Columbus – Legend and Loser
We all know about Christopher Columbus, but what do we know? The real man who set sail in 1492 was a failed adventurer, a poor navigator, a confused philosopher and a serial liar. He was being pushed out to sea by shadowy Italian bankers. And what they wanted to do was to make a fortune by enslaving the people who lived on the islands they already knew were out in the Atlantic, just waiting to be claimed.
Read on
The problem with starting to research Christopher Columbus is finding anything that reliably gives you an overview. Like the Gunpowder Plot, this is a subject many historians apparently avoid. Popular accounts (let’s not list them) simply repeat the same old nonsense about a heroic explorer let down by lesser mortals. For a knockabout – and pretty accurate – account of just how wrong the old books are, read James W Loewen’s chapter on Columbus in his always readable, Lies my Teacher Told Me (Touchstone, NY 1995). It’s a book that covers an important range of misremembered historical stories. Every armchair historian should own it.
Those academics who have attempted a biography then seem to gloss over the poor quality of the sources. William and Carla Rahn Phillips, The Worlds of Christopher Columbus (Cambridge 1992) is the best of them, even if it leaves many central questions unasked. By contrast, Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s Columbus (Oxford 1991) seems to have been a bid to cash in on the 1992 centenary and falls well adrift of Armesto’s usual high standard.
We are left piecing much of the story together as best we can from other material. For histories up to 1994 (which includes the enormous burst of Columbus studies for the 1992 centenary) the first place to check is Wendy R. Childs’s comprehensive bibliography in ‘1492-1494: Columbus and the Discovery of America’ The Economic History Review Vol. 48, No. 4 (Nov., 1995), pp. 754-768.
Nicolás Wey Gómez, The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies, (Cambridge, MIT Press, 2008) is absolutely key to understanding the voyages. Gómez convincingly demonstrates that, once arrived in the Caribbean, Columbus consistently opted to go south. Gómez argues that this corresponds to the ancient theory of zones, and that Columbus was in search of gold (for his Spanish royal backers) and slaves (which we argue were intended for his Italian financiers.) Gómez’s case seems unanswerable.
John K Thornton, A Cultural History of the Atlantic World 1250-1820 (CUP 2012) is a sharp survey of Atlantic navigation and trade across a long period. It’s your best introduction to the historical importance of winds and currents, as well as the complex trade that already existed in the Atlantic as far west as the Azores. Thornton points out that, according to the Santa Fe, Capitulaciones, Columbus was never sent to Asia. His task was always to locate islands in the Atlantic. For simple, accessible maps of Columbus’s voyages, use www.caribbeanandco.com/?s=columbus
As you will know from our podcasts, the central context – and one most historians completely ignore – is the role of the Italian bankers. Helen Nader is a veteran in this field and her ‘Desperate Men, Questionable Acts: The Moral Dilemma of Italian Merchants in the Spanish Slave’, Sixteenth Century Journal 23 (2002) is a fine place to begin. Then read D. B. Quinn ‘The Italian Renaissance and Columbus’, Renaissance Studies 6 (1992), which traces the Italian financiers’ role in Atlantic exploration and also examines Columbus’s debt to Italian mapmaking.
Link these with Gabriel de Avilez Rocha, ‘The Pinzones and the coup of the acedares: fishing and colonization in the fifteenth-century Atlantic,’ Colonial Latin American Review, 28 (2019), pp. 427-449. The Pinzon family of mariners and merchants from the port Columbus first set out from – Los Palos de la Frontera, near Cadiz - has always been overshadowed by Columbus. We argue it is time to take their role in this business seriously.
Enslavement is central to this story. On the vicious history of enslavement under Columbus, read Tink Tinker and Mark Freeland’s passionate plea, ‘Thief, Slave Trader, Murderer: Christopher Columbus and Caribbean Population Decline’ in Wicazo Sa Review , 23 (2008) pp. 25-50. Here it is also important to read Jorge Ulloa Hung, Roberto Valcárcel Rojas, Andrzej T. Antczak, Marlieke Ernst, Menno L.P. Hoogland, and Corinne L. Hofman, ‘Social networks and colonial adaption in the Caribbean’ in The Routledge Handbook of the Archeology of Indigenous-Colonial Interaction in the Americas (Routledge, London 2021). Hung et al show how complex Taino/Arawak society was, how little the Europeans understood it, and how it was changed by their arrival. Read the other chapters in this ground-breaking book too.
