Columbus was a particularly unsavoury individual whose instinct was to sell the Taino natives he encountered as slaves, but it is difficult to imagine a scenari

Columbus was a particularly unsavoury individual whose instinct was to sell the Taino natives he encountered as slaves, but it is difficult to imagine a scenario where the inevitable large scale contact between the Old and the New Worlds would not have resulted in calamitous declines in the native population of the Americas who had no resistance to smallpox and other Old World pathogens, no matter the nature of the intial contact. Even without Columbus, it would have been a matter of time before the Europeans found out about the Americas.