**The Jew Christopher Columbus spearheaded industrial slavery, genocide, sex slavery, and the nearly complete extermination of the Taino Indian people directly after landing in Hispainola, now Haiti and the Dominican Republic.** >More recent views of Columbus have been critical of his colonization and treatment of natives.[106][107][108] Among reasons for this criticism is the treatment and disappearance of the native Taino people of Hispaniola, where Columbus began a rudimentary tribute system for gold and cotton. The people disappeared rapidly after contact with the Spanish because of overwork and the first pandemic of European diseases, which struck Hispaniola after 1519. >De las Casas records that when he first came to Hispaniola in 1508, "there were 60,000 people living on this island, including the Indians; so that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war, slavery, and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this? I myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it...." >Modern estimates for the pre-Columbian population of Hispaniola are around 250,000–300,000. According to the historian Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes by 1548, 56 years after Columbus landed, fewer than five hundred Taino were left on the island. The native Taino people of the island were systematically enslaved via the encomienda system implemented by Columbus. >Which resembled a feudal system in Medieval Europe .. disease played a significant role in the destruction of the natives. Indirect evidence suggests that some serious illness may have arrived with the 1500 colonists who accompanied Columbus's second expedition in 1493. And by the end of 1494, disease and famine had claimed two-thirds of the Spanish settlers. >When the first pandemic finally struck in 1519 it wiped out much of the remaining native population, Columbus's soldiers killed and enslaved with impunity at every landing. When Columbus fell ill in 1495, "what little restraint he had maintained over his men disappeared as he went through a lengthy period of recuperation. **The troops went wild, stealing, killing, raping, and torturing natives, trying to force them to divulge the whereabouts of the imagined treasure-houses of gold."** >According to de Las Casas, 50,000 natives perished during this period. Upon his recovery, Columbus organized his troops' efforts, forming a squadron of several hundred heavily armed men and more than twenty attack dogs. The men tore across the land, killing thousands of sick and unarmed natives. Soldiers would use their captives for sword practice, attempting to decapitate them or cut them in half with a single blow. >The historian Howard Zinn writes "Columbus spearheaded a massive slave trade; in 1495 his men captured in a single raid 1500 Arawak men, women, and children. When he shipped five hundred of the slaves to Spain, 40 percent died en route." Historian James W. Loewen asserts that "Columbus not only sent the first slaves across the Atlantic, he probably sent more slaves – about five thousand – than any other individual... other nations rushed to emulate Columbus." >De Las Casas writes that when slaves held in captivity began to die at high rates, Columbus switched to a different system of forced labor: he ordered all natives over the age of thirteen to collect a specified amount (one hawk's bell full) of gold powder every three months. Natives who brought the amount were given a copper token to hang around their necks, and those found without tokens had their hands amputated and were left to bleed to death.[46][118] **The Arawaks attempted to fight back against Columbus's men but lacked their armor, guns, swords, and horses. When taken prisoner, they were hanged or burned to death.** >Desperation led to mass suicides and infanticide among the natives. In just two years under Columbus's governorship more than half of the 250,000 Arawaks in Haiti were dead.[46] The main cause for the depopulation was disease followed by other causes such as warfare and harsh enslavement. >Samuel Eliot Morison, a Harvard historian and author of a multivolume biography on Columbus writes, "The cruel policy initiated by Columbus and pursued by his successors resulted in complete genocide."[122] Loewen laments that while "Haiti under the Spanish is one of the primary instances of genocide in all human history", only one major history text he reviewed mentions Columbus's role in it. >However some of these accounts may be part of Black Legend. Noble David Cook, writing about the Black Legend and the conquest of the Americas wrote, "There were too few Spaniards to have killed the millions who were reported to have died in the first century after Old and New World contact". He instead estimates that the death toll was caused by diseases like smallpox, which according to some estimates had an 80–90% fatality rate in Native American populations. >There is evidence that the men of the first voyage also brought syphilis from the New World to Europe.[128] Many of the crew members who served on this voyage later joined the army of King Charles VIII in his invasion of Italy in 1495. After the victory, Charles's largely mercenary army returned to their respective homes, thereby spreading "the Great Pox" across Europe and triggering the deaths of more than five million people.[129] Sex slavery **On his way back to Spain to stand trial for accusations of abuse of Spaniard colonists, Columbus wrote a letter to the nurse of the son of Ferdinand and Isabella, pleading his case. He wrote..** >"Now that so much gold is found, a dispute arises as to which brings more profit, whether to go about robbing or to go to the mines. A hundred castellanos are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten are now in demand, and for all ages a good price must be paid." [Wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus#Atrocities_and_tragedies_of_colonization).