Columbus and the Labyrinth of History
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Columbus and the Labyrinth of History Every generation creates the Columbus it needs. As the Quincentenary of his 1492 voyage approaches, observers are torn between celebrating a brave visionary and condemning the first representative of an age of imperial exploitation. Here Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Noble Wilford explores the various Columbus legends and discovers, beneath them, a very human figure and an adventure unprecedented in boldness. by John Noble Wilford istory has not been the lumbus. Such, it seems, is the fate of histori- same since Christopher cal figures whose deeds reverberate Columbus. Neither has through time. he been the same The Columbus story surely confirms the throughout history. axiom that all works of history are interim During- the five cen- reports. What people did in the past is not tunesH since his epochal voyage of 1492, Co- preserved in amber, a moment captured lumbus has been many things to many peo- and immutable through the ages. Each gen- ple: the protean symbol of the adventuring eration looks back and, drawing from its human spirit, the lone hero defying both own experiences, presumes to find patterns the odds and entrenched thinking to that illuminate both past and present. This change the world; the first modem man or is natural and proper. A succeeding genera- a lucky adventurer blinded by medieval tion can ask questions of the past that those mysticism; an icon of Western faith in in the past never asked themselves. Colum- progress or an object of scorn for his bus could not know that he had ushered in failings of leadership and intellect; a man what we call the Age of Discovery, with all virtually deified at one time and roundly its implications, any more than we can vilified today for his part in the initiation of know what two world wars, nuclear weap- an international slave trade and European ons, the collapse of colonial empires, the imperialism. We hardly know the real Co- end of the Cold War, and the beginning of WQ AUTUMN 1991 66 COLUMBUS space travel will mean for people centuries Quincentennial, he has fallen victim to a from now. Perceptions change, and so does more self-critical society, one prone to our understanding of the past. hero-bashing and historical pessimism. Accordingly, the image of Columbus has As recently as 1974, Samuel Eliot Mori- changed through the years, sometimes as a son, the biographer of Columbus, con- result of new information, more often be- cluded one of his books with a paean to cause of changes in the lenses through European influence on America: "To the which we view him. Once a beneficiary of people of the New World, pagans expecting this phenomenon, Columbus in times of short and brutish lives, void of hope for any reigning optimism has been exalted as a future, had come the Christian vision of a mythic hero. Now, with the approach of the merciful God and a glorious heaven." It is WQ AUTUMN 1991 67 COLUMBUS hard to conceive of those words being writ- creasingly expansionist Europe in the 15th ten today. In a forward to the 1983 edition century. The Portuguese had sought a route of Morison's Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A around the tip of Africa. Some Florentine Life of Christopher Columbus, British histo- cosmographers had pondered the prospect rian David Beers Quinn criticizes Morison of a westward sea route. But Columbus was for ignoring or dismissing Columbus's apparently the first with the stubborn cour- failings. Columbus, Quinn writes, "cannot age to stake his life on the execution of be detached from the imperialist exploita- such a daring scheme. tion of his discoveries and must be made to After years pleading his case before the take some share of responsibility for the courts of Portugal and Spain, dismissed as a brutal exploitation of the islands and main- hopeless visionary or a tiresomely boastful lands he found." nuisance, Columbus finally won the reluc- By and large, this new perspective has tant support of Ferdinand and Isabella. At produced a more realistic, demythologized the little Andalusian port of Palos de la version of the Columbus story. The tempta- Frontera, he raised a fleet of three ships tion, though, is to swing too far in the other and enlisted some 90 seamen. Whatever direction, rewriting history as we wish it the sailors' trepidations or their opinion of would have been or judging people wholly Columbus when he arrived at Palos, their by anachronistic political standards. This destiny was to share with him a voyage "by has happened all too often regarding Co- which route," Columbus wrote in the pro- lumbus, producing myth and propaganda logue to his journal, "we do not know for in the guise of history. certain anyone previously has passed." All the more reason for us to sift Columbus was never more in command through the romantic inventions and en- of himself and his destiny than on that day, during misconceptions that have clouded August 3, 1492, when he weighed anchor at the real Columbus and to recognize that so Palos. He was a consummate mariner, as much of the man we celebrate or condemn all his contemporaries agreed and histori- is our own creation. He is the embodiment ans have not contradicted, and here he was of our running dialogue about the human doing what he did best and so sure of his potential for good and evil. success. Of course, he never made it to the Indies, as head-shaking savants had pre- dicted, then or on any of his three subse- quent voyages. His landfall came half a ome of the facts about Columbus- world short of them, on an unprepossess- who he was and what he did-are be- ing island inhabited by naked people with yond serious dispute. This mariner of no knowledge whatsoever of Marco Polo's humble and obscure origins was possessed Great Khan. of an idea that became an obsession. He On the morning of October 12, Colum- proposed to sail west across the uncharted bus and his captains, together with their ocean to the fabled shores of the Indies, the most trusted functionaries, clambered into lands of gold and spices celebrated in the armed launches and headed for the sandy tales of Marco Polo and the goal of an in- beach and green trees. They carried the John Noble Wilford has been a science correspondent for the New York Times since 1965. Twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Wilford is the author of The Mapmakers (1981), The Riddle of the Dinosaur (1985), and Mars Beckons (1990). His Mysterious History of Columbus is being published this October by Alfred A. Knopf. Copyright @ 1991 by John Noble Wilford. WQ AUTUMN 1991 68 COLUMBUS flags of the Christian monarchs of Spain. A ment white men entered their lives. solemn Columbus, without so much as a Columbus made certain by his words thought that it was anything but his to take, and actions that his discovery would not be proclaimed possession of the island for the lost to history. On the homeward voyage, king and for the queen. Columbus and his after visiting a string of other islands and officers then dropped to their knees in more people, he composed a letter to the prayer. court of Ferdinand and Isabella in which It did not escape Columbus that these he announced his discovery. He had made islanders "go around as naked as their good his boast to one and all. He may have mothers bore them; and the women also." harbored some disappointment in not This was not prurience but culture shock. reaching the Asian mainland, but he had Columbus was generally admiring in his sailed across the Ocean Sea and found initial descriptions of the people. They were lands and peoples unknown to Europeans. "guileless and generous." Bringing cotton, And he wanted the court to read about it in parrots, and javelins to trade, they paddled his own words, especially since this justi- out to Columbus's ships in their dugouts, fied his own claim to the titles and wealth each made from a single tree and so long due him pursuant to the deal he had struck that they held 40 men; the West Indian with the court. term for these dugouts was canoa-and The letter Columbus wrote was also his thus a New-World word entered European bid for a place in history. He understood speech. Columbus was pleased to note that that the achievement would go for naught they had no firearms. When he had shown unless the news got back to others. To ex- them some swords, "they took them by the plore (the word, in one version of its ety- edge and through ignorance cut them- mology, comes from the Latin "to cry out") selves." "They should be good and intelli- is to search out and exclaim discovery. Sim- gent servants," he concluded, "for I see ply reaching a new land does not in itself that they say very quickly everything that is constitute a discovery. It must be an- said to them; and I believed they would be- nounced and then recorded in history so come Christians very easily, for it seemed to that the discovery can be acted upon. me that they had no religion." Columbus Others besides the indigenous people the anthropologist had his priorities. preceded Columbus in finding parts of Unfortunately, we have no record of the America. This is no longer an issue of con- first impressions that the people Columbus suming dispute in Columbian studies.