| "Discovering Columbus" by John Noble Wilford in The New York Times Magazine (August 11, 1991, pp. 25+) Few stories in history are more familiar than the one of Christopher Columbus sailing west for the Indies and finding instead the New World. Indelibly imprinted in our memory is the verse from childhood: "In fourteen hundred and ninety-two/ Columbus sailed the ocean blue." The names of his ships, the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria, roll fluently from our lips. We know how Columbus, a seaman of humble and obscure origins, pursued a dream that became his obsession. How he found not the riches of Cathay but a sprinkling of small islands inhabited by gentle people. How he called these people Indians, thinking that surely the mainland of Asia lay just over the horizon. Yet the history of Columbus is frustratingly incomplete. When and how in the mists of his rootless life did he conceive of his audacious plan? He supposedly wanted to sail west across the Ocean Sea to reach Cipangu, the name then for Japan, and the region known generally as the Indies. But was he really seeking the Indies? How are we to navigate the poorly charted waters of ambiguous and conflicting documentation everywhere Columbus went and in everything he did? We are not certain how he was finally able to win royal backing for the enterprise. We know little about his ships and the men who sailed them. We don't know exactly where he made his first landfall. We don't know for sure what he looked like or where he lies buried. We do know he was an inept governor of the Spanish settlements in the Caribbean and had a bloodied hand in the brutalization of the native people and in the start of a slave trade. But we are left wondering if he is to be admired and praised, condemnedor perhaps pitied as a tragic figure. Walt Whitman imagined Columbus on his deathbed, in the throes of self-doubt, seeming to anticipate the vicissitudes that lay ahead in his passage through history: What do I know of life? what of myself? I know not even my own work past or present; Dim ever-shifting guesses of it spread before me, Of newer better worlds, their mighty parturition, Mocking, perplexing me. The man who wrote to his patron, Luis de Santangel, on the voyage back to Europe in 1493, proclaiming discovery and assuring that he would not be forgotten, probably had no such thoughts. He could not foresee posterity's "ever-shifting guesses" concerning his deeds and himself any more than he could assimilate in his inflexible mind what he had done and seen. But it was his fate to be the accidental agent of transcendental discovery and, as a result, to be tossed into the tempestuous sea of history, drifting half-forgotten at first, then swept by swift currents to a towering crest of honor and legend, only to be caught in recent years in a riptide of conflicting views of his life and of his responsibility for almost everything that has happened since. Columbus's reputation in history has followed a curious course. His obsession, obstinacy and navigational skill carried Europe across the ocean. "The Admiral was the first to open the gates of that ocean which had been closed for so many thousands of years before," wrote Bartolome de las Casas a half century later in a comprehensive account of the voyages, which remains to this day a major source of knowledge about Columbus. "He it was who gave the light by which all others might see how to discover." But he was then anything but the stellar figure in history he was to become. His immediate reputation was diminished by his failures as a colonial administrator and by a protracted lawsuit between the crown and the heirs of Columbus, casting doubt on the singularity of his plan for sailing west to the Indies. (Testimony by some seamen who had sailed with Columbus suggested that one of his captains was actually responsible for much of the idea.) In time, Las Casas forced his contemporaries to question the morality of the brutal treatment of Indians at the hands of Columbus and his successors. By the early years of the 16th century, Amerigo Vespucci, a more perceptive interpreter of the New World and a more engaging writer, had already robbed Columbus of prominence on the map. His star was also eclipsed by explorers like Cortes and Pizarro, who obtained gold and glory for Spain and had the good fortune to conquer not an assortment of islands but splendid empires like those of the Aztecs of Mexico and Incas of Peru, and by mariners like Vasco da Gama, who actually reached the Indies, and Magellan, whose expedition of circumnavigation was the first to confirm by experience the world's sphericityand also left no doubt about the magnitude of Columbus's error in thinking he had reached Asia. Many books of general history in the first decades of the 16th century either scarcely mentioned Columbus or ignored him altogether. Writers of the time "showed little interest in his personality and career, and some of them could not even get his Christian name right," according to J.H. Elliott, a British historian. Responsibility