Useful Notes / Christopher Columbus

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Christopher Columbus (Italian: Cristoforo Colombo, Spanish: Cristóbal Colón, Portuguese: Cristóvão Colombo, French: Christophe Colomb; late 1451 — 20 May 1506) is a famous historical figure, known as the sailor who wanted to find an easier trade route from Europe to Asia (NOT to prove the Earth was round, which is a common misconception) only to discover The Americas during his travels.

As you probably know, he was not the first European to discover the Americas ^note The credit goes to Leif Erikson and the Vikings some 500 years before Columbus. Ultimately their settlements at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland (Canada) failed and were largely forgotten until more recent times., but it was his efforts that led directly to the the Colombian Exchange, through which European exploration and colonization shaped the Western Hemisphere, and with it the entire world, into its current form. An inestimable boon for the nations of Europe, though considerably less advantageous for the American indigenous natives.^note Albeit mostly for reasons not intended by anybody - it's estimated that up to an apocalyptic 90% of the pre-Columbian American Natives were wiped out by diseases unwittingly brought by Europeans, against which the Native populations had no antibodies due to animal domestication never reaching the scale it did in Europe, Asia and Africa, where it exposed human populations to more pathogens that would build up their immune systems. In an era before germ theory nobody could have thought of this, and the results would have been the same if an African or Asian made the trip instead of a European.

On his most famous voyage, the 1492 transatlantic trip in the ships Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria,^note These were not the actual names of Niña and Pinta, but the crew's nicknames. Spanish ships at the time were generally named for saints, and Niña's real name was Santa Clara. Pinta's real name has been forgotten by history, but the nickname is short for "la Pintada" (literally "the painted one" but in context "the prostitute"). he was searching for a route to "India", which at the time meant Asia—specifically, he was hoping to find Japan. Another common misconception is that he went to his grave assuming that he had reached Asia as intended, when the reality is more complicated: When he finally reached land, all he could tell was actually that the natives he met were neither Japanese nor Chinese, and so he was at a loss to figure out where he really was. However, his assumption was that he landed on some previously-unknown part of Asia, so he referred to the natives generically as "Indians", and the island chain as the "East Indies". (Today, we've corrected this second mistake, and refer to these islands as the West Indies.) On his third voyage, in 1498, he did realize he'd found a hitherto-unknown continent (South America), but the most accurate way to sum it up is that he never learned that he hadn't come close to reaching Asia. And it's easy to laugh at him for being such an idiot that he thought he was in "India", but the maps of Asia Europeans had at the time were laughably inaccurate◊, so the man had to work with what he could get.

Nobody today is sure what he looked like; the picture here, painted after his death by someone who never met him, shouldn't be taken as fact. For one, he had auburn hair in his youth which would have turned white by the time he was the age depicted.^note Some portraits◊ do take the white hair into account, not that they are necessarily more accurate.

Columbus was born in late 1451 (scholars peg it down to between August and October). He was born in Genoa, which was a maritime republic. His father was a middle class weaver who also sold cheese, but his brother worked in a cartography workshop. In 1473, he began his apprenticeship as a sailor for a merchant family. He sailed to the Genoese colony of Chios. After that in 1476, he was a sailor in an armed convoy sailing from Genoa to Bristol, England. After that, he might have even sailed to Iceland in 1477. In the fall of 1477 he sailed to Libson, Portugal. There, he met up with his brother and based himself there. He married and had children. Between 1482 and 1487, Columbus sailed along the west African coast to the Portuguese colony of Elmina. His wife died, and he started dating a twenty year old orphan. He taught himself Latin, Castilian, and Portuguese, and he read up on astronomy and on the travels of Marco Polo and John Manderville.

