Christopher Columbus still has his own holiday. Today, most people are at least dimly aware that Columbus wasn’t exactly a great guy, but somehow, he’s still managed to hold on to a little dignity and respect. It was a different time, some might say; or, perhaps, he was no worse than the rest.

SEE ALSO: 10 Rarely Told Tales Of Columbus, History’s Greatest Explorer

But Christopher Columbus wasn’t just your standard careless colonialist. The things he did were so twisted that even the people of his own time thought of him as a monster. Most of it is so brutal it gets cut out of history books in the name of good taste, but the real Columbus was far, far worse than you ever could have imagined.

We’re going to tell you the real story of Christopher Columbus. So get ready—because this is going to get pretty messed up.

10 He Cut The Hands Off Of Natives Who Didn’t Bring Him Enough Gold

Columbus, upon reaching the New World, had written back to the Spanish lord promising “as much gold as they need . . . and as many slaves as they ask.” Now, though, he had to prove he could do it—even if it took a massacre.

He started rounding up natives and locking them in pens. Some were sent to Spain as slaves—though nearly half died during the voyage—and the rest were put to work gathering gold. Every member of the Arawak people who was 14 or older was sent into a part of Haiti were Columbus believed huge gold fields were hiding.

Any native who came back with enough gold to satisfy Columbus was given a copper token to hang around his neck, which meant he was allowed to live. Any native spotted without the token was to have his hands chopped off on the spot. This wasn’t just amputation; the wounds were left untreated, and the victims were allowed to bleed out until they died.^[1]

There was next to no gold in Haiti, which meant it was almost impossible to bring Columbus what he demanded. Most, realizing it was impossible, tried to flee, so the Spaniards hunted them down with dogs and killed every person they could find.

9 Columbus’s Men Tested Their Blades By Killing People

“My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write.”

This was the report that Bartolome de las Casas, a priest who had joined Columbus’s men in New World, sent back home to Europe. He’d witnessed how the Spaniards treated the natives, and what he described was worse than any horror story.

Columbus’s men, Bartolome said, would round up natives and slice off parts of their bodies to test the sharpness of their blades. Just to pass the time, he wrote, the Spaniards “made bets as to who would slit a man in two, or cut off his head in one blow.”

They didn’t stop their massacres at adult men, though. As sport, Columbus’s crew would tear babies out of their mothers’ arms and dash their heads against rocks—or worse. According to Bartolome: “They spitted the bodies of other babes, together with their mothers and all who were before them, on their swords.”^[2]

People were massacred, sometimes just as a way to pass the time. “A stream of blood was running,” Bartolome said, through the native villages after Columbus arrived, “as if a great number of cows had perished.”

8 Columbus Also Mutilated His Own Spaniards

Columbus didn’t stop at torturing the natives; he tortured his own men, too. As he stayed on in the New World and food became scarce, he started to starve his men out. He’d fill his ships with an abundance of food, but he wouldn’t share it with his settlers, even when they began dying of starvation.

Instead, Columbus set up a strict set of rules, promising to hang anyone who so much as stole bread. Often, though, his actual punishments were even more depraved. When a cabin boy stole a fish out of another man’s trap, Columbus had the boy’s hand nailed to the spot where he’d stolen the fish. And when another young boy was caught stealing corn, Columbus had his ears and nose cut off and then had him whipped, shackled, and finally sold into slavery.

He even tortured people for simply buying food with their own money. A group of a dozen Spanish men was tied together by their necks and feet and publicly whipped for buying pork and bread. Their crime, Columbus declared, was that they had “bartered and gave gold without the Admiral’s permission.”^[3]

By the time Columbus left, 50 of his men had died of starvation. He, though, stayed fairly plump—by strict command. In fact, when one of his men failed to get enough food for his pantry, Columbus had him stripped naked and whipped with 100 lashes.

7 Women Were Regularly Paraded Naked Through The Streets

When a Spanish woman upset Columbus, he took a bit of different route. He didn’t stop at whipping her or hanging her; he made sure she was humiliated. Specifically, he’d strip her naked, put her on a mule, and parade her through town.

