On November 28, 1493, Christopher Columbus returned to the Caribbean outpost of Navidad after a long voyage only to find a horrifying sight. The men he had left there had not only been killed by the local population, but more disturbingly, had been decapitated, and their eyes removed. The no doubt stomach-turning scene led the Admiral to wonder what had gone wrong. On making inquiries of nearby native people, Columbus confirmed his fears that his own men had disregarded his orders. Prior to departing the outpost, Columbus had directed the crewmen he left behind to:
“…avoid doing injury or using violence to the women, by which they would cause scandal and set a bad example…rather they should strive and watch by their soft and honest speech, to gain their good-will, keeping their friendship and love, so that he should find them as friendly and favourable and more when he returned”
During his absence, the explorer’s crewmen ignored this admonition, attacked nearby native villages, kidnapping and raping many native women. Far from encouraging wanton rapacity, the man today derided as one of history’s greatest villains directed subordinates not to do the very things we today accuse him of.
What ought we today make of Christopher Columbus, one of only three people who gets his own holiday on the federal calendar?* Should we think of him as one of the true monsters of human history alongside Hitler, Genghis Khan, and Leopold II of Belgium, men whose chief exploits are confined chiefly to the death and misery of others? Or should we consider him a visionary, a pioneer, an optimist, a man whose boundless view of the future’s possibilities expanded the horizons of the western world. The answer, as is usually the case, is more complicated than that.
Columbus Day now generates some of the most facile and stupid discourse in an age truly proficient in facile and stupid discourse. Every October our Very Online media culture subjects us to more pieces about how Actually this Thing About America You Were Taught to Like is Bad, a strong competitor for laziest genre of commentary. Not content to be left out of the mess, conservative media likes to respond with its own analyses of how This Thing About America isn’t Just Good, it’s the Best and You Are Bad for Not Liking It. A certain kind of person on the left, as a form of compulsion, must find whatever mainstream American nationalism has elevated onto a pedestal and knock it off because things this country puts on pedestals must be destroyed. Likewise, a certain kind of person on the right sees what someone is trying to knock over, and rushes to defend it. It’s like the perennial Confederate statue wars, but somehow more tedious.
On one side, looking at Columbus’s legacy without examining how destructive his arrival was for the indigenous population simply will not do. There is no denying that Columbus’s men perpetrated atrocities upon the native people’s they encountered. We know, for example, that one of Columbus’s crewmen, Michele de Cuneo, captured a Carib women and raped her, commenting “that she had to have been brought up in a school of harlots.” In a move that anthropologist Carol Delaney considers uncharacteristic of the Admiral, Columbus permitted de Cuneo to keep her aboard. Columbus at one point also thanked his brother for ordering a woman led naked through the streets with her tongue cut out for deriding the Columbus family as lowborn. Columbus and his expeditions also waged war against some of the native communities, which resulted in the enslavement of many native people. Many more labored still under Spanish encomenderos in a form of serfdom distinct from slavery only in some particulars.
But we also know that Columbus earned many an enemy and critic among Spaniards for the restraints he attempted to impose upon them. Like most Spanish subjects and citizens of his native Genoa of the time, Columbus was Roman Catholic. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Columbus does appear to have brought a certain rigor to his religious practice. His entire voyage he justified, in part, by the need to convert the Indies to Christianity in order to help defeat the Turks and free Christian holy sites from Muslim rule. The Columbus brothers at different points tried to impose monastic-like religious disciplines upon the rapacious and turbulent hidalgos (“hijo de algo,” or “son of somebody”) long accustomed to lives of privilege and not performing physical labor. Such men reared in the context of the reconquista showed few qualms about inflicting violence upon non-Christians, enslaving them, and seizing their land and property. As shown above, Columbus instructed his men not to do such things, and on one occasion, even executed two Spaniards for their acts against the native peoples, leaving their decaying corpses out as a warning. At more than one point, Columbus faced disorder and rebellion among Spanish settlers who complained that Columbus would not let them attack the indigenous people as much as they wanted to.
Neither, though, can we look upon Columbus as a visionary hero looking towards the modern age. We can best consider Columbus as a 15th century European merchant captain doing 15th century merchant captain things. Like so many of his contemporaries, he sought glory, status, and wealth. We can easily enough wave off any acts of his we dislike by claiming he was a “man of his time,” but if we want to do that, we have to truly grasp what that means. For if we want to call him a man of a different time, what would we find if we looked there?