He and his brother Bartholomew together conceived of an "enterprise of the Indies", a way to sail directly to the Orient without having to go through the Turkish-controlled land route or the very long route beyond Africa. Columbus argued that the world was smaller than what common scholarship held, and that Japan was very, very far east of China, which was in turn very, very far east of where it actually was. He believed the world was smaller than it was because while he was sailing in the Portuguese Canary Islands, he would often hear rumors of driftwood floating over from west. So while he was right in assuming something was close by, he was wrong in thinking it was Asia. He was right on one more count though, that the "Easterly" winds off the coast of Africa could propel a sailing ship a great distance in relatively little time.

He went to Portugal in 1485 and presented his plan, along with a demand that he be made "Great Admiral of the Ocean", appointed governor of any lands he discovered, and received 10% of revenue derived from anything he found. The Portuguese flatly rejected his proposal, and the English simultaneously rejected a similar proposal made by his brother. Then Columbus went to the Spanish, who held a similar opinion but decided to keep him around by paying him not to go anywhere else. This was in 1489.

In 1492, hurting for cash after conquering the last Muslim stronghold in Spain, Granada, The Catholic Monarchs of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella, decided to give him what he wanted (although Isabella initially turned him down). Most likely, Ferdinand didn't think he'd come back. However, Columbus was an experienced sailor and was fully aware that the trade winds could carry across the Atlantic with ease. While many would say that Columbus just got lucky, in actuality his feat was impressive. He had to sail in open waters for over a month (longer than anyone else in history up to that point) and had to quell his mutinous sailors who knew less about geography and were afraid they were too far out from land. Eventually, against the odds, they reached land. He landed first in the Bahamas, and the natives he met there were peaceful.

And here is where things get seriously controversial and disputed.

Columbus was famously self-promoting, confident, and arrogant, as well as a gifted sailor. However, much of the true nature of his personality and actions are unknown and subject to one of the greatest disputes in biographical history, made all the worse by both how heavily freighted he and his name have become with wider events, and also the fact that most of what we hear of him comes from the politicized reports of warring factions headed by himself and his rivals both in the colony and the Castilian Court with obvious agendas to push portraying themselves as the truest, goodest, most Christian servants of the Queen and their enemies as responsible for almost everything wrong. In general the cleavages seem to focus on how well or badly he treated the Amerindians, and how well or badly he treated his fellow expedition members. This was made worse by how the different Amerindians were often at each others' throats (with the Carib in particular being utterly hated and feared by their neighbors as a warlike and cannibalistic people and this being one of the points of commonality among the accounts), and how whoever was commander of the expedition would logically have the duty and authority to either punish Amerindians for attacking or mistreating the Queen's Men, or punish their subordinates for mistreating the Amerindians or each other. The result was a high tension situation under military law and half a world away from any sort of higher authority on the borders of a violent and (to the Europeans) mysterious region, all creating a situation rife for tension and conflict.

This problem would fester for years, but all sources agree that after returning to Spain, Columbus was given 1500 men and 14 ships, and sent back to set up a colony. However, not all natives were Noble Savages, and the measures Columbus and his brother Bartholomew had to take to survive against hostile tribes soon extended to a regime where enslaving and brutalizing natives became too usual, even although Queen Isabella had explicitly forbidden this and ordered to treat the indigenous as full-fledged vassals. Who exactly is responsible for what and how much became a subject of controversy even at the time, with accusations of atrocities towards the Amerindians and members of the Spanish expedition being a weapon used by the Columbuses and their political rivals to smear one another as tyrants, corrupt, or even satanic. From what little we can determine it seems that Columbus was a hard warlord who was not shy of using execution, torture, and slavery against his enemies, but he seems to have been remarkably unprejudiced (describing the Taino and many other Amerindians other than the Carib in glowing terms and saying they were "good servants" (of God and their rulers, not as slaves, as malicious translations or fabrications often interject) and interested in a lasting alliance with many of the locals against the Carib and Spain's other enemies. He engaged in enslavement and helped introduce the hellish conditions of forced labor popular in the Iberian colonies off the West African coast to the Caribbean, but claimed it went too far and at least made a show of alleging sexual slavery was the product of a group of mutineers against his authority who he stated were "unworthy of being baptized." However, whatever the reality was Isabella got a steady stream of hearsay reports from the Caribbean from the Columbuses and their enemies alleging mutiny, insubordination, tyranny, and murder. Eventually Isabella ordered the reinforcements to sort the problem out, and the reinforcements interpreted this (in alliance with Columbus's enemies) to arrest the Columbus camp, replacing him as governor with de Bobadilla (who de las Casas and many others argue was unquestionably worse). What followed was a complicated game of political maneuvering and hearsay as the different factions tried to justify their accounts of their own actions, shift blame onto their rivals, and argue for or against punishment. In the end Columbus was released and his property was returned to him, he did not get his governorship back and basically fell out of grace in Spain.