Columbus’s group did this at least three times. The first was a sentence given out by Christopher Columbus himself, who accused a woman of “falsely claiming to be pregnant” and, as punishment, had her stripped naked and paraded through town.

His brother Bartolome followed his example a little later when a woman accused them of being the sons of a common journeyman.^[4] Again, he stripped her naked and had her shown off to the town on a mule—and then, for good measure, he had her tongue cut out. Christopher was thrilled and publicly congratulated Bartolome for defending the family’s good name.

Then another official did it to a woman named Teresa de Vaeca because her friend had an affair. Teresa herself hadn’t done anything—it was her friend who had the affair—but they still felt she deserved “the punishment for pimping,” which was to be stripped naked, given 100 lashes, and have her tongue cut out.

6 He Started A Child Sex Slave Ring

When Columbus realized that there was more money to be made in prostitution than there was in cultivating land, he started a ring of sex slaves. This, he believed, was just good business. “A hundred castellanos are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm,” he wrote in a letter home, so how, he felt, could he be faulted for dragging away women and selling them to be brutally raped?

The women weren’t willing participants—nor were they, for that matter, always women. Little girls, Columbus said, were the most profitable. He wrote that “those from nine to ten are now in demand.”^[5]

The stories that came out of it are horrifying. One man, named Michele de Cuneo, wrote that Columbus gifted him a young girl to use as a sex slave. “Since I wanted to have my way with her and she was not willing, she worked me over so badly with her nails that I wished I had never begun,” Cuneo wrote in a letter. “I got a rope and tied her up so tightly that she made unheard of cries which you wouldn’t have believed. At the end, we got along so well that, let me tell you, it seemed she had studied at a school for whores.”

5 He Lied About Being The First Person To Spot Land

It wasn’t all murders and massacres, though. Sometimes, Columbus was just petty. Even before he’d set foot in the New World, he was ruining people’s lives.

Before Columbus sailed west, the king and queen of Spain promised a lifetime pension to whoever first spotted land. Columbus’s men, hoping never to have to work another day in their lives, kept an eye out at every moment—until one night, two hours after midnight, Rodrigo de Triaga caught the first glimpse of land over the horizon.

When they reported back to Spain, though, Columbus interjected that he had noticed a light “which appeared like a candle” the day before, and though he hadn’t told his men he’d spotted land, he still felt it was only right that he get the money and Rodrigo de Triaga get nothing.^[6]

As the leader of the expedition, Columbus probably didn’t need the money. According to his contemporaries, he just wanted to be able to say he was the first to spot land. So, for the sake of his pride, he stole a lifetime pension and a place in the history books from one of his own men.

4 He Paraded Dismembered Bodies Through Town

After they’d been mutilated, run down with dogs, and sold into sexual slavery, some of the Arawak natives decided to fight back. They put up the best resistance they could, revolting against Columbus and his men and trying to chase them away—but they didn’t have much of a chance.

The Spaniards had armor, muskets, swords, and horses, so the rebellion was crushed pretty quickly. Columbus and his men hung some of their prisoners, enslaved others, and even burned some of them alive.

Then, to make a point, they dismembered the bodies of the dead and marched through the native towns, parading the mutilated corpses to send a message.^[7] Anyone who tried to fight Columbus, they were warning them, would meet the same fate.

3 He Pretended To Be God To Keep The Natives Working For Him

When they realized they couldn’t kill Columbus, the Arawaks tried another approach: starving him out. Columbus hadn’t really figured out how to survive on his own in the New World; he relied on the food the natives gave him. So, the people in Jamaica decided to just stop feeding him, hoping he’d give up and go away.

Columbus, though, managed to trick them into giving up their food by pretending to have magic powers. He used an astronomical table to figure out when the next lunar eclipse would hit. Then, moments before the eclipse began, he told them that his god was angry with them and that the Moon would now appear inflamed with wrath.

“They came running from every direction to the ships, laden with provisions,” Columbus’s son Ferdinand gleefully wrote, describing it, “praying the Admiral to intercede by all means with God on their behalf; that he might not visit his wrath upon them.”^[8]

It’s a fairly well-known story—but what’s usually left out is the context. Columbus’s triumph came after he’d massacred their people, and the natives were just doing what they could to spare their own lives.

