Ahead of the now controversial holiday Columbus Day, it is worthwhile to examine the myths and mysteries surrounding that much vaunted explorer who in fourteen hundred and ninety-two went and sailed the ocean blue: Christopher Columbus. As with many of you listeners, I’m sure, I vividly remember the legend of Columbus as it was taught to me by teachers and illustrated children’s books. As the legend went, Columbus was a man of conviction; he believed the world was round and thus that he could sail west to reach the Indies in the east. But he had trouble obtaining financial backing for his journey, for the advisers to Queen Isabella scoffed at his ignorance. Finally, Queen Isabella, who believed in Columbus, pawned her crown jewels to pay for his endeavor, and after a long and perilous crossing, Columbus’s ships, the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria landed in the New World, for rather than reaching the East Indies, Columbus had discovered America. This is a story that many children have heard, and some embellished particulars might be forgiven as necessities in making history palatable to youngsters, such as the fact that Queen Isabella never pawned her jewels for Columbus—she had done this before, to provision her armies, but in the case of Columbus, she had only expressed a willingness to do it. But in the early 1990s, as the quincentennial, or 500th anniversary, of Columbus’s landing at the Bahamas approached, far more central aspects of the legend than this were challenged. And in the years since, Columbus has become a villain in the eyes of many who see him as a figure representative of terrible colonial atrocities against native inhabitants. Native American activists have disrupted numerous Columbus Day parades, and today many cities have chosen to replace the holiday with Indigenous Peoples Day, and just as there has been a continual push to remove or relocate confederate monuments, so have activists petitioned to do away with Columbus’s statues. As with the controversy over Confederate statues, which I discussed in my episode Jubal Early’s Lost Cause, there are still many who vociferously oppose this trend, which they see as historical revisionism of the worst sort, meant only to libel and demonize. And it is not at all clear which of these contending sides will win out in this historiographical conflict. While it may seem that the majority of professional historians ascribe to a less than idealized version of Columbus, this may mean nothing when it comes to whether the legend will continue to be disseminated as it always has been. In fact, Christina M. Desai, in a 2014 article in Children’s Literature in Education called “The Columbus Myth: Power and Ideology in Picturebooks about Christopher Columbus,” showed that children’s literature continues to promote the same ideas about Columbus, regardless of how modern views of the man have changed. What is this myth? What revelations about Columbus do modern historians offer? What do we know and what do we not know about the so-called Great Discoverer? Thank you for listening to Episode 26: The Myth and Mystery of Christopher Columbus.

One might ask, what are these conceptions of Columbus that children’s literature teaches? What are these myths propagated by schoolbooks? First and foremost would be the myth of discovery. To children in the United States, we teach that Columbus discovered America, but of course, in his 1492 voyage, he landed at the Bahamas, and his various subsequent journeys likewise saw him land at other islands in the Caribbean, such as that which today we call Haiti and the Dominican Republic, but which Columbus called Hispaniola. He can hardly be said to have discovered our country, which is essentially what children are allowed to believe. Now, one might cry “semantics!” Clearly he landed in the New World, so one can accurately say he discovered the Americas. But Native Americans have a deeper misgiving here, for how can it be said that Columbus discovered a land that was already inhabited with a native Arawak population numbering somewhere around 8 million? Books and traditions that assert Columbus discovered this land thereby transmit to future generations an age-old colonialist ideology that is intrinsically Euro-centric. Yes, some dark-skinned Other was already present, it tells children, but their existence was incidental, as they were inferior to the Western European explorers who made their way to those lands. Thus the inherent right of colonial powers to claim lands for themselves is tacitly asserted. The ridiculousness of this idea being in any way approved of today, regardless of how commonly held it was in that era, was illustrated dramatically by Adam “Fortunate Eagle” Nordwall, a Native American Chippewa activist who in 1973 flew to Italy and emerged from his plane resplendent in his tribal regalia to proclaim that he had discovered Italy and would claim possession of it on behalf of Native Americans, despite the little detail that it was teeming with Italian inhabitants.

