t's somewhat old hat at this point to point out that Christopher Columbus — in whose name children are off school and mail isn't delivered today — was a homicidal tyrant who initiated the two greatest crimes in the history of the Western Hemisphere, the Atlantic slave trade, and the American Indian genocide.
Rehashing all of his crimes would require a much longer article, not least because evaluating the claims of contemporary primary sources is a somewhat tricky historiographical enterprise. Philadelphia Magazine's Michael Coard has a good survey here; Howard Zinn's work on this is controversial, but you can find a good excerpt at Jacobin and an illustrated version at the Oatmeal.
Here are just a handful of specific cases, mostly culled from Laurence Bergreen's recent biography, Columbus: The Four Voyages, of almost unimaginable cruelty inflicted by Columbus and his crew during their time in the Caribbean.
