The Rest Is History - 309: Columbus: Villain or Hero?

Episode Date: March 2, 2023

Christopher Columbus caused debate in his own time, and remains a controversial figure today: some argue he initiated both the Atlantic slave trade and the genocide of the Native Americans, others laud him as one of the great men of History. Join Tom and Dominic as they explore these issues, their roots, and the truth behind the man Columbus really was... *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That had three ships and left from Spain. He sailed through sunshine, wind and rain. He sailed by night, he sailed by day, he used the stars to find his way. A compass also helped him know how to find the way to go. Ninety sailors were on board. Some men worked while others snored. Day after day they looked for land. They dreamed of trees and rocks and sand.

October 12, their dream came true. You never saw a happier crew. Indians! Indians! Columbus cried. His heart was filled with joyful pride. But India, the land was not. It was the Bahamas. And it was hot. Columbus sailed on to find some gold to bring back home, as he'd been told. He made the trip again and again, trading gold to bring to Spain. The first American? No, not quite. But Columbus was brave and he was bright. So, Dominic, we on the rest of history, big fans of William McGonagall. Yes. But he is rivaled by Gene Mazzolo, who is apparently a bestselling US kids author from the 1970s onwards. Your notes tell me. Well, lots of our American listeners will be very familiar with that wonderful work of poetry time the bardic tradition at its best

so um a great poem both for its command of rhyme and meter and all that kind of stuff but but also for its historical accuracy so as we've been describing um columbus wasn't necessarily trading was he when he got hold of gold yeah i think maybe well some a lot of academics now would probably use the word looting wouldn't they yes possibly or stealing and also that poem which lots of american listeners will have heard when they were elementary school there's no mention there of the fact that he was also taking back people um from the very beginning he was taking back people against their will so it's such an interesting debate and we'll come to it in the

second half the sort of columbus hero or villain i mean whether history has heroes or villains is a rather issue which we'll also discuss but it's clearly columbus's legacy is a complicated one and and even at the time i mean we've already discussed this in previous episodes in this series even at the time people were arguing about columb. He was hated by a lot of the people who sailed with him, who fell out with him. There was the friar we talked about in the last episode, who basically went back to Spain and informed on him to the Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, said, you know, Columbus is a terrible man. He's behaving very badly. So arguments about Columbus are not, I mean, as you said last time, they're not 21st century arguments.

They're 16th century arguments that we're still having, basically. But we left last time on a bit of a, so Columbus had come back from voyage number two and was sort of hanging around Spain, desperate to go back for a third voyage, even though he's lost his monopoly. So other people are going over now. And the Catholic monarchs do eventually decide to let him go. But the plan is now that he will go beyond the Caribbean. He will see what else is there.

Specifically, he's going south, isn't he? Yes. Because he's traveled to the Gold Coast on Africa. And it's an assumption of geographers of the time that if there's gold on one latitude, then it's going to be on one side of the Atlantic, then it'll be, there'll be gold on the other side as well. Yeah, that doesn't strike me as unimpeachable geography. I'm not a great geographer. So Columbus's relationship to geographical theory in this is interesting. So he heads southwards, and basically he's heading for the continent of south america and he almost gets there and then his supplies are running out and so he veers off north and he sees ahead of him

an island with three mountains and so he calls it after the trinity trinidad so trinidad yes he does indeed he's actually what you missed out on was before he got to trinidad so this is 1498 he stopped in what's called the doldrums. So the doldrums is this spot where basically there's no wind. And wine turns to vinegar, doesn't it? Yeah. And it's incredibly hot and you'll just be calm there. And actually, I know you're a big fan. You're starting to get into the novels of Patrick O'Brien. And there's a very, very memorable sequence in those stories, which are about the age of the Napoleonic Wars and a sea captain and his friend, Aubrey and Maturin, in the Napoleonic Wars. There's a very

memorable passage when they are stuck in the doldrums and it's incredibly hot. They have no water and they can't move. You're waiting desperately for a breath of wind. And this is exactly what happens to Columbus. And this is why he has to go north, because they're running out of supplies. Exactly. So he goes to Trinidad, but then he does make the crossing across the Caribbean. It's a very perilous, difficult crossing. But he's a brilliant mariner, isn't he? I mean, this is the thing. So there is madness, but there is also method. Yes. So his ability to, there's almost a kind of supernatural quality to his ability to find ways across seas that no European is there in the most horrendous conditions often and he's heading for venezuela so he is going to somewhere where no european has ever been again

and he hears this great what he describes as a deafening roar like the noise of an enormous wave crashing against rocks and currents going from east to west with all the mighty fury of the Guadalquivir in full flow. The Guadalquivir is the river Seville. And this is the estuary of the river Orinoco. And it was a gigantic estuary, bigger than anything any European will ever have seen. And Columbus writes later that he says, I can still feel the fear spreading through my veins that I felt with the thought that we're in danger of capsizing, faced with this kind of torrent of water. And it's funny, there's a funny moment. They anchor near the estuary and they raise a cross on the land.