Adam “Fortunate Eagle” Nordwall meeting the Pope, via The Bemidgi Pioneer

Some would argue this may be misconstruing the meaning of the word discovery as it’s used in this context, for surely it is a worthwhile accomplishment to be the first explorer to “discover,” as in find out, that other continents existed in this world, regardless of whether they were inhabited, just as a Native American sailing across the Atlantic and landing in France could be said to have “discovered” that Europe existed. But can Columbus even claim this honor for himself? There are many theories and indications that Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact occurred, some of course dubious, and others intriguing. It has been suggested that an Irish monk, Saint Brendan the Navigator, who is said to have made a great voyage across the sea to a legendary Isle of the Blessed, may have actually landed in North America as long ago as the sixth century. Then, of course, there were the Norse voyages to the mysterious, fertile shores of Vinland west of Greenland detailed in the Saga of the Greenlanders and the Saga of Erik the Red, which if believed would place the first European explorers on North American shores somewhere around 1000 C.E. and give credit to Leif Eriksson, or perhaps to a lesser known Norseman named Bjarni Herjólfsson around 14 years earlier. And if the Norse claim is soured by some of the doubtful claims over inscribed rune stones that proponents tout as proof, then there’s always the Welsh claim that in 1170 an illegitimate prince by the name of Madoc ab Gwynedd, son of a Welsh prince and the daughter of a Viking lord, set sail with his brother and 200 Welshmen. Declared missing the next year, a legend transmitted by Cherokee tribes would have us believe that these resolute Welshmen made their way to the shores of what is today Mobile, Alabama, and thenceforth, harried by native attacks, sailed up a series of rivers until they settled in Georgia and intermarried with the indigenous peoples there. Then again, perhaps this story strains your credulity even more than that of the Viking voyages to Vinland, due not only to its folkloric roots but to the suspicious fact that it gained prominence in Elizabethan England as a means of countering Spanish claims to the New World. As an example of its questionable veracity, one of its biggest promoters was the colorful character of John Dee, whom I’ve mentioned before in my episode on the Voynich Manuscript and to whom I still plan to devote at least one full episode in the future. Dr. Dee not only asserted that Madoc’s voyage strengthened Elizabeth’s claim on the New World; he further insisted that King Arthur had discovered it long before that!

And so, with such outlandish contentions as these, perhaps you give no credence to any theories of pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact. But still, can Christopher Columbus be credited even with being the first European to “discover” that a hitherto unknown continent existed if he never realized it himself? Columbus sailed west searching for a new route to the Indies, those East Asian lands rich in gold and spices. When he landed on what today are the Bahamas, Cuba, Haiti, he believed that he was visiting the distant shores of China and Japan, a conviction most evidence shows he held throughout his subsequent voyages and maintained to his death. This, of course, is why the Americas are named for the cartographer Amerigo Vespucci, who was first to realize the significance of what Columbus found. However, this is disputed as well, with some pointing to another Welshman, Richard ap Meryk, who anglicized his name to Amerike when he moved to Bristol and founded a Society of Merchant Adventurers. Some say America was named for him, as he was a principal financier of John Cabot’s 1497 expedition to Newfoundland, and others take it further, asserting that Bristol fisherman landed at Newfoundland in 1480 and named it for Richard Amerike. So the claims do not cease, and indeed are not limited to Europe. Some have claimed Chinese voyager Zheng He found the New World in the 15th century and point to an 18th century map of the world clearly showing the Americas as proof, for a dubious notation on it claims it was a copy of a 1418 map. And even more recently, Turkish president Erdoğan, a despot and known propagandist, suggested that Muslims had preceded Columbus to Cuba. His evidence? In Columbus’s writings, there is mention of finding a mosque on a hill, but historians agree this was a metaphor. Nevertheless, this gives a clear indication of just how muddled is the history of the New World’s “discovery.”

