Frostburg Mining Journal

COLUMBUS CRITICISED.

ANOTHER VIEW OF AMERICA'S DISCOVERER BY A. P. DUNLOP.

A Few Plain Words About His Treatment of the Carib Race—Ingratitude Par Excellence—Bartering Slaves for Privileges—Ferdinand and Isabella Take the Bait—A Race Exterminated

There is one fact worthy of note in the coming four hundredth year celebration of the discovery of the American continent, namely, that not one single specimen of the race Columbus discovered will be on hand to defend itself, writes A. P. Dunlop in the Saturday Review. Not alone has the Cib been wiped from the face of the earth, but the oldest inhabitants of the West Indian Islands have not seen a half breed even of that race, nor do any of them remember having been told that they existed in the time of their fathers or grandfathers. Columbus writes of these people as the best he had ever seen, and says they received him with overwhelming kindness. Nay, to that they were numerous, and that every island from San Salvador to Santo Domingo was thickly inhabited.

Could one of these guileless savages arise to say a few words at the opening of the World's Fair he might only disarrange the mantle of glory which the Saxon, Celtic, and Teutonic races have so prettily arranged around the historic figures of Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella. The genuine savage might first ask why the mighty people of North America were celebrating the advent of a man who had nothing whatever to do with the discovery of what is now the United States. He would find no record of his own people—involved not even left a trace of their existence behind them—but he might insinuate into the enemy's camp for information, and there he would find—whether proved or not—that Mr. Columbus was said by his son Ferdinand to have been a pirate, or the descendant of one, who was constantly on the move, and who, in the fifteenth century, in the home of the Vikings, had heard the story of the discovery of Vineland.

He could readily reconcile Mr. Columbus's way of doing things by authenticated dispatches from Columbus to "Their Highnesses," Isabella and Ferdinand, by reading a copy of a letter now in the Spanish archives, in which the discoverer informs "Their High." that he was treated as a brother by the savage people, that they gave freely all they had and conducted him to their gold mines. The Carib might then read the latter part of the dispatch, evidently written as soon as Columbus returned from the gold mines, and suggests how easy it would be to overcome this unarmed people and send them as slaves to Spain.

Did he get them? The answer now in the Madrid archives is: "Their highnesses will send the vessels."

If the written account of these Spanish pirates be correct, the Carib orator might say that 12 years after Columbus arrived in the West Indies not one of this prosperous race was alive, and he could with truth point to the accounts left by the Dominican friar, Las Casas, who wrote that 40,000 of them were killed on the Lucayan group inside of a very short time either by the sword or the lash of the slave drivers.

The native West Indian might sum up his argument by saying that as an example of deliberate treachery and cold blooded cruelty and hypocrisy, the world's history has no parallel to Christopher Columbus, who exterminated a race that he himself says received him as "one sent from heaven," nor to his side partner, who went into the real estate and slave speculation with a hard, cold greed for gold, and then permitted the discoverer to end his miserable life as a pauper.