The admiral asked the pilots where they thought they were. And some said they thought they were in the Sea of Spain, others in the Sea of Scotland. Yes. Well, it's a the Sea of Scotland. Yes. Well, it's a bit hotter than Scotland. Yes. Well, but Columbus himself, I mean, he's torn in all kinds of ways as to where he might be because he's still very much clinging to the idea that he's reached Asia.

He's not abandoning that hope. But he is also perhaps in the nether reaches of his mind starting to contemplate the possibility that, as he puts it himself, that he is navigating along a very large continent, which has hitherto remained unknown. So that's a kind of shadow over his thoughts. And then there is a wilder, more apocalyptic, kind of religiously infused perspective that is also part of his thinking all the time. And he's starting to think, well, maybe this is Eden. Yeah, it's crazy, isn't it?

I think nothing better exemplifies the genius and the weirdness of Columbus than the fact that he, as he's been sailing, he's noticed things about the stars. And because of his observation of the stars and the fact that they are not behaving as they should do were the globe to be perfectly spherical a perfect sphere he comes to think you know is he sailing uphill yeah um and he starts to construct this image of the globe as being in the shape of a pair yes or even better and this is very much an idea that you could see he's been at sea a very long time um surrounded entirely by men it is as if somebody had a very round ball and somewhere on its surface, it was as if a woman's breast had been placed there.

So that the point at which we might imagine the nipple would be is the most prominent part and the nearest to the heavens. So he's casting the nipple as Eden. But in fact, he's right. The world isn't a perfect sphere. So he's onto something. On the other hand, the world is not shaped quite as he is describing it. On the other hand, the world is not a breast shaped like a breast. So there's a lot going

on there, obviously. Yeah, he has been at sea too long, I think it's fair to say. But wouldn't you say, I mean, that's kind of paradigmatically Christopher Columbus' behavior? It's the combination of a slightly fevered mind. He has been at sea too long. His paranoia, his anxiety about the fact that his theory isn't matching the facts. I mean, that's been a feature right from that very first voyage in 1492, but also the intense religiosity. That's been a feature of Columbus's life from the very beginning. He is incredibly pious. I think he has started to really believe that he has been chosen by destiny. So in episode one, we were talking about when he was setting out, he thought of himself as somebody... We had that sort of line about him being the teenager in their

bedroom, reading internet forums and coming up with theories and whatnot. But by now, 1498 or so, that has become obsessive, unhealthily obsessive, to the extent that he thinks everybody else is wrong, that he has this unique, divinely ordained destiny, and he starts to see everything through that prism and i he he don't you think he cuts a slightly melancholy isolated figure from this point on definitely and also there's physical decline isn't there because his eyes are starting to hurt yes so he's sort of so that that confusion that fog that he is in he doesn doesn't know what Venezuela is. He doesn't know what the Orinoco is.

He thinks he might be in paradise or Eden or whatever. Or China. Or China, as you say. I mean, that's mirrored by the fact that he actually can't see because he has this eye condition that he seems to have come down with in Cuba. And it's sort of getting worse and worse, partly because of the eye condition. I mean, he could have gone on into Venezuela. Actually, if he had gone on, I wonder if he'd probably have died because the story of conquistadors who go trudging through the jungles of Venezuela. Yeah.

I mean, those stories normally end extremely badly with them eating each other, being eaten, dying of malaria. Very Werner Herzog. Very Werner Herzog, exactly. But actually, because of his eyes and because he's feeling so ropey, he decides to go back to Hispaniola, which he does. He goes back to Hispaniola. And as is the tradition, he arrives to find that all the men who he'd left there previously have either died or fallen out massively with each other. His brother, Bartolomeo, has fallen out with this guy called Francisco Roldan. Roldan has turned completely against the sort of Columbus regime.

There's all sorts of very complicated and slightly sort of impenetrable arguments about land ownership, treatments of the locals. They come up with a new system in the wake of this, which actually anticipates a lot of what the Spanish are going to do, not just in the Caribbean, but also in Mexico, which is called the encomienda. And the way that works is you're given a land grant, and then you're given a chieftain, basically, who's assigned to you and it's his job. I mean, he's basically been turned from a chieftain to a foreman. And his job is to get all his people to work for you. And you're granted this land. I mean,

that's basically how the Spanish will divvy up the whole of the New World. And by that point, so it's only six years since Columbus's first voyage, but the whole enterprise has worked out completely different from the Portuguese system. So if the Portuguese had done it, they'd have established a few trading posts, and that's it. But the Spanish, because of what you were saying last time because the reconquista they're used to the idea of conquering land and sort of planting it with people and with farms and mines and all these kinds of fascinating what if isn't it if the portuguese had done it yeah because would they have continued working would they have worked with existing sort of state entities as it were so in other words with the incas would there still be an aztec right exactly yeah exactly would the portuguese have have carried on to have used

them as collaborators and traded with them or would they have been wiped out anyway by disease i mean who knows and european land greed yeah and over time would the exactly um and indeed would portugal have been strong enough to sustain defend off yeah other with the french let's say or the english when they when they got involved um later on anyway um it's the sort of classic thing with columbus some people want to go home he lets them go home but with that sort of suicidal side he says they can take slaves with them, even though he knows Queen Isabella is dead against this. So they take slaves back. And when they get back, the queen is very put out about this.

