The Untold Story of Christopher Columbus

And we continue with our American Stories. For generations, students in American elementary schools were taught that Christopher Columbus fell the ocean blue to discover America in 1492. Today, that lesson is changing in schools across the country. Here to tell the real story of Christopher Columbus is Lawrence Berggreen, who wrote the definitive biography, Columbus: The Four Voyages.

Let’s take a listen.

Hello, my name is Lawrence Bergreen, and I’ve written a book about Christopher Columbus: Columbus, The Four Voyages. Of all the books I’ve written, I think this has been the most challenging and the most controversial, because Columbus’s reputation has been changing by the month. He’s a figure that we all know about, and he’s been devalued almost beyond recognition, torn down from statues, discredited over and over as if it were the first time. But as I discovered, the criticism of Columbus—intense criticism—was there almost at the beginning. It seems to get rediscovered with each generation. He’s been hated, considered a genocidal monster. I would like to discuss Columbus in three dimensions, if you will, to give a sense of what he was really like as a person with his flaws at all. The flaws were huge, but also so were his accomplishments. There’s a reason why we remember Columbus. He tied together, with his four voyages, the Old World and the New. First of all, who was Columbus? Christopher of Columbus. Colombo was born in Genoa in 1451. He was the son of a weaver. He went to sea at 14, which was common, and he had a very rough beginning. He sank in a bottle off the coast of Portugal. He managed to paddle safely to shore on a piece of wreckage, and as a Genoese, he enjoined a colony of Expatriogenolye sailors in Portugal. Later on, he was exploring the coast of West Africa and actually aboard another ship made it all the way to Iceland. So, even as a young person, Columbus had been around mostly as what we would call a merchant marine, and he worked carefully with his brothers, especially his brother Bartholomew, who was a mapmaker. This was kind of interesting, because conceptions of the world at that time were, by our standards, faulty and misleading to an almost comical extent. Both Alomu’s maps and other maps of that era reinforced the belief that China and all the riches that Columbus eventually went to seep from China lay just to the west of the Americas, that the Pacific Ocean was not the largest body of water on the planet, but could be traversed in maybe a few days. So, the idea was that if you could only get to the beginning of the Pacific, to its western edge, that you would be able to get to China very quickly. This was, of course, a huge mistake. Columbus, if he had known the reality of it and how difficult it was to get to China, probably would never have undertaken the voyage. There were a couple of other sailors and navigators who did; they were all lost. So, the fact that he was emboldened to undertake it was based on a series of faulty misconceptions. It’s just one of the many ironies. He spent a lot of time getting backing for the voyage. He was in Portugal. Wouldn’t back him. He finally went to Spain, and by that time, he was no longer a young man. He was 40. Forty, in those days, was late middle age, so he was, in a way, what seemed like the back nine of his career. On the other hand, Columbus had some gifts, and his main gift as a mariner, as a navigator, was what we call dead reckoning, sailing by the seat of his pants. If he wanted to estimate time and distances, he used very simple devices, such as a rope or a buoy or a landmark, timing the distance it took to move from one end of his ship to another. If it sounds primitive, it was, but it also worked, so he wasn’t dependent on technology or intellectual constructs were beyond his ken. He also paid close attention to tides and to wind, to the color of the sea, the composition of the clouds. These mattered a lot more to him than the mathematical calculations of the era’s leading cosmographers. They generally had never gone to sea, but Columbus had, and in his long apprenticeship, he had acquired a great deal of experience, which turned out to be very helpful, especially in an era of all these faulty maps, and he also had this conviction that he could sail from the western coast of Spain to the eastern coast of China without much of a problem. He was not familiar with the astrolabe. He did not steer by the stars. If he had done that again, he probably would have never set out on this voyage, because he would have realized how faulty his assumptions were. But he did have a sense that God wanted him to do this. At times, he even thought that God was speaking to him. That wasn’t that uncommon in those days. Many people felt that God was directly speaking to them about what they should be doing in life. When I say speaking, I don’t mean a mild, prompting an intuitive one. I mean actually hearing a voice. And we know that Columbus had this experience of God speaking to him because he wrote down what he thought God actually told him at critical times. What was so remarkable about all this was that when he set out on this voyage the very first time, the one that we all study about in school, in 1492, he went across the Atlantic with three ships, and it’s the first time we know that Europeans had done this with no loss of life. This is really remarkable considering the dangers that he faced and his lack of specific knowledge. And he made this voyage three more times, each time improving based on hard-won experience, until on the last voyage, he was able to cross the Atlantic in only 16 days. It was incredible. Of course, the shorter the voyage, the less dangers you faced. There was less danger of storms, less danger of dehydration, less danger of unmet needs at sea, so this worked in his favor. His crew on these voyages was very problematic because he sailed on the first voyage just the day after the Spanish Inquisition became the law of the land that was intended to drive Muslims out of Spain, but it also had ripple effects across Europe and all the way to Portugal, and was really an important watershed in history. It was the brainchild, if you could call it that, of the Catholic monarchs of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella. Because Columbus was not able to get backing in Portugal. He was able to get sort of backing from them, but let me say, it was tentative. His first fleet was three cramped, leaking, fragile vessels. They were old and falling apart. We would call them rustbuckets, except they were made out of wood, and they were small. The Santa Maria, which was the largest, could hold only 40 sailors.

