Christopher Columbus receives the honor of being my first annointed Douchebag of the Week for several reasons. First, he falsified his numbers on the estimate of the size of the Earth, primarily because doing so made his planned expedition seem cheaper than it would be so the Spanish crown would be more likely to fund it. He estimated the distance from Spain to Asia to be about 2,400 miles, which is about a quarter of the actual distance. Fortunately for him and his crew, who would have starved to death otherwise, they came across islands in the Caribbean, the Bahamas. Thus began the brutal destruction of the Western Hemisphere's indigenous populations.
Fueled by a blinding greed for gold and violent religious extremism, Columbus and his men decimated the native people of Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic), the Arawaks (also known as the Taino). Initially awed by the natives' generosity and hospitality, Columbus demanded to be led to their gold. However, the expedition revealed that gold was of limited supply in the Caribbean, so the Europeans' attention was directed towards capturing as many slaves as possible. Over the next three years, Columbus and his men slaughtered, pillaged, burned, and raped their way through the Caribbean Islands. On Hispaniola, 1500 Arawak men, women, and children were rounded up in a massive raid by the Spaniards who were to return to Spain (about forty men were left behind to gather gold and slaves in the systematic rape of the Caribbean). Five hundred of the strongest were selected to be dragged back in chains for labor and sex slavery. Two hundred died on the journey home. Until the establishment of permanent sugar plantations, slaves were the Caribbean's biggest export to Europe.
Columbus justified his actions by declaring that he was acting under the will of God to spread Christianity to the unsaved heathens of the New World. He later wrote, "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending as many slaves as can be sold." His sickening religious extremism was alarmingly typical in Spain in the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, as Ferdinand and Isabella had used religious hatred to great extent as a manipulative propaganda tool to motivate their people to drive out the Muslims and Jews. More expeditions to the Americas followed, spreading smallpox, clapping natives in chains, and massacring villages that were reluctant to comply with Spanish demands. When Columbus landed on the shores of Hispaniola in 1492, there were between 250,000 and 500,000 Arawaks. Two years later, after merciless slaughter of a people who had never before even manufactured weapons, there were less than 150,000. By 1515, the death toll from encomienda slave labor brought that number to 50,000. In 1550, the Arawak population was estimated to be 500. Fifty years later, the Arawak people and their descendants had been completely and utterly obliterated. It has been one of history's few successful genocides.
Yep. He was a major douchenozzle
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