For the 1490s debate over slavery see Hector Avalos, ‘Pope Alexander VI, Slavery and Voluntary Subjection: Ineffabilis et Summi Patris in Context,’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 65 (October 2014). There is important background to the Florentine banker Berardi in Chapter 2 of Petro Omodeo (ed), Amerigo Vespucci: The Historical Context of His Explorations and Scientific Contribution (Venice University Press, 2020). Vespucci is of course, a fascinating figure in his own right, arguably more significant than Columbus. But that’s another series of podcasts.
In this context, read also Peter Hulme Colonial Encounters.Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492-1797 (Methuen and Routledge, London and New York 1986, 1992). Hulme convincingly shows Columbus making a token attempt to press on west before all-too-easily giving in to the lure of gold and slaves in the torrid zone to the south. Hulme then develops an important and convincing argument that Columbus and his crew went on to invent the concept of the cannibal, a process they shared with others at similar junctures in history. As Hulme shows, no-one has ever seen anyone eat anyone else, except in very rare circumstances of starvation. See an account of the debate over this issue in Merrilee H. Salmon, ‘Anthropology. Art or Science? A Controversy about the Evidence for Cannibalism’ in Peter Machamer, Marcello Pera and Aristides Baltas (eds), Scientific Controversies : Philosophical and Historical Perspectives (OUP 2000), pp. 199-211.
John Edwards, Ferdinand and Isabella (Pearson, London, NY etc 2005) is a well-researched account of the royal court, clearing away much nonsense about Columbus. This is particularly important for the context of the second voyage, which was hurriedly despatched in the middle of – and as part of – a Europe-wide diplomatic crisis. For this series of events see also Lawrence A. Coben, ‘The Events that Led to the Treaty of Tordesillas’, Terrae Incognitae 47 (2015), pp. 142-162. This was a moment that was explored over a century ago in H. Vander Linden, ‘Alexander VI. and the Demarcation of the Maritime and Colonial Domains of Spain and Portugal, 1493-1494’ American Historical Review 22 (1916), pp. 1-20. It’s still the best thing on the subject.
Enslavement is central to this story. On the vicious history of enslavement under Columbus, read Tink Tinker and Mark Freeland’s passionate plea, ‘Thief, Slave Trader, Murderer: Christopher Columbus and Caribbean Population Decline’ in Wicazo Sa Review , 23 (2008) pp. 25-50. Here it is also important to read Jorge Ulloa Hung, Roberto Valcárcel Rojas, Andrzej T. Antczak, Marlieke Ernst, Menno L.P. Hoogland, and Corinne L. Hofman, ‘Social networks and colonial adaption in the Caribbean’ in The Routledge Handbook of the Archeology of Indigenous-Colonial Interaction in the Americas (Routledge, London 2021). Hung et al show how complex Taino/Arawak society was, how little the Europeans understood it, and how it was changed by their arrival. Read the other chapters in this ground-breaking book too.
For the 1490s debate over slavery see Hector Avalos, ‘Pope Alexander VI, Slavery and Voluntary Subjection: Ineffabilis et Summi Patris in Context,’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 65 (October 2014). There is important background to the Florentine banker Berardi in Chapter 2 of Petro Omodeo (ed), Amerigo Vespucci: The Historical Context of His Explorations and Scientific Contribution (Venice University Press, 2020). Vespucci is of course, a fascinating figure in his own right, arguably more significant than Columbus. But that’s another series of podcasts.
In this context, read also Peter Hulme Colonial Encounters.Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492-1797 (Methuen and Routledge, London and New York 1986, 1992). Hulme convincingly shows Columbus making a token attempt to press on west before all-too-easily giving in to the lure of gold and slaves in the torrid zone to the south. Hulme then develops an important and convincing argument that Columbus and his crew went on to invent the concept of the cannibal, a process they shared with others at similar junctures in history. As Hulme shows, no-one has ever seen anyone eat anyone else, except in very rare circumstances of starvation. See an account of the debate over this issue in Merrilee H. Salmon, ‘Anthropology. Art or Science? A Controversy about the Evidence for Cannibalism’ in Peter Machamer, Marcello Pera and Aristides Baltas (eds), Scientific Controversies : Philosophical and Historical Perspectives (OUP 2000), pp. 199-211.
