Columbus Day: Let's not forget the sins of Columbus
Sure, he "sailed the ocean blue." But history long ago recorded other facts: his demands for gold, his use of torture, his kidnappings, his implementation of a regular slave trade.
Every Columbus Day, I’d roll my eyes when Native American groups would protest. A typical litany of ills purportedly inflicted by Columbus included “grand theft, genocide, racism, initiating the destruction of a culture, rape, torture, and maiming of indigenous people.”
Really. How could Columbus have done all that?
I was raised in Massachusetts, where Columbus Day is a state holiday. Instead of school, you’d watch the Columbus Day parade. You'd recite rhymes — “In fourteen hundred ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue” — and celebrate Columbus’s homeland, Italy.
Sure, the white settlers mistreated Indians, and did indeed practice genocide. The phrase “The only good Indian is a dead Indian” had its roots with New England's Puritans, gained widespread acceptance during the government’s 18th and 19th century wars against natives, and persisted in 20th century movie and TV culture.
But Columbus? Surely the accusations were exaggerated. Surely Columbus was just the scapegoat for all the ills of white–native relations.
That’s what I thought until I read the classic account of Columbus that won the 1943 Pulitzer Prize for biography, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, by Samuel Eliot Morison. Morison was a blue-blooded Boston patrician, Harvard historian, and retired U.S. Navy captain who saw action in both the North African and Pacific theaters in World War II. No left-winger him.
In his meticulously documented book, he praised Columbus for his navigation skills, his determination and focus, organizational ability, and ability to lead men. But Columbus also was a man of his time who never believed Indians were capable of being proper, civilized Christians, even if their souls might be saved upon conversion.
From the start, he treated them as less than human beings than commodities. In his writings, he noted their potential as slaves. He kidnapped them regularly to be trained as translators. As one contemporary, a priest, noted, “It appears that the Admiral did this unscrupulously … it not appearing to him that it was an offense to God and his neighbor to take free men against their will, separating fathers from sons and wives from husbands.” To help pay for future voyages, Columbus proposed, in February 1494, a regular slave trade, and during his second trip to the New World, he implemented it, sending hundreds of Indians — “the best males and females,” according to one of Columbus’ shipmates — to the Seville slave market.
While Columbus didn’t appear to practice genocide himself, his demands that Indians supply gold set a model for the systematic destruction of the natives who would be unable to meet Columbus’ demands. Morison cited a priest who called the system “irrational, most burdensome, impossible, intolerable, and abominable.” Those who couldn’t meet the quotas were tortured or killed or both; the Indian agriculture was disrupted, and many starved to death, contracted disease from the Spanish (including venereal disease), or committed suicide.
On the island of Hispaniola (shared now by the Dominican Republic and Haiti), the pre-Columbus population was 300,000. Between 1494 and 1496, it was reduced to 200,000. By 1508, only 60,000 lived. Forty years after that, perhaps 500 remained.
When Morison's book was published in 1942, people were living this kind of horror. The New York Times reviewer of Admiral of the Ocean Sea noted that Morison brought "the birth of terror home to us by suggesting that the Nazis might treat us as the men of Aragon and Castile treated the natives of Hispaniola."
How did we lose sight of this? I suspect this was a case of popular culture trumping facts — as so many parents today choose to believe discredited studies that condemn childhood immunization; of annoying truths being ignored — as the Tea Party ignores the truth that George Washington was the great proponent of a strong federal government and federal Hamiltonian bailouts; and of the power of inertia and peer pressure — as the Washington Mutual Board of Directors failed to question the assumptions of their mediocre CEO.
Yes, we'll continue to observe Columbus Day for all of these reasons. But we should not celebrate it.
