What Does the Record Show About Columbus?

People had lived across the Americas for thousands of years before 1492. A 2019 review in Science found people at sites in both North and South America between about 15,500 and 14,000 years ago. Their ancestors came from Asia.

Some sites may be older. At White Sands, New Mexico, human footprints lie between layers of seeds dated in 2021 to about 23,000 to 21,000 years ago. Critics doubted the seed dates, but pollen dated in 2023 and wetland mud dated in 2025 supported a date at the last ice age’s peak.

By 1492 the Americas held tens of millions of people. A 2019 review of the published estimates put the total at 60.5 million. Its interquartile range, the middle half of its combined estimates, runs from 44.8 to 78.2 million. When people say Columbus discovered America, the sense that holds up is that his voyages began lasting contact between the two hemispheres.

The team that dated L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland calls it “the only confirmed Norse site in the Americas”. The archaeologist Birgitta Wallace, who dug there, describes eight sod buildings, slag from smelting and working iron, and nails from boat repair. Finds, buildings and radiocarbon dates put the Norse stay at about 1000, and it seems to have lasted about a decade. In 2021 the team dated three pieces of wood cut with metal tools to 1021, 471 years before Columbus sailed.

Two Icelandic sagas tell of Leif Erikson reaching a land named Vinland for its grapes; in one, he sails there from Greenland. In the sagas, Thorfinn Karlsefni led an expedition to Vinland but gave up and returned to Greenland after fighting with the people already living there.

Scholarly opinion that the Earth was round was nearly unanimous in the first fifteen centuries of the Christian era. The historian Jeffrey Burton Russell counts five writers in that time who seem to have denied it, and by the fifteenth century all doubt had gone.

Eratosthenes (about 276 to 194 before the Common Era) had estimated the Earth’s circumference, and Ptolemy, about the year 150, supplied the figures most fifteenth-century geographers used. Sacrobosco’s medieval treatise The Sphere states, “Thus it is clear that the earth is round.”

Kris Lane, a historian of colonial Latin America at Tulane University, credits the myth to Washington Irving’s best-selling 1828 biography of Columbus. Irving describes a council of “clerical sages” at Salamanca in which some, quoting the Psalms and Saint Paul, argue that the Earth “must be flat”. Russell calls Irving “the most dramatic perpetrator of the Flat Error”.

A royal commission heard Columbus between 1486 and 1490, once at Salamanca. Its most convincing objection was about distance. Relying on Ptolemy’s figures, it argued that the ocean was too wide to cross, and none of its objections questioned that the Earth was round, Russell writes.

Columbus shrank both the ocean and the length of a degree. He took a degree to be 45 nautical miles, about 83 km. The modern figure is about 111 km, so his Earth was about a quarter too small. He put Japan about 4,450 km west of the Canary Islands, where the real distance is 22,000 km. By Russell’s reckoning, he expected a voyage about 20 percent as long as the real one.

Columbus believed he had reached Asia. On 23 October 1492 his journal says he thinks Cuba “must be Cipango”, Marco Polo’s name for Japan; by 1 November he was sure it was “the mainland”. In 1498 he wrote of having found “another world”. His 1906 editor, Edward Bourne, read this as a region unknown to Marco Polo but “not for that reason necessarily physically detached from the known Asia.”

From the first day, Columbus’s journal praises the people he met and weighs their use as labor. The journal, addressed to Ferdinand and Isabella, survives in a shortened copy, reportedly in the hand of Bartolomé de las Casas, which quotes him at length. His letter to Luis de Santángel, dated 15 February 1493, was sent with another for the monarchs.

On 12 October 1492, the day he landed, he wrote that “They neither carry nor know anything of arms,” that “They should be good servants and intelligent,” and that he believed “they would easily be made Christians, as it appeared to me that they had no religion.”

Two days after landing, on 14 October, he wrote of the islanders, seven of whom he had seized “to bring home and learn our language and return”:

Columbus wrote that “on my reaching the Indies, I took by force, in the first island that I discovered, some of these natives”. They were to “learn our language and give me information”, he wrote. He also wrote that he took possession of the islands “without resistance”. In closing he promised the monarchs gold, spices, cotton, mastic and lign aloes, for “a very little assistance”. Then came “slaves, as many of these idolators as their Highnesses shall command to be shipped.”

All figures as given in Livi Bacci’s 2003 study in Revista de Indias.