Columbus landing on Hispaniola, quite unsure of where he was, via Wikimedia Commons

Another persistent myth about Columbus is that he was in the minority, or even alone, in believing that the earth was round. This is not merely a simplification used to embellish his story in children’s books; even scholars have been known to repeat this myth, suggesting that Columbus’s venture was so adamantly opposed at first because ignorant and narrow-minded officials in the Spanish court scoffed at him for suggesting one could reach the East by sailing westward, reminding Columbus that his ships would fall off the edge of the world. This part of the story helps to build the legend of Columbus as a brilliant and inspired genius, a hero opposed by small-minded men. In truth, however, it was commonly held at the time that the earth was round, and had been since antiquity. Aristotle himself worked out what he believed was the circumference of the planet some two hundred or more years before the Common Era, as did librarians at Alexandria, and their measurements differ only about 5% from current day calculations! It had been common knowledge among the educated for centuries, and for everyone else, the curved shadow of the Earth on the Moon during eclipses made it obvious enough. Moreover, anyone who observed ships on the ocean was able to confirm it, for as they sailed away over the curvature of the Earth, they dropped slowly out of sight, their hulls long before their masts. In fact, the oldest surviving globe, the Erdapfel or “earth apple,” was made the same year as Columbus’s first voyage, 1492; though it shows no indication of the existence of the Americas, it is quite spherical, and it was likely not the first of its kind. Columbus cannot even be credited with being the first man to realize the world’s globular shape would make it possible to sail west to reach the East, as Greek historian and geographer Strabo suggested back in 63 BCE that India could be reached by such a westward route. In truth, Spanish resistance to Columbus’s venture derived from the very fact that knowledge of the Earth’s shape and size was far greater than the received myth would have us believe. Court officials scoffed at Columbus’s specious projections, insisting sailing westward to reach the Indies would take far longer than Columbus claimed. And, of course, they were right. Indeed, one cannot even credit Columbus with proving what everyone previously had only reasoned about the Earth’s shape because he never actually circumnavigated it. Recognition for that must go to Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition 30 years later.

This myth that Columbus set out to disprove the theory of Earth’s flatness began in the work of America’s great mythmaker, Washington Irving, perhaps best known for his iconic fiction stories, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle.” Having gone to Madrid to help translate some documents on Columbus, Irving decided to write the man’s history for American audiences. Along the way, though, he relied more and more on his tendencies as a writer of fiction, filling in the blind spots by reasoning what must have happened or what may indeed have occurred and weaving those imagined scenes into the narrative, resulting in The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, an 1828 work presented to the reading public as scrupulous historiography when it was really something closer to historical fiction. And when it came time to write about Columbus’s meeting with the Council at Salamanca, he embellished the scene to create the drama he assumed the true encounter must have had. In fairness to Irving, Columbus himself had a tendency to portray himself as persecuted and unfairly treated in his own writings, so Irving may have thought his sources justified his elaboration, but the result was a fictional passage in which Columbus faces the derision of closed-minded men in power. This is the origin of the myth that objections were raised over Columbus’s notion of a round Earth, but actually, Irving does have some council members concede the roundness of the planet, and the principal reservation that Irving has his the councilmen raise against Columbus’s reasoning is doctrinal, having to do with the idea of the antipodes, an idea rejected by the church because it meant the existence of people on the other side of the planet who must not have been descended from Adam. Still others in the council Irving depicted as more concerned that the distance around the earth was far greater than Columbus anticipated, which of course is accurate. Nevertheless, it was the idea that the council members were all Flat Earthers that caught on and soon found itself included in other books. And this notion of enlightened scientific thinking being suppressed by dogmatic reactionaries became an especially popular trope used by Darwinists in the later 19th century to defend the theory of evolution, equating Columbus’s struggle against ignorant Flat Earthers with Copernicus’s struggle against the 16th century church in an effort to depict their religious detractors as brassbound and standpat. As true as this may have been in Copernicus’s case and in the case of the dogmatists opposing Darwinian thought, it was not the case when Columbus went seeking support for his venture. And just as today reactionaries parade outlier examples to suggest there is not scientific consensus when it comes to climate change, so then the champions of science in the 19th century held up obscure claims of Flat Earthers in antiquity as representative of common belief, suggesting that 15th century science owed its backward notions to the ideas of Cosmas Indicopleustes in the 6th century or Lactantius in the 3rd century, even though few in the 1400s likely even knew about these thinkers and their religious opposition to the idea of the Earth’s roundness and probably even fewer gave weight to their opinions.

