Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus: What Your History Books Got Wrong (6 page)

Having thus satisfied their consciences by offering the Indians a chance to convert to Christianity, the Spaniards then felt free to do whatever they wanted with the people they had just “discovered.”

A fifth development that caused Europe's reaction to Columbus's reports about Haiti to differ radically from reactions to earlier expeditions was Europe's recent success in taking over and exploiting various island societies. On Malta, Sardinia, the Canary Islands, and, later, in Ireland, Europeans learned that conquest of this sort was a route to wealth. In addition, new and more deadly forms of smallpox and bubonic plague had arisen in Europe since the Vikings had sailed. Passed on to those the Europeans met, these diseases helped Europe conquer the Americas and, later, the islands of the Pacific.' Except for one paragraph on disease in The American Pageant, not one of the twelve textbooks mentions either of these factors as contributing to European world dominance.

Why don't textbooks mention arms as a facilitator of exploration and domination? Why don't they treat any of the foregoing factors? If crude factors such as military power or religiously sanctioned greed are perceived as reflecting badly on us, who exactly is “us”? Who are the textbooks written for (and by)? Plainly, descendants of the Europeans.

High school students don't usually think about the rise of Europe to world domination. It is rarely presented as a question. It seems natural, a given, not something that needs to be explained. Deep down, our culture encourages us to imagine that we are richer and more powerful because we're smarter. Of course, there are no studies showing Americans to be more intelligent than, say, Iraqis. Still, since textbooks don't identify or encourage us to think about the real causes, “we're smarter” festers as a possibility. Also left festering is the notion that “it's natural” for one group to dominate another,15 While history brims with examples of national domination, it also is full of counterexamples. The contact between Norse and Indians around 1000 A.D., for example, though mostly unfriendly, was not marked by domination. The triracial Native American societies that developed after 1492from Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, through Florida to Ecuadoralso offer evidence that domination is not natural but cultural.

The way American history textbooks treat Columbus reinforces the tendency not to think about the process of domination. The traditional picture of Columbus landing on the American shore shows him dominating immediately, and this is based on fact; Columbus claimed everything he saw right off the boat. When textbooks celebrate this process, they imply that taking the land and dominating the Indians was inevitable if not natural. This is unfortunate, because Columbus's voyages constitute a splendid teachable moment. As official missions of a nation-state, they exemplify the new Europe. Merchants and rulers collaborated to finance and authorize them. The second expedition was heavily armed. Columbus carefully documented the voyages, including directions, currents, shoals, and descriptions of the Indians as ripe for subjugation. Thanks to the printing press, detailed news of Haiti and later conquests spread swiftly. Columbus had personal experience of the Atlantic islands recently taken over by Portugal and Spain, as well as with the slave trade in West Africa. Most important, his purpose from the beginning was not mere exploration or even trade,

but conquest and exploitation, for which he used religion as a rationale. If textbooks included these facts, they might induce students to think intelligently about why the West dominates the world today.

The textbooks concede that Columbus did not start from scratch. Every textbook account of the European exploration of the Americas begins with Prince Henry the Navigator, of Portugal, between 1415 and 1460. Henry is portrayed as discovering Madeira and the Azores and sending out ships to circumnavigate Africa for the first time. The textbook authors seem unaware that ancient Phoenicians and Egyptians sailed at least as far as Ireland and England, reached Madeira and the Azores, traded with the aboriginal inhabitants of the Canary Islands, and sailed all the way around Africa before 600 B.C. Instead, the textbooks credit Bartolomeu Dias with being the first to round the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa in 1488. Omitting the accomplishments of the AfroPhoenicians is ironic, because it was Prince Henry's knowledge of their feats that inspired him to replicate them." But this information clashes with another social archetype: our culture views modern technology as a European development. So the Afro-Phoenicians' feats do not conform to the textbooks' overall story line about how white Europeans taught the rest of the world how to do things. None of the textbooks credits the Muslims with preserving Greek wisdom, enhancing it with ideas from China, India, and Africa, and then passing on the resulting knowledge to Europe via Spain. Instead, they show Henry inventing navigation and imply that before Europe there was nothing, at least nothing modern.

