Oct. 12, 1492—When he set foot in the Bahamas after two months across a largely unknown Atlantic Ocean, Christopher Columbus initiated the
long-term contact with the natives that fundamentally altered both Europe and
the “New World.”
Leave aside for a minute, if you can, and try to
reframe that epochal meeting between Native Americans and the Genoese-born
navigator in the service of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. This
was not really a “discovery” of America: Not only had Scandinavian Leif Ericson
come to the Western Hemisphere four centuries before (not to mention, if the
Irish are to be believed, St. Brendan the Navigator even before that), but, as
Washington Irving chuckled, the Indians never knew they were lost.
The word “exploration” comes closer to what
happened, but it only takes into account one side involved in the event.
Instead, historians have come up with other phrases
that fit: the “Columbian Encounter”
or “Columbian Exchange”--the transatlantic movement and mingling of living organisms, with convulsive impacts on the people and landscapes of the New and Old Worlds.
When I was a schoolboy, Columbus was not seen as a
harbinger of imperialism or a perpetrator of genocide. Instead, he was regarded, in
his determination, willingness to risk all, and courage, as a forerunner of
American patriotism. That link was made explicit in Joaquin Miller’s “Columbus,”
written for the 400th anniversary of the sighting of San Salvador:
Then pale and worn, he kept his deck,
And peered through darkness. Ah, that night
Of all dark nights! And then a
speck --
A light! a light! at last a light!
It grew, a starlit flag unfurled!
It grew to be Time's burst of dawn.
He gained a world; he gave that
world
Its grandest lesson: "On! sail on!"
Perceptions of Columbus have changed markedly since
I was a schoolboy. Back then, controversy swirled, after discovery of the
“Vineland Map” detailing Ericson’s voyage, on whether the “Admiral of the Ocean
Sea” could really be called the discoverer of America. Now, it is the very
moral character of Columbus that is at issue. In enslaving inhabitants of the West Indies and forcibly converting them to Christianity, he introduced practices that haunted the Western Hemisphere for the next four centuries and let loose the even longer-lived virus of slavery.
More
so than Robert E. Lee, Thomas Jefferson, and other figures who have sparked
monumental (if you’ll pardon the pun) controversies, Columbus was the original
Dead White European Male. As such, he’s been made to bear the weight of outrage
over several centuries of atrocities, much of which cannot even be traced back to
him with any elemental fairness.
There
are three titles that illustrate our evolving understanding of Columbus:
*Admiral of the Ocean Sea, by Samuel Eliot Morison: Befitting the
author’s penchant for retracing the voyages of his subjects, this 1942 Pulitzer
Prize-winning biography is far more concerned with Columbus’ prowess as a
mariner than his shortcomings as a human-rights violator. Perhaps this is unsurprising for someone who several years later, in his
textbook co-written with Henry Steele Commager, The Growth of the American Republic, refers to a typical black
slave as “Sambo.” Morison, then, could hardly be counted on as particularly sensitive
toward nonwhites. But even he faulted Columbus as a colonial administrator out of
his depth, and could not overlook "the monstrous expedient" that he perpetrated in
enslaving the natives and bringing them to Spain as proof that he had indeed
found something very different on his voyages.
*The Mysterious History of Columbus, by John Noble Wilford. This shorter bio, published nearly 50 years after Morison’s, took account
of the revisionism that had occurred in the interim. “The burden of the practices Columbus
initiated or condoned weighs heavily on his reputation in history,'' Wilford
stated bluntly. This is an especially acute examination of just how much
responsibility (more than his admirers care to admit, less than his detractors
charge) that the explorer bore for the Black Legend, Spain's ``burden of violence
and destructive greed.''
* Seeds of Change, edited by Herman
J. Viola and Carolyn Margolis. This beautifully illustrated companion to a
Smithsonian exhibit 25 years ago examines the wider legacy of Columbus, with
contributor essays focusing on five areas: sugar, maize, disease, the horse,
and the potato. It also analyzes, in often painful detail, the destructive impact
that Columbus’ ethnocentricism would have on whites’ relations with
Native-Americans over the next few centuries. At the same time, Viola gives a
succinct summary of why the explorer cannot
be forgotten by history:
``Columbus did more than force the cartographers of
Europe to revise their maps of the Earth. His voyages of discovery were pivotal
in world history. The Western Hemisphere was rapidly and profoundly transformed
biologically and culturally by seeds of change--plants, animals and
diseases--that were introduced, sometimes deliberately, sometimes accidentally,
by Columbus and those who followed him.
``Eventually the processes of encounter and exchange
that Columbus initiated affected the Old World as well, altering flora and
fauna, reordering the ethnic composition of the countries, changing the diet
and health of peoples everywhere. They continue to this day.``
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