Essay Database

Christopher Columbus was born in Genoa, Italy in 1451. As a boy he became initiated to sailing by one of his kinsmen (a sea captain), which is what forced him to become a Spanish navigator. He pleaded with the Spanish and the French governments, Spain’s King Ferdinand V and Queen Isabella I gave him a grant to lead an expedition to the west across the Atlantic Ocean in search of new routes to Asia. He …

…cared little or not at all about the indigenous culture and they saw the local population as nothing more than slave labor force. This resulted in indigenous people as well as their cultures to start dying out. “Disease, force labor, invasion, and conquest inflicted by the Europeans caused the death of millions of American indigenous peoples, in what can only be described as one of the greatest tragedies of all time.” (Encarta Encyclopedia Standard Edition 2002)