Why celebrate Columbus Day?

                                           Left to right, Niña, Santa Maria (Columbus' ship) and the Pinta

             In the early morning hours of October 12, 1492 a lookout named Rodrigo de Triana shouted what every sailor aboard the Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria had been hoping to hear for 33 days since leaving the Canary Islands far to the east. The three ships had sailed from Spain on August 3^rd and the men were now on the verge of mutiny. Except for that quick stop for provisions in the Canary’s; after over two months of seeing nothing but the broad expanse of water in front of them, the men wanted to return home, any shortcut to Asia be damned.

“Land, land,” Rodrigo shouted from the crow’s nest of the Pinta. The soft white moon-lit sand of one of the southeasterly islands of the Bahamas beckoned. No one knows exactly which one it was; most often Samana Cay or Watling Island are chosen as possibilities. Rodrigo was also quite excited because Spain’s king Ferdinand and queen Isabella had offered a pension of 10,000 maravedis (around $1,300) for life to the first man who sighted land. At the time, seamen made about 12,000 maravedis in a good year so it was a sizable amount for any of them. Rodrigo was most likely smacking his lips in anticipation of the reward. But rather than compensate the lookout as promised by Spain’s rulers, Christopher Columbus, leader of the expedition, claimed he saw lights on the horizon a few hours previously and kept the reward for himself. It is not recorded if anyone questioned him about how he could see those distant lights, yet they were missed by all the other sailors, and why he never mentioning the sighting to anyone until after Rodrigo’s detecting the shoreline. This glimpse of Columbus tells us a lot about the man who would be crowned Admiral of the Ocean, and provides insight into his dishonesty and cunning.

                            The arrival of Columbus' ships as seen from the Taino's vantage

The natives he was about to meet would have been better off wiping out the ship’s crews as they came ashore. Those who lived on the island swam out to meet the newcomers as their boats neared the beach. The Taínos, as they were dubbed by the Spaniards, were part of a larger group of island natives called Arawaks, and were described as “naïve and free with their possessions” offering to share all they had with Columbus and his crewmen. They also discover the Taínos women were very free with sex as well. Because of small gold ornaments they wore in their ears and noses, several were taken prisoner and ordered by Columbus to lead him to the gold’s source. Columbus’ true reason for his voyage was revealed. It was not for discovery; it was for human and mineral plunder.

          Columbus claims the new land for God and Spain completely ignoring the desires of the natives who live there (seen in unauthentic dress in the background).

We now know that Columbus was not the first European to detect the American continents and nearby islands. Vikings had beaten him to it by around 500 years and there is evidence that other cultures and seafaring men may have stumbled upon the New World in the decades and centuries prior to Columbus’ voyage. Certainly what Columbus’ visit did was set in motion the annihilation of millions of natives who had flourished throughout the Americas. And Columbus’ justification? This is from his diary: "It was the Lord who put it into my mind, (I could feel His hand upon me), the fact that it would be possible to sail from here to the Indies. All who heard of my project rejected it with laughter, ridiculing me. There is no question that the inspiration was from the Holy Spirit, because He comforted me with rays of marvelous inspiration from the Holy Scriptures.......

I am a most noteworthy sinner, but I have cried out to the Lord for grace and mercy, and they have covered me completely. I have found the sweetest consolation since I made it my whole purpose to enjoy His marvelous Presence.

For the execution of the voyage to the Indies, I did not make use of intelligence, mathematics or maps.
It is simply the fulfillment of what Isaiah* had prophesied......(probably Isaiah 40:22.
In this scripture passage the prophet Isaiah made reference to "the circle of the earth.) No one should fear to undertake any task in the name of our Savior, if it is just and if the intention is purely for His holy service. The working out of all things has been assigned to each person by our Lord, but it all happens according to His sovereign will, even though He gives advice. Oh, what a gracious Lord, who desires that people should perform for Him those things for which He holds Himself responsible! Day and night, moment by moment, everyone should express their most devoted gratitude to Him."

Yes, god through the bible told Columbus to go west. And once there, god and the bible were the justification for all sorts of heinous acts committed by the Spaniards in service to Columbus. Since the natives had no recognizable religion, they were considered fair game for anything. A young priest named Bartolome de las Casas recorded what happened to the natives in their interactions with Columbus’ crew of one of his later voyages. The Spaniards “grew more conceited every day and refused to walk, so they rode on the backs of the Indians, or were carried in hammocks by the Indians running in relays. They thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and cutting slices off of them to test the sharpness of their blades.” In another passage he wrote about how “two of these so called Christians met two Indian boys each carrying a parrot; they took the parrots and for fun beheaded the boys.”

                                           The Natives were slaughtered for no reason at all by their Spanish overlords.

                Natives by the thousands were rounded up and forced at sword point to dig for gold in mines while the women were put to work cultivating fields of crops for the Spaniards. Most died within six to eight months. This kind of treatment set the stage for the English, Portuguese, Dutch and French invaders whose treatment of the natives they met was just as harsh as the Spanish. In most every case, they claimed God wanted them to kill all the Native Americans found over here. The land was deeded to Christians and would soon be theirs. One English governor put it succinctly when he wrote “Sickness [in the Indians] was the physical manifestation of the will of God.” In less than 300 years, the American continent’s original inhabitants had been reduced by almost 90%.

                If Christopher Columbus should be remembered for anything, it is not for his guidance, compassion, and honesty, since he deliberately misled his own men with a phony ship’s log so the men didn't know how far they’d traveled on that first voyage. Plus, he had vastly underestimated the circumference of the earth figuring it was about one fourth its actual size. He contemptuously kept the reward for discovering land from the man who actually had sighted it, and his mission turned out to be to claim any land for Spain through God, plundering the new land for riches and capturing the natives as slaves, or just out and out killing them in the name of Christ. He should be remembered for what his actions, grounded in the belief that God has ordained it, unleashed on an unsuspecting population. Genocide.

                Nothing says a religion is true more than death and destruction meted out by its believers.