Michele da Cuneo, childhood friend of Columbus, describes raping an indigenous women given to him by

[tenderfoot]

Christopher Columbus

"While I was in the boat, I captured a very beautiful Carib woman, whom the said Lord Admiral gave to me. When I had taken her to my cabin she was naked - as was their custom. I was filled with a desire to take my pleasure with her and attempted to satisfy my desire. She was unwilling, and so treated me with her nails that I wished I had never begun. But - to cut a long story short - I then took a piece of rope and whipped her soundly, and she let forth such incredible screams that you would not have believed your ears. Eventually we came to such terms, I assure you, that you would have thought that she had been brought up in a school for whores."

Celebrate that...

[PdxSean]

1. That's heart-breaking. Here is a source for the text.

A source for the text at the University of Virginia: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~cap/poca/POC-col.html

[tenderfoot]

3. Yes.

https://www.rawstory.com/2014/10/five-scary-christopher-columbus-quotes-that-let-you-celebrate-the-holiday-the-right-way/

[whathehell]

38. Crimes against humanity...Sickening in the extreme.

[Calculating]

2. Sociopaths are scary

Actions like that require a person entirely devoid of empathy.

[whathehell]

39. Yes..

Horrific and sickening In the extreme.

[snooper2]

4. Interesting, I didn't know people were using the phrase "to cut a long story short" 500 years ago

[obamanut2012]

7. Translating a similar idiom

[highplainsdem]

9. Colloquial translation. Another was "to tell you the end of it all."

[MineralMan]

18. Without the original Spanish, it's impossible to tell,

but it sounds like a idiomatic translation to me. It was not written in English, you see.

[WinkyDink]

25. STHU. You need some serious schooling: DaVinci, Michelangelo, Fermi, Galileo FGS, Volta, Marconi,

http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1929666,00.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Italian_scientists

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Italian_painters

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Italian_composers

That's a start.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

31. What? People keep telling me Columbus Day is about Italian-American heritage!

It's almost like the name of the day should be changed, or something.

[geardaddy]

36. They aren't Italian-Americans.

But Columbus Day should be named after one of them instead of a creep like Columbus.

[Nevernose]

47. Me, pedantically:

Fermi was. He was married to a Jewish woman and moved to the US because fascist Europe in the 30s wasn’t an awesome place for them.

[geardaddy]

48. Cool. Thanks for clarifying!

[obamanut2012]

6. It's even more horrible when you consider that was a "low-level" atrocity

against the women, men, and children there. Just horrific.

It is literally like Germany celebrating Adolf Hitler Day.

[DK504]

8. Heard a lady speaking today that said she couldn't stand

for the National Anthem, she didn't see the US as a land of laws or a land of equality. She said we were built on a lie. We have been a huge PR experiment from a bunch old white guys and it's not working.

She sounded like a 30-something woman and identified as African American. I couldn't agree with her more.

[snooper2]

12. I agree, we should all go back home..

My mom was from Austria, dad side here for 150 years or so...don't know full history-

I was born prior to 1983 though so kind of screwed on getting Austrian citizenship. Any ideas?

"If the parents are married at the time of birth, Austrian citizenship of either the mother or the father is sufficient, so long as the child was born after 1 September 1983. For children born prior to that date, the father must have been an Austrian citizen: children born to an Austrian mother married to a non-Austrian father do not qualify."

[Doreen]

15. Sound sexist to me. Like women do not count as citizens.

[smirkymonkey]

17. That's exactly what stood out for me as well.

I wonder if anyone has ever tried to change it. Especially since it is much easier to prove maternity than paternity.

[WinkyDink]

26. Send me to Sicily, England, or Ireland, PLEASE.

[highplainsdem]

10. Elsewhere in that letter he referred to beautiful women who were 15-16 years old.

Sadly, even that would have been considered mature when other sources say that Columbus's crew wanted girls who were 9-10 years old.

[pnwmom]

16. Life expectancy was lower in that era, so girls of 15-16 were considered adults. n/t

[YoungDemCA]

27. Sounds like something a certain so-called President would say.

Hmmm

[cwydro]

11. Same thing happened in Vietnam.

I’ve been watching the PBS series, and it’s a brutal reminder that these things have happened throughout history.

And some of those people who committed those crimes are still alive.

[mythology]

13. I find it amusing that people think you can apply today's standards to people who lived long ago

Thomas Jefferson and George Washington owned slaves. Renowned historian Edmund Morgan talked about how intertwined slavery and freedom were in terms of creating the United States.

Or what about this quote from the "great emancipator"

"If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union."

FDR is widely regarded as a great president and he put Japanese-Americans in camps, a far cry from how even German POWs much less German-Americans were treated.

Martin Luther King Jr had repeated affairs. But we don't hold that against his record.

Is it really so hard to understand that times change and people can be complicated? Columbus in the modern sense, discovered the Americas. Yes it was entirely by accident and yes he did a lot of crappy things, but if you are going to drop all the crappy things that have followed on his shoulders, you also have to give him credit for the good things that came about. For example stopping the Holocaust, the amazing gains in science and technology, modern democracy as we know it.

[highplainsdem]

14. You don't seem to understand that Columbus was denounced, even arrested/imprisoned,

in his own time because of the "crappy things" he did.

[delisen]

19. Columbus stumbled across a continent

already inhabited by humans while trying to find a new trade route.

From a euro-centric viewpoint he discovered a previously unknown (to most of them) continent.

From the viewpoint of the inhabitants he was a visitor from another world who had gotten lost while trying to get somewhere else.

Maybe Lost Traveler Day would be a god name for the holiday.

I think it was still an achievement to cross the Atlantic and land somewhere.

