Portrait of a man, said to be Chistopher Columbus, by Sebastiano del Piombo / Metropolitan Museum of Art

Christopher Columbus

By Felipe Fernández-Armesto

No one, from Spain’s past, is more famed, more hated, or more misunderstood. Misplaced vengeance topples Columbus’s statues. Tweets traduce him. The president of my university thinks we should hide our paintings of him in case they offend ill-informed sensibilities. A lifetime of study has not led me to like Columbus: he was mendacious, egotistical, irrational, self-righteous, humourless, and mean. But he had virtues to balance his vices — including dazzling bravery, a kind of ingenuous charm, and a confiding nature. He was, moreover, sympathetic towards cultures other than his own, including Native Americans’. His detractors are unpardonably ignorant of that.

Felipe Fernández-Armesto reads this essay in the podcast Major Figures in Spanish Culture

Hero? Yes. Villain? Of course, because you can’t be one without the other. While sainthood is universal, heroism is partisan. Someone’s hero is always someone else’s villain. Does Columbus deserve adulation or obloquy? Both.His character was slimy, but his achievements were world-transforming. Maybe he doesn’t need all the statues nineteenth-century admirers erected. But there aren’t many individuals more worthy of commemoration.

Almost everything people commonly believe about him is false. He didn’t prove the world is round: everyone already knew that. As far as we know, there were fewer flat-Earthers in Christendom in the fifteenth century than today. It’s not true that Columbus failed to recognise America as “new” to European science: on the contrary, he was the first to call it “otro mundo” — another world.[1]

Nor is it true that he was always focussed on finding China: he changed his proposed objectives to please whomever he addressed; if potential patrons wanted a route to Asia, that was what he was prepared to promise.[2] He wasn’t driven by any of the motives conventionally ascribed to him:

Not religion — although like most of us, he turned to God late in life, when disappointment embittered him.

Not money: he loved and wanted it, but it didn´t matter to him as much as his more elusive ambitions for status and fame.

Not adventure: that was only a means to an end.

Not scientific curiosity — though he did avow, late in life, “desire to know the secrets of this world,”[3] and he read a fair amount of scientific literature, most of it not until after he launched his transatlantic career.[4]

To understand him, you have to realise that social ambition drove him — the desire, as some of his men noticed, — “to be a great lord”.[5] What mattered to Columbus was not so much where he was going as whether, in a social sense, he would “arrive.”

Two features of his background explain his life. First was the fact that he was a nobody — a man “que de nada han puesto en honra”,[6] raised from nought, as he admitted in a candid moment. He was a weaver’s son, despicable for modest birth and foreign provenance: he came from Genoa, and in the Spain of his day xenophobes targeted Genoese residents, whose worldly success affronted resentful natives.[7] Columbus invented a bogus genealogy, trying to convince interlocutors that he was “not the first admiral of my line”.[8] His son made out that he had grand ancestors and a university education:[9] it was all as phoney as a con-man’s resumé.

Struggling to escape into the acceptance-world, Columbus contemplated all the usual avenues of social ascent. He considered the Church, but he had no vocation; he thought of soldiering — he fancied himself as “a captain of cavaliers and conquests” — but he had little opportunity and the prospects were slight.[10] He settled on exploring — the occupation that elevated scallawags to honor in fifteenth-century Iberia, including Columbus’s own father-in-law, Bartolomeo Perestrello. When Columbus married Bartolomeo’s elderly, ugly daughter, he took his first step toward the status he craved.[11]

The second circumstance that makes him intelligible is his imperfect education — which never matched his formidable but undisciplined intellect. From allusions in his writings we know that he read books accessible to everyone: the fifteenth-century equivalent of station-bookstall pulp.[12] Sea-stories were amazingly popular. The typical plot featured a protagonist down on his luck — a foundling or victim of derogation, who had to retrieve his honor and prove his birth. You can already see a bit of Columbus’ self-image: someone naturally superior to the class and trade in which he grew up. The storybook hero usually takes to the sea, discovers an island, battles giants or monsters, marries a princess, and becomes a great ruler. Cervantes lampooned literature of this genre when he made Sancho Panza beseech Don Quixote for “the governorship of some island and, if it may be, a little bit of the sky above it.”[13]

