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Columbus Day

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Submitted By gespaillatcos
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In fourteen hundred ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue. He sailed at the command of the king and queen of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella, trying to find a shorter route to India but instead arrived to what we know today as the Bahamas. The question is, did Christopher Columbus really discover America? That is a question that has been a motive of debate. There are clearly mixed feelings about this. The facts tell us that he was not the first human in the Americas; there were already “Tainos” in the land. Also, he wasn’t the first person to see land from the ship, it was Rodrigo de Triana who hollered: “Tierra! Tierra!” even though Columbus later told the Queen Isabelle that he saw a light that evening and claimed the reward that was supposed to be given to Rodrigo de Triana. The issue is not only whether or not he was who discovered America or not but that he imposed himself to the Natives of the land and did as he pleased, exploiting them in their own territory, claiming his what was rightfully theirs. Based on these facts we could even say that Christopher Columbus was a Realist individual because all he was after was power and behaved in an extremely selfish manner. There have been claims by cartographic expert, Armando Cortesao,(Jr.) that, Portuguese explorers had previously been in the Americas before Columbus and that these explorers had mapped the area in 1424. However, the map is the only proof we have that such thing did happened. What Cortesano states is that before the Europeans came to the Americas thanks to the “discovery” of a New World (to them) and colonize, exploit and oppressed the Natives in the land, the Portuguese already had knowledge that the Americas existed. There are also recollections that Icelandic Explorer Leif Erikson came to the Americas a long time before Columbus did (Foundation). He pulled his boat in the waters of what

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