And you’ve been listening to historian Lawrence Bergreen tell the story of Christopher Columbus in a way you’ve probably never heard it before. It’s complicated, and it’s nuanced, and like any human being, this man had his flaws, but my goodness, his virtues, his talents, you’re hearing about some of them.

By the way, if he had not known how difficult it was, we learned to get to China. Of course, they were looking for a shorter route. He probably would have never embarked on the voyage in the first place.

The irony of ironies.

And he’s 40 years old when he tries to get the backing to do this, and 40, as Lawrence pointed out, is the back nine of your career back in the late 15th century. And of course, how he knew what he was supposed to do? Well, he knew it because he’d heard from God. And I mean, he thought he literally heard from God. And that’s what he wrote in his own journals and memoirs. A really spectacular part of Lawrence’s book is hearing about those messages from God, from Columbus himself, and of course, that first voyage and those three sort of rickety ships.

You’re going to hear more of the story of Christopher Columbus with Lawrence Bergreen as Our American Stories continue, and we continue with Our American Stories and the story of Christopher Columbus as told by historian Lawrence Bergreen.

Let’s pick up where we last left off.

Now, another one of Columbus’s, it seems almost comical, misconceptions, was that he was going to sail to China in these ships. Therefore, he brought translators with him, ready to interpret Chinese once they reached Asia. Where did he get these ideas from? Well, like everybody in Europe at that time, he got them from Marco Polo’s popular Travels. Marco Polo went overland rather than sea, for the most part, and dictated a very popular account of his adventures. Some of it was embellished, some of it were drawn from other accounts that he’d heard that he included in his own. In general, it painted a picture of this mythical China or Asia that Columbus thought he was reaching as a place of great luxury, of gold, and sensual gratification. The idea was he would go there and bring back spices, which were very important and easy to transport; gold, a little more difficult because it had to be mined or stolen; and much, much more ominously, slaves. Slavery at that point was very common throughout Europe. He also had another mission, which partly contradicted this one, was that he wanted to bring, and he was quite serious about this, Christianity to what he called the idol worshipers of the East. He felt that his name, Christopher Columbus, meant Christ Bearer, and he had a messianic sense of this. Now, this didn’t square with the idea of slavery, because if you had slaves and he wanted to convert people, they couldn’t be Christians. But nobody really bothered at that time to think it through until he actually went out on the voyage. He also planned to meet Kubla Khan. He had official letters from King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. The only problem was that Kubla Khan had died decades ago. The Mongol Empire, which he led, was fading into oblivion. So, it could be said that, I think with some fairness, that Marco Polo’s Travels, which in many ways were accurate, misled rather than inspired Columbus, and he spent his entire career, four voyages, in a futile effort to discover this maritime route to China. Okay. In the process, he stumbled across what we know now and now call the New World. And that was the beginning of what we also call globalization. Now, we can debate endlessly whether this was a good thing or a bad thing. But once Columbus had started this process of going back and forth between what we now call the Americas and Spain and Europe, there was no stopping it. And it wasn’t just trade, and it wasn’t just geopolitics. It was also what we call the Columbus exchange. But the Columbian Exchange involved livestock, and seeds, and germs, and other things that could not be undone, because what you left behind stayed and transformed the landscapes of both the Old World and the New. On the first voyage, his initial contacts—this was the 1492 voyage—were tentative and respectful. He wrote, and he was a big letter writer, “I hope to win them to the love and service of their highnesses,” by which he meant Ferdinand and Isabella and the whole Spanish nation. “They have no religion, but they are not idolators. They believe that power and goodness dwell in the sky, and are firmly convinced that I have come from the sky with these ships and people. This is because they are not stupid. Far from it. They are men of great intelligence, for they give a marvelously good account of everything. But they have never before seen men clothed or ships like these.”

