Columbus Blog

Christopher Columbus, although considered to be an excellent navigator and may have faced some odds when it came to traversing the Atlantic Ocean, is not all that we celebrate him to be. He never truly "discovered" the New World, merely stumbled upon it on his search for a more efficient trade route to Asia. Columbus' original intent for the journey was for gold, not to discover whether or not the Earth was round (most people of that time didn't even believe that the Earth was flat). His opinions of the natives? They were weak and he could "could conquer the whole of them with fifty men, and govern them as [he] pleased." His treatment of the natives in the New World was even worse. Columbus enslaved the natives, taking some back, and a great deal of them died on their way to Europe. The only reason he is "celebrated" and has become a federal holiday is because of lobbying from a group called the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic group during Roosevelt's administration, all because they wanted a celebrated Catholic figure. Before that, Columbus Day had been celebrated since 1892 as the 400th anniversary of Columbus' arrival because of President Benjamin Harrison.

And so every second Monday of in October we dedicate an entire 24 hours to a man who mistreated an entire group of people and cared only for the potential gold that lay beneath the surface of the New World.