columbus and the labyrinth of history - salem state...

Article 37

Columbus and the Labyrinth of History

Every generation creates the Columbus it needs. As the Quincentenary of his 1492 voyage approaches, observers are torn between celebrating a brave visionary and condemning the

first representative of an age of imperial exploitation. Here Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Noble Wilford explores the various Columbus legends and discovers, beneath them,

a very human figure and an adventure unprecedented in boldness.

John Noble Wilford

History has not been the same sinceChristopher Columbus. Neither has hebeen the same throughout history.

During the five centuries since his ep-ochal voyage of 1492, Columbus hasbeen many things to many people: theprotean symbol of the adventuring hu-man spirit, the lone hero defying both theodds and entrenched thinking to changethe world; the first modern man or alucky adventurer blinded by medievalmysticism; an icon of Western faith inprogress or an object of scorn for his fail-ings of leadership and intellect; a manvirtually deified at one time and roundlyvilified today for his part in the initiationof an international slave trade and Euro-pean imperialism. We hardly know thereal Columbus. Such, it seems, is the fateof historical figures whose deeds rever-berate through time.

The Columbus story surely confirmsthe axiom that all works of history are in-terim reports. What people did in the pastis not preserved in amber, a moment cap-tured and immutable through the ages.Each generation looks back and, drawingfrom its own experiences, presumes tofind patterns that illuminate both pastand present. This is natural and proper. A

succeeding generation can ask questionsof the past that those in the past neverasked themselves. Columbus could notknow that he had ushered in what we callthe Age of Discovery, with all its impli-cations, any more than we can knowwhat two world wars, nuclear weapons,the collapse of colonial empires, the endof the Cold War, and the beginning ofspace travel will mean for people centu-ries from now. Perceptions change, andso does our understanding of the past.

Accordingly, the image of Columbushas changed through the years, some-times as a result of new information,more often because of changes in thelenses through which we view him. Oncea beneficiary of this phenomenon, Co-lumbus in times of reigning optimismhas been exalted as a mythic hero. Now,with the approach of the Quincentennial,he has fallen victim to a more self-criti-cal society, one prone to hero-bashingand historical pessimism.

As recently as 1974, Samuel EliotMorison, the biographer of Columbus,concluded one of his books with a paeanto European influence on America: “Tothe people of the New World, pagans ex-pecting short and brutish lives, void of

hope for any future, had come the Chris-tian vision of a merciful God and a glori-ous heaven.” It is hard to conceive ofthose words being written today. In a for-ward to the 1983 edition of Morison’sAdmiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life ofChristopher Columbus, British historianDavid Beers Quinn criticizes Morisonfor ignoring or dismissing Columbus’sfailings. Columbus, Quinn writes, “can-not be detached from the imperialist ex-ploitation of his discoveries and must bemade to take some share of responsibil-ity for the brutal exploitation of the is-lands and mainlands he found.”

By and large, this new perspective hasproduced a more realistic, demytholo-gized version of the Columbus story. Thetemptation, though, is to swing too far inthe other direction, rewriting history aswe wish it would have been or judgingpeople wholly by anachronistic politicalstandards. This has happened all too of-ten regarding Columbus, producing mythand propaganda in the guise of history.

All the more reason for us to siftthrough the romantic inventions and en-during misconceptions that have cloudedthe real Columbus and to recognize thatso much of the man we celebrate or con-

1

Article 37. Columbus and the Labyrinth of History

demn is our own creation. He is the em-bodiment of our running dialogue aboutthe human potential for good and evil.

Some of the facts about Columbus—who he was and what he did—are be-yond serious dispute. This mariner ofhumble and obscure origins was pos-sessed of an idea that became an obses-sion. He proposed to sail west across theuncharted ocean to the fabled shores ofthe Indies, the lands of gold and spicescelebrated in the tales of Marco Polo andthe goal of an increasingly expansionistEurope in the 15th century. The Portu-guese had sought a route around the tipof Africa. Some Florentine cosmogra-phers had pondered the prospect of awestward sea route. But Columbus wasapparently the first with the stubborncourage to stake his life on the executionof such a daring scheme.

After years pleading his case beforethe courts of Portugal and Spain, dis-missed as a hopeless visionary or a tire-somely boastful nuisance, Columbusfinally won the reluctant support of Fer-dinand and Isabella. At the little Andalu-sian port of Palos de la Frontera, heraised a fleet of three ships and enlistedsome 90 seamen. Whatever the sailors’trepidations or their opinion of Colum-bus when he arrived at Palos, their des-tiny was to share with him a voyage “bywhich route,” Columbus wrote in theprologue to his journal, “we do not knowfor certain anyone previously haspassed.”

Columbus was never more in com-mand of himself and his destiny than onthat day, August 3, 1492, when heweighed anchor at Palos. He was a con-summate mariner, as all his contempo-raries agreed and historians have notcontradicted, and here he was doing whathe did best and so sure of his success. Ofcourse, he never made it to the Indies, ashead-shaking savants had predicted, thenor on any of his three subsequent voy-ages. His landfall came half a worldshort of them, on an unprepossessing is-land inhabited by naked people with noknowledge whatsoever of Marco Polo’sGreat Khan.

On the morning of October 12, Co-lumbus and his captains, together with

their most trusted functionaries, clam-bered into armed launches and headedfor the sandy beach and green trees.They carried the flags of the Christianmonarchs of Spain. A solemn Columbus,without so much as a thought that it wasanything but his to take, proclaimed pos-session of the island for the king and forthe queen. Columbus and his officersthen dropped to their knees in prayer.

It did not escape Columbus that theseislanders “go around as naked as theirmothers bore them; and the womenalso.” This was not prurience but cultureshock. Columbus was generally admir-ing in his initial descriptions of the peo-ple. They were “guileless and generous.”Bringing cotton, parrots, and javelins totrade, they paddled out to Columbus’sships in their dugouts, each made from asingle tree and so long that they held 40men; the West Indian term for these dug-outs was canoa—and thus a New-Worldword entered European speech. Colum-bus was pleased to note that they had nofirearms. When he had shown them someswords, “they took them by the edge andthrough ignorance cut themselves.”“They should be good and intelligentservants,” he concluded, “for I see thatthey say very quickly everything that issaid to them; and I believed they wouldbecome Christians very easily, for itseemed to me that they had no religion.”Columbus the anthropologist had hispriorities.

Unfortunately, we have no record ofthe first impressions that the people Co-lumbus called Indians had of the Europe-ans. What did they think of these whitemen with beards? Their sailing ships andtheir weapons that belched smoke? TheirChristian God and their inordinate inter-est in gold and a place beyond the hori-zon called the Indies? We will neverknow. They could not put their feelingsinto writing; they had no writing. Andthe encounter itself doomed them.Within a generation or two, they becameextinct, mainly through exposure to Eu-ropean diseases, and so could not pass onby word of mouth stories about the mo-ment white men entered their lives.

Columbus made certain by his wordsand actions that his discovery would notbe lost to history. On the homeward voy-age, after visiting a string of other islands

and more people, he composed a letter tothe court of Ferdinand and Isabella inwhich he announced his discovery. Hehad made good his boast to one and all.He may have harbored some disappoint-ment in not reaching the Asian mainland,but he had sailed across the Ocean Seaand found lands and peoples unknown toEuropeans. And he wanted the court toread about it in his own words, especiallysince this justified his own claim to thetitles and wealth due him pursuant to thedeal he had struck with the court.

