The voyages of Christopher Columbus opened a period of European exploration and empire building that breached the boundaries of isolated worlds and changed the course of human history. Columbus has given his name to a South American country and to numerous cities, towns, and villages. Yet after five centuries, Columbus remains a mysterious and controversial figure. He has been described as a great mariner, a visionary genius, a mystic, and a national hero as well as a failed administrator, a naive entrepreneur, and a ruthless and greedy imperialist.
The myth of Columbus continues to portray his life and accomplishments in simplistic terms, ignoring the complexity of his character and the rich historical context of his life and voyages. Some parts of his life are well documented, even after five centuries. Other parts remain obscure. Historians now agree that the major sources of many of these obscurities come from the writings of Columbus’s son, Fernando, and Bartolomé de las Casas, who had access to the explorer’s family papers in the first half of the sixteenth century. The distortions promoted by these two men have contributed to these myths because later historians merely repeated what has been passed down from Fernando and de las Casas.
The voyages of Genoese explorer Christopher Columbus have inspired countless historical interpretations over the centuries. Myths about Columbus range from his alleged Jewish ancestry to speculation about the nature of his confusion about the earth’s geography. Misconceptions about Columbus continue to flourish because few documents from his life have survived, and a variety of forged books and papers have surfaced, bearing false or exaggerated accounts of his travels. (Library of Congress)
The myths begin with Columbus’s origins. Experts have decided against Fernando’s claims that Columbus grew up next to the city gate in a distinguished house. Historians have determined instead that the explorer descended from a modest background in a house in the back streets of Genoa. Another myth about Columbus’s origins surfaced in the nineteenth century. Writers implied that Columbus and his family had Jewish ancestry. Other writers claimed that Columbus was English, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, or some other nationality. All of these speculations were encouraged by the scant documentation on Columbus’s early life. These rumors, however, dissipated in the late nineteenth century when scholars uncovered documents that verified that Columbus was middle-class Genoese and that his ancestors were Christians.
The planned sea route of Columbus’s first voyage is another controversy. At first, Columbus had the notion that one could reach Asia, the far east of the known world, by sailing west. Columbus’s experience with Atlantic winds and currents planted the seeds for these notions, inspiring him to collect tales of possible lands to the west. Later historical research on where Columbus was sailing on his first voyage shows that there is no good evidence that he was indeed aiming for Asia. Columbus actually believed that he could find a route to the Indies by sailing westward. In 1492 Columbus arrived in the Americas in an attempt to sail to India, recounting his adventures in Diario de a Bordo [The Onboard Log], which he presented to Queen Isabella upon his return to Spain in 1493.
The exact spot in which Columbus first came ashore in the New World is another point of debate. At least nine islands have been declared the spot where Columbus landed, but today it is generally accepted that Columbus landed on Watlings Island (Columbus’s original name for the island), which became San Salvador in 1926.
Another myth that has been dismissed pertains to Queen Isabella of Spain. After many difficulties trying to find support for his desire to voyage west, Columbus gained the support of the Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella. The Spanish monarchs were reluctant at first to support Columbus, but they knew what advantages could be gained if Columbus was successful. The myth is that Queen Isabella pawned her jewels just to finance Columbus’s exploration, but this is now known to be false.
Most of the misinformation and subsequent myths about Columbus resulted from the way centuries of historians read the existing documents about the explorer and his voyages. Many documents were forgeries or exaggerations, and very few of them hold up factually when examined. For example, the original Columbus diary has not been found, so many researchers rely on the Bartolomé de las Casas copy, which is of questionable validity.
In 1493, Columbus sent a letter, written in Latin, to the Spanish sovereigns about the islands that he acquired possession of and named for them. In it, he described the islands (San Salvador, Santa Maria de Concepcion, Fernandina, Isabela, Juana), the lush vegetation and animal life, the natural resources, and the native peoples. Columbus’s report was intended to serve as a public announcement of his discoveries. Yet the 1494 Basel edition, allegedly based on the 1493 original, contained curious illustrations depicting the peoples and places he had encountered on his first voyage, and none of the illustrations were taken from real-life situations but came from the imagination of the publisher. The five woodcuts are supposedly meant to illustrate Columbus’s voyage and the New World, but they are in fact mostly imaginary and were probably adapted drawings of Mediterranean places. This widely published yet false report made Columbus famous throughout Europe. Other letters from Columbus on his first voyage were often misprinted or not translated properly, giving rise to many of the misinterpretations about the first voyage.
There is also the debate over Columbus’s official signature. This debate has puzzled scholars because there is no general agreement concerning its meaning. Columbus’s undoubtedly authentic writings fill a good-size book and there are some surviving documents actually written in his own hand. These include diaries, legal documents, public and personal letters, memoranda, and a work of scholarship, the Book of Prophecies, a compilation of biblical texts and excerpts from patristic writings and medieval theology to support his vision of the discovery of the Indies as an important event in the process of human salvation.
