TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/100791/1007601.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 10.6 KB | 217 lines

                                                                                HISTORY, Page 58

Just Who Was That Man?


No one is sure what Columbus looked like, but enough is known
about him that the dispute over his legacy should not obscure
his real accomplishments

By ROBERT HUGHES -- With reporting by Cathy Booth/Miami


    Has the 500th anniversary of the first voyage of
Christopher Columbus added to the primary evidence about him --
what he did, how he thought, what kind of man he was? Not by
much.

    No new letters to or by Columbus have been found. Neither
have traces of any wrecked ships from his four voyages, though
newly found documents in Seville have cast some light on the
rigging and fitting of the little Nina.

    In 1492 Columbus left 39 men from the crew of the wrecked
Santa Maria to fend for themselves at La Navidad in Haiti. When
he came back for them on his second voyage, they had all been
killed by the Lucayo tribesmen. Archaeologists at this first
Spanish settlement in the Americas have dug out some shards of
Venetian glass and the bones of a 15th century pig. At Isabela
in the Dominican Republic, where Columbus founded Spain's first
colony on his second voyage in 1493, some evidence is turning
up about the layout of the town, its artifacts (including a
crucifix, possibly the first in the New World) and the
colonists' interaction with the natives.

    But to expect dramatic discoveries to appear on cue for
1992 is unrealistic. The Holy Grail of Columbus studies would
be the long-lost original log of his first voyage to what he
called "the Indies," which exists only in a badly garbled
abridgment made after his death by the Spanish priest Bartolome
de las Casas. Las Casas, who wrote voluminously on the Spanish
colonization of the New World, was not a mariner, and his
version is filled with errors that have caused endless dispute
over such basic matters as Columbus' course on his historic sail
and where his little fleet made landfall. Candidates for this
honor include San Salvador, Grand Turk, East Caicos, Semana Cay,
Conception Island and half a dozen others. In these, as in a
myriad other matters, we still don't know enough about Columbus
and never will.

    In part, the celebration of 1992 will have done its job if
it erases a number of the apocrypha patched onto the figure of
the Discoverer, as the 19th century called him. Some are
obviously false, such as the tenacious story that Queen Isabella
sold her jewels to pay for his first voyage, or that the Santa
Maria was crewed by convicts, or that Columbus was trying to
prove the world was round. (No educated person in the late 15th
century, and no mariner either, believed otherwise.)

    The 500th anniversary may also force a new awareness in
school curriculums of the immense role played by Spaniards in
early colonial America. Up to now they have been all but shunted
out of view behind the screen of Anglo founder-images (the
Pilgrim Fathers, Raleigh in Virginia). This can do good, not
because it may pump up the "self-esteem" of Hispanic
schoolchildren (the purpose of history is not to make people
feel better), but because it accords with a large truth
shrouded, at present, in omissions and lies. Columbus himself
has been presented as Castilian, Catalan, Corsican, Majorcan,
Portuguese, French, English, Greek and even Armenian. He was,
in fact, Italian: born in Genoa in 1451, the son of a weaver.

    Columbus' sense of his humble origins was crucial. He was
determined to transcend them; his means would be navigation. At
first he wanted to succeed through trade. Sea trade was the
lifeblood of Genova la superba, proud Genoa. As a merchant
navigator, Columbus sailed all over the Mediterranean, to the
Guinea coast of Africa and as far north as Ireland. He may have
gone as far as Iceland too. Sometime between 1478 and 1484, the
full plan of self-aggrandizement and discovery took shape in his
mind. He would win glory, riches and a title of nobility by
opening a trade route to the untapped wealth of the Orient. No
reward could be too great for the man who did that.

    This drive is one of the few attributes of Columbus that
all the surviving sources agree on. It was clear to the crew of
the Santa Maria as the little fleet was pitching and rolling
west in 1492, with no land yet in sight and mutiny brewing.
According to Las Casas' account, some of the men argued that "it
was great madness and self-inflicted manslaughter to risk their
lives to further the mad schemes of a foreigner who was ready
to die in the hope of making a great lord of himself." They
planned to pitch him overboard at night as he fiddled with his
quadrant, trying to take a reading of the polestar.

    No authentic portrait of Columbus done from life exists,
but there are verbal descriptions: tall, a long face, ruddy
skin, reddish hair that turned white in middle age. Adopting
Spain as his homeland in 1484, Columbus was never to use Italian
in his writings. But he soon became bookworm enough to be seen
as an amateur geographer as well as a mariner, and to
accumulate a large library. Alas, only four of these volumes
survive with his annotations.

