Columbus Discovered America...Not Quite... But Still a Compelling Story...

 “Columbus was never more zealous than when in pursuit of an illusion” Laurence Bergreen

Columbus: The Four Voyages

A Review by James Romano

Hey 1000 Bookies!!  Welcome to Columbus Day 2020.  In honor of this day, I am reviewing Columbus: The Four Voyages by Laurence Bergreen.  Mr. Bergreen is an accomplished historian with volumes on other explorers like Marco Polo and Ferdinand Magellan.  This is the first biography I ever read regarding Christopher Columbus.  As a (proud) Italian American, I have an interest in the history of Columbus. We all learn the mythology--Columbus discovered America, he proved the world was round.  Then in school you learn that Columbus wasn’t the first person to come to the New World, just the first one to record the trips in a meaningful way and begin colonization.  Now of course, Columbus is quite reviled, albeit for good reasons.  In honor of this Columbus Day, I would actually read a biography of him.  And this one is excellent, and I highly recommend reading this biography.  At approximately 350 pages, this biography concentrates on the four voyages of Columbus. I learned a lot about Columbus, but I also gained a lot of respect for him which is against popular opinion at the moment.  With corporations such as Disney and politicians shunning Columbus, I think we all should read about the man who braved an ocean, discovered two continents and set in motion the beginnings of the modern world. 

The United States has always been fascinated with the story of Christopher Columbus so much so that Congress established not only a national holiday recognizing him but named the national capital of the US as the District of Columbia.  Two state capitals are named for him—Columbus, Ohio and Columbia, South Carolina.  There is the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest.  After the American revolution, Kings College in New York became Columbia University.  Not bad for a guy who never even stepped foot on any inch of the United States.  To me he was a modern Odysseus. I believe the author (Mr. Bergreen) said it best, “For all the scorn Columbus engendered, his four voyages constitute one of the greatest adventure stories in history”   

On his first voyage, Columbus spotted land around midnight between October 11th and October 12th, 1492 in what is today the Bahamas.  First, many of us would like to spend October 12th in the Bahamas.  My own odyssey as a parent began on October 11th, with the birth of my daughter, Rachael.  As an Italian American, Columbus Day was always one of pride (and of course my mom’s homemade spaghetti and meatballs).  My parents bought me the book Meet Christopher Columbus as a boy.   At my (Italian) grandparents’ home, I could always see a photo of a portrait of Columbus in Alistair Cooke’s America, which my grandfather owned. As a 7th grade student (in 1988), I remember passing a monument under construction on my way to school that would honor Columbus on the 500th Anniversary of his landing in 1992.  My father’s mentor and boss, Mr. Charles Greco, was a leading advocate in the construction of that monument.  Columbus hit my imagination.  I do believe we need to share the good with the bad, and we should not judge him by the standards of today. 

 

I do not think it hyperbole to state that Christopher Columbus was the greatest or one of the greatest sailors/navigators in history.  He knew how to navigate treacherous conditions (storms, topography) with relatively few losses.  The Italian heritage of Columbus proved powerful. Never doubt the power of books. According to Don McClean, “Lenin read a book on Marx” well Columbus read a book, The Travels of Marco Polo (which is on the 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die) and it fueled his imagination and dreams.  As a sailor, Columbus went to the Greek Islands and Ireland.  However, he wanted to go to Xanadu and meet the Great Khan and he wanted to accomplish that goal via the sea.  Columbus was born 120 years after Polo died. What Columbus did not know was that Xanadu did not exist anymore and there was no Great Khan.  The travels of Polo, a fellow Italian lit a spark in Columbus and drove him to near madness but also greatness.

Columbus was born to a noble, politically active family in Genoa.  He was educated.  Flagging family circumstances led him to the sea.  He later settled in Portugal and Columbus married well.  His wife Felipa Montiz was from a well-connected family.  Her father was a navigator.  According to Bergreen, “His mother-in-law gave her late husband's instruments, documents and navigation charts’ to Columbus”.  Columbus was in the orbit of King Joao II of Portugal whom he tried to obtain funding and blessing to follow his dream to get to the East Indies via going west.   The Portuguese King rejected Columbus, who then sent his brother, Bartholomew, to England and asked King Henry VII to fund this trip.  Finally, Columbus found the benefactors he needed with Isabella and Ferdinand of Spain. 

Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon ruled smaller kingdoms until they married uniting into modern Spain. The next 100 years would be the “Golden Age of Spain” in which Spanish hegemony flourished.  Columbus would be their key.  It would seem that Isabella for some reason was more taken with Columbus than her husband who really never warmed to the explorer.  However, Ferdinand was a notorious philanderer and she may have used the explorer to make her husband jealous.  Once Isabella died, support for Columbus disappeared at the throne.  Columbus used Ferdinand and Isabella, but he also was used by them. Both sides over promised and under-delivered.  What cannot be contested was that the next 100 years of Spanish influence was directly tied to Columbus. 

The first voyage of Columbus left Spain with three ships (the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria).  He sailed across the ocean blue. He discovered and claimed the Bahamas, Cuba and the Island of Hispaniola (today’s Haiti and Dominican Republic) for the Catholic Monarchs of Spain.  Columbus had no idea what he found, and he was convinced till he died that the Indies were the East Indies and he was close to China and India.  Second, the Cuba he discovered would be a Spanish colony and possession till 1898 and the Spanish-American War.  Columbus’s greed was on display though, and he wanted to find the gold, the gold that Marco Polo discussed in a book that was prominent in the Orient.  Bergreen states, “he saw himself as a tormented, heroic figure.  The greater his fantasies, the more inhuman he became…When not contemplating his China delusion, Columbus returned to his other chimera: gold.”

