Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus: What Your History Books Got Wrong (8 page)

To make a better myth, American culture has perpetuated the idea that Columbus was boldly forging ahead while everyone else, even his own crew, imagined the world was flat. The American Pageant is the only textbook that still Most textbooks include a portrait of Columbus, These head-and-shoulder pictures have no value whatsoever as historical documents, because not one of the countless images we have of the man was painted in his lifetime. To make the point that these images are inau thentic, the Library of Congress sells this T-shirt featuring six different Columbus faces.

repeats this hoax, “The superstitious sailors . . , grew increasingly mutinous,” according to Pageant, because they were “fearful of sailing over the edge of the world.” In iruth, few people on both sides of the Atlantic believed in 1492 that the world was flat. Most Europeans and Native Americans knew the world to be round. It looks round. It casts a circular shadow on the moon. Sailors see its roundness when ships disappear over the horizon, hull first, then sails,

Washington Irving wins credit for popularizing the flat-earth fable in 1828. In his bestselling biography of Columbus, Irving described Columbus's supposed defense of his round-earth theory before the flat-earth savants at Salamanca University, Irving himself surely knew the story to be fiction,42 He probably thought it added a nice dramatic nourish and would do no harm. But it does. It invites us to believe that the “primitives” of the world, admittedly including pre-Columbian Europeans, had only a crude understanding of the planet they lived on, until aided by a forward-thinking European. It also turns Columbus into a man of science who corrected our faulty geography. Intense debunking of the flat-earth legend by professional historians has made an impact. Yet even the eleven textbooks that do not repeat Irving's fiction choose wholly ineffectual words to counter it. This passage from Triumph of the American Nation exemplifies the problem: “Convinced that the earth was round, a knowledge shared by many informed people of” the day, Columbus Wifliout project funding, theworldmightstillbe flat American culture perpetuates the image of Columbus boldly forging ahead while everyone else imagined the world was Hat. A character in the movie Slar Trek V, for instance, repeats the Washington Irving lie: 'The people of your world once believed the earth to be flat; Columbus proved it was round." Every October, Madison Avenue makes use of the flat-earth theme. This ad seeks clients for daring and courageous stock brokers!

believed that if he sailed far enough to the west he would reach Asia." To be sure, the minor subordinate clause quietly notes that not everyone, perhaps not even most people, believed in flat-earth geography. But the main subordinate clause and the primary clause emphasize Columbus's own belief that the earth was round. The sentence makes little sense unless the reader infers that Columbus's belief was unusual. I have talked not only with students but also with teachers who have read textbooks like Triumph without noticing this point. Thus teachers often still believe and still relay to their students the flatearth legend.

Even the death of Columbus has been changed to make a better story. Having Columbus come to a tragic end-sick, poor, and ignorant of his great accomplishment-adds melodramatic interest. “Columbus's discoveries were not immediately appreciated by the Spanish government,” according to The American Adventure. “He died in neglect in 1506.” In fact, Spain “immediately appreciated” Columbus's “discoveries,” which is why they immediately outfitted him for a much larger second voyage. In 1499 Columbus made a major gold strike on Haiti, He and his successors then forced hundreds of thousands of Indians to mine the gold for them. Money from the Americas continued to flow in to Columbus in Spain, perhaps not what he felt he deserved, but enough to keep all wolves far from his door. Columbus died well off and left his heirs well endowed, even with the title, “Admiral of the Ocean Sea,” now carried by his eighteenth-generation descendant. Moreover, Columbus's own journal shows clearly that he knew he had reached a “new” continent.

The errors textbooks make about Columbus do not result simply from sloppy scholarship. Textbooks want to magnify Columbus as a great hero, a “man of vision, energy, resourcefulness, and courage,” in the words of The American Pageant. Some of the details the textbook authors pile on are harmless, I suppose, such as the fabrications about Isabella's sending a messenger galloping after Columbus and pawning her jewels to pay for the expedition,44 All of the enhancements humanize Columbus, however, to induce readers to identify with him. Here is a passage from Land of Promise:

It is October, 1492. Three small, storm-battered ships are lost at sea, sailing into an unknown ocean. A frightened crew has been threatening to throw their stubborn captain overboard, turn the ships around, and make for the safety of familiar shores.

