Many explorers including the most famous of them all, Christopher Columbus, were brutal, greedy and cruel men. In the name of country and religion, they exploited and killed many indigenous people. When Columbus ‘discovered’ the New World, “he demanded that the Lucayan people give his men food and gold, and allow them to have sex with their women.” The Lucayans refused and rebelled but were ill-equipped against the advanced weaponry of Columbus’s troops. Fallen Lucayan warriors were fed to hunting dogs while they were still alive. Brutal and cruel, check.
Not only did Columbus slaughter the natives but he enslaved some, too. Out of the 500 Lucayans he had chained below the decks of his ships, 300 survived the voyage to arrive in Spain as slaves. He sold women too, especially young girls. Columbus wrote in his journal in 1500, “A hundred castellanoes are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and…there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten are now in demand.” And yet, as Columbus debunker Matt Inman writes so succinctly: “The father of the transatlantic slave trade is honored on the same level as Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr.”
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