Columbus met the local indigenous people and tried at first to bring peace with him, calling them “Indians”. He was also trying to convert them to Christianity.  He was unsuccessful in that endeavor. His flagship, Santa Maria was heavily damaged and left for scrap.  Columbus was ingenious though, he wanted continued voyages, so he left a contingent of men to form a colony on Hispaniola, a fort called La Navidad (founded on Christmas Day).  By doing that he began an empire and ensured his return. 

When Columbus arrived back in Spain he was treated as a conquering hero. Columbus was made “Viceroy and Admiral of the Ocean Sea (the Atlantic Ocean) and Indies”. His return with some gold and “Indians” ensured the second voyage, which was much more spectacular.  When he left, Columbus sat at the head of a fleet of 17 ships carrying pigs, sheep, goats, horses, cows and mules.  It was joked that he was Noah’s Ark. According to Bergreen, “His company of over a thousand gentlemen, commoners, and criminals compromised a microcosm of Spain waiting and, for once, eager to be transported to a New World and its riches under the leadership of Christopher Columbus”.  On a side note, one sailor on the 2nd Voyage was Ponce de Leon, who would discover and name Florida.  

The Second Voyage discovered the islands of Dominica, Montserrat, Nevis, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica.  He would visit Cuba and Hispaniola again.  The men however were wiped out by the Indians.  This set off an adversarial relationship with the tribes he encountered.  Columbus tried it again and built a settlement in a place called La Isabella.  However, the settlement was soon moved to a town called Santo Domingo.  Santo Domingo is the oldest settlement in the New World.  One story from the beginning of the second voyage that engendered a laugh from me.  Once he left Spain, the armada landed on the island of Gomera, in the Canary Islands.  It was ruled by a woman named Beatrix de Bobadilla.  She was a maid of honor to the queen, until Ferdinand took an interest.  She was banished but ruled the island. Supposedly she was quite the seductress.  I think of Jane Fonda as Barbarella seducing Columbus as he was the hero of the hour. 

Setting up another settlement bought Columbus a third voyage.  The third voyage discovered such territory as Trinidad and parts of Venezuela before heading to Hispaniola.  The third foray into the New World was a low point for Columbus.  He exacted a large price from the natives in his quest for gold.  Columbus developed a reputation for cruelty that made its way to Spain.  50,000 natives committed suicide from the policies Columbus enacted to obtain gold. Columbus made his share of enemies along the way.  Francisco Roldan led a revolt against the rule of the Columbus brothers on Hispaniola. Then Isabella and Ferdinand sent Francisco de Bobadilla to be their Special Prosecutor to “investigate” the claims of cruelty.  However, Bobadilla decided to attack Columbus and send him and his brothers back to Spain in chains.  On the ship the captain wanted to free Columbus, however he wanted to act as the martyr.  Once back in Spain though, the monarchs were angered at the treatment of Columbus and freed him.  In my opinion this was politics, saying to Columbus “that the monarchy made you and we can break you”.  I also believe that Columbus figured into the marital politics of the King and Queen. 

 

Isabella and Ferdinand gave him what he wanted most: a Fourth Voyage.  The price for that was removing him as Governor of Hispaniola.  In some irony not lost on me, Columbus had the last laugh, both of his antagonists Roldan and Bobadilla were returning to Spain when their ship sunk off the coast of Hispaniola and they were lost.  The Fourth Voyage is truly badass, I wish there was some other way of describing this. First, Columbus was able to convince the monarchs to send him…again.  Then he was able to bring his son, Ferdinand to join him.  Called the “El Alto Viaje”, this voyage was always remembered as Columbus’s favorite.  On the voyage, Columbus discovered Martinique, and most of Central America (Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama).  He claimed a lot of territory for the Spanish Court.  He also saw firsthand the ruins of the ancient Mayan civilizations in Central America.  However, damage to his boats stranded him and his men on the island of Jamaica for over a year.  And this is where the badass Columbus shows up. 

My absolute favorite story in the book occurred during the Fourth Voyage. Stranded, Columbus dispatches some of his men in canoes to go to Hispaniola (the next island) to save them.  The indigenous people were initially helpful but then reluctant because Columbus ran out of things to trade with them.  Then Columbus had to deal with a mutiny of his men that ended up being foiled because of poor weather.  Finally, Columbus was also sick, probably with malaria, a disease that would ultimately kill him. But he overcame it all and survived.  Columbus was a reader, and he brought books with him on the journey, namely Almanach Perptuum by Rabbi Abraham Zacuto and Regiomontanus’s Ephemerides Astromonicae (never heard of either).  The latter book had a table of lunar eclipses over 50 years.  Columbus knew there would be an eclipse on February 29th, 1504 (Leap Day).  Columbus used the science to scare the Indians into cooperation with a big feast and a belief that he spoke with a supreme being, the Christian God.  The author described what the lunar eclipse would look like with a blood red sky.  The red sky scared the Indians.  Columbus pretended to an alchemist or necromancer who changed the sky and then unchanged it.  He brought the Indians around to cooperation and they brought food to him and his men every day.  Eventually Columbus was saved and returned to Spain.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book on Columbus.  I learned a lot and I recommend it for everyone. The question I ponder, if Columbus had not sailed the ocean blue, would the United States have become the United States.  I don’t know the answer to that question.  I would like to think our human spirit of adventure would have led people to find the New World, but would they have understood how to navigate it.  Columbus died not realizing what he did. I don’t want to glorify the man because Columbus was horrible to the native populations and he began the slave trade.  He also brought disease with him to the New World probably including Syphilis.  But he made history and that should not be overshadowed, ignored or covered up.  Pick up a copy of Columbus: The Four Voyages you will learn and maybe appreciate Christopher Columbus as much as I. 

Keep Reading My Friends!!!