Christopher Columbus Character Analysis

“Gold is a treasure, and he who possesses it does all he wishes to in this world, and succeeds in helping souls into paradise.” Christopher Columbus is seen as more of an icon or symbol than a man when we talk about his daring journey to find a new pathway to the countries that had silk and spices that the Spaniards wanted. When we talk about Columbus, we only ever really talk about how he discovered America and claimed the land mass as Spain’s. We never touch on important questions about the man like how did Columbus actually treat the natives of the land, is our portrayal of him misleading and do textbooks and other pieces of literature agree on his character? When comparing three pieces of work, Columbus takes a different light in each one but in all of them his brutality towards Native Americans is prevalent. In The American Pageant, the authors touch on the extermination of the culture and peoples but only very briefly, keeping the description to a minimum and not explicitly saying he was the root cause. Yet in other pieces of literature, authors place an utmost importance on the brutality. In Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got

Yet to others he could be seen as a primitive beast with the sole purpose of destroying and conquering. Some may even say he had Hero Syndrome, “…an unconscious need to be needed, appreciated or valued”. In the American Pageant he is portrayed as a blood thirsty conquistador trying to bring home pride for Spain, more of a nightmare then a knight in shining armor. Yet in Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, Columbus is described as the extermination of all indigenous life that he encountered describing him as anything but a hero. Maybe the portrayal of the mythical man in standard school textbooks is distorting the beast into more of a