There's loads more feuding on Hispaniola. And then in 1500, a guy arrives from Spain called Bobadilla. And he has actually been sent by the former Chamberlain to the Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella. And they said, enough is enough. Go to Hispaniola, sort it all out. Yeah, end of story. Columbus is shambles.

Columbus has been there, ill, mad, miserable, writing endlessly about David and Solomon and all this sort of business. Bobadilla turns up. Yeah, pressed, writing endlessly about David and Solomon and all this sort of business. Bobadilla turns up. Yeah, pressed, exactly. Bobadilla turns up and actually just arrests him. They have a meeting and then Bobadilla sort of claps him in chains. It's very fast, isn't it?

Well, you know, he did it and probably was right to do it. Puts him on a ship and says, back to Spain. And that's basically the end of Columbus as a governor, as the end of him as a sort of managerial figure. So he's back in Spain by November 1500. He's more and more going in for this kind of religious rhetoric. So he says, he writes to the monarchs. He says, Baba Dia sent me here in chains.

I swear I do not know nor can I think why, save what God our Lord wants me to do for your highnesses. I did only what Abraham did for Isaac and Moses for the people of Israel in Egypt. So it's amazing then, is it not? He's been sent back in chains and he's writing, comparing himself to Abraham and Moses, that there's a fourth voyage. How does he persuade Ferdinand and Isabella to back him for a fourth voyage? Because we've been talking about how he's a difficult man, he's a prickly man, but he clearly has an incredible ability to persuade people who he needs to persuade to back him. You know, there is a sense of charisma there as well as everything else we've been

describing. When he's coming out with this, they perhaps don't have the same reaction that we do, Tom. So we listen to him say, comparing himself with Moses. And we say Columbus is clearly losing his marbles. He's been at sea too long. He's blind. He's all this stuff. I think Isabella, who is incredibly pious, is perhaps quite moved when she hears him describing himself in this way. Plus, they know he is good at discovering things i mean he discovered venezuela i'm going to say discovered i mean it's not like there weren't people there already of course there were and he had met them but he's the first european to discover it so they think they're also because they're in competition with the portuguese all this time so vasco de

gama has just got back we talked about vasco de gama in our portuguese episodes last year vasco de gama got back in 1499 and he actually i mean this is the thing with columbus the amazing thing columbus is just a complete failure he has completely failed to find china he's failed to find india the portuguese who had turned him down were right all along their guy has done it has got back which is actually very embarrassing for Columbus and for the Spanish because the Portuguese are basically saying to them, you know, you've been wittering on for the last seven years about, we've actually now found it.

We were right. Perhaps because of that competition, the Spanish authorities think he's not good at administering, but he's good at finding things. I mean, he writes to the Pope, Alexander Borgia. He says, I found the Garden of Eden, which is great news. But also, isn't he proposing to launch, to attack Mecca

by sailing westwards? Yeah, he's got all this stuff. All these schemes. That crusading stuff that we talked about in episode one. It's absolutely still there. I mean, just because they've conquered Granada and they've sort of settled down

and they're making a bit of money, it doesn't mean that Ferdinand has given up his ambition to be the last world emperor, to take Jerusalem, to wipe out Islam, to be that monarch who unites the world behind the banners of Christ. And Columbus is sort of saying to him, you know, I can do that. He's also, his Genoese network is still giving him funds. So he gets permission from the Pope to go. The Bank of Genoa says, say they'll back him again. And so it is that in May 1502, Columbus heads off for voyage number four. This time, it's a much smaller voyage. He's only got four caravels. So 17 with voyage number two. So he's sort of back down to virtually the level that he was with voyage number one.

The difference is that this time he's actually banned from visiting Hispaniola. So he gets to Hispaniola. They've got a new governor there called Nicolás de Obando. And Obando says to him, you're not welcome. You know, you're not allowed to land. It's against the law now. And Columbus says, well, there's a massive storm coming. You know, please let me land. And Columbus says, well, there's a massive storm coming.

You know, please let me land. And Obando thinks that Columbus is lying, partly because he's about to send a treasure fleet back to Spain. And he thinks Columbus wants to stop him. Actually, Columbus wasn't lying. The treasure fleet is almost all destroyed. Columbus shelters in a bay. His fleet is very battered.