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Comments:
Posted Sun, Oct 9, 8:02 a.m. Inappropriate
i still roll my eyes on columbus day. of course as a "white" male, i am well aware of the various ethno "pride" movements that rest upon the victomology of skin color. makes me wonder if we have really "progressed" from the type of ignorance columbus practiced. of course, were i to take any outwardly perceived pride in my skin color or my maleness, i would be condemned as a sexist bigot.
but while we are talking about revisionist history, we should consider the fact that the plunder and rape of north american indigenous tribes was helped along by north american indigenous tribes. The introduction of the horse into central america wrought more damage to indigenous peoples than columbus. by the early 1600s the horse had made its way up into the Blackfeet territory near the u.s./canadian border. it rapidly changed relations between tribes and their ecosystem, and it disrupted the relations between the tribes. so in point of fact, indigenous tribes were over-hunting the buffalo, and raiding neighboring tribes for slaves, before europeans crossed the Appalachian mountains.
Posted Sun, Oct 9, 12:56 p.m. Inappropriate
let's not forget what was behind Columbus' sins- the doctrine of discovery. The papal bull Romanus Pontifex, issued in 1455, serves as a starting point to understand the Doctrine of Discovery, specifically, the historic efforts by Christian monarchies and States of Europe in the fifteenth and later centuries to assume and exert rights of conquest and dominance over non-Christian indigenous peoples in order to take over and profit from their lands and territories. Even as recent as 2005 (when the Supreme Court was determining the sovereignty of the Oneida Indian Nation) the US has used this doctrine to negate the rights of indigenous peoples. Columbus may have "sinned", but it ain't just him. We continue the tradition until we change our attitudes towards indigenous people.
Posted Sun, Oct 9, 2:27 p.m. Inappropriate
Sounds like the true american we all should become.. maybe life would be better here
Posted Mon, Oct 10, 7:59 a.m. Inappropriate
And that's the key realization missing from so many modern assessments of historical figures. Even 100 years ago, the western world was a far crueler, meaner, more dangerous place than it is today. What's happened in the intervening years is called progress.
Posted Mon, Oct 10, 10:30 a.m. Inappropriate
Lets also not forget that the Basque's were fishing off the Grand Banks of Nova Scotia in the 1200's feeding Mid-evil Europe salted Cod, but keeping pretty mum on where they were catching those fish. And that Columbus had a pretty good idea that there was a large land mass right where he was headed to "discover."
Posted Mon, Oct 10, 10:53 a.m. Inappropriate
Columbus didn't introduce genocide, slavery and warfare to the New World. Those things were already here. What Columbus introduced was the technology to make those things far deadlier to the indigenous people than they had ever experienced. And he also introduced the groundwork for the political structures that now exist that have eliminated the practice of slavery, raids, human sacrifice and genocide for the first time in the history of humans in the Americas. It's been a while since there was a Haida raid on Neah Bay.
Columbus didn't stumble across a land with innocent child-like natives living in perfect harmony with nature. The people that lived here already had political structures and alliances and enemies, and they welcomed the new arrivals as potential allies against their long-standing enemies. (Nathaniel Philbrick's "Mayflower" points out that Squanto didn't befriend the Pilgrims because he was a friendly neighbor, but because he needed a strong ally to keep his tribe from utterly destroyed by their ancient enemies.) Explorers were often warned about the untrustworthy, bloody reputation of other groups by those who they first met, such as the Nootka trying to scare Captain Cook by telling them that their enemies were cannibals and liars. They wanted the European explorers for themselves because they saw the technology and they knew that they could become wealthier and more powerful than their ancient enemies.
It isn't fair to blame Columbus for the actions of the US or Canadian governments in the 19th Century. Columbus opened the door, but there was no way that he could have closed it again once it was apparent how much wealth and power the New World could bring to the old.
Posted Mon, Oct 10, 9:53 p.m. Inappropriate
Interesting that priests criticized Columbus, considering how they treated Mesoamericans. Depressing that we talk about the progress we've made since then, considering that we kept slaves 150 years ago and what we've done very recently in Abu Ghraib and are still doing in many countries in the world.
Posted Mon, Oct 17, 10:59 a.m. Inappropriate
Since we are on the subject of sins, JFK, Martin Luther King, Bill Clinton had plenty to write book about... but they get statues, books and concerts with out the pathetic finger pointing...
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