In fact, Henry's work was based mostly on ideas that were known to the ancient Egyptians and Phoenicians and had been developed further in Arabia, North Africa, and China, Even the word the Portuguese applied to their new ships, caravel, derived from the Egyptian caravos.1 Cultures do not evolve in a vacuum; diffusion of ideas is perhaps the most important cause of cultural development. Contact with other cultures often triggers a cultural flowering. Anthropologists call this phenomenon efflorescence. Children in elementary school learn that Persian and Mediterranean civilizations flowered in antiquity due to their location on trade routes. Here with Henry at the dawn of European world domination, textbooks have a golden opportunity to apply this same idea of cultural diffusion to Europe, They squander it. Not only did Henry have to develop new instruments, according to The American Way, but “people didn't know how to build seagoing ships, either,”“ Students are left without a clue as to how aborigines ever reached Australia, Polynesians reached Madagascar, or Afro Phoenicians reached the Canaries. By ”people" Way means, of course, Europeansa textbook example of Eurocentrism.

These books are expressions of what the anthropologist Stephen Jett calls “the doctrine of the discovery of America by Columbus.”1“ Table 1 provides a chronological list of expeditions that may have reached the Americas before Columbus, with comments on the quality of the evidence for each as of 1994.1[ While the list is long, it is still probably incomplete. A map found in Turkey dated 1513 and said to be based on material from the library of Alexander the Great includes coastline details of South America and Antarctica. Ancient Roman coins keep turning up all over the Americas, causing some archaeologists to conclude that Roman seafarers visited the Americas more than once,22 Native Americans also crossed the Atlantic: anthropologists conjecture that Native Americans voyaged east millennia ago from Canada to Scandinavia or Scotland. Two Indians shipwrecked in Holland around 60 B.C. became major curiosities in Europe.”

The evidence for each of these journeys offers fascinating glimpses into the societies and cultures that existed on both sides of the Atlantic and in Asia before 1492, They also reveal controversies among those who study the distant past. If textbooks allowed for controversy, they could show students which claims rest on strong evidence, which on softer ground. As they challenged students to make their own decisions as to what probably happened, they would also be introducing students to the various methods and forms of evidence oral history, written records, cultural similarities, linguistic changes, human blood types, pottery, archaeological dating, plant migrationsthat researchers use to derive knowledge about the distant past. Unfortunately, textbooks seem locked into a rhetoric of certainty. James West Davidson and Mark H. Lytle, coauthors of the textbook The United StatesA History of the Republic, have also written After the Fact, a book for college history majors in which they emphasize that history is not a set of facts but a series of arguments, issues, and controversies,14 Davidson and Lytle's high school textbook, howevet, like its competitors, presents history as answers, not questions.

New evidence that emerges, as archaeologists and historians compare American cultures with cultures in Africa, Europe, and Asia, may confirm or disprove these arrivals. Keeping up with such evidence is a lot of work. To tell about earlier explorers, textbook authors would have to familiarize themselves with sources such as those cited in the three preceding footnotes. It's easier just to retell the old familiar Columbus story.

Seven of the twelve textbooks I studied at least mention the expeditions of the Norse. These daring sailors reached America in a series of voyages across the North Atlantic, establishing communities on the Faeroe Islands, Iceland, and YEAR 70,000? B.C.12.7 B.C.

6000? B.C.0? B.C.

5000? B.C.

10,000? B.C.? B.C.

9000? B.C. to present 1000 B.C.

1000 B.C. A.D,

BOOB.C.

600 A.D.

1000-1 1311?-1460?

c. 1 1375?-1491 1481-91 1 FROM SiUeria TO Alaska QUALITY OF EVIDENCE High: the survivors peopled the Americas.

Moderate: similarities in blowguns, pa per making, etc.

Moderate: similar pottery, fishing styles.

High: Navajos and Crees resemble each other culturally, differ horn other Indians.

High: continuing contact Oy Inults across Bering Sea.

Low. Chinese legend; cultural sim ilarities.

Moderate: Negroid and Caucasoid likenesses in sculpture and ceramics, Arab history, etc.

Low. megaliths, possible similarities in script and language.

