Columbus, Christopher (1451-1506)

American Eras

Christopher Columbus (1451-1506)

Explorer

Sources

Judging the Man. The quincentennial, or 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in America in 1992, raised many new questions about the man. Once nearly universally regarded as a hero, Columbus today also conjures up brutality, violence, and the destruction of Native Americans and their culture. However, rather than rushing to judgment one way or another, we need to consider him in the context of his times.

Background. For a long time historians believed that Columbus was the son of a poor Genoese weaver and that before going to sea he had been a trader of African slaves in Spain. His marriage to the daughter of a prominent Lisbon merchant gave him many connections to the royal court. More recently other scholars have argued that Columbus was too prominent to have come from such humble beginnings.

Gold and Christianity. Part of Columbus’s desire to explore was to bring Christianity to the world’s peoples. He firmly believed, inspired by the prophecies in the Book of Isaiah, that the second coming of Christ would not be realized until every last individual was converted to Christianity. One of Columbus’s goals was to personally deliver the Christian message. Ultimately he strove to bring enough gold back from his voyage to finance the final Crusade, the one that would achieve the Christianization of the whole world. Queen Isabella was convinced by Columbus’s reasoning, and even though the Spanish Crown was impoverished, she agreed to fund his first voyage. Of course, gaining wealth, power, and fame was also a part of Columbus’s agenda.

First Voyage. Seven weeks after going to sea in three small boats with a crew of about ninety men, Columbus landed in the Bahamas on 12 October 1492. He promptly erected two banners of the Green Cross, one each for Ferdinand and Isabella. He named the land San Salvador, or “Holy Savior.” The Indies were, to him, paradise, and he spent the next ten weeks exploring the Caribbean, including parts of present-day Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. Columbus returned with spices, slaves, and a small amount of gold. On his return voyage he authored a pamphlet extolling the lands he had found. They were, he exclaimed, filled with amiable natives and vast riches.

Second Voyage. Columbus returned to the New World for a second time in 1494. This second voyage witnessed not the conversion of the Native Americans as much as, in the words of one historian, “the true beginning of the invasion of the Americas.” An epidemic hit many of Columbus’s crew, and the Grand Admiral of the Ocean Sea also fell ill for months. As he lay sick, despite his personal promise to Ferdinand and Isabella not to be violent toward the natives, many of his soldiers used the opportunity not to proselytize but to wander freely, abusing and killing as many as fifty thousand Native Americans. Violence and murder were a part of Spanish culture; fifteenth-century Spain was a brutal place in which the questioning of heretics—and swift, severe punishment if they were found guilty but did not confess—famine, and disease were parts of normal life. However, Columbus’s men no doubt felt justified in their marauding by the fact that their victims were not Christians but “beasts.”

Book of Prophecies. Toward the end of his life, in 1500, after returning from his third voyage, Columbus composed the Book of Prophecies. This collection of thoughts, commentary, and biblical passages was an appeal to the Spanish monarchy to regain Jerusalem from Muslim control and affirmed that recovering the Holy City and finding and converting the native peoples he had discovered would lead to the second coming of Christ. Columbus placed himself squarely in this holy history which intended to show the schema of the salvation of the human race. Columbus was certain, he wrote Ferdinand and Isabella in 1503 from Jamaica, that Jerusalem would be rebuilt by a Christian and that “this person would come from Spain.” He appealed to the monarchs to continue to support his voyages to enable him to find more gold and thus be able to liberate the Holy City.

Legacy. In considering Columbus’s legacy, we must also consider that he acted in the name of religion. He believed he was directed by divine guidance on all of his voyages. To Columbus, religion and the less-than-benevolent treatment of the Native Americans were not necessarily mutually exclusive. If such brutality led to greater riches for Spain, it could use this wealth to effect more conversions, according to his thinking.

Sources

Roberto Rusconi, ed., The Book of Prophecies edited by Christopher Columbus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997);

Margarita Zamora, Reading Columbus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

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