And is this the storm in which Bobadilla gets drowned? Yeah. So Bobadilla is drowned and also Roldan, the guy who Columbus had fallen out with before. So Columbus is sort of the last man standing to some extent.

I mean, he knows the sea. He's a very, very good mariner. So they're blown off to Belize. And he then does another of these incredible voyages that actually, if he'd just done this, it would be enough for a podcast. Yeah, he'd earn a place on the rest of his history.

So he sails down the coast of Central, along the coast of Central America. He meets people that are probably Maya from Yucatan, Mexico. He drinks pulque, doesn't he? He drinks pulque, their sort of beer, I guess it is. He compares it to English beer. Oh, there's no higher praise, Tom. No. Wonderful.

Good for him. He would have known that because, of course, he'd been to Bristol, hadn't he? Yeah. And Ireland and sort of hanging around there. So he would have... Hanging out in Clifton. Exactly. Exactly.

And the Meyer are clearly more sophisticated. They have very fancy swords out of wood and they have dyed cotton clothes he thinks well this clearly means I'm in Southeast Asia I'm so near the river Ganges yes he thinks he's only 10 days from the corner yeah and this is so interesting because it's a point to which everybody else absolutely everybody else thinks this is the new world i mean that's now become a cliche we're only a few years away from it being renamed after amerigo vespucci which is harsh isn't it it is harsh well vespucci himself is actually quite an impressive explorer

but it is yes i suppose it is harsh but it's partly columbus's own fault because he just refuses to accept that it even exists he keeps saying how can you name it after somebody who doesn't even yeah believe it so he goes all the way down to panama and he says at that point he says he's in malaysia the strait of malacca people say to him there's an isthmus and if you go across it there will be another ocean and he says oh well this is definitely malaysia you know i know exactly where I am. And so he's still trying to fit everything into his sort of mad theories. But it's Panama. It is Panama. So I mean, it's amazing he doesn't die, actually, because as I said,

a lot of people who visit tropical places like Panama, they come to very sticky ends. But Columbus doesn't. They're absolutely shattered. Their ships are riddled with termites. One of the historians says Columbus by this stage was spending long periods in the crow's nest talking to God, which I think is probably not ideal for the captain of your ship. He had a policy, didn't he, of whenever he was too depressed that he'd go out in a ship out into the ocean depths and commune with God. Yeah. I mean, I suppose it's easy for us to... Yeah, it's a kind of Franciscan retreat. It is, but also it worked for him. He did four amazing voyages and returns to tell the tale. And neither of us, Tom, has done...

Neither of us have done that, no. So much as one. So good for Columbus. And then actually one of the craziest elements of all the Columbus story, they are blown by a massive storm as they're sailing back to Hispaniola and end up being marooned on the north coast of Jamaica. And they basically, the ships are in such a terrible condition, they have to turn them into

sort of shelters on the beach. They divide up the rations and they say, well, what are we going to do? And two of Columbus's men, a guy called Diego Mendez and Bartolomeo Fieschi, who's Genoese, they say, well, we'll go by canoe to go and get help. And they do. That's amazing, isn't it? They cover 120 miles of sea. They have, I think, about six tainos with them intense heat they're incredibly thirsty one of the natives dies of thirst uh they find a rock in the middle of the the ocean where they are able to get some rainwater and eat some mollusks and then but even after they've got to hispaniola they're the western bit and they've got to Hispaniola, the western bit, and they've got to then go another 300 miles over land to go and get help.

And the incredible thing is when they finally get to the governor of Hispaniola and say, Columbus is shipwrecked on Jamaica. Please send help. He says, no. He says, I hate Columbus. They call him the pharaoh. The pharaoh. Leave the pharaoh alone.

Yeah. The pharaoh is a terrible man. I'm not sending help for him. So then there's a long delay while Columbus is waiting for help. Unsurprisingly, there's a rebellion that breaks out among Columbus's crew. I mean, it's an extraordinary indictment of his managerial style that even when their shipwreck's living in the sort of the shattered wreck of their ship on the beach, they still all fall out with each other. Two of them lead a rebellion. They sail off along the coast of Jamaica with some overloaded boats, some makeshift boats with some Tainos.

They're massively, because they're overloaded, they throw all the Tainos overboard, which I think we can both agree is very bad behavior. Yeah. They then have to make their way back on land, killing and robbing and sort of raping as they go. Then they pitch up back at Columbus's camp and say, well, we did rebel, but that didn't work out. So let's make up. Yeah, let's make up.

So they're there. Columbus is sort of half mad. He's just wittering on about Solomon and the Garden of Eden and the River Ganges. And finally, in June 1504, Nicolaus de Obando says, fine, all right, you know, I'll send help. And they send help. Columbus is rescued and basically sent back to Spain.

And when he gets back to Spain, so that's November 1504, he has a bit of bad news. Queen Isabella is on her deathbed. And she's his particular patron. Yeah, she dies on the 26th of November 1504, the mother of Catherine of Aragon. And when she dies, that's kind of it, curtains for him, really.

