Good Work, Columbus
Columbus Day is a sort of weird beast. In New York City and other areas with a significant Italian-American population it’s a significant ethnic holiday. In Washington, DC where federal employees are thick on the ground, it’s normal for large swathes of the politics-related sector to give people the day off. And in the rest of the country—which is to say most of the country—my understanding is that it’s really not a holiday at all; just maybe a day when the mail doesn’t get delivered.
But I work in Washington, DC and this is an official CAP day off so don’t expect too much of blogging from me.
I definitely read some Columbus books when I was a kid, but does anyone have any recommendations for more serious, adult-oriented books on the subject? If not, there’s always the excellent Goodbye, Columbus.
84 Responses to “Good Work, Columbus”
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October 12th, 2009 at 8:40 am
While it’s not about Columbus, Changes in The Land by William Cronin does an excellent job of examining the impacts of early colonialism on the New England land scape. An excellent read.
October 12th, 2009 at 8:45 am
Well, in Sweden the shops are open, handing out prizes to Americans…
First woman to win Nobel Economics Prize
http://www.swedishwire.com/business/1193-americans-dominated-the-nobel-awards
October 12th, 2009 at 8:46 am
Also, this is a good time to point out that in South Dakota there is no Columbus day. It was replaced by Native American day in the early nineties. I think this is a much better day to concentrate efforts for educating the majority about Native Americans than Thanksgiving.
October 12th, 2009 at 8:49 am
the deal in the much of the private sector that I’m familiar with – Columbus Day is exchanged for the day after Thanskgiving. Unlike the government, we’re at work today, but we’ll get the 4 day weekend next month when govt employees will have to use a personal leave day to get Black Friday off
October 12th, 2009 at 8:55 am
Also, does anyone else think that painting of Columbus looks eerily like Larry Summers?
October 12th, 2009 at 9:02 am
Guess you’ve never been to Denver for the protests.
October 12th, 2009 at 9:03 am
As to recommendations on reading about Columbus, I would say a combination of the Columbus parts of these two books should do it:
”Rivers of Gold: The Rise of the Spanish Empire, From Columbus to Magellan.” by Hugh Thomas
and
”Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492-1763″ by Henry Kamen
You should get solid analysis and color between the two.
October 12th, 2009 at 9:05 am
Guess you’ve never been to Denver for the protests, although I guess all that ugliness has gone by the by.
October 12th, 2009 at 9:07 am
Why wouldn’t we celebrate the day Christopher Columbus found The Bahamas, and decimated the local peoples and cultures through disease, enslavement, theft, and murder? This is America! Take the day off and relish in it.
October 12th, 2009 at 9:17 am
when we were a child, many, many moons ago,
we were required to read excerpts of Christopher Columbus’
Sea Logs (in the original Spanish).
the Franciscans have some online:
http://www.franciscan-archive.org/columbus/opera/excerpts.html
enjoy
..
.ero
October 12th, 2009 at 9:18 am
Sorry about the double post. Any posting mechanism that does not tell you your post is completed is pretty weak.
Anyway, pretty lively discussion (by which I mean left/right screaming match, b/c that’s the only way we do things) at the DenverPost.com today. So Columbus Day does indeed still stir some things up. Just not in Matt’s habitat of heavily-Italian NYC and free-day-off-loving DC.
October 12th, 2009 at 9:22 am
I think that Christopher Columbus is a lousy person to honor with a holiday, I’d rather be rid of it and the presidential birthdays too, although for different reasons.
There was an Italian-American parade and festival here in Albany, but as it was directed so as to screw a different street than the one that I live on up, I paid it no mind.
October 12th, 2009 at 9:24 am
Automatic:
For a mixture of the Italian American love of Columbus Day and the political critique of the holiday, one should mention this great episode of the Sopranos:
http://www.hbo.com/sopranos/episode/season4/episode42.shtml
October 12th, 2009 at 9:31 am
Columbus discovered nothing. America was already here. The dope was lost anyway. What a joke.
October 12th, 2009 at 9:44 am
I think we should clearly get rid of Columbus Day, but as someone who gets the day off, I’ll take it. Still, if we weren’t going to do something worthwhile like have a Native Americans Day, we could at least take the holiday of Columbus’ shoulders and have Exploration Day in celebration of the human drive to explore the unknown. Then we could include other historic explorers (though most of those guys were pretty scummy too), but we could expand it to astronauts and future space explorers. It’d be a good day for education about both history and science, rather than trying to white wash the pretty terrible things of a guy who wasn’t even the first European to land here.
October 12th, 2009 at 9:46 am
Give the book “A Voyage Long and Strange” by Tony Horwitz a try. It covers the period from Columbus to Plymouth Rock. It’s part history and part travelogue and a very entertaining read.
Hope you enjoy it.
October 12th, 2009 at 9:56 am
I can’t recall the title of it, but there’s at least one English-language translation of Columbus’ logbooks that’s been published. (I read it in middle school as part of my research for a paper on the conquistadors.) Also try Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest by Matthew Restall, which does a good job of cutting through both traditional idealized Euro-American views of the exploration of the Americas and P.C. baloney about the native populations.
October 12th, 2009 at 10:06 am
As we can see from the comments so far, Columbus Day is definitely a multi-purpose holiday . . .
1) It gives school teachers a much needed breather from their hellish fall workload, which includes hyper, sulky children, hyper, sulky parents, and hyper, sulky administrations trying out new educational theories.
2) It reminds civil servants that, for all people revile them, they have some perks the private sector doesn’t.
3) It gives Italian-Americans a break from Sopranos and Godfather jokes.
4) It forces a few people each year to take a more nuanced view of history. Saints are sinners and sinners are saints, and whichever Columbus was, his first voyage was a key event in story of human existance.
5) It reminds people of our unfinished business of correcting traditional oppression of Native Americans.
6) It gives our neo-puritans another chance to morally flog hapless European explorers because smallpox killed more Native Americans than syphillis killed Native Eurasians. Rationally, this makes as much sense as Pat Robertson blaming Moslems for the Indian Ocean tsunami or gays for hurricanes striking New Orleans, but there you have it.
I’d love to recommend a good book on the topic, but I haven’t read one since Morrison’s Discovery, which was excellent, but I’m aware it is out of date.
October 12th, 2009 at 10:14 am
Given today is actually Thanksgiving just pretend you’re Canadian.
October 12th, 2009 at 10:14 am
I’d second Changes in the Land. I had Prof. Cronin in college, and I absolutely loved that book.
October 12th, 2009 at 10:20 am
Happy Exploitation of Native Peoples Day!