John Edwards, Ferdinand and Isabella (Pearson, London, NY etc 2005) is a well-researched account of the royal court, clearing away much nonsense about Columbus. This is particularly important for the context of the second voyage, which was hurriedly despatched in the middle of – and as part of – a Europe-wide diplomatic crisis. For this series of events see also Lawrence A. Coben, ‘The Events that Led to the Treaty of Tordesillas’, Terrae Incognitae 47 (2015), pp. 142-162. This was a moment that was explored over a century ago in H. Vander Linden, ‘Alexander VI. and the Demarcation of the Maritime and Colonial Domains of Spain and Portugal, 1493-1494’ American Historical Review 22 (1916), pp. 1-20. It’s still the best thing on the subject.
For Las Casas - one of the most heavily mined sources - see for example, Lawrence Clayton, ‘Bartolome ́ de las Casas and the African Slave Trade,’ History Compass 7 (2009), pp. 1526–1541. For extracts from the interminable lawsuits between the crown and Columbus – much under-used documents in which we begin to glimpse the real significance of the Pinzons - try James E. Wadsworth, Columbus and his First Voyage: a history in Documents (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016).
As we mention in the series, E Ward Laughran showed long ago that Columbus took no priest on his initial voyage. You can find Laughran’s paper in The Catholic Historical Review, 16 (1930), pp. 164- 174. For the strange story of Fr Bernardo Boyl/Buil, who turns out to have been King Ferdinand’s agent, sent to report on Columbus, see Ana Brisa Oropeza Chávez, ‘Fray Bernardo Boyl y la emisión de la bula Piis Fidelium: análisis preliminar de la participación del primer vicario en América en la configuración del regio patronato indiano,’ in Viviana Kluger et al, Dimensión Transatlánticade la Iushistoria (Univ Católica Argentina 2023).
Let’s finally move to the margins of this subject. Despite its University of Illinois imprint, Jack D Forbes, The American Discovery of Europe (Univ Illinois 2007) is often flippant and loosely argued. You have the feeling that many of the details – however diverting - might not stand up to scrutiny. But the general argument seems reasonable – that, before Columbus, the Spanish had encountered much flotsam from across the Atlantic, including indigenous boats, some of them very large.
Did the Pinzons have maps showing them where to go? Dip into the contentious world of medieval portolans if you dare. Actually, it’s an entertaining and revealing study in just how wrong historians can be. Thumb your nose at the scholars and read Charles H Hapgood, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings: evidence of advanced civilisation in the ice age (Dutton, NY, 1979 ed., first 1964). Set aside all the ad hominem mudslinging about Hapgood, notably from Wikipaedia. Most of the book is in reality an accessible introduction to portolans and an object lesson in presenting an inquiry, seriously undertaken and honestly presented. Hapgood then, infamously, concludes that there must have been a sophisticated map-making civilisation around the time of the last ice-age. He is honest about his own astonishment. We are all agreed he must have been wrong. But does anyone have a better idea?
It seems not. Read Nicolai Roelof’s unpublished Utrecht 2014 thesis, ‘A critical review of the hypothesis of a medieval origin for portolan charts’ (easy to find on-line). It tells you everything you need to know about an expert geodesist’s take on these mysterious charts. Roelof shows that historians who airily account for them haven’t a clue about navigation or cartography. (And at least Hapgood was not guilty on that score). There is, Roelof simply and authoritatively concludes, still no known explanation for their origin.
For what we playfully call the ‘invention’ of Columbus in the 18th and 19th centuries, read Elise Bartosik-Vélez, The Legacy of Christopher Columbus in the Americas. New Nations and a Transatlantic Discourse of Empire (Vanderbilt University Press, Nashville, 2014). Also Matthew Edney, ‘Creating “Discovery”: The Myth of Columbus, 1777–1828’, Terrae Incognitae, 52 (2020) pp. 195–213 and P. Larner, ‘North American Hero? Christopher Columbus, 1702–2002’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 137(1993), pp. 46–63.
Lastly, a footnote. You may (like me) have read and enjoyed Gavin Menzies’s books on Chinese voyages in the early 15th century. Menzies argues that the Chinese circumnavigated the globe decades before Columbus. It’s an intriguing tale. However, read J A Muñiz-Velázquez and J Lozano Delmar, ‘The fake first round about the Earth. The case of the supposed Chinese circumnavigation of 1421 from the post-truth paradigm,’ Revista Latina de Comunicación Social, 74 (2019) pp. 950-68 for the many cogent reasons why Menzies does not appear in this series. See also Geoff Wade’s demolition of Menzies in Zheng He and Ming China’s Voyages in the Early 15th Century in Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Asian History (OUP 2020).