Washington Irving, looking rather proud of his mythologizing, via Wikimedia Commons

A final facet of the Columbus myth as it continues to be conveyed to generations of youth has to do with Columbus’s motivation. Many treatments of Columbus emphasize his devoutness, portraying him like a saint. In this view of Columbus, he had no other purpose for crossing the Atlantic than to spread the word of God to those benighted souls across the water whom he considered to be heathens. This mythical portrayal of him has Columbus finding inspiration, even as a child, in his namesake, Saint Christopher, who according to a decidedly folkloric tradition once carried the Christ child across a river. In just the same way, so the myth goes, Columbus had been chosen to carry Christ across the dark waters metaphorically in carrying His Word to the godless, and most depictions of his arrival in the New World show him kneeling in prayer upon stepping foot on shore. This element of the Columbus myth also seems to have been derived from Columbus’s own self-aggrandizing writings. In his efforts to acquire backing for his voyage, he presented himself as a heavenly-anointed character, divinely chosen to spread not only Christendom but also Spanish influence abroad. In fact, later in his career, when he had lost his position in his colony and no longer held favor in the court, he spent time searching the scriptures for indications that his voyages had been foretold in prophecy and compiled them in a manuscript never published in his life. Around this time he also began to sign his name as Christo Ferens, or Christ Bearer, an indication that he actively publicized himself as a figure analogous to St. Christopher. But to accept and promulgate this image of Columbus is to allow the man to make his own myth, and it means turning a blind eye to more clearly supported motivations, such as the gathering of wealth for the Spanish crown and, of course, self-enrichment. Columbus did not sell his voyage on the basis of the opportunity it would afford for evangelizing natives. The Spanish court expected returns on their investment, and Columbus’s actions after his “discovery” indicate that the gathering of gold and other riches was paramount. Now there may have been some overlap with these two motivations attributed to him, as some recent scholarship has suggested that Columbus hoped through his venture to finance a new crusade in order to take Jerusalem from Muslims. Among the prophecies compiled by Columbus, alongside those foretelling the conversion of all peoples to Christianity, were those prophesying the final reclamation of the Holy Land from Muslim control. But an accurate evaluation of what drove Columbus cannot be taken directly from the man’s own words alone. Rather, we must consider his actions in the New World to gain a more perfect understanding of his enterprise.

And it is here where we sail into the deepest and darkest waters of the Columbus myth. Since the quincentennial, a clear revisionist effort has been made to rewrite his character in memory and history. Rather than a saintly hero or harbinger of enlightenment, he was the father of slavery and a perpetrator of genocide. Traditionalists decry this trend as libel, arguing that Columbus’s villainy has been exaggerated and his actions judged out of context according to the moral sensibilities of modern society. Further, they insist that he cannot be held accountable for events he only set in motion, especially when he did so inadvertently. So it becomes incumbent on us to examine these two allegations. First, was Columbus responsible for the New World slave trade? We know he was no stranger to the slave trade, as the earliest records we have of him indicate he was sailing around the west coast of Africa on a Portuguese slaving vessel. And on his 1492 voyage, he appears to have personally planted the first sugar plant in the Caribbean, a crop which would flourish in that climate and would eventually require a massive labor force for its cultivation, leading directly to the establishment of a slave trade between Africa and Hispaniola. But if that is too unwitting an act for us to lay blame on Columbus, then let us look to his second voyage, when he returned to Hispaniola with 17 ships. This was his voyage of conquest, and when he took control of the island, he quickly discovered that the gold and riches he believed would be so plentiful were actually not so forthcoming. Therefore, in an effort to boost the disappointing return, he began to see the native population as another resource he could exploit, and he established the institution of slavery. Not only did he enslave natives in the New World for the purposes of gathering wealth for the crown, but he also shipped the natives back across the Atlantic. Although many died during the crossing, he took comfort in the fact that, as he wrote, “this will not always be the case, for the Negroes and Canary Islanders reacted in the same way at first” (Fernández-Armesto 6). Traditionalists may insist that Columbus cannot be judged a villain even for these actions, as the world’s understanding of the evils of slavery was not then prevalent. But the surprising fact is that the Spanish had laws against slavery even in that era. Slavery was only to be condoned with prisoners of war and criminals who had violated natural law, and even then must be approved by a royal court. This is not to say that the Spanish disapproved of all slavery in the New World. In fact, they did approve of the enslavement of certain Carib natives of the Lesser Antilles who it was said practiced cannibalism, as such acts broke natural law. The problem was that Columbus traded mostly in Arawak natives, and specifically the Taino population, whom he had often stated were responsive to evangelization, making their enslavement unlawful. Columbus actually received warnings from Spanish royal courts, which ordered these illegally enslaved natives to be emancipated. So, the fact that he appears to have had far fewer reservations about human bondage even than those he served would seem to justify the revisionist perception of Columbus as the man who brought slavery and its concomitant evils to the Americas.