The letter Columbus wrote was alsohis bid for a place in history. He under-stood that the achievement would go fornaught unless the news got back to oth-ers. To explore (the word, in one versionof its etymology, comes from the Latin“to cry out”) is to search out and exclaimdiscovery. Simply reaching a new landdoes not in itself constitute a discovery.It must be announced and then recordedin history so that the discovery can beacted upon.

Others besides the indigenous peoplepreceded Columbus in finding parts ofAmerica. This is no longer an issue ofconsuming dispute in Columbian stud-ies. Almost certainly the Norse underLeif Ericson landed at some northern is-lands and established a short-lived settle-ment at Newfoundland. Ericson andothers may have reached America, butthey failed to discover it. For nothingcame of their deeds. Columbus, in writ-ing the letter, was making sure his deedswould have consequences and hisachievement would enter history.

The letter eventually reached thecourt in Barcelona and had the desiredeffect. The king and queen received Co-lumbus with pomp and listened to hisstory with genuine interest and pleasure.They instructed him to return to the new-found lands with a larger fleet includingsoldiers and settlers. America had en-tered world history, though Columbusinsisted to his dying day that he hadreached the Indies.

This familiar story of Columbus hasbeen embellished to create an enduringpopular legend. Some of the tales(though not all of them) have been laid torest through historical research.

2

ANNUAL EDITIONS

‘Gardens the Most Beautiful I Ever Saw’

The following account of October 10–13, 1492, is taken from Columbus’s Diario, as

abstracted by Bartolomé de las Casas and adapted by William Carlos Williams.

Wednesday, 59 leagues, W. S. W., but counted no more than 44. Herethe people could endure no longer. All now complained about thelength of the voyage. But I cheered them as best I could, giving themgood hopes of the advantages they might gain by it. Roused to mad-ness by their fear, the captains declared they were going back but Itold them then, that however much they might complain, I had to goto the Indies and they along with me, and that I would go until I foundthem, with the help of our Lord. And so for a time it passed but nowall was in great danger from the men.

Thursday, 11th of October. The course was W. S. W. More sea[spilling over the deck] than there had been during the whole of thevoyage. Sandpipers and a green reed near the ship. And for this I gavethanks to God as it was a sure sign of land. Those of the Pinta saw acane and a pole, and they took up another small pole which appearedto be worked with iron; also another bit of cane, a land plant, and asmall board. The crew of the caravel Niña also saw signs of land, anda small plant covered with berries.

.… I admonished the men to keep a good lookout on the forecastleand to watch well for land and to him who should first cry out that hehad seen land I would give a silk doublet besides the other rewardspromised by the Sovereigns which were 10,000 maravedis to him whoshould first see it. Two hours past midnight, the moon having risen ateleven o’clock and then shining brightly in the sky, being in its thirdquarter, a sailor named Rodrigo de Triana sighted the land at a dis-tance of about two leagues. At once I ordered them to shorten sail andwe lay under the mainsail without the bonnets, hove to waiting fordaylight.

On Friday, the 12th of October, we anchored before the land andmade ready to go on shore. Presently we saw naked people on thebeach. I went ashore in the armed boat and took the royal standard,and Martin Alonzo and Vincent Yañez, his brother, who was captainof the Niña. And we saw the trees very green, and much water andfruits of diverse kinds. Presently many of the inhabitants assembled. Igave to some red caps and glass beads to put round their necks, andmany other things of little value. They came to the ship’s boats after-ward, where we were, swimming and bringing us parrots, cottonthreads in skeins, darts—what they had, with good will. As naked astheir mothers bore them, and so the women, though I did not see morethan one young girl. All I saw were youths, well made with very hand-some bodies and very good countenances. Their hair short and coarse,almost like the hairs of a horse’s tail. They paint themselves someblack, some white, others red and others of what color they can find.Some paint the faces and others paint the whole body, some onlyround the eyes and others only on the nose. They are themselves nei-ther black nor white.

On Saturday, as dawn broke, many of these people came to thebeach, all youths. Their legs are very straight, all in one line, and nobelly. They came to the ship in canoes, made out of the trunk of a tree,all in one piece, and wonderfully worked, propelled with a paddle likea baker’s shovel, and go at marvelous speed.

ILLUSTRATION FROM THE GRANGER COLLECTION, NEW YORK

Bright green trees, the whole land so green that it is a pleasure tolook on it. Gardens of the most beautiful trees I ever saw. Later I cameupon one man in a canoe going from one island to another. He had alittle of their bread, about the size of a fist, a calabash of water, a pieceof brown earth, powdered then kneaded, and some dried leaves whichmust be a thing highly valued by them for they bartered with it at SanSalvador. He also had with him a native basket. The women wore infront of their bodies a small piece of cotton cloth. I saw many treesvery unlike those of our country. Branches growing in different waysand all from one trunk; one twig is one form and another is a differentshape and so unlike that it is the greatest wonder of the world to seethe diversity; thus one branch has leaves like those of a cane, and oth-ers like those of a mastic tree; and on a single tree there are five dif-ferent kinds. The fish so unlike ours that it is wonderful. Some are theshape of dories and of the finest colors, so bright that there is not aman who would not be astounded, and would not take great delight inseeing them. There are also whales. I saw no beasts on land save par-rots and lizards.

On shore I sent the people for water, some with arms, and otherswith casks; and as it was some little distance I waited two hours forthem.

During that time I walked among the trees, which was the mostbeautiful thing which I had ever seen.…

3


Columbus did not, for example, haveto prove that the world was round: Alleducated people in Europe at the time ac-cepted this as a given. Isabella did nothave to pawn her jewels to raise moneyfor the expedition; though the Crown,following its wars against the Moors,was strapped for cash, the financial ad-viser Luis de Santangel arranged a loanfrom the ample coffers of the state policeand from some Italian merchant bankers.And Columbus did not set sail with acrew of hardened criminals. Only fourmen, accused of murdering a town crier,took advantage of a promised amnesty,and even they were seasoned marinersand acquitted themselves well on thevoyage.

More troublesome for historians havebeen certain other mysteries and contro-versies.

Where, for example, did the firstlandfall occur? We know it was a smallisland the inhabitants called Guanahaniand Columbus christened San Salvador.It was in the Bahamas or thereabouts, farfrom the Asian mainland he was seeking,but which island? No fewer than ninedifferent possible islands have beenidentified from the few ambiguous cluesin Columbus’s journal. The site favoredby most experts is the Bahamian islandonce called Watling’s but renamed SanSalvador in 1924 to help solidify itsclaim.

Did Columbus really come fromGenoa? Nearly every European nationhas at one time or another laid someclaim to him. Was he Jewish? Such con-jecture originated in the 19th century andwas promoted in 1940 in Salvadore deMadriaga’s vivid biography, Christo-pher Columbus. But the evidence is cir-cumstantial. Records in Genoa indicatethat, whatever his more remote ancestry,Columbus’s family had been Christianfor several generations.

When and how in the mists of hisrootless life did Columbus conceive ofhis audacious plan? Was it sheer inspira-tion bolstered by rational research? Ordid he come into some secret knowl-edge? Was he really seeking the Indies?How was he finally able to win royalbacking? What were his ships like?—nocaravel wreck from that period has everbeen recovered. Scholars and amateur

sleuths have spent lifetimes trying to re-solve these questions, usually withoutnotable success.

