DEAR EDITOR:

In her Nov. 7 letter, Lena Fox presented a sanitized, one-sided, inaccurate version of Christopher Columbus’ story. Here are some historical facts she left out.

After his first encounter with the Arawak Indians, Columbus wrote, “They have no iron (weapons) … they would make fine servants … with 50 men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”

Columbus also wrote, “On the first island which I found, I took some of the natives by force.” Why did he kidnap those natives? It wasn’t to teach them Christianity. It was to force them to show him where to find gold.

On Hispaniola, Columbus killed some natives because they wouldn’t trade with him. Then he captured some natives to take back to Spain. Unaccustomed to the cold northern latitudes, many of the native prisoners died of exposure aboard ship before they ever reached Europe.

Columbus promised the king and queen if they financed his next voyage, he would bring them “as much gold as they need … and as many slaves as they ask.” So, of course, the good Catholic monarchs gave him 17 ships. Back in the Caribbean, Columbus and his men went from island to island capturing natives to be sent back to Spain as slaves. In 1495, they captured over 1,500 native men, women and children, and shipped them off to Spain. A few hundred died along the way, but several hundred survived and were handed over to an archdeacon, who put them up for sale in the slave market. When he heard about the profits made from selling the slaves, Columbus wrote: “Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.” But he didn’t send all of his slaves to Spain. Some of them he tortured and worked to death in a frantic quest to find gold.

Thus began the presence of white Christians in the so-called New World.

Yes, Columbus was an expert sailor and navigator. Yes, his bravery and daring were extraordinary. But he was also a slaver, a killer, a brutalizer and a bigot. These facts long have been known by historians. It’s all right there in Columbus’s own writings. But most Americans have been kept blissfully ignorant of these facts in deference to national pride and the myth of “American exceptionalism.”

SHAWN KOSIOR

Canfiel