Carol Delaney's work on Columbus, of which you have the article from the journal Comparative Studies in Society and History, was published as Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem in 2011. Delaney is a professional scholar but she is not a historian. Far from it. She makes rather fantastical claims that previous scholars have discussed many years before. For example, she believes that Columbus was heavily engaged in religious ideology and was engaged in a long-term plan to take Jerusalem from the east, rather than the west as crusaders had done. If you were to read Columbus's own letters and the work of his son you would find a similar argument: deep, personal Christian devotion is at the center of Columbus's actions. However, historians are trained to not read primary sources like that at face value.

Everyone has an angle, a game to play. Modern scholarship tells us that while Columbus did have ideas to invade Asia and continue a crusade type expedition in the name of the Kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, he did so only after he began to realize that his discoveries (and the profits from them) were not tied to Asia. See Fernández-Armesto's Columbus for a detailed explanation that makes Delaney's arguments look dated and inaccurate.

While scholars agree that Columbus was an excellent seaman and navigator, his mathematical and geographic education was lacking. He intended to reach Asia because the world should have been smaller than it actually is. Instead, he found islands that were where he believed them to be, but not the right ones. Was he a leader of men and a good man of the sea? Sure. What about his interactions with the natives? This is more complicated.

His own diaries demonstrate the warm relationship that the Europeans and the indigenous shared. As Peter Hulme has noted (Colonial Encounters and Wild Majesty) the transcribed conversations between Columbus and the locals is invented and skewed to the benefit of the Europeans. To maintain favor with his royal patrons, Columbus needed to open up a trade network. Once it became clear that gold was not as easy to obtain as he had anticipated, Columbus was forced to implement hard policies against local populations to bring him mineral wealth. He made this system easier to manage by incorporating medieval styles of territory and labor management that we now call the encomienda. This was in addition to indian slavery, which was legal if the indigenous peoples did not agree to be subservient to the Europeans and the Church. I would recommend the highly readable Worlds of Christopher Columbus by Phillips and Phillips.

Columbus was not a saint and nobody would argue that he deserves to be treated like one. He was a businessman, first. He sought to make a profit and used the tactics and legal avenues available to him to achieve his economic and financial goals (both personal and as a representative of the Catholic Kings). He implemented a slave system that was destructive to the local population (even though slavery existed before 1492 in those islands) and helped organize the abusive encomienda system which would be adopted on the American mainland a generation later. By modern standards he was cruel, violent, and abusive to his own men as well as those peoples he encountered in the Americas. Should he be treated as a caricature of evil like some cartoonists would have us do? No. There is still significant work to be done on the early colonial history of the Caribbean and the early Conquest era in Europe. I think that your question places Columbus in a more religious, saintly light and this is problematic.

For more readings, see Greenblatt's Marvelous Possessions; Henige's In Search of Columbus; Fernández-Armesto's Columbus on Himself.

For some other AskHistorian answers, see u/itsalrightwithme Here and u/Vampire_Seraphin Also here

Very much depends on who you read, ask, or believe. According to Bartolome de las Casas, a Spanish historian and friar in the new world, said that between 1494-1508, when Casas arrived on Hispanola, over 3 million people(natives) died due to disease, hard labor in slavery, or war. Columbus also implemented the Encomienda system, which rewarded conquerors with the labor of conquered peoples, essentially enslaving them. One of the more damning and cruel acts that Columbus seems to have perpetrated in the new world was his decision to cut the hands off natives who did not collect their quota of gold, and were then left to bleed to death. Further, Columbus, while governor of the West Indies, was accused of tyrannical governance and cruelty, even for the time. He was accused of ruling Hispanola through cruelty and fear including the following examples: Punishing a man convicted of theft by chopping odd his ears and nose and selling him into slavery. Supporting his brother in forcing a woman to march through the streets naked and then cutting out her tongue for accusing the Columbus family of being of low birth. According to historian Consuelo Varela: "Even those who loved him had to admit the atrocities that had taken place."