Numpy was originally designed for mathematicians and scientists, and in those domains convention often lines up better with column major order. For example, vectors are a single column, and the column index comes before the row index in many notations. So using column major order meant familar formulas and algorithms (including translating from fortran code which is column major, or matlab for that matter) are easy to translate to numpy code.

Also, numpy is built on some fortran libraries, like BLAS and LAPACK that assume a column major order. If it took row major input, it would need to transpose matrices in some cases change the order, or rewrite those libraries to use row major form.