Sometimes romances of seaborne chivalry combined with tales of sanctification, like the legend of St Brendan, who supposedly sailed the Atlantic in search of the Earthly Paradise — a destination Columbus claimed to have found or at least approached, not because he was mad, though he may have been a bit febrile, but because he was reflecting the expectations his reading induced. (He decided, from his inaccurate astronomical observations on his third transatlantic crossing, that the world was pear-shaped and that he was sailing “uphill” towards the site of the Garden of Eden).[14]

Sometimes, fiction-writers appropriated heroes of classical antiquity. When Columbus compared himself with Alexander — which, rather immodestly, he often did — he was not thinking of the real-life world-conqueror, but of the homonymous hero of medieval romances. A revealing moment in the first transatlantic voyage, which has always puzzled scholars and students, came when Columbus laid claim to the reward the Spanish monarchs had promised to the first man to sight land. He insisted that he should have the prize, even though it was a common seaman, high in the rigging, who first set up the cry of “¡Tierra!” Land Ahoy![15] But Columbus wasn’t trying to diddle his shipmate. He wanted to echo the medieval Alexander, who, in one Spanish version of the legend, goes to India by sea, and, as the text says,

Dixoles Alixandre de todos el más primero.
Que antes lo vio él que ningunt marinero.[16]

Thus spoke Alexander, first of all his crew,
That he could see the land, ere any seaman knew.

So that was Columbus’s quest: to imitate in real life the trajectory of a romantic hero in sensational fiction. There was nothing original about it. Almost every explorer of the time whom we know about had similar models in his head.[17] Nor was there anything innovative about the adventure that Columbus imagined for himself: at intervals in the fifteenth century explorers had acquired lordships of islands in the Atlantic — in the Madeira group, the Canaries, the Azores, and off Cape Verde. Financial returns, however, on the cost of expeditions were disappointing until the 1480s, when profits suddenly multiplied, thanks mainly to sugar in the islands and gold from west Africa. Businessmen — especially a group in Seville, composed of Italian bankers and Spanish bureaucrats — were on the lookout for a greenhorn foolhardy enough to try another voyage.[18]

There is no evidence that Columbus put himself forward for the role before 1486, when he was probably in his mid thirties. He had few qualifications, but he was willing to take a risk no predecessor embraced: to ride the sea with the prevailing wind behind him. All previous attempts to get further out into the Atlantic had started in the latitude of the Azores, where the westerlies forced them back. It may seem odd to modern yachtsmen, who love the breeze in their sails, but, until Columbus, seaborne explorations were almost always made against the wind, because, to seamen, the guarantee of a wind home was vital.[19]

Willingness was not enough: Columbus needed sovereign patrons to sanction the enterprise. He changed his pitch as he hawked his services around. If he thought potential backers wanted more Atlantic islands, that’s what he offered. If — as was increasingly the case — they were interested in the possibility that an unknown continent awaited discovery, that’s what he proposed. When he appealed to the Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, he emphasised what they wanted: a short route to Asia, where the world’s richest economies beckoned, and where fortunes awaited whoever could cut the cost of access.

Most geographers knew it was impossible. They had fairly accurate estimates of the size of the globe and realised that the voyage was too long for existing shipping. But a few érudits — especially, in Spain, among Franciscan astronomers — hoped otherwise. With Franciscans’ help, Columbus scoured the literature. By misreading some data and misrepresenting the rest, he came up with a fantastically small figure for the size of the globe — at least twenty per cent less than in reality. He also speculated that Asia might extend much further west than traditionally supposed. Its closest shore might lie only “a few days” sail from Spain.[20]

The monarchs had nothing to lose: bankers and bureaucrats put up all the money. That Isabella pawned her jewels is a fable. She wasn’t that stupid. In 1492, the king and queen authorised a transatlantic attempt, promising Columbus the rewards he wanted — noble rank, and an ill defined share of any profit. Henceforth, Columbus was committed to Asia: he had to fulfill his contract to get his rewards. That is why he insisted he had got there or thereabouts, even when it became obvious that he had not.

He set his course west from the westernmost of the Canary Islands, which, he believed, were on the same latitude as China’s principal port. Drift and a late change of mind took him well south of his planned course.[21] He juggled the latest instruments of navigation to impress his men, like a conjurer waving a wand; in reality, however, he navigated like an amateur, timing the hours of daylight and reading the corresponding latitude off a printed table: we know that, because mistakes in his log matched printers´ errors in the table.[22] The stories of impending mutiny among fear-struck seamen[23] were probably part of a legend of his own making: of the lonely visionary, persevering in the face of adversity.

