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Comment by belval | Hacker News Reader

I read the journals of Colombus mostly as a result of reading comments like yours and wondering what I was missing that wasn't taught in school so to speak.

At least in the Kantian sense, the guy was not really bad in that he didn't really intend to do much harm. His writing is very tied to bringing Christianity to Caribbean tribes, some of which were still actively practising cannibalism. He "scammed" them by trading glass beads for gold, but that still feels somewhat minor. I wonder if people don't sometime confuse him with Cortés (who was a true piece of work) and the later stage of Spanish colonisation which all happens several years after the death of Columbus.

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> I read the journals of Colombus

Perhaps not the most neutral source.

> At least in the Kantian sense, the guy was not really bad in that he didn't really intend to do much harm.

No, they just recognize him as someone whose torture and other cruelty and abuses as a colonial administrator were so severe and notorious that he got thrown in chains, dragged back to Spain, and stripped of titles for them, in late 15th century Spain, not exactly a model of moderation when it came to conversion of subject populations to Christianity or paragon of human rights more generally.

> Perhaps not the most neutral source.

Considering most of the things raised against him in the 21st century were not really frowned up in the 15-16th, I don't think this is a major issue. Additionally, the version I read was https://www.amazon.com/Four-Voyages-Dispatches-Connecting-Na... which has some contextualization by the editor.

> whose torture and other cruelty and abuses as a colonial administrator were so severe and notorious that he got thrown in chains, dragged back to Spain

I did not say he was an inspiring role model and that was abuse directed towards Spanish settlers which is definitely not what people refer to when they call Colombus a monster...

Trading glass beads for gold can only be a scam if seen by a simplistic perspective.

Gold was abundant in America and not worth much for those tribes, but glass beads or mirrors were products of a technology not available to those natives, so for them the exchange was extremely valuable, as they were obtaining something unique and unavailable to hem in exchange of some shiny stones found everywhere.

For the Carribbean tribes he made first contact with gold was somewhat of a big deal though as they could only get it by trade with other continental tribes. The first few people that he encountered weren't doing any kind of gold mining.

The dude took slaves, instituted a brutal gold quota, hung the corpses of resistors to rot, and other cartoonishly evil things. He was such a piece of work even by Spanish colonial standards that he was hauled back to Spain and stripped of his governorship.

He was very, very far from a nice person.

Even by Spanish colonial standards? Those colonial standards were not at all low, they were more advanced than any of their equivalent European counterparts. Any native people were considered children of god, due to their Catholic view, and us such viewed as free people. And those were the first laws proposed already in 1513 in Burgos. More advanced laws came some decades later by Bartolomé de las Casas.

In reality the settlers were not supervised and the laws were not always followed, but they were expected by the Government back in European Spain.

That's whitewashing the realities, but in any case the comparison was with modern sensibilities rather than early modern Europeans'.

There is some dispute on whether all those accusations were true, or politically motivated slander. Sure he did evil things by our standards, but there's no certainty whether he was that much worse than other rulers of that time. Taking slaves and hanging people alone isn't that special for the era.

The things I've listed are the uncontroversial ones. He presented said slaves to the king and Queen. His own son wrote a biography lionizing his father and talking about the gold quota. We have the court records of his governorship being stripped for brutality.

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