The truth about Columbus is not as rosy as we learned in grade school, but the evil he is accused of is exaggerated and often lied about. Today we were debunking some of the egregious smears about Columbus. Columbus claimed he proved the world was round: No, Columbus never claimed this. Its spherical shape had been known since ancient times, although globes were not common in Columbus's day. Vikings discovered America not Columbus: True, they stumbled upon America first, but did nothing about it and forgot about it. Columbus’s Journey changed world history forever. Columbus intentionally introduced smallpox. Columbus did not intentionally introduce smallpox. Columbus and his men did not know what viruses or germs were. The germ theory of disease wasn’t developed until the 19th century, so they could not have understood the mechanism of contagion. The historical cases of Europeans trying to spread smallpox were in the 18th century (for example, during Pontiac’s War in 1763) when they attempted to spread smallpox using contaminated blankets. But this was long after Columbus, and by then people had some empirical sense, though not full germ theory, that disease could be spread by contact. Columbus said that the indigenous people would make good slaves: Columbus did not say that the indigenous people would make good slaves. The Italian translation of the quote in question doesn’t even have the word slave or servant, instead they translate it to mean they could be good servants of God. Columbus did not say, “I could conquer them with 50 men an govern them as I please.”: What he did say was “for with fifty men they can all be subjugated and made to do what is required of them.” The words conquer or govern do not appear here. Subjugate here means to turn them into subjects of the crown, or into peasants. That probably doesn’t sound great, but peasants are not the same thing as slaves. Columbus sold indigenous people into sexual slavery: This claim comes from a letter that Columbus wrote, in which he was complaining about the robbery and sexual enslavement of the natives, which is why he cut off the hands and noses of the colonists, another thing he is accused of doing to the natives. This claim smears him for something he was complaining about and says the he was doing it.