for the neglect has been attributed in part to Peter Martyr, an Italian cleric in the court at Barcelona, whose correspondence, beginning in the months after Columbus's return, was widely read. It made much of the years of discovery but gave only passing notice to Columbus himself, though acknowledging his fortitude and courage. With the poverty of available documentation about the man, there were few alternative sources of information. Yet to come were the works of the contemporary observers Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo (who would write an encyclopedic history of the early discoveries), Bartolome de las Casas and Columbus's son Ferdinand, who would write the first definitive biography of Columbus. Nearly all of Columbus's own letters and journals had long since disappeared. By the middle of the 16th century, Columbus began to emerge from the shadows, reincarnated not so much as a man and historical figure but as a myth and symbol. In 1552, in a ringing assessment that would be repeated time and again, the historian Francisco Lopez de Gomara wrote, "The greatest event since the creation of the world (excluding the incarnation and death of Him who created it) is the discovery of the Indies." Columbus came to epitomize the explorer and discoverer, the man of vision and audacity, the hero who overcame opposition and adversity to change history. By the end of the 16th century, English explorers and writers acknowledged his primacy and inspiration. "Had they not Columbus to stirre them up," Richard Hakluyt, the historian of exploration, wrote in 1598. He was celebrated in poetry and plays, especially by the Italians. Even Spain was coming around. In 1614, a popular play, "El Nuevo Mundo descubierto por Cristobal Colon," portrayed Columbus as a dreamer up against the stolid forces of entrenched tradition, a man of singular purpose who triumphed, the embodiment of that spirit driving humans to explore and discover. The association between Columbus and America prospered in the 18th century, as the population became increasingly American-born, with less reason to identify with the "mother country." No one in Boston or New York is recorded to have celebrated Columbus on the bicentennial, in 1692. But within a very short time, the colonists began thinking of themselves as a people distinct from the English. By virtue of their isolation and common experience in a new land, they were becoming Americans, and they looked to define themselves on their own symbols. Samuel Sewall of Boston was one of the first to suggest their land should rightfully be named for Columbus, "the magnanimous heroe ... who was manifestly appointed of God to be the Finder out of these lands." The Columbus who thought of himself as God's messenger"As the Lord told of it through the mouth of Isaiah, He made me the messenger, and he showed me the way," Columbus wrote on his third voyagewould have been pleased at this turn in his posthumous reputation. But Sewall was also indulging in a practice that would become rampant: enlisting the symbolic Columbus for his own purposesin spirited defense of the colonies, which were being described by theologians at Oxford and Cambridge as the Biblical "infernal region," or in plain English, "hell." By the time of the Revolution, Columbus had been transmuted into a national icon, a hero second only to Washington. The new Republic's celebration of Columbus reached a climax in October 1792, the 300th anniversary of the landfall. By then, King's College in New York had been renamed Columbia and the national capital being planned was given the name the District of Columbia, perhaps to appease those who demanded that the entire country be designated Columbia. It is not hard to understand the appeal of Columbus as a totem for the former subjects of George III. Columbus had found the way of escape from Old World tyranny. He was the solitary individual who challenged the unknown sea, as triumphant Americans contemplated the dangers and promise of their own wilderness frontier. He had been opposed by kings and (in his mind) betrayed by royal perfidy. But as a consequence of his vision and audacity, there was now a land free from kings, a vast continent for new beginnings. In Columbus, the new nation found a hero seemingly free of any taint from association with the European colonial powers. The Columbus symbolism gave Americans an instant mythology and a unique place in history, and their adoption of Columbus magnified his own place. In "The Whig Interpretation of History," Herbert Butterfield, a British historian of this century, properly deplored "the tendency of many historians ... to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present." But historians cannot control the popularizers, the myth makers and propagandists, and in post-Revolutionary America the few who studied Columbus were probably not disposed to try. Even if they had been, there was little information available on which to assess the real Columbus and distinguish the man from the myth. By the 19th century new materials had