I have noticed a certain line of reasoning lately which goes like this:
It’s wrong to say that Christopher Columbus (or any European explorer) “discovered” the New World, because there were already civilizations living there. You can’t “discover” a civilization that is already existing.
I have read this in various articles; I’ve seen it posted online; most notably, one of the articles for the magazine I work for which I proof-read last week had a line which said something like:
After European explorers “discovered” the New World…
I know the man who wrote this article. He’s a nice guy and a good writer but I also know that he is a left-leaning academic and that he put those quotation marks there as a subtle, but subversive, way of trotting out this bit of historical revisionism. “You can’t ‘discover’ a continent that people were already living on!”
Um…why not? What the hell else are you supposed to call the Europeans who found the New World? I don’t understand this reasoning, predicated on the idea that the colonization of the Americas was an oppressive and evil thing, that the efforts of all of the Europeans who sailed to America are somehow null and void? The word “discover” works perfectly in this situation and here is why: discovering something means that it is new to the person discovering it. The discovery of America is still valid and still a great accomplishment even if there were already Indians living on the continent! It’s still a discovery, for God’s sake!
It’s like if I said, “I just discovered Dixieland jazz” or “I just discovered a great new restaurant” or something. You’re still discovering it even if it already exists. If it is new to you - if you didn’t know about it before, and you found it - that is a completely valid use of the term “discovery.”
And even if Columbus thought he had found India, he still discovered something, so saying that it was accidental and therefore not a discovery doesn’t cut any ice. It’s possible to accidentally discover something.
I just do not get it. Do these people realize their logical error here?
When I was studying Anthropology there was still a strong subcurrent of admiration of the Noble Savage, who worked with his environment to produce a land only slightly-filled with humans with a life expectancy of 25, and that we ruined these cultures by introducing such artefacts as aluminum pots and steel arrowheads.
That was bullshit. While I admire the observation of a culture that has not been touched by modern ways, I also believe it is wrong to let young Tandaleo die at age 13 because to treat her with antibiotics would skew the experiment.
I’ve never seen your house before. When I first stumble upon it I get a band of armed thugs to do away with you. House is now mine. Did I “discover” it or did something else happen? What would your dispossessed heirs think?
Anything you do after that, good or bad, is beside the point. If you never knew about my house, and then you found it, you discovered it and that’s all there is to it.
The long and short of it, it seems to me, is that the word “discovery” has an eminently positive connotation to it - and people with an axe to grind against Columbus and colonialism want to remove any positive connotations from them. But attempting to do this by violating the logic of our language is underhanded and wrongheaded.
The person most often credited with the “discovery” not only did not find something new either to Europeans, nor Far Eastern Siberians, but also did not realize what he had “discovered”.
To extend the house metaphor, how much should we celebrate it if not only I “found” a house in the countryside while looking for a completely different house, and then took a band of people and slaughtered all inside, I lived in the house for the rest of my life and not realize the basement was the entrance to a huge underground complex full of people? (And several other entrances were pretty well known already.)
Such a person would indeed be notable, but not in a good way.
I think its legitimate to speak of it as a “discovery” but care should be taken to use appropriate qualifiers when doing so. I have no problem with a reference to “the European discovery of America.” We already do this with the word invention. Inventions can also technically only be made once, but phrases like “the European invention of the printing press” are commonly used. No one (AFAIK) claims that this steals credit from the Chinese.
The English physicist Isaac Newton and the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had a long, bitter and mutually discreditable feud over which of them had discovered calculus. Historians now believe neither stole from the other, and each deserves equal credit for discovering it independently of the other. Leibniz probably had the idea before Newton, but did not publish until after Newton.
And again I don’t understand the harping on what happened after the discovery. I completely fail to see how that has any bearing on whether or not the term “discovery” is legitimate for this situation.
Merriam-Webster defines “discovery” as:
1 a : to make known or visible : expose b archaic : display 2 a : to obtain sight or knowledge of for the first time
Something to remember was that for a long time, a lot of the study of history, especially popular history, was really Eurocentric. A lot of attention was paid to the Greeks and Romans, and then to the various medieval states, and then the Renaissance and the wars of religion, and the European exploration and settlement of the rest of the world. Along with that, the rest of the world was pretty much ignored except to the extent that it interacted with Europe. So you’d hear about Hernan Cortez’s conquest of the Aztecs/Mexicans, but you wouldn’t hear about the rise of the Aztecs in the first place, let alone the earlier Central American empires. You’d hear about the dividing up of Africa, but you wouldn’t hear about the various African kingdoms.
