It’s probably just as well Chicago won’t be hosting a 1992 World’s Fair commemorating the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas. Even at the proposed cost of over $2 billion, the festivities probably wouldn’t have held a candle to the lakefront Columbian Exposition of 1893. That fair–it was a year late because the mammoth task of construction held it up–attracted some 24 million visitors at a time when the national population was 63 million. According to Kirkpatrick Sale in his new history, The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy, it was “the largest crowd for any single event in the history of the world to that point.” A promotional pamphlet billed the fair as “a very panorama of the possibilities of human ingenuity and persistent effort.”
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Many of the stories told about the man known in Spain as Cristobal Colon are no more than myths: that Queen Isabella of Spain pawned her jewels to pay for his first voyage, for example, or that contemporary mariners thought the world was flat. But to winnow these colorful accounts–as Sale does–is not to deny the very real accomplishments of a remarkable man. Colon did spend seven years persuading Isabella and King Ferdinand to underwrite the first expedition; he did navigate to the Caribbean with uncanny skill, taking advantage of favorable winds that few, if any, mariners of the time knew; he deduced correctly that the North Star does not stand still, contrary to what Mediterranean sailors thought; and it’s likely he was the first European to recognize that South America–whose coastline he explored at length–was a continent, distinct from Asia. (That last point has been disputed by numerous historians, who have claimed that Colon believed he’d found merely a new sea route to Asia; but Sale is convincing that Colon knew better.) Most significant, Colon’s first voyage–though it was not the first European voyage to the New World–opened the floodgates of colonization at a time when Europe was economically stagnant and eager to expand its influence and wealth.
Sale suggests that Colon was very much a man of his time. Certainly his navigational achievements reflected the advancing science and technology of Europe. But also his greed for gold reflected the cupidity and growing materialism of 15th-century Europe; his apocalyptic millenarianism, his belief in his own calling, reflected the spiritual doubts of a subcontinent under the hegemony of a corrupt church; and his heroic striving reflected the gung-ho spirit of a new age of rationalism and capitalism. But most important the man’s rootlessness, his constant longing to be someone or somewhere else, mirrors the restlessness, the frontier mentality, the perception that there are no limits that pushed the Old World west–and has informed the consciousness of the New World to this day.
The colonists went beyond even the barbarity of this law. Fernando Colon, the admiral’s son and no critic of colonization or of the lust for gold, reported that “Each one went where he willed among the Indians, stealing their property and wives and inflicting so many injuries upon them that the Indians resolved to avenge themselves on any that they found alone or in small groups.”
Indeed, writes Sale, there is little evidence in the written leavings of the 15th century of what we today might call the appreciation of nature. Moreover Europeans showed an unwillingness to see human beings–at least themselves–as part of nature: “In its attitude to the wilderness, a heightening of its deep-seated antipathy to nature in general, European culture created a frightening distance between the human and the natural, between the deep silent rhythms of the world and the deep recurrent rhythms of the body, between the elemental eternal workings of the cosmos and the physical and psychological means of perception, by which we can come to understand it and our place within it. To have regarded the wild as sacred, as do many other cultures around the world, would have been almost inconceivable in medieval Europe–and, if conceived, as some of those called witches found out, certainly heretical and punishable by the Inquisition.”
Those who followed him west and their descendants became through the centuries wealthy beyond Colon’s wildest dreams, but they retained his restlessnes. And, says Sale, understood little more than Colon the harmony that could have been theirs, and ours. I see little point in trying to wish away history–as Sale at times seems to do–but there is ample reason to work toward understanding our roots, toward understanding the places we live and how to live there.