Part of the problem lies with the pas-sage of time. Although the record of Co-lumbus by contemporaries is moresubstantial than that of any other 15th-century explorer, surviving accounts areoften difficult to assess from this dis-tance. Whose version is to be trusted:The letters of Peter Martyr, the courtierin Spain who never ventured to the NewWorld? The biography by Hernando Co-lumbus, the devoted son protective of hisfather’s fame? The history of the NewWorld by Bartolomé de las Casas (1474–1566), the Dominican friar and cham-pion of the Indians who never missed achance to condemn the brutality of theearly explorers and colonists? Even thefew extant writings of Columbus him-self, who could be vague, contradictoryand self-serving?

Hero worship has further distortedhistory. We want—or used to want—ourheroes to be larger than life. The resultcan be a caricature, a plaster saint invit-ing iconoclasts to step forward with theirown images, which can also ignore thecomplexity of human reality.

We are left, therefore, with enoughmaterial to mold the Columbus wechoose to extol or excoriate, but notenough ever to feel sure we truly knowthe man.

Nothing better illustrates history’schanging images of Columbus than thesuccession of portraits of him that haveappeared over the centuries. They show aman of many faces—handsome and stal-wart, heavy and stolid, shadowed andvaguely sinister. Artistic interpretation,like history, changes with the times.

Yet, there should be little confusionover the man’s physical appearance. Hisson Hernando, who should have known,said he was “a well-built man of morethan average stature, the face long, thecheeks somewhat high, his body neitherfat nor lean. He had an aquiline nose andlight colored eyes; his complexion toowas light and tending to be red. In youthhis hair was blond, but when he reachedthe age of 30 it all turned white.”

The son went on to describe his fa-ther’s character: “In eating and drinking,and in the adornment of his person, hewas very moderate and modest,” Her-nando wrote. “He was affable in conver-sation with strangers and very pleasant tothe members of his household, thoughwith a certain gravity. He was so strict inmatters of religion that for fasting andsaying prayers he might have been takenfor a member of a religious order.”

Hernando may be guilty of some ex-aggeration. Columbus could not be toogentle and modest if he were to promotehis vision before skeptical courts and ifhe could control a crew of rough seamenwho suspected they might be headed totheir deaths. He could be harsh in metingout punishment to seamen and in order-ing punitive raids against Indian villages.Like others of that time, and to this day,he presumably saw no contradiction be-tween his behavior and his religious be-liefs. By all accounts Columbus was ademonstrably pious man. Late in life, hiswritings portrayed a mind filled withmysticism and a belief in his divine mis-sion to carry Christianity to all peopleand prepare them for the impending endof the world.

Of this mysticism, Hernando hasnothing to say. He is also frustratinglyreticent or misleading about the genesisof his father’s consuming dream andeven about his origins. Columbus him-self chose to reveal very little about hisearly life.

Every verifiable historical document,however, indicates that Columbus wasborn in Genoa, which was an indepen-dent city-state (the lesser rival to Venice)whose ships traded throughout the entireMediterranean world. He was probablyborn in 1451, and both his father Do-menico and his father’s father were woolweavers; his mother, Susanna Fontan-arossa, was a weaver’s daughter. Chris-topher was probably their eldest child.Bartholomew, the chart-maker whowould share many of Columbus’s adven-tures, was a year or two younger. Theother children who grew to adulthoodwere a sister named Bianchetta and abrother Giacomo, better known by theSpanish equivalent, Diego, who joinedChristopher on the second voyage. All inall, the Columbuses of Genoa were fruit-

4

ANNUAL EDITIONS

ful and humble tradespeople—and noth-ing for a young man to be ashamed of.

At a “tender age,” as Columbus oncewrote, he cast his lot with those who goto sea. At first, he probably made shortvoyages as a crewman, and then longerones on trading ships to the Genoese col-ony of Chios in the Aegean Sea. Buteven more crucial to Columbus’s devel-opment than his ancestry or his birth-place was the timing of his birth. He wasborn two years before the fall of Con-stantinople, Christendom’s eastern capi-tal, to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. YoungColumbus was to grow up hearing aboutthe scourge of Islam, the blockage ofregular trade routes to the spices of theEast, and the parlous times for Christian-ity. Priests and popes were calling for anew crusade to recapture Constantinopleand Jerusalem. All of this could havenourished the dreams of a great adven-ture in an ambitious young man withnautical experience.

The most significant mystery aboutColumbus concerns how he came upwith his idea for sailing west to the In-dies. As in everything else, Columbus’sown words on the subject obfuscatemore than elucidate. It was his practice,writes the Italian historian Paolo EmilioTaviani, “never to tell everything to ev-eryone, to say one thing to one man,something else to another, to reveal onlyportions of his arguments, clues, and ev-idence accumulated over the years in hismind.” Perhaps Columbus told so manypartial stories in so many different ver-sions that, as Morison suspects, he him-self could no longer remember theorigins of his idea.

In all probability he formulated theidea in Portugal sometime between 1476and 1481. Columbus had come to Portu-gal quite literally by accident. When theGenoese fleet he had shipped with wasattacked and destroyed in the summer of1476, Columbus was washed ashore atthe Portuguese town of Lagos. He madehis way to Lisbon, where the talk of sea-going exploration was everywhere. Heheard stories of westering seamen whofound islands far out in the ocean andsaw maps sprinkled with mythical is-lands. On voyages north perhaps so faras Iceland and south along the coast ofAfrica, he gained a taste for Atlantic sail-

ing. There may even be something to thestory of the unknown pilot from whomColumbus supposedly obtained secretknowledge of lands across the ocean. Butas far as anyone can be sure—and vol-umes have been written on the subject—there was no sudden revelation, no blind-ing flash of inspiration.

Nor did Columbus derive his planfrom a careful reading of scholars. Hewas not then, and never became, a manwho read to learn; he read to gather sup-port for what he already thought to betrue. His familiarity with the travel ac-counts of Marco Polo and the Travels ofSir John Mandeville, a 14th-century col-lection of travelers’ tales from aroundthe world, did not so much inform hisconcept as inflame a mind already stokedwith the dry tinder of desire. From othersources—from a recent Latin translationof Claudius Ptolemy’s second-centuryGeography, which described manySoutheast Asian spice islands, to Pierred’Ailly’s Imago Mundi, a compendiumof contemporary knowledge about theworld which argued that the Western Seawas not very wide—Columbus madesome calculations of global distances.Like d’Ailly, he conveniently managedto constrict the unknown he proposed tochallenge, grossly underestimating thedistance from Europe to Japan. Had heunwittingly deceived himself? Or had hedeliberately contrived calculations to de-ceive those he looked to for support? Allthat can be said with assurance is thatColumbus was by then a man consumedby an enthusiasm that willed away obsta-cles and brooked no doubt.

His marriage in Portugal may have in-directly contributed to his growing con-viction. In 1479, he wed FelipaPerestrello de Moniz, a daughter oflesser nobility. Her widowed mothershowed Columbus the journals and mapsleft by her husband, who had sailed forPrince Henry the Navigator. From thepapers of Bartolomeo Perestrello andother Portuguese seamen, Columbusconcluded, his son Hernando wrote, “forcertain that there were many lands Westof the Canary Islands and Cape Verde,and that it was possible to sail to, and dis-cover them.” The social position of hiswife’s family also smoothed the way for

Columbus’s introduction to the court ofPortugal’s King John II.

