Chapter 8
“Columbus Sailed the Ocean Blue”
In This Chapter
Detailing fact and fiction
Looking for the new route to Asia
Exploiting the Arawaks
Checking out his later voyages
Looking over what Columbus wrought
Christopher Columbus a divisive figure? The great Italian explorer who discovered America? How can that be? Who could have a problem with Columbus?
Well, the truth is some people do, some people don’t. In this chapter, we look at not only what Columbus did, but the impact of his actions and the opinions and views of both Columbus lovers and Columbus bashers.
It’s “equal opportunity” criticism and praise time, folks!
Sifting through Fact and Fiction
Christopher Columbus — also known as Christophorus Columbus, Cristoforo Colombo, and Cristóbal Colón — was born in Genoa, Italy, in 1451.
The “falling off the edge of the world” is a joke. Very few people in Columbus’s circle believed the world was flat, and it isn’t true that Columbus’s assignment was to prove the world was round. That’s a myth perpetuated by biographers of Christopher Columbus who, um, made stuff up. Washington Irving, in particular, in his Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, is egregiously responsible for making grammar and high school students believe this myth as fact.
Another myth is that Queen Isabella had to pawn her jewels to come up with the cashola to send Columbus on his merry way. This is also not true and was, in fact, made up by Bartolemé de Las Casas in the 16th century.
Fiction is fiction; fact is fact.
Facts we’re pretty sure of are that Columbus was the son of a wool weaver and merchant. In his early years, Christopher worked in his father’s business, and also as a mapmaker and possibly a book merchant. He always had an interest in the sea and, beginning at the age of 14, he began serving as a sailor on a range of ships and voyages in the Portuguese merchant marine. He may have also served as a privateer — a pirate for hire.
When Columbus was in his 20s, he and his brother began soliciting funds for maritime expeditions of exploration. He wanted to find routes to China and India. He first tried King John II of Portugal in 1484, but that was a turndown.
It wasn’t until 1486, when he was 35 years old, that Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain listened with attention to his proposal, and then placed his request — dubbed by Columbus the “Enterprise of the Indies” — under serious consideration.
Initially, they, too, also turned him down, but they were so intrigued by his idea of finding a route to the east — such a route would save time, which would save money — (the more things change, the more they stay the same) — that the monarchs ordered his idea be studied by “learned men and mariners.”
This “studying” by said learned men and mariners took more time than Columbus had anticipated (see the later section, “Columbus’s First Voyage (1492–1493)” for more information).
Columbus’s “Google Maps”
Columbus consulted several reference works and atlases to come up with his ideas regarding how far it was from here to there, how big the Earth was, how wide the seas, and so forth.
These books included:
Geography by Ptolemy
Imago Mundi by Pierre d’Ailly
The Travels of Marco Polo
The Perpetual Almanac by Abraham Zacuto
Ephemerides by Johannes Müller
Prospettiva and the Meteorologia Agricola by Paulo de Pozzo Toscanelli (possibly — Columbus may have simply corresponded with Toscanelli)
Correspondence (possibly) with Antonio Gallo
Columbus’s First Voyage (1492–1493)
For six years, Columbus waited, and then finally his voyage proposal was approved. Why did the Spanish monarchy decide to back what was unquestionably a risky endeavor with little assurance of a happy outcome?
Deciding to back Columbus was a power play by Ferdinand and Isabel. If the adventurous navigator succeeded in finding a new route to China and the Far East, Ferdinand and Isabel’s standing in the European Royals Club (there wasn’t really a club) would skyrocket, and then the pope would gravitate to their side to go after the Muslims and convert them to Christianity. (Sound familiar? In more ways than one?)
The Capitulations of Santa Fe was the agreement between Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain and Christopher Columbus signed in Santa Fe on April 17, 1492. (“Capitulations” in Columbus’s time meant “enumerated agreements,” not “items of surrender.”) Columbus was 41 years old, and his prior seagoing experience had been, to put it kindly, limited. He had apparently been on a few sea voyages prior to 1492, but nothing that was remembered as particularly significant.