October 12th, 2009 at 10:29 am
I fail to see what Columbus deserves accolades for? Showing up on North America three centuries after the nordic people? Completely underestimating the size of the earth? Finding a continent he refused to acknowledge AS a new continent?
Really, if there hadn’t been a lost continent in the way, Columbus would be just another idiot who died at sea because he couldn’t grasp geometry.
October 12th, 2009 at 10:33 am
Try Felipe Fernandez-Armesto’s “Columbus”. It’s especially good at putting Columbus in the context of 15th-century European exploration.
October 12th, 2009 at 10:38 am
If you can find a good translation, his travel log is fascinating. He wrote it in broken Spanish and kept the actual travel details in a separate, secret log. He also says yams are carrots that taste like almonds. Gold is always just around the corner (or on the next island) too. It’s entertaining stuff.
October 12th, 2009 at 10:44 am
Re: I fail to see what Columbus deserves accolades for? Showing up on North America three centuries after the nordic people? Completely underestimating the size of the earth? Finding a continent he refused to acknowledge AS a new continent?
In case anyone is interested, there is now good evidence that Polynesian sailors from the Marquesas ‘discovered’ South America around the same time as the Nordic people. For some reason though this doesn’t seem to be widely known. And of course there is some reason to believe that European fishermen might have discovered North America shortly before Columbus.
It would appear that Columbus’ misunderstandeing of the size of the earth was at least in part driven by an overly literal interpretation of certain biblical verses which seem to imply that the world is only 1/7 covered in ocean.
As for the late and unlamented Colombus, the less said the better.
October 12th, 2009 at 10:50 am
My girlfriend gets today off, although she is working anyway in solidarity with the native american, or something. Or possibly because if she does she can get a vacation day some other day.
I did much the same the last two years, working for the Iowa Democratic Party. Not sure why it was officially a holiday (probably just federal schedule), but no one took it off in 2008 obviously.
I don’t get the day off anymore. It’s a stupid holiday anyway – we should swap it for something in June or August.
October 12th, 2009 at 10:52 am
Open Veins of Latin America is an excellent book and is much easier to find in translation than news reports suggested when Chavez presented it to Obama.
October 12th, 2009 at 10:53 am
I’m pretty amused that Italian Americans celebrated a Genoese sailing under the Spanish flag, when the vast majority of Paisans are Neapolitan, Apulian, Calabrian, and Sicilian.
I find this amusing, of course, because in Italy, neither of those two groups consider the other to be Italian in the least.
One of my favorite insults involving this is the Northern quip that Cavour didn’t unite Italy, he joined Italy to Africa.
October 12th, 2009 at 11:03 am
American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World
October 12th, 2009 at 11:06 am
Admiral of the Ocean Sea by Samuel Eliot Morrison is pretty solid, if dated cuz it lacks the modern perspective that denotes intellectual diversity.
The Establishment of European Hegemony 1415-1715 isn’t bad, by JH Parry. Most of it happened in less than a century — Prince Henry sent his ships down the Africa coast, and they eventually got around it and into the Indian Ocean, then Columbus crossed the Atlantic and found out the world was considerably larger than anybody had thought (including the Chinese, much less the Japanese, not to mention the Aztecs and Incas, et al, who had no clue about the rest of the world.)
The best single line about Columbus, of course, is Mark Twain’s observation that everybody gives him so much credit for discovering America, when what would have been TRULY remarkable would have been to have somehow missed it.
But people scoff too much. Morrison points out that Norse navigators were common in Bristol, which Columbus would have been familiar with during his naval apprenticeship. Norse exploration of North America (not just settlement) had only been abandoned a generation or so before, so it is quite likely that the kid from Genoa might well have heard old salts bragging about the Skroelings. Morrison speculates rather learnedly that it enhances, rather than degrades an appreciation of Columbus’ skills to realize that he wasn’t actually trying to go where no one had gone before, he was trying to cross an ocean that killed sailors by the thousands, to go a new way to where Europeans had failed to thrive.
European dominance was all naval power, edged steel and immunities. Starting with the theology or morality of it misses the point.
It was mostly an accident, frankly — the First Americans died of diseases that Europeans didn’t quite understand they had. What if it had gone the other way, if there were American diseases for which Europeans had no immunities? Would the planet be better off?
It was also unmistakably cultures with superior technology overwhelming cultures with inferior tools and weapons — which isn’t a value judgment, just a fact: You can draw a line across all evidence of First Peoples when they come into contact with Europeans and start using edged metal tools instead of shells as fast as they can get hold of them. The European conquest of this hemisphere always involves natives, generally under the thumb of some local tyrant, who work with Europeans to overthrow their rulers: how is the Mohegans helping the British to exterminate the Pequot any different from the Jewish communities in Jerusalem (or Cordoba) helping Arabs take over? (Oddly, if you answer the question, the forces of Christendom come off worse — but not necessarily because of their weapons or their sins.)
If the First Peoples didn’t have 50-90% mortality from measles and smallpox, etc., things might have been very different: no, d-uh.
The morality of the American genocide is indefensible — but it really ought to be tempered with a practical sense of “compared to what?”
October 12th, 2009 at 11:08 am
Can’t say I know any historical works on Columbus, but for something a little different, Orson Scott Card wrote a novel called “Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus” that I enjoyed a great deal. It’s a really good thought experiment on how the world would have turned out differently if Columbus’s life had taken a different path.
October 12th, 2009 at 11:10 am
My NNJ town is absolutely closed today. In CT where I used to live, they didn’t bother.
October 12th, 2009 at 11:15 am
If the First Peoples didn’t have 50-90% mortality from measles and smallpox, etc., things might have been very different: no, d-uh.
No, First Peoples in North America had 50-90% mortality.
I assure you that south of the Rio Grande, or at least the Yucatan, the survival rate was much, much higher.
You realize that most Central and South American countries are overwhelmingly Indian in their ethnic makeup to this very day?
The difference is that the Spanish put a economic-exploitative and religious-humanitarian value on the Indians that was utterly absent from Anglo-Saxon-Celtic (it was the Scots, Ulstermen, and Scots-Irish who formed the spearhead of British movement inland) calculations. And even, frankly, from French calculations in Louisiana, if not Quebec.
October 12th, 2009 at 11:25 am
I like Columbus Day. My wife and I celebrate it by spreading infectious diseases to remote tribal populations in far flung lands. The WiFi here in Borneo is amazing!!
October 12th, 2009 at 11:47 am
Yeah, Greg is right: I was over-generalizing. (Good thing THAT never happens ’round here.)
