During his multiple trips to the Caribbean Islands, and as governor of Santa Domingo Island, he was not, what we would call today, a very nice man. What he was was a man of his time. In the 15th and 16th centuries, western Europeans were a very brutal collection of nation states. These nation states committed the same kinds of brutality against each other as they did against the Caribbean indigenous people and later the indigenous people in Central and North America. Throughout the history of mankind, conquering people took the land of the conquered people until the 20th century. Generally speaking, the North American indigenous peoples were the last major victims of how humans had behaved from the beginning of human history.
After World War I and World War II, Americans and their allies, except Russia, did not keep the countries that were conquered. After WWII, for the first time in human history, America helped the conquered enemies rebuild their nations. The only land America kept was the land in which the thousands of American soldiers were buried from these conflicts. By 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries standards, Germany, Italy, Japan, and many Pacific Islands should be owned by America. It is the American exceptionalism that set a new standard for international behavior.