1451-10-00: (Christopher Columbus, the Genoese Navigator Whose 1492 Arrival on Hispaniola Set in Motion the European Conquest, Colonization, and Enslavement …

1451-10-00: (Christopher Columbus, the Genoese Navigator Whose 1492 Arrival on Hispaniola Set in Motion the European Conquest, Colonization, and Enslavement of the Island’s Indigenous Taíno Population, Celebrated as a Discoverer in the West but Understood in Haiti as the Beginning of Catastrophe): Christopher Columbus was born in Genoa in late October 1451 and convinced the Spanish crown to fund a westward voyage seeking a shorter route to India. He departed Spain on August 3, 1492, with three ships and arrived off the northern coast of Hispaniola on December 5. When his flagship, the Santa Maria, ran aground on Christmas Eve, he left 39 men behind in a settlement called La Navidad near present-day Cap-Haïtien and returned to Europe in March 1493. He came back that November to find the fort burned and his men dead, killed by the Taíno whose hospitality had been repaid with violence. Columbus made four voyages in total and died on May 20, 1506, in Valladolid, Spain. The framing of Columbus as a “discoverer” persists in Western education, but from the perspective of the people already living on Hispaniola, his arrival was the opening act of a genocide. The Taíno population, estimated at several hundred thousand, would be functionally annihilated within decades through forced labor, disease, and deliberate violence. What Columbus “discovered” was not a new world but a world he could take. Haiti commemorates his arrival on December 5 as Discovery Day, a date that carries considerably more ambivalence than the American Columbus Day celebrated in October.