I’ve always wanted to read an essay (maybe one day I will write it) on the very different ways the various European powers exploited the New World.
The Spanish pretty much thought of it as a place to steal wealth. It’s remarkable to realize how much like they were like the Muslims they had just driven out of Spain — the economics of the Islamic expansion, from Arabia to India, and all the way across North Africa, across Gibraltar and up to the Pyrenees, was about stealing everything they could in the invasion. The only way to make the Caliphate a paying proposition was to expand so there was more to steal. After that, infidels survived the old-fashioned way: by paying for the privilege. (This created the odd incentive NOT to convert Christians and Jews under Muslim rule, while it made saying the Witness into a tax break.)
It must have left a deep impression on the Spanish, because that’s pretty much what they did in America: the more I look at the way Spain handled the New World, the more impressed I am that they created no wealth at all. The Pope even handled the conversion problem by defining natives as only partly human, so enslaving them was a means to saving their souls. But karma is a bitch — hell, over time Spain stealing all that gold from the Incas and Aztecs was the worst thing that ever happened to ‘em.
It’s not that the northern Europeans — the British, Dutch, even the French — didn’t want to do the same thing, it’s that Spain had pretty much cornered the Western Hemisphere market on available wealth to steal. The Brits wound up CREATING wealth in North America (first by growing tobacco), along with the Dutch, et al, in the East Indies (growing sugar cane), pretty much because they had no other choice. They’d rather have stolen it if they’d found any.
It’s also intriguing how so much expansion in North America was driven by fur, an essentially non-renewable resource: fur is the reason Sacajawea had a French guy’s kid with her as she was leading Lewis and Clark places where no English-speaker had ever been. As central a piece of New York-ana as the Astor fortune was founded on being the middleman between the trappers and the European market for beaver — on BOTH coasts, no less. But after just a generation or two they were trapping fur so fast they kept having to go further inland to find enough — if the big rodents grew faster (or they’d bothered to figure out how to farm ‘em), we might have left much of the country alone for much longer.
Greg: do you (does anybody) know how come Central and South American Indians didn’t die off from European diseases the way North Americans did? Did they have immunities — and why didn’t North Americans have ‘em?
October 12th, 2009 at 11:47 am
I can’t vouch for the facts, but I recently read “Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean”, which traced Columbus’ ties to the Jewish conversos and explored evidence that some of Columbus’ backers were secret Jews who fought to ensure that Columbus’s deal with Spain would give him enough control of certain discovered lands that the Jews could settle there with some degree of freedom from the Inquisition.
I had never heard this angle, and, like I said, can’t vouch for it. But the case in the book was plausible. And certainly Jewish merchants played a big role in the settlement/conquest of the New World.
October 12th, 2009 at 11:47 am
Wait, the mail doesn’t get delivered?
On Columbus day?
Seriously?
October 12th, 2009 at 11:51 am
Not quite true. The original population was much greater in those areas, but there was still a massive die-out. The greater population just meant there were more survivors.
Blaming the Anglo-Celto-Saxons is rather beside the point. It doesn’t matter whether the Hispanics were nicer to the natives than the Anglos–the mass deaths were the result of disease, not intentional acts, and in many instances raced ahead of European contact. The Inca empire was more than decimated by European disease before it had any direct contact with Europeans–the same with the Mound Builders in what is now the US.
October 12th, 2009 at 11:59 am
Wait, the mail doesn’t get delivered? On Columbus day?
No mail delivery on federal holidays in the U.S.
October 12th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
I’ll take the contrarian view here. Columbus discovered the Americas, plain fact. For the Europeans had no idea that an entire continent existed before Columbus’ voyage, he changed world history forever, regardless of whether there were already peoples in the Americas. When an ancient emperor like Alexander the Great claims to have conquered the world, who points out that his empire was only a small percentage of world geography?
Because Columbus was a bad person, it is now fashionable for revisionists to try and claim that he was well aware of the American continent from the Norse, despite the fact that he did not land in Norse colonial lands nor is there any shred of evidence that such knowledge was passed to Columbus. Some people have even forged ancient Norse maps in order to re-write history. Why can’t people separate the person from the deed?
October 12th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
Re: Greg: do you (does anybody) know how come Central and South American Indians didn’t die off from European diseases the way North Americans did? Did they have immunities — and why didn’t North Americans have ‘em?
My understanding is that this was mostly true for Mexico and Peru/Ecuador/Bolivia, which have in common that most of the people were living at high altitude.
High altitudes and cooler temperatures meant that the introduced pathogens could not thrive as well (this is especially the case of the African pathogens, introduced concomitantly with the slave trade, like yellow fever and malaria). Also, Peru and Bolivia were at _such_ high altitude that Europeans tended to have health problems and lowered fertility.
It’s _also_ true that the Church influence humanized colonialism in South America, as Greg points out.
October 12th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
I would suggest _Lies My Teacher Told Me_ by James Loeven.
It’s not only about Columbus and how much the hero worshiping of him is over done, but explains why history is the only subject that students in the US (at least) have to be un-taught.
October 12th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
I read a really great book: 1421 The Year China Discovered The World. You can read about it here: http://www.1421.tv/
October 12th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
Liam Says:.. but for something a little different, Orson Scott Card wrote a novel called “Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus”
I have avoided much of OSC’s work since “Ender’s Game”, but “Pastwatch” is an interesting alternative history of the Columbus journeys.
For some insight on the world Columbus “discovered”, check out “1491:New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus” by Charles C. Mann.
October 12th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
It’s not that the northern Europeans — the British, Dutch, even the French — didn’t want to do the same thing, it’s that Spain had pretty much cornered the Western Hemisphere market on available wealth to steal. The Brits wound up CREATING wealth in North America (first by growing tobacco), along with the Dutch, et al, in the East Indies (growing sugar cane), pretty much because they had no other choice. They’d rather have stolen it if they’d found any.
Oh, no, I agree, you’re absolutely right that the Northern Euros would have loved to have steal everything not nailed down themselves.
The difference, I’d say, is that the British, but to an extent the French and Dutch too, truly *colonized* their areas, in the way that the Greeks and Romans and later medieval Germans did. Which is to say that they moved fairly substantial numbers to the new lands to form new communities; the Spanish, by contrast, relied a lot on intermarriage with natives to create theirs.