The Capitulations stated that Columbus would embark on a voyage west in an attempt to find a new route to Asia. The mission would be funded by Spain, and the Capitulations spelled out the terms of the deal (and it was a pretty good all-around deal for Columbus, who hadn’t really been all that successful prior to embarking on his voyage of discovery):
Christopher Columbus would become the viceroy and governor general of any lands he discovered. He would be in charge of “all those islands and mainland in the Ocean Sea which by his hand and industry he would discover and acquire.” He was also granted the authority to “hear and dispatch all civil and criminal proceedings pertaining to the said offices of the admiralty, viceroyalty, and governorship.” He could also “punish” ne’er-do-wells.
Columbus’s compensation was 10 percent of, well, everything, but mainly gold and other precious metals and stones discovered in any of the lands he claimed.
Trade with the new lands would be under his control.
All in all, it was a pretty good deal and Chris probably felt it was worth the six-year wait. Yet, the bottom line was that Columbus was promising to repay the funds expended on his trip with the bounty he’d discover and claim upon his arrival in “India.” And notice that there was nothing said regarding people who might be living on “those islands . . . he would discover.”
So, on August 2, 1492, Columbus set sail from Palos, Spain, with around 90 men in a fleet of three ships, the Pinta, the Niña, and the Santa Maria, which Columbus himself captained.
Here is where Columbus stopped on his voyage:
Canary Islands
San Salvador (October 12, 1492)
Cuba (October 28, 1492)
Haiti (December 6, 1492; he named it Hispaniola)
He made these stops on his return trip:
Santa Maria, the Azores
Lisbon, Spain
Wiping Out the Welcoming Arawaks
The Arawaks were the Native peoples Columbus first encountered upon his arrival on the island of Hispaniola (Haiti) in December 1492. The second group he came upon were known as the Caribs, on the Lesser Antilles islands.
In a report to his Spain backers, Columbus describes the people that he met and offers a few suggestions on how best to deal with them. (And there’s a line about the Natives believing Columbus and his men came from Heaven, which, in hindsight, is irony at its most tragic, isn’t it?)
Columbus told his Spanish backers that the Natives had no religion that he could identify, but that they were gentle people and seemed not to know how to be evil. He reported that they didn’t kill each other, rob from each other, didn’t have weapons, were very timid, and that they were certain that he and his men were divine visitors from Heaven. He recommended that Ferdinand and Isabella resolve to turn them all into Christians. He also commented on the fact that they were all naked, all the time. Guess he felt he ought to mention that, since it was probably a rather noticeable custom to him and his men. (Ahem.)
Considering this perception, it is no surprise that Columbus saw these Natives as ripe for two things: conversion and exploitation. And even though common custom in Europe dictated that only unoccupied lands could be claimed in the name of a monarchy, Columbus claimed his discovery for Spain, wrote it down, had it notarized, and delivered it to the Spanish Crown upon his return.
“We could subjugate them all”
There weren’t any monsters, but there were cannibals!
Columbus also provided Spain with additional assessment of the island Natives, and reported back that making them slaves would be an easy thing to do, and that he thought this was a good idea.
He also wrote that he hadn’t seen any monsters, but that there might be a chance that the Natives were cannibals. His bottom line was that he could take over the whole bunch of ’em with no more than 50 men.
It is now known that Columbus put forth his mistaken “cannibal” story to justify his exploitation of the Indians and bring the Spanish monarchy onboard for whatever he wanted to do to assure complete domination of the Natives and their natural wealth.
Columbus’s mistake came from seeing gourds in the Natives’ homes containing the bones of their ancestors. He leaped to the erroneous conclusion that because the Natives saved their family members’ bones, they had thus eaten Grampa for dinner.
We know with certainty that Columbus enslaved, brutalized, raped, and slaughtered the Arawak people. He shipped Indians back to Spain to be sold as slaves. He gave young Indian girls to his crew members to be used as sex slaves. He put Indians to work as slaves in the gold mines.