I mean, I think by that point he's pretty ill, and he's half blind and his wits are so scrambled by all this stuff about the Garden of Eden, pears, shipwrecks, storms, everybody calling him the pharaoh. I wouldn't do wonders for your health, would you? After hearing the stories of those four voyages, Tom, would you sign up for voyage number five with Columbus?

No, I wouldn't. No, nor would I. Not afraid to say it. Well, you wouldn't get the chance because he sort of just drifts around, trudging around after King Ferdinand, vaguely trying to get permission for new voyages, but also he's so obsessed with his titles, just try endlessly to get confirmation of his own titles. And then in May 1506...

Which he gets, doesn't he? Yeah, he does. He does. He absolutely does. So he's always complaining that Ferdinand is letting him down. But actually Ferdinand's quite good. You know, the King and Queen, I don't think they treated him badly. I think they paid him a pension before they even gave him the permission to go on voyage number one. And even after this sort of shambolic behavior,

they never break with him. Well, Ferdinand fixes for Diego, Columbus's son, to marry the niece of the Duke of Alba. So actually,us gets everything he wants because columbus this son of a weaver who's risen from nothing ends up the progenitor of a line of dukes i mean that's absolutely right the um the title that he has which is um admiral of the ocean sea uh i think that's inherited to this day by his descendants so i think there's a man who is so there is that isn't that so he dies on um 20th of may 1506 in valladolid there's obviously a kind of cloud hanging over him a feeling of regret that he hasn't nailed down the fact that he's reached asia yeah but he must have been able to die feeling that he had achieved great things

and it would be interesting to know what he was more pleased to die feeling that he had achieved great things. And it would be interesting to know what he was more pleased about. The fact that he had made all these extraordinary crossings or the fact that after his death, he would prove to be the progenitor of a line of dukes. That's a good question. Yeah, because it was always about. I suspect the latter. So much of it was about status for him. Yeah, so much of it.

So getting his son, getting those titles confirmed for his son. Anyway, should we take a break now? And when we come back, let's look at the, well, the extraordinary story of what happens to his body. Oh, yes. And the way in which

he has been remembered over the course of the centuries and particularly in more recent years in the debate over his legacy. So we'll do that when we come back. We'll see you in a few minutes.

I'm Marina Hyde. And I richard osmond and together we host the rest is entertainment it's your weekly fix of entertainment news reviews splash of showbiz gossip and on our q a we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works we have just launched our members club if you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Children's Biographies of Christopher Columbus function as primers on racism and imperialism. These books teach youngsters to accept the right of white people to rule over people of color, of powerful nations to dominate weaker nations. That is William Bigelow, who is a US high school teacher and the author of Rethinking Columbus. And Dominic, compared to the poem with which we opened this episode, that is indeed a rethinking. That is a rethinking, yeah. The poem, I think, was written in the 70s. And that gives you some sense of the revolution in opinion

that has happened over the past few decades. It is, because I think that quote from Mr. Bigelow, I think that's actually from the 1990s or so. Oh, is it? Oh, right. Okay, so that would be in the context, perhaps, um the the anniversary in 1992 exactly before we come to that let's just look at the immediate aftermath of what happens uh in in the wake of his death so we we talked about how ferdinand looks after diego and yes columbus's kind of legacy the legacy of his family and actually i mean diego ends up the governor of the Indies, doesn't he?

He does. He kind of, he goes out to Santo Domingo. And he's there until the early 1520s, I think. So he's there while Mexico is being conquered. I mean, he's a big man. And the Spanish crown absolutely do honour those promises to Columbus. And while he's out there, Columbus has been, he died in Valladolid. He gets buried there in the Franciscan monastery.

Then he gets moved to Seville, his body. And then because Diego is out in Hispaniola, he has him brought out to Santo Domingo and buried there, where he stays for as long as Hispaniola remains Spanish. But when Santo Domingo becomes French, which it does at the end of the 18th century, Columbus's body is moved to Havana in Cuba. And then the Cubans rebel against the Spanish and become independent. And so Columbus's body is taken back to Seville, where it's buried in a rather kind of overblown monument. Yeah, ginormous monuments in the cathedral. And is there to this day and so there is there is um there is skepticism as to whether these the body that is said to be columbus's after all this transfer is

actually columbus's that's right because i think it's still there are still competing claims aren't there between the dominican republic and spain and whether in fact the columbus's body might have been dismembered and different bits of him are perhaps in different places. There has been talk of DNA testing, though it all seems completely fruitless to me. I think everybody should claim, you know, a little bit of Columbus. But if you want a metaphor, this idea of Columbus's posthumous remains kind of endlessly being moved from place to place and being torn to pieces by competing interests is a very good metaphor, isn't it? It is. Although the funny thing is that Columbus at first, so in the 16th century, partly because I suppose he wasn't Spanish, the Spanish don't make a huge

