Christopher Columbus Is Wrongly Reviled — but Not for the Reason You Think

‘S eeking for the roots of order,” Russell Kirk wrote in The Roots of American Order, “we are led to four cities: Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, and London.” The city from where the ideas of Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, and London found their way to Philadelphia gets lost in discussion — and on the map, too.

Christopher Columbus persevered for about a decade before finally obtaining in Santa Fe, Spain, the backing for his westward expedition to Asia. King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella granted Columbus the title of admiral of the seas, named him governor and viceroy over any conquered lands, and agreed to a 90-10 split (in their favor) on the material Columbus extracted on his journey. As he later reflected in gratitude to the sovereigns, “All who knew of my enterprise rejected it with mockery and laughter.”

The Capitulations of Santa Fe were just that, even if that peculiar first word meant something entirely different on April 17, 1492 (just weeks after the Iberian Reconquista finished, the Conquista of the Americas began). Columbus entreated Portugal’s King John II, England’s King Henry VII, and France’s King Charles VIII to sponsor his voyage before Ferdinand and Isabella, who had for seven years rejected his proposal mainly for the sound reason that he underestimated the size of the planet, capitulated.

At the very moment Spain completed the expulsion of Islam from Western Europe, it — and other European powers — faced trade routes to Asia closed by the great Islamic powers to their east. As Will Durant explains in The Reformation:

The failure of the Crusades compelled the discovery of America; the domination of the Eastern Mediterranean by the Turks, the closing or obstruction of land routes by the Ottomans at Constantinople and by anti-Christian dynasties in Persia and Turkestan, made the old avenues of East-West trade costly and dangerous. Italy and even France might cling to the remnants of that trade over every discouragement of tolls and war, but Portugal and Spain were too far west to make such arrangements profitably; their problem was to find another route.

A bailiff sent by the Catholic Monarchs, convinced of disastrous potentialities should Columbus win backing elsewhere, caught up with the sailor they had just again rejected atop a mule near the Pinos Puente Bridge en route to present his case to France. Isabella and Ferdinand brought Columbus back to Santa Fe, and the rest is history. But as torn down statues in Boston, Buffalo, Sacramento, Chicago, and, yes, Columbus attest, large swaths of the population wish to avert their gaze from the history of Christopher Columbus — at least parts of it.

The celebrants of Indigenous Peoples’ Day fixate upon his abduction and enslavement of natives. They shout down talk that the natives they celebrate abducted and enslaved and castrated and cannibalized (a word that enters language through Caniba, another name for the Carib people) other natives. The late Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States dismisses Columbus’s discovery as “lucky.” It ignores Columbus’s expertise in cartography, astronomy, and meteorology, his decades of seafaring experience from Galway to Ghana, and the influence of classic works by Seneca, Ptolemy, and Pliny the Elder on the learned Columbus’s belief in his much-doubted expedition.

Marxist critiques, in imposing their well-worn oppressors–oppressed template on his great discovery, portray him as the top rung of the bourgeois. They ignore that, aside from the open ocean, the immigrant explorer faced death from mutineers, the attacking natives (who conducted a complete genocide of the first settlement of whites in the Caribbean), New World diseases, and, he at least feared, Spain’s rivals and the Spanish crown itself. Those engaged in the project to repeal Western civilization ridicule Columbus for believing that he found, in son Ferdinand’s words, “the unknown eastern part of India.” They squelch discussion of native ignorance of iron so complete that one cut his hand by grabbing the wrong end of a Spaniard’s sword, overwhelming fear that the horses rode by the Europeans might eat them, belief that Columbus and his men came from heaven, and innocence of the wheel (save for some children’s toys).

These final, seemingly petty observations actually hold tremendous importance in helping us to understand the inevitability of the conquest. Just as the fiercer Caribs often lorded over the weaker Arawaks, the more primitive inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere appeared ripe for conquest by some power in the Eastern Hemisphere. That neither the Ming Dynasty nor the Ottoman Empire but European Christians discovered the New World seems fortuitous.

The moral order from Jerusalem, the philosophy of Athens, the republican governance of Rome, and the common law from London, according to Kirk, amount to a few of the ingredients that found their way to Philadelphia to root American order. Such impediments to a socialist order, and not the vile (yet altogether common in the 15th century) practices of conquest and enslavement, best explains the hatred of Columbus.