Christopher Columbus Hero Or Villain Essay
A heavily debated topic in this day and age is if Christopher Columbus was really a hero or a mass murderer. On one hand, he opened up access to the New World and created trade routes, on the other, he primarily unintentionally almost wiped out a population and abused Native Americans. I believe that Columbus was more of a hero than he was a villain because he had a normal mindset and goal for Spaniards during the time period, many things he is blamed for happened completely unintentionally or by accident, and Columbus wasn’t the only one who had servants and took Natives captive. Often when looking back into history, we unintentionally judge events, people, and actions based off of our current mindset, and Christopher Columbus was no exception. …show more content…
Christopher Columbus’s journal describes the Natives as having “marks of wounds on their bodies” and that they indicated the wounds are from “people from other adjacent islands came with the intention of seizing them, and that they defended themselves”. This is what many accuse Columbus of doing, and while he did seize natives, it was already happening before he got there. There we much worse occurrences, such as terrible acts of “sacrifice” done by the Aztecs. Schweikart and Allen said in the book A Patriot’s History of the United State that “A four-day sacrifice in 1487 by the Aztec king Ahuitzotl involved the butchery of 80,400 prisoners by shifts of priests working four at a time at convex killing tables who kicked lifeless, heartless bodies down the side of the pyramid temple. This worked out to a killing rate of fourteen victims a minute over the ninety-six-hour bloodbath”. That is absolutely insane. Christopher Columbus may have killed people for shady reasons, he didn’t rip out the beating heart of innocent people, which may be one of the most painful ways to die. Even outside of sacrifices, apparently “crime and street carnage were commonplace” in the Aztec empire. Some Native Americans weren’t as peaceful as many make them out to be. This is why Columbus shouldn’t be criticized as much as he is for killing
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