Columbus was probably talking about one of two tribes in the Caribbean. The Taíno was probably the most likely, and they were fairly sophisticated, as he realized, and they were not particularly hostile to Columbus or to rivals. Some of them were very curious and welcomed him. However, some of the behavior of Columbus’s followers, or those who came in after him, was so outrageous that what we think of as the atrocities that we attribute to Columbus were actually perpetrated by those who came afterwards, sometimes in his name. And sometimes independently. Some of the worst of them, for example, one of his lieutenants, Michele de Cuneo, wrote about capturing and raping a beautiful indigenous woman, whom he claims the Lord Admiral, that was Columbus, had given to him. And then he writes about how she was unwilling and scraped her with his fingernails so that he wished he had never laid eyes on her. Finally, he got a piece of rope and punished her with it. These kinds of letters were circulated around Europe and sensationalized this voyage, so the impression of it went from being one of trade and a religious mission to one of complete exploitation. Columbus also decided that one of the other tribes, the Caribs, as opposed to the Taíno, were cannibals, and he wrote after the second voyage that the Caribs eat the male children that they have been adopted by their women, and only bring up the children of their own women. In other words, they eat the children of a rival indigenous people. And then, to top it off, he reported that they say that human flesh is so good that there is nothing like it in the world. Well again, these kinds of accounts electrified Europe, Spain, and not in a good way, and set off a big reaction that changed the color of everything. At the same time, while this was going on, unknown to Columbus and his sailors, in Europe, something maybe more important was going on, and one that continues to this day. That’s the Columbian Exchange, which I mentioned earlier. This was first identified by Alfred Crosby at the University of Texas at Austin, and it indicates the change in commingling of bacteria and plants and animals between the Old World and the New, beginning in 1492, and then the subsequent four voyages, when there was a cross-fertilizing of these separate landmasses brought about by Columbus and his followers.

And you’ve been listening to historian Lawrence Bergreen tell the story, the rich and complicated story, the nuanced story of Christopher Columbus, one of the great storytellers in this country. Lawrence is. His book is Columbus, The Four Voyages. I urge you to get it. You will not put it down. Get two copies, give it to a friend. We learn so much about the context and the times in which he lived. Lawrence isn’t one of those historians who judge people out of context. But yet he’s honest, as honest can be. The full picture, the good, the bad, and the ugly. And my goodness, the international trade lanes that Columbus started, he started, for better or worse, global trade. He started globalization, and it changed not only the New World, it changed the Old World too. Also, a great discussion, a great piece of storytelling on how Columbus viewed the native tribes and, more importantly, how people used his name to do just, well, tragic and ugly things, and of course, some of Columbus’s own writings and the impact they had on the native tribes that lived here before his arrival. When we return, more of this remarkable story, this rich and complicated story, story of Christopher Columbus. Here on Our American Stories, and we continue with Our American Stories and with the story of Christopher Columbus as told by Lawrence Bergreen.

Let’s pick up where we last left off.

Columbus brought white potatoes, sweet potatoes, maize, and manioc, which is a rather starchy root, from the New World to the old, to Europe, and he brought wheat, turnips, barley, apples, and rice from Europe to the Americas. They made a big difference because they enabled the people in the Americas who started growing them to rapidly increase the population there. But there was more; it got more complicated. Columbus and his men brought horses, cattle, sheep, and goats to the New World. We have to imagine what it was like without horses, without cattle before them. They also brought back to Europe pathogens that were unknown. People didn’t really know about germ theory in those days. These pathogens had a devastating effect. Smallpox, malaria, chickenpox, influenza, and yellow fever all came, thanks to Columbus and his men, not intentionally. He never decided, “Okay, we’re going to intentionally infect defenseless people in another land.” They didn’t realize they were doing it. Some other effects of this Columbian Exchange: alcohol and alcoholism. There weren’t alcoholics in the New World or alcohol before Columbus. Alcohol and alcoholism devastated local populations. So, as you can see, this Columbian Exchange was complicated and multi-layered. Once that was started, it could not be undone. Columbus’s first voyage was relatively quick. As I mentioned, it seemed to be successful. The second voyage was meant as a follow-up. He wanted to capitalize on it. Finally, when he got to the third voyage, which was 1498 and 1500, in a way, this was the most complicated of all, and we see a lot of the contradictions in the Columbus voyages coming to the fore. He had a very difficult time maintaining order among the crew, and he had also had a difficult time maintaining the pretense that he was going to China or Asia. He was also undermined by his brother Bartholomew, who was much more interested in plunder and conquest and did not share Columbus’s messianic visions or ideals. At the meantime, on this voyage, he seemed to be losing his mind, or at least temporarily losing his reason. On this third voyage, once he discovered Venezuela, another major accomplishment, but again, not China, he decided that he was sailing uphill, as he wrote about, which of course, on