emergedsome of Columbus's own writings and a lengthy abridgment of his lost journal of the first voyagethat might have been used to assess the real man. Instead, these manuscripts provided more ammunition for those who would embellish the symbolic Columbus. Washington Irving mined the new documents to create a hero in the romantic mold favored in the century's literature. His Columbus was "a man of great and inventive genius" and his "ambition was lofty and noble, inspiring him with high thoughts, and an anxiety to distinguish himself by great achievements." Perhaps. But an effusive Irving got carried away. Columbus's "conduct was characterized by the grandeur of his views and the magnanimity of his spirit," he wrote. "Instead of ravaging the newly found countries ... he sought to colonize and cultivate them, to civilize the natives." Columbus may have had some faults, Irving acknowledged, such as his part in enslaving and killing people, but these were "errors of the times." The historian Daniel J. Boorstin observes that people "once felt themselves made by their heroes" and cites James Russell Lowell: "The idol is the measure of the worshiper." Accordingly, writers and orators of the 19th century ascribed to Columbus all the human virtues that were most prized in that time of geographic and industrial expansion, heady optimism and an unquestioning belief in progress as the dynamic of history. This image of Columbus accorded with the popular rags-to- riches, log-cabin-to-the-White-House scenario of human advancement. This was the ideal Columbus that schoolchildren learned about in their McGuffey readers. The orator Edward Everett reminded his audience in 1853 that Columbus had once been forced to beg for bread at the convent doors of Spain. "We find encouragement in every page of our country's history," Everett declared. "Nowhere do we meet with examples more numerous and more brilliant of men who have risen above poverty and obscurity .... One whole vast continent was added to the geography of the world by the persevering efforts of a humble Genoese mariner, the great Columbus; who, by the steady pursuit of the enlightened conception he had formed of the figure of the earth, before any navigator had acted upon the belief that it was round, discovered the American continent." With the influx of millions of immigrants after the American Civil War, Columbus assumed a new role, that of ethnic hero. Irish Catholic immigrants organized the Knights of Columbus in New Haven in 1882. The fraternity's literature described Columbus as "a prophet and a seer, an instrument of Divine Providence" and an inspiration to each knight to become "a better Catholic and a better citizen." The knights grew in number and influence, promoting academic studies in American history, lobbying for the Columbus memorial erected in front of Union Station in Washington and seeking the canonization of their hero. At the same time, French Catholics were mounting a campaign to elevate Columbus to sainthood, on the grounds that he had "brought the Christian faith to half the world." But, despite encouragement from Pope Pius IX, the proponents got nowhere with the Vatican. Columbus's rejection was based largely on his relationship with Beatriz Enriquez de Arana, his mistress and the mother of his son Ferdinand, and the lack of proof that he had performed a miracle, as defined by the church. The 400th anniversary of Columbus's voyage was marked by a yearlong commemoration throughout the United States. To the beat of brass bands and a chorus of self-congratulation, Americans hailed the man who had crossed uncharted seas as they had now leaped a wide and wild continent. As part of the celebration, Antonin Dvorak composed "From the New World," a symphony evoking the sweep and promise of the beckoning American landscape. President Benjamin Harrison proclaimed, "Columbus stood in his age as the pioneer of progress and enlightenment." In New York, Italian immigrants, who had joined the Irish in search of an identity with the larger American community, raised money for a statue atop a column of Italian marble, placed at the southwest corner of Central Park, which was renamed Columbus Circle. The grandest of all the celebrations, the World's Columbian Exposition, in Chicago, was billed as "the jubilee of mankind." President Grover Cleveland threw the switch on that new invention, electricity, to set in motion the many machines and architectural marvels by which the United States advertised itself as an emerging giant among the nations. Columbus was now the symbol of American success. The invocation was a prayer of thanksgiving for "that most momentous of all voyages by which Columbus lifted the veil that hid the New World from the Old and opened the gateway of the future of mankind." Clearly, the exposition was more than a commemoration of the past; it was also the exclamation of a future that self-confident Americans were eager to shape and enjoy. A few historians, seeking the man behind the myth, struck chords of a refreshing counterpoint to the adulatory