Was that in Vinland or just in Greenland?
Hmm. I thought one of the pieces of evidence that he was Spanish instead of Italian is that his written records, in Spanish, were “too good” for someone who was not actually Spanish.
Well, yeah, but nobody has a public holiday celebrating Vasco de Gama or James Cook (and the latter seems to have been a pretty nice guy, though maybe just because he didn’t find any natives to massacre.) I note with interest that there is a right-wing party in Australia agitating for a James Cook Day but apparently nobody else is.
So what? Are you suggesting that we eliminate Columbus Day? How many places are named after great explorers (esp. Cook). Should we change those names?
Couldn’t they have created an Indigenous People’s Day without eliminating Columbus Day? Promoting indigenous people is one thing, trashing someone else is another.
I’ve heard the argument that his discovery of the Americas wasn’t just dumb luck. Apparently he spent some time in northern Europe, where it’s rumored that some of the fishermen were sailing out to the coast of North America for their prime fishing spots. The argument goes that he heard from some of these fishermen, and so knew (correctly) that there was land a reasonable distance across the Atlantic, and that it was this land that he was seeking. He misidentified this land as East Asia, of course, but the important point was that there was land of some sort or another there, and that he knew of it.
Yes.
One thing I’m surprised no one’s mentioned in this thread was that Columbus’s big push to find new routes to the east wasn’t just to keep the Turks from getting their hands on their share of the money trade generated, it was to build up enough money to start another Crusade. Two hundred years of strife, horror, and insanity just weren’t enough for the man. Even by the standards of his time, the man was a bastard. But that doesn’t change his accomplishments. That others would have ultimately done the same thing, and likely not long after, is, in this case, immaterial- he did them, and that’s what we honor on Columbus day. Referring to it as “indigenous people’s day” is not only insulting on technical grounds (since there were/are ‘indigenous people’ everywhere), but on practical ones as well: their part in Columbus’s voyages basically consisted of getting enslaved, murdered, generally brutalized. You want to honor these people with a holiday, feel free- but stealing Columbus’s is the worst of both worlds. Give them their own.
I think the reason Columbus’ reputation was sanitized in the past is because that his real history wasn’t taught in school. It was either overlooked or deliberately suppressed. We learned about Columbus in 1st or 2nd grade.
“Columbus sailed the ocean blue
In fourteen hundred ninety-two.”
If our teachers were aware of Columbus’ real nature, they almost certainly would have thought it was inappropriate to teach it to six or seven year olds. And they certainly never got around to it by the time we were in high school. It wasn’t until later in life that I found out the real story of Columbus, which I found out from sources such as the History Channel and the internet, which weren’t available when I was that young.
can we also get rid of Presidents Day
or at least specifically exclude the Presidents who were bad people
I don’t think that most historians except that account. Maybe a few but not that many.
Columbus exploited the natives, but he was far from the only one. Remember: since they were non-Christians, the Spaniards (who, after all, had just managed to kick heathens out of Ibera) just didn’t see them as human.
And for discovering the new world – it’s pointless nitpicking to say the natives or Basque fishermen knew about it. That knowledge didn’t affect history. Columbus showed Europe that there was a continent within reach. That made a massive change in the world, so it is not wrong – except in the most nitpicking sense – to say he discovered America.
Historically speaking, the Norsemen knew (at one time) that there was a landmass there. They had long-lasting colonies all the way to Greenland (blatant lies in advertising there) and had carved a short-lived foothold in the Americas proper.
That being said, by the time of Columbus any tales of Vinland would have been just that - tales, myths and tall yarns. Plus I don’t reckon there was much in the way of communication between Daneland and Portugal - though I’m no great scholar.
Regardless, Columbus ostensibly set out to find a direct route to either India or Zipango (i.e. Japan) ; he never said none about any landmass in-between in any official papers or letters he penned prior to his Big Find (that we’ve recovered).
No, the Spaniards did see the Indians as human. Why bother to convert beings without souls?
The Vallolidad Debate pitted Bartolome de las Casas against a less famous “Humanist” scholar who claimed the Indians deserved to be “punished” by slavery or serfdom. De las Casas even said that conversion should be voluntary.
This is not to excuse Spanish abuses. But I doubt that any European power would have been more merciful–especially when tempted by the gold & silver of Mexico & Peru. (The French found a more moderate approach useful in Canada–but they wanted the locals to survive & continue supplying them with furs. A small amount of land was needed for European settlers.)
All history is dumbed down in elementary school. The Pilgrims were all heroes, Paul Revere single-handedly saved America, King George was just a big jerk taxing the colonies for no reason, Washington had wooden teeth and could not tell a lie, the Founding Fathers wanted liberty for everyone, etc. It’s not some deliberate attempt to sanitize Columbus himself but the over all kiddie version of American Mythology.
On the other hand, I think some people learn “the truth” and veer hard in the other direction in response so that everyone was a villain and everything they did was evil.
The thing is, “discover” doesn’t mean “find”. It requires spreading the knowledge. In Shakespeare, we read of someone “discovering himself” to another: the word took an object, and pretty much meant “uncovering” or “exposing”. It’s lost the object, but retains the latter meanings.
Others may have found America earlier, but none spread the knowledge as effectively as happened in Columbus’s case. Columbus discovered America to Europe, using the term in it’s earlier form. These days, communication is so pervasive, that when anyone finds anything and mentions it to anyone, if it’s big news, it’s pretty quickly disseminated, so we don’t much need the object any more. But it’s still important, in historical context.
It’s all the same to me–I haven’t gotten it as a day off since I was in high school!
Well, yes. What’s the point (other than allowing me to get drunk on a Sunday night)? Why celebrate Columbus?
[Bill Bryson] If you ask me, the Vikings would make far more worthy heroes for America… the Vikings were manly and drank out of skulls and didn’t take any crap from anybody. Now that’s the American way. [/BB]
Thank you. I was beginning to think I had been educated in an alternate universe.
Ok, but what has Columbus ever done for me? He never set foot on the continental US. Among Latin Americans, he was the least competent of the conquistadors. I mean c’mon: the population of Hispaniola was a few hundred thousand when he arrived, 14,000 by 1517 and 500 by 1548. Now a lot of that was due to disease, but causing economic collapse by requiring every male to produce a certain quantity of gold suggests we’re dealing with Caligula, not Genghis Khan. The Spanish crown understood that you don’t decimate your population base: you use them. Which was why Columbus was ultimately relieved of his post.
ETA: Viking Day. Now that’s a holiday I can support.
I have also heard that theory. Basically that informally, some common people knew that there was some land there, but Columbus was the first to go there as a representative of a government. The claim was made that Columbus was, as a representative of Spain, breaking the Treaty of Alcacovas by taking the route south of the Canary Islands (and subsequently claiming land there) and had no reason to do so without knowing there was something there – if he was actually searching blindly for a route to Asia he might as well have avoided the problem altogether.