Christopher Columbus (1440-1506)

Hitherto we have proceeded upon the assumption that Columbus was a real historical person. It is one of the limitations of biography that the writer must always assume the existence of the subject of his sketch. There are, however, grave reasons for doubting whether Christopher Columbus ever lived. There is the matter of his birthplace. Is it credible that he was born in seven distinct places? Nobody claims that George Washington was born in all our prominent cities, or that Robinson Crusoe, who was perhaps the most absolutely real person to be found in the whole range of biography, was born anywhere except at York. Can we believe that the whole of Columbus was simultaneously buried in two different West Indian cities? If we can accept any such alleged fact as this, we can no longer pretend that one of the two Italian cities which boast the possession of the head of John the Baptist is the victim of misplaced confidence.

And then the character of Columbus as portrayed by his admiring biographers is quite incredible, and his alleged treatment by the King and Queen whom he served is to the last degree improbable. The story of Columbus is without doubt an interesting and even fascinating one; but can we, as fearless and honest philosophers, believe in the reality of that sweet Genoese vision—the heroic and noble discoverer of the New World?

There are strong reasons for believing that the legend of Christopher Columbus is simply a form of the Sun myth. We find the story in the Italian, Spanish, and English languages, which shows, not that Colombo, Colon, and Columbus ever lived, breathed, ate dinner, and went to bed, but that the myth is widely spread among the Indo-Germanic races. Columbus is said to have sailed from the east to the west, and to have disappeared for a time beyond the western horizon, only to be found again in Spain, whence he had originally sailed. Even in Spain, he was said to have had his birthplace in some vague locality farther east, and to have reached Spain only when near his maturity.

This is a beautiful allegorical description of the course of the sun as it would appear to an unlearned and imaginative Spaniard. He would see the sun rising in the distant east, warming Spain with his mature and noonday rays, setting beyond the western horizon in the waters of the Atlantic, and again returning to Spain to begin another voyage, or course, through the heavens. The clouds which at times obscure the sun are vividly represented by the misfortunes which darkened the career of Columbus, and his imprisonment in chains by Bobadilla is but an allegorical method of describing a solar eclipse. The colonists who died of fever under his rule, like the Greeks who fell under the darts of the Sun God, remind us of the unwholesome effects produced by the rays of a tropical sun upon decaying vegetation; and the story that Columbus was buried in different places illustrates the fact that the apparent place of sunset changes at different points of the year.

There is very much to be said in favor of the theory that Columbus is a personification of the Sun, but that theory cannot be accepted either by a biographer or by any patriotic American. The one would have to put his biography of the Great Admiral in the fire, and the other would lose all certainty as to whether America had ever been discovered. We must resolve to believe in the reality of Columbus, no matter what learned sceptics may tell us; and we shall find no difficulty in so doing if we found our belief on a good strong prejudice instead of reasonable arguments.

Let us then permit no man to destroy our faith in Christopher Columbus. We can find fault with him if we choose; we can refuse to accept Smith’s or Brown’s or Jones’s respective estimates of his character and deeds: but let us never doubt that Columbus was a real Italian explorer; that he served an amiable Spanish Queen and a miserable Spanish King; and that he sailed across a virgin ocean to discover a virgin continent.

There prevails to a very large extent the impression that the voyages of Columbus prove that he was a wonderfully skilful navigator, and it is also commonly believed that the compass and the astrolabe were providentially invented expressly in order to assist him in discovering America. There was, of course, a certain amount of practical seamanship displayed in keeping the Santa Maria and her successors from being swamped by the waves of the Atlantic; but it may be safely asserted that only a very slight knowledge of navigation was either exhibited or needed by Columbus. The ships of the period could do nothing except with a fair wind. When the wind was contrary they drifted slowly to leeward, and when the wind was fair a small-boy with a knowledge of the elements of steering could have kept any one of them on her course. The compass was a handy thing to have on board a ship, since it gave to the sailors the comfortable feeling which an ignorant man always has in the presence of any piece of mechanism which he fancies is of assistance to him; but for all practical purposes the sun and the stars were as useful to Columbus as was his compass with its unintelligible freaks of variation. So, too, the astrolabe must have impressed the sailors as a sort of powerful and beneficent fetish, but the log-book of Columbus would have testified that the astrolabe was more ornamental than useful.

The system of navigation followed by Columbus was to steer as nearly west as practicable on the way to America, and to steer as nearly east as possible on his way back to Spain. In the one case he would be sure to hit some part of the New World if he sailed long enough, and in the other case persistent sailing would be sure to bring him within sight of either Europe or Africa. In neither case could he so far overrun his reckoning as to arrive unexpectedly at some point in the interior of a continent. The facts prove that this was precisely the way in which Columbus navigated his ship. When steering for America he never knew where he would find land, and was satisfied if he reached any one of the countless large and small West India islands; and on returning to Spain there was as much probability that he would find himself at the Azores or at the mouth of the Tagus as at any Spanish port.

The truth is, that neither the seamanship of Columbus nor the invention of the compass or the astrolabe made his first voyage successful. Probably any one of the thousands of contemporary Italian sailors could have found the West Indies as easily as Columbus found them, provided the hypothetical sailor had possessed sufficient resolution to sail westward until the land should stop his way. What we should properly be called upon to admire in Columbus as a navigator of unknown seas is the obstinacy with which he adhered to his purpose of sailing due west until land should be found, no matter if it should take all summer. It was an obstinacy akin to that with which our great Union General fought his last campaign. Such obstinacy will sometimes accomplish greater results than the most skilful navigator or the profoundest strategist could accomplish. Had the man who discovered our country or the man who saved it been less obstinate, American history would have been widely different from what it has been.

