Christopher Columbus: The Last Crusader

Lee Habeeb (00:12):
This is Lee Habeeb, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. October is Italian-American Heritage Month, and perhaps no figure is more closely associated with this month than Christopher Columbus. We all learned the story as a kid. In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. We know what he did, but why did he do it? Here to tell the story is George Grant, author of The Last Crusader. Here’s George.

George Grant (00:47):
You might well know that in 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue, but I’d warrant that you don’t know and never knew what it was that he set out to do. The truth is, is that the story of Christopher Columbus has become muddled through the years and partly because of politics, partly because of distance from time. William Debertin, the 19th-century essayist, declared, it ought to be the greatest part of our object and business in life to unlearn what we have been taught amiss, and only then to acquire the knowledge of better things. Back in 1992, when the 500th anniversary of Columbus was about to be celebrated, I decided to unlearn what I had been taught amiss about Christopher Columbus. And what I discovered really astonished me. I thought I knew the story, but I didn’t at all.

George Grant (02:05):
For instance, I thought that Christopher Columbus sailed for Spain. But in fact, there was no such nation, no such kingdom, no such territory as Spain in 1492. We’ve been taught amiss. I was taught amiss. It’s also often asserted that the greatest obstacle Columbus faced in receiving a royal warrant for his expedition across the Atlantic was… the prevailing view that the Earth was flat. But in fact, most seasoned navigators knew full well that the Earth was spherical. Washington Irving was one of the 19th-century biographers of Columbus, and a lot of the stories that we have about Christopher Columbus have come from Washington Irving. Interestingly, Washington Irving was responsible also for things like George Washington throwing a silver dollar across the Potomac River and chopping down the cherry tree, both of which are highly likely untrue altogether. Washington Irving wasn’t a historian. He was a storyteller. And so one of the myths that Washington Irving created, he sort of invented the idea of the flat-Earth myth.

George Grant (03:38):
There were, of course, sailors that believed in a flat earth. Just as to this day, there are people that believe that the Apollo landings on the moon were faked in a studio. But the truth is, is Washington Irving was a great storyteller. I love his biography of Columbus. There’s not much in it that’s reliable. Contemporaneous with Columbus were the careers of Copernicus and Erasmus, of Michelangelo and Leonardo, of Brunelleschi and Gutenberg, of Nicholas of Cusa and Regiomontanus. I mean, this was a time of great, great knowledge. His was hardly an age of darkness and ignorance.

George Grant (04:29):
We’ve been taught amiss. I was taught amiss. Other Columbian myths that have to be debunked before we even begin to tell his remarkable story are things like the assumption that the explorer was in search of colonial possessions for the crown, or perhaps even for himself. The fact is, is Columbus kept journals and logbooks, diaries, and discursive essays that made his intentions clear. A record of his actions for each of his four transatlantic expeditions in 1492, 1493, 1498, and 1502 affirmed that he maintained his aims and purposes to the end of his life. So, what was it that he was actually after?

George Grant (05:25):
And who was this remarkable navigator? Well, he was born in the Italian city of Genoa, which is on the far west coast, just on the opposite side of the Italian peninsula from Venice. And in fact, Genoa and Venice were great naval rivals. And he grew up the son of a wool merchant who traveled up and down the Ligurian coastline to sell his wares. So from the earliest age, Columbus was out at sea in the Mediterranean. But something dramatic happened when Columbus was three years old in 1453. And that was news came to the city of Genoa that the great Byzantine Empire had fallen to the Islamic horde, that the city of Constantinople had been sacked and destroyed.

George Grant (06:32):
And as a result, the city of Genoa went into deep mourning. The bells were ringing. The women were out in the streets mourning because it was believed that at this point, the invasion of the Muslim hordes was unstoppable.

Lee Habeeb (06:52):
And you’ve been listening to George Grant tell the story, well, at least in this part, demythologize the many stories out there about Christopher Columbus and then start to drill down on who the man was and what he was after. Why? Why did he sail the ocean blue? Not once, not twice, not three times, but four times in over a 10-year period. And when we come back, we’re going to learn more about those answers. Here on Our American Stories, The Last Crusader: The Untold Story of Christopher Columbus continues after these messages. Lee Habeeb here again. Our American Stories tries to tell the stories of America’s past and present to Americans. And we want to hear your stories too. They’re some of our favorites. Send them to us. Go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the Your Stories tab. Again, please go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the Your Stories tab.

Lee Habeeb (08:09):
And we continue with Our American Stories and with George Grant, author of The Last Crusader: The Untold Story of Christopher Columbus. Let’s pick up where we last left off.

George Grant (08:22):
If Byzantium could fall, if the great city of Constantinople, the center of Christian civilization in the East, if that could fall, if the imperial armies of the Byzantine emperor could be defeated, then surely nothing else could stop them. Almost immediately, there were calls for a liberating crusade of all of the historic lands in the Eastern Mediterranean. The previous crusades had all failed. All called for new crusades to liberate the Eastern Mediterranean from the terror of the Islamic horde. And all of those calls went unanswered until Columbus arrived. We have been taught amiss. Columbus was so taken with the idea that there might be some way to launch a new crusade where every other crusade had failed that he began to scheme as a teenager his great vision for an expedition. And it was simply this. Instead of sailing east across the Mediterranean, which was now caught in the stranglehold of the Islamic navies, what if you sailed around to the opposite side of the globe?

