In this paper I will discuss whether Christopher Columbous was a good person or

In this paper I will discuss whether Christopher Columbous was a good person or not. People say he was a bad person with poor morals, I will discuss the truth and reasoning behind this as well as breaking down the way he interacted with the indigenous people. Columbus as a person was significant because he led the voyages to the new world in the late 14th and early 15th century. His miscalculations cause him to land on the Caribbean island, changing the geographical knowledge of the world at the time.
His voyages initiated the Columbian exchange, a significant exchange of plants, animals, and cultures between the Old World, Europe, and the New World, the Americas. This change impacted the trade world, agriculture and civilization on both sides of the Atlantic. Columbus was a very influential person in America’s history, but there’s also a dark side to his story. Columbus describes the native people as peaceful when he originally arrives on the island, but it is said he enslaved them into doing forced labor as well as beating and even killing them.
When we were in school, Christopher Columbus was taught to be a great guy, hence why we have a day about him. The truth about him was that he was a tyrant over the indigenous people he called “indians”. He enslaved using violence and force to get them to work in his gold mines and plantations. He also brought slaves back to Spain to be sold into slavery, many of them dying because of the horrifying conditions on the slave ships. Columbus and his men also brought many diseases with them such as smallpox and influenza, which the people were very vulnerable too. According to “Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation” when Columbus arrived in 1492 there were an estimated 250,000 indigenous people, but in 1517 only 14,000 remained due to getting sick and their bodies not being able to fight it off.