deal of Columbus. In fact, lots of people obviously are still alive who hated Columbus. They thought of him as the pharaoh. So Columbus is not really fated as a great hero. You know, there aren't cities named after him. But he does. I mean, he is established as the discovery. He's the discoverer, but the New World is not named after him. It's named after Vespucci, who sailed along the coast of Brazil. The two figures who sort of dominate the sort of Spanish accounts of the sort of conquest of the New World are Cortes and Pizarro. So they're the conquerors of the Aztecs and the Incas, because they really do bring back gold,

because they do bring back gold. And also because they're, you know, there's something more obviously sort of, I mean, as violent as they were, there's something more obviously sort of i mean as as as as violent as they were there's something more obviously swashbuckling about those stories about them fighting their way in and out of capital cities and things that seem to fit with the sort of marshall's mindset of the spanish empire better than this sort of very disputatious genoese marinos wrong going on about breasts. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Exactly.

And actually, the interesting thing with Columbus, I think, is that a lot of the debate about Columbus here or villain comes from the United States, which is actually, of course, a part of the world that Columbus never visited. Although he might have done, had he stayed on his course on the first voyage, he might have crashed into Florida.

But he didn't. So he never went to the United States. He didn didn't discover it he didn't colonize it but what was once the ormadaire i say the sacralization of of columbus the mythologization of columbus started in america in the 19th 18th 19th centuries so obviously if you think about the use of columbia the of Columbia, Columbus, Ohio. Columbia University. Columbia University. You get a bit of that in Latin America, obviously.

The country, Columbia, Gran Colombia, which was Simon Bolivar's dream of a kind of United States of Latin America. But that's obviously the period, in particular, the North America of Manifest Destiny. And Columbus is seen as the progenitor of Manifest Destiny. Go West, young man man all of that stuff so martin van buren u.s president in the 1830s um commissioned a discovery of america's statue with columbus and a kind of cringing indian maiden which stood outside as well she might have cringed yeah well exactly Well, exactly. You're quite right, Tom. It stood outside the Capitol until it was removed in the mid of the 20th century. And why was it moved?

Because it was felt to be, even then, to be... I think because even then, yeah, in the mid 20th century, it was just incredibly insensitive. Yeah. The image of Columbus is this sort of square-jawed, blue-eyed, European, this sort of model of heroic European exploration. That comes late 19th century, and it's largely a product of immigration to the US. And there are things like, there's a group called the Knights of Columbus, who were set up from the 1880s onwards. And they're Catholic Italian immigrants, largely, who need an American hero. so we began

with the Sopranos episode yeah they're the Sopranos written by uh Mike Imperioli who plays Christopher yeah in the Sopranos and in that the whole I mean the whole plot of the episode revolves around the idea that these members of the of the mafia in New Jersey are obsessed with a sense of Italian-American pride and that Columbus is the focus for this. Yeah, that's exactly right. I think, and actually, that episode is hated by lots of Sopranos fans. I mean, the woker of the Sopranos fan, the more they dislike that episode, I think it's fair to say. But those groups, Italian-American groups, were lobbying because what they wanted was a founding father who was like them who was catholic and italian and involved in all kinds of bad

behavior under bad behavior i mean that's that's i mean that is the that's the irony that's being played on in the sopranos episode isn't it i suppose it is that the mafia are not good for the reputation of italian americans and the sopranos isn't good for the reputation of Italian Americans and The Sopranos isn't good for the reputation of Italian Americans. So there's a lot of, you know, a slight hall of mirrors there. There is, yes. But they sort of, so what they do is they reinvent Columbus as this heroic square-jawed, heroic individualist

who is the sort of herald of manifest destiny. And in other words, it gives them... And of science, but a forward-thinking modern figure who gives them a hero that will rank alongside Washington, Jefferson, and Co., who are obviously all Protestants and Anglo-Saxon Protestants. And so they are pushing for a national holiday, so Columbus Day, from the 1880s or so.

So it's actually – it wasn't made a federal holiday until 1971. Lyndon Johnson had passed the legislation or signed it off a couple of years earlier. And that's a point at which there's a kind of ethnicization of America. Anyway, you know, Italian-Americans, it's the era of the godfather, of the deer hunter, of all these kinds of things. But also Marlon Brando turning down his Oscar.

Oh, yes. Yeah. and a native american turning up who i now gather isn't a native american that's right sachin little feather yes that's the uh is the name um yeah and actually columbus day interestingly has never been universally accepted so there are quite a lot of states where they were always very ambivalent about it places like new New Mexico and so on. And right now, there are some cities, some states in the United States where they insist on, they do not mark Columbus Day, or they declare it to be Indigenous Peoples Day instead. And that's not just, it'd be very tempting for us to say, oh, woke Americans. But actually, that's mirrored across Latin America. So from about the 1910s, 1920s, and this will ring a bell for people who listen to our World Cup podcasts about places like Argentina or Uruguay or Mexico.

