posthumous portrait of CC by Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, 1520 "In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue," or so we learned in elementary school.
Check out this website made by elementary school kids--what vision of Columbus do they have?
Click through this cute cartoon at the BBC website, also geared towards children.
And here's a "history" website that gives a brief account of CC's voyages. How does this account compare to CC's letters in our Anthology?
On the other end of the spectrum, we find websites such as this, claiming that CC and his missions participated in genocide.
Here's the MSN Encarta account of CC, and here's the ever popular wikipedia.
Historian James Loewen notes that "When Columbus and his men returned to Haiti in 1493, they demanded food, gold, spun cotton--whatever the Indians had that they wanted, including sex with their women. To ensure cooperation, Columbus used punishment by example. When an Indian committed even a minor offense, the Spanish cut off his ears or nose. Disfigured, the person was sent back to his village as living evidence of the brutality the Spaniards were capable of" (Lies My Teacher Told Me 61).
Columbus' missions took on a religious zeal, as this excerpt from a letter he sent Isabella and Ferdinand in 1496: "In the name of the Holy Trinity, we can send from here all the slaves and brazil-wood which could be sold" (Loewen 62).
Loewen also cites population statistics: "Estimates of Haiti's pre-Columbian population range as high as 8,000,000 people...by 1555, they were all gone" (63). Loewen cites a letter by Pedro de Codoba to King F. (1517): "As a result of the sufferings and hard labor they endured, the Indians chose and have chosen suicide. Occassionally a hundred have committed mass suicide. The women, exhausted by labor, have shunned conception and childbirth...Many, when pregnant, have taken something to abort and have aborted. Others after delivery have killed their children with their own hands, so as not to leave them in such oppressive slavery" (63).
How do all of these diverse texts compare to CC's own words? Why do some of the stories overlook CC's ethnocentrism, enslavement of "Natives" and sexploits? And, why overlook CC's despair about being "alone" in a strange land that we read in the excerpt from our anthology?
How does the whole of "American" history, and, more importantly for our class, literature, shift when we account for the darker truths of Columbus and the first European contact?
No comments:
Post a Comment