Dem
47
GOP
53
We're going to start this series with a bit of a lay-up, just to make sure we get off on the right foot. And we're going to start this entry with a pop quiz. Which of these pictures most accurately captures what Christopher Columbus actually looked like?
We will get to the answer in short order.
For now, however, we will observe that Columbus is such an obvious entry for this series, it's almost a cliché. For at least 50 or 60 years, people with even a modicum of historical knowledge have been pointing out two well-known falsehoods about the Columbus myth. The first is that he did not, of course, "discover" the New World. The tens of millions of people who were living here when he arrived could tell you that (well, if they were still alive). He was not even the first European to visit what became known as North America. Leif Erikson beat him to it by nearly 500 years, and there's also the possibility that other Europeans paid a pre-Columbus visit, as well.
Second, Columbus did not "prove" the world was round. This was known thousands of years before Columbus was born. Both the ancient Greeks and the ancient Indians (and probably others, too), using pretty basic trigonometric principles, had inferred that Earth must be globe-shaped. This notion was broadly accepted by educated people of Columbus' time, such that a flat-Earther back then would have been regarded much like a flat-Earther is regarded today: ignorant, anti-scientific, superstitious, conspiratorial, etc.
The significance of Columbus, such as it is, is that in his efforts to "prove" that Asia was relatively easy to reach by traveling due west, he bumped into a landmass that had largely escaped European attention, and had not previously inspired European interest. After Columbus, followed by several others, demonstrated that there was something pretty big and pretty resource-rich in that direction, Europeans became very interested, indeed. And so, he was effectively the starting point for the Age of Exploration.
Now, it should be noted that Columbus was—to use the professional historian's term—an evil bastard. He was unbelievably cruel to the people he governed, both European and Native American, and indiscriminately used harsh corporal punishment and summary execution against both groups, while also being more than happy to enslave and rape Natives when that served his purposes. It is not true, mind you, that Columbus deliberately handed out smallpox-infected blankets to the native peoples. That's not because Columbus was above such a thing, however, but because people in his time were not aware of that sort of biological warfare. The smallpox-infected blankets thing actually originated with the British, during Pontiac's War, nearly 300 years after Columbus.
It should also be noted that Columbus was—again to use a technical term—a moron. He was pretty much wrong about everything. We still have copies of his journals, where he scribble notes and thoughts in the margins, and nearly everything he wrote was wrong. He guessed that it was about 4,000 miles due West to get to Asia; he was off by about 8,000 miles. Bumping into North America saved Columbus' bacon, not that he ever figured that out. To his dying day, he believed that each of the three visits he made to the New World were actually visits to Asia, which is why he called the area in and around the Caribbean Sea the "West Indies."
And that brings us to the opening question, about what Columbus looked like. The correct answer is... it's a trick question. We don't have any real idea what he looked like; the images of him (including the most famous one, which is the one in the center) were artists working generations or centuries after Columbus lived, and basically picturing a somewhat generic Italian male in the garb of a Spanish admiral. They are, in essence, fantasy pieces.
There's actually much more about Columbus that is not known. Although he's long been portrayed as a native of Genoa, Italy, his DNA is consistent with someone born in or near Valencia, Spain. Similarly, although he's generally assumed to be Catholic, since he was employed by the fanatically Catholic Ferdinand and Isabella, the DNA evidence points to his having been a Sephardic Jew (if that is true, he undoubtedly did NOT clue his bosses in on the truth). Another thing we don't know is... exactly what Columbus' name really was. Spellings were not only not standardized back then, but it was also customary to translate names into the local language, such that a person might be Columbus in one place, Colón in another, and Corombo in a third. We do have Columbus' (or is it Corombo's?) signature on some documents, but it's not much help in solving the mystery:
Most of that is actually braggadocio about how he's an admiral and is blessed by God.