It’s also intriguing how so much expansion in North America was driven by fur, an essentially non-renewable resource: fur is the reason Sacajawea had a French guy’s kid with her as she was leading Lewis and Clark places where no English-speaker had ever been. As central a piece of New York-ana as the Astor fortune was founded on being the middleman between the trappers and the European market for beaver — on BOTH coasts, no less. But after just a generation or two they were trapping fur so fast they kept having to go further inland to find enough — if the big rodents grew faster (or they’d bothered to figure out how to farm ‘em), we might have left much of the country alone for much longer.
I agree with this too. The amusing thing is that the beaver population in Canada has exploded, to the point where they might be more numerous than before the European conquest. They’re actually a hazard in a lot of Canada because of their ability to cause floods, create roadblocks, and even bring down trees on things.
However, I’d say that you’re only part right. The *French* might have been content, but the British/Americans were absolutely dedicated to continental expansion. I mean, probably the biggest reason we fought the Independence War was that the colonial magnates had huge investments and interests in the West, especially the Ohio Valley – which, after all, was the proximate cause of the colonial war that got subsumed into the Seven Years War. They wanted to speculate on that land and they wanted tenants on those lands to wring dry.
By the way, re: Sacajawaya, the French/Quebeçois/Métis Runners of the Woods went places that English speakers didn’t get to in some cases until the 19th Century. They were pretty incredible. So too were, frankly, the Jesuits. They were absolutely fearless.
Greg: do you (does anybody) know how come Central and South American Indians didn’t die off from European diseases the way North Americans did? Did they have immunities — and why didn’t North Americans have ‘em?
I think that, first, malaria advanced through the New World waaay faster than people. This wasn’t great for the natives, but Euros die of malaria like flies, and so they pretty much left the swamps and jungles alone. Still do, in a lot of cases.
Second, as I said before, there was a massive difference in scale between Spanish emigration and the other powers’. When the Northeastern Amerindians got killed off, in the late 16th and early 17th Centuries, they were pretty quickly followed by a fairly comprehensive rush of settlement from the northern Carolinas to southern Maine. The Pale of Settlement in the North didn’t advance with the swiftness of the Spanish conquest, but it was the result of sustained settlement, not military control.
The diseases really did kill off tons of people in Mexico and Peru.
But the Spanish never followed up with Spanish families. This allowed the native populations to recover, in part by intermingling with the overwhelmingly male Spanish arrivals.
In the Northeast of the continent, we killed off most of the Indians with disease, and then before they could recover, we killed off the rest ourselves directly or indirectly by destroying their food supply.
October 12th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
Not Columbus-specific, but Eric Wolf’s Europe and the the People Without History is a must-read for people wanting to understand the history of European expansion and colonialism.
Favorite Columbus fact: his Italian (real) name was Cristobal Colon.
October 12th, 2009 at 12:40 pm
Favorite Columbus fact: his Italian (real) name was Cristobal Colon.
Err, no?
That’s his Spanish name.
In Italian of the old Genoese dialect, it was Christoffa Corombo
(old Venetian and Genoese are pretty fun dialects/languages)
October 12th, 2009 at 12:40 pm
And I guess that means we were discovered by a speaker of “Engrish”?
October 12th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
re: 43
Are you serious? Menzies’ book is probably the stupidest, most poorly reasoned piece of non-fiction I have ever had the misfortune to read. It’s an embarrassment to fat, red-faced brits everywhere.
October 12th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
No, but I do recommend a song by the Nields, “Just Like Christopher Columbus” from their CD “Bob on the Ceiling.”
October 12th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
@49 Apparently a lot of people don’t seem to know that book was written by a crank.
October 12th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
LOL — Columbus “couldn’t grasp geometry”?
Man, that’s gobsmacking stupid: YOU try to sail in a straight line across a couple thousand miles of ocean with the stars and a protactor, judging your drift by the waves.
Cuz that’s what Columbus did.
Hector: the idea that the Polynesians “discovered” America but for “some reason though this doesn’t seem to be widely known…” is one of those remarkable bits of intellectual inversion whose foolishness would be hard to exaggerate: a “discovery” only counts if other people heard about it. The dubious proposition that Polynesians found their way to Chile, for example, is not widely known because it had no consequences.
As for the notion that the Spanish were “nicer” to the locals than the British were: are you people nuts?
The Spanish flat-out exterminated the locals in the Caribbean, e.g., the Caribs. I can’t recall any outright exterminations that the British conducted in North America, and certainly nothing like the Spain’s wholesale replacement of the deceased indigenous populations with slaves that the Spanish did in Cuba and Hispaniola.
And no, what happened in Virginia was nothing like that — the Powhatan Federation was damned near equal with the English for a generation or two, until their huge disadvantages just ate away at ‘em. Even the infamous incident of smallpox-infected blankets that Amherst gave Indians came waaaay after the pattern was set: it wasn’t deliberate policy that emptied much of the East Coast before the Pilgrims landed.
The ranking historical observation about the impact of European diseases in North America is the contrast between de Soto’s exploration of the Mississippi Valley in I think it was 1545, when he saw “many” communities of 5,000 or more (these weren’t “the” Mound Builders, though, but their heirs, perhaps), and La Salle’s in 1615 IIRC, when he saw…. none.
Most historians note that de Soto’s guys captured some locals (torturing them to reveal where their gold jewelry came from), and a couple escaped: the not unreasonable speculation is that the ones who escaped were infected with smallpox, etc., which simply wiped out their people.
I don’t think it’s necessary the greater population in Central and South America that explains greater survival — maybe it’s that the Aztecs and Incas were more urban, or had greater contact with peoples further away that caused those folks to withstand European diseases better? Cuz the urban thing wouldn’t explain why the Mississippi towns simply vanished, but the Mississippi peoples may not have had the wide exposure to outside diseases (cuz the forests to the East were impenetrable to trade?) and everybody was simply going up and down the river — and not even to the Gulf of Mexico?
That doesn’t seem plausible, either. Anybody?
October 12th, 2009 at 1:42 pm
Oops — I stand corrected. But don’t hold my mistake against Eric Wolf’s brilliant book — I got my misinfo from some other now-forgotten source.
October 12th, 2009 at 2:06 pm
I still don’t understand why October 12 is even recognized, let alone celebrated, as ‘Columbus Day’. Why recognize the day when he ‘dicovered’ an island in the West Indies? Is it because we can’t figure out the day when Lief Erickson ‘discovered’ North America?
October 12th, 2009 at 2:07 pm
I don’t think it’s necessary the greater population in Central and South America that explains greater survival — maybe it’s that the Aztecs and Incas were more urban, or had greater contact with peoples further away that caused those folks to withstand European diseases better? Cuz the urban thing wouldn’t explain why the Mississippi towns simply vanished, but the Mississippi peoples may not have had the wide exposure to outside diseases (cuz the forests to the East were impenetrable to trade?) and everybody was simply going up and down the river — and not even to the Gulf of Mexico?
