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Celebrating Columbus

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Christopher Columbus, the most famous explorer in history, was once a celebrated hero. Now, many consider him a villain, a despoiler of paradise. So which version of Columbus is true? Michael Knowles answers this question and offers some much-needed historical perspective.

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Script:

He ventured where no other man of his age dared to go. He saw things no other man of his age had ever seen. He discovered a New World.

For centuries, he was universally admired as a hero. Now he’s widely considered to be a despoiler of paradise, an enslaver, and a genocidal maniac.

I’m talking, of course, about Christopher Columbus. So which is true? Is he a hero—or a villain? 

The truth is complicated, as the truth often is—especially when you have to go back 500 years to find it. But let’s try to get as close as we can. 

Columbus was born in 1451 in the port city of Genoa, Italy. At a time when birth often determined destiny, his origins were entirely unremarkable. His father was a middle-class wool weaver who expected his son to follow the same path. But Columbus had different plans. The Age of Discovery was dawning. The future belonged to the bold. And the bold went to sea. 

By the time he turned 30, Columbus had sailed to Iceland, Ireland, and Africa. Somewhere on his many voyages, he became obsessed with the idea that there was a westward sea route from Europe to India. But there were no maps to consult, only wild rumors of sea monsters and endless ocean.

He put together the 15th-century version of a PowerPoint presentation for the king of Portugal, then the world’s leading sea power. But the king, heeding the advice of his experts, turned him down. It simply couldn’t be done, the experts told the king. It was pure speculation, and an expensive one at that. 

So Columbus took his plans to Spain. But King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella weren’t interested either—at least, not at first.

Columbus persevered. After eight years, they finally relented. They gave the explorer three small ships. There was a time when every schoolkid knew their names—the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria—and the year in which Columbus set sail: 1492.

Except for a compass and the stars, Columbus had virtually no navigation tools at his disposal. He was, to mix metaphors, flying blind. He was heading west. That’s about all he knew. 

Once the ships left the Canary Islands, they were on their own. His crews stayed loyal for the first week, but by the third week, they had lost their nerve. Columbus, however, never lost his. By sheer force of will, he kept his men in line. 

Finally, after 10 long weeks at sea, on the night of October 11, Columbus spotted land. 

He called it San Salvador. Today we know it as the Bahamas. 

There Columbus and his men encountered the Taino tribe. The first encounter between Europe and the Americas went well. The Taino were curious and helpful. Columbus was emphatic that his crew treat them with kindness and respect. 

Lest you think that Columbus stumbled on the Garden of Eden, the islands were also inhabited by the Caribs, a tribe of cannibals for whom, according to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Samuel Eliot Morison, babies were a delicacy—or, in Morison’s words, “a…toothsome morsel.” Like every place else on Earth, in every time in history, the local peoples were a mixed bag. Some good, some not so good.

Upon his return to Spain, word of the Italian explorer’s successful voyage quickly spread throughout Europe. A New World had been discovered, and the Old World would never be the same. 

Columbus was a man meant for the sea. On land, he was easily outmaneuvered and betrayed by professional politicians and bureaucrats. It is on their dubious, self-serving accounts that modern attacks on Columbus’s reputation are based. In his own day, these attacks made the explorer’s life a misery.

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46 Comments

  2. Columbus day should be about celebrating his arrival and the spark of the American conquest, not about glorifying him specifically. Columbus himself wasn't really a nice peaceful guy, same goes for the others along with him with some exceptions like Bartolome de Las Casas. Columbus had disobeyed Isabella by mistreating the natives, and most sources do claim that Columbus did mistreat the natives. The argument should be about how excessive the mistreatment and atrocities were, and usually these might be exaggerated or simply not true but we do know for a fact that he did mistreat the natives we just don't truly know how evil and cruel it was. The demographic loss of the Taino populations were simply due to the disease brought by the Spanish unintentionally, which hit them harder then the ones in central and South America. People usually use Las Casas' writings as an example of the genocide but people forget that these works are extremely exaggerated by him because he wanted to win in the 1550 Valladolid debate and many others to end the encomienda system and mistreatment of natives. He did do it for a good cause but his examples are exaggerated when it comes to the numbers of victims etc… Also thanks to Las Casas' protests, laws like those from 1542 were released to stop the mistreatment of natives in America. Unfortunately, some other guys coughs Netherlands, England, and France cough would use these works from Las Casas' to portrait the Spanish as evil, justify their colonialism and ignore the good results from his protests. These guys were masters at spreading this propaganda and this is how the history has been manipulated, into making people think that the "atrocities and slavery of the indigenous peoples just kept happening at a genocidal level and it never ended until the heroic indigenous liberators of Latin America ended it." But yeah my opinion is that we should celebrate his achievement for sparking one of the world's biggest event, and changing the course of history, allowing the evangelization of millions of people, mixture of societies, and speeding up the evolution of history. But this also generated the biggest slave trade in history and the displacement/cleansing of native Americans in North America by the British Canadians and USA, and in South America by Chile and Argentina.