Low: legends of St. Brendan, written C. 850 A.D., confirmed by Norse sagas.

High: oral sagas, conf rmed by archaeology on Newfoundland.

Moderate: Portuguese sources in West Africa, Columbus on Haiti. Balboa in Panama.

Low: inference from Portuguese sources and actions.

Low: cryptic historical sources. Low: cryptic historical sources. High: historical sources.

Table 1. Explorers of America Indonesia (or other direction)

Japan Siberia Siberia China Afro-Phoenicia Phoenicia, Celtic Britain Ireland, via Iceland Greenland, Icelard West Africa Portugal Basque Spain Bristol, England Spain Ecuador Canada. New Mexico Alaska Central America Central America New England, perhaps elsewhere Newfoundland? W eal Indies?

Labrador, Baffin Land, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, possibly Cape Coo and further south Haiti, Panama, possibly Brazil Newfoundland? Brazil?

Newfoundland coast Newfoundland coast Caribbean, including Haiti South America Greenland. The Norse colony on Greenland lasted five hundred years (982-c. 1500), as long as the European settlement of the Americas until now. From Greenland a series of expeditions, some planned, some accidental, reached various parts of North America, including Baffin Land, Labrador, Newfoundland, and possibly New England.

Textbooks that mention the Viking expeditions minimize them. Land of Promise writes, “They merely touched the shore briefly, and sailed away.” Perhaps the authors of Promise did not know that, around 1005, Thorfinn and Gudrid Karlsefni led a party of 65 or 165 or 265 homesteaders (the old Norse sagas vary), with livestock and supplies, to settle Vineland. They lasted two years; Gudrid gave birth to a son. Then conflict with Native Americans caused them to give up. This trip was no isolated incident: Norse were still exporting wood from Labrador to Greenland 350 years later. Some archaeologists and historians believe that the Norse got as far down the coast as North Carolina. The Norse discoveries remained known in western Europe for centuries and were never forgotten in Scandinavia. Columbus surely learned of Greenland and probably also of North America if he visited Iceland in 1477 as he claimed to have done.

It may be fair to say that the Vikings' voyages had little lasting effect on the fate of the world. Should textbooks therefore leave them out? Is impact on the present the sole reason for including an event or fact? It cannot be, of course, or our history books would shrink to twenty-page pamphlets. We include the Norse voyages, not for their ostensible geopolitical significance, but because including them gives a more complete picture of the past. Moreover, if textbooks would only intelligently compare the Norse voyages to Columbus's second voyage, they would help students understand the changes that took place in Europe between 1000 and 1493. As we shall see, Columbus's second voyage was ten times larger than the Norse attempts at settlement. The new European ability to mobilize was in part responsible for Columbus's voyages taking on their awesome significance.

Although seafarers from Africa and Asia may also have made it to the Americas, they never make it into history textbooks. The best known are the voyages of the Afro-Phoenicians, probably launched from Morocco but ultimately from Egypt, that are said to have reached the Atlantic coast of Mexico in about 750 B.C. Organic material associated with colossal heads of basalt that stand along the eastern coast of Mexico stand has been dated to around 750 B.C. The stone heads are realistic portraits of West Africans, according to the anthropologist Ivan Van Sertima, who has done much to bring these images into popular consciousness. Around the same time Indians elsewhere in Mexico created small ceramic and stone sculptures of what seem to be Caticasoid and Negroid faces. As Alexander von Wuthenau, who collected many such terracotta statues, put it, “It is contradictory to elementary logic and to all artistic experience that an Indian could depict in a masterly way the head of a Negro or of a white person without missing a single racial characteristic, unless he had seen such a person.”27 Although some scholars have dismissed the Caucasoid images as “stylized” Indian heads and the Negroid faces as representing jaguars or human babies, the faces nonetheless stare back at us, steadfastly Caucasoid or Negroid, hard to explain away. Ivan von Sertima and others have adduced additional bits of evidence, including similarities in looms and other cultural elements, identical strains of cotton that probably required human intervention to cross the Atlantic, and information in Arab historical sources about extensive ocean navigation by Africans and Phoenicians in the eighth century B.C.