Then a miracle: The sailors see some green branches floating on the water. Land birds fly overhead. From high in the ship's rigging the As Columbus cruised the coast of Venezuela on his third voyage, he passed the Orinoco River, “I have come to believe that this is a mighty continent, which was hitherto unknown,” he wrote,

I am greatly supported in this view by reason of this great river and by this sea which is fresh," Columbus knew that no mere island could sustain such a large flow of water. When he returned home, he added a continent to the islands in his coat of arms. Its presence at the bottom of the lowet left quadrant visually rebuKes the authors of American history textbooks.

lookout cries, “Land, land ahead!” Fears turn to joy. Soon the grateful captain wades ashore and gives thanks to God.

Now, really. The Nifia, Pinca, and Santd Mdrid were not “storm-battered.” To make a better myth, the textbook authors want the voyage to seem harder than it was, so they invent bad weather. Columbus's own journal reveals that the three ships enjoyed lovely sailing. Seas were so calm that for days at a time sailors were able to converse from one ship to another. Indeed, the only time they experienced even moderately high seas was on the last day when they knew they were near land.

To make a better myth, to make the trip seem longer than it was, most of the textbooks overlook Columbus's stopover in the Canary Islands. The voyage across the unknown Atlantic took one month, not two.

To make a better myth, the textbooks describe Columbus's ships as tiny and inefficient, when actually “these three vessels were fully suited to his purpose,” as naval author Pietro Barozzi has pointed out.'

To make a better myth, six of twelve textbooks exaggerate the crew's complaints into a near-mutiny. The primary sources differ. Some claim the sailors threatened to go back home if they didn't reach land soon. Other sources claim that Columbus lost heart and that the captains of the other two ships persuaded him to keep on. Still other sources suggest that the three leaders met and agreed to continue on for a few more days and then reassess the situation. After studying the matter, Columbus's biographer Samuel Eliot Mortson reduced the complaints to mere griping: “They were all getting on each other's nerves, as happens even nowadays,”46 So much for the crew's threat to throw Columbus overboard.

Such exaggeration is not entirely harmless. Another archetype lurks below the surface: that those who direct social enterprises are more intelligent than those nearer the bottom. Bill Bigelow, a high school history teacher, has pointed out that “the sailors are stupid, superstitious, cowardly, and sometimes scheming, Columbus, on the other hand, is brave, wise, and godly.” These portrayals amount to an “anti-working class pro-boss polemic.”47 Indeed, the only textbook that still repeats the old flat-earth myth thinks badly of the sailors, whom it characterizes as “a motley crew.”

False entries in the log of the Santa Maria constitute another piece of the myth, “Columbus was a true leader,” says A History ofthe United Stales. “He altered the records ofdistances they had covered so the crew would not think they had gone too far from home,” Salvador de Madariaga has persuasively argued that to believe this, we would have to think the others on the voyage were fools. Columbus had “no special method, available only to him, whereby distances sailed could be more accurately reckoned than by the other pilots and masters.” Indeed, Columbus was las experienced as a navigator than the Pinion brothers, who captained the Nina and Pinto.41 During the return voyage, Columbus confided in his journal the real reason for the false log entries: he wanted to keep the route to the Indies secret. As paraphrased by Las Casas, “He says that he pretended to have gone a greater distance in order to confound the pilots and sailors who did the charts, that he might remain master of that route to the Indies.”

To make a better myth, our textbooks find space for many other humanizing particulars. They have the lookout cry “Tierra!” or “Land!” Most of them tell us that Columbus's first act after going ashore was “thanking God for leading them safely across the sea”even though the surviving summary of Columbus's own journal states only that “before them all, he took possession ofthe island, as in fact he did, for the King and Queen, his Sovereigns.”50 Many of the textbooks tell of Columbus's three later voyages to the Americas, but they do not find space to tell us how Columbus treated the lands and the people he “discovered,”

Christopher Columbus introduced two phenomena that revolutionized race relations and transformed the modern world: the taking of land, wealth, and labor from indigenous peoples, leading to their near extermination, and the transatlantic slave trade, which created a racial underclass.