hymns. Henry Harrisse's diligent examination of all known Columbus materials left scholars no excuse for continuing to treat the man as a demigod, though he, too, rendered a largely favorable judgment. "Columbus removed out of the range of mere speculation the idea that beyond the Atlantic Ocean lands existed and could be reached by sea," he wrote in "Christopher Columbus and the Bank of Saint George." He "made of the notion a fixed fact, and linked forever the two worlds. That event, which is unquestionably the greatest of modern time, secures to Columbus a place in the pantheon dedicated to the worthies whose courageous deeds mankind will always admire." It was the biographer Justin Winsor, more than any other respected historian of the day, who cast a cold light on the dark side of Columbus's character. He had objected strongly to Columbus's proposed canonization. ("He had nothing of the generous and noble spirit of a conjoint lover of man and of God," he wrote at the time.) In his view, Columbus forfeited any claim to sympathy when he robbed of proper credit the lookout who had cried "Tierra!" and thus took for himself the lifetime pension promised to the first person to see land. "No child of any age ever did less to improve his contemporaries, and few ever did more to prepare the way for such improvements," Winsor wrote in his 1891 biography. "The age created him and the age left him. There is no more conspicuous example in history of a man showing the path and losing it...." Columbus left his new world "a legacy of devastation and crime. He might have been an unselfish promoter of geographical science; he proved a rabid seeker for gold and a viceroyalty. He might have won converts to the fold of Christ by the kindness of his spirit; he gained the execrations of the good angels. He might, like Las Casas, have rebuked the fiendishness of his contemporaries; he set them an example of perverted belief." Winsor's withering assault on the Columbus of legend was the exception in the late 19th century, and not taken kindly by those who held to the prevailing image. They had created the Columbus they wanted to believe in, and were quite satisfied with their creation. But by the early 20th century, historians were beginning to expose contradictions, lacunas and suspected fictions in the familiar story. No one could be sure when and how Columbus arrived at his idea, what his real objective was or what manner of man he wasan inspired but rational genius, a lucky adventurer clouded by mysticism, a man of the Renaissance or of the Middle Ages. It wasn't until 1942 that Columbus was rescued from mythology and portrayed as what he had been first and foremost: an inspired mariner. In his biography, "Admiral of the Ocean Sea," Samuel Eliot Morison, drawing on the accumulating documents and his own seafaring expertise, chose to stress the one aspect of Columbus that has been beyond serious dispute. Morison's Columbus was no saint, but he could sail a ship and possessed the will and courage to go where no one had presumably gone before. The world and America are changing, of course, and Columbus's reputation is changing, too. Modern life has made disbelievers of many who once worshiped at the altar of progress. In the years after World War II, nearly all the colonies of the major empires won their independence and, like the United States in its early days, began to view world history from their own anticolonial perspective. The idol had been the measure of the worshipers, but now there were atheists all around. To them, the Age of Discovery was not the bright dawning of a glorious epoch, but an invasion. Columbus became the avatar of oppression. Another Columbus for another age. "A funny thing happened on the way to the quincentennial observation of America's 'discovery'," Garry Wills wrote in The New York Review of Books in 1990. "Columbus got mugged. This time the Indians were waiting for him. He comes now with an apologetic airbut not, for some, sufficiently apologetic.... He comes to be dishonored." Today, historians are addressing consequences as well as actionsincreasingly approaching the European incursion in America from the standpoint of the native Americans. They speak not of the "discovery" but of the "encounter" or the "contact." Alfred W. Crosby, at the University of Texas at Austin, has examined the biological consequences of Columbus's arrival. While somethe exchange of plants and animals between continents, the eventual globalization of biologywere generally beneficial, he found others, like the spread of devastating disease, to be catastrophic. In public forums, Columbus is tarred as the precursor of exploitation and conquest. Kirkpatrick Sale, in "The Conquest of Paradise," argues that Columbus was a grasping fortune hunter whose legacy was the destruction of the native population and the rape of the land that continues to this day. Descendants of American Indians and the African slaves brought to the New World, as well as those who sympathize with their causes, are understandably reluctant to celebrate