Still Celebrating Columbus

In honor of Columbus Day today, PragerU has a new video, presented by Steven Crowder.

Crowder’s purpose is to debunk the trendy idea that Columbus committed genocide, which he did not.

screen shot from "Goodbye, Columbus Day,"
from PragerU

Did natives die? Actually, quite a lot, on the island of Hispaniola, where Columbus first landed—but not from warfare. They died of infectious diseases. It turns out that, back almost half a millennium before medical science discovered the causes of infectious diseases under a microscope, what you don’t know can hurt you. What would have been a mild cold to a group of people used to certain germs could be catastrophically life threatening to a group of people never introduced to those germs.

It’s hard to hold someone accountable for something they had no way of knowing about nor could they have anticipated.

Also, while there has been war, there has never been anything in the way of policy or practice that could accurately be called genocide against native peoples in this country.

Another thing that’s not true, as Crowder puts it, is that natives

lived in harmony with the environment until Columbus arrived, and European settlers destroyed the land with their evil technology.

Truth? Not only did the Natives brutally take out PEOPLE, but they took out entire forests and hunted species to extinction.

And one more myth that’s not true: that natives lived in pacifistic harmony until Western civilization introduced war. Not so. As Crowder tells it,

The truth is... not so much. When Columbus arrived, the islands were inhabited by two main tribes: the Arawaks, who were passive and friendly, and the Caribs, who were vicious cannibals. The Arawaks actually lived in fear of the Caribs for—you guessed it—the reasons being that they hunted them down to enslave them and eat them. Yes—eat them. Ironically, we get the name “Caribbean Islands” from those famous people-eaters.

The only way settlers were able to conquer this land was through the help of Native Americans who teamed up with them to settle the score with other tribes who were even bigger jerks than they were!

That’s not even to mention the populations in Central and South America, famous for ritual human sacrifice. You think Cortes was able to command and conquer with only 500 or so Conquistadors? Of course not! It took 50,000 screaming, ANGRY allied natives who’d had it up to here with being tortured, enslaved and forced to carry gold for the other native Aztecs. At some point, they decided to roll the dice and go with the guys sporting funny beards and metal hats.

So why do we get told about Columbus and the evil he supposedly committed? Good question:

Columbus is not the issue here, and never was. This whole “Indigenous Peoples Day” charade is about teaching your children to despise Western civilization and anybody who dare defend it.

The next logical question, of course, is, Why do people teaching our children these things so despise Western civilization? And the answer to that—which is beyond the scope of this particular PragerU video—is that certain people use a misguided but common self-disparagement disguised as humility as a manipulation tool to get weaker, immature minds to submit to assertions of power over them.

I wrote a fuller discussion (including a lot of PragerU videos that day too) in “Self-Hatred Isn’t Virtuous,” from August of this year.  

Last year I also spent Columbus Day debunking some of the myths, probably also worth reviewing, here. 

Truth is always a good way to celebrate this historically memorable day, and every day.

Here’s the full PragerU video:

Columbus--Restoring after the Revisionists

There were certain historical stories told when I was growing up, many decades ago, that gave us heroes: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Christopher Columbus. Yes, Columbus was one of those. And we had a day to celebrate his story. This was before holidays all got shifted to Mondays, so mostly they were school days, and we learned about that person on their day—and maybe for the week or two of surrounding days.

Christopher Columbus, screenshot from
The History Channel; I found it here.

Then, in my adulthood, there’s been this movement to disillusion us about these heroes. And others. We could add Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. And probably others.

But what I’m learning is that the disillusionment is based on fake “facts.” There wasn’t really a cabal of historians for centuries secretly hiding facts in order to sanitize and glorify the heroes. While human, with the sensibilities of their times, our American heroes were really extraordinarily good men who accomplished great things for mankind.

I don’t know why the lies are there. It seems perverse to tear down, with lies, someone we should admire and honor—someone who isn’t here to defend himself or set the record straight. It seems related, in most cases, to hating America. I’m not certain whether this weird hero destruction goes on in other countries as it does here.

But why would it be considered a “good” thing to hate your country, and the iconic figures who helped make it? That seems cynical, pseudo-intellectual, and just plain ugly.

Dinesh D’Souza has done a good job debunking some of this anti-American fake history, with America—Imagine a World without Her and other books and documentaries. I’ve also turned to a series of history books by various authors: The Real Benjamin Franklin, and The Real Thomas Jefferson, for example.

Today is Columbus Day. I’ve written about Columbus a couple of times (here and here). I believe the real historical record is in his favor.