    Though Columbus was already a first-rate practical sailor,
his idea of the unexplored Atlantic was formed as much by books
as by navigation: writings of the ancients (Pliny, Strabo and
especially Ptolemy), medieval cosmographers, collections of
"marvels." These gave him a framework in which to sell his
plans to patrons: his letters to Ferdinand and Isabella, King
and Queen of Spain, begging their patronage for the "Enterprise
of the Indies," are full of appeals to the authority of older
writers.

    On what? On the belief that one could reach China and
"Cipangu" (Japan) by sailing west. No European ship had reached
the Orient by sailing east around the bottom of Africa yet,
either. But Columbus was convinced that the westward passage
would be shorter and easier. The enterprise of the Indies had
nothing to do with discovering America, or even with any
suspicion that America existed. Columbus was looking for China
and Japan, and long after reaching the Caribbean he remained
convinced, against any and all evidence, that he had done so.

    Columbus was in fact a very rigid man, and his
inflexibility combined with piety and opportunism to produce
behavior not far from paranoid. His growing ambition encouraged
the belief, typical of obsessed loners, that everyone except God
was against him. He was so certain that his enterprise of the
Indies was a fulfillment of God's designs that he even greeted
the wreck of the Santa Maria as a sign of divine approbation.
He had an apocalyptic turn of mind.

    Columbus could be extremely petty, as when he claimed for
himself the prize money he had promised to the first crewman to
sight westward land. His reports to the crown were absurdly
self-serving, especially those composed after the first voyage,
which are a tissue of hustling lies about "incredible amounts"
of gold and spices -- which, however, got him 17 ships for the
second voyage. His fixations often skewed his charting, so that
Columbus mistook islands for continental coasts and thus claimed
to have found what he had not.

    But lies and self-delusion, inflated claims, greed and
chart errors were the common currency of exploration. Columbus'
mistakes, for instance, were no worse than those of the 16th
century navigators who blundered out into the Pacific in search
of gold and terra australis, the antipodal continent. And unlike
others, Columbus got across the Atlantic and found something --
not Asia, but something -- in the West.

    The current prejudice against the word discovery, in the
context of Columbus' efforts, is interesting. There has never
been a shortage of claims and hypotheses about alternative
"discoveries" of America. It seems quite certain that the first
Europeans to reach the mainland of North America (which Columbus
never did: the closest he got to it was Venezuela) were the
Vikings, who created a short-lived settlement in Newfoundland
around the year 1000.

    One need not pay too much attention to other candidates.
Irish legend has it that St. Brendan and some monks reached the
New World in a coracle, and one particularly choice theory
holds that a Cherokee inscription in a burial mound at Bat Creek
in Tennessee, found in 1889, was actually in Hebrew, left by
Jewish refugees fleeing Roman persecution in the 2nd century.
Others hold out for Japanese fishermen blown off across the
Pacific in 3000 B.C., and (most recently) an unknown Spanish
mariner who supposedly reached the Bahamas in the 15th century,
struggled back across the Atlantic and entrusted his map and
logs to Columbus, who concealed his knowledge of them to reap
the glory of discovery for himself. But then, why leave out the
extraterrestrial beings who landed in Peru to create the vast
Nazca earth drawings?

    The point about discovery is not that someone floats
ashore somewhere, by accident, leaving no traces. The American
continental coast from Tierra del Fuego to the Aleutians in the
west and Baffin Bay on the east coast is such a vast catchment
area for the globe's wind and water currents that it is
inconceivable that non-native people should not have fetched up
there before Columbus. But the essence of discovery is that the
voyage is repeatable. It entails documentation -- logs and
records. The discoverer is the person who gets from known A to
unknown B, returns to A, and can then get back to B again.
Columbus' claim to be a discoverer is, admittedly, a function
of European consciousness. It exists only in a European cultural
frame -- the native cultures and civilizations of America knew
very well where they were. But this does not make it unreal. The
achievement of Columbus' first voyage in 1492 was to open a
route to the New World that could be sailed again, by himself
and others, over and over -- and was.

    In this sense, he united the Western and Eastern
hemispheres of the world across the Atlantic. No man had done
so before. Our traditional reverence for his feat is Eurocentric
in essence; as the world's focus shifts toward the Pacific, the
ocean of the future, Ferdinand Magellan and Captain James Cook
-- the latter being a better candidate for the greatest mariner
and "encounterer" in human history -- may assume the same
dimensions for our descendants that Columbus had for our
immediate ancestors. But in the meantime, we should not allow
our reaction against the myth of Columbus as Renaissance
Ulysses, Romantic hero and near saint to obscure his actual
achievement.