The islands he encountered were disappointing: bereft of evidence of the proximity of the Orient. He lost the biggest of his ships on a reef. His co-commander, Martín Alonso Pinzón, who had supplied ships and crews, broke with him for unknown reasons and headed home. But on Hispaniola Columbus collected scraps of panned gold from the natives. He could return to Spain with some hope of being well received.

About the native people he encountered he was genuinely conflicted. On the one hand, he admired their nakedness and apparent docility as tokens of dependence on God, like the nakedness of St Francis, or as relics of the classical Golden Age of austerity and innocence. He recognised the natives as rational, redeemable humans, remarking on the absence of the monsters that encyclopaedias and maps predicted. In other words, his perceptions were remarkably positive and broad-minded for their day. On the other hand, the poverty of indigenous material culture repelled him as a sign of “savagery” — deficiency of what he and his fellow Europeans could perceive as civilization.[24]

What about natives’ attitude to Columbus? They weren’t victims doomed to defeat by superior men. Their technology was good for their purposes. They retained control of their fates. But the culture of many of them was susceptible to what I call the “stranger-effect.” They treated strangers not as some people do in the U.S, today, as “illegals” to reject or exploit, but as treasures whose strangeness augmented their value. Strangers were usefully objective arbiters, marriage partners, allies, and holy men, touched with the sanctity of the divine horizon.[25]

After some havering, Columbus found home-bound winds well to his north and struggled home, surviving storms, to a tentative triumph. Even skeptics, who knew the size of the globe, felt obliged to admit that he had found something worth investigating.[26] The monarchs sent him back with a grand fleet and a lot of samples of livestock and plants. His aim was to establish a trading settlement, such as he was familiar with in and around the Mediterranean.

But his return to Hispaniola was a disaster. First, ominously, visiting more southerly islands on the way, he encountered cannibals, whose existence, on his first voyage, he had dismissed as implausible. Second, when he got to Hispaniola, he found that thirty of his men, whom he had left with the natives, had been massacred. Expectations of a peaceful idyll crumbled. Third, the site he established for his settlement proved insanitary and uninhabitable. His claims that Hispaniola’s environment was better than Spain’s collapsed. Fourth, with the biota he brought, unintended pathogens arrived. The natives, who had no immunity against unfamiliar diseases, succumbed. Spaniards were desperate to keep them alive, not out of kindness but to be able to use them. But the plague was intractable. Next, Columbus found he could not control the desperados who accompanied him in the hope of easy gains. The scum of the earth, it seemed, gathered at the edges. Finally, war loomed. The local chief who reported the massacre blamed it on his enemies. Columbus set off with him on a punitive expedition, which stimulated resistance and spiralled into a wide-ranging and destructive campaign.

In short, Columbus’s failure was glaring. He reconnoitred Cuba and, on a third voyage, a long stretch of the continental coast, which he recognized as a vast, previously undocumented mainland. But the enterprise was getting costlier and less productive all the time. Columbus and his chief banker, the Florentine Gianotto Berardi, faced unmanageable debts.[27]

They fell back on a desperate expedient: enslaving natives. In the terms of the time, it wasn’t immoral, but it was illegal. Slavery was normal in Europe, as in almost every society we know about. But enslavement of the natives was inadmissible in Spanish law. The monarchs banned the sale and ordered the liberation of the captives.[28] Columbus was recalled in disgrace.[29]

This was when he turned to religion in a big way. He had begun to have visions on his way home on the first voyage — unhinged, perhaps, by the prospect of dying in a storm before he could acquaint the world with his achievement. The visions multiplied. He found supposed prophecies of his life in sacred and classical texts. He went around in a Franciscan habit — an ostentatious kind of affected humility. Christopher became “Christoferens” — bearer for Christ — and the evangelization of indios became a reward worth more than riches. He wrote self-pitying poetry and petitions. He predicted the end of the world.[30]

The monarchs sent him on one last voyage — more, one suspects, to get rid of him than to give him another chance. It produced no significant new consequences, except another of his visions. His last few years were spent in the bitterness of disillusionment, fabricating a legend for himself and begging the monarchs to meet their side of a bargain he had failed to fulfill.