  3. Have any of you guys ever heard the quote “Wrong is wrong, even if everyone is doing it. Right is right, even if no one is doing it”?

    The suffering of the enslaved people had always been felt. We just didn’t realize it. And plus, this is useless anyway, since like someone else said, Columbus was hated and considered a monster by EUROPEANS. EUROPEANS!

    Also Michael, you look so punchable right now

  6. Why did the presenter leave out the reasoning for denying funding for his voyage? The experts were absolutely correct in telling him that he would die at sea because Columbus calculated the earth to be much smaller than it actually was. By that point, the size of the earth was well known. What the Europeans didn't know about was the existence of the Americas. For all they knew it was open ocean from Europe to Asia. But they did know that such a distance would be suicidal.

  10. I wanted to use this video as a thoughtful comparison for my class, so students could compare the arguments here with Columbus's Diary and other primary sources like the writings of Bartolome de las Casas. Unfortunately, there are so many factual inaccuracies, overgeneralizations, and mythologizing here that I don't feel like I can responsibly show this in a public school. Especially one like mine where I have many indigenous students.

  16. Picking on a dead man who can’t defend himself is simple bullying. He was a commoner sailing for a different country than his own. Who do you think lauded this guy: the royalty of the time or the other common men of the time?

  17. To everyone claiming that we can’t judge Columbus based on today’s standards, I’m curious if you then actually like ANYONE in history before and after his time? Do you in any way look up to and idolize the Pharaohs of Egypt? King David? King Leonidas? King Darius I? Alexander the Great? Socrates? Julius Caesar? Attila the Hun? Da Vinci? Qin Shi Huang? Genghis Khan? Confucius? King Montezuma? Shaka of the Zulu? Napoleon? General Grant/Lee? Churchill? MLK? Mandela? Obama? Trump?
    The actions of people in history, and history itself, isn’t black or white, it’s grey. Every monarch, ruler, general, soldier, philosopher, President in history comes with their own accomplishments and baggage. They all achieved many great things, but they all also committed mistakes and atrocities whether directly or indirectly. If you admire them in anyway, then don’t condemn those who idolize Columbus for the good that he’s contributed to history, despite his abhorrent flaws. Remember, next time you admire art, music, pet a dog, love a woman, or eat food, even Adolf enjoyed those things too. He wasn’t 100% evil, just 95-99% so.

  25. I am more inclined to believe the story he showed up on islands and cut people's hands off if they didn't dig gold fast enough. Most explorers at that time viewed indigenous people as animals practically. Only good for pillaging and writing stories.

  26. Other people ventured there before him. He was a brute who cut off people's noses and ears. He was a slaver who led to the slaughter, forced labor, slavery and rape of the peoples he encountered. He was not a typical person of his time, he was especially sadistic, greedy and cruel. A word one might use: psychopath. There is much to learn from this as we still live in a society that enables people of limited conscience and remorse to rise to immense power and once they are elites they will be allowed to be far more cruel than any common citizen, they will be forgiven by the powerful for the horrors they unleashed. Please do not try to bury what a horrible person Columbus was or why his society permitted the atrocities he committed even after they superficially condemned them. He is a symbol of the evils of colonialism and greed-based economic systems that favor the few at the expense of the many.

  28. 4:29 even by the standards of the day some of his followers called him a psychopath, he would do inhumane experiments like throwing an axe at a line of native americans and counting how many he could decapitate to "see how tough they are". He even had his own settlers beaten to death for exchanging gold for food during times of starvation, yeah his atrocities were not limited to the native people, he would chop off tongues for disrespect

  30. For all the "let's not be moral relativists", you sure do defend enslavers, murders and thieves from the past, making your morality relative to time.
    Oh, and I liked Michael Knowles more in that role where he played a gay dude having sex with other dudes.
    Much better acting.

  31. He cut Taino's wrists off if they walked in the wrong direction or didn't call him Master, he threw 200 men off board, dead and alive, and had his crew almost starve to death because of horrible miscalculations, which is shown, as one of the only Taino sentences preserved were "Our Master is (very) upset, please don't kill me. He tortured them for fun. This was unacceptable in every major culture or religion throughout history, let alone one 500 years ago.

  32. I just don't get it. Why do you cling so hard to this weird mythology of history that's objectively and verifiably false? Like you don't actually lose anything by just telling the truth. For real what do you have to gain by perpetuating lies? It makes no sense.

  33. This neglects to mention that Columbus allowed his men to rape the native women of the islands they visited and while in Haiti he ordered the Arawak people to collect gold for him and if they didn't collect his quota their hands were cut off. But hey, at least he didn't eat them.