This past weekend I heard the best debunking of the Columbus maligning I’ve heard in some time. This was Michael Knowles, in his Daily Wire podcast on Friday. You can get the audio here, or you can see it, with some extra visuals, by scrolling down to last Friday on his Facebook page.

Later I found much of that 20-minute segment written as an article by Knowles. There’s extra humor in the podcast, and I recommend that. But for now I’d like to share a few of his points. This first is an example of what we truth seekers are up against.

The typical mainstream media anti-Columbus hit piece goes as follows: cite a well- known passage from the Admiral’s diary out of context, juxtapose it next to the testimony of his chief political rivals, and pretend that all of this information has only recently been uncovered.

Vox’s Dylan Matthews follows this strategy with his outlet’s typical sobriety in his 2015 article, “9 reasons Christopher Columbus was a murderer, tyrant, and scoundrel.” Perhaps the worst charge Matthews alleges is that “Settlers under Columbus sold 9- and 10-year-old girls into sexual slavery.” Matthews asserts, “This one he admitted himself in a letter to Doña Juana de la Torre, a friend of the Spanish queen: ‘There are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten are now in demand, and for all ages a good price must be paid.’”

One might conclude from Vox’s article that Columbus devised the plan or at least approved of it. But the opposite is true. Columbus doesn’t brag about selling those girls into slavery or even defend the action. On the contrary, in the very next sentence, Columbus writes, “I assert that the violence of the calumny of turbulent persons has injured me more than my services have profited me; which is a bad example for the present and for the future. I take my oath that a number of men have gone to the Indies who did not deserve water in the sight of God and of the world.”

There are attacks that quote Columbus’s contemporary rivals, who maligned him at the time, and he spent energy refuting. Knowles makes this comparison:

The report’s author is none other than Francisco Bobadilla, Christopher Columbus’s chief political rival and the man who successfully usurped power from him in the West Indies. A modern analog would be to say that a document written by Walter Mondale proves Ronald Reagan was a terrible president.

Columbus’s behavior, as testified by those who knew him and saw how he acted, debunked those accusations then, and they should not be picked up as pseudo-fact again in our day. Among the accusations are ways the natives were treated.

Columbus spent years of his life refuting the document as a vicious libel and turned down as a matter of principle lucrative agreements with the Spanish crown that did not correct for history what he regarded as calumny. This is not to say that Columbus is guiltless in the Spanish treatment of natives. But the Left’s claims of Columbus’s special monstrosity are without foundation. Even Bartolomé de Las Casas, the first resident Bishop of the Americas and most vociferous defender of the indigenous islanders against Spanish slavery and brutality admired Christopher Columbus to the end and expressed as much in his History of the Indies.

Stanford professor emerita Carol Delaney marvels at the ignorance. “They are blaming Columbus for the things he didn’t do,” she explains. “It was mostly the people who came after, the settlers. I just think he’s been terribly maligned.” Delaney points out that in the man’s own writings and the writings of those who knew him, Columbus seems to be “very much on the side of the Indians” and even adopted the son of an American Indian leader he had befriended.

Columbus was devout, which may irk modern-day cynics. He believed he was led by God, and reports several miraculous details that led him forward fortuitously. And he believed he was sharing both Christianity and civilization with poor people who lacked these sources of happiness. He was respectful and gentle with the natives.

Columbus land in the New World
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
I found it here.

Possibly he was not a strong enough leader as a colonial island governor—for which there was no precedent—although he managed to overcome multiple mutinies through sheer force of will during the original voyage. But he was not a tyrant. In a letter to the Spanish crown, his Lettera Rarissima, he wrote these self-defending words:

“Let those who are fond of blaming and finding fault, while they sit safely at home, ask, ‘Why did you not do thus and so?’ I wish they were on this voyage; I well believe that another voyage of a different kind awaits them, or our faith is naught.”

I like Knowles’s accusation against the ungrateful and ignorant, who are willing to believe any word against an American hero, but fail to consider the documentation we’ve had for centuries:

The modern left-wing revisionist sits comfortably in the freest, most prosperous, most charitable country in the history of the world and from a position of wholly unmerited luxury slanders the man who made it all possible.

A few days ago I suggested asking the question, sincerely, “What makes you think that?” That’s a good question to ask about Columbus. If you think he was an evil tyrant who ruined the entire “New World,” what makes you think that? What are your sources? Why do you believe those sources instead of more positive, historical records?

And, if you weren’t being taught to believe that America is evil, would you think that solely from your own experience and evidence?

As for me, I flew my American flag today, in celebration of Christopher Columbus and his intrepid voyage that led to the eventual founding of America.