A depiction of Spanish atrocities in the work of Las Casas, via Wikimedia Commons

So we come to the worst of the crimes laid at Columbus’s feet in modern times: that of genocide or the deliberate murder of an entire people. Apologists rightly point out that it would have been foolish for Columbus to deliberately stamp out the population of Taino natives on Hispaniola, as he relied on them to gather wealth from the island, and he could hardly be said to have redeemed them in Christ if he simply killed them all. Moreover, there was the matter of rebellion to consider. Wholesale slaughter would have made the Taino ungovernable, and Columbus even said as much, exhorting the Spanish to “take much care of the Indians, that no ill nor harm may be done them…so [they] should have no cause to rebel” (Fernández-Armesto 7). And yet, over the course of the first three years of his governorship, the Arawak population plummeted by some 5 million! Of the remaining 3 million, only about 22,000 remained 18 years later. 30 years after that, they were all but extinct. And a similar pattern prevailed across the Caribbean basin. To account for these numbers without laying blame on Columbus and his governorship, apologists point to disease, and certainly contact with Europeans meant the spread of disease. In fact, disease took many Spanish lives as well, but one of the worst diseases to spread in the aftermath of the Spanish invasion was syphilis, and it spread because of Spaniards routinely raping native women. And Columbus’s programs and policies would prove just as brutal and deadly as any illness. Many among the indigenous population, in addition to being enslaved, had their valuable cultivated lands seized by the invaders, and for many, this meant starvation. As for those who escaped enslavement, there remained an unrealistic tribute program. Upon their arrival, the Spanish had delighted many natives with gifts, including baubles such as hawk’s bells, the little brass bells that falconers customarily affixed to their birds’ talons. During Columbus’s subsequent rule, however, these gifts became a curse, as around 1495, Columbus ordered that every native over 14 years old had to bring him enough gold to fill his or her hawk’s bell every three months. This proved to be an impossible task for many, as gold was not as plentiful there as had been imagined, and as a consequence for failing to meet one’s tribute, the Spanish chopped off the natives’ hands and let them bleed to death. Historians estimate more than 10,000 natives were murdered in this way. And the atrocities do not cease there, with reports of Spaniards wagering on who could behead a native or hack him in half with one fell strike and of Spaniards taking infants from their mothers’ breasts and throwing them against rocks or cutting them into pieces with their swords and feeding them to their dogs. They hanged the natives, burned them at the stake, and cooked them on spits just to teach them respect, or rather, fear, and they even engaged in wholesale massacre, putting men, women, and children—whole villages—to the sword until the streets ran with blood like the floor of an abattoir. All this was reported by Bartolome de Las Casas, a Dominican friar who arrived at Hispaniola in 1502 (Churchill 8). Again, apologists argue with a straight face that Columbus cannot be blamed for atrocities that occurred when he was no longer governor of Hispaniola, but these outrages were made possible not only by the atmosphere first established under his rule, but also by his policies, which remained in effect and, after 1509, were enforced by Columbus’s own son.