As the astrolabe has been mentioned several times in the course of this narrative, it may be well to describe it, especially as it is now obsolete. It was an instrument of considerable size, made of some convenient material—usually either metal or wood, or both—and fitted with various contrivances for the purpose of observing the heavenly bodies. When a navigator took an observation with the astrolabe he immediately went below and “worked it up” with the help of a slate and pencil, and in accordance with the rules of arithmetic and algebra. The result was a series of figures which greatly surprised him, and which he interpreted according to the humor in which he happened to find himself. A skilful navigator who could guess his latitude with comparative accuracy generally found that an observation taken with the astrolabe would give him a result not differing more than eighty or ninety degrees from the latitude in which he had previously imagined his ship to be, and if he was an ingenious man he could often find some way of reconciling his observation with his guesses. Thus the astrolabe gave him employment and exercised his imagination, and was a great blessing to the lonesome and careworn mariner.

It is our solemn duty, as Americans, to take a warm interest in Christopher Columbus, for the reason that he had the good taste and judgment to discover our beloved country. Efforts have frequently been made to deprive him of that honor. It has been urged that he was not the first man who crossed the Atlantic, that he never saw the continent of North America, and that he was not the original discoverer of South America. Most of this is undoubtedly true. It is now generally conceded the Norwegians landed on the coast of New England about six hundred years before Columbus was born; that Americus Vespuccius was the first European to discover the South American continent; that Sebastian Cabot rediscovered North America after the Norwegians had forgotten all about it; and that Columbus never saw any part of what is now the United States of America. For all that, Columbus is properly entitled to be called the discoverer of the New World, including the New England, Middle, Gulf, Western, and Pacific States. Who invented steamboats? And who invented the magnetic telegraph? Every patriotic American echo will answer, “Fulton and Morse.” There were nevertheless at least four distinct men who moved vessels by machinery driven by steam before Fulton built his steamboat, and nearly twice that number of men had sent messages over a wire by means of electricity before Morse invented the telegraph. The trouble with the steamboats invented by the pre-Fultonians, and the telegraphs invented by the predecessors of Morse, was that their inventions did not stay invented. Their steamboats and telegraphs were forgotten almost as soon as they were devised; but Fulton and Morse invented their steamboats and telegraphs so thoroughly that they have stayed invented ever since.

Now, the Norwegians discovered America in such an unsatisfactory way that the discovery came to nothing. They did not keep it discovered. They came and looked at New England, and, deciding that they had no use for it, went home and forgot all about it. Columbus, who knew nothing of the forgotten voyage of the Norwegians, discovered the West India islands and the route across the Atlantic in such a workmanlike and efficient way that his discoveries became permanent. He was the first man to show people the way to San Domingo and Cuba, and after he had done this it was an easy thing for other explorers to discover the mainland of North and South America. He thus discovered the United States as truly as Fulton discovered the way to drive the City of Rome from New York to Liverpool, or Morse discovered the method of sending telegrams over the Atlantic cable.

We need not be in the least disturbed by the learned men who periodically demonstrate that Leif Ericson, as they familiarly call him, was the true discoverer of our country. We need never change “Hail Columbia” into “Hail Ericsonia,” and there is not the least danger Columbia College will ever be known as Leifia University. We can cheerfully admit that Leif Ericson—or, to give him what was probably his full name, Eliphalet B. Ericson—and his Norwegians landed somewhere in New England, and we can even forgive the prompt way in which they forgot all about it, by assuming that they landed on Sunday or on a fast-day, and were so disheartened that they never wanted to hear the subject spoken of again. We can grant all this, and still cherish the memory of Columbus as the true and only successful discoverer of America.

Most biographers have written of Columbus in much the same way that a modern campaign biographer writes the life of the Presidential candidate from whom he hopes to receives an office. They forget that he was never nominated by any regular party convention, and that it is therefore wrong to assume, without any sufficient evidence, that he was the greatest and best man that ever lived. He was undoubtedly a bold sailor, but he lived in an age when bold sailors were produced in quantities commensurate with the demands of exploration, and we cannot say that he was any bolder or better sailor than the Cabots or his own brother Bartholomew. He was certainly no braver soldier than Ojeda, and his conquests were trifling in comparison with those of Cortez and Pizarro.

As a civil ruler he was a conspicuous failure. It is true that the colonists over whom he was placed were, many of them, turbulent scoundrels; but the unanimity with which they condemned his administration, and the uniformity with which every commissioner appointed to investigate his conduct as a ruler condemned him, compel us to believe that he was not an able governor either of Spanish colonists or contiguous Indians. He was not habitually cruel, as was Pizarro, but he insisted upon enslaving the Indians for his own profit, though Queen Isabella had forbidden him to enslave them or to treat them harshly.

He could be magnanimous at times, but he would not undertake a voyage of discovery except upon terms which would ensure him money and rank, and he did not hesitate to claim for himself the reward which was offered, during his first voyage, to the man who should first see the land, and which was fairly earned by one of his sailors.

As an explorer, he failed to find a path to India, and he died under the delusion that Pekin was somewhere in Costa Rica. His first voyage across the broad Atlantic seems to us a wonderful achievement, but in either difficulty or danger it cannot be compared with Stanley’s march across the African continent. We must concede to Columbus a certain amount of boldness and perseverance, but we cannot shut our eyes to the faults of his conduct and character.

And yet Columbus was a true hero. Whatever flaws there may have been in the man, he was of a finer clay than his fellows, for he could dream dreams that their dull imaginations could not conceive. He belonged to the same land which gave birth to Garibaldi, and, like the Great Captain, the Great Admiral lived in a high, pure atmosphere of splendid visions, far removed from and above his fellow-men. The greatness of Columbus cannot be argued away. The glow of his enthusiasm kindles our own, even at the long distance of four hundred years, and his heroic figure looms grander through successive centuries.

THE END.