The Requiremento and other bull(s)
In 1455, Pope Nicholas V issued a papal bull (a formal proclamation by the pope) called Romanus Pontifex. Catholics were urged to conquer all Saracens and pagans and make them their slaves. And guess what? The Indigenous people were considered pagans.
And then, in 1493, Pope Alexander VI, in a papal bull called Inter Caetera, gave the New World to Spain — much to the displeasure of Spain’s rival Portugal.
It speaks volumes about the power of the Catholic Church and the politics of the time that a pope could issue a papal bull that awarded Columbus’s discovery to Spain and that people acceded to it as indisputable!
France complained, but it did no good, and Spain assumed total control over the lands — and the people. (By the way, there was a proviso that protected the lands of Christians. How thoughtful.)
The Native population of the Caribbean dwindled from estimated millions to mere hundreds from illness (from Europeans and their animals), extermination, and suicide. Mothers killed their newborns rather than allow them to become slaves; pregnant women aborted themselves; Natives killed themselves en masse to escape the horrors of living in an enslaved society.
And then, in 1513, the pope issued the Requiremento, which was an official decree, a solemn edict from the Church that was read to the Indians so that the Spanish could state that the Natives had been fully informed of two things:
The pope officially ruled the world.
The Natives were now officially screwed.
The Requiremento was insane. That sounds harsh, but this document may be the quintessential example of what can happen when a theocracy is in charge. The Requiremento was read to the Indians in Spanish (which, of course, they didn’t understand) and the bull stated that the Indigenous peoples had to acknowledge the Catholic Church as the ruler of the world. If they didn’t comply, the Church promised to do as much harm and damage to them as it possibly could.
A quarter of a century later, in 1537, Pope Paul II issued a papal bull titled Sublimis Deus, which revoked in large part the slavery component of the Requiremento by stating unequivocally that Indians were human beings and were entitled to liberty and dignity. This bull was commonly ignored.
The Burning of the Bulls
Papal bulls were never anything but bad for Indigenous peoples. Over the past decade, groups of Native Americans have petitioned the Vatican to revoke the encroaching bulls, singling out especially the 1493 Inter Caetera bull.
Indigenous people meet every October 12 in Honolulu to symbolically burn the bulls. The first public Burning of the Bulls took place in Hawaii in 1997.
They pledge to continue until the pope formally revokes the edict.
Columbus’s Three Other Voyages
Columbus’s voyages began as journeys of exploration and devolved into missions of conquest, subjugation, and exploitation.
As the old saying goes, money changes everything, and the gold, gems, and, yes, human bounty in the Indies quickly led to the Spanish colonists doing everything in their power to control and sell the Natives, mine the mountains clear of gold, and establish dominance in an already-occupied land.
No wonder many Indians these days consider Columbus Day a day of mourning.
The following sections are about the voyages Columbus made to North America after his discovery became widely known, and after the New World’s riches became a highly sought-after prize to the European powers.
Voyage two: The first slave roundup (1493–1496)
When Columbus went back to Isabella and Ferdinand for backing for a second trip to the newly discovered lands, he had no problem getting the money. They named him Admiral of the Ocean Sea, and he was made supreme commander of 17 ships and 1,500 men.
This time, Columbus’s orders were clear:
Set up a trading post.
Convert the Natives to Christianity.
Greatly expand the colony he had left behind in Hispaniola.
Continue to look for a new route to Asia.
Columbus’s second journey departed Spain on October 13, 1493, and made good use of the north Atlantic trade winds. He arrived in the West Indies in early November and later that month discovered that the small group he had left behind had been massacred by hostile Natives.
He then established a short-lived colony called La Isabela, and then traveled to Cuba and Jamaica.
During his three-year stay, he established colonies, fought with the Natives, and enslaved them to dig for gold. He headed back to Spain in March 1496 with 500 slaves for Spain.