All of this led to the implications that the Europeans really were the only people out there. And especially when you talked about Columbus, and the settlement of the Americas, there was this implicit assumption that the Europeans came upon a wilderness, that the history of the settlement of America was the “taming of a frontier”.
So, now, instead of using terms like “discovery of America”, a lot of historians focus instead on the interactions between the Europeans and the native peoples.
Let’s not forget the Vikings, who made it to Canada circa AD 1000. But at that time, it was not feasible to take economic or social advantage of that discovery, so after setting up a handful of campsites, they never returned.
By Columbus’ time, the Old World was primed and ready, technologically, politically and socially, for a discovery of that magnitude, so I do think it’s a fair call to say Columbus discovered the New World despite the Vikings’ earlier voyages.
…yes, many Native people died as a result, but they were a mix of deer and buffalo hunters a thousand miles from the coast trading with a bunch of traders along the Atlantic seaboard who were looking for new sources and markets. Given time they would’ve backtracked the Vikings’ route and the invasion would’ve begun from west to east, though that, based on the material advantages of the Norsemen and their trading partners, would last only so long. The Vikings missed the window with their hostility, and having a Norwegian Chick slapping her boobs with her sword, which can distract any red-blooded fellow, even at 1000 yrs remove.
I make a lousy Communist because I firmly believe that self-interest drives almost all commerce.
Er, I think I just suggested that Capitalism is superior to other financial forms. Anybody want to dig me out of this?
And weren’t many of the Native American warring against each other anyway? It’s not like the Europeans upset the Garden of Eden. IIRC, the groups subjugated under the Aztecs gleefully helped the Spaniards.
The harping is precisely because of what happened after the discovery. To use another analogy, let’s say I take your wallet with violence the first time we meet. If you do not object to the use of the word “discover” to describe what happened that first time I saw your wallet, so be it. But surely you can understand how others might say that I didn’t discover it, I stole it.
In some ways dying as a peon under Spanish rule beat the shit out of being a prisoner from the next modification on your belief system to one a few blocks to the east, which meant ones beating heart was cut out and offered to the gods. Which, in the event, blew as a method to attract allies.
The Aztecs had few friends. Regardless of the landing of the Spaniards, they were fucked within a few years.
Words seem to be very important to you, and I can relate to that. But I really don’t see why you are taking such umbrage at a minor qualification of Columbus’ contribution to history. There seems to be some justification for a metaphorical asterisk in the record book, and I don’t think that rises to the level of revisionism.
Whilr I think that the OP brings uo a valid point, I also suspect that it is better directed against some, (such as the article that prompted it), but not all objections to the word “discover.”
There is clearly one set of people who object to the word discover based on a notion that the lans mass had been “discovered” by Asians millennia earlier. These people are silly.
It is pretty clear that European civilization only discovered the Americas after Columbus returned, leading to the introduction of potatoes, chocolate, and syphilis to Europe.
On the other hand, there was a period when texts written about the European discovery of the Americas professed a perspective that until the Europeans arrived, there was no point in any event that occurred in the Americas. The inhabitants were treated, (by historians and philosophers, regardless how they were treated by colonists and conquerors), as little more than interesting cattle while the information those inhabitants provided to Europeans about the raising of potatoes, maize, cotton, tobacco, peanuts, chocolate, etc., was treated as nothing more than discoveries that the European explorers acquired on their own.
For the most part, I suspect that such a perspective was pretty thoroughly trampled into dust inthe 1970s and that the “corrective” attitude is more habit than legitimate need, today.
Likewise. I think the primary difference between Vikings, Irish Monks, whoever else and Columbus is that, when Columbus discovered something, it stayed discovered.
I’m as liberal as the next guy and married to a woman of indigenous blood who has some very strong opinions about the Spanish conquest in the New World. Be that as it may, quotes around “discovered” in that context just make me roll my eyes.
Like many words, discover has implications beyond it’s strictest meaning in the dictionary. Do history books refer to the native Americans brought back to England as having “discovering Europe”? Did the Caribe Indians “discover Columbus” when they saw his ships on the horizon? Did the Mongols “discover” Eastern Europe?