  34. So wrong on the opening lines as the Vikings discovered America 400 years before Columbus and he never discovered the mainland and all his Discovery's were for the Spanish Empire and for the Catholic church, so this utter nonsense that this butcher who most people throught was crazy when he ran San Salvador killing a massive number of the population. The American continent was colonised by the British and French on the mainland America the Spanish Empire took over and Genocided the Aztecs and Mayan peoples for Spain. Frankly this is just nonsense

  42. This is absolute nonsense. I'm very annoyed right now and I'll be typing furiously so forgive any grammar errors, it will be a long post but please read. I'm Irish, and I'm almost fifty years of age, this is the history I learned in school- The Castile Crown colonised the Canaries in the early fifteenth century, as it became apparent what they were doing, Pope Eugene IV issued a papal bull stating this- ""They have deprived the natives of their property or turned it to their own use, and have subjected some of the inhabitants of said islands to perpetual slavery, sold them to other persons and committed other various illicit and evil deeds against them…. Therefore We exhort, through the sprinkling of the Blood of Jesus Christ shed for their sins, one and all, temporal princes, lords, captains, armed men, barons, soldiers, nobles, communities and all others of every kind among the Christian faithful of whatever state, grade or condition, that they themselves desist from the aforementioned deeds, cause those subject to them to desist from them, and restrain them rigorously." The Catholic Church had been preaching for centuries that slavery, murder, greed and theft were wrong and the laity were devout and doing their best to live according to those values. They were incensed at what the Spanish so-called "Catholic" aristocracy were doing, it was in no way a cultural norm of the commoner for people to behave in that way. This bull was read out from the pulpit all over Europe.

    In 1493, Pope Alexander VI ( an extremely corrupt and unpopular Pope who was leading a visibly debauched lifestyle) issued Inter Caetera, a bull that essentially gave free rein to the aristocracy and emerging mercantile class to enslave, murder, and steal from a people in another part of the world who were extremely similar to the Gaunches in the Canaries. The laity and the clergy were outraged. People were sick to death of a wealthy, tyrannical elite who ruled by fear, abused their own people, and left them hungry and poor while living a life of luxury and sin. The peasants and the tradespeople were devout and could not stand the absolute hypocrisy of the ruling class who claimed to be Christians. There were uprisings of common folk all over Europe and they went on for decades. Priests, Nuns, and commoners joined together to fight the nobility. The nobility were sponsoring adventures to other parts of the world to make themselves rich while their own people were living a miserable hand-to-mouth existence. The common people hated the nobility across Europe, there are even instances of people rising up to challenge their kingdom's defensive forces because they wanted the Ottomans to take over as they believed that the Ottomans treated their subjects better. Claiming that the cultural norms of people like Columbus and the European aristocracy were the cultural norms of the time is a fantasy completely unsupported by the facts.

    Did they teach about the Arawaks and what Columbus and the Spanish did to them? What they did in Haiti is nothing like any slavery that had been practiced anywhere that I can find a record of. It's a level of barbarity probably never seen before in history, the Romans or Genghis Khan weren't as brutal as Columbus. They wiped out millions of Arawaks during Columbus lifetime and he most certainly was party to it. Did they tell you about the tri-monthly tokens he issued? Did they tell you he was perfectly fine with people trafficking 8 and 9-year-old girls into sex slavery so they could buy farmland? From a letter written by Columbus -"A hundred Castellanos are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go looking for girls; those from nine to ten are now in demand". Do you honestly think that ordinary people in Europe who were following the teachings of Christ weren't disgusted by that? I challenge you to find any other culture at that time that committed genocidal acts at the scale and viciousness that Columbus did. That Prager U video is absolutely disgusting, I cannot fathom how people could be so ignorant and cruel as to try and normalise that way of thinking to young children.

    One more Just to really ram the point home, from a book written by a Dominican Monk called Bartolomé de las Casas ( a low born) who was absolutely traumatised by what he saw in Haiti-

    "There are two main ways in which those who have travelled to this part of the world pretending to be Christians have uprooted these pitiful peoples and wiped them from the face of the earth. First, they have waged war on them: unjust, cruel, bloody and tyrannical war. Second, they have murdered anyone and everyone who has shown the slightest sign of resistance, or even of wishing to escape the torment to which they have subjected him.

    This latter policy has been instrumental in suppressing the native leaders, and, indeed, given that the Spaniards normally spare only women and children, it has led to the annihilation of all adult males, whom they habitually subject to the harshest and most iniquitous and brutal slavery that man has ever devised for his fellow-men, treating them, in fact, worse than animals."

    Are you happy with a video telling children that what Columbus did was culturally normal at that time? That is morally repulsive. By the way, the natives began killing themselves en mass to escape their torment. The woman starved themselves to stop their menstruation cycles so they couldn't conceive to their rapists. Why don't you teach your children that? This video and the video they are apparently going to use to teach schoolchildren about Columbus are beyond vile.