I have someone telling me that they all already knew about the New World being there, and rather just used it as a cover up, but I can’t find anything confirming nor denying this when googling. I can’t fathom why they would lie about this when enslavement was kinda the norm back then, but I still want to make sure about all this.
(I copied and pasted from my post on r/IsItBullshit due to many people recommending I ask here for better answers, sorry if it’s not as clear as it should be)
Edit: I used India as a general term, sorry. I don’t mean the specific country, but more East Indies I guess
It is not true in any way whatsoever.
We know quite a lot about Columbus' motivations thanks to his own writings (Book of Prophecies, letters to friends, to the Crown, etc). We are fairly aware of what Columbus knew or what Columbus did not know.
Columbus' idea is clear from the start to the end: find a direct route to the Indies (Cathay, Zipangu, India Extragangetica), which would end the stranglehold the Ottomans had on the spice trade via the Silk Road, and avoid the Portugueses' route that went through the Cape of Good Hope and the Indian Ocean. This would result in the Spanish Monarchs becoming fairly rich from the spice trade.
His knowledge of the Indies was of dubious quality, taking much of his information from Marco Polo, who is a rather unreliable narrator. The farther East Marco Polo "goes", the more outlandish his claims are. Syria, Bagdad, Persia are all fairly reasonable in Polo's book, but when he gets beyond what people actually had some general idea of, then he makes stuff up wholesale, like when he talks about the cynocephali (men with dog's heads). So, Columbus had this idea of the India Extragangetica as a place of unfathomable riches, with literal mountains of gold and gems, and fields overflowing with nutmeg and black pepper.
When Columbus made it back from the Americas in the first voyage, he carried a few natives in chains and presented them to the Catholic Monarchs. Queen Isabel was absolutely furious about this, freed the slaves, and mandated Columbus to return them to their lands at his own expenses. Isabel was absolutely against enslaving the natives, whom she considered to be subjects of the Crown of Castile, same as any given person from Segovia, Toledo, or Murcia.
Why was Columbus enslaving people? Money, obviously. He had these notions of lands of unspeakable riches, but what he found was far from that: gold and silver were not in extreme abundance, there were no mountains made of gems, and black pepper was nowhere to be found. Hence, he resorted to slavery to enrich himself, but that was not a succesful enterprise, as it was instantly cut short by the Queen.