How does columbus described the native people

They go as naked as when their mothers bore them, and so do the women, although I did not see more than one young girl. All I saw were youths, none more than thirty years of age. They are very well made, with very handsome bodies, and very good countenances.

They wear the hairs brought down to the eyebrows, except a few locks behind, which they wear long and never cut. They paint themselves black, and they are the color of the Canarians, neither black nor white.

He thought that their lack of clothing meant they were poor. These notions led to a sense of paternalism and the idea that the original inhabitants of the land somehow needed Europeans to improve their lives. From the earliest days of European contact in the Americas, race and religion were intertwined. Columbus believed that Native Americans would make good servants because they seemed to grasp new information quickly.

Apparently, it did not occur to him that Native Americans could do far more than serve Europeans nor that they might not have any interest in doing so. Furthermore, Columbus insulted Native Americans by presuming that because they did not practice Christianity, they had no religion whatsoever.

He ignored the sophisticated cosmology of the people he encountered and assumed they were ignorant of religion altogether.

These people are very simple as regards the u. As Columbus encountered the original inhabitants of the Americas, he evaluated them primarily based on their usefulness to Europeans. Since they utilized simple weapons, Columbus presumed that they could be easily subdued through violence.

He intended to bring seven Native Americans back with him to Italy in order to learn the language of Europeans. Many Europeans looked at darker-skinned people as inferior in all kinds of ways—militarily, culturally, and religiously.

They arrived in the Americas with the objective of extracting resources to enrich their home countries. They looked at the original inhabitants of the land through this prism as well. Columbus evaluated the people for their potential as laborers and considered them empty vessels to receive the language, culture, and Christianity of nations in Europe.

Thus, Columbus Day remains a source of controversy. Should present-day Americans honor a man who harbored such harmful ideas about other human beings? But there was a little more to it than that, and there still is. Civil people distinguished themselves by the pains they took to order their lives. They organized their society to produce the elaborate food, clothing, buildings and other equipment characteristic of their manner of living.

They had strong governments to protect property, to protect good persons from evil ones, to protect the manners and customs that differentiated civil people from barbarians. The superior clothing, housing, food and protection that attached to civilization made it seem to the European a gift worth giving to the ill-clothed, ill-housed and ungoverned barbarians of the world.

Slavery was an ancient instrument of civilization, and in the 15th century it had been revived as a way to deal with barbarians who refused to accept Christianity and the rule of civilized government. Through slavery they could be made to abandon their bad habits, put on clothes and reward their instructors with a lifetime of work. Throughout the 15th century, as the Portuguese explored the coast of Africa, large numbers of well-clothed sea captains brought civilization to naked savages by carrying them off to the slave markets of Seville and Lisbon.

Since Columbus had lived in Lisbon and sailed in Portuguese vessels to the Gold Coast of Africa, he was not unfamiliar with barbarians. He had seen for himself that the Torrid Zone could support human life, and he had observed how pleased barbarians were with trinkets on which civilized Europeans set small value, such as the little bells that falconers placed on hawks. Before setting off on his voyage, he laid in a store of hawk's bells.

If the barbarous people he expected to find in the Indies should think civilization and Christianity an insufficient reward for submission to Spain, perhaps hawk's bells would help. Columbus sailed from Palos de la Frontera on Friday, August 3, , reached the Canary Islands six days later and stayed there for a month to finish outfitting his ships. He left on September 6, and five weeks later, in about the place he expected, he found the Indies. What else could it be but the Indies? There on the shore were the naked people.

With hawk's bells and beads he made their acquaintance and found some of them wearing gold nose plugs. It all added up. He had found the Indies.

And not only that. He had found a land over which he would have no difficulty in establishing Spanish dominion, for the people showed him an immediate veneration. He had been there only two days, coasting along the shores of the islands, when he was able to hear the natives crying in loud voices, "Come and see the men who have come from heaven; bring them food and drink.

Columbus made four voyages to America, during which he explored an astonishingly large area of the Caribbean and a part of the northern coast of South America. At every island the first thing he inquired about was gold, taking heart from every trace of it he found.

And at Haiti he found enough to convince him that this was Ophir, the country to which Solomon and Jehosophat had sent for gold and silver. From aboard ship it was possible to make out rich fields waving with grass.