His legacy was inauspicious for people whose islands disease ravaged and intruders disrupted. It was equivocal for his heirs, who spent generations litigating against the crown.[31] But Columbus achieved what he most wanted: he founded a dynasty of dukes, who married into the highest Spanish aristocracy.[32] And he left a myth of his own indomitability and clarity of vision that suckered historians for centuries. The adamantine Columbus of the old history books must be rebuilt in mercury and opal: poor materials for a statue.

Eventually, almost everyone in the Americas seemed to want to appropriate his memory, as if he were a sort of adoptive founding father of the hemisphere. Italians claimed him by right of birth, Spaniards by naturalization. Immigrants in the U.S. — Jewish, Portuguese, even Polish, Greek, English, and Scottish — invented “evidence” to link him with their own communities.[33] Now, at an even more perverse stage of the myth, post-colonial “correctness” blames him for consequences he had never foreseen and never contrived.

But what he really accomplished mattered more than the myths. His discovery, not “of America” but of a viable route there and back, put sundered cultures in touch and opened unimagined prospects for commercial and cultural exchange.

He launched the greatest humanly induced upheaval in the course of evolution, at least since the emergence of agriculture. Until Columbus’s second voyage, for something like 150,000 years — ever since Pangaea split, — evolution had been diverging among continents that were drifting apart. Now, a long process of convergent evolution began, in which life-forms have been swapped between continents, enriching diversity and multiplying the sources of food. Historians call it the Ecological Revolution or Columbian Exchange.[34]

At the same time, Columbus helped to trigger new departures in Western science. Hitherto, China had always been ahead in innovation. But access to specimens, samples, and observations from afar gave scientists in Latin Christendom the chance to catch up. What historians have conventionally called the “Scientific Revolution” would have been very different, if it had happened at all, without access to remote worlds by the wind-riding method Columbus pioneered.

Unwittingly, he set Spain on course for creating an unprecedented empire of land and sea, encompassing more cultures and biomes than any ever before. I can’t help regretting that. I detest empires. But we shouldn’t forget what they were good for: empires, like all human feats and follies, aren’t all bad. They create arenas of exchange in which, of course, failures and inefficiencies compound sufferings, but which are creative as well as cruel. The outcomes of Columbus’ initiative included new ways of life, food, thought, worship, work, language, and art that have enhanced our world. Columbus’ legacy is like the man himself: complex, morally equivocal, and full of wonder as well as wickedness.

Felipe Fernández-Armesto (London, 1950) is a historian and William P. Reynolds Chair of Arts and Letters at the University of Notre Dame (Indiana, USA). He previously held the Prince of Asturias Chair at Tufts University in Boston and was a visiting professor at several North American universities. He has been distinguished, among other awards, with the World History Association Book Prize (2007) and the Grand Cross of the Order of Alfonso X El Sabio (2016). His books include Columbus on Himself (Folio Society, 1992), Columbus (Duckworth, 1996) and Cristobal Colón(ABC, 2004).

Further reading

• Bankoff, Greg “Aeolian Empires: The Influence of Winds and Currents on Maritime Expansion in the Age of Sail”, Environment and History, 23, 2017.
• Colón, Fernando, Historie del S.D. Fernando Colombo: nelle quali s’ha particolare, & vera relatione della vita, & de’ fatti dell’Ammiraglio D. Christoforo Colombo, suo padre, Venice, appresso Francesco de’ Franceschi Sanese, 1571.
• Crosby, Alfred W., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, Westport, CT, Praeger, 2003.
• Fernández-Armesto, Felipe, Columbus on Himself, London, Folio Society, 1992.
• Fernández-Armesto, Felipe, Columbus, London, Duckworth, 1996.
• Fernández-Armesto, Felipe, “The Stranger-Effect in Early Modern Asia”, Itinerario, 24.2, 2000.
• Fernández-Armesto, Felipe, “The Origins of the European Atlantic”, Itinerario, 24.1, 2000.
• Flint, Valerie I. J., The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1992.
• Helms, Mary W., Ulysses’ Sail, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1988.
• Irving A., Leonard, Books of the Brave, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1949.
• Phillips, William D. and Phillips, Carla Rahn, The Worlds of Christopher Columbus, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992.
• Phillips, William D., Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, Philadelphia, Penn Press, 2013.
• Wey-Gómez, Nicolás, The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2008.

Endnotes

[1] B. de Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, ed. A. Millares Carlo, 3 vols (Mexico City and Buenos Aires, 1951), ii, 26.