When Columbus finally laid out hisplan before John II, probably in 1483 or1484, the court cosmographers, a Portu-guese historian wrote, “considered thewords of Christovae Colom as vain, sim-ply founded on imagination, or thingslike that Isle Cypango of Marco Polo.”

Columbus refused to accept rejection.By this time, his wife had died, and in1485 he took their son, Diego, and leftPortugal for Palos, across the border inSpain. Tradition has it that Columbusand little Diego, penniless and hungry,got off the ship and trudged along a dustyroad to the Franciscan monastery of LaRabida. He knocked at the portal to begfor water and bread. If the legend is true,the father may have been taking the sonthere to be a boarding student, freeinghimself to pursue his dream.

Though a secretive man and oftenportrayed as a loner, Columbus must nothave been without charm, even cha-risma. He had insinuated himself into theinfluential society of Lisbon and woulddo so again in Spain. “Columbus’s abil-ity to thrust himself into the circles of thegreat was one of the most remarkablethings about him,” writes Harvard histo-rian John H. Parry. It was also in hischaracter that he seldom acknowledgedthe help of others.

At La Rabida, Columbus won thefriendship and confidence of a Fran-ciscan official knowledgeable in cos-mography and through him gainedintroductions to wealthy patrons andeventually his first audience with Ferdi-nand and Isabella. They referred his pro-posal to a commission of learned men atthe University of Salamanca. Washing-ton Irving, in his fanciful biography, hasthe commissioners saying that the “ro-tundity of the earth was as yet a matter ofmere speculation.” Many of them nodoubt deserved Irving’s condemnationas a “mass of inert bigotry,” but theywere right (and Columbus wrong) intheir judgment that Asia could not bereached by ships sailing west. They rec-ommended that the monarchs reject theventure.

Columbus was nothing if not persis-tent. With a modest retainer from thecourt, he continued to solicit support

5


from influential courtiers. While in Cor-doba, waiting for some sign of royal en-couragement, he met Beatriz Enriquezde Arana, a peasant woman, and they be-came lovers. In August 1488 she gavebirth to an illegitimate son, Hernando.(They never married, and sometime afterhis first voyage, they drifted apart. Helikely felt a peasant woman was beneathhis station.)

Through another friar at La Rabida,Columbus gained other audiences withthe monarchs in 1491 and again in early1492, just after the Moorish capital ofGranada fell to the Christian forces. Hehad been led to believe that, after the bur-den of the prolonged war was lifted, thequeen especially might be disposed togive her approval. Some writers have letthemselves imagine that Isabella sawmore in Columbus than an insistent sup-plicant. Such speculation of a sexual re-lationship between the two, Tavianisays, is “a sheer fairy-tale, rejected by allhistorians.”

Nothing seemed to change with thefall of Granada. Columbus was turnedaway, this time with an air of finality.Behind the scenes, however, Luis deSantangel, the chief financial adviser, in-terceded with assurances to the queenthat financing the expedition need not bean insurmountable obstacle. No oneknows why the king and queen finally re-lented. They might have been persuadedby the argument that they had little tolose and much to gain if this importunateforeigner just happened to be on to some-thing.

After his first voyage, when he wasthe toast of Barcelona, Columbus sup-posedly faced down his first critics. At abanquet, some noblemen insisted that ifColumbus had not undertaken the enter-prise, someone else, a Spaniard and not aforeigner, would have made the samediscovery. At this, Columbus called foran egg and had it placed on the table.“Gentlemen,” he was reported to havesaid, pointing to the egg, “you make itstand here, not with crumbs, salt, etc. (foranyone knows how to do it with meal orsand), but naked and without anything atall, as I will, who was the first to discoverthe Indies.” When it was Columbus’s

turn, he crushed one end of the egg andhad no trouble making it stand up on thetable.

The anecdote has proved irresistibleto historians and storytellers to illustratethe singular role of Columbus in history.But it never happened—one more Co-lumbian myth. The story was not onlyapocryphal, Morison points out, but it“had already done duty in several Italianbiographies of other characters.”

In reality, Columbus would not soeasily put down the critics who doggedhim the rest of his life—and through his-tory. If only he had stopped with the firstvoyage, the echo of those fanfares inBarcelona might not have faded so fast.

A fleet of 17 ships, carrying some1,200 people, left Cadiz in the autumn of1493 with instructions to establish a per-manent settlement on the island of His-paniola. There, near the present city ofPuerto Plata in the Dominican Republic,Columbus built a fort, church, and housefor what would be his colonial capital,La Isabela. The experiment was disas-trous. The site had no real harbor, insuf-ficient rainfall, and little vegetation.Sickness and dissension brought work toa standstill and the colony to the point ofstarvation. Expeditions into the moun-tains failed to find any rich lodes of gold.As Las Casas wrote, they “spread terroramong the Indians in order to show themhow strong and powerful the Christianswere.” Bloody warfare ensued.

With little gold to show for his efforts,Columbus ordered a shipment of TainoIndians to be sold as slaves in Spain. Thebest that can be said in defense of Co-lumbus is that he was now a desperateman. His power to rule La Isabela waswaning. His visions of wealth were fad-ing. He feared that his influence back inSpain would be irreparably diminishedby critical reports from recalcitrant offic-ers who had returned to Spain. And hehad failed again to find a mainland. Hisdesperation was such that he forced allhis crew to sign a declaration that, atCuba, they had indeed reached the main-land of Cathay. Sick and discouraged, hesailed home in 1496.

The third voyage did nothing to re-store his reputation. Departing fromSeville in May 1498, he steered a south-erly course and reached an island off the

northeastern coast of South America,which he named Trinidad, for the HolyTrinity. A few days later, he saw a coast-line to the south. Columbus recognizedthat the tremendous volume of fresh wa-ter flowing from the Orinoco River wasevidence of a large land, but he failed toappreciate that this might be a continentor to pursue his investigations. Instead,his mind drifted into speculation that theriver must originate in the Earthly Para-dise. Bound to medieval thinking, theman who showed the way across theocean lost his chance to have the NewWorld bear his name. The honor wouldsoon go to a man with a more open-minded perspective, Amerigo Vespucci,who on his second voyage of exploration(1501–2) concluded that the SouthAmerican landmass was not Asia but anew continent.

Columbus turned his back on SouthAmerica and sailed to Santo Domingo toattend to the colony there. He found thathis brothers, Bartholomew and Diego,had lost control. Some of the colonistshad mutinied, and the crown had dis-patched a new governor empowered todo anything necessary to restore order. Itwas then that Columbus was arrested,stripped of his titles, and sent back inirons to Spain in October 1500.

It was an ignominious end to Colum-bus’s authority and to his fame in his

ILLUSTRATION FROM THE GRANGER COLLECTION,NEW YORk

Columbus disgraced, 1500. Charged with mal-feasance as governor of Hispaniola, Columbusreturned to Spain a prisoner in chains.

6

ANNUAL EDITIONS

lifetime. The crown eventually restoredhis titles, but never again was he allowedto serve as viceroy. The monarchs nowwere under no illusions about Columbus.He had failed as a colonial administrator,and they had strong doubts about the va-lidity of his claims to have reached theIndies.

Columbus was given permission forone final voyage, which lasted from1502 to 1504. He was specifically barredfrom returning to Santo Domingo. In-stead, he explored the coast of CentralAmerica and attempted without successto establish a settlement in Panama.