Reflecting on Columbus’s legacy requires us to face the uncomfortable facts of life of medieval Europe. This was a world so violent it is hard for us really to grasp it. Corporal punishment and public execution were still widely practiced. This was the age of hangings, beheadings, the Inquisition, and her auto-da-fé. Columbus inhabited an intolerant age, one in which governments, – Christian, Muslim, and Pagan – could not countenance free exercise. This was an era when affronts to honor could be and were met with violent outbursts and duels to the death. Had we lived in that same era, we would find slavery a living institution on all three continents of the Old World, a sad, sorry estate to which both the church and society at large appeared largely indifferent. Though Columbus and his compatriots trafficked in slaves, so too did soldiers and sailors throughout Christendom and the Islamic world, a sorry representation of the mores of the age. Columbus is not remarkable for his violence, but really rather boring. If we look in shock and horror at the things Columbus’s crew did in the Caribbean, so would we look with similar emotions at the kind of world these people came from. Celebrating this world should give us some pause.
Nor does it make any sense to approach Columbus as a stand-in for every crime committed by a European or a Euro-American anywhere in the world. Far from seeking to wipe from the face of the earth every native of the Americas in anticipation of the genocides of the modern age, Columbus sought the Christianization of the peoples he encountered. We can denounce this as an unworthy goal, a misuse of the Gospel, and rank imperialism if we like, but it is a thing far different from the atrocities perpetrated by imperial regimes in the 19th and 20th centuries. Blaming Columbus for the Atlantic Slave Trade seems an odd choice as well. European slavers had been taking captured Africans to Portuguese settlements in Madeira well before Columbus ever thought of going west. His landing in the Caribbean may have opened a new frontier for the slave trade, but he by no means created it. Engaging in counterfactual speculation is a perilous endeavor, but suggesting that if nearly any other European sailor had landed arrived in America in 1492 then slavery would not have expanded here beggars belief.
Those who wish to decry Columbus Day for the Admiral’s claimed complicity in every crime committed by The West against The Rest wish not to engage with history, but with reality as they find it in the present. Much like Confederate monuments, Columbus Day is a handy stand-in for everything we think is wrong with our society. We like blaming people, and if we can simply things down to blaming one person or a few as opposed to many, so much the better. At the moment, Columbus is the man on the pedestal, and whomever this racist nation has placed on the pedestal must me knocked off. He stands trial as the representative of his age, and like his age, he has been weighed, and found wanting.
The topic of Columbus Day is one that, I admit, I approach with some degree of ambivalence. We can appropriately enough acknowledge the observance’s role in the crafting of an American nationalism in an age when America experienced growing pains from the addition of new immigrants, many of them Italian. But important enough as Columbus’s voyages were in the tale of human history, very little about him embodies what we today value as Americans. He was a man of the 15th century, and represented a time that valued things far different from what we today cherish. Liberty, self-government, and equal opportunity did not play the same role in his mental map of the universe that they do in ours. If we lived in the kind of world Columbus envisioned, we would today experience a kind of Roman Catholic supremacy even most Roman Catholics today would find abhorrent. We can acknowledge the importance of Columbus’s voyages to American history, but does he really deserve to be one of only three people to get his own nationally commemorated holiday? I’m not so sure. We can celebrate the diversity for the American immigrant experience without focusing solely on him.
Having said that, attempts to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous People’s Day run aground on the same rocky outcroppings. Whom are we commemorating? The indigenous peoples who populated the Americas in 1492 and the cultures that then existed? Indigenous peoples as we find them today? To do the former would celebrate cultures some of which still practiced slavery, that scalped captives, mutilated their genitals, and publicly humiliated them. Such rituals could continue for days. And this is to say nothing of the much-publicized human sacrifices practiced by the Aztecs. If this is what we replace Columbus Day with, we have only substituted it with its own mirror image, substituting one age of violence and nastiness for another.
Celebrating the indigenous peoples of today – or rather, the descendants of the indigenous people of yesteryear, for all of us born here are indigenous to the land – appears an altogether different matter. But it is one I think we should approach sensitively and delicately so as to avoid the kinds of ethnocentrism we would ideally avoid. Such commemorations have to take into account the uncomfortable truth that the very notion of “indigenous peoples” exists only because of the arrival of Europeans, and their cultures today take the shape they do because of interactions with them. Like Americans of African descent, America’s indigenous cultures have never fit particularly cleanly into America’s definition of itself, and wanting to acknowledge them is an important goal.
With Confederate statues, the 1619 Project, and the ongoing debates about how we represent American history to the public, the annual Columbus Wars represent more growing pains in this country’s vision of its present and its future. Clearly many of our countrymen see in our national story something hostile and unwelcoming, and we cannot persuade them that it is not by engaging in mockery and angry declamation. Like every cultural question, this one has no easy solution. We clearly must continue to weave the diverse fabric of American life even if the edges fray every now and then. Just because part of the national story no longer works, that does not mean we have to destroy it. Sometimes, letting it fade into the background is enough. And if we are who we say we are as a nation, we can and should tell a new story as inclusive as we like to think ourselves to be.
*The observance we commonly call “Presidents Day” remains, as a matter of law, Washington’s Birthday. The only other American citizen to have his own separately denominated holiday is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.