You came very close to it earlier, when you were talking about wealth extraction.
They needed people to work the mines, haciendas, and plantations.
They did, as you say, obliterate the Caribs, Taino, etc. but on the mainland, they tended to rely on Indian labor. They only really used blacks on the islands.
The English and the Portuguese/Brazilians, forming the two largest blocs after the Spanish, used blacks pretty much everywhere.
October 12th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
I still don’t understand why October 12 is even recognized, let alone celebrated, as ‘Columbus Day’. Why recognize the day when he ‘dicovered’ an island in the West Indies? Is it because we can’t figure out the day when Lief Erickson ‘discovered’ North America?
It has very little to do with Columbus, and very much to do with the political allegiance of American Catholics, and Italian Americans in particular.
October 12th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
Someone mentioned it earlier, but Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus by Orson Scott Card is really an excellent science fiction/alternate history take on Columbus.
October 12th, 2009 at 2:27 pm
Let me add to the praise of “Pastwatch” by Orson Scott Card. I stopped reading him at some point after he went off the deep end after 9/11, but this one is really good alternate history. It was interesting, suspenseful and has a terrific ending. It isn’t at all like the “Ender” books and much better than (and not preachy like) the Alvin Maker series.
On the alternate hostory subject I also recommend “The Years of Rice and Salt” by Kim Stanley Robinson. It reimagines history if 90+% of Europe had died in the Black Death. As in “Pastwatch”, the First Americans are given the chance to develop on their own longer, especially in the East, and the Chinese and Japanese get to America first.
October 12th, 2009 at 2:52 pm
Greg, we’re not talking about the same thing — or if we are, I’m right and you’re wrong: you explain the greater survival of Amerindians in Central and South America by noting the Spanish “needed people to work the mines, haciendas, and plantations.”
Sure, but they didn’t inoculate or cure ‘em of imported diseases to ensure a workforce.
Your sort of unspoken premise is the opposite, that the British (in particular) did NOT need a local workforce, so they killed off the natives and imported slaves (in the South) and encouraged settlers everywhere.
That misses the point — there were intense wars of annihilation fought by British colonists up and down the East Coast, but they were nearly always after the fact.
European diseases destroyed the Mississippi peoples, and it knocked the woodland tribes loose from their homelands, which is why it was possible for the British, followed by the Americans, to roll them back consistently for 300 years. Moreover, as they fled (or were driven) West, they went into a vacuum left by the plagues that wiped out the Mississippians, AND the radically changed culture of the Plains peoples who had just gotten horses from the Spanish.
Just to pick some, there were two other possibilities: one would have been if there had been American diseases that caused 90% mortality in Europeans: the colonies would never have been started, anywhere.
Another possibility would have been if Amerindians had the same immunities that Europeans did. The colonies would surely have been planted, but they’d have grown differently — VERY differently.
If the Mississippi towns had remained intact, a network of communities with thousands of inhabitants along the river, if the Pilgrims, etc., had found intact villages instead of empty fields, the violence wouldn’t have necessarily been delayed, but it would have been far more equal (population vs. technology) from the start, and in a very different strategic environment (with the Mississippi valley, especially). The concept of being Indians against Americans that Tecumseh tried to persuade the Nations of in 1811 — too late! — might have happened earlier, but what’s more important is that IF the Mississippi peoples and the folks along the coast had been intact when the British (and Dutch, and French) had started encroaching, anybody like Tecumseh trying to unite the tribes would have had a far bigger and more solidly-based people to work with.
I just think it’s silly to blame Columbus (or Cortez, or Pizzaro, much less John Smith) outside of their times — or immune systems: compared to what, the way the Black Death had wiped out a third of Europe? Or what happened to the Anastazi? Or how the Romans, or the Chinese, or the Mongols built their empires?
October 12th, 2009 at 2:54 pm
Pastwatch is fuckin’ *terrible*. At least when you start really thinking about the underlying premises. Or, at least as bad as SM Stirling’s alternate history fiction.
Columbus was pretty much just a charlatan(fundy) villian who conned a monarchy desperate for a new fix of gold after the final conquest of muslims–and still managed to fuck it all up for himself. World would have been quite a bit better if it was Cortez on the three ships and Columbus leading the spanish band…
October 12th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
I still don’t understand why October 12 is even recognized, let alone celebrated, as ‘Columbus Day’. Why recognize the day when he ‘dicovered’ an island in the West Indies? Is it because we can’t figure out the day when Lief Erickson ‘discovered’ North America?
Same reason why Obama got the Nobel Prize – he was the “game changer”
October 12th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
Re: The dubious proposition that Polynesians found their way to Chile, for example, is not widely known because it had no consequences.
It brought the sweet potatoe to the South Pacific islands, where it became a staple food.That seems like a big consequence to me. And the evidence is not dubious. Sweet potatoes were found in the Pacific islands and dated to 1000 AD, just as chicken bones were found in the South America and dated to, I think, 1300.
RE: The Spanish flat-out exterminated the locals in the Caribbean, e.g., the Caribs. I can’t recall any outright exterminations that the British conducted in North America, and certainly nothing like the Spain’s wholesale replacement of the deceased indigenous populations with slaves that the Spanish did in Cuba and Hispaniola.
The British certainly did exterminate indigenous peoples, as did the Americans later on.Have you met any Beothuks around lately? Anyway, I hardly think it’s that much better to eliminate 95% of an ethnic group as opposed to 100%.
While there were indigenous groups that were entirely wiped out by the Spanish/Portuguese conquests, including as you note the Caribs and Tainos, it very quickly became Spanish policy (at least on the mainland) _not_ to exterminate the indegenous people and instead to turn them into a population of serfs and laborers. Plenty of Spanish governors were reprimanded and disciplined for being too cruel to the indigenous population, and there was a slogan around at the time something like “No Indians, No Colonies”. Serfdom is not a nice thing but it’s better than annihilation.
I don’t think it’s accurate, btw, to say that the official policy of the church was that indegenous people were only partly human. See the encyclical “Sublimus Dei”, from 1537, excerpted below.