the anniversary of Columbus's landfall. Leaders of American Indian organizations condemn Columbus as a pirate or worse; Russell Means of the American Indian Movement says that Columbus "makes Hitler look like a juvenile delinquent." In a 1987 newspaper story, the Indian activist Vernon Bellecourt was quoted as calling for "militant demonstrations" against celebrants in 1992 "to blow out the candles on the birthday cake." The governing board of the National Council of Churches, a predominantly Protestant organization, resolved that, in consideration of the "genocide, slavery, 'ecocide' and exploitation" that followed Columbus, the quincentenary should be a time of penitence rather than jubilation. In 1986, after four years of impassioned debate, the United Nations abandoned its attempt to plan a celebration. Once again, Columbus has become a symbol, this time of exploitation and imperialism. It is time that the encounter be viewed not only from the European standpoint, but from that of the indigenous Americans. It is time that the sanitized storybook version of European bringing civilization and Christianity to america be replaced with a more clear-eyed recognition of the evils and atrocities committed in wresting a land from its original inhabitants. But are we burdening him with more guilt than any one man should have to shoulder? Should not the guilt be more broadly shared? Columbus should be judged by the evidence of his actions and words, not by the legend that has been embedded in our imaginations. What do we know of Columbus the person, who really was, and of the times, as they really were? Columbus, as far as we can tell, was born in 1451 in Genoa, apparently the eldest of five surviving children in a family of wool weavers. (One child was a girl, rarely mentioned in historical accounts.) They were tradespeople of modest means. But of them, as of most aspects of his early life, Columbus said nothing. Some of his ancestors may have been Jewish, though this has never been established and, in any event, it seems to have had no direct bearing on his life and exploits. His family was Christian, and so was Columbusdemonstrably so. His surviving journals and letters are replete with invocations of the names of Christ, Mary and the saints, and he often sought the advice and hospitality of Franciscans. Even more crucial than his ancestry may have been the time into which he was born. Columbus grew up hearing of the scourge of Islam, the blockage of trade routes to the spices of the East and the parlous times for Christendom. All this could have nourished dreams in an ambitious young man with nautical experience. Columbus did write that at a "tender age" he cast his lot with those who go to sea, shipping out on several voyages in the Mediterranean. In 1476, he found his way by chance to Portugal, where exploration of the sea was a dynamic of the age and the search for a new route to the Indies was an economic and religious imperative. He gained a knowledge of the Atlantic in voyages to England and Ireland (perhaps as far as Iceland) and at least once down the African coast. His marriage to Felipa Perestrello e Moniz took him to the Madeiras, where he would study Atlantic sailing charts and hear the many tales of westering voyages, and gave him access to Portuguese nobility. In these years he presumably conceived of his bold plan, but it was rejected by John II of Portugal. So after his wife died, Columbus took their young son, Diego, and went to Spain in 1484, again seeking royal backing. He managed to make friends with influential Franciscan friars and members of the royal court. "Columbus's ability to thrust himself into the circles of the great was one of the most remarkable things about him," writes John H. Parry, an American historian. But he would spend the next eight years entreating the court and defending his plan before royal commissions. During this time, he fell in love with Beatriz Enriquez de Arana of Corboda; they never married, but she bore their son, Ferdinand, who became his father's devoted biographer. Ferdinand described his father as a "well-built man of more than average stature" who had a complexion tending to bright red, an aquiline nose and blond hair that, after the age of 30, had all turned white. Only after the fall of Granada in January 1492, which ended the Moorish presence in Spain, did Ferdinand and Isabella finally relent, apparently on the advice of Santangel, the king's financial adviser. Contrary to legend, Isabella did not have to hock her jewels, and Columbus did not have to prove the world was round. Educated Europeans were already convinced, but he seems to have been the first to stake his life on it. Columbus was a consummate mariner everyone seemed to agree. As Michele de Cuneo, who sailed with him, said: "By a simple look at the night sky, he would know what route to follow or what weather to expect; he took the helm, and once the storm was over, he would hoist the sails, while the others were asleep." And he found a new world. If there had not been an America there, he