The Columbus I Knew

It’s Columbus Day. I’m old enough to remember when Columbus was a good person, worth studying, as part of our history. Not like he has become—liar, genocidal maniac, evildoer of all time.

The famous voyage was 523 years ago, and since none of us was there, we have to rely mainly on recorded history. But recorded history from that far back doesn’t really change. So, if he really was an all-time evildoer, the record would have shown that all along. If we had an accurate record.

If I were a historian, I might have, at hand, the original documentation. I don’t. But I do have some logic and common sense.

Columbus's Voyages
Image found at Wikipedia

Here’s what I think I know. Columbus was a ship’s captain, intent on exploration. Specifically he was looking for a better trade route. He may have miscalculated the circumference of the globe, because there was an entire continent between Europe and the Far East.

He had to seek funding for his venture. Not an easy thing to do. Shipping, up until very recent times, was a risky endeavor. But if the ship came in (yes, that’s where the saying came from), it was a commerce bonanza. Remember the premise of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice?

So, Columbus eventually traveled to Spain, from his home in Genoa (in present-day Italy), and persuaded King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella to invest.

Here’s a little Iberian history: for a couple hundred years there, Spain (a little bigger than Nebraska and Kansas together) and little Portugal (a little bigger than Vermont) were the maritime masters of the world. That power over the seas meant better commerce, exploration of new lands and routes, and eventual new colonies. Portugal was specializing in a southern route around Africa, so Spain took the challenge to find western route.

So, in the times of Columbus, he was at the forefront of his profession. He set out to conquer the world—but only in the “I went there” way, and the “I’m creating opportunities for commerce” way. The mindset of a European of the day was different from ours. They saw as normal things like conquest, subjugating weaker peoples, slavery, subordination of women, and other things that might not (should not) meet with our approval today.

Maybe those things shouldn’t have met with their approval either, but no one taught them better. People had pretty much always thought the people in power were the ones strong enough to subjugate the weaker ones.

So when they came in contact with the native peoples, they weren’t shocked to see slavery and the rest. They were impressed with them at first, and pleased with the welcome they received. It wasn’t until later visits, when they found the crew members they’d left with them had been murdered and, um, probably eaten. That was shocking. The later conquistadores were further shocked to encounter ritual sacrifice leaving piles of bloody bones—sometimes the limbs and organs were eaten.

To a people who were used to thinking of society as stratified, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that they thought the savage behavior was the result of an inferior savage people who deserved to be conquered and possibly enslaved.

But, unlike almost any society previous, and the indigenous peoples themselves, the “invading” Spanish missionaries decided to rethink their assumptions about the savages not having souls, got the King to hold up on conquering until the Pope made a declaration against stealing belongings or enslaving the indigenous peoples.[i]

What if Columbus hadn’t insisted on a west-across-the-Atlantic route? Would the native peoples been forever safe from invasion? Probably not. Eventually someone else would have come.

Whoever came would have carried with them diseases common among them; that was inevitable. As was contracting diseases from the natives to which the Europeans weren’t immune. But this was several hundred years before germ theory, so it’s hard to imagine the Europeans came with the intent to kill with biological warfare. Carrying germs when you don’t know about germs might be unfortunate, but it can hardly be equated to genocide. So let’s stop letting revisionists get away with that.

How about we just say Columbus was a successful explorer, by sea, leading the way for European extension into the American continent. We don’t have to say he “discovered” America; we can say he discovered a route to this new part of the world, which was later followed up by other explorers, traders, missionaries, and colonists. He had what appeared to him and those around him to be an honorable, brave, and intrepid passion. And by most measures of his day, he was successful.

Personally, I believe it was a blessing to the New World and the Old World that relatively good people came to this land, and settled it, and created the best experiment ever in Constitutional freedom, with its resulting freedom, prosperity, and civilization. The world is better, because America came to be. Maybe God directed Columbus to come here.[ii]

So, thank you, Christopher Columbus, for sailing this way back when no one where you would end up.

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[i] Dinesh D’Souza’s book America: Imagine a World without Her, recounts some of these events in the chapter “The Red Man’s Burden, pp. 89-106.

[ii] This piece from the 500^th anniversary year offers this suggestion: https://www.lds.org/ensign/1992/10/columbus-and-the-hand-of-god?lang=eng

Remembering Columbus

I grew up in a day when celebration of Columbus Day was untainted by guilt. Columbus was a heroic figure, a man who braved the seas and discovered this part of the world, making it possible for us to eventually be born here on this favored free land. So pardon me if I don’t jump on the “Columbus was evil” school of thought often taught today.  

