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Introduction: Spain, Columbus, and the New World
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18850 |
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SPECIAL SECTION
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12 / 1991 |
1,106 Words |
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Christopher Columbus must be spinning in one if not both of his proclaimed gravesites. The man who was little prone to self-doubt during his lifetime is suffering an identity crisis as we approach the five hundredth anniversary of his epic voyage.
For almost three hundred years, his rest was undisturbed. Since 1792, however, he has been resurrected in a number of guises to serve a variety of causes. For the youthful American republic, he was the lone pioneer who broke with tradition to explore new pathways. That he was not Anglo-Saxon added to his stature as a symbol of American independence.
Washington Irving portrayed him as an apostle of progress, challenging the flat earth obsurantism of medieval Spanish clerics--a totally apocryphal scenario. Today he is at the center of a controversy over whether he should be celebrated or execrated. He stands accused by his detractors of ecocide and the destruction of native cultures to the point of genocide.
Most of this is totally ahistorical. The voyage of 1492 and what it precipitated certainly mark a watershed in world history and Columbus has even been described as the first modern man. This he certainly was not.
He was a child of his time and, indeed, of his birthplace, the trading city of Genoa. He did not sail in 1492 as an explorer, nor as a colonizer, nor yet to test a scientific hypothesis. He was a merchant adventurer seeking the rich trade of Asia and a bold navigator ready to open a new route to get there. He was religious in the spirit of the reconquista, the eight-century campaign of Christian Spain to expel the Moors, and he hoped to find enough gold to finance another crusade to Jerusalem.
Columbus' writings express his sense of a divine calling but, if providence led him to the New world, as many religious writers have concluded, he was its blind instrument. His discovery rested on the happy accident of his faulty estimate that Asia should be where the new continent actually was. To the end of his days, he did not recognize what he had stumbled upon. It was left to Amerigo Vespucci to promote the idea of a new world that was not Asia. So today we have America and not Columbia.
The study of history, properly understood, enables us to distinguish the myths from what we actually can know about Columbus and the society from which he emerged. John Riley, in the first of the
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