Christopher Columbus part 1

• [Voiceover] In 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue and he discovered America, discovered the world was, in fact, round, and he's a hero, and that's why we get the day off from work and school and get to celebrate him every October. So, you've probably heard this story maybe once or twice, but you've probably also seen competing visions of Christopher Columbus and his legacy. Some that aren't so favorable.

In this video series, I will clear up misconceptions. For example, Christopher Columbus did not discover America, and he didn't actually discover that the world was round. People already knew that in about 600 A.D. with Aristotle, but hopefully with these facts and explanations of the implications of Christopher Columbus and his voyage, that you, as the viewer and budding historian, can decide for yourself if you think that Christopher Columbus was a hero. So, we're gonna change this into a question.

Christopher Columbus's voyage started way before 1492 when he started petitioning different European governments for funding for his trip. So, Christopher Columbus was actually an Italian navigator, and he asked the Portuguese and then he asked the Spanish. And then, when King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain wouldn't give him the money originally, he even threatened to go to France and ask for money from them. But eventually, he ended up doing the voyage under the Spanish crown, and he got together a crew of about 150 men in three ships. You probably know the names of those. They were the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria. There they are.

They don't look very high-tech, but they did have a lot of help from new technology in Europe, making these brand new ships, and they were a little bit nicer than they look in these drawings (chuckles). Christopher Columbus set out for the first voyage ever across the Atlantic. So, why was he going across the Atlantic? This has to do with a lot of motivations that you can read more about in the Khan Academy article, Motivations for Conquest, but I'll give you a general overview here.

The little acronym that I like to go with is God, Gold, and Glory. So, these were some of Christopher Columbus's main motivations, and I would say it was mostly about gold and glory. Christopher Columbus aimed to find a new route to the West Indies. So, the West Indies were somewhere, you know, over here, really, if you're looking at this map, and Europeans had to travel by land all the way down through the Middle East to the West Indies over here. Along that route, there were many middlemen that imposed taxes, and it was just a really, really hard route to navigate.

So, Christopher Columbus wanted to find a way that he could go west to get to the east. Christopher Columbus knew the world was round, right. He wanted to go like that, but he was the first person to prove that it was. Columbus and his men set out in 1492, and they have enough food and water to last them a year, so this was an unprecedented voyage. Everyone was really excited and curious about what they would find, and it ended up taking them five weeks, so it was a five-week voyage, and it certainly wasn't pretty.

There were many times where the ship men lost morale, and Columbus himself had doubts. So, he even made this promise to the people on the ship. He said, "The first person to see land will get a silk coat," and so this was a way that he increased morale when things were looking really rough. But he was a very impressive navigator and used the stars and lots of really impressive scientific measurement to arrive in the Bahamas.

The Bahamas are part of an island group called the West Indies. And why are they called the West Indies? Because Christopher Columbus thought that he had arrived in the Indies, which are an island group in Southeast Asia. So, geographers then named the West Indies west as to distinguish them from the island that Christopher Columbus thought that he had, in fact, arrived on. I know, kind of funny to think about now because they are just so far away, but Christopher Columbus was determined that he had, in fact, arrived in the East Indies. So, that's where the name Indians came from.

The native people were not related to or descendants from Indians in any way. Christopher Columbus was just determined that China was just a little bit north of them and that they had successfully found this new trade route. To give you a sense of where Christopher Columbus ended up, you can check out this map. So, he came from Spain and first landed here in the Bahamas. So, he named it San Salvador; that was the first place that they stopped, and in San Salvador, they encountered the Taíno people.

So, the Taínos were, historically, a very friendly people. They were very welcoming to Christopher Columbus and his men, and Christopher Columbus actually wrote this all down in his journal. So, a lot of the records that historians reference and argue a fair amount about come from both Columbus's journal and his probanzas de merito. These were literally proof of merit in English, and so Christopher Columbus had to write back to the Spanish crown to make sure that he was actually making progress on his mission, that he was, in fact, finding a new trade route and increasing capital for the Spanish crown, or else they would stop funding him.

So there's a lot written about his voyage between his journal and these official documents. Within those documents, you can see that Christopher Columbus and his people had intentions of conquering and colonizing the Taíno people. Christopher Columbus writes, "They were very well built with very handsome bodies and very good faces. They do not carry arms or know them. They should be good servants." Later on, he writes about the Taíno people who were historically jewelry traders and helped them a lot with finding different resources and gold and silver. He writes, "I could conquer the whole of them with 50 men."

These sorts of quotes from Columbus's journal provide evidence to historians that Columbus's violence against the Taíno people was premeditated and planned. So, this photo down here depicts the Taíno people welcoming the Spaniards, and this image depicts the traditional Taíno culture. You can see the jewelry, which Christopher Columbus writes extensively about, lots of gold jewelry; he found it very beautiful. He was met by these friendly people, but he did have intentions of colonizing them and turning them into servants and slaves, which he then did.

So, when he returned to Spain, 25 Taínos got on the ship with him back, but only seven survived, and so this began the practice of forcing the Taínos into servitude, which would increase over the next 10 to 15 years during which Christopher Columbus would come back and forth to the Caribbean. Ultimately, Christopher Columbus made four voyages, so the first one was in 1492, up here, but then there were three more voyages over the next couple of years.

Over the course of these three voyages, the Taíno people were decimated by violence and disease. So, between the forced servitude and the mutilation that the colonizers would practice, they would actually cut off the Taínos' limbs or hands if they refused to do work for them. Disease really was what killed the most Native Americans at the time. On the ships, the colonizers would bring with them, yes, weapons, but most notably microbes that the Taíno people were not accustomed to fighting off.

When they would come into contact with these new diseases, the Native Americans were killed in the masses. So, over the course of Christopher Columbus's colonization of the Caribbean, he ended up going to, I'll scroll up and show you a little bit more on the map, he ended up going to San Salvador; that was the first stop, then to Cuba, and then to Española, which is the modern-day Dominican Republic and Haiti. Here, in all these places, Christopher Columbus's men set up different colonies, and slowly, as Christopher Columbus kind of went back and forth to Spain, the colonies rebelled against him.

By his third voyage, Columbus ultimately gets removed completely from this colonization project because he proved such an awful leader, and he really had violent tendencies toward the Taíno people. So, in the next video, I'll talk a little bit more about the implications of the contact with the new world and about how Christopher Columbus has become such a controversial figure in American memory and American celebration.