Roke~commonswiki Christopher Columbus voyages.gif - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en
What happened when he got there?
On 11th October 1492 Columbus, on board the Santa Maria (see model) arrived at what is believed to be Watling Island in the West Indies. One of his first acts was to enslave some of the indigenous Taino population so he could take them back to Spain as trophies and curiosities.
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On later voyages, he would plunder goods from the islands and set up colonies.
His arrival also introduced diseases to the indigenous peoples. They had no natural resilience or medicine against them. Over the centuries, the spread of disease alone would kill millions of people!
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Columbus' 'discovery'* also started trade routes between Europe and the Americas (which would expand the existing trade in enslaved people from West Africa).
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* We feature 'discovery' in inverted commas in recognition that these lands were already inhabited and hence already 'discovered' by people who came before.
Paul Hermans Santa Maria 24-03-2007 under licence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:GNU_Free_Documentation_License
Was this new?
OK, Columbus changed a lot. But was what he did particularly new?
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Below, we explore this idea further....
Over to You!
Below is a map of the Canary Islands, which are off the coast of Africa.
1. Use a world map to find out how far away they are from Spain.
2. Read about what happened there before Columbus.
The Canaries off the North West coast of Africa.
The Canary Islands
By the time Columbus was 'discovering' new places in the 1400's, the Normans (Yes, the ones who in 1066 invaded England) had sailed to the Canaries to find and bring back a rare dye. The indigenous peoples, the Guanche, were probably enslaved by these sailors.
The Guanche resisted their lands being taken over and resisted enslavement, but still these lands were colonised.
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The land was used for sugar growing, which fed the new European fashion for sugar.
The model
This model of taking over a place for another countries gain had been going on for centuries! Columbus was doing nothing new.
Taking luxury goods had also been done many, many times before. We humans really are a greedy lot!
Indigenous peoples all over the world had been tormented by this treatment throughout history, but now the scale and the distance the colonisers had come from had increased massively. New shipping technology allowed 'explorers' to go further.