For many Italians and Italian-Americans, these facts do not sit well, for despite the fact that Columbus sailed and claimed land for Spain, it is said Columbus was born in Genoa and was therefore ethnically Italian. And he has become a symbol in Italy just as much as he has in the United States. During the quincentennial in 1992, a ceremony was held in Las Vegas to marry the Statue of Liberty to a statue of Christopher Columbus in Barcelona. But to illustrate just how many blind spots remain in our understanding of who Columbus was and what he stood for and did, it should be pointed out that we know shockingly little about him. In portraits, he is always depicted differently because we don’t really know what he looked like and can’t even guess about his appearance based on race or culture because we don’t even know for a certainty where he came from. The Italians make the strongest case, but the fact remains that there exists no record of his birth, even though birth records were kept at the time in Genoa. Moreover, Columbus never wrote himself about his youth, leaving the place of his birth and upbringing a mystery, and he wrote and apparently spoke not in any dialect of Genoa but in Castilian with a smattering of Latin and Portuguese. Of course, the fact that he sailed for Portugal, had some knowledge of the language, and took a Portuguese wife led to claims he was Portuguese as well as theories that he ran a map shop in Lisbon. Then his Castilian fluency and his service to Spain, along with the fact that he kept a Spanish mistress, led to claims he was Spanish; perhaps you’ve heard the Hispanic version of his name, Cristóbal Colón. In the 1920s, some historical documents surfaced purporting to prove his Spanish heritage, but these turned out to be forgeries. Nevertheless, the claims did not cease there. In 1913, a theory arose that he was Jewish, or more specifically that he was a Spanish Jew, either a converso who had converted to Christianity, or that he had been forced to hide his Jewish identity because of King Ferdinand of Aragon’s 1492 order expelling Jews from Spain. There is little concrete evidence for this theory, however, and some who have promoted it relied on awful anti-Semitic stereotypes, suggesting Columbus’s Jewishness explained his excessive greed for gold (Churchill 11). While the notion of a Jewish Columbus may add new dimension to the theory that Columbus’s central motivation was to reclaim Jerusalem, and has even led to other theories about his motivation, such as that he was really interested in tracking down the lost tribes of Israel in the New World, there is virtually no evidence for it beyond some linguistic analysis that suggests he occasionally dropped a Hebrew word into his compositions. It would seem to me, though, that this proves nothing, since foreign words are frequently adopted by other languages, and Columbus specifically was known to use a mix of several languages and dialects, as already noted.

Various portraits of Columbus showing no resemblance to each other, via vanderkrogt.net

Mystery follows Columbus from his origins to the end of his life and beyond. More than 30 years after his death in 1509, his remains, along with his son’s, were transported to Santo Domingo to be laid to rest in the New World according to his wishes. With the end of Spanish power in Hispaniola in 1795, the remains were sent to Havana, but in 1877, a lead box was discovered back at Santo Domingo containing bones and clearly marked as the casket of Cristóbal Colón. Thus there were two sets of remains, those in Cuba—which, with the outbreak of war with the U.S. in 1898, were shipped again back to Spain and are still there—and those in the present day Dominican Republic, where their keepers claim they never left, the Spanish having taken the wrong bones, whether by accident or because someone loyal to Columbus’s memory switched the remains since Columbus had wished to stay in Santo Domingo. They point to the evidence of arthritis in their bones as proof, as it is known Columbus suffered from that condition. The Spanish have somewhat weightier proof for the authenticity of the remains in their possession in the form of DNA analysis confirming their bones share DNA with those of Columbus’s brother, but the Dominicans refuse to accept these results and at the same time have declined to allow similar testing on the bones in their possession. So even in death, Columbus remains a man between worlds, claimed by many but belonging to none. The apologists who would reclaim his identity as a hero cry that modern revision indulges in the so-called “Black Legend,” the trend in historiography to tear down and demonize persons and cultures that in the past may have been idealized, and to ignore or minimize their positive contributions. But if the scholarship is sound, if the facts that have caused revisionists to reexamine previous portrayals are accurate, then what other response can there be but to recoil from such deeds? Some argue for more balance in our consideration of Columbus, such as the Smithsonian and other museums, which in recent years have altered their discourse to stress not Columbus’s “discovery” but Spanish “contact,” and use the antiseptic term “exchange” to encompass all that transpired during the clash of these cultures. This historiographical trend warns us to strive for balance and fairness, and above all not to engage in reductive archetypes like heroes and villains (Bigelow, “Two Myths”). This may be a worthwhile and even admirable endeavor, in theory, but one wonders if such evenhandedness is always warranted. In the future, for example, will we be censured for suggesting that some villainy was at work in orchestrating the holocaust?