I have my flag out. And I want to say a few things identifying what is praiseworthy about the man remembered for the 1492 voyage across the ocean blue. 

Columbus was a religious man, from his youth on. He had something of a vision as a young man, wherein he thought he heard the voice of the Lord as well as Old Testament prophets. Whether he was inspired about the trip around the world at that moment, I don’t know, but Columbus believed the “Holy Spirit had spoken to him, saying that his name would be proclaimed throughout the world” [West and King, The Book of Prophecies of Christopher Columbus, pp. 53-54). By early adulthood he came to see himself as a man on a mission to find new lands and peoples. And to bring Christ to those pagan people. 

Whatever people may believe now about Europeans bringing disease or other evils, in his heart Columbus intended good—for those who sponsored his voyages, and for those he encountered in his travels. 

He had access to royalty, despite humble beginnings, because of his devoutness. According to his son Ferdinand, he caught the attention of Felipa Perestrello e Moniz, daughter of Portuguese nobles, while attending mass, because Christopher “behaved very honorably and was a man of handsome presence and one who never turned from the path of honesty” [Ferdinand Columbus, The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus, p. 14]. Ferdinand also described him as “pleasant but dignified,” and “was so great an enemy to cursing and swearing [that he] never heard him utter any other oath than by ‘St. Ferdinand!’” [p. 9]. 

There were years when things weren’t going well. The Spanish Monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand, had a long war to fight in Granada (southern Spain) to oust the Moors, and they couldn’t be distracted with attention or money until they succeeded. That happened in the memorable year 1492 (and immediately after the expulsion of Jews from Spain as well).  

When Columbus gathered his crew, he went about it carefully. He normally would have selected from the prisons, offering amnesty in exchange for the life-risking task of manning the voyage. But Columbus believed he would be better off with God-fearing men. He had only four prisoners: a man who had killed someone during a quarrel, along with his three friends who had attempted to rescue him from hanging. The men he took with him, each one, before embarking on the trip home, recommitted himself to Christ. 

Columbus was considered the most skilled seaman of his day. And he hired skilled sailors to man the other two ships. He hired an interpreter, Louis de Torres, a former Jewish Rabbi converted to Christianity, in case the peoples they encountered had languages related to ancient Israel. 

The ships left August 3, 1492, and sailed 660 miles to the Canary Islands, where they made repairs and resupplied provisions. From here they left September 9^th and made a course due west, encountering smooth sailing with the trade winds most of the way. On the way he changed course only twice during the entire 33 days. Note that the longest voyage directly away from Europe prior to this had been three weeks, so it took some doing to keep persuading the men to stick with him. The men were fearful—that the wind would never allow them to return to Spain (miraculous calm assured them otherwise), and then that the winds wouldn’t carry them to land (miraculous sea movement took care of this worry), and they would never get there. The change in course, it is believed, brought them to land a day sooner than they would have otherwise, which, when the men were on the verge of mutiny, was crucial. 

Columbus saw the hand of God at every point along the journey. 

Columbus treated the natives well, and was concerned at how open and guileless they were. Such people could be easily enslaved, which he had no intention of allowing. He reminded his men to always be Christ-like, and to be gentle toward the New World people and treat them properly. 

The return trip was rather more dangerous, but he was able to keep his promise to the men that they would return. Columbus believed he had been inspired in choosing the route home. He recorded in his log January 14, 1493, “I have faith in Our Lord that He who brought me here will lead me back in His pity and mercy…no one else was supportive of me except God, because He knew my heart.” 

Future voyages may have been sponsored because of the hope for gold and treasure (which he did indeed provide evidence of). But Columbus had more spiritual desires. In outlining recommendations for colonizing Hispaniola, he suggested “that there be a church and priests or friars [b sent] for the …observance of divine worship and the conversion of the Indians.” And he suggested “that one per cent of all the gold obtained be taken for the building of the churches and…for the maintenance of the priests or friars” [Peter Marshall, The Light and the Glory, p. 101, 105].  

It is likely, maybe inevitable, that at some point someone would eventually cross the ocean. I believe the world is better off because Columbus was that man. His purpose was to follow God’s inspiration and to spread the word of Christ. He did what he could to prevent conquest, enslavement, or other uncivilized behaviors that could (and at some times and places later did) happen as a result of his explorations. I continue to honor him. 

(Note: The books cited above were cited in a chapter of our homeschool text, God’s Hand in the Building of America, Volume 1, from The Center for Educational Restoration.)