Christopher Columbus Case

Essay

Christopher Columbus was born before October 31, 1451 in Genoa, party of modern Italy. He always loved the sea and wanted to become a sea captain someday. Columbus's dream was to sail to India using a westward route to prove that the earth was round. For this reason Columbus did stumble upon America, but he did not know that it was another continent. Columbus did leave a legacy, but like every story, there are two sides. Columbus could be considered as a hero or a villain.

Columbus's father was a normal wool weaver and he had three brothers. Columbus loved the sea and in his attempt to sail to India, he found land and stopped there. This was a new world he had found. He was a great leader and the Spaniards had funded him to find land. As in source 2, the Historian Paolo Emilio Taviani, says in Columbus, the great adventure, 1991, "The Columbian discovery was of greater magnitude than any other discovery or invention in human history". Columbus was a very ambitious man and had found a new world much to his surprise and then he started to bring people from Spain and started colonizing them, as said in source 5, by Boris Biancheri, an Italian ambassador to the united states, October 4, 1992, "The Columbus voyage was first and foremost a great moment of integration between societies and civilizations". In spite of his father being so poor and unpopular, he never gave up hope and was determined to do something great in his life. Soon he had become very popular for his act, as said in source 9 by Henry Bamford Parkes in the American experience, 1959 "He was a man of obscure birth, without influential family connections or financial resources, who had the audacity to plan an enterprise without precedent in history".

Although Columbus was a great discoverer, he had many flaws in his attitude too. There was a reward of 10,000 maravedis by the Spanish crown to the first man who sighted land and according to source 1, Diary of Columbus "A sailor named Rodrigo de Triana saw this land first, although the admiral, at the tenth hour of the night;", and the admiral took away this claim from him. When Columbus reached on this new island, he saw naked natives and enslaved 6 of them for himself as source 1, diary of Columbus says, " I recognized that they were people who would be better....... And I believe that they would become Christians very easily, for it seemed to me that they had no religion". By saying this Columbus actually meant that the natives there