“The enemy of the human race, who opposes all good deeds in order to bring men to destruction, beholding and envying this, invented a means never before heard of, by which he might hinder the preaching of God’s word of Salvation to the people: he inspired his satellites who, to please him, have not hesitated to publish abroad that the Indians of the West and the South, and other people of whom We have recent knowledge should be treated as dumb brutes created for our service, pretending that they are incapable of receiving the Catholic Faith. We, who, though unworthy, exercise on earth the power of our Lord and seek with all our might to bring those sheep of His flock who are outside into the fold committed to our charge, consider, however, that the Indians are truly men and that they are not only capable of understanding the Catholic Faith but, according to our information, they desire exceedingly to receive it. Desiring to provide ample remedy for these evils, We define and declare by these Our letters, or by any translation thereof signed by any notary public and sealed with the seal of any ecclesiastical dignitary, to which the same credit shall be given as to the originals, that, notwithstanding whatever may have been or may be said to the contrary, the said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and the possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen, it shall be null and have no effect.”
If you’re curious about why there was less mortality from disease in S. and Central America, I would think partly because the African diseases never made it up to high altitude, and partly because the indigenous people had an advantage in living at the high altitudes (i.e. physiological adaptations).
October 12th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
The epidemics that cut a swathe through the New England tribes occurred no more than thirty years before the MA Bay Company started shipping large numbers of settler families into the area. They then fought several wars that basically destroyed the power of the Indians in New England, while the Dutch wiped out those in southern New York and New Jersey, and the Powhatan Confederacy was destroyed before 1650.
Now, the Mississippi tribes were decimated, but there was a certain amount of recovery in that rich region. Other tribes moved in; certainly the French had to kill a lot of people to secure Louisiana in the latter part of the 17th and the 18th Centuries.
The Spanish, by contrast, did not start shipping settlers en masse to Mexico in the 1540s. Nor did they do so in most places they owned.
What I’ve been trying to get at is that a. the native peoples all experienced tremendous losses during First Contact but also that b. the Spanish were content to rule over the remaining natives and to intermingle with them, which probably allowed additional antibodies to make their way into the remaining natives.
In Anglosphere, the native losses were compounded by continued population transfers from Europe, including many women, which meant that the native population was looked at as something to be expelled, rather than something to potentially draw wives from. Just look at the sermon given to the MA Bay Company before they started their Atlantic voyage, and you’ll get a good sense of what the English thought of the natives.
In fact, I’d say the Spanish represented more a version of colonialism more in line with what later occurred in Africa, except with a willingness to reproduce with the natives that created a bridge between the Euro conquerors and the remaining Indians.
October 12th, 2009 at 3:44 pm
Hey Matt, if you are still looking for a good Colombus Day book, I highly, highly suggest The Harp And The Shadow by Alejo Carpentier. Colombus + magic realism, you can’t go wrong.
October 12th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
There are some good book recommendations here: Cronon, Kamen, etc. For an up-to-date work that focuses strictly on Columbus and not so much on his legacy, try Carla Rahn Philips, The Worlds of Christopher Columbus.
October 12th, 2009 at 4:40 pm
Re: Columbus crossed the Atlantic and found out the world was considerably larger than anybody had thought
No. Columbus’ problem was that he thought the world wqas smaller than was generally believed. The Greeks had estimated the circumference of the Earth by geometrical means and that estimate was reasonably accurate. No one was aware that there were continents between Europe and Asia in the west, and no one attempted to reach Asia by sailing west because without those continents it would have been impossible to carry enough provisions to make the trip.
Re: The Spanish pretty much thought of it as a place to steal wealth.
A couple of points: 16th century Spain was a lot closer to the medieval world than was 18th century Britain or 17th century Holland and France. And 16th century Europe as a whole was still suffering the demographic effects of the Black Death 150-200 years earlier: to wit, Europe was not overpopulated. The Spanish were not looking for Lebensraum to which they could export their surplus population because ther was no surplus population. The Spanish (and their neighbors in Portugal) were looking for an empire over which a small European upper class could rule native peasants.
Re: do you (does anybody) know how come Central and South American
The did. But there were a lot more of them (their advanced civilizations, relatively speaking, supported larger populations) so there were a lot more survivors. Also, as I noted above the Spaniards and the Portuguese did not export a lot of their own population to the New World; young men might come over to make their fortune and while there take a native wife (who would be coveniently abandoned when the men returned to Europe), and this is the source of the large Mestizo population. Hector may also have a point about high altitudes in the Andes.
Re: The Spanish flat-out exterminated the locals in the Caribbean, e.g., the Caribs.
And yet it is a fact that when Spain had to hand Florida over to Britain in 1763, the surviving Native Americans, who by then regarded themselves as good subjects of the Spanish crown and good Catholics, departed to Cuba along with the Spanish; this is why Florida’s native people like the Seminole are all later immigrants from farther north. This speaks volumes as to how the Spanish were seen relative to the British.
Re: the not unreasonable speculation is that the ones who escaped were infected with smallpox, etc., which simply wiped out their people.
Probably not. De Soto and men had been in North America for quite a while at that point. Any smallpox they had brought with them would have long since run its course. A more likely culprit is inlfuenza hiding in the guts of the pigs they brought along. Any pig they had that escaped and went wild would have passed the virus on to native animals and eventually a mutation would have led to an influenza epidemic, against which disease the natives peoples also had no immunity. Of course, smallpox and other diseases could also have reached them from Mexico via native trade routes too.
Re: the French had to kill a lot of people to secure Louisiana in the latter part of the 17th and the 18th Centuries.
Can you document this assertion? The French usually got along quite well with native peoples, and frequently intermaried with them. There’s a reason many native peoples sided with the French against the British. And in Louisiana the French tended to settle in bottom land that the natives didn’t want (it was unhealthy and their agricultural techniques couldn’t handle the thicker soils) so I don’t think there was much competition.
October 12th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
I would recommend Henry Kamen’s Empire as well.
October 12th, 2009 at 5:22 pm
Where I’m from, Columbus Day is a day of Mourning.
Also, isn’t it believed that Columbus thought his funding would be cut off if he revealed he had not found the riches of the Indies to Spain? Spain wasn’t looking for a New World, after all, they wanted a known quantity.
October 12th, 2009 at 5:27 pm
Several people have mentioned this already, and I’d like to suggest “Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus” as well. It is Orson Scott Card’s best book, of the one’s I’ve read (and after the atrocious garbage that was “Empire,” I will probably never read another).
He tells a good story when he’s not being batshit crazy, which unfortunately is all the time nowadays.
October 12th, 2009 at 5:39 pm
“Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World” by Stephen Greenblatt. VERY theory-heavy, but lots of references to Columbus’ own diaries etc. and an unusual perspective. At least, I saw Greenblatt speak engagingly about the book, so I can recommend it with that qualification. Also, he is a sharp dresser.
