What Role Did Columbus Really Play in America's Discovery?

The asshole who killed everyone then took the fame.

He accidentally crashed into Jamaica while looking for India.

He played the role of “the jackass who’s the reason we have the phrase ‘American Indian’ today”

And the Vikings have Amerigo Vespucci beat by hundreds of years.

I think he simply opened the floodgates, so to speak. He brough more people over, and then more followed him. He didn’t play a role in discovery, just delivery.

Removed by me because I can’t read.

Uh… huh…

Read the sentence again. Slowly.

I think he played Max Bialystock in “The Producers.”

Well he brought syphilis back to europe so he must have had a good time what ever he was doing.

Chief BigFoot!

Columbus landed on the island of San Salvador (in what is now the Bahamas) in 1492 on his first voyage. He had three subsequent voyages to the Caribbean after that. He was not the first person to visit the Americas, but he was the one who brought the Americas to the attention of the Europeans. He also began small settlements there.

“Columbus’s claim to fame isn’t that he got there first, it’s that he stayed.”

withdraw my comment…misread the question! please don’t hit me!

He was also named after a town in Ohio.

He didn’t “discover” America (the native Americans did tens of thousands of years ago when they came here from Asia, then the Vikings). But he was the first European to do what the Europeans did best in the Americas—enslaving and mass-murdering the native population and claiming their land for white/Christian “civilization.”

Vespucci may not have reached America at all, let alone before Colombus; there’s controversy over his claim

@ChazMaz You always have the best answers!