There was a trend to have a Dia de la Raza, the day of the race, on the the 12th of October on Columbus Day. But in a lot of countries, Argentina, Peru, Colombia, Costa Rica, old friends in Costa Rica, they have renamed it things like Diversity Day, Indigenous Peoples Day, Cultural Encounters Day, all of these kinds of things. So in other words, it's not just a North American phenomenon to tilt against Columbus. Lots of people in Latin America are doing it too. And this is something that we've been talking about before, that the tradition of seeing what Columbus is doing in the new world, the raping, the enslavement as crimes,

is a tradition that is imported by the Spanish. We don't know what the Tainos thought. I mean, presumably they weren't in favour of it at all, but since they left no writings about it, we don't know what the Tainos thought. I mean, presumably they weren't in favour of it at all, but since they left no writings about it, we don't know what they thought. So that tradition of seeing what Columbus did is inherited from Spanish writers who were criticising him. And it has always been there. I mean, it's particularly strong in Protestant narratives for obvious reasons. It becomes conflated with Catholic oppression, but it's always been there. And in preparation for this, I listened to a very, very old episode

of Letter from America by Alastair Cooke, who was a BBC British journalist who explained America to BBC listeners. And he was talking about the celebrations, so the 500th anniversary celebrations in 1992. So there was a huge world expo in Seville, specifically, you know, the burial place of supposedly of Columbus. And the theme of the expo was, I think, the age of exploration. So it couldn't have been more clearly identified with Columbus. But when the Spanish king, Juan Carlos, before he disgraced himself and had to abdicate, he gives a kind of speech of welcome and he never once mentions Christopher Columbus. Yeah.

And Alistair Cooke is kind of wondering about this and he relates it to the sense of embarrassment in America, in the United States, where there had been lots of plans being made to celebrate the anniversary, places with any kind of link to Columbus, you know, Columbia University, District of Columbia, all those kinds of places, and saying, well, actually, they've been overtaken by a deep sense of embarrassment. And he says, I don't know where this come from. He's describing it. And he says, words to the effect, what no one has been able to explain is why this has suddenly happened, the sense of embarrassment about Columbus. But actually, it's very clear why words to the effect what no one has been able to explain is why this has suddenly happened the

sense of embarrassment about columbus but actually it's very clear why it's happened and where it's come from is it's a continuous tradition reaching back centuries and centuries well you mentioned uh las casas the priest who was active he was a kind of a conquistador himself he was active in cuba wasn't he in the early 1500s 1510s and then he witnessed his massacres and he kind of it's like the scales fall from his eyes and he becomes the great protector of the indians i think he was given that title wasn't he protector of the indians and he i mean you're saying it's taken up by protestants but it's actually catholic writers who first create this idea that the conquest of the new world, that Columbus, the voyages, all of that sort of business was rotten from the very beginning with rape and violence.

And some historians now would go along with what they say. Some would, some think Las Casas was exaggerating. One of the arguments that people have is about genocide. I personally do not think it makes any sense to accuse Columbus of genocide because it's absolutely not what he wanted. He wanted the locals. We've kind of made that clear from the beginning. You could argue that one of the repercussions and unanticipated consequences, I suppose you would say, of his arrival is genocide and that pretty much all the indigenous people of the Caribbean die. But disease plays a large part in that. And I think it's very

harsh to blame the Spanish. You would no more blame the Spanish for bringing smallpox than you would blame somebody for giving you COVID, I would say. But I think you could absolutely legitimately argue that their ability to withstand disease, that they're a broken people because their entire way of life has been destroyed and they're having to adjust to new ways of living, which are basically involves them having to work in mines. I think that's absolutely right, Tom. And I think that, you know, when your entire way of understanding the world has been shattered, and we talked about this in the episode we did on the aztecs as well that the impact of disease is greater when you feel kind of emotionally maybe spiritually broken yeah and again you know we don't know because as we say we you know we have no record it's it's

it's hard to imagine how how utterly dislocating and devastating what happens to them in the space of what a few decades not even a few decades i mean 10 15 years maybe yeah start to finish las casas and other people actually write about exactly what you say they say when the smallpox comes when they're they're starving and so on they say it was horrible to watch you know people just sat there waiting to die or killed themselves they it's as though they as though their world had just been completely turned upside down and all their assumptions destroyed, their children taken away, families broken up, all of this business, and they just feel they have nothing to live for. And I think

you can absolutely see that people would have thought like that, that the men with beards and swords have turned up and destroyed everything that they took for granted. And one of the reasons why this perspective on Columbus accelerates becomes more pronounced in the 70s, in the 80s, into the 90s, I think is partly because it's focused by the anniversary, but also the perspective that is offered by the civil rights movement in America, which has black Americans as its focus. But of course, it spills outwards because the idea that specifically white Europeans have done to portions of the world what followed in the wake of Columbus's discovery is it's there in the campaign against apartheid in South Africa. It's there in Australian and New Zealand's kind of sense of guilt about what's happened to

