History of Christopher Columbus: Hero or Heel?

Christopher Columbus. Image: History.com

HISTORY OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS

The man who sailed from Spain to discover America was neither Spanish nor did he actually discover America, at least not the North American mainland. But it is true that:

In fourteen hundred ninety-two
Columbus sailed the ocean blue

Where was he from, where did he go, who paid for it, why is he famous, why was a holiday named after him, and what are the changing moods about this European explorer?

Origin of Christopher Columbus

Colombo giovinetto, sculpture of young Columbus by Giulio Monteverde, Genoa. Image: Wikipedia

Tradition holds that he was Italian, born in 1451 to a wool merchant in Genoa, and first went to sea in his youth. He sailed to Iceland and Guinea on business and later served as a privateer. It was in 1484, the year after Martin Luther was born in Germany, that Christopher Columbus presented to King John II of Portugal the idea of an “Enterprise of the Indies” (no relation to Star Trek‘s starship), where he would sail west to the East Indies, thinking it shorter than the eastern spice trade route.

His brother Bartholomew approached Henry VII of England and Charles VIII of France, while Christopher was already lobbying in Spain. Christopher eventually secured the patronage of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. You know them as the parents of Queen Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII of England’s first wife, and the grandparents of Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor who presided over the trial of Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms.

But What About The DNA?

You may have read that forensic research, presented in a Spanish TV documentary aired on October 12, 2024, used the DNA of his son and one of his brothers against that of a sample from one of his suspected burial sites in Seville, Spain. From this, researchers concluded that Columbus was a Sephardic Jew, with some positing he was born in Valencia, Spain.

Your friendly neighborhood historian loves DNA research, as he’s also a high-tech guy. However, if Columbus was a Sephardic Jew, that tells you his ethnicity; it doesn’t tell you his nationality. Instead, it indicates where his ancestors lived, typically in Spain or Portugal. After the 1391 Iberian pogroms, some Sephardic families did move to Italy and North Africa. So a Sephardic Columbus born in Genoa in 1451 remains entirely plausible.

Historical Trivia:

Columbus died in Valladolid, Spain in 1506. But he had indicated that he desired burial on Hispaniola, modern-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic. His remains were moved from Valladolid to the monastery of La Cartuja in Seville around 1509, and later to Santo Domingo (c. 1537–42), subsequently moved to Cuba in 1795, and finally to Seville in 1898. The Dominican Republic claims his remains never left. A box found in Santo Domingo’s cathedral in 1877 is why Seville is only a “suspected” site.

Voyages of Christopher Columbus

Voyages of Columbus, approximate. Image: Wikipedia

Columbus sailed from Palos, Spain, with three ships on August 3, 1492, and arrived not in the East Indies, but in the Bahamas on October 12. He sailed on to Cuba and Hispaniola.

Contrary to popular belief, Columbus was not alone among 15th-century Europeans in thinking the world was round; Eratosthenes measured the Earth’s circumference around 240 B.C.; however, Columbus vastly underestimated it.

Fame of Christopher Columbus

He returned with captives and gold to a hero’s welcome in Spain, which subsequently enjoyed its Golden Age of exploration. Columbus made three more voyages to the New World, including the Caribbean and South America, but never set foot on what is now the United States, Canada, or Mexico.

So, did he discover America? Perhaps, if you ignore the indigenous people already living there, or the Viking Leif Erikson, who visited pre-Columbian America some 500 years earlier. (There’s even a Leif Erikson Day on October 9.) New dating methods show that Vikings were present in Newfoundland in 1021 AD. However, Columbus’ journeys ultimately led to the establishment of the first permanent European colonies in the New World.

In the United States of America, Columbus Day is one of only four federal holidays that honor individuals, the other being:

• Jesus Christ (Christmas)
• President Washington (Presidents Day)
• Martin Luther King, Jr. (Martin Luther King, Jr. Day)

Spain and Latin America also commemorate it under various names:

• Día de la Hispanidad (Spain)
• Día de la Raza (Mexico)
• Día de las Américas (Uruguay)
• Día de la Resistencia Indígena (Venezuela, since 2002)
• Día del Respeto a la Diversidad Cultural (Argentina, since 2010)

Why Was It Named “America”?

Universalis Cosmographia, by Martin Waldseemüller, Image: Wikipedia

Columbus returned from his fourth and final voyage to the New World in 1504. In 1507, German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller created a map of the American continent. He applied the Latin name “America” to the land illustrated on the map, crediting the Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci, who argued in his widely printed letters Mundus Novus that this was the “New World,” not Asia.

Columbian Exchange

The Columbian Exchange. Image: Britannica

The “Columbian Exchange” refers to the extensive transfer of plants, animals, and diseases between the New World (the Americas) in the Western Hemisphere and the Old World (Afro-Eurasia) in the Eastern Hemisphere, beginning in the late 15th century. Named after Columbus, this phenomenon is closely tied to the European colonization and global trade that followed his 1492 voyage. Some exchanges were deliberate; others were unintended.