Nobody knows how many Taíno lived on Hispaniola in 1492. A 2021 genetic study of ancient Caribbean people points below Livi Bacci’s figure. Its authors judged that estimates of hundreds of thousands or even millions for an island like Hispaniola are too large. After smallpox struck in 1518–19 a few thousand Taíno remained. By the middle of the century their communities had died out, though some Taíno survived, very often by mixing with Spaniards, enslaved Africans and Indigenous people brought from elsewhere.

On Hispaniola most of the fall came before smallpox. Livi Bacci finds no record of a deadly epidemic on the island before the smallpox of 1518–19, by which time the population had already fallen to a few thousand.

Instead, those who argued over the collapse from the 1510s on agreed that the main causes were the hunt for gold and the encomienda. They included Las Casas, the Dominican friars and the chronicler Oviedo. The encomienda assigned Taíno to Spanish settlers as forced laborers. A third of the able-bodied men worked in the mines, for up to ten months a year, with too little food and much mistreatment. Families and villages were broken up. Deaths rose and births fell.

Columbus and his brother Bartholomew imposed a tribute in 1495–96 on the part of the island the Spaniards held. Las Casas records that everyone aged 14 and over in the Cibao, the Vega Real and near the mines owed a hawk’s bell full of gold every three months. Everyone else owed an arroba, a Spanish weight, of cotton.

Anyone without the copper or brass token given at each payment was to be punished, “aunque, diz que, moderadamente” (though, it is said, moderately), Las Casas writes. The story that people who failed to pay had their hands cut off is not in his account of the tribute. His Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies tells of Spaniards who, refused “a coffer filled with gold”, “cut off the hands and noses of countless women and men”. But it tells this as one episode, not as the tribute’s penalty.

Charges against Columbus reached Spain, and the Crown sent Francisco de Bobadilla. In September 1500 he held an inquiry into three charges: whether Columbus had tried to rise against him, whether he allowed the Taíno to be baptized, and how he and his brothers had dispensed justice.

Consuelo Varela and Isabel Aguirre published its record in 2006. Its witnesses describe harsh punishments of Spanish settlers. Nine men were flogged over a piece of old bacon or a glass of wine, and men were hanged for selling food from the storehouse. Others were banished, enslaved or had ears or noses cut off.

One witness said that in 1499 Columbus seized a chief and more than 300 of his people, who were under the king’s protection, to send to Castile as slaves. Varela adds that Bartholomew Columbus hunted Taíno who refused to pay, using dogs, and sent survivors to Spain as slaves. Several witnesses said Columbus defended Taíno mistreated by Spaniards, perhaps, Varela suggests, to damage his image. Only one recalled the wider mistreatment of the Taíno, and Varela thinks him probably right.

Bobadilla sent Columbus and his brothers back to Spain in irons in the autumn of 1500. The monarchs let him sail again in 1502, but they had sent Nicolás de Ovando to govern the island in Bobadilla’s place.

Bartolomé de las Casas went to Hispaniola in 1502 with Ovando. His Short Account was written in 1542 and published in 1552. In Andrew Hurley’s translation, it says the Spaniards “became like fierce wolves and tigers and lions who have gone many days without food or nourishment”. Las Casas presented it to Prince Philip, hoping that the emperor Charles V would end the abuses.

His numbers run far above Livi Bacci’s. He wrote that of the “above three millions souls that we once saw” on Hispaniola, “today there be no more than two hundred”. Livi Bacci’s most likely range for 1492 is a tenth or less of that, yet he still takes the 1508 count of 60,000 from Las Casas’s History of the Indies.

For the Americas as a whole, disease was the main killer. Diseases that crossed from the Old World included smallpox, measles, typhus and malaria, to which the peoples of the Americas had no immunity. The 2019 review that put the 1492 population at 60.5 million finds that European epidemics removed 90 percent of it over the following century. It dates Hispaniola’s first outbreak to 1497. Livi Bacci counts Hispaniola among the exceptions, because most of its fall came before smallpox.

Disease was one part of the Columbian Exchange. The economists Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian define it as the exchange of diseases, ideas, food crops and people between the Old World and the New after 1492. The Old World gained potatoes, maize and tomatoes, and sugar and coffee were planted in the Americas. The historian Alfred Crosby’s 1972 book The Columbian Exchange told the story of 1492 through biology.

Whether the collapse was genocide turns on intent. The 1948 Genocide Convention defines genocide as any of five acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”. The United Nations office for genocide prevention calls intent “the most difficult element to determine.” The enslavement and the tribute on Hispaniola were deliberate: Columbus offered the monarchs slaves in 1493 and imposed the tribute in 1495–96.

