By Laurence Bergreen
http://nypost.com/
August 26, 2017
Statue of Christopher Columbus in Columbus Circle (Photo: Tomatika/Dreamstime)
Christopher Columbus has been coming under fire for decades, and lately Mayor de Blasio hasn’t ruled out scrapping the iconic 1892 statue of the explorer, in Columbus Circle, as a possible “symbol of hate.” But if Columbus were to come back to today, he would be dumbfounded by both the acclaim and condemnation he’s received over time in a land he never knew existed.
Despite everything, Columbus has a claim to greatness. He was a peerless and fearless navigator, maybe the best ever, able to read the seas and skies with near-perfect understanding, and to make the first documented ocean voyages from Europe to the new world and back. This was at a time when sailing uncross the uncharted Atlantic was like going to the moon, only more dangerous.
It took an incredible amount of courage to sail over the horizon on a quest from which no one else had ever been known to return, and to endure unimaginable hardships along the way.
All earlier efforts to sail to the Indies, as Columbus called his goal, had failed, yet he managed to accomplish this feat not once, but four times, with a minimum loss of life. Along the way he discovered the powerful yet steady trade winds that proved immensely helpful to him and later explorers.
Furthermore, Columbus was a man of deep faith. His name meant “Christ bearer,” and he took his mission to bring Christianity to other parts of the world with the utmost seriousness, to the point of believing he heard God talking to him. For many people, that’s enough to justify his place in the annals of exploration, even if he never did anything else. But he did.
His voyages permanently changed the course of history. Thanks to them, Europe and the Americas were subsequently linked forever through a phenomenon described by Alfred W. Crosby in 1972, known as the Columbian Exchange. This was a vast transfer in both directions between the two continents. Potatoes, tomatoes, and maize all became transplanted from the Americas to Europe, transforming agriculture and cuisine. There was no tomato sauce in Italian cooking, and no chocolate in Switzerland before the Columbian Exchange.
Going the other way, horses, donkeys, pigs, cattle, cats, and dogs spread from Europe to the Americas, transforming economies there. All this was thanks to Columbus.
But his voyages also transferred Bubonic plague, chicken pox, measles, yellow fever, and other deadly scourges that decimated indigenous peoples. Tobacco, which Columbus had observed the inhabitants of the islands he visited smoking, moved back and forth, creating health hazards everywhere. Most pernicious of all, the New World became a source of slaves for Europe.
It is true that he had no idea the Pacific Ocean existed, but neither did anyone else in Europe until 1513, when Vasco Núñez de Balboa reached the Pacific. Columbus was equally oblivious to North America. He might have glimpsed the distant Florida Keys from the deck of his ship, but he never suspected that a giant continent lay to the north. All the streets, cities, rivers, and other landmarks named for him in North America exist in places he never imagined.
Nor did he set out to “discover” a new world; he attempted to sail to the old world, Asia, where he expected to find remnants of the long-vanished Mongol empire, as Marco Polo had two centuries earlier. Columbus even brought an interpreter along with him, just in case.
He made other errors: he thought at times that he was sailing uphill, and that he’d discovered the entrance to Paradise somewhere north of what is now Venezuela. By then, his health was failing, his corneas burned out from staring at the sun, and when he climbed the rigging during a particularly violent storm, he thought he heard the voice of God speaking to him.
He accidentally triggered the suicides of tens of thousands of people who thought that he and his men (who’d begun to pair off with the women they’d discovered) were fulfilling a prophecy of doom. Finally, he took to enslaving some of the people he found, despite his urge to convert them to Christianity. No wonder the reaction against Columbus Day, established as a federal holiday by FDR in 1937, has been gaining steam for decades, replaced by efforts across the nation to celebrate “Indigenous Peoples’ Day.”
It is disturbing to recognize the harsh effects of Columbus’s voyages, many of them unintentional, but it would be folly to ignore the fact that Columbus came along at the right moment to connect two worlds, even without fully understanding what he was doing.
He was a true pioneer. “To the world he gave a world,” reads the legend below his statue in Columbus Circle. It wasn’t the antiquated colonial world he had in mind, but it’s not going away — not now, not ever.
Laurence Bergreen is the author of “Columbus: The Four Voyages, 1492-1504.”
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