Historians cite the last voyage as oneof his many “missed opportunities.”With luck and more persistence, Colum-bus might have stumbled upon the Mayacivilization or the Pacific Ocean. As itwas, he barely made it back to Spain. Hewas marooned a year on Jamaica, wherehe wrote a pathetic letter to the mon-archs. “I implore Your Highnesses’ par-don,” he wrote. “I am ruined as I havesaid. Hitherto I have wept for others;now have pity upon me, Heaven, andweep for me, earth! I came to Your High-nesses with honest purpose and sincerezeal, and I do not lie. I humbly beg Your

Highnesses that, if it please God to re-move me hence, you will aid me to go toRome and on other pilgrimages.”

Columbus in his last years was adispirited man who felt himself to bemisunderstood and unappreciated. Hesought to define himself in a remarkablemanuscript now known as Libro de lasprofecías, or The Book of Prophecies.Between the third and fourth voyages,Columbus collected passages of biblicalscriptures and the words of a wide rangeof classical and medieval authors. Ac-

Columbus’s Mysterious Signature

In 1498, Columbus instructed all of his heirs to continue to“sign with my signature which I now employ which is an Xwith an S over it and an M with a Roman A over it and overthem an S and then a Greek Y with an S over it, preserving therelation of the lines and the points.” At the top, thus, is the letterS between two dots. On the palindromic second row are the let-ter S A S, also preceded, separated, and ended with dots. Thethird row has the letters X M and a Greek Y, without dots. Be-low that is the final signature, Xpo Ferens, a Greco-Latin formof his given name.

To this day no one can decipher the meaning Columbus hadin mind, but it almost certainly bears on his religious outlook.The simplest explanations hold that the letters stand for sevenwords. It has been suggested that the four letters stand for “Ser-vus Sum Altissimi Salvatoris,” for “Servant I Am of the MostHigh Savior.” The three letters of the third line could be an in-vocation to Christ Jesus and Mary, or to Christ, Mary, and Jo-seph. Another proposed solution is that the seven letters are theinitials for “Spiritus Sanctus Altissimi Salvator Xristus MariaYesus.”

John Fleming, a medievalist at Princeton University, be-lieves he has cracked the code, finding it to be an “acrostic ofconsiderable complexity committed to a more or less learnedand hermetic mystical theology.” Columbus, he concludes,was borrowing from two medieval traditions in formal signa-tures, that of the church worthies, like St. Francis, who devisedintricate crucigrams, and that of the church mariners who oftenincluded in their craft marks anchors, masts, fishhooks, and soforth. For his signature, Fleming says, Columbus seems tohave combined religious and nautical symbolism. The unifyingidea is the medieval association of the Virgin Mary with StellaMaris, the indispensable navigational star also known as Po-laris, or the North Star. The first cross bar stands for StellAMariS. The vertical “mast” stands for “Stella Ave Maris,” afterthe vesper hymn “Ave, stella maris.” By design, the structure

represents both a Christian cross and a ship’s mast. The line XM Y may have one meaning, “Jesus cum Maris sit nobis invia” (an invocation with which Columbus opened much of hiswriting), with the Y representing the fork in the road and thesymbolism for his having chosen the hard way to destiny’s ful-fillment. Fleming suggests a double meaning. The X and Y ateither end of the bottom line could also stand for “Christopho-rus,” his name and destiny, and “Jacobus,” for “St. James,”whose feast day and Christopher’s are the same and who is, notincidentally, the patron saint of Spain, Santiago—Sant Yago.

Fleming’s cryptographic skills have uncovered other cluesin the signature to Columbus’s “religious imagination.” But,for understanding Columbus the mystical discoverer, Flemingdraws insight from his associations with Mary, Christopher,and Santiago. He writes: “In Columbus’s heavenly city, theVirgin Mary stands ever firm between her two Christ-bearingguards, Christophorus on the one hand, San Yago theMoorslayer on the other. And in the larger meaning of thesetwo saints, both celebrated by the Roman church on a singleday, which was of course Columbus’s name-day, we may seeadumbrated much of the glory, and much of the tragedy, of theEuropean encounter with the New World.”

From The Mysterious History of Columbus, copyright © 1991 by Alfred A.Knopf. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Art Reproduction from thecollection of the Library of Congress

7


cording to his own description, this wasa notebook “of sources, statements,opinions and prophecies on the subjectof the recovery of God’s Holy City andMount Zion, and on the discovery andevangelization of the islands of the In-dies and of all other peoples and na-tions.”

The document reveals the depth andpassion of Columbus’s belief that he hada special relationship with God and wasacting as the agent of God’s scheme forhistory. He marshaled evidence from theprophecies of the Bible to show that hisrecent discoveries were only the preludeto the realization of a greater destiny. Itwas as if he saw his role as being not un-like John the Baptist’s in relation toChrist. The wealth from his voyages anddiscoveries had given the king and queenof Spain the means to recover the HolyLand for Christendom, and thereby hehad set the stage for the grandiose climaxof Christian history, the salvation of allthe world’s peoples and their gatheringat Zion on the eve of the end of time.

Most historians who studied the doc-ument have tended to dismiss it as theproduct of his troubled and possibly se-nile mind. His other writings at the timesometimes betrayed a mind verging onparanoia. Delno C. West, a historian whohas recently translated the Book ofProphecies, suspects that historians were“reluctant to admit that the first Ameri-can hero was influenced by propheticideas.” If the book indeed reflects Co-lumbus’s thinking even before 1492, itundermines the popular image of Co-lumbus as a man of the modern age whoapplied reason in conceiving his venture.It exposes him as a person thoroughlymired in the medieval world, obsessedwith eschatology, and driven by a sup-posed call from God to carry out a mis-sion of apocalyptic dimensions.

West contends that this spirituality,which fed Columbus’s apocalyptic viewof history, lay at the heart of the man andshaped his actions. Rather than somemap or unknown pilot’s tale, this mayhave been the “secret knowledge” thatinspired Columbus. Certainly, withouthis unwavering belief in himself and hisdestiny, Columbus might not have sus-tained the single-minded persistence ittook to win support for the enterprise and

to see it through. “The Lord purposedthat there should be something clearlymiraculous in this matter of the voyageto the Indies,” Columbus wrote in theProphecies, “so as to encourage me andothers in the… Household of God.” Be-ginning in 1493, he began signing nearlyall of his letters and documents Christof-erens, a Latinization of his given namethat means “Christ-bearer.”

New attention to the spiritual side ofColumbus does not, however, necessar-ily bring this complex man into focus.Images of a superstitious spiritualist andthe modern explorer must be superim-posed to produce a stereoscopic pictureof Columbus, revealing the depth andheights of the mental terrain throughwhich he traveled as he found Americaand then lost his way in failure, self-pity,and a fog of mysticism.

Columbus was probably no morethan 55 years old when he died on May20, 1506, in Valladolid, Spain. But hewas much older in body and in tormentedmind. His last voyages had left him crip-pled with arthritis and weak from fever.He was reduced to a sad figure, spendinghis last years in disgrace while stub-bornly pressing his claims for the resto-ration of titles and the wealth due him.

Contrary to legend, he was neitherdestitute nor alone at the end. His twosons were with him, in a comfortablehome. We cannot be sure of the tradi-tional story, that he died believing he hadreached the Indies. He never gave ex-plicit expression to any recognition thathe had found something other than Asia.All the evidence, though, suggests thathe died unsatisfied.