October 12th, 2009 at 6:27 pm
Lord, how tendentious folks can be about simple stuff: “Columbus’ problem was that he thought the world wqas smaller than was generally believed. The Greeks had estimated the circumference of the Earth by geometrical means and that estimate was reasonably accurate…”
Do you think about what you write? Consider — “thought the world was smaller….”
Okay, so you’re at a dock on the Atlantic Coast of Europe in 1491, looking West, and you think: well, I’m so many hundreds of miles from the Pyrenees, and so many thousands of miles from the Urals, and those are so many thousands of miles from Cathay, so… gee, I think I have to sail 15,000 miles to get there from here?”
Get a grip, willya? People who command fleets tend to be sorta practical.
Samuel Eliot Morrison makes a pretty good case that there was enough historical overlap between the Norse navigators who made fairly routine cross-Atlantic trips roughly from 900-1250 or so, and more rarely from 1250-1400, would have been known to folks hanging around Bristol when Columbus was there as a cub in the 1460s and 70s. Those voyages were all in the North, where it is much narrower and the voyages were in stages, from Norway to Greenland or Iceland, and on to Nova Scotia.
“No one was aware that there were continents between Europe and Asia in the west…” No kidding. Think finding that out might have been important? I’m sure we would have heard about it.
“no one attempted to reach Asia by sailing west because without those continents it would have been impossible to carry enough provisions to make the trip…”
Prove it. Show a SINGLE European who said so. Start with Prince Henry the Navigator. Vasco de Gama? Zarco? Cadamasto? Dias?
People didn’t try to sail across the Atlantic BECAUSE THEY DIDN’T KNOW WHAT WAS OUT THERE.
Ever been in a dark room, trying to get to the other side? You feel your way along the wall — that’s what the Portuguese were doing down the African coast. Columbus sold Ferdinand and Isabella on the idea that they could jump right over their rivals by sailling West — no need to feel along the wall, just walk across the room.
Bold — but not stupid, and definitely not ignorant.
But the idea that Columbus blundered into the most influential discovery in history because he was ignorant IS offensively stupid. He knew exactly what he was doing — he was betting that the Norse had found the northern parts of Cathay, and that he could find the southern part if he sailed in a straight line for something like 2,000 miles due West of Portugal.
Which is EXACTLY what he did.
To project backwards that Columbus should have concluded that Erotosthanes’ “measured” the earth’s circumference accurately, so the distance he would have had to sail to Cathay was off by a factor of six, is really, REALLY dumb: how the hell could anyone on the Atlantic coast of Europe in 1491 have known exactly how far the Pacific coast of China was, overland?
Columbus thought Cathay was a helluva lot bigger than it is, or that the world was smaller, but I expect which one made no difference to him at all: he KNEW where the Norse had been up north was a place he could sail to, and he bet his life on sailing straight across to it, further south.
Give the man credit, there are damned few in human history who achieved as much.
October 12th, 2009 at 6:44 pm
A Journey Long and Strange, by Tony Horwitz. While not just about Columbus is an intresting read on who discovered the ‘New’ world. Plus, you’ll learn that Columbus thought the Earth was “like a woman’s breast” with the Gaden of Eden being the nipple. So there’s that.
October 12th, 2009 at 6:48 pm
JonF, to name a few, the Natchez and Chickasaw Wars. I recall that they basically wiped out the Natchez as a people.
And don’t forget their death grapple with the Iroquois. Frankly, the best thing that ever happened to British North America was that Champlain got into a local tussle between the much weaker Huron and, I believe, the Mohawk.
What he could not have known, because I’m sure the Huron never told him, was that the Mohawk were part of the most powerful native nation left after the fall of the Inca, Aztec, and Mississippi Valley civilizations. And they became the blood enemies of the French for the next 150 years.
October 12th, 2009 at 7:24 pm
Re: And don’t forget their death grapple with the Iroquois.
Um, “death grapple”? Nonsense. The Iroquois had a small empire of their own, and the French earned their displeasure by allying with the Algonquian people whom the Iroquois had originally cowed into submission. As a result the French and the Iroquois, after some scattered skirmishes, pretty much divided Canada and the Great Lakes area into zones of influence. Yes, they had occasional set-tos, but calling this a “death grapple” is ridiculous. The Iroquois were tough customers and the French most certainly did not destroy them; rather the Iroquois ultimately helped the British evict the French from Canada.
October 12th, 2009 at 7:29 pm
JonF, the Iroquois were allied with the Brits pretty much every time in the major wars.
Had they been on the French side, like practically the whole of the Algonquin tribes, I find it highly unlikely the British would have succeeded in winning out, at least in 1763. And the US found the natives a hard nut to crack even during the early 19th Century.
Hell, the most important concession of the 1812 War was that the Brits would no longer provide support to the Old Northwest natives and give up the forts they still possessed in the region – so long as the US forswore invading Canada, which we essentially did.
October 12th, 2009 at 7:34 pm
Re: Get a grip, willya? People who command fleets tend to be sorta practical.
Huh What’s more practical than worrying about whether you will run out of food and water on a long ocean voyage far from land? Columbus’ plans were criticized precisely because the size of the Earth was approximately known and he was dead wrong about it.
Re: . Start with Prince Henry the Navigator.
Um, how abour we start with Eratosthenes of Alexandria who made the first estimate of the Earth’s circumference. And this was known in late medieval times (Greek science was rediscovered in the 15th century).
Re: that’s what the Portuguese were doing down the African coast.
The Portguese always had land nearby. They could put in and take on water and other supplies.
Re: But the idea that Columbus blundered into the most influential discovery in history because he was ignorant IS offensively stupid. He knew exactly what he was doing
No, he did not. He went to his grave insisting he had landed in Asia or the Indies. Good grief, this is a matter of historical record! Why defend him- are you one of his descendants or something?
Re: how the hell could anyone on the Atlantic coast of Europe in 1491 have known exactly how far the Pacific coast of China was, overland?
Ptolemy’s globe, found in every university of Europe since the 1200s. And why are you being so offensive? You are the one showing your profound ignorance.
October 12th, 2009 at 7:35 pm
Since Columbus Day is really intended as an “Italian-American Recognition Day” (Columbus was the best known Italian), why not rename it after some Italian-American like Marconi ?
October 12th, 2009 at 7:45 pm
We have a problem with Columbus. There’s so much we would like to know, but don’t. We can either just make up whatever we like, as Morison did, or do solid source criticism.
