Chapter 1 Howard Zim

In Chapter 1 “ Columbus, The Indians, and Human Progress”, it explained to the readers how Spain was looking for gold and silver to make Spanish richer using the Columbus expedition. At that time Columbus was promised to get 10 % of the profit and he will be a governorship over new-found lands, and the fame that would go with a new title: Admiral of the Ocean Sea. The first expedition, Columbus reported to the Court in Madrid was extravagant. He insisted he had reached Asia (but it was wrong because It was actually Cuba), and an island off the coast of China (Hispaniola). He said there are many wide rivers of which the majority contains gold. Moreover, there are many spices, and great mines of gold and other metal. Because of the interesting report and promises, his second expedition was given seventeen ships and more than 1200 men join his expedition to get more gold. Because of this expedition, many people especially Indian died, because they are forced to find gold while they actually don’t know where it is. At the end, Spanish ended up losing those wars, and all that was left was a deadly inflation, a starving population, and the worst case is the rich become richer while the poor become poorer. After reading the first chapter about how Columbus and other Spanish take advantage of other countries in order to make them wealthier, I feel there are also many cases recently that are kind of similar with this problem. I was born in Indonesia. Indonesia is such a beautiful country because we have hot coveted resources, such as spices, cloves, nutmeg, and sugar. Because of many interesting resources, Indonesia faced approximately 450 years of colonization by Europeans. According to weloveindonesia.tumblr.com, several European countries were attracted to Indonesia because of its exotic resources and its prime location for trade. The longest colonization that Indonesia ever got is from Netherland. The Dutch approximately colonize Indonesia for 350 years. During the