Apropos of the recent Thanksgiving holiday, you may have seen this video of Native Americans word association with Christopher Columbus. They…don’t have a positive view, to put it mildly. “Evil”, “Invader”,* “Murderer” *and *“Fuck him!” *are some of the responses.
So I want to see what the view of him is at large of how his moral character (not his skills as a navigator) should be judged and remembered, using my moral-o-meter, 0 is completely morally average for a man of his time. 1 is slightly better in moral character than the average man of his day, -1 is slightly worse and so on.
Given that he was jailed and stripped of his titles for his tyranny and incomptence, I don’t see how you can say that he was morally average for a man of his time.
Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that he was but I wanted a baseline from which we could judge ‘better’ or ‘worse’, relative to his contemporaries seemed the fairest way to do it.
Minus 2. He was a fairly unsavory character who combined extreme stubbornness with a disregard for human life and, well, being very wrong about a lot of things. Not terrible, mind - even suggesting a comparison with Hitler is comical. But certainly a jerk, even accounting for his time.
To give the guy the benefit of the doubt, I think a lot of the negative reactions people have about him is to counterbalance the conventional wisdom that he was a god among men. Not saying the genocide of Native Americans was at all excusable, but putting the blame on him for it is like blaming Franz Ferdinand for WWI. The Americas would have eventually been discovered and exploited, Chris or no Chris.
I tend to think of him being incompetent more than I think about any moral issues. His whole expedition was based on being wrong about the size of the Earth, and it wasn’t as common a belief as many folk histories would suggest. Then he kept the two logs of his travel, where the “right” one turned out to be not so right. Even his rule over the new territories seems to be marked more by “in over his head” than meanness or immorality.
But I’m also coloring this by the fact that he comes from an age of torturing people into religious confessions, burning witches at the stake and whipping sailors for virtually any infraction. It was a pretty inhumane time, all things considered. You’d have to be Tomas de Torquemada or Vlad the Impaler to stand out much in my judgment.
Even if Columbus was Mother Theresa with a sextant, it’s not like the political and religious powers of the time would have put up with a lot of mercy and soup kitchens.
The average morality of the period was indeed kinda awful, but CC was probably a step below that. Vainglorious, gold hungry, dictatorial and exceedingly harsh. -1 or -2, I went -2.
Actually Columbus instituted slavery in the New World in defiance of the direct prohibition of the Spanish monarchy. While not the absolutely worst, he was pretty bad even by the standards of his time.
That notion carried over into the early days of of America, when in the late 1600s Metacom of the Wampanoag Tribe went to war with the colonists in a conflict known as King Philip’s War. At the end of it all, many of the surviving adult males were sold into slavery in Bermuda, while the women and children were enslaved by white settlers.
Everyone was taking and keeping slaves. I give Columbus a very slight “+1” on this poll – he wasn’t as bad as Cortez or Pizarro.
(Of all the Spanish explorers, de Anza is perhaps the most admirable. He set out to make friends with the Indians, and to learn their languages. He helped them to stop fighting with each other, and this made him extremely popular in the region. The tribes were lining up, begging to come under his protection. Several times, the tribes could have wiped out his expedition, but saved them instead, guiding them to water when they were exhausted, and so on.)
(Alas, the guy who followed him was a typical Spanish tyrant, and mistreated the Indians until they rose in rebellion, at which point he killed them in large numbers. But for one brief period, there was a good Spanish explorer and colonizer.)
Definitely better than Hitler. He’s better even than Hernán Cortés, so I think it would be unreasonable to put him in the -3 to -5 zone.
But he was certainly more of an asshole than your average guy of the time.
I’d probably put him down as a -1 if we were just talking about his personality, but based on the effect that his decisions were able to take and how horribly that turned out, I chose -2.
I went with -2 due to the weighted middle. On a fully linear scale, he’d probably get a -3 or even -4. (-5 is not reserved for Hitler, but for a more active evil.)
These types of questions are impossible to judge fairly, as almost nobody is ever able to put their contemporary values aside. FDR is viewed (correctly) as the defining progressive, socially liberal statesman, yet he interned the Japanese, would have dropped the bomb on them as surely as Truman did, and made no attempt to desegregate the armed forces during the war (though he probably would have later).
“Definitely” better than Hitler? I think it’s a closer race than it looks.
From “Lies My Teacher Told Me” (James W. Loewen):
Not only were the native Haitians brutally enslaved and worked to death (literally), Columbus also did such nice things as unleashing hunting dogs on them which tore them apart, and letting Spaniards hunt them for sport and murder them for dog food.