Indeed, according to a popular story, one deliberate exchange that didn’t immediately “take” was Columbus bringing cocoa beans from the New World back to his financial sponsors, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. However, they didn’t realize it was food, as I describe in my article on the history of chocolate.

Columbus, Columbia, and America

Other European explorers, within decades following Columbus, landed in North America, including:

• Juan Ponce de Leon (Florida)
• Alonso Alvarez de Pineda (Texas)
• Giovanni da Verrazzano (New York)

But it was Columbus — who never got closer than Bermuda and the north coast of Cuba — whose name was used in the United States in the late 1700s.

Examples include:

• Columbia University (1784, renamed from King’s College)
• District of Columbia (1791), i.e., Washington, D.C.
• Columbia River (1792), and of course later
• Columbus, Ohio (1812).

Christopher Columbus Day Holiday

Columbus Day, stylized graphic from the United States Department of Defense. Image: Wikipedia

How did Columbus Day become a holiday? Americans did not celebrate him until the mid-18th century, but that changed after the U.S. gained independence from Britain. Italian immigrants began arriving in America in the 1820s, but a large wave of immigration occurred between 1880 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914. As with the Irish who had settled in the US before them, they experienced religious and ethnic discrimination, including a lynching in March 1891.

The following year, President Benjamin Harrison became the first president to call for a national observance of Columbus Day, on the 400th anniversary of the Italian’s arrival. Colorado was the first state to observe Columbus Day in 1906. Angelo Noce, an Italian immigrant and founder of Colorado’s first Italian newspaper, La Stella (The Star), helped establish the holiday. Fourteen other states followed suit within the next five years.

Ironically, in 2020, Colorado replaced Columbus Day with Frances Xavier Cabrini Day, observed on the first Monday in October, to honor an Italian American saint. Notably, the Catholic Church recognized her as the first American saint. Further irony: she established Columbus Hospital in Manhattan and Columbus Hospital in Chicago.

The Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal service organization, played a pivotal role in securing its designation as a federal holiday during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency in 1934. It was originally set on October 12, but since 1971 (Uniform Monday Holiday Act), it has been fixed to the second Monday in October to create a three-day weekend. By coincidence, this is the same day as Canadian Thanksgiving since 1971.

Did Columbus Meet “Indians”?

Many people think Columbus believed that by traveling west around the spherical world, he had landed in the Indian subcontinent, or more generally “the Indies,” which back then referred to all of South and East Asia between the Indus River and the Pacific Ocean. He thus named the people he encountered “Indians,” and the name stuck.

However, some indigenous peoples of the New World have not always enjoyed that name and consider it inaccurate and obsolete. The term “American Indian” has been used to differentiate Western Hemisphere indigenous people from people of India. In the latter half of the 20th century, the U.S. government proposed the term “Native American,” which became well known in the 1960s-70s and is preferred by many. Canada uses the term “First Nations” for some tribes and “Indigenous peoples” more generally.

Alternative Etymologies

Over the last fifty years or so, etymologists, those who study the history, origin, and evolution of words, have proposed alternative names. En Dios is the Spanish expression that means “in God.” The Italian is In Dio. But we don’t see either term in any of Columbus’ writings, and some historians consider this “folk etymology.”

Exonyms are names a group does not choose to use for itself or its land; rather, a foreign group imposes it on them. For example, Germany is an exonym for the country that the inhabitants call “Deutschland.” Likewise, “Les États-Unis” is a French exonym for the United States.

In America, the term “Indian” has been an exonym for over 500 years.

Rethinking the Holiday

Although it remains a federal holiday and, in some states, not all, a state holiday, several hundred cities have voted over the last three decades to observe the day locally as Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Some cities declare it an official city holiday; others do not. In California, Native American Day is a state holiday observed on the fourth Friday in September. South Dakota renamed the day Native Americans’ Day in 1990.

In 2017, California’s Burbank narrowly voted for this new name, joining Berkeley (the first in 1992, on the 500th anniversary), San Fernando, and Los Angeles among the state’s cities that have replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

Cover page, The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, by Washington Irving. Image: Abe Books

Critics argue that Columbus’s heroic image owes much to one romanticized biography, based on a best-selling book that popularized his story, though it was supposedly inaccurate. In 1828, Washington Irving published A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, which has since served to glorify the voyager. It remained the most popular book about Columbus for over a century.

Admittedly, Irving’s book has a mixed purpose: it attempts to provide a historical biography while also promoting nationalistic patriotism. In the book, Irving portrays Columbus as a benevolent adventurer, renowned for his generosity toward the indigenous peoples he encountered.

This book also promoted the belief that most Europeans thought the Earth was flat at the time and that Columbus’ journeys dispelled the misconception. People widely understood the world was spherical at that time, and in some places, centuries earlier.

So, do you think Columbus was a hero or a heel?

Columbus Day inspiration. Image: Daily Mail

Bill Petro, your friendly neighborhood historian
billpetro.com