Voyage three: Mutiny and insurgency (1498–1500)
In May 1498, Columbus left Spain for his third voyage to his discovered lands, this time with six ships. When they arrived at the Canary Islands in June, the fleet split into two groups of three, with one heading for Hispaniola, and the other, captained by Columbus, venturing to look for new lands.
After sighting the coast of South America, Columbus ordered his fleet back to Hispaniola where he discovered the colonists were very unhappy with him. And his crew wasn’t in the best of moods either. Not to mention that the powers back in Spain were upset about the less-than-ample quantities of gold being sent back.
Columbus hung some of his rebellious crew, and tried to quash the resistance, but Ferdinand and Isabella had had enough. They appointed a new commissioner of the colonies, who arrived in 1500, arrested Columbus, and had him sent back to Spain, shackled and humiliated.
Voyage four: Stranded on Jamaica (1502–1504)
Columbus was imprisoned for about six weeks in Spain, and then freed by Ferdinand. The crown then agreed to fund a fourth voyage, which would be to find a water passage to Asia. Columbus set sail in May 1502 with four ships and about 140 men. His son, Ferdinand, then 14, accompanied his father and would later write a detailed account of the trip.
All in all, this trip, Columbus’s last, was an abysmal failure. Storms resulted in his older ships being beached and Columbus and his crew ending up stranded on Jamaica for an entire year.
He and his crew (half of whom mutinied against Columbus, but were quickly overpowered), were rescued in June 1504 and he returned to Spain in November of that same year.
The Impact of Christopher Columbus
How the mighty have fallen! Every Columbus Day now, the blogosphere and newspaper Op-Ed pages explode with indignant, repulsed articles spelling out in detail the new and terrible image of the disgraced Italian explorer.
Today, even the most ardent defenders of the “Columbus as hero” school of thought have had to take a step back from their dogmatic praise of the master navigator and acknowledge the negative impact he and his voyages had on Native peoples.
So, was Columbus a genocidal invader or not? Perception is a funny thing. As is context.
To many Native Americans, Columbus is a symbol of the beginning of their end. To many Italian Americans, he is a brave Italian explorer.
The reality, and the truth, is that he is both, and that both sides of the argument make a valid point.
Thanks to Columbus, a country that many consider the greatest in all of human history was created. Columbus’s discovery effectuated European expansion into an enormous, abundant New World, resulting in a nation that has defined “liberty” for the rest of the world since 1776. There is no argument that the United States of America changed the world.
Yet, in addition to claiming his discovery for Spain, Columbus also wanted to conquer Jerusalem with the gold he found in the Indies. His policies were genocidal, of this there is no doubt:
He rounded up slaves and shipped them back to Spain to be marched naked through the streets and then sold at market.
He enslaved island Natives and set them to work stripping the mountains of gold from top to bottom.
His men treated the Natives like animals, often torturing them and beheading children for amusement, killing men, women, and children at will, chopping off their hands if they were deemed to be lazy, using their corpses as dog food, and even simply walking up to a Native and slicing off a thick piece of flesh from his body to check the sharpness of their knives.
Thus, the problem with the word discovery when talking about Columbus. Upon his arrival, there were civilizations with established societal structures, a thriving cultural life, and a healthy economy. The European guiding principle of colonization resulted in the devastation of Native populations.
Here is the good Columbus is remembered for:
He opened up the Americas to European settlement.
He created enormous profit for Spain, Portugal, Italy, and other European countries through the gold and precious stone mines he operated on the Caribbean islands.
He successfully navigated seas that had never before been traversed, setting the stage for all future visits to the New World by Europeans.
But this is the evil Columbus is remembered for:
He launched and grew the slave trade between the newly discovered lands and Europe.
He and his men brought to the New World diseases to which the Natives had absolutely no immunity, resulting in mass epidemics and diminishment of the populations.
The results of his exploitation of the Arawaks and other Native peoples was the genocidal destruction of millions of people.