would probably have sailed to his death and certainly to oblivion. He could never have made the Indies, which lay far beyond where his miscalculations had placed them. He was wrong, but lucky. No explorer succeeds without some luck. He made three more voyages, but his skill and luck deserted him on land. He was an inept administrator of the colony he established at La Isabela, on the north shore of what is now the Dominican Republic. Ruling by the gibbet for three years, he antagonized his own men to insurrection (some lieutenants tried to seize ships and get away with a load of gold) and goaded the native Tainos into bloody rebellion. Thousands of Tainos were raped, killed and tortured and their villages burned. At the first opportunity, Columbus captured Tainos and shipped them to Spain as slaves, a practice not without precedent in Europe or even among the people of pre-Columbian America. Las Casas sadly lamented the practices of his countrymen: "If we Christians had acted as we should." The geographic interpretations of Columbus were muddled by preconceptions. He tended to see what he wanted to see and took native words to be mispronunciations of places in Cathay. He forced his crew to swear that one of his landfalls, Cuba, was the Asian mainland. His was not an open mind. He sought confirmation of received wisdom, usually church teachings, rather than new knowledge. Enthralled by the proximity of what he believed was the earthly paradise, he failed to appreciate that he had reached the South American continent on his third voyage. The waters of the Orinoco, he wrote, must flow from the fountain in Paradise, "whither no one can go but by God's permission." Still, Columbus persevered, often racked with the pain of arthritis, which worsened with each voyage, and also tropical fevers. His four voyages, between 1492 and 1504, showed the way to countless others. As he approached death in 1506, his mind was consumed with self-pity, mysticism and a desperate desire to seize Jerusalem in preparation for Judgment Day. He wrote in a letter to the court: "All that was left to me and to my brothers has been taken away and sold, even to the cloak that I wore, to my great dishonor.... I am ruined as I have said. Hitherto I have wept for others; now have pity upon me, Heaven, and weep for me, earth!" Columbus did not die a pauper, legend notwithstanding. But his death, in Valladolid, Spain, went unheralded. How are we to judge the historical Columbus, the man and not the legend? Was he a great man? No, if greatness is measured by one's stature among contemporaries. We will never know if the course of history might have been any different if Columbus had been a kinder, more generous man. To argue that Columbus was acting in the accepted manner of his time is to concede that he was not superior to his age. To contend (with ample supporting evidence) that even if Columbus had set a better example, others who followed would have eventually corrupted his efforts, is to beg the question. Moreover, the only example Columbus set was one of pettiness, self- aggrandizement and a lack of magnanimity. He could not find in himself the generosity to share any credit for his accomplishments. Whatever his original objective, his lust for gold drove him from island to island and, it seems, to the verge of paranoia. And the only future he could anticipate was wealth for himself and his heirs and, probably more than most people of his time, the chimera of the imminent end of the world. Yes, if greatness derives from the audacity of his undertaking, its surprising revelation and the magnitude of its impact on subsequent history. Columbus did cross the uncharted Atlantic, no mean feat. He did find new lands and people, and he returned to tell of it so that others could follow, opening the way to intercontinental travel and expansion. True, if he had never sailed, other mariners would eventually have raised the American coast, as the Portuguese did in reaching Brazil by accident in 1500. But it was Columbus who had the idea, ill conceived though it was in many respects, and pursued it with uncommon persistence, undeterred by the doubters and scoffers. As it was put in the apocryphal story, Columbus showed the world how to stand an egg on its end. Whether he was a great man or merely an agent of a great accomplishment, the issue really is his standing in history. And that depends on posterity's changing evaluationWhitman's "ever- shifting guesses"of him and the consequence of Europe's discovery of America. His reputation is inextricably linked to America. Ultimately, Columbus's place in history can be judged only in relation to the place accorded America in history. Surely we have not finally established that place. It would be interesting to know how Columbus will be characterized in 2092. For it seems that his destiny is to serve as a barometer of our self-confidence and complacency, our hopes and aspirations, our faith in progress and the capacity of humans to create a more just society. | |
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