[raccoon]

21. What did Columbus have to do with stopping the holocaust?

Unless you were saying the United States stopped the Holocaust. Which wouldn't exactly be true either. The Allies did because they won the war.

I sincerely hope you don't think that the United States went to war with Germany to stop the Holocaust.

[YoungDemCA]

30. The US government knew about the Holocaust as it happened - and still turned Jewish refugees away

Profiles in courage, right there. Uh-huh.

[fierywoman]

32. My born-in-Germany-but-living-in-the-US-for-many-years grandmother, aunt and uncle

were put in camps in the US during WWII. For whatever reason, Germans done't talk about it.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

33. So it sounds like you're saying adult affairs are on par with invaders raping 9-year-olds.

Do I have that right?

[YoungDemCA]

35. Are you sure you're not trying to live up to your username?

Because that's what I see in a lot of what you wrote here.

[obamanut2012]

45. These actions were considered deplorable then

And, there is no reason for this to be a Federal holiday, even if we use your "standard."

[kcr]

49. It's amazing to me what some people find amusing

I'm never surprised, however, at ignorance. A lot of people lived long ago. Maybe google Bartolome de las Casas for a start.

[delisen]

20. Odious man.

[WinkyDink]

22. Is this from the Steele dossier?

[tenderfoot]

23. Not sure but Meryl Streep must have known...

[WinkyDink]

28. Just pointing out how little, throughout time, power and men change. Yet we

still wave the American flag, do we not, MyLai, Kent State, Dresden, Hiroshima, Jackson State (e.g.,) notwithstanding?

[whathehell]

24. Wow...UGLY!

[geardaddy]

29. Don't forget Bartolome de las Casas' account

Endless testimonies . .. prove the mild and pacific temperament of the natives…. But our work was to exasperate, ravage, kill, mangle and destroy…

And the Christians, with their horses and swords and pikes began to carry out massacres and strange cruelties against them. They attacked the towns and spared neither the children nor the aged nor pregnant women nor women in childbed, not only stabbing them and dismembering them but cutting them to pieces as if dealing with sheep in the slaughter house. They laid bets as to who, with one stroke of the sword, could split a man in two or could cut off his head or spill out his entrails with a single stroke of the pike. They took infants from their mothers’ breasts, snatching them by the legs and pitching them head first against the crags or snatched them by the arms and threw them into the rivers, roaring with laughter and saying as the babies fell into the water, “Boil there, you offspring of the devil!” Other infants they put to the sword along with their mothers and anyone else who happened to be nearby. They made some low wide gallows on which the hanged victim’s feet almost touched the ground, stringing up their victims in lots of thirteen, in memory of Our Redeemer and His twelve Apostles, then set burning wood at their feet and thus burned them alive. To others they attached straw or wrapped their whole bodies in straw and set them afire. With still others, all those they wanted to capture alive, they cut off their hands and hung them round the victim’s neck, saying, “Go now, carry the message,” meaning, Take the news to the Indians who have fled to the mountains. They usually dealt with the chieftains and nobles in the following way: they made a grid of rods which they placed on forked sticks, then lashed the victims to the grid and lighted a smoldering fire underneath, so that little by little, as those captives screamed in despair and torment, their souls would leave them….

[Kingofalldems]

34. Any Columbus fans willing to debunk this?

Of course not, it's true.

[B2G]

37. How many southern women were raped

by Union soldiers on Sherman's march to the sea?

[tenderfoot]

40. Not as many as the almost 13,000 Union soldiers that died from scurvy, diarrhea, and dysentery

at Andersonville.

[YOHABLO]

43. Despicable how human beings treat each other.

[Kingofalldems]

44. Boom.

[tenderfoot]

42. How many slave women were raped by Southern Plantation Owners?

https://www.bowdoin.edu/~prael/projects/gsonnen/page4.html

Slave women were forced to comply with sexual advances by their masters on a very regular basis. Consequences of resistance often came in the form of physical beatings; thus, an enormous number of slaves became concubines for these men. Most often the masters were already bound in matrimony, which caused tension and hatred between the slave and the mistress of the house. Many "mulatto" or racially mixed children also resulted from these relations. Because the "status of the child" followed that of his or her mother, the child of a white man would not be freed based upon patriarchal genealogy. These children also became a sore reminder for the mistress of her husbands infidelity.

The following passages sketch the nature of the master-slave relations, and their consequences:

"Maria was a thirteen-year-old house servant. One day, receiving no response to her call, the mistress began searching the house for her. Finally, she opened the parlor door, and there was the child with her master. The master ran out of the room, mounted his horse and rode off to escape, 'though well he knew that [his wife's] full fury would fall upon the young head of his victim.' The mistress beat the child and locked her up in a smokehouse. For two weeks the girl was constantly whipped. Some of the elderly servants attempted to plead with the mistress on Maria's behalf, and even hinted that 'it was mass'r that was to blame.' The mistress's reply was typical: 'She'll know better in the future. After I've done with her, she'll never do the like again, through ignorance'" (Stanley Felstein, Once a Slave: The Slaves' View of Slavery, p.132).

Here, the mistress was able to take out her aggressions on the girl rather than the guilty master. I suppose we could empathize with the frustration and betrayal these wives felt, but the outlet of their aggressions often became the slave girl. Women in the south were quite powerless. Because the option of divorce was not readily available, the mistresses often times punished the slave women for their husbands' wrong-doings.

[JustAnotherGen]

46. But, but, but

ETA - I think he meant Confederate States of America. That country that fired on Ft. Sumter. Does that change your answer? No. I didn't think so.

Answer is still the same!

[YOHABLO]

41. Oh but ..

Those were different times and indigenous people were considered less than human .. so that makes it all okay.