Europeans sought to start colonies in the Americas to make their lives better, which meant that they needed wealth, as much of it as possible. According to Howard Zinn, Columbus was seeking spices and gold from Asia (2), two things that would make one very wealthy, but when he instead found the Americas he would seek the only wealth he could find. The first two things Columbus would notice is that the natives were very easily taken advantage of and that they had bits of gold on them along with gold particles in the rivers (3). From this he derived that he could use the natives as slaves to retrieve gold and increase his wealth. Of course Columbus is not the only European to figure this out as almost all of the Europeans (from Spanish to English)
