NRO Weekend, October 7-8, 2000
Admiral of the Ocean Sea
The worthiness of celebrating Christopher Columbus' discovery of America.

By NR's editors, November 2, 1992

ive hundred years ago Christopher Columbus discovered America. That's right: discovered America. To say this would be to risk ridicule on any college campus today (and indeed, thanks to multicultural "diversity," many high schools and grade schools). After all, weren't there people already present in the Western Hemisphere in 1492? But in a real sense Columbus did discover America.

That is, he and other fifteenth-century navigators brought the American continent into world history. In the European world of Columbus, the great navigators were part of an explosion of cultural and intellectual energy that reached into all areas of life. Its spirit is well expressed by the late-Renaissance poet John Milton when he vowed to do things yet "unattempted in prose or rhyme."

This period included Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, and the building of St. Peter's in Rome, and the Pope who named himself not after a saint but after Alexander the Great. Christopher Columbus belonged to this company. Importantly, he was determined to test his ideas against the facts as revealed by exploration.

Those who today denounce Columbus are ahistorical sentimentalists and would-be tribalists who rail fruitlessly against a momentous historical development.

Americans justly celebrate Columbus five hundred years later. He richly deserves the title conferred upon him by the Spanish monarchs, "Admiral of the Ocean Sea," and the applause of the heirs to the European civilization he brought to the Americas.