The lack of information about Columbus, not to mention the lack of any sort of formal portrait made during his lifetime, pretty overwhelmingly demonstrates that he was not seen as a man of great importance while he was alive. Certainly, not a man worth commemorating and celebrating. And he remained a relatively obscure figure for at least a couple of centuries after his death. While it is true that he initiated the Age of Exploration, or at least one key chapter of it, the general sense was that others (Prince Henry the Navigator, Ferdinand Magellan, etc.) were equally or more important, and that things would largely have unfolded as they did whether or not Columbus did what he did.
So, why is Columbus so well-known today? Well, he can mostly thank a king for that, and it's not Ferdinand. No, the key monarch is actually a fellow from a different country, namely George III. George, and his Parliament, made their American colonists cranky. And, as you may have heard, those colonists decided to rebel in 1776.
Now, a nation needs to have inspirational figures to look up to, to serve as a model of that nation's values, and an inspiration to aspire to. If you were an Englishman or Englishwoman in New York on, say, July 1, 1776, then most of your heroic figures would be Englishmen and women—select monarchs, generals, philosophers, academics, etc. But when England becomes the enemy overnight, well, those heroic figures aren't going to get it done anymore. And if there's ever a time that inspirational figures are needed, it's in the middle of a war.
So, there was a sudden need for new heroic figures. Given the culture of tha time, those figures had to have some meaningful role in American culture and/or history. They had to be white and male. And they could not be English. George Washington checked all those boxes, and so he was elevated to demigod status, even while he was alive. Some of the other founders, most obviously Benjamin Franklin, as well. But it couldn't all be people who were alive in 1776.
Under these circumstances, Columbus was one of the main figures that Americans seized upon for their new pantheon of civic heroes. He did have a role in American history, and he was white and male, and he was definitely not British. They thought he was Italian back then, of course, rather than Spanish. But either way, definitely not an Englishman.
The importance of Columbus in that era is indicated by the sudden prominence of his name in American culture circa 1780 or so. King's College was re-christened as Columbia University. The nation's new capital district, once it was established, was named Washington, District of Columbia. The ship commanded by Capt. Robert Gray was named Columbia Rediviva. Most people have not heard of that ship, but they have heard of the river its crew visited, becoming the first Americans to do so. That river was, of course, the Columbia River, which was named after the ship. Most of the original 13 colonies also had a city named in the explorer's honor; Columbia in some cases, and Columbus in others. Indeed, he's the only person to be the namesake of two state capitals—South Carolina's and Ohio's (and yes, we know Ohio wasn't one of the original 13 colonies).
Of course, it helps one's reputation if a skilled mythmaker comes along to help lionize you. In Washington's case, of course, the mythmaker was Parson Weems (of cherry-tree story fame). In Columbus' case, it was Washington Irving. Irving's A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828), like Weems' Life of Washington, was not meant to be a biography so much as it was a heroic epic loosely based on real events. Still, it was THE work on Columbus for well over a century, and was generally treated as the unvarnished truth. The bit about Columbus proving the world was not flat, incidentally, came from Irving's book.
The apex for Columbus' reputation came in the late 19th century. By the final decade of that century, not only were (white) Americans eager to celebrate their country's general prosperity and success, they were also eager to celebrate the fact that they had finished the "job" that Columbus started, namely conquering the North American continent. Sitting Bull was killed in 1890, and shortly thereafter, the Indian Wars concluded, with the massacre at Wounded Knee.
All of this laid the groundwork for the massively successful World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, a celebration of American culture and technology that drew nearly 30 million visitors. It was at the Exposition that the country and the world were introduced to, among other things, A/C power, the Pledge of Allegiance, the Ferris Wheel, the escalator, Braille type, Quaker Oats, Shredded Wheat and Vienna Sausage. It was also at that event that the historian Frederick Jackson Turner announced that the frontier existed no more, and that the process that had created a uniquely American culture (i.e., "taming" the West) was over.
These days, of course, Columbus is mostly back to where he was when he died all those years ago—a second-tier jerk. Sure, Donald Trump put up a statue of him outside the White House, but the hero worship has otherwise largely ended, most of the other statues are gone, and his once-important holiday is usually either ignored or is co-opted as Indigenous Peoples' Day.
And that is the REAL story of Christopher Columbus. (Z)