2 The Arawaks Committed Mass Suicide Rather Than Live With Columbus

With no way to escape from Columbus, the Arawaks of Haiti just gave up. Death, they believed, was inevitable. The only hope they had was to spare themselves from the pain and torture they’d experience at Columbus’s hands.

They started committing suicide en masse. Whole communities would gather together to kill themselves, sometimes doing so in groups of 100 at a time. Mothers would feed their children cassava poison to let them die peaceful deaths, and the young women swore not to bring another child into the world.

One of the Spaniards there, Perdro de Corboda, wrote home: “Many, when pregnant, have taken something to abort and have aborted. Others after delivery have killed their children with their own hands, so as not to leave them in such oppressive slavery.”^[9] At the peak of mass suicides, 250,000 native Haitians died in just two short years.

1 He Brought Syphilis To Europe

Columbus killed millions of natives, but in what might well be divine retribution, he killed millions more back home. When he and his men came back from the New World, they didn’t just bring back slaves—they brought back syphilis.

The first syphilis outbreak in Europe happened in 1495, shortly after Columbus and his sailors returned. Before Columbus, there hadn’t been any known cases of syphilis in Europe. There are a few researchers who insist they’ve found one, but none have been conclusively proven, and all signs point to the idea the Columbus and his men brought it over with their ring of child sex slaves.^[10]

Some of Columbus’s crewmen ended up serving in a war against Italy, whoring their way across Europe on the way, and soon spread syphilis all across the continent. It was devastating. The first outbreak alone killed more than five million Europeans.

That death toll might even include Christopher Columbus, who died in 1506, after years of fighting through a long and painful illness he’d contracted on his last voyage to the New World. At the time, they called it gout, and today, most think it was Reiter’s syndrome, but some believe that he was taken out by his own disease: syphilis.

In the 1960s, a Viking settlement was discovered in Newfoundland, Canada that predated Christopher Columbus’s famous voyage by about 500 years. The discovery shattered the notion that Columbus was the first person to discover the New World (outside of the indigenous people who had been living there for millennia, of course). So if the Norse could do it, who else might have managed to cross the ocean blue before fourteen hundred and ninety-two? Here are ten theories that have been proposed by college professors, museum professionals, and amateur historians. We covered this topic six years ago, so it seems appropriate that we do an update today!

10 Civilizations That Might Have Beaten Columbus To America – 2014

10 Polynesian Voyagers

The epic journeys of the ancient Polynesians inspired the 2016 Disney movie Moana. Starting about 3,000 years ago and using ocean-going catamarans, they colonized New Zealand, Hawaii, Rapa Nui (Easter Island), and everything in between. Their network of islands, now referred to as the Polynesian Triangle, was larger than modern-day Russia.

The Polynesians almost certainly made it to South America before Columbus. Sweet potatoes, which are native to South America, were being cultivated on Mangaia Island and Hawaii centuries before European contact. In 2007, chicken bones dating from 1321 to 1407 were discovered in Chile. Although there is not yet DNA evidence to prove a link, Polynesians were known to bring the tasty birds around the Pacific.

An analysis of Rapa Nui islanders showed that DNA from South America appeared in their gene pool somewhere between 1300 to 1500 AD. But how did it get there? Some believe South Americans sailed over on balsa wood rafts (Thor Heyerdahl famously sailed a reproduction from Peru to Raroia Island in 1947) but many experts believe that the superior vessels and sophisticated wayfinding of the Polynesians—still used today—is much more likely.^[1]

9 Japanese Fishermen

In the late 1960s, Ecuadorian businessman Emilio Estrada led an excavation of Valdivia, a 5,000year-old archeology site in Ecuador. There was a large amount of strange pottery, so he wrote a letter to Betty Meggers at the Smithsonian Museum to help identify them. She replied that they looked like 5,000-year-old Jomon pottery from Japan.

But how could a Japanese ship sail all the way to Ecuador? They might have been aiming for it. The Kuroshio Current has been known to push Japanese fishing junks out to sea, leaving the crew to drift for months. In 1815, a junk was washed ashore near Santa Barbra, California with three crew members still alive after 17 months at sea. In 1843, another appeared on the Mexico coast with two traumatized fishermen still inside.

