Christopher Columbus

(Yes, I know this is a week late, but I have an extraordinarily busy life right now.)

Columbus.

Everyone knows who he is and what he is most famous for, but not much more. Well, most of us don’t anyway, and after the load of horse manure spouted out by the White House for Columbus Day last week, I feel the need to introduce people to him and his character.

Christopher Columbus was indeed an explorer and a discoverer, as every grade-school textbook points out. First and foremost, however, he was a merchant seaman, in it for the money instead of something as abstract as “the thrill of discovery.” He was also a self-aggrandizing braggart, a blowhard, and the worst sort of self-promoter. He was, in short, the sort of person who would probably have gotten along well with the current President. He was also a terrible navigator. We’re not talking run of the mill bad, or slightly incompetent, or even just would be fired by any credible employer bad; we’re talking the sort of monumental incompetence that normally gets the holder and/or other people killed unless he is very lucky.

Unfortunately for the rest of the world, Columbus was very lucky indeed.

Let’s take a step back and look at the world of the fifteenth century. The Islamic world had a lock on the valuable overland exchange routes to the Far East. Everyone in Europe wanted in on the action, both to lower the cost of their own goods and to make a killing selling them to others. Portugal was busy seeking a route around the Horn of Africa, which left the other European powers with only two choices: compete with them or seek a route across the Atlantic.

The latter was impossible or should have been. Not because anyone thought the world was flat; educated people from the time of the Greeks on knew the world was round. This would include navigators like Columbus, monarchs, and their advisors. They even knew the approximate distance from Europe to Japan -10,000 to 12,000 miles, much too far for any ship of that day to cross.

Columbus decided they were wrong. He calculated that Japan was “only” 3,000 miles from Europe. This one dude from Genoa decided that every mathematician, philosopher, astronomer, and learned person from the Ancient Greeks on down who had independently calculated the circumference of the Earth (which is easy to do, you can look up directions) was wrong, and he alone was right.

He spent several years bouncing around Europe trying to convince someone of his rightness. He was laughed out of court after court, not because they thought the earth was flat, but because they knew no ship could hold enough food and water to sustain its sailors for a 10,000-mile voyage. They didn’t discount the possibility of finding land in between the two continents, but they weren’t foolish enough to count on it. Columbus was proposing a suicide trip. He didn’t give up though and kept looking for someone stupid enough, or desperate enough, to finance his voyage.

Enter Spain.

Spain was in a unique position, having just finished a long effort to expel the Moors and unite the country. They found themselves with an experienced, restless army that needed something to do. They also desperately wanted to put one over on Portugal. Somehow, Columbus convinced Isabella to finance his voyage. If it failed, she would never see him again, and if he succeeded, they would find a way to tap into the untold wealth of the East, and hey, what better way to put their restless soldiers to use than by conquering another territory?

You know the next part of the story. Columbus got extraordinarily lucky and found land roughly 3,000 miles west of Europe, just as provisions were beginning to give out and his crew was contemplating mutiny. It wasn’t North America, however -despite the myth, in four voyages he never set foot in North America.

Now, it would be hard to overstate what a rotten person Columbus was. His very first night in the new world, he wrote in his diary about what good slaves the Taino would make. That’s the level of depravity we are talking about here. But it only gets worse. During his time as governor and over the course of his four voyages, Columbus enslaved, raped, tortured, and murdered tens of thousands of the natives in the Caribbean. His brutality and tyranny against both the Natives and the colonists under him were so terrible that Spain -never known for its squeamishness -eventually removed him from office. He was arrested and sent back to Spain in chains. Spanish authorities stripped him of his title as Governor and installed a replacement.

He supposedly got religion in his later years but never repented of his actions. And he never admitted that he was wrong and the lands he found were not part of Asia.

This is whom the current administration wants to venerate. This is the man they want to hold up as an example of what is great about America and American history. This mass murdering, genocidal, rapist, and enslaver. It says a lot about the state of the country today. None of it good.

There are many great people to celebrate in the history of the Americas. Christopher Columbus is not one of them.