Lane writes: “We may charge him with genocide by negligence (if there is such a thing), but it is harder to prove intention. Columbus wanted live and multiplying subjects to tax and govern.” His answer to the charge is in three questions: “Was Columbus an active protector of Native Americans? No. Did he wish to eliminate them? No. Did genocide directly result from his decrees and his family’s commercial aims? Yes.”

The schoolbook Columbus who proved the Earth round was built in the nineteenth century. Checking old textbooks held at Stanford, Russell found that many written before 1870 do not mention the question, while most written after 1880 make the flat-earth accusation.

Russell traces much of it to Irving. A textbook by John J. Anderson said in 1880 only that Columbus “believed the earth to be round”. By 1898 another Anderson textbook had him face “wise men” who quote Lactantius at him, in wording Russell calls “almost a direct quote, from Irving.” Some textbooks for fifth and eighth graders still repeated the flat-earth error in the early 1980s.

New York’s Society of St. Tammany marked the 300th anniversary of the landing in 1792. In the second half of the nineteenth century the day was celebrated in cities with many Italian Americans. In March 1891 a mob in New Orleans killed 11 Italian Americans, in one of the largest lynchings in U.S. history.

Encyclopaedia Britannica calls the lynching the direct impetus for the first national holiday. To appease the Italian government, President Benjamin Harrison proclaimed 21 October 1892, the 400th anniversary, a general holiday, meant to be held once. In 1937 President Franklin D. Roosevelt made it an annual federal holiday.

By the quincentennial in 1992, Britannica notes, the holiday had become an occasion for discussing the European conquest of Indigenous peoples. Alternatives such as Indigenous Peoples’ Day had been proposed. Lane noted in 2015 that several cities and states now celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day or Native American Day instead.

His voyages began lasting contact and the Columbian Exchange. Lane credits him with finding the true extent of the North Atlantic’s trade-wind circuit, “proving over his four voyages that transatlantic sea travel in the age of sail was far more certain than anyone had imagined.” Lane notes that “Columbus was following Spanish and Portuguese trading and slaving practices.”

The holiday matters to many Italian Americans. The first national Columbus Day followed the lynching of 11 Italian Americans in 1891, and Italian Americans have led opposition to changing it. The National Italian American Foundation calls New York’s parade “the most visible and accessible manifestation of our Italian American Pride”. Across the Americas most deaths came from epidemics, and, as Lane notes, Columbus wanted his subjects alive, to tax and govern.

Parts of this case do not hold for Hispaniola, the island he governed. There most of the fall came before smallpox, under the tribute and forced labor that began in his time.

Nor were the practices of his time beyond objection then. The Crown’s envoy took over his government in 1500 and investigated his rule, and by the 1510s Spaniards on Hispaniola were condemning the treatment of its people. Among them were the Dominican Antonio de Montesinos, who preached that the Indigenous people were “men” with souls, and, from 1514, Las Casas.

His own journal and 1493 letter record captives and offer the monarchs slaves, and he imposed the tribute on Hispaniola. Lane writes that “by 1500, he and his brothers had sent nearly 1,500 enslaved islanders to European markets to be sold”. The Crown’s envoy removed him and sent him home in irons.

Parts of this case go further than the record. The story that he cut off the hands of people who failed to pay tribute is not in Las Casas’s account of the tribute. Las Casas reached the island after Columbus had been removed. And Lane finds intent, which genocide requires, “harder to prove” than negligence.

The school story is mostly myth, and the record that replaces it is harsher. The round-Earth Columbus comes from Washington Irving’s 1828 biography and the schoolbooks that followed it. Before 1492 the dispute was over the ocean’s width, and Columbus had it wrong. His own journal and letter are direct evidence against him.

On Hispaniola, under the governors who followed him, the Taíno counted fell from 60,000 in 1508 to a little over 26,000 in 1514, years before smallpox reached the island. Whether that was genocide turns on intent. Kris Lane writes that Columbus wanted subjects to tax, yet holds that genocide directly resulted from his decrees and his family’s commercial aims.

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The verdict above as one image. The Taíno counted on Hispaniola fell from 60,000 in 1508 to fewer than 34,000 in 1510. In 1514 they numbered a little over 26,000, and Oviedo estimated fewer than 500 in 1548. Anyone may download and post it.

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