1492
From their nakedness, Columbus inferred the native people to be an inferior race. Columbus wrote of the Indians he encountered, "They all go around as naked as their mothers bore them; & also the women." However, he noted that "they could easily be commanded & made to work, to sow & to do whatever might be needed, to build towns & be taught to wear clothes & adopt our ways." Although Columbus also wrote that "they are the best people in the world & above all the gentlest," his record of the first encounter between Europeans & New World Indians was filled with accounts of enslavement, murder, & rape.
