I am writing to express my disappointment with the Penobscot Maritime Heritage Association for canceling the visits of the Nao Santa Maria, a replica of the flagship of Christopher Columbus, to Bangor and Searsport. I would have liked to have toured the vessel and did not get a chance. I can understand the decision to stay out of a controversy but I still wish they had not backed down. It also seems like it was done at the behest of a very few people, unhappy Native Americans.

The controversy is over the Indians mistreated and killed by Columbus during his time as the first governor of the Dominican Republic. All true. However, the voyage was one of the great milestone events in world history. It lead to the events that got most of us here today. It was always known what Columbus did to the Indians. That does not mean that the voyage did not have the major importance that it had.

Right or wrong, very few people in European society at the time thought very much of acting cruelly towards less advanced people. Columbus invented nothing here and likely thought he did nothing wrong by the standards of the day.

The people who settled here came from a world where there was no opportunity, freedom and plenty of oppression. They saw vast tracts of unused land and opportunity. That’s right, someone was here first. In the centuries-long struggle that followed Columbus, neither side had a monopoly on cruelty. Families and innocents of settlers also were butchered right here in Maine.

 

Gerald Thibault

Skowhegan

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