In January , leaving several dozen men behind in a makeshift settlement on Hispaniola present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic , he left for Spain. He kept a detailed diary during his first voyage. More troublingly, it also recorded his initial impressions of the local people and his argument for why they should be enslaved. They have no iron …They would make fine servants … With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.
About six months later, in September , Columbus returned to the Americas. Then he headed west to continue his mostly fruitless search for gold and other goods. His group now included a large number of indigenous people the Europeans had enslaved. In lieu of the material riches he had promised the Spanish monarchs, he sent some enslaved people to Queen Isabella. In May , Columbus sailed west across the Atlantic for the third time.
Conditions were so bad that Spanish authorities had to send a new governor to take over. Meanwhile, the native Taino population, forced to search for gold and to work on plantations, was decimated within 60 years after Columbus landed, only a few hundred of what may have been , Taino were left on their island.
Christopher Columbus was arrested and returned to Spain in chains. In , cleared of the most serious charges but stripped of his noble titles, the aging Columbus persuaded the Spanish crown to pay for one last trip across the Atlantic. This time, Columbus made it all the way to Panama—just miles from the Pacific Ocean—where he had to abandon two of his four ships after damage from storms and hostile natives.
Empty-handed, the explorer returned to Spain, where he died in However, his journey kicked off centuries of exploration and exploitation on the American continents. The Columbian Exchange transferred people, animals, food and disease across cultures.
Old World wheat became an American food staple. African coffee and Asian sugar cane became cash crops for Latin America, while American foods like corn, tomatoes and potatoes were introduced into European diets. Today, Columbus has a controversial legacy —he is remembered as a daring and path-breaking explorer who transformed the New World, yet his actions also unleashed changes that would eventually devastate the native populations he and his fellow explorers encountered.
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Columbus Day is a U. Was Columbus the first European to glimpse the untamed, verdant paradise that America must have been centuries ago? There is proof that Europeans visited what is now Canada about years before Columbus set sail.
They were Vikings, and evidence of their presence can be found on the Canadian island of Newfoundland at a place called l'Anse Aux Meadows. Today the area is barren, but a thousand years ago there were trees everywhere and the area likely was used as winter stopover point, where Vikings repaired their boats and sat out bad weather.
It's not quite clear if the area was a permanent settlement, but it is clear that the expansion-minded Norsemen were here long before Columbus. And to add one fascinating wrinkle to the story of America's discover, consider the Sweet Potato. Yes, that's right the sweet potato. This humble pinkish-red tuber is native to South America. And yet, there have been sweet potatoes on the menu in Polynesia as far back as 1, years ago. So how did it get there? By comparing the DNA of Polynesian and South American sweet potatoes, scientists think it's clear that someone either brought them back to Polynesia after visiting South America, or islanders brought them from South America when they were exploring the Pacific Ocean.
Either way, it suggests that about the same time Nordic sailors were cutting trees in Canada, someone in Polynesia was trying sweet potatoes from South America for the first time. There are other theories out there. Another theory from a retired chemist named John Ruskamp suggests that pictographs discovered in Arizona are nearly identical to Chinese characters. He puts the Chinese in the U. We mention these two only because we have seen them pop up in newspaper articles recently.
They're thoroughly discredited, so we'll leave it at that. Well, here at VOA, we are trying to tell the story of America. And what is clear is that America was a melting pot hundreds of years before the Statue of Liberty began urging the world, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. In fact, the entirety of North and South America are a polyglot of cultures stretching back before recorded history. And people have been coming here ever since, chasing a better life, abundant food, water and opportunity.
Kevin Enochs is an award-winning content creator who has been explaining the intricacies of the natural world to television and online audiences for over 20 years. Load more comments. Search Search. After crossing the Atlantic, the Vikings encountered a rocky, barren land in present-day Canada.
The Norsemen then voyaged south to a timber-rich location they called Markland Forestland , most likely in present-day Labrador, before finally setting up a base camp likely on the northern tip of the island of Newfoundland.
The Vikings spent an entire winter there and benefitted from the milder weather compared to their homeland. They explored the surrounding region abounding with lush meadows, rivers teeming with salmon, and wild grapes so suitable for wine that Eriksson called the region Vinland Wineland. After spending the winter in Vinland, Eriksson and his crew sailed home to windswept Greenland with badly needed timber and plentiful portions of grapes.
While Columbus is honored with a federal holiday , the man considered to be the leader of the first European expedition to North America has not been totally forgotten on the calendar. The proximity of the days honoring Eriksson and Columbus is coincidence. October 9 was chosen because it is the anniversary of the arrival in New York of the ship Restauration, which carried the first organized band of Norwegian immigrants to the United States.
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