[2] F. Fernández-Armesto, Colón (Madrid, 2004), pp. 77–103.

[3] Varela and Gil; Historie del S.D. Fernando Colombo; : nelle quali s’ha particolare, & vera relatione della vita, & de’ fatti dell’Ammiraglio D. Christoforo Colombo, suo padre (Venice, 1571), p. 8.

[4] Fernández-Armesto, Colón, pp. 49–76.

[5] B. de Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, op. cit., i, 189.

[6] C. Varela, ed., Cristóbal Colón: textos y documentos completos (Madrid, 1984), p. 277.

[7] F. Fernández-Armesto, “La financiación de la conquista de las Islas Canarias en el tiempo de los Reyes Católicos, Anuario de estudios atlánticos, xxviii (1982), 343–77.

[8] Historia del almirante don Cristóbal Colón por su hijo Fernando, 2 vols (Madrid, 1932), p. 25.

[9] Ibid., pp. 2–8.

[10] Fernández-Armesto, Colón, pp. 24–5.

[11] W.D. and C.R. Phillips, The Worlds of Christopher Columbus (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 97–8.

[12] F. Fernández-Armesto, “Cristóbal Colón y los libros de caballería,” in C. Martínez Shaw and Celia María Parcero Torre, eds, Cristóbal Colón (Valladolid, 2006), pp. 115–30.

[13] Don Quijote, II: 16. F. Fernández-Armesto, Columbus (London, 1996), p. 2.

[14] V. Flint, The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus (Princeton, 1992), pp. 91–7, 149–81.

[15] Varela, op. cit., pp. 27–30.

[16] J. Canas, ed., Libro de Alixandre (Madrid, 1988), p. 182; Fernández-Armesto, “Colón y los libros,” op. cit. (n.12).

[17] L. Irving, Books of the Brave (Cambridge, Ma., 1949); F. Fernández-Armesto, “Inglaterra y el Atlántico en la baja edad media,” in A. Betencourt Massieu et al., Canarias e Inglaterra a través de la historia (Las Palmas, 1995), pp. 11–28.

[18] Fernández-Armesto, “The Origins of the European Atlantic,” Itinerario, xxiv (2000), 111–28.

[19] Fernández-Armesto, Columbus, p. 56; G. Bankoff, “Aeolian Empires: the Influence of Winds and Currents on Maritime Expansion in the Age of Sail,” Environment and History, xxiii (2017), 163–96; Varela, op. cit., pp. 22–4.

[20] Fernández-Armesto, Columbus on Himself (London, 1992), p. 16.

[21] Or perhaps it was what he intended: N. Wey-Gómez, The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies (Cambridge, Ma., 2008).

[22] R. Laguarda Trías, El enigma de las latitudes de Colón (Valladolid, 1974).

[23] Las Casas, op. cit., i, 189.

[24] Fernández-Armesto, Columbus, pp. 124–7.

[25] Fernández-Armesto, “The Stranger-Effect in Early Modern Asia,” Itinerario; M.W. Helms, Ulysses´ Sail (Princeton, 1988), pp. 170–84.

[26] F. Fernández-Armesto, Columbus, p. 93.

[27] C. Varela, Colón y los florentinos (Madrid, 1988), pp. 35–47.

[28] A. Rumeu de Armas, La política indigenista de Isabel la Católica (Madrid, 1969); W.D. Phillips, Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (Philadelphia, 2013); C. Verlinden, L´Esclavage dans l’Europe médiévale: i, Péninsule Ibérique-France (Bruges, 1955).

[29] C. Varela, La caída de Cristóbal Colón. El juicio de Bobadilla (Madrid, 2006).

[30] A. Milhou, Colón y su mentalidad mesiánica en el ambiente franciscanista español (Valladolid, 1983).

[31] A. Colón de Carvajal and J.M. Pérez-Prendes, eds, Laherencia de Cristóbal Colón (Madrid, 2016); C. Fernández Duro, ed., Colección de documentos inéditos relativos al descubrimiento, conquista y organización de las antiguas posesiones españolas de ultramar, 2nd s., vii (Madrid, 1892).

[32] Varela, Cristóbal Colón: textos (1984), pp. 15–16.

[33] A. Ballesteros y Beretta, Cristóbal Colón y el descubrimiento de América, 2 vols. (Barcelona, 1945), i, 90–130.

[34] A.W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (New York, 2003).