The continuing antiheroic myths of Columbus took on much importance as the 1992 Columbus quincentenary neared. Native Americans denounced the idea of such a celebration as insensitive to the sufferings inflicted on the native population as a consequence of Columbus’s discovery. They saw Columbus as a callous and brutal slaver interested only in gold and a primary reason for the destruction of indigenous societies in the Caribbean by waging a genocidal war against the native peoples. The Native Americans offered the idea of the “invasion of America” as an alternative to the “discovery of America.” In the dispute between Italian American and Latino American politicians over the composition of the Christopher Columbus Quincentenary Jubilee Commission, in which Italian members heavily outnumbered Latinos, a national Latino organization created a rival group, the National Hispanic Quincentennial Commission, to run alternative programs. Perhaps the best symbol of the bitter opposition by ethnic groups was on quincentenary political buttons, one in particular reading: Discover Columbus Legacy: 500 Years of Racism Oppression + Stolen Land.
In art, there is no indisputable likeness of Columbus. The only portraits of the explorer from contemporaries are narrative texts by a handful of close compatriots, including Fernando (Columbus’s son) and Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes. Historians who had access to Columbus’s acquaintances or to primary documents followed with similar descriptions, but artistic interpretations were often the work of artists who let their imaginations run wild or created their portraits within the standards of their time.
The film industry has also shown imagination in bringing Columbus to the screen. The age of commercial development in motion pictures began the year after Americans celebrated the 1892 quadricentennial of Columbus’s discovery of America, a period that also saw an enormous output of plays, novels, songs, poems, and other works about the explorer. The first feature-length American film about Columbus was a three-reeler, The Coming of Columbus, released by the Selig Polyscope Company of Chicago in 1912. Many scenes were filmed on replicas of Columbus’s three ships (Santa Maria, Niña, and Pinta) that were presented to the United States by the queen regent of Spain for display at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Like the Selig film, subsequent movies about Columbus treated him in the same reverential and commercial manner that characterized other biographical films that, until the 1960s, fictionalized the facts for the sake of a good story. Columbus has also been the subject of educational films and documentaries that have tried to stick more closely to the known facts.
Books about Columbus and his voyages have become a cottage industry, but many of these same volumes have perpetuated the fabrications and myths about his life and his adventures. Many authors simply repeated the findings of earlier authors and accepted as fact what early research revealed. This gradually changed as more documents were discovered. These uncovered documents allowed scholars to look more carefully at the evidence with the usual differing historical interpretations of Columbus. The most recent dispute about the real life of Columbus versus the myths of Columbus is the exchange between Kirkpatrick Sale and Samuel Eliot Morison. Morison wrote widely on Columbus, but many of his purported facts have been debunked by Sale, who offered more concrete evidence. Sale, however, also generated controversy over his findings, which claimed several new theses on the Columbian myths. His writings advanced three new ideas: a perception of Columbus as a rootless, lonely man who never found a home and never understood the world he discovered; a new analysis of where Columbus was sailing on his first voyage, showing there is no good evidence that he was aiming for Asia, as is commonly asserted; refutation of other myths such as criminals sailing on the Santa Maria; a mutiny at sea; sailors’ beliefs that the world was flat; and Columbus’s death in poverty and obscurity.
What Sale and others discovered is the Columbian achievement was indeed impressive because it altered the cultures of the globe. It also enabled the society of the European subcontinent to expand beyond its borders in a fashion unprecedented in the history of the world. Finally, it has come to dominate virtually every other society it has touched.
Martin J. Manning
See also Founding Myths; Written or Printed Traditions
Further Reading
Bedini, Silvio A., ed. 1992. The Christopher Columbus Encyclopedia. New York and London: Simon and Schuster.
Kubal, Timothy. 2008. Cultural Movements and Collective Memory: Christopher Columbus and the Rewriting of the National Origin Myth. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Morison, Samuel E. 1942. Admiral of the Ocean Sea, a Life of Christopher Columbus. Boston: Little, Brown.
Phillips, William D., and Carla R. Phillips. 1992. The Worlds of Christopher Columbus. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Sale, Kirkpatrick. 1990. The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy. New York: Knopf.
Summerhill, Stephen J., and John A. Williams. 2000. Sinking Columbus: Contested History, Cultural Politics, and Mythmaking during the Quincentenary. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
Viola, Herman J., and Carolyn Margolis, eds. 1991. Seeds of Change: A Quincentennial Commemoration. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Columbus, Christopher—Primary Document
Journal of the First Voyage of Columbus (1492)
Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) kept a journal during his legendary voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in 1492. Columbus’s manuscript was soon lost, and one of his traveling companions, Fr. Bartolomé de las Casas, rewrote it from notes and memory. The earliest transcription dates from the 1530s. The journal is a remarkable record of a momentous event, the modern European rediscovery of the Western Hemisphere and the opening of the Americas to European settlement. This excerpt recounts the expedition’s first sighting of land in the present-day Bahamas and the first contact between Columbus and the island’s indigenous people, events soon to be shrouded in myth.