The Kuroshio does not have a direct line to Ecuador, but there seem to be some DNA markers and unique viruses in the area hinting that a Japanese junk might have bested the odds. If so, those Japanese fishermen beat Christopher Columbus by about 4,500 years.^[2]

8 Irish Monks

Not long after the death of Saint Patrick, another Irish saint was in town. Saint Brendan was nicknamed “the Navigator” for his voyages to Scotland, Wales, and Brittany to spread Christianity. In the ninth century, a semi-mythical, semi-historical account of his voyage became a medieval bestseller

In The Voyage of Saint Brendan, Saint Barinthus tells Brendan that he has just returned from Paradise, a land far beyond the western horizon. Brendan decides that he needs to see it for himself. He assembles a crew, a leather-bound Irish currah boat, and some divine goodwill before setting out. The crew travels through a mystical world, including “hell,” where “great demons threw down lumps of fiery slag from an island with rivers of gold fire.”

Could this be a reference to Iceland? And if the Irish reached Iceland, could they have followed the Viking path all the way over to Newfoundland? To test this theory, historian and adventurer Tim Severin successfully sailed a leather-bound currah boat from Ireland to the New World in 1976. So, it is possible!^[3]

7 English Merchants

In 1475, medieval codfish conglomerate the Hanseatic League refused to sell cod to the British port of Bristol. The English, who loved fish, immediately started looking for a workaround.

A wealthy customs official named Thomas Croft several funded fish-finding expeditions led by merchant John Jay, whose plan was to find a mythical fog-hidden land west of Ireland called Hy-Brasil. The official record says, unsurprisingly, that they didn’t find it. But shortly afterward, Bristol started importing a suspicious amount of fish. Thomas Croft was arrested for illegal trading, only to be acquitted at trial. So where were the fish coming from?

In 1956, a letter written by a spy for the Spanish Inquisition was discovered in the Spanish National Archives. “It is considered certain,” the spy wrote, “that the cape of the said land was found and discovered in the past…by the men from Bristol who found ‘Brasil.’”

If the Bristol fisherman discovered the rich cod stocks off Newfoundland, they would understandably want to keep it an industry secret. Too bad Christopher Columbus spilled the beans.^[4]

6 A Moorish Daredevil

The Arab historian Abu al-Hasan Ali Al-Mas’udi, who lived from 896 to 956, described in his famous history book The Golden Meadows that a Moor named Khoshkhash had sailed into the Atlantic. “Nobody knew for a long time what had become of them,” he wrote, “At length they returned with rich booty.” Although the book fails to mention where Khoshkhash got his booty, Muslim scholars have suggested he traveled to the Caribbean islands over 600 years before Columbus.

In the 1960s, a container of many Roman and two 8th century Arabic coins was found washed up off the coast of Venezuela. These were used in medieval Europe, leading some to consider this evidence for Khoshkhash’s voyage. But there is very little information about the coins, including (as one researcher put it) “whether the container was a ceramic amphora or a pickle jar.”^[5]

Top 10 Iconic Things With Criminal Beginnings

5 Two Venetian Brothers and a Norwegian Nobleman

In 1558, Nicolò Zeno published a bestselling book of letters that he claimed had been in his family archive for generations. They were from his great-great-great-grandfather Antonio Zeno and his great-great-great-uncle Nicolò Zeno, who wrote about their adventures traveling the Arctic.

In 1380, Nicolò Zeno sailed from Venice to Flanders. From there, according to the text, he was shipwrecked on an island called Frislanda and rescued by a prince named Zichmni, who was in the business of conquering everything in sight. Nicolò wrote to his brother Antonio and together they helped Zichmni win lots of battles against defenseless islanders. The book also included a map they supposedly drew, which is a semi-accurate depiction of northern Scotland, Iceland, and Greenland.

Modern theorists suggest that “Zichmni” is a very, very misspelled “d’Orkney,” (as in Henry Sinclair, Earl of Orkney) and that the islands mentioned are similarly butchered names for islands in the North Atlantic.