And the debate over disease and Native Indian populations is just mass avoidance of the plain fact that since the vast majority of all emigrants, English, Spanish and French, were male, all pure laine American Caucasians are, in fact, Metis.
October 12th, 2009 at 8:01 pm
LOL — JonF, think before you write. Hell, think WHILE you’re reading — honest, it helps. I’m not saying anything remotely like what you’re refuting — and you’re not saying anything worth saying at all.
Ptolemy hadn’t actually BEEN anywhere. People who command fleets tend to place a certain credibility in people who’ve been someplace, and can go back there when they choose.
I asked you to cite a single source — ANYBODY — at the time who said that crossing the Atlantic to get to Cathay meant going 15,000 miles. Just one. C’mon, you can do it — unless, of course, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Show us — using those quotation mark things.
I pointed out what Columbus actually did, which was to go to Ferdinand and Isabella (but only after striking out with several of their rivals), to persuade ‘em that the way to jump over the route around Africa (sailing South to go East) was to go West across the Atlantic.
You have this projection thing, where because we know how far it is from the Atlantic to the Pacific across Eurasia, not only must Columbus have known this, but so would every educated person in Europe.
I’m pointing out that, as a matter of historical fact, this is bullshit.
It made no never mind to Columbus, nor any of his contemporaries, if Cathay was 12,000 miles bigger than we now know it to be, or if the world was 12,000 miles smaller: what HE bet his life on, was that he could get to the land the Norse had found in the North, only much further South — which he figured, had to be Cathay.
Hence, his actual discovery — which was that there was this whole frigging continent which nobody had even imagined.
The reason that Prince Henry didn’t send his guys across the Atlantic beyond the Azores, is because they didn’t know what was out there, not because they thought it was too far to go.
Columbus TESTED whether it was too far to go — but he was positive there was something there that he could reach.
This is too hard for you to understand?
October 12th, 2009 at 9:06 pm
A third vote for “A Voyage Long and Strange” by Tony Horwitz. The thing is a hoot.
October 12th, 2009 at 9:11 pm
Are we certain Columbus was an Italian? I would hate to think my Italian/American brothers and sisters are out marching and celebrating the life of their favorite slave trader if he was, in fact, born in the Catalonia region of Spain and a person who quite possibly never spoke a single lick of Italian in his entire life.
October 12th, 2009 at 9:58 pm
People knew the distance across Eurasia from Europe to Cathay
and the Pacific since the days -and mainly from the writings – of Marco Polo. In the meetings of Salamanca, requested by the king and queen of Spain, it was pointed out that Columbus was off. Queen Isabella agreed to a limited gamble only
October 13th, 2009 at 6:27 am
Re: This is too hard for you to understand?
I understand that you are an offensive bore and are taking this debate personally for reasons I cannot imagine since we are dealing with people who lived 500 years ago with no connection to us. Makes about as much sense as getting hot under the collar over disagreements about the tactics of Alexander the Great. Good grief.
October 13th, 2009 at 8:56 am
LOL — nonsense. I’m making fun of you because you have opinions without knowledge.
RECEIVED opinions, no less.
Look, JonF: it’s obvious you’ve never actually thought about the Columbus stuff on which you’ve expressed your “thinking” in this thread. It clearly never occurred to you that, EVEN IF your silly premise was true, that the navigators who were actually exploring the world in Columbus’s time had Erotasthanes’ stick and Ptolemy’s globe with ‘em in the caravels — and why would that be, pray tell? Ptolemy’s globe have much of the African coast, did it?
But even IF they did “know” that the world was 25,000 miles around, how would they know how far it was from the European Atlantic to the Asian Pacific? Did you ever LOOK at Ptolemy? (Somebody actually showed me an original once: I wouldn’t use it for navigation.)
You’re typical of a widespread sort of contemporary “thinking” that is impressively efficient — spreading an infinitesimal amount of information over the largest swath of opinion. You “know” all kinds of stuff that ain’t true, and what you DO know, you apply in places where it’s irrelevant, if not downright misleading.
Columbus’ achievement isn’t complicated, nor is it hard to see what it WAS — he persuaded Ferdinand and Isabella to pay for his ships to sail due West across the Atlantic, because he convinced them that this COULD leap over their Portuguese rivals who had found a way to India by sailing South to get around Africa, then East Northeast to India.
You have the gobsmacking historical myopia to hallucinate that the reason the Portuguese went down the African coast is because they “knew” the Atlantic was too wide to get to Cathay. (I’ve challenged you thrice now to back this up with even a single citation, and suggested you start with Prince Henry the Navigator. Well?)
Um, JonF: the reason the Portuguese went around Africa is because THEY KNEW WHERE IT WAS. The reason they didn’t sail across the Atlantic (at least, not past the Azores) is because that way, they didn’t know where ANYTHING was.
If you read the actual histories — that is, if you bothered to learn something, rather than merely repeated half-baked politically correct crap — you’d find that their bet was that the well-known westward bulge of the African coast would soon turn east, which it did. This is the ACTUAL historical reason they rationalized India was closer down past Africa, rather than across the Atlantic — but the truth is, they knew nothing.
Unlike you, they were aware of it. That’s why these were voyages of “discovery” a concept that seems astonishingly foreign to you in discussing the subject.
There was great rejoicing in all the years the Portuguese explored the Bight of Benin (even as they lost ships and men), because they were hopeful it would lead directly to India, and there were some seriously dashed hopes when the coast turned impenetrably to the South.
Like I said above, Columbus’s bet was that the great land which the Norse had found across the Atlantic in the North, was joined to Cathay somewhere in the South. I keep pointing out that to him, as to ANY of his contemporaries, it made no never mind if this was because Cathay was 12,000 miles bigger , or the globe 12,000 miles smaller.
But you’re so blinded by historical ignorance and myopia, that KNOWING the Americas are here, you miss the point that Columbus, like everybody else in Europe at the time, did NOT know they were here.
But he did know that SOMETHING was.
Which is how he found it. I suggest that you start looking for knowledge in the same way — by recognizing what you don’t know, and particularly in history, applying the lesson to recognize what folks in the past did not know, either.
Basically, you want to argue the utterly unexamined view that, betting his life that he would find land before they ran out of water, and SUCCEEDING, is evidence of Columbus’ ignorance. How do you figure that? He bet he’d find land in time — and he did. QED.
Your argument, such as it is, is that he figured the land had to be Cathay – ah-HA! you say, proof of his ignorance, because “everybody knew” that crossing the Atlantic to get to Cathay would …. cause the fleet to run out of water before they found land?
(arched eyebrow)