His death went unheralded. Therewas no public ceremony of mourningand no recorded expressions of grief atthe royal court. The man who rose fromobscurity died in obscurity. His remainshave been moved so many times over thecenturies, from Spain to the New Worldand presumably back again, that no oneis sure of his final resting place.

In the first century after his voyages,Columbus languished in the backwatersof history. His reputation suffered fromhis many failures as a colonial governor.The 1519–1522 Magellan circumnaviga-

tion left no doubt about the magnitude ofColumbus’s error in thinking he hadreached the Indies. Conquering explor-ers such as Cortes and Pizarro wongreater immediate fame by their dazzlingexploits against the Aztecs and Incas.Cartographers saw fit to name the NewWorld after Vespucci, not Columbus.Books of general history scarcely men-tioned Columbus or ignored him alto-gether.

Within 50 years of Columbus’s death,Bartolomé de las Casas, the Dominicanbishop who extolled and defended theIndians, produced the first revisionisthistory. In his History of the Indies, LasCasas wrote eloquently of the atrocitiescommitted against the Indians. To sail tothe islands Columbus had discovered,Las Casas wrote, one needed only to fol-low the floating corpses of Indians thatmarked the way. His accounts of tortureand killings documented the so-calledBlack Legend of Spanish cruelty thatwas seized upon by the English, Dutch,and French to fan the fires of national ri-valries and religious hatreds.

As the Age of Discovery flourishedduring the late 16th century, Columbusbegan to be rescued from oblivion. Hewas celebrated in poetry and plays, espe-cially in Italy and later in Spain. A glim-mer of history’s future hero could beseen in a popular play by Lope de Vegain 1614. In The New World Discoveredby Christopher Columbus, he portrayedColumbus as a dreamer up against the es-tablishment, a man of singular purposewho triumphed, the embodiment of thatspirit driving humans to explore and dis-cover.

It was in the New World, though, thatColumbus would be transformed almostbeyond human recognition into an icon.

By the late 17th century, people in theBritish colonies of North America werebeginning to think of themselves asAmericans and sought to define them-selves in their own terms and symbols.Samuel Sewell, a Boston judge, sug-gested that the new lands should right-fully be named for Columbus, “themagnanimous hero… who was mani-festly appointed by God to be the Finderout of these lands.” The idea took root. Intime, writers and orators used the name“Columbia” as a poetic name for Amer-

8

ANNUAL EDITIONS

ica. Joel Barlow’s poem The Vision ofColumbus, appearing in 1787, has anaged Columbus lamenting his fate untilhe is visited by an angel who transportshim to the New World to see what hisdiscovery had brought to pass. There hecould glimpse the “fruits of his cares andchildren of his toil.”

Indeed, the young republic was busyplanning the 300th anniversary of thelandfall, in October 1792, when it namedits new national capital the District ofColumbia—perhaps to appease thosewho demanded that the entire country bedesignated Columbia. Next to GeorgeWashington, Columbus was the nation’smost exalted hero. In him the new nationwithout its own history and mythologyfound a hero from the distant past, oneseemingly free of association with theEuropean colonial powers and Old-World tyranny. Americans invoked Co-lumbus, the solitary individual who hadchallenged the unknown, as they con-templated the dangers and promise oftheir own wilderness frontier. “Instead ofravaging the newly found countries,”Washington Irving wrote in his 1828 bi-ography, Columbus “sought to colonizeand cultivate them, to civilize the na-tives.”

This would be the Columbus Ameri-cans knew and honored throughout the19th and into the present century. Withthe influx of millions of immigrants afterthe Civil War, he was even made to as-sume the role of ethnic hero. In responseto adverse Protestant attitudes and to af-firm their own Americanism, Irish Cath-olic immigrants organized the Knights ofColumbus in 1882. The fraternity’s liter-ature described Columbus as “a prophetand a seer” and an inspiration to eachknight to become “a better Catholic anda better citizen.” Catholics in both Amer-ica and Europe launched a campaign tocanonize Columbus on the grounds thathe had brought the “Christian faith tohalf the world.” The movement failednot because of Columbus’s brutal treat-ment of Indians but mainly because ofthe son he had sired out of wedlock.

Columbus’s reputation was neverhigher than on the 400th anniversary ofhis first voyage. There were parades andfireworks, the naming of streets and ded-icating of monuments. The World’s Co-

lumbian Exposition in Chicago, with itslavish displays of modern technology,was less a commemoration of the pastthan the self-confident celebration of afuture that Americans were eager toshape and enjoy. Americans ascribed toColumbus all the human virtues thatwere most prized in that time of geo-graphic and industrial expansion, headyoptimism, and unquestioning belief inprogress. A century before, Columbushad been the symbol of American prom-ise; now he was the symbol of Americansuccess.

The 20th century has dispelled muchof that. We have a new Columbus for anew age. He is the creation of genera-tions that have known devastating worldwars, the struggle against imperialism,and economic expansion that ravages na-ture without necessarily satisfying basichuman needs. In this view, the Age ofDiscovery initiated by Columbus wasnot the bright dawning of a glorious ep-och but an invasion, a conquest and Co-lumbus himself less a symbol of progressthan of oppression.

Columbus scholarship has changed.More historians are writing books fromthe standpoint of the Indians. They areexamining the consequences—the ex-change of plants and animals betweencontinents, the spread of deadly diseases,the swift decline of the indigenousAmericans in the face of European in-roads. The Quincentennial happens tocome at a time of bitter debate amongAmericans over racism, sexism, imperi-alism, Eurocentrism, and other “isms.”Kirkpatrick Sale’s 1990 book about Co-lumbus said it all in its title, The Con-quest of Paradise.

Was Columbus a great man, ormerely an agent of a great accomplish-ment, or perhaps not a very admirableman at all? His standing in history hasvaried whenever posterity reevaluatedthe consequences of Europe’s discoveryof America. Ultimately, Columbus’sreputation in history is judged in relationto the place that is accorded America inhistory.

Europeans took a long time appreciat-ing their discovery. Columbus and suc-ceeding explorers looked upon the

islands and mainland as an inconve-nience, the barrier standing in their wayto Asia that must be breached or circum-navigated.

As early as Peter Martyr, Europeanstried to assimilate the new lands intowhat they already knew or thought, re-jecting the utter newness of the discov-ery. This was, after all, during theRenaissance, a period of rediscoveringthe past while reaching out to new hori-zons. And so the peoples of the NewWorld were described in terms of the Re-naissance-ancient image of the “noblesavage,” living in what classical writershad described as the innocent “GoldenAge.” The inhabitants of the New World,Martyr wrote, “seem to live in thatgolden world of which old writers speakso much, wherein men lived simply andinnocently without enforcement of laws,without quarreling, judges and libels,content only to satisfy nature, withoutfurther vexation for knowledge of thingsto come.”

The innocence of the indigenousAmericans was more imagined than real.To one degree or another, they knewwarfare, brutality, slavery, human sacri-fice, and cannibalism. Columbus did not,as charged, “introduce” slavery to theNew World; the practice existed therebefore his arrival, though his shipmentsof Tainos to Spain presaged a transoce-anic traffic in slaves unprecedented inhistory.

This idealized image of people livingin nature persisted until it was too late tolearn who the Americans really wereand, accepting them for what they were,to find a way to live and let live. Diseaseand conquest wiped out the people andtheir cultures. In their place Europeanshad begun to “invent” America, as theMexican historian Edmundo O’Gormancontends, in their own image and fortheir own purposes. They had set upon acourse, writes historian Alfred W.Crosby, of creating “Neo-Europes.” Thiswas the America that took its place inworld history.