It’s also been suggested that Henry Sinclair and the Zeno brothers sailed beyond Greenland and followed the Viking path to Nova Scotia, over a century before Columbus. In 1998, the Prince Henry Sinclair Society of North America unveiled a monument at his supposed landing spot in Canso, Nova Scotia in the hope it would draw tourists.^[6]

4 A Roman Explorer

In 1933, a tiny terracotta statue head was excavated at an archeology site in Calixtlahuaca, Mexico. The face was beaded, with decidedly non-Mexican features and wearing a truncated cap. Ernest Boehringer, a specialist in Classical Archaeology, examined the head and declared it to be of second or third-century Roman origin. But how could a Roman head end up at an archeology site occupied from 1300 to 800 B.C.?

One theory is that the statue head was placed on the site as a joke. Dr. John Paddack used to tell his classes at the Universidad de las Américas that it had been planted by Hugo Moedano, a student who worked at the site. It also could have been a mix-up in the paperwork, since archeological standards in the 1930s were a tad bit looser than they are today. Or—a theory that has yet to be disproven—it could be evidence that a Roman made their way to Mexico in pre-Columbian times.^[7]

3 Chinese Treasure Ships

In the early 1400s, China was the world’s greatest naval power. Their treasure ships were described as the size of the World War I vessel USS Minnesota and traveled throughout southern Asia, the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf, and the east coast of Africa. If the Chinese had wanted to cross the Pacific, they certainly could have.

Former submarine commander Gavin Mendes believes that a Chinese treasure fleet commanded by Zheng He went further than the others, exploring Australia, the Caribbean, and even leaving settlements in South America. But he had little evidence to support these claims until Chinese lawyer Liu Gang found an old map in a Shanghai secondhand bookshop that showed North and South America in surprising detail. The map contained a note saying it was a 1763 copy of a 1418 original—about the date Mendes had claimed.

The cartography community considers the map to be a fake. China and Hong Kong are full of “ancient texts” that can be bought on street corners, and the map is filled with naming errors—including a modern Chinese spelling of Mohammed. Not exactly ironclad evidence for a transcontinental voyage, but further proof might be out there.^[8]

2 A Mali Emperor

Mansa Musa ruled the Islamic Empire of Mali and was so wealthy that when he went on his 1324 pilgrimage to Mecca, he gave away so much gold that the price dropped internationally. But when asked about his brother Abu Bakar II, who held the throne before him, Mansa Musa said, “The ruler who preceded me did not believe that it was impossible to reach the extremity of the ocean that encircles the earth (meaning Atlantic), and wanted to reach that (end)… never to return nor to give a sign of life.”

Malian scholar Gaoussou Diawara believes that the reason Ali Bakar II never came back is that he landed in Brazil. Specifically, the city of Recife, whose other name of Purnanbuco might be an aberration of the Mande name for the rich goldfields of the Mali Empire. He also cites chemical analyses stating that the gold on American spears might have come from Mali and a report by Christopher Columbus saying that he had encountered black traders on his voyages.

Whether Abu Bakar II made it to Brazil or drowned in the Atlantic Ocean, his heir Mansa Musa took the throne and become the greatest emperor in Mali history.^[9]

1 Basque Whalers

In 1530, the Basque were whaling in Newfoundland. In 1535, when Jacques de Cartier “discovered” the Saint Lawrence River, he found about 1,000 Basque fishing boats already harvesting cod. This makes them the first Europeans to settle in the area after the Vikings.

The Basque are a unique group of people that live on the border of France and Spain. They are culturally unique, and their language Euskera has no similarities to those of their neighbors—so they don’t do a lot of talking to outsiders. Shipbuilders and seafarers for centuries, they were expert navigators and fishermen.

Either the Basque swooped in the moment Columbus came back, or they had a head start—perhaps from chasing whales across the Atlantic. After all, they were extraordinarily good at preserving fish for long voyages. There may yet be a pre-Columbian Basque settlement waiting to be discovered in Newfoundland.^[10]

10 Rarely Told Tales Of Columbus, History’s Greatest Explorer