Cristoforo Colombo, aka Cristóbal Colón, Christopher Columbus, etc., an Italian, led an expedition on behalf of Isabella I and Ferdinand II of Spain. Emerging from the Dark Ages, Spain found itself in competition with Portugal, France, and England for resources, wealth, and trade routes. While Henry the Navigator and his successors were working to establish a route to India and China around the African continent for Portugal, Spain's sponsorship of Columbus' expedition was a Hail Mary bid to reach Asia first.
In school, I had been taught that at the time, Europeans thought the Earth was flat, and that sailing west across the Atlantic would result in falling off the edge. That's ridiculous. The ancient Greeks knew the Earth was round, and while some uneducated 15th Century sailors might have been Flat Earthers, the nobility and educated people knew the truth. The reason no one tried the voyage before Columbus was due to uncertainties as to how far the trip would be, and the daunting logistics of making such a long, perilous trip at sea.
Here's another story I heard and not quite sure if I believe, although it is telling about human perception and our mental models. After Columbus arrived in the Bahamas, the native Arawak could not see his three ships in the harbor. The sun was shining and the boats were clearly visible, but they had never seen anything like that before in their lives, or ever heard any tales of anything like those ships, or even imagined such large man-made objects could exist in the water. When their eyes "saw" the ships, their minds, not knowing what to do with the information their eyes were transmitting, chose to ignore the visual data and just ignored the fleet.
It wasn't until an elder was looking at the water and noticed that the waves were breaking in a funny kind of way where the ships were that his mind began to process first the bows of the ships, then the rest of the hulls, and then finally the ships in their entirety. And once he was able to process what his eyes were seeing, he told the other Arawak natives, and then they, too, could finally see what had been right there in front of their eyes. So we could say that in 1492, the Arawak discovered Columbus.
Whether that story's true or not, I don't know, but it does bring up the question of what we're missing today with our own cognitive blind spots. What evidence is right in front of us that we're not seeing because we don't know what to make of it? I should note that the modern blind spot may not be visual and more likely is conceptual. Five hundred years from now, what will people (assuming there are survivors) wonder, "How could they not have seen that coming?" Candidate blind spots might be climate change, or pervasive microplastics, or nuclear arms, or something I still can't even guess.
Anyway, in 1492, the Arawak found Columbus and his men sitting off the coast and it didn't go well for the Arawak after that. Columbus' first impression of them was "they would make fine servants . . . With fifty men we could subdue them all and make them do whatever we want." What he wanted was to know where he could find the gold Spain needed to compete with its European neighbors. Convinced the Arawak were hiding vast reserves of gold from him, he took some of them on board his ship as prisoners to make them reveal the source. He sailed them to Cuba and to Hispaniola in his search for gold, taking on more prisoners as he went. He eventually returned to Spain, taking his prisoners with him, many of whom died on the voyage as the weather turned colder.
On his second voyage, Columbus captured 1,500 Arawak men, women, and children, and brought back 500 of the "finest specimens" to Spain to be sold as slaves; two hundred died enroute. On his subsequent voyages, the search for gold and acquisition of slaves led to imprisonment, bounties, forced mining, and indiscriminate cruelty and killing of the native population. Bartolome de las Casas, a young priest who accompanied these voyages, reported that the natives were so overworked and exhausted by the demands placed on them that "from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war, slavery, and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this? I myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it."
Always one to engage in the most loathsome activity, the Stable Genius issued an official proclamation declaring today to be “Columbus Day,” i.e., not "Indigenous Peoples Day." The proclamation says that today “our Nation honors the legendary Christopher Columbus—the original American hero, a giant of Western civilization, and one of the most gallant and visionary men to ever walk the face of the earth. This Columbus Day, we honor his life with reverence and gratitude, and we pledge to reclaim his extraordinary legacy of faith, courage, perseverance, and virtue from the left-wing arsonists who have sought to destroy his name and dishonor his memory.”
Historian Heather Cox Richardson points out that we are not setting fire to historical legacies when sordid parts of our past are uncovered. "If we are going to get an accurate picture of how a society works," she wrote, "historians must examine it honestly, seeing the bad as well as the good. With luck, seeing those patterns will help us make better decisions about our own lives, our communities, and our nation in the present."
Happy Indigenous Peoples Day, fellow arsonists!
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