Duly noted and corrected. That's my bad.

Columbus Day is coming up. Now, those of a politically correct bent might argue that it is wrong […] to celebrate the arrival of a white Spanish bloke in the Caribbean

Columbus was not Spanish, he was Italian.

No. This is what I wrote:

Columbus arrived in the New World entirely by accident. He thought he was finding a faster route to the East Indies (modern-day Indonesia and the Philippines) by sailing west, across an ocean that his theoretical model of the world stated was a third smaller than it actually is. When he did arrive, his Spanish explorers and the conquistadores that followed shortly afterward proceeded to wipe out pretty much every trace of native civilisation.

(emphasis added)

I'm well aware of what Cortes and Pizarro did- and of the fact that they did so after Columbus arrived in the Bahamas.