> But isn't that literally what Columbus day celebrates?

No, not primarily and not historically.

President Harrison's 1892 proclamation praised Columbus because "Columbus stood in his age as the pioneer of progress and enlightenment", and because of his "devout faith". He drew a parallel between Columbus's enlightenment and that of the recently introduced "system of universal education". See https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/proclamation-335-4... .

While yes, it was held on "four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America", it was not a holiday for purpose of celebrating that voyage. It was a day to encourage the "patriotic duties of American citizenship."

It must also be seen in context of white xenophobia, and the 1891 lynchings of 11 Italian-American immigrants in New Orleans.

"As part of a wider effort to ease tensions with Italy and placate Italian Americans, President Benjamin Harrison declared the first nationwide celebration of Columbus Day in 1892, commemorating the 400th anniversary of the Italian explorer's landing in the New World" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1891_New_Orleans_lynchings

Now, that is not the modern-day Columbus Day. That effort started in the 1930s by the Knights of Columbus, a male-only Catholic Fraternal organization who wanted to promote a Catholic as being also American. They chose the name "Knights of Columbus" back in the 1880s because, to quote them:

"When founding the Knights of Columbus, Father Michael McGivney picked Christopher Columbus as a namesake for the organization because in a time when anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant feeling ran rampant, the American public embraced this famous explorer." - https://www.kofc.org/en/news-room/articles/honoring-columbus...

Bear in mind that Americans mostly knew about Columbus through Washington Irving's best-seller "biography" about him. The scare-quotes there are because that book told falsehoods, like the idea that educated people at the time thought the earth was flat. It did not describe Columbus's brutal orders. That's because Irving's book was not written to be historically correct, but as a way to promote American nationalism.

"Literary critics have noted that Irving "saw American history as a useful means of establishing patriotism in his readers, and while his language tended to be more general, his avowed intention toward Columbus was thoroughly nationalist"." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_the_Life_and_Voya...

Furthermore, in 1882 when the KoC started, the US was finishing it's own conquest of the native population, and looking towards expanding its own (short-lived) empire, which by 1900 included Cuba and the Philippines.

So it's not like Americans at that time were against violent attacks on people they considered savages. They were doing something similar!

Again, very little of this is a celebration of exploration. It's using that one event as a hook to promote that Italian immigrants and their descendants, and Catholics, can be patriotic Americans.

> to quote myself: exploration and brutality are orthogonal

To quote you: 'All explorers & conquistadors were, for the most part, pretty brutal bounty hunters.'

That is not true about explorers.

Your discussion about orthogonality is that someone can be an explorer and be a brutal bounty hunter, and those two can be separate.