Thursday, 11th of October
The course was W.S.W., and there was more sea than there had been during the whole of the voyage. They saw sandpipers, and a green reed near the ship. Those of the caravel Pinta saw a cane and a pole, and they took up another small pole which appeared to have been worked with iron; also another bit of cane, a land-plant, and a small board. The crew of the caravel Niña also saw signs of land, and a small branch covered with berries. Every one breathed afresh and rejoiced at these signs. The run until sunset was 27 leagues.
After sunset the Admiral returned to his original west course, and they went along at the rate of 12 miles an hour. Up to two hours after midnight they had gone 90 miles, equal to 22 leagues. As the caravel Pinta was a better sailer, and went ahead of the Admiral, she found the land, and made the signals ordered by the Admiral. The land was first seen by a sailor named Rodrigo de Triana. But the Admiral, at ten o’clock, being on the castle of the poop, saw a light, though it was so uncertain that he could not affirm it was land. He called Pero Gutierrez, a gentleman of the King’s bed-chamber, and said that there seemed to be a light, and that he should look at it. He did so, and saw it. The Admiral said the same to Rodrigo Sanchez of Segovia, whom the King and Queen had sent with the fleet as inspector, but he could see nothing, because he was not in a place whence anything could be seen. After the Admiral had spoken he saw the light once or twice, and it was like a wax candle rising and falling.
It seemed to few to be an indication of land; but the Admiral made certain that land was close. When they said the Salve, which all the sailors were accustomed to sing in their way, the Admiral asked and admonished the men to keep a good look-out on the forecastle, and to watch well for land; and to him who should first cry out that he saw land, he would give a silk doublet, besides the other rewards promised by the Sovereigns, which were 10,000 maravedis to him who should first see it. At two hours after midnight the land was sighted at a distance of two leagues. They shortened sail, and lay by under the mainsail without the bonnets.
Friday, 12th of October
The vessels were hove to, waiting for daylight; and on Friday they arrived at a small island of the Lucayos, called in the language of the Indians, Guanahani. Presently they saw naked people. The Admiral went on shore in the armed boat, and Martin Alonso Pinzon, and Vicente Yanez, his brother, who was captain of the Niña. The Admiral took the royal standard, and the captains went with two banners of the green cross, which the Admiral took in all the ships as a sign with an F and a Y and a crown over each letter, one on one side of the cross and the other on the other. Having landed they saw trees very green, and much water, and fruits of diverse kinds. The Admiral called to the two captains, and to the others who leaped on shore, and to Rodrigo Escovedo, secretary of the whole fleet, and to Rodrigo Sanchez of Segovia, and said that they should bear faithful testimony that he, in presence of all, had taken, as he now took, possession of the said island for the King and for the Queen his Lords, making the declarations that are required, as is now largely set forth in the testimonies which were then made in writing.
Presently many inhabitants of the island assembled. What follows is in the actual words of the Admiral in his book of the first navigation and discovery of the Indies. “I,” he says, “that we might form great friendship, for I knew that they were a people who could be more easily freed and converted to our holy faith by love than by force, gave to some of them red caps, and glass beads to put round their necks, and many other things of little value, which gave them great pleasure, and made them so much our friends that it was a marvel to see. They afterwards came to the ship’s boats where we were, swimming and bringing us parrots, cotton threads in skeins, darts, and many other things; and we exchanged them for other things that we gave them, such as glass beads and small bells. In fine, they took all, and gave what they had with good will. It appeared to me to be a race of people very poor in everything. They go as naked as when their mothers bore them, and so do the women, although I did not see more than one young girl. All I saw were youths, none more than thirty years of age. They are very well made with very handsome bodies, and very good countenances. Their hair is short and coarse, almost like the hairs of a horsetail. They wear the hairs brought down to the eyebrows except a few locks behind, which they wear long and never cut. They paint themselves black, and they are the color of the Canarians, neither black nor white. Some paint themselves white, others red, and others of what color they find. Some paint their faces, others the whole body, some only round the eyes, others only on the nose. They neither care nor know anything of arms, for I showed them swords, and they took them by the blade and cut themselves through ignorance. They have no iron, their darts being wands without iron, some of them having a fish’s tooth at the end, and others being pointed in various ways. They are all of fair stature and size, with good faces, and well made. I saw some with marks of wounds on their bodies, and I made signs to ask what it was, and they gave me to understand that people from other adjacent islands came with the intention of seeing them, and that they defended themselves. I believe and still believe, that they come here from the mainland to take them prisoners. They should be good servants and intelligent, for I observed that they quickly took in what was said to them, and I believe that they would easily be made Christians, as it appeared to me that they had no religion. I, our Lord being pleased, will take hence, at the time of my departure, six natives for your Highnesses, that they may learn to speak. I saw no beast of any kind except parrots, on this island.” The above is in the words of the Admiral.
Source: Columbus, Christopher and Bartolomé de las Casas. Personal Narrative of the First Voyage of Columbus to America. Samuel Kettell, trans. Boston: T. B. Wait and Son, 1827.