Skip to main content

Was Christopher Columbus good or evil or both?

First of all, I would say that essentially every person who has ever lived has been some combination of good and evil.  Both seem to be innate parts of our human nature.  Columbus was certainly both.  He was a man who had good qualities, but whose ambition led him to do thing that we, today, would see as evil.


If we can say that ambition and perseverance are good qualities in a person then Christopher Columbus was good in some ways.  Columbus had strong ambitions.  He wanted to be an important and respected person.  He was also willing to strive hard and to never give up in pursuit of his ambitions.  He tried time and again to get his voyage of exploration funded until finally he succeeded.  He pushed his men to continue the voyage when they were afraid that they were doomed.  We tend to honor people who are determined and driven.  Columbus definitely had these qualities.


On the other hand, Columbus did things that we certainly do not approve of today. When he saw the “Indians,” his main reaction was to think of how to exploit them.  He wrote about how easily they could be enslaved.  He forced them to work for him and punished them harshly when they did not do as he expected.  He sent hundreds of them back to Spain to be slaves.  Columbus was also a greedy man.  He and his brothers governed the colony that they were given so harshly and corruptly that he was eventually arrested and sent back to Spain in chains.  He also promised to give a large sum of money to whichever of his crew first sighted land, but then took the reward for himself, claiming that he had seen the land the night before the crewman saw it for the first time.  Like many people who are ambitious and driven, he was capable of being greedy and always wanted more for himself.


Like most people, then, Columbus was both good and bad.  He had good qualities that allowed him to succeed and bad qualities that showed up in the way he treated other people.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is there a word/phrase for "unperformant"?

As a software engineer, I need to sometimes describe a piece of code as something that lacks performance or was not written with performance in mind. Example: This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. Based on my Google searches, this isn't a real word. What is the correct way to describe this? EDIT My usage of "performance" here is in regard to speed and efficiency. For example, the better the performance of code the faster the application runs. My question and example target the negative definition, which is in reference to preventing inefficient coding practices. Answer This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. In my opinion, reads more easily as: This coding style leads to unmaintainable and poorly performing code. The key to well-written documentation and reports lies in ease of understanding. Adding poorly understood words such as performant decreases that ease. In addressing the use of such a poorly ...
Post a Comment
Read more

A man has a garden measuring 84 meters by 56 meters. He divides it into the minimum number of square plots. What is the length of the square plots?

We wish to divide this man's garden into the minimum number of square plots possible. A square has all four sides with the same length.Our garden is a rectangle, so the answer is clearly not 1 square plot. If we choose the wrong length for our squares, we may end up with missing holes or we may not be able to fit our squares inside the garden. So we have 84 meters in one direction and 56 meters in the other direction. When we start dividing the garden in square plots, we are "filling" those lengths in their respective directions. At each direction, there must be an integer number of squares (otherwise, we get holes or we leave the garden), so that all the square plots fill up the garden nicely. Thus, our job here is to find the greatest common divisor of 84 and 56. For this, we prime factor both of them: `56 = 2*2*2*7` `84 = 2*2*3*7` We can see that the prime factors and multiplicities in common are `2*2*7 = 28` . This is the desired length of the square plots. If you wi...
Post a Comment
Read more