There were good harbors, lovely sand beaches and fruit-laden trees. The people were shy and fled whenever the caravels approached the shore, but Columbus gave orders "that they should take some, treat them well and make them lose their fear, that some gain might be made, since, considering the beauty of the land, it could not be but that there was gain to be got.

Although the amount of gold worn by the natives was even less than the amount of clothing, it gradually became apparent that there was gold to be had. One man possessed some that had been pounded into gold leaf. Another appeared with a gold belt. Some produced nuggets for the admiral. Here he began the European occupation of the New World, and here his European ideas and attitudes began their transformation of land and people.

But they spent most of the day like children idling away their time from morning to night, seemingly without a care in the world. Once they saw that Columbus meant them no harm, they outdid one another in bringing him anything he wanted.

It was impossible to believe, he reported, "that anyone has seen a people with such kind hearts and so ready to give the Christians all that they possess, and when the Christians arrive, they run at once to bring them everything.

To Columbus the Arawaks seemed like relics of the golden age. On the basis of what he told Peter Martyr, who recorded his voyages, Martyr wrote, "they seeme to live in that golden worlde of the which olde writers speake so much, wherein menne lived simply and innocently without enforcement of lawes, without quarreling, judges and libelles, content onely to satisfie nature, without further vexation for knowledge of things to come.

As the idyllic Arawaks conformed to one ancient picture, their enemies the Caribs conformed to another that Columbus had read of, the anthropophagi. According to the Arawaks, the Caribs, or Cannibals, were man-eaters, and as such their name eventually entered the English language.

This was at best a misrepresentation, which Columbus would soon exploit. The Caribs lived on islands of their own and met every European approach with poisoned arrows, which men and women together fired in showers. They were not only fierce but, by comparison with the Arawaks, also seemed more energetic, more industrious and, it might even be said, sadly enough, more civil.

After Columbus succeeded in entering one of their settlements on his second voyage, a member of the expedition reported, "This people seemed to us to be more civil than those who were in the other islands we have visited, although they all have dwellings of straw, but these have them better made and better provided with supplies, and in them were more signs of industry.

Columbus had no doubts about how to proceed, either with the lovable but lazy Arawaks or with the hateful but industrious Caribs. He had come to take possession and to establish dominion. In almost the same breath, he described the Arawaks' gentleness and innocence and then went on to assure the king and queen of Spain, "They have no arms and are all naked and without any knowledge of war, and very cowardly, so that a thousand of them would not face three. And they are also fitted to be ruled and to be set to work, to cultivate the land and to do all else that may be necessary, and you may build towns and teach them to go clothed and adopt our customs.

So much for the golden age. Columbus had not yet prescribed the method by which the Arawaks would be set to work, but he had a pretty clear idea of how to handle the Caribs. On his second voyage, after capturing a few of them, he sent them in slavery to Spain, as samples of what he hoped would be a regular trade.

They were obviously intelligent, and in Spain they might "be led to abandon that inhuman custom which they have of eating men, and there in Castile, learning the language, they will much more readily receive baptism and secure the welfare of their souls. This plan was never put into operation, partly because the Spanish sovereigns did not approve it and partly because the Cannibals did not approve it.

They defended themselves so well with their poisoned arrows that the Spaniards decided to withhold the blessings of civilization from them and to concentrate their efforts on the seemingly more amenable Arawaks.

The process of civilizing the Arawaks got underway in earnest after the Santa Maria ran aground on Christmas Day, , off Caracol Bay. Once again Columbus was overjoyed with the remarkable natives.

They are, he wrote, "so full of love and without greed, and suitable for every purpose, that I assure your Highnesses that I believe there is no better land in the world, and they are always smiling. Guacanagari "was greatly delighted to see the admiral joyful and understood that he desired much gold.

He decided to make his permanent headquarters on the spot and accordingly ordered a fortress to be built, with a tower and a large moat. Though the effects were widespread and cannot all be dismissed as negative, critics of Columbus have asserted that the worst aspects of this exchange added up to biological warfare. Eventually, his methods and actions caught up with Columbus.

A number of settlers lobbied against him at the Spanish court, accusing Columbus of mismanagement. In , the king and queen sent in a royal administrator, who detained Columbus and his brothers and had them shipped home. Although Columbus regained his freedom and made a fourth and final voyage to the New World, he had lost his governorship and much of his prestige. This historical record has cast Columbus' legacy under a cloud of controversy. Protests at Columbus Day parades, efforts to eliminate him from classroom curricula and calls for changing the federal holiday have all followed.

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