This October 12th, we will be celebrating the day Columbus discovered America. We call this Columbus Day. Venezualans call it the Day of Indigenous Resistance. They call it this because the Day the Native Culture Got Sodomized was already taken (citation needed).
Columbus started this day off right by dicking one of his crew out of a small fortune. The first person to sight land was supposed to get a pension for life of 10,000 maravedis (at current exchange rates, about twelve bucks). The sailor tried to collect his reward, and Columbus informed him that he himself had "seen a light" the evening before, and the sailor would get nothing (Zinn 2). To give you an idea how much money this was back then, consider the following: In 1755, after two hundred sixty more years of inflation, the Homestead Newspaper valued a "Mulatto boy" named Harry at $27 (Indentured Servants and Slave Prices). So basically, Columbus cheated an employee out of the equivalent of a free slave, every two years, for life. Before breakfast.
He then came ashore, and met a friendly people called the Arawak. They were very generous and friendly, giving Columbus and his men presents. Columbus, seeing the tiny gold earrings they wore, assumed the island had gold floating around everywhere... like pollen, or genocide. He took a bunch of slaves back to Spain, lied to the King and Queen about what he found, and came back with more ships. That's when the real fun began. Spanish gold lust got to the point over the next few years that they forced all the natives to bring them gold every three months (Zinn 4). They gave a token to each person who brought it, and whenever they caught a native without this token, they cut off his fucking hands and let him bleed to death.
Might have looked something like this.
When the spanish were bored, they would "cut slices off [the natives] to test the sharpness of their blades". If they fought, they were captured, and either hanged or burned alive. If they ran, the Spanish hunted them down with dogs. The Arawak people responded with mass suicides. All told, in 2 years, Columbus and his men were responsible for 125,000 deaths in Haiti. To put that in perspective, if modern-day Tallahassee had been the place ol' Chris had landed, he would have killed 3 out of 4 people. In 2 years (Zinn 4-7).
Columbus, you get a 10/10 on the International Dickhead Scale. Congratulations, dick.
Citations:
"Indentured Servants and Slave Prices" http://curry.edschool.virginia.edu/socialstudies/projects/jvc/unit/econ/msstatemsg.html 27 March 2009
Zinn, Howard. A people's history of the United States. New York: HarperCollins, 1999.
Columbus is full of shit
ReplyDeleteColumbus was a real Jerk.
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