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More than 50 have passed since Christopher He was only 55 years old, but had destroyed his health during four difficult ocean voyages to the New World. He died without knowing that he had found a new hemisphere. Today, this remarkable achievement along with the reputation of this gifted Italian navigator are routinely attacked on the federal holiday that bears his name.
Among his critics are college professors, social activists, politicians, and religious leaders, who blame Columbus for persecuting the native tribes he found in the New World. They charge him with bringing deadly diseases, armed conquest, slavery, religious persecution and racism-evils common to all civilizations up to his time (and ours), and common to the primitive Indian tribes Columbus met as well.
LOOK AT THE FACTS
According to these special interest groups, Columbus and his men landed in a Garden of Eden and destroyed it, but anthropologists tell us that before the Europeans arrived, the scattered tribes in the New World lived in abject poverty, ignorance, and superstition.
To survive, the native populations were huntergatherers who depended on "slash-and-burn" cultivation of the land along with hunting, fishing and collecting edible wild plants, seeds and shellfish. They had no written language, history or literature.
Forensic scientists have examined the remains of these primitive Indians and discovered that long before Columbus arrived, they died from many diseases, including syphilis, hepatitis, polio, tuberculosis and intestinal parasites. Very few lived past age 40.
Most of the native tribes Columbus found were engaged in bloody tribal wars and, in the case of the Arawaks, Caribs and Canibs, practiced slavery, torture and cannibalism - hence the word "cannibal."
Later Spanish explorers in Mexico and Central America found that even the more advanced...