- [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 descendents 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 between these official documents
and 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 years
and 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
and 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.