Christopher columbus what was he looking for

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. Home United States U. Africa 54 - November 11, VOA Africa Listen live. VOA Newscasts Latest program. VOA Newscasts. Previous Next. October 10, PM. Kevin Enochs. See comments Print.

And before Columbus? Kevin Enochs 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. Newest Newest Oldest. This forum has been closed. More US Stories. Spurning the wishes of the local queen, who found slavery offensive, Columbus established a forced labor policy over the native population to rebuild the settlement and explore for gold, believing it would prove to be profitable.

His efforts produced small amounts of gold and great hatred among the native population. Before returning to Spain, Columbus left his brothers Bartholomew and Diego to govern the settlement on Hispaniola and sailed briefly around the larger Caribbean islands further convincing himself he had discovered the outer islands of China. It wasn't until his third voyage that Columbus actually reached the mainland, exploring the Orinoco River in present-day Venezuela.

Unfortunately, conditions at the Hispaniola settlement had deteriorated to the point of near-mutiny, with settlers claiming they had been misled by Columbus' claims of riches and complaining about the poor management of his brothers.

The Spanish Crown sent a royal official who arrested Columbus and stripped him of his authority. He returned to Spain in chains to face the royal court. The charges were later dropped, but Columbus lost his titles as governor of the Indies and, for a time, much of the riches made during his voyages.

After convincing King Ferdinand that one more voyage would bring the abundant riches promised, Columbus went on what would be his last voyage in , traveling along the eastern coast of Central America in an unsuccessful search for a route to the Indian Ocean.

A storm wrecked one of his ships, stranding the captain and his sailors on the island of Cuba. During this time, local islanders, tired of the Spaniards' poor treatment and obsession with gold, refused to give them food.

In a spark of inspiration, Columbus consulted an almanac and devised a plan to "punish" the islanders by taking away the moon. On February 29, , a lunar eclipse alarmed the natives enough to re-establish trade with the Spaniards. A rescue party finally arrived, sent by the royal governor of Hispaniola in July, and Columbus and his men were taken back to Spain in November of In the two remaining years of his life following his last voyage to the Americas, Columbus struggled to recover his lost titles.

Although he did regain some of his riches in May , his titles were never returned. Columbus probably died of severe arthritis following an infection on May 20, , still believing he had discovered a shorter route to Asia. Columbus has been credited for opening up the Americas to European colonization - as well as blamed for the destruction of the native peoples of the islands he explored.

Ultimately, he failed to find that what he set out for: a new route to Asia and the riches it promised. The horse from Europe allowed Native American tribes in the Great Plains of North America to shift from a nomadic to a hunting lifestyle. He did make one last voyage to the Americas, however, this time to Panama — just miles from the Pacific Ocean. Columbus died in , still believing that he had found a new route to the East Indies.

Today his historic legacy as a daring explorer who 'discovered' the New World has been challenged. His voyages launched centuries of European exploration and colonisation of the American continents. His encounters also triggered centuries of exploitation of native American populations. Browse our best selling books, or pick up nautical inspired homewares.

Visit us. National Maritime Museum. Plan your visit. Top things to do. Shop nautical gifts Browse our best selling books, or pick up nautical inspired homewares Shop. The Nautical Puzzle Book is packed to the brim with over puzzles inspired by the National Maritime Museum's objects and their stories Buy Now. Some of the natives struck back and hid out in the hills.

But in a punitive expedition rounded up 1, of them, and were shipped off to the slave markets of Seville. The natives, seeing what was in store for them, dug up their own crops of cassava and destroyed their supplies in hopes that the resulting famine would drive the Spaniards out.

But it did not work. The Spaniards were sure there was more gold in the island than the natives had yet found, and were determined to make them dig it out. Columbus built more forts throughout the island and decreed that every Arawak of 14 years or over was to furnish a hawk's bell full of gold dust every three months. The various local leaders were made responsible for seeing that the tribute was paid. In regions where gold was not to be had, 25 pounds of woven or spun cotton could be substituted for the hawk's bell of gold dust.

The pieces that the natives had at first presented him were the accumulation of many years. To fill their quotas by washing in the riverbeds was all but impossible, even with continual daily labor. But the demand was unrelenting, and those who sought to escape it by fleeing to the mountains were hunted down with dogs taught to kill. A few years later Peter Martyr was able to report that the natives "beare this yoke of servitude with an evill will, but yet they beare it.

The tribute system, for all its injustice and cruelty, preserved something of the Arawaks' old social arrangements: they retained their old leaders under control of the king's viceroy, and royal directions to the viceroy might ultimately have worked some mitigation of their hardships.

They wanted a share of the land and its people, and when their demands were not met they revolted against the government of Columbus. In they forced him to abandon the system of obtaining tribute through the Arawak chieftains for a new one in which both land and people were turned over to individual Spaniards for exploitation as they saw fit.

This was the beginning of the system of repartimientos or encomiendas later extended to other areas of Spanish occupation. For the Arawaks the new system of forced labor meant that they did more work, wore more clothes and said more prayers. Peter Martyr could rejoice that "so many thousands of men are received to bee the sheepe of Christes flocke.

They died from overwork and from new European diseases. They killed themselves. And they took pains to avoid having children. Life was not fit to live, and they stopped living. By , according to Las Casas, only were left. In their place had appeared slaves imported from Africa.

The people of the golden age had been virtually exterminated. What is the meaning of this tale of horror? Why is the first chapter of American history an atrocity story? But we shall have to go further than Spanish greed to understand why American history began this way. The Spanish had no monopoly on greed. The Indians' austere way of life could not fail to win the admiration of the invaders, for self-denial was an ancient virtue in Western culture.

The Greeks and Romans had constructed philosophies and the Christians a religion around it. The Indians, and especially the Arawaks, gave no sign of thinking much about God, but otherwise they seemed to have attained the monastic virtues. Plato had emphasized again and again that freedom was to be reached by restraining one's needs, and the Arawaks had attained impressive freedom. But even as the Europeans admired the Indians' simplicity, they were troubled by it, troubled and offended.

Innocence never fails to offend, never fails to invite attack, and the Indians seemed the most innocent people anyone had ever seen. Without the help of Christianity or of civilization, they had attained virtues that Europeans liked to think of as the proper outcome of Christianity and civilization.

The fury with which the Spaniards assaulted the Arawaks even after they had enslaved them must surely have been in part a blind impulse to crush an innocence that seemed to deny the Europeans' cherished assumption of their own civilized, Christian superiority over naked, heathen barbarians. That the Indians were destroyed by Spanish greed is true.

But greed is simply one of the uglier names we give to the driving force of modern civilization. We usually prefer less pejorative names for it. Call it the profit motive, or free enterprise, or the work ethic, or the American way, or, as the Spanish did, civility. Before we become too outraged at the behavior of Columbus and his followers, before we identify ourselves too easily with the lovable Arawaks, we have to ask whether we could really get along without greed and everything that goes with it.

Yes, a few of us, a few eccentrics, might manage to live for a time like the Arawaks. But the modern world could not have put up with the Arawaks any more than the Spanish could.