Over time, through money and favors, Columbus managed to restore a bit of his reputation and got funds to explore a bit more, landing in Venezuela and sailing along the Panama coast in search of a strait from which he could dial to Asia, but found none.^note You probably know that the Panama Canal was man-made and opened in the early 20th century, four centuries after Columbus. Bypassing Panama as a trade option instead of having to circumnavigate the entire South America was only viable to the Spaniards after the Spanish Conquest of the Aztec Empire in 1521, when they achieved control of both the Atlantic and the Pacific coasts of Central America. This would be the fourth and last of his travels.

Many historians have credited Columbus for the European colonization of the Americas, which involves many Europeans battling each other for colonies and land in the New World, looting and destroying many tribes for gold and valuable resources, massacres of populations to take their land, and forced destruction of native cultures. Most Indian victims, however were claimed by the European diseases, which their immune systems could not handle. Although obviously, how the Europeans approached the New World and the Native American tribes varied.^note The Spanish and the Portuguese ruled over and intermixed with the natives; meanwhile, the French and Dutch were less interested in taking control of the natives lands and more establishing lucrative trading relationships with them. The English were mostly fleeing from political persecutions in their home country, and intentionally separated themselves from neighboring native tribes. It should be noted that, although Columbus was ironically much more brutal than many of the Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors that came after, he was also much less brutal than many others, with much of his controversy seems to have been how repressive he was to his own men and the Caribs both for personal power and out of concern for his local allies. Moreover, most of the atrocities of any empire happened well after Columbus arrived and died, so people blaming them all on him might not be entirely fair. For much of the 20th century, Columbus Day was a popular holiday celebrated in many New World countries on October 12th, though as modern sensibilities bring more light to the dark sides of both Columbus the man and the expeditions he headed - as well as the enduring controversy of just how honorable or oppressive he was - , the tradition has begun to be downplayed (in some parts the United States, it's taken on the new name of Indigenous People's Day, for obvious reasons).

Columbus's descendants hold the Spanish noble title Duke of Veragua, and the hereditary title of "Admiral of the Ocean Sea". Both the current Duke and his father were named Cristobal Colon (Christopher Columbus) and the father was actually a naval officer, which means he was an Admiral even when he was a Lieutenant. (And by the way this list of descendants does not include movie director Chris Columbus.)

As for his legacy, several things in the new world were named for him, including the Republic of Colombia, The District of Columbia (no relation to the Republic), the Territory of Columbia (no relation to the District) which later became the state of Washington (no relation to the city located in the District), British Columbia (the westernmost province of Canada, situated between the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains), the cities of Columbus in Ohio and Columbia in South Carolina (each the capital of their respective states), and Columbia, the Anthropomorphic Personification of the United States of America (before she was overshadowed by Uncle Sam). Pre-Columbian Civilizations refers to American indigenous cultures before the European conquests starting at the tail end of the fifteenth century with him, as he was the first of that era to venture westwards. Ironically, he did not get to name the whole America, this honor belonging, possibly unknowingly so, to his associate Amerigo Vespucci.

Columbus in fiction: