Blog 11—
Columbus is unique. His religious piety that he prized over wealth makes him a remarkable man. However, his progression from a respectful bewilderment of the Indians to an antagonistic force, bent on subjugating their culture, undeniably rests some degree of blame for the subsequent colonization on his shoulders.
Arguably any other European would have more quickly made the jump from assimilation to colonization, but the reality is that Columbus was the first European man with the ability to make that transition; which of course he did. It is clear that he delights in the natural aspects of the new world, which many other men would have viewed as secondary to wealth, but his discovery of Indian culture was altogether normal and predictable. Tzvetan Todorov asserts that Columbus possessed an extraordinary amount of pride, predisposing him to infuse irrevocable truth in the skewed observations he ascribes to the new world. This idea can be expanded to the sentiment of European superiority, so although other Europeans would have had the same enslaving colonialist doctrine as Columbus, it was Columbus who first shaped the Indian reality in that light.
Columbus began the inevitable progression from discovery to domination, and despite the fact that he went about the transformation in a slightly novel manner, he crossed that bridge. The subsequent actions of Spanish colonizers were dually part of their own subversive intentions as well as reflections of the precedent set by Columbus. With the great praise gifted to Columbus for his world altering discovery, there must also be dispensed an equally harsh degree of responsibility for the actions that his discovery initiated.
Sam, I would have to disagree with you that he prized religious piety over wealth. His goal for setting sail westward was to find a shortcut to wealth. When he asked the king of Portugal for equipment, he proposed to be governor and to receive 10% of all revenue of all new land he discovered. He imposed a rule that if a native didn’t find enough gold in three months, the native’s hand would be chopped off. I think this shows his greed was behind his actions, more so than spreading Christianity. I agree with you that although most other Europeans may have taken similar actions to Columbus, he is the one that “started it all.” The excuse that everyone else would have done the same thing doesn’t let him off the hook. That would be like someone justifying owning slaves because people around that person owned slaves too. It wouldn’t change the fact that what you’re doing is wrong.
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