George Grant (09:51):
Columbus had grown up hearing the stories of Marco Polo, Polo was a Venetian, but during an internecine war between Venice and Genoa, he had been held in a Genoese prison. And it was there in the Genoese prison that he told his story of his great, great trek across the Asian continent to meet the Khan of the Mongols. And while Marco Polo was there, the Khan actually asked Marco Polo to bring Christian missionaries, 100 Christian missionaries, to evangelize the Mongols. When Marco Polo got back to Italy, he went to the pope in Rome, and the pope believed as did all of the pope’s counselors that Marco Polo was just telling tall tales. As it turns out, the story was so dramatic that it became a bestseller and eventually it captivated Columbus’s young mind.

George Grant (11:01):
And he thought, what if it is possible to sail across the Atlantic Ocean, connect with the great Khan in Asia, bring the gospel to him, and then use his unstoppable force of the cavalry of the Mongols to then launch a new crusade, not from the west, but from the east. In other words, what if we could rear flank the Muslim horde? Well, that was, in a sense, the genesis of the idea. So it was difficult to get financiers to catch this vision, especially since it didn’t seem to have commercial appeal. Columbus was not interested in the gold that he might obtain in any discovery. He wasn’t interested in colonial possessions. He wasn’t interested in power.

George Grant (12:05):
What he wanted to see was the Eastern Mediterranean freed up again for the flow of the gospel. One of the things that we discover in Columbus’s journals is that he was an ardent Christian who believed that the great calling of every Christian was to spread the good news of the gospel to the ends of the earth, Christ’s own great commission. So he saw his vision of recovering for Christ the Eastern Mediterranean, the birthplace of Christianity, as the life work that he was called to. Now, eventually, because the Reconquista was finally successful in January of 1492, the Reconquista was the attempt of the various kingdoms on the Iberian Peninsula to push the Muslims finally out of Europe.

George Grant (13:11):
It was successful in January of 1492, after almost six centuries of struggle. And for the first time, Ferdinand, Isabella, King John of Portugal could begin to think about other things. They’d been literally waging this war all their lives, all their parents’ lives, all their grandparents’ lives, etc., And because Queen Isabella was sort of enraptured by the personality and vision and charisma of this merchant and explorer, this mapmaker, this scientific theorist, she beckons Columbus back to the court after having rejected him a number of times and pledged a modest commitment. If Columbus could raise the money immediately and find the ships that he would need for an expedition, she would give a royal warrant. Well, immediately Columbus went to work.

George Grant (14:15):
He secured three ships, two of them very inadequate, the Niña and the Pinta, but the third ship, his primary ship, the Santa María, was more than adequate. He recruited a crew, found financiers, and finally, in August of 1492, he set out on his great expedition. And finally, in October of 1492, they caught sight of land. They did not catch sight of Asia, which is where they thought they were going, because no one knew that the North and South American continents stood between Europe and China. Instead, it was a series of Caribbean islands that we now know so familiarly today in the Gulf of America, formerly the Gulf of Mexico. Columbus began to explore the islands, met some of the islanders, was taken by their need of the civilizing power of the gospel, and began to make plans for evangelism there as well. On that trip, they discovered Hispaniola, the island that Haiti is on today, and the Dominican Republic. They discovered Cuba, and they left a delegation of soldiers to create a little settlement and sailed back to great triumph.

Lee Habeeb (15:58):
And you’ve been listening to George Grant, author of The Last Crusader: The Untold Story of Christopher Columbus. Tell the story, the why part of the story of this great explorer. And it all had to do with the fall of Constantinople. And if that great city could fall, then surely every other city could fall. And so Columbus’s insight was simple. Instead of sailing east and straight into the stranglehold of the Islamic navies, Why not sail in the opposite direction toward Asia? And of course, the why was, well, what he’d learned about Marco Polo, which may indeed have been, well, not true. But it was a story that etched in the mind of Columbus, this idea that Kublai Khan was hoping for missionaries to come and make Christians of his people. This inspires Columbus, who had grown up on the sea. His father was a trader.

Lee Habeeb (16:59):
What does he do? He decides to sail across the Atlantic and launch what he considers a new crusade from the East. And in the end, what he was really doing in military terms was create a rear flank against what many considered to be the Muslim hordes. And there was no commercial appeal here for Columbus. He wasn’t doing it for gold. He wasn’t doing it for wealth. This was not a commercial enterprise. No, he was doing it for God and spreading the gospel. which is, of course, the prime directive of Christ to his followers, was to take and spread the gospel to all nations. And when we come back, we’re going to learn about what happens next as Columbus embarks on this all-important spiritual mission here on Our American Stories. And we continue with our American stories and the story of Christopher Columbus as told to us by George Grant, author of The Last Crusader.