In the 18th century, however, Euro-pean intellectuals did engage in a search-ing reappraisal. A scientific movement,encouraged by the French naturalistGeorges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon(1707–1788), spread the idea that Amer-

9


1991: Cerebration, Not Celebration

It was in 1982 that I first became aware that the 500th anniversary ofColumbus’s 1492 Voyage of Discovery was a minefield, where theprudent celebrant stepped lightly and guardedly.

To my long-time friend Ramon, in an institute attached to the for-eign ministry in Madrid, I said on the telephone one day that year,“Ramon, here at Florida we’re beginning to get interested in the Co-lumbus Discovery Quincentenary.”

“Why do you say Columbus?” he responded. “He was an Italianmercenary. It was Spain that discovered America, not Columbus.”

“But, Ramon,” I protested, “we can’t celebrate 1492 in the UnitedStates without mentioning Columbus.”

“In your country,” he lectured me, “Columbus Day is an Italianholiday. But the ships, the crews, the money were all Spanish. Colum-bus was a hired hand.”

“But—”“So when Cape Canaveral space center holds its 100th anniver-

sary, are you going to call it the Werner von Braun celebration?”I was grateful to Ramon for alerting me, in his way, to the sensitive

character of this anniversary. Soon afterwards I learned that “Discov-ery,” too, is a term freighted with ethnic and cultural contentions, asmany descendants of the native peoples in the Americas argue againstits Eurocentric and paternalistic coloring. “We were already here,”they reminded me. And they were here so long ago, 10 to 25,000 yearsthe anthropologists say. I was left to wonder, which was the OldWorld and which was the New?

As the past ten years have shown, the Spanish-Italian tension hassoftened, but the European-Native American disjunction has hard-ened, as historians, epidemiologists, moralists, romanticists, and na-tive spokespersons have clashed over the benefits, if any, thatEuropean entrance onto the American stage brought the societies ofboth worlds, particularly this one.

Certainly huge numbers of indigenous people died as a result ofthe collision: some, it is true, from the sword, but by far the majorityfrom the Europeans’ unwitting introduction of pathogens—smallpox,measles, tuberculosis, the plague—to which the native peoples had noimmunities. Recognizing the dimensions of that calamity, manyWesterners acknowledge that there is little to celebrate. In Spain,where a 500th Year Worlds’ Fair will open in Seville, many of thatcountry’s intellectuals are decrying what they call a 15th-and 16th-century genocidio.

In the margins of the debate, native descendants and their advo-cates are publicizing a long list of grievances against the Caucasianswho abused their liberties, expropriated their lands, and despoiled anenvironmental paradise. On July 17–21, 1990, some 400 Indian peo-ple, including a delegation from the United States, met in Quito, Ec-uador, to plan public protests against 500 years of European“invasion” and “oppression.” Even before that, the first sign of reac-tion in the United States had already come when, in December 1989,representatives of the American Indian Movement, supported by agroup of university students, began picketing the “First Encounters”archaeology exhibition mounted by the Florida Museum of NaturalHistory as it traveled from Gainesville to Tampa, Atlanta, and Dallas.(In Tampa, their presence was welcomed because it boosted paid at-tendance.) In 1992, a loose confederation of North American Indiangroups will picket in all U.S. cities where the Columbus replica shipswill dock. They seek, one of their leaders told me, “not confrontationbut media attention to present-day Native American problems.”

African Americans also remind their fellow citizens that the eventsof 1492 and afterwards gave rise to the slave trade. And Jews appro-priately notice that 1492 was the year when they were forcibly ex-pelled from their Spanish homeland. In a counter-counteraction in allthis Quincentenary skirmishing, however, the National Endowmentfor the Humanities decided not to fund a proposed television docu-mentary about the early contact period because, reportedly, it was toobiased against the Europeans. (Spain, by contrast, is acting uncom-monly large-minded: It has agreed to fund the Smithsonian-Carlos Fu-entes television production, “The Buried Mirror,” a show that ishighly critical of Spain’s colonial practices.)

It is this “politically correct” dynamic that, most likely, will keep1992 from being quite the exuberant and careless celebration that theBicentennial was in 1976.

Anglo-Saxon and Celtic Americans felt comfortable with the Bi-centennial because it reinforced their ethnic and cultural givens (Ply-mouth Rock, Virginia, Washington, Jefferson, the English language,Northern European immigration, etc.). Today, nervous about what ishappening to “their” country and learning that citizens of Hispanic or-igins are projected soon to be the largest U.S. minority, the old linewhite majority may not be enthusiastic about celebrating the 500thcoming of the Hispanics—especially since they sense no continuingneed for Columbus as a unifying principle or symbol.

What is likely to happen in 1992? Occasional public celebrationsand observances will be produced by civic, ethnic, and cultural bod-ies. Reproductions of Columbus’s ships will arrive in various portsfrom Spain. Tall ships may parade in New York harbor. Fireworkswill explode here and there. People will view two television mini-se-ries and read countless ambivalent newspaper stories.

The Federal Quincentenary Jubilee Commission that was ap-pointed to superintend our exultations is in disarray, its chairmanforced out on a charge of mishandling funds, its coffers empty of fed-eral dollars, its principal private donor, Texaco, pulling the plug.Some states, and numerous individual cities (especially those namedafter Columbus, 63 at last count), have plans for observances, large orsmall. Florida which has the best reasons, geographically and tempo-rally, to do something, has no state-wide plans, two commissions hav-ing collapsed and a third now being stripped of its funds.

But now the good news: In anticipation of the 500th anniversaryan enormous amount of intellectual activity has occurred, in the formof archival discoveries, archaeological excavations, museum and li-brary exhibitions, conferences, and publications. Some 30 new andupcoming adult titles have been enumerated by Publishers Weekly.Over 100 exhibitions and conferences have been counted by the Na-tional Endowment for the Humanities. This remarkable efflorescenceof original research and scholarship will leave a lasting legacy of un-derstanding and good. On the twin principles that cerebration is morevaluable than celebration and that correcting one paragraph in ourchildren’s schoolbooks is worth more than a half-million dollarsworth of fireworks exploded over Biscayne Bay, 1992 should be thebest 1492 anniversary ever.

—Michael Gannon

Michael Gannon is Director of the Institute for Early ContactPeriod Studies at the University of Florida.

10

ANNUAL EDITIONS

ica was somehow inferior to the OldWorld. As evidence, Buffon offered den-igrating comparisons between the “ridic-ulous” tapir and the elephant, the llamaand the camel, and the “cowardly” pumaand the noble lion. Moreover, Old-World animals introduced there faredpoorly, declining in health and size, withthe sole exception of the pig. It was Buf-fon’s thesis that America suffered an ar-rested development because of a humidclimate, which he attributed to its rela-tively late emergence from the waters ofthe Biblical flood.

Buffon’s ideas enjoyed a voguethroughout the 18th century and inspiredmore extreme arguments about “Amer-ica’s weakness.” Not only were the ani-mals inferior, so were the Americans,and even Europeans who settled theresoon degenerated.

Unlike the proud patriots in colonialand post-Revolutionary North America,European intellectuals began expressingstrong reservations about the benefits ofthe American discovery. There was nogainsaying its importance. Few disputedthe opinion of Adam Smith: “The dis-covery of America, and that of a passageto the East Indies by the Cape of GoodHope, are the two greatest and most im-portant events recorded in the history ofmankind.”