Columbus's initial impression of the Arawaks, who inhabited most of the islands in the Caribbean, was quite favorable. He wrote in his journal on October 13, 1492: “At daybreak great multitudes of men came to the shore, all young and of fine shapes, and very handsome. Their hair was not curly but loose and coarse like horse-hair. All have foreheads much broader than any people I had hitherto seen. Their eyes are large and very beautiful. They are not black, but the color of the inhabitants of the Canaries,” (This reference to the Canaries was ominous, for Spain was then in the process of exterminating the aboriginal people of those islands.) Columbus went on to describe the Arawaks' canoes, “some large enough to contain 40 or 45 men.” Finally, he got down to business: “I was very attentive to them, and strove to learn if they had any gold. Seeing some of them with little bits of metal hanging at their noses, I gathered from them by signs that by going southward or steering round the island in that direction, there would be found a king who possessed great cups full of gold.” At dawn the next day, Columbus sailed to the other side of the island, probably one of the Bahamas, and saw two or three villages. He ended his description of them with these menacing words: “I could conquer the whole of them with fifty men and govern them as I pleased.”1 On his first voyage, Columbus kidnapped some ten to twenty-five Indians and took them back with him to Spain." Only seven or eight of the Indians arrived alive, but along with the parrots, gold trinkets, and other exotica, they caused quite a stir in Seville. Ferdinand and Isabella provided Columbus with seventeen ships, 1,200 to 1,500 men, cannons, crossbows, guns, cavalry, and attack dogs for a second voyage. One way to visualize what happened next is with the help of the famous science fiction story War of the Worlds. H. G. Wells intended his tale of earthlings' encounter with technologically advanced aliens as an allegory. His frightened British commoners (New Jerseyites in Orson Welles's radio adaptation) were analogous to the “primitive” peoples of the Canaries or America, and his terrifying aliens represented the technologically advanced Europeans. As we identify with the helpless earthlings, Wells wanted us also to sympathize with the natives on Haiti in 1493, or on Australia in 1788, or in the upper Amazon jungle in the 1990s.

When Columbus and his men returned to Haiti in 1493, they demanded food, gold, spun cottonwhatever the Indians had that they wanted, including ; sex with their women. To ensure cooperation, Columbus used punishment by example. When an Indian committed even a minor offense, the Spanish cut off his ears or nose. Disfigured, the person was sent back to his village as living evidence of the brutality the Spaniards were capable of.

After a while, the Indians had had enough. At first their resistance was mostly passive. They refused to plant food for the Spanish to take. They abandoned towns near the Spanish settlements. Finally, the Arawaks fought back. Their sticks and stones were no more effective against the armed and clothed Spanish, however, than the earthlings' rifles against the aliens' death rays in War ofthe Worlds.

The attempts at resistance gave Columbus an excuse to make war. On March 24, 1495, he set out to conquer the Arawaks. Bartolome de Las Casas described the force Columbus assembled to put down the rebellion. “Since the Admiral perceived that daily the people of the land were taking up arms, ridiculous weapons in reality . . . he hastened to proceed to the country and disperse and subdue, by force of arms, the people of the entire island ... For this he chose 200 foot soldiers and 20 cavalry, with many crossbows and small cannon, lances, and swords, and a still more terrible weapon against the Indians, in addition to the horses: this was 20 hunting dogs, who were turned loose and immediately tore the Indians apart.'”54 Naturally, the Spanish won. According to Kirkpatrick Sale, who quotes Ferdinand Columbus's biography of his father “The soldiers mowed down dozens with point-blank volleys, loosed the dogs to rip open limbs and bellies, chased fleeing Indians into the bush to skewer them on sword and pike, and 'with God's aid soon gained a complete victory, killing many Indians and capturing others who were also killed.'”