Hammurabi’s Code, the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, the Magna Carta, the discovery of the Americas. At a glance, one might think of this as a list of random major historical events. However, they are all related in one very important way: They each represent major mile markers in Western Civilization. Briefly, Hammurabi’s Code was the first standard set of laws in the civilized world, Christ’s teachings gave us the backbone of morality, the Magna Carta is thought to have laid the foundations for the Articles of Confederation and later the US Constitution, and the discovery of North America by Christopher Columbus is the catalyst that ultimately started the chain of events that led to the modern world that we see today. Unfortunately, historical revisionists have sought to villainize Columbus every chance they get for being a man of his time while completely missing everything that made him great.
I am old enough to remember when the view on Columbus started to switch in our public schools. As a child, I remember being taught about how Columbus and his brave crew gallantly crossed the Atlantic looking for India and afraid that they would fall off the edge of the world the whole time. Now, this is false, but it paints a narrative just as inaccurate as what I was taught in high school. There I learned that Columbus was an idiot that bumbled his way across the Atlantic and when he got there, he and his crew were responsible for the “genocide” of the indigenous people of the Caribbean. Sadly, this version of events could not be any farther from the truth, but in order to truly understand his story one must look at his origin.
Born in 1451, to a wool weaver in Genoa, Italy, Christopher Columbus came from very humble beginnings. Unable to afford any kind of formal education, Columbus had to educate himself and eventually learned to read and write in Latin as well as speak Portuguese and Castilian. Always hungry for knowledge, he often studied astronomy, geography, and history which would serve him well in later years. In 1473, Columbus began an apprenticeship working for various wealthy Genoese families as a business agent, where he would travel the known world by ship. In the year 1481, the Florentine astronomer Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, had sent Columbus his flawed charts that severely underestimated the circumference of the Earth (as it was common knowledge to the educated that it was not flat at the time thanks to the works of ancient Greeks) which suggested that Asia could be reached by way of ship simply by traveling West across the Atlantic.
Wanting to capitalize on this seemingly great opportunity, Columbus would spend the next decade trying to secure the funding until Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain granted him three ships and ninety men for that fateful voyage in 1492. Many months and several mutinies later, Columbus finally made landfall on the island which he named San Salvador, meaning Holy Savior, on October 12th, 1492, and encountered the native Taíno people. This is where most consensus ends and the controversy over the nature of his character begins
In recent years revisionist historians from the Howard Zinn school of thought have felt the need to reexamine all historical events through a Marxist lens in which all human interactions are viewed from an oppressor and oppressed narrative. Without a doubt, if Columbus was here with us today, we would view him as an immoral man… but this is true about most people who lived half a century ago let alone half a millennium ago. This revisionist history has also created a two-dimensional caricature of the indigenous population in which they were a monolithic and peace-like people who lived in harmony with nature. This caricature robs the indigenous population of its rich and diverse culture. When referring to the peace like Taíno the modern caricature seems far more accurate. However, when examining the Kalinago tribe (Caribs) of the Island of Carib, a tribe that according to sources practiced cannibalism and gives us the English word for cannibal, the caricature falls apart. The caricature also undermines Great Indigenous empires like the Aztecs, who at the time of Hernán Cortés´ conquest, had a capital more populous than any city in Europe. The Aztec Empire was also so marked by brutality that thousands of natives flocked to Cortés´ banner to help him overthrow their Aztec oppressors. This should not be seen as a justification for the brutal treatment of the Natives by the Spanish Empire, but it should be understood as the historical context that existed during Columbus’ time.
Above all, he was a man of his time. There are several damning quotes from his initial contact pertaining to taking captives for the King and Queen, or his remarks on how easy it would be for him to conquer such a simple people. That being said, he was sent there to conquer and govern new lands for the crown. In his day, it was the norm for the strong to take what they pleased from the weak as might made right. His voyage was the result of this very principle as it was made necessary when the Ottomans had conquered Constantinople and cut Europe off from the spice trade. But in reading his diary, you can tell that he rises above it in some ways. From October 13th entry of his diary:
The natives are an inoffensive people, and so desirous to possess any thing they saw with us, that they kept swimming off to the ships with whatever they could find, and readily bartered for any article we saw fit to give them in return, even such as broken platters and fragments of glass. I saw in this manner sixteen balls of cotton thread which weighed above twenty-five pounds, given for three Portuguese ceutis. This traffic I forbade, and suffered no one to take their cotton from them, unless I should order it to be procured for your Highnesses, if proper quantities could be met with
A lengthy quote, yes, but I felt it was owed to him who has so often been reduced to single sentences about taking captives and conquering islands with little to no context. As seen in the text, Columbus clearly recognizes that these people have some sort of inherent right to not be taken advantage of, even when procuring it for the Queen it was clear that he was set on fair trade with these naïve people. How many men in history can say the same?
There are many and more such tales of Columbus rising above the expectations of his time that I simply do not have the time to touch on. This article could go on for dozens of pages if I let it given the wealth of information on this man. What I do know is that he was a brilliant self-educated man of humble beginnings that did the unthinkable while displaying a certain virtue that cuts through the ages. Today he is often scorned for partaking in the practices of his time that we here in the future have deemed wrong, going so far as to try to replace the celebration of his achievement with a new day celebrating the Indigenous People that he discovered. This kind of erasure cannot be tolerated, by all means, make the second Tuesday of October Indigenous People’s Day, their unique and fascinating culture ought to be celebrated, but that Monday belongs to the flawed but great man that we know as Christopher Columbus.