Lee Habeeb (18:19):
Let’s pick up where we last left off.

George Grant (18:22):
Much of the rest of the story of Columbus’s life is one of frustration, and oftentimes fierce opposition. Because as soon as men began to realize there was opportunity across the seas, a flood of conquerors, colonizers, and imperialists, the conquistadors, began to make their way across the Atlantic and establish settlements and colonies there. The real story of you know, the imperialization of the Americas began. Oftentimes, Columbus is accused of the exploitive behavior and the enslavement of Native Americans, including questions raised by Bartolomé de las Casas. But those accusations weren’t written until more than half a century after Columbus’s death. the labor system that was codified by the Castilian court didn’t pass until 1503 after the final voyage of Columbus, and the system of enslavement was not codified until 1575, two generations after the explorer’s death. So, the supposition that Columbus was an enslaver, a colonizer, a colonialist is simply not the case.

George Grant (19:59):
What Columbus did do, however, was he made a whole series of remarkable scientific advances that changed the navigation forever. For instance, at one point on his third voyage, he sailed across the northern coast of South America and was able to plot the actual size of the South American continent simply by measuring the flow of water that came into the North Atlantic from one of the major rivers. The only part of the landmass that he could not account for was Patagonia, that little tail at the very end of Chile and Argentina. It was an astonishing feat of mathematical genius that laid the foundations for mapmaking and cartography, as well as geographical estimation and everything from plotting of landmaps to the plotting of the stars ever afterwards. Both sons adored their father. He was a doting father. He taught them everything. The oldest son became the governor of Cuba. The youngest son became, his name was Fernando. He became one of the most remarkable intellectuals that Europe produced in the 16th and 17th centuries.

George Grant (21:25):
He actually created the world’s largest library in the city of Seville. And he bought books from all over Europe and brought them back, cataloged them. He invented something that we, to this day, greatly enjoy. It’s called bookshelves. Prior to this, all books were stored on tables or in chests. But Hernando Columbus, inspired by his father’s vast learning, decided that he wanted to create, in a sense, an analog version of a medieval Google, where he would collect every single book that had been printed up to that point. And he very nearly succeeded. All of this driven by a great passion for the discovery of truth and the liberation of captive peoples. Columbus was at one point imprisoned by his opponents in Cuba, who wanted to grasp for power and steal away his titles and his authority. And to the end of his days, Columbus kept the chains that he was shackled with as a reminder of the call for every man in pursuit of truth to be humble. And in his will, he asked to actually be buried in his shackles as a symbol of his life of service.

George Grant (23:20):
When Abraham Kuyper, a great Dutch leader, famously declared, there is not one square inch in the whole domain of human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not say, mine, that would be a perfect description of the philosophy of Christopher Columbus. G.K. Chesterton once quipped, the great intellectual tradition that comes down to us from the past was never really interrupted or lost through such trifles as the sack of Rome, the triumph of Attila, or the barbarian invasions of the Dark Ages. It was lost after the introduction of printing, the discovery of America, the coming of the marvels of technology, the establishment of universal education, and all the enlightenment of the modern world.

George Grant (24:20):
It was there, if anywhere, that there was lost or impatiently snapped that long, thin, delicate thread that had been discarded from ancient antiquity, the thread of that unusual human hobby the habit of thinking. One of the greatest lessons that we can learn from Columbus, who was by no means a perfect man, made many mistakes along the way and opened himself up for much criticism. But the great lesson that we can learn from him is that we need to think clearly, investigate sources clearly and diligently in order to arrive at the truth and then tell a story.

George Grant (25:19):
But at the heart of all that he did was his Christian worldview. We can’t emphasize it enough. His expeditions were a worldview project, not a commercial project, not a colonizing project. It was a worldview project. It wasn’t mere pragmatism. This was a passion for that which is right and good and true.

Lee Habeeb (25:50):
And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling, and narration, too, by our own Greg Hengler. And a special thanks to George Grant, author of The Last Crusader: The Untold Story of Christopher Columbus. And my goodness, This storytelling gets at the big why. What animated, what drove Christopher Columbus to do what he did? And as Grant so artfully said, his expeditions, Columbus’s expeditions, were a worldview project, not a commercial project. And we could say the same for our founders in the end. It was a worldview project, the founding of this country, and not a commercial project.

Lee Habeeb (26:34):
Indeed, our founders did risk their success, their fortunes and everything else to put that worldview out, not only through the colonies and states, but ultimately spread around the world. And we also learn in this remarkable piece of storytelling that much about what we’ve learned about Columbus just isn’t true. That indeed, the man, though not perfect, did not advance slavery or colonization. It was not his work. But my goodness, once he discovered what he discovered, the opportunists came, the adventurers came, and of course, so much else that came with those things. The Untold Story of Christopher Columbus, the last crusader, here on Our American Stories.

Lee Habeeb (27:23):
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