But there were negative assessments,not unlike today’s. The anti-imperialistSamuel Johnson (1709–1784) wrote:“The Europeans have scarcely visitedany coast but to gratify avarice, and ex-tend corruption; to arrogate dominionwithout rights, and practice cruelty with-out incentive.” He was also one of thefirst to make an unflattering connectionbetween the conquest of America and itsoriginal conqueror. Columbus, Johnsonsaid, had to travel “from court to court,scorned and repulsed as a wild projector,an idle promiser of kingdoms in theclouds: nor has any part of the world hadreason to rejoice that he found at last re-ception and employment.”

The French philosopher Abbé Guil-laume-Thomas Raynal (1713–1796)challenged others to consider the follow-ing questions: Has the discovery ofAmerica been useful or harmful to man-kind? If useful, how can its usefulness bemagnified? If harmful, how can the harm

be ameliorated? He offered a prize forthe essay that would best answer thosequestions.

The respondents whose essays havesurvived were evenly divided betweenoptimists and pessimists. Although “Eu-rope is indebted to the New World for afew conveniences, and a few luxuries,”Raynal himself observed, these were “socruelly obtained, so unequally distrib-uted, and so obstinately disputed” thatthey may not justify the costs. In conclu-sion, the abbé asked, if we had it to doover again, would we still want to dis-cover the way to America and India? “Isit to be imagined,” Raynal speculated,“that there exists a being infernal enoughto answer this question in the affirma-tive?”

Pangs of guilt and expressions ofmoral outrage were futile, however;nothing stayed the momentum of Euro-pean expansion in America. Most of theimmigrants had never heard of the“American weakness” or read the intel-lectuals who idealized or despised the In-dians or deplored Europe’s bloodstainedseizure of the lands. By the millions—particularly after the introduction of thesteamship and on through World WarI—immigrants flocked to a promisedland where people could make some-thing of themselves and prepare a betterlife for their children. There had beennothing quite like this in history. Thiswas reflected in the image of Columbia.Little wonder that Columbus’s standingin history was never higher than it waswhen the achievements and promise ofAmerica seemed so bright and were ex-travagantly proclaimed at home andabroad.

The “primary factor behind our [cur-rent] reassessment of the encounter,”Crosby writes, “is a general reassess-ment of the role of rapid change, even ca-tastrophe, in human history, and even thehistory of the earth and of the universe.”The earlier faith in progress was foundedon a Western belief that change camegradually and almost invariably for thebetter. In 19th-century science, the uni-formitarian geology of Charles Lyell andthe evolutionary theory of Charles Dar-win were widely accepted because theyseemed to confirm the idea of progress:The present world and its inhabitants

were the products not of global disastersand multiple creations but of slow andsteady change.

By contrast, Crosby observes, the20th century has experienced the twoworst wars in history, genocide, the in-vention of more ominous means of de-struction, revolutions and the collapse ofempires, rampant population growth,and the threat of ecological disaster. Cat-astrophism, not steady progress, is themodern paradigm. Even the universewas born, many scientists now believe,in one explosive moment—the BigBang.

“The rapidity and magnitude ofchange in our century,” Crosby con-cludes, “has prepared us to ask differentquestions about the encounter than theolder schools of scientists and scholarsasked.”

If Abbé Raynal held his essay contesttoday, the pessimists might outnumberthe optimists. Indeed, almost everythingabout Columbus and the discovery ofAmerica has become controversial.

And perhaps the greatest controversyof all is whether or not to celebrate theQuincentennial. The critics who advo-cate not celebrating it are correct, if tocelebrate perpetuates a view of the en-counter that ignores the terrible toll. Thismust be acknowledged and memorial-ized in the hope that nothing like it isever repeated. Even so, it would be un-historical to ignore the more salutaryconsequences. The New World, for ex-ample, changed Europe through newideas, new resources, and new models ofpolitical and social life that would spreadthrough the world. William H. McNeillis one of many historians who believethis led to the Enlightenment of the 18thcentury and thus to the philosophical, po-litical, and scientific foundations ofmodern Western civilization. It shouldnot be overlooked that this is the kind ofsociety that encourages and tolerates therevisionists who condemn its many un-forgivable transgressions in the NewWorld.

Of course, attributing so much to anyone historical development makes somehistorians uneasy. In cautioning againstthe “presentism” in much historical in-

11


terpretations, Herbert Butterfield re-called “the schoolboy who, writing onthe results of Columbus’s discovery ofAmerica, enumerated amongst otherthings the execution of Charles I, the warof the Spanish Succession and theFrench Revolution.” No one will everknow what the world and subsequentevents would have been like if the dis-covery had not been made, or if it had notoccurred until much later. But the impactof that discovery can hardly be underes-timated. And it did start with ChristopherColumbus.

That brings up another issue central tothe Quincentenary debates: Columbus’sresponsibility for all that followed. Itmust be remembered who he was—notwho we wish he had been. He was a Eu-ropean Christian of the 15th century sail-ing for the crown of Spain. There can beno expiation, only understanding. Hissingle-mindedness and boldness, as wellas the magnitude of his achievement,give him heroic standing. Others did nothave Columbus’s bold idea to sail acrossthe unknown ocean, or if they did, theynever acted upon it. Columbus did. In somany other respects, he failed to riseabove his milieu and set a more worthyexample, and so ended up a tragic figure.

But he does not deserve to bear alone theblame for the consequences of his auda-cious act.

We must resist the temptation to shiftblame for our behavior to someone deadand gone. Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peru-vian novelist, finds little to admire in theearly Spanish conquerors but recognizesthe dangers inherent in transferring tothem an inordinate share of the blame formodern America.

“Why have the post-colonial repub-lics of the Americas—republics thatmight have been expected to have deeperand broader notions of liberty, equality,and fraternity—failed so miserably toimprove the lives of their Indian citi-zens?” Vargas Llosa asks. “Immense op-portunities brought by the civilizationthat discovered and conquered Americahave been beneficial only to a minority,sometimes a very small one; whereas thegreat majority managed to have only anegative share of the conquest.… One ofour worst defects, our best fictions, is tobelieve that our miseries have been im-posed on us from abroad, that others, forexample, the conquistadores, have al-ways been responsible for our prob-lems.… Did they really do it? We did it;we are the conquistadores.”

People have choices, but they do notalways choose well. One wishes Colum-bus had acquitted himself more nobly, inthe full knowledge that, even if he had,others who came after would have al-most surely squandered the opportunitypresented to them to make a truly freshstart in human history—a new world inmore than the geographic sense. Butwishes, yesterday’s self-congratulationor today’s self-flagellation, are not his-tory.

Columbus’s failings, as well as hisambitions and courage, are beyond his-torical doubt—and are all too human.The mythic Columbus of our creation issomething else. His destiny, it seems, isto serve as a barometer of our self-confi-dence, our hopes and aspirations, ourfaith in progress, and the capacity of hu-mans to create a more just society.

John Noble Wilford has been a science cor-respondent for the New York Times since1965. Twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Wil-ford is the author of The Mapmakers (1981),The Riddle of the Dinosaur (1985), MarsBeckons (1990), and Mysterious History ofColumbus (1991).

From The Wilson Quarterly, Autumn 1991, pp. 66–86. © 1991 by John Noble Wilford. Reprinted by permission of the author.

12

columbus and the labyrinth of history - salem state...

Documents