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To: ppaul
Then the marauders came in the night and rained lies on our parade. Charlatan historians revised, distorted and finally destroyed the well-documented legacy of Columbus.

I can't tell from this what the "charlatan historians" got wrong. Perhaps the author can refute the charge that Columbus' men enslaved or murdered 1/3 the entire population of Taino Indians:

After he failed to contact the emperor of China, the traders of India or the merchants of Japan, Columbus decided to pay for his voyage in the one important commodity he had found in ample supply - human lives. He seized 1,200 Taino Indians from the island of Hispaniola, crammed as many onto his ships as would fit and sent them to Spain, where they were paraded naked through the streets of Seville and sold as slaves in 1495. Columbus tore children from their parents, husbands from wives. On board Columbus' slave ships, hundreds died; the sailors tossed the Indian bodies into the Atlantic.

Because Columbus captured more Indian slaves than he could transport to Spain in his small ships, he put them to work in mines and plantations which he, his family and followers created throughout the Caribbean. His marauding band hunted Indians for sport and profit - beating, raping, torturing, killing, and then using the Indian bodies as food for their hunting dogs. Within four years of Columbus' arrival on Hispaniola, his men had killed or exported one-third of the original Indian population of 300,000. Within another 50 years, the Taino people had been made extinct [editor's note: the old assumption that the Taino became extinct is now open to serious question] - the first casualties of the holocaust of American Indians. The plantation owners then turned to the American mainland and to Africa for new slaves to follow the tragic path of the Taino.

source

6 posted on 10/16/2002 7:48:10 AM PDT by secretagent
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To: secretagent
Your "source" sucks.
7 posted on 10/16/2002 9:11:52 AM PDT by ppaul
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