from Columbus

The Four Voyages

Laurence Bergreen

A graduate of Harvard University, Laurence Bergreen (b. 1950) has published numerous biographies, including Over the Edge of the World: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (2003) and Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu (2007). He has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Esquire magazine and is a featured historian on the History Channel. The following excerpt is the epilogue from his best-selling biography Columbus: The Four Voyages (2011).

The drastic devaluation of Columbus seems a recent phenomenon, but it originated at the time of his voyages. The Spanish judicial investigator, Francisco de Bobadilla, sent him home in chains. King Ferdinand disdained him. Bishop Fonseca’s intense dislike for Columbus was widely known. Amerigo Vespucci fostered the impression that he, rather than Columbus, had discovered a New World, and gave his name to the continent. His former lieutenant, Alonso de Ojeda, laid claim to territories first visited by Columbus. Nicolás de Ovando, who succeeded Columbus as governor of Hispaniola, endangered his life and mocked him. The Porras brothers, Francisco Roldán, and others who sailed with Columbus staged mutinies with little or no retribution.

The most lasting damage to Columbus’s reputation came from the pen of Bartolomé de Las Casas. Arriving in Hispaniola with the new governor, Nicolás de Ovando, in 1502, Las Casas began as a slave owner. In 1510, he became the first priest to be ordained in the Americas, often called the “Apostle to the Indians.” In his influential jeremiad, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias), written in 1542, he laid out the torture and genocidal practices of the Spanish colonialists who followed Columbus.

Las Casas championed the nearly extinct victims of this outrage—“the simplest people in the world,” he wrote of the Taíno Indians, “long suffering, unassertive, and submissive,…without malice or guile, utterly faithful and obedient”—in short, the kind of subjects the Spanish crown would want to have. Yet instead of cultivating these gentle and intelligent people, “we know for sure our fellow-countrymen have, through their cruelty and wickedness, depopulated and laid waste an area which boasted more than ten kingdoms, each of them larger than the Iberian Peninsula.” They slaughtered their children, “on occasion running through a mother and her baby with a single thrust of their swords.” The Spaniards were even more brutal with the Indians’ leaders, whom they lashed to a “griddle consisting of sticks resting on pitchforks driven into the ground and then grill[ed] them over a slow fire, with the result that they howled in agony and despair as they died a lingering death.”

All this Las Casas witnessed. He estimated that “the despotic and diabolical behavior of the Christians has, over the last forty years, led to the unjust and totally unwarranted deaths of more than twelve million souls, women and children among them.” Indeed, he believed fifteen million to be a more accurate tally of deaths caused by Christians resorting to torture, wholesale slaughter, and “the harshest and most iniquitous and brutal slavery that man has ever devised for his fellow men.” Las Casas’s figures have long been debated, but even conservative estimates are stark: of 250,000 Indians under Spanish rule, only 40,000 survived after fifteen years. After a few decades, only a few hundred survived. Many died from infectious diseases caused by exposure to germs borne by the Europeans or their livestock, against which the inhabitants of the New World were defenseless.

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And the reason for this tragedy? In his words, “Purely and simply greed.”

Las Casas’s indictment found a receptive audience in Spain’s nascent rival, England, where it took root as the Spanish “Black Legend.” For centuries thereafter, Spain and the explorers who sailed under the Spanish flag were widely condemned as murderers and thieves. The shadow of the Black Legend hung over Columbus as it did over other explorers from Spain. Explorers who sailed under the Spanish flag were widely condemned as murderers and thieves who habitually resorted to inhuman extremes of cruelty. Without meaning to, Las Casas’s account served as a call to arms for Spain’s mostly Protestant rivals to save the New World from further horrors. The surviving Indians became pawns in a geopolitical struggle beyond their comprehension. Even religion offered little guidance concerning the explorers’ deeds and the acquisition of empire. Both Las Casas and Spain’s pious rulers believed God was on their side, as did England.

In 1510, eight years after arriving in Hispaniola, Las Casas became a missionary to the Taínos of Cuba. For a time he exploited Indian labor, then renounced the practice, and by 1514 declared his opposition to the Spanish Enterprise of the Indies, even while encouraging the conversion of the Indians to Christianity. In his later years, he formulated the Doctrine of Self-Determination. It stated, simply, that all power derives from the people, that the people delegate power to rulers to serve the interests of their people, and that significant government deeds require popular approval. “No state, king, or emperor can alienate territories, or change their political system without the express approval of their inhabitants,” he affirmed. Las Casas lived on until July 17, 1566, and died at age ninety-two.

Not everyone was hostile to Columbus or indifferent to his suffering and accomplishments. His loyal friend Diego Méndez always considered his desperate rescue mission in a modified canoe across the open sea to Hispaniola as his life’s great adventure. In his will, dated June 19, 1536, he directed his executors to erect a tomb made of stone—“the best to be had”—to commemorate the event. In the middle of the stone, he ordered, “let there be a canoe, which is a hollowed log in which the Indians navigate, since in one such I navigated 300 leagues, and above it let them carve merely the letters which read CANOA.”

Nowadays, Columbus the explorer is everywhere. Sculptures, monuments, and memorials of Columbus abound in public squares in Genoa, Barcelona, Madrid, Mexico City, Seville, and in cities throughout the Caribbean and the Americas. From street level these statues reveal themselves by turns as heroic, grotesque, and fearsome; they portray a gargoyle of conquest. Rivers, cities, towns, thoroughfares, and the nation of Colombia have been named in his honor.

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In the United States especially, his example and his voyages answered an unceasing need for self-definition and identity. Beginning in the eighteenth century, his name was given to the capital of South Carolina, the capital of Ohio, and the mighty Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest. Through an act of Congress in 1871, the site of the nation’s capital was named the District of Columbia. New York City has Columbia University, Columbus Circle, and Columbus Avenue.

His marble statue sits atop a seventy-foot granite column rising above Columbus Circle. Designed by Gaetano Russo in 1892, the monument’s marble base proclaims:

Columbus held up a mirror to the Old World, revealing and magnifying its inhumanity and greed along with its piety, curiosity, and exuberance. Columbus’s voyages revealed many harsh truths about the limits of human understanding, but it is too late to undo the consequences of these voyages. Their crimson thread is now woven deeply into the fabric of European and global history.

For all the scorn Columbus engendered, his four voyages constitute one of the greatest adventure stories in history. Although he was not the first explorer to glimpse or visit the distant shores of the Americas, his was the discovery that permanently planted the reality of the New World in the imagination—and political schemes—of the Old. Columbus forever changed the idea of what a European empire could be. He had the vision—and, at times, the delusion—to imagine, and to persuade himself and others that he had found something immense, important, and lasting.

For all their accomplishments and liabilities, Columbus’s voyages were just the beginning, setting in motion consequences—political, cultural, and scientific—that persist to this day. In its complexity and powerful contradictions, his example speaks more urgently than ever to our contentious era.

(2011)