Columbus: Man of History

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This post is the first in a series on Christopher Columbus.

A Tempest on the Voyage of Columbus — J.M.W. Turner (c.1830-2)

In the five centuries that have passed since Christopher Columbus first made landfall on the Bahaman island of Guanahani, the Genoese navigator has been cast as both hero and villain. He has been celebrated as a great visionary, the pioneer of transatlantic voyaging, the man who first connected the two hemispheres of the world which thitherto had not known of each other’s existence. But more common today is his excoriation as a monster, the archetypical coloniser, the man who set the template for all the crimes of European colonialism, responsible for beginning the evisceration of the indigenous American peoples, their cultures, and the subsequent replacement of their fatal labour with enslaved Africans dragged across the sea. In the West today, it is no exaggeration to say Columbus is perhaps the most controversial figure in all history.

Each year in the US, the clamour for renaming the national holiday in his honour grows louder. His statues are defiled and pulled down. Eponymous institutions are picketed and petitioned. Such is the vitriol wrought by any sniff of his laudation today, it’s easy to forget that this backlash is a fairly recent development. Only a few decades ago Columbus was still largely held up as something of a father figure to the Americas, the man who first discovered the continent which is today host to thirty-five sovereign nations and over a billion people. But even the conception of Columbus as a heroic pioneer is not that old.

While it would be an exaggeration to say the Genoese sailor had been forgotten, his achievement in being the first to make the equatorial transatlantic crossing was not looked upon with any special reverence for centuries after his initial voyage. It is no coincidence that the Americas bear not Columbus’ name, but instead that of another European sailor, Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine who was not even the leader of either of his two expeditions to the Western Hemisphere.¹ This is in large part due to the man himself: Columbus’ refusal to accept that what he had discovered there in the Caribbean was a novel part of the world, and not the easternmost edge of the Asian continent, made it difficult for his contemporaries to grasp the momentousness of what he had found. Furthermore, his inability to keep a handle on the virgin colonial administration of Hispaniola led to his removal as governor and the stripping of many of his privileges by the crown, meaning many of his own time saw him as an inept, contemptuous figure, unworthy of celebration. Columbus’ sons attempted to redeem their father’s name with monuments and hagiographies, but for much of the 16th and 17th centuries, few of the Europeans greedily colonising the New World stopped to remember the man who had started it all.

It was not really until the 18th century that Columbus began to be invoked as a historical figure worthy of note. As the modern nation states of Spain and Italy were beginning to take a form we would recognise today, burgeoning nationalism led each to claim Columbus as one of their national heroes. Similarly, the new rulers of a chunk of the former Spanish colony known as the Viceroyalty of Granada decided to name their fledging country in the Genoese’s honour when they founded Colombia in 1819. Even in North America, home to Northern European settlers who had long denigrated Spanish colonialism as a catholic barbarism to which they, as enlightened Protestants, would never stoop, began to stoke a Columbian revival. Columbia began to be deployed as an alternative, somewhat poetic name for the Americas. Districts, counties, and colleges were renamed in the wake of the American Revolution.² Monarchy was out, and Columbus was in.

Nothing epitomised this transition more than Washington Irving’s 1828 biography of the Genoese. His largely fictional account created something of a national mythos, establishing Columbus in the American consciousness as a visionary, a Great Man of history, an explorer who dared do what no one else of his age could even conceive.³ This sentiment took root in American public life, in school curriculums, in Columbus Day.⁴ Throughout the 20th and well into the 21st centuries, in their proclamations of the annual holiday, American Presidents have traditionally praised Columbus’ “spirit of exploration”, hailing him as a key figure in the history of the nation.⁵ How quickly things change.

During the latter decades of the 20th century, a growing sense that Columbus was not a man to be admired, let alone lauded, began to spread. Public awareness of the foul deeds inflicted by Europeans upon the native peoples of the Caribbean, and the wider Americas, grew year on year. Increasingly, Columbus has come to be seen as the paradigmatic coloniser, the ur-villain of American history, the lightning rod for all disgust at the horrors of European colonialism. Each time I have mentioned his name in the pages of this newsletter I have received comments from many of you expressing your revulsion of the man and all he stands for. I can certainly understand the sentiment.

And yet, I must confess, there is something about him that I find utterly absorbing. Columbus is perhaps the most psychologically fascinating character in all history. He was not a good man, quite possibly even an evil one by journey’s end. But he was a distinctly human character. It was his pettiness, his insecurities, his obsession with status that drove him — quite literally — to the ends of the earth. He oversaw atrocities that you and I might be tempted to deem the actions of a psychopath. But he wasn’t a psychopath. To call him one and leave it at that is to let him off the hook. Columbus had motivations other than enriching himself: he was gripped by a distinctly 15th century religious millenarianism; a feverish messianic complex; an overwhelming obsession with climbing the social hierarchy. At one stage, he became convinced he had discovered the Garden of Eden. He made his men sign a sworn oath on pain of putting out their eyes that they had found mainland China when it was painfully obvious to everyone involved, especially Columbus himself, that they hadn’t. He sent thousands to the grave in the futile effort to secure enough riches to make his voyages worth the expense to the Spanish crown, and thus secure his fame and glory. And at the very peak of his achievement, the man who had so boldly undertaken a voyage that so many deemed doomed from the start, who had bet his own life on his crackpot theories about the true size of the earth, would write to the King and Queen of Spain, not to provide them any details of his discoveries, but to paranoiacally remind them of his promised titles and ennoblement.

Columbus’ first voyage across the Atlantic is one of the great hinge moments in history. It marks the turning point between the Middle and the Early Modern ages. Yet the man who accomplished the feat was no Alexander, no charismatic leader, no great visionary. He was a petty, obsessive, jealous crank. His paranoia drove him almost to madness. He died with little to show for his endeavours.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be telling his story.

1. I’ve written before about how the Americas got their name here.

2. Wikipedia has an entire article listing places named after Columbus.

3. It was in this fictional biography that Irving first created the myth that everyone bar Columbus believed the world to be flat in the 15th century.

4. Columbus became a historical figure of particular importance to Italian Americans, who saw their own heritage reflected in the Genoese.

5. During his term in office, Biden became the first president to issue a separate proclamation of Indigenous Peoples’ Day alongside the usual missive for Columbus Day.