On the morning of October 12, 1492, a group of Tainos discovered Christopher Columbus and a landing party from his flagship the Santa Maria on a beach of Guanahani. Russell Thornton, author of American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492, calls it quite justifiably, "one of the more important demographic events in the history of the world." Thornton, whose book was published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 1987, estimates that "there were 72 million Native Peoples in the Western Hemisphere in 1492." He notes as well, "this number plummeted in following centuries to perhaps 4 to 4.5 million – a population about 6% of its former size. That American Indians exist today and have shown recent population increases is a testament to perseverance over a dark period of history."
The history of that first voyage of "discovery" and the three others that Columbus made in his lifetime, has been glossed over for five centuries. Depicted mostly as one of romance and adventure, it is only recently that some of the hideous consequences of that "discovery" have been brought to light. The excuse proffered for Columbus is that he was a man of his time, but Hans Koning, in the final chapter of his work, Columbus: His Enterprise, contests this cavalier claim by suggesting that if this were so, then
It is to the greater glory of those men who were not "of their time": de las Casas, who in vain fought for half a century to save the Indians; Antonio de Montesinos, a [principled and fearless] Dominican friar . . . There were a few worldly men around too, who were not "of their time" . . . . Pedro Margarit, who sickened at the treatment of the Arawaks, who left Hispaniola and spoke against Columbus at Court. Alfonso de Albuquerque, who treated his subjects in Portuguese India as if they were people.
