Explain What America Was Like Before Christopher Columbus

When Columbus landed in the Bahamas in 1492, he thought he reached Asia. He has made himself believe that he has found the New World and that he was the first to inhabit the land. This was not the case as an Indian Tribe, the Arawaks, was swimming to their boats with excitement. As Columbus’s crew arrived on the shores, he was shocked from the Indians hospitality. Columbus was carrying iron swords as the tribes brought gifts, food and water.

"I could conquer the whole of them with fifty men and govern them as I pleased." Columbus kidnapped ten to twenty-five Indians and took them back with him to Spain. Only seven or eight of the Indians arrived alive. He took them because he wanted to teach them Spanish in order to be translators

This week for our essay we had to watch a video titled America before Columbus. I enjoyed this video as it concentrated on the food aspect of the particular time from and before 1491. The introduction itself made it clear that the search for a short cut to India and the accidental 'run in' with the Americas was spearheaded and funded by the Queen of Spain. I believe this is an important fact to remember and to note that Columbus was not simply conquering inhabited lands willy-nilly but rather followed orders and working for the Queen of Spain. The area of the America's that Columbus landed on, and all of the America's, was inhabited by Natives that had infrastructures. In the North America's there was an entire civilization that stretched the

The Arawak people welcomed Columbus and his men as if they were gods. In return, Columbus took advantage of their generosity and responded with enslavement, torture, violence and mass killings. A person who takes advantage of an innocent person or group in these ways is not a hero, a good leader, or a good person.

In the age just before Columbus sailed the ocean blue, there was abundant life, lifestyles, and necessities that sustained that. In the 1500s, Europe was as tense as ever. Kings and popes raise armies to fight against one another. The population capacity of Europe at this time was around one hundred million people. At this point, Isabella, the Queen of Spain, is the most powerful woman in Europe as well.

The full measure of Columbus's failure as a colonizer was not yet apparent when he returned to Castile in 1496. Yet by the end of six or seven years of his governorship, with his own, the monarchs', and the settlers' objectives all still unachieved, and Hispaniola suffering an apparently interminable series of rebellions not only by the Indians but by the colonists too, Columbus was to be superseded and disgraced, and shipped home to Spain in chains.1 Overall, Fernandez-Armesto depicted Columbus as an annoyingly eccentric person incapable of succeeding. Although, he discovered the Americas, he failed to be a leader to his crew and the natives. Instead, he was on the lookout for ways of manipulating the motives for profit.

For my compare and contrast paper I decide to write about Christopher Columbus because he is big in geography and his name is known throughout the world, and not only in the United States, and he did a lot in his lifetime. And I know every student will learn about him in schools. Christopher Columbus is mentioned in Davis’ book; however, I also decide to do my own research as well.

In the seventeenth century, colonial America was categorized into three major regions; New England, the Middle Colonies, and the South. Each region provided various opportunities and breakthrough ideas that created a distinct economic, cultural, and political society different from any other region. These ideas became the beginning of some prominent themes and beliefs Americans see as essential in today’s society.

In the article Hello Columbus: America was No Paradise in 1492, by Robert Royal, Royal argued that Native Americans, along with Columbus, are portrayed wrongly in society today, from schools to media.

• had a formal language to write, a type of counting system, an correct calendar, and a agri system that was ahead of the time

12 October 1492- Columbus arrives in the Americas- Christopher Columbus had the support of King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella I. Columbus set sail in April of 1492. It took him nearly six months for him to touch land. Although Columbus was not the first to actually discover the Americas, he has been given that credit despite there being evidence that Vikings actually discovered the Americas around 1000 AD. “Icelandic legends called sagas recounted Eriksson’s exploits in the New World around A.D. 1000. These Norse stories were spread by word of mouth before becoming recorded in the 12th and 13th centuries.” (History.com/Vikings) The significance of Columbus coming to America over the Vikings is that following the voyage of Columbus, is when settlers really began to start traveling to the Americas and “a new phase of civilization began.” (Reference.com)

Claim: Columbus was admired for what he did by exploring the world and I have three reasons to why.

Columbus did not respect the rights and liberty of the native people. The Arawak were uncivilized people, whom as innocent person gave everything they had generously. “They had no

Shelby welcome and I look forward to working with you in this class. I completely agree with your analysis of Columbus and Cabeza de Vaca. In my opinion, Columbus was quite arrogant and wanted to subjugate these people who he most certainly felt were beneath him. Like many of the explorers and colonist through history, they felt they were a superior race and the land was theirs for the taking. Columbus’s writings would not be received favorably today as we all know that, for most but not all of the world, we have more respect and compassion for our fellow human beings. If there were this type of thinking today it would never be allowed to occur in a civilized society.

In modern America, we often take for granted the natural world that surrounds us and the American culture which is built upon it. For many of us, we give little thought to the food sources that sustain and natural habitats that surround us because when viewed for what they are, most people assume that they have “simply existed” since the country was founded. However, the documentary ‘America Before Columbus’ provided this writer an extremely interesting record of how the America we know came to exist. In the documentary, one of the most interesting discussions centered on the fact that it was not merely the arrival of conquistadors and colonists that irrevocably changed the landscape of the Americas, but that it was also the coined term known as the “Columbian Exchange” that afforded these travelers the ability to proliferate so successfully. The basic definition of the Columbian exchange is one that defines the importation of European flora and fauna. It could also loosely represent other imports, both intended and unintended, such as tools, implements, and even disease. Armed with this definition, it takes little imagination to envision how differently the Americas might have developed had any significant amount of the native European flora, fauna, or other unintended import not been conveyed to the Americas through the Columbian Exchange. Beyond the arrival of explorers, settlers, and colonists to the New World, the breadth of what the Columbian Exchange represented to