the indigenous peoples there. And there's this feeling that what happens with Columbus is expressive of a trend that has lasted centuries and is kind of enduring into the 21st century. But the counter argument to that is that Columbus is getting grief for a lot of things that he personally, you know, things that happened long after he was dead. So a good example of this is, well, the trend now generally is to see Columbus as a villain. And a good early example of that is from Howard Zinn, his People's History of the United States, you know, overtly Marxist history, very successful though, you know, very popular among students and so on. He says absolutely explicitly Columbus's legacy was, and I quote, conquest, slavery, death.

And if you look at any, if you Google Columbus and that sort of American news website or something, so I got a quote from Vox, 2015. Christopher Columbus, in whose name children are off school and mail is not delivered today, was a homicidal tyrant who initiated the two greatest crimes in the history of the Western Hemisphere, the Atlantic slave trade and the American Indian genocide. And I think actually both of those statements are wrong. To say that Columbus

initiated the Atlantic slave trade, to me, is to miss the fact that people in the Atlantic were already trading slaves. And it's from that milieu that Columbus comes. So the Portuguese, for example, were already shipping slaves from West Africa, back to Lisbon, to Seville, to their islands in the Atlantic, decades before Columbus. The fact he didn't begin it doesn't alter the fact that he was complicit. But I'm not disputing that, Tom. I'm not saying that he wasn't involved in it. But in a sense, to say, well... He's not the founder of it, though.

No, he's not. But what happened in the Canary Islands, I mean, that is a kind of genocidal program that had begun in the early 15th century. Not deliberately genocidal, though. What the Spanish want is a workforce, and if people resist, they kill them. Now, the effect is genocidal. We would look at that and we would say, this is terrible, but it's not a deliberate project. Let's wipe all these people out. But I think that what has darkened Columbus's reputation is the fact that the criticisms that were made of him in his own lifetime for what he was doing to the Indians, it was seen as being a terrible thing. And that involved both the sense that they were being wiped out in enormous numbers. Peter Martyr says this,

it's not just Las Casas. Peter Martyr was saying 200,000 die in that war that he and his brother launched on Hispaniola. And also that they keep sending back slaves to Isabella and she gets more and more cross about it. But in a sense, he is on the wrong side of a debate in Spain that has carried into the present. Yeah. That's why there's a kind of a darkness to his name and his reputation now. Against that, it would be remiss to deny that he is an astonishing figure of epical historical significance, and that he's a man of extraordinary courage, extraordinary charisma, and extraordinary ability. And the scale of what he achieved

is utterly momentous for good or ill. Even on his second voyage, he's worked out the quickest way to get across the Atlantic. He's cracked the wind scheme. He's cracked the fact that you can get across there if you have the wind in your sails. You don't need to worry about it. He's discovered the difference between true north and magnetic north. He's worked out the fact that the globe isn't a perfect sphere. He's negotiated the incredibly complicated seas of the Caribbean. He's begun to fathom that South America is a continent. I mean, any of these, any of those achievements would- And all of them together. Extraordinary. All of them together. Yeah, he is an astonishing figure.

While, you know, not doing them, he's not doing this behind a desk. He's doing it in the middle of a storm, leading men. Yeah, I agree with with you and actually i agree with the what you said before that i mean columbus it's one of those things that if he were in a courtroom i mean i don't ever think history should be conducted as a sort of courtroom trial i don't think um i never like the spectacle of historians sort of sitting in judgment and moral judgment and people in the past but imagine that columbus were in a courtroom and you played back, you know, you had hidden cameras and you played back scenes of his behavior on Hispaniola or on Cuba or on Jamaica. I mean, they would be scenes that would have most people averting their eyes in horror,

and probably that he wouldn't himself watch with, he'd be embarrassed to have them played back, the pillage, the enslaving, all of that kind of thing. So I definitely don't think there's any way in which you can say Columbus was a saintly man, a man of tremendous virtue. And as you say, the very fact that people at the time are shocked by some of the behavior is the real indictment. It doesn't matter what we think, but it matters what Las Casas and what other people at the time, the friars, some of the, you know, what Queen Isabella or some of these people thought that they thought he was behaving badly. I suppose what you would say is that this isn't just, I mean, Columbus is not a violent man before he sails across the Atlantic. So in other words, there's not some deeply buried homicidal impulse in Columbus.

He's behaving as he does. He's a desperate man. He's a desperate man. And he's also coming out of a context in which there are already thousands upon thousands of slaves in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, in which he has been at the court of the Spanish monarchs during a war, a war that they see as a holy war

against the Moors in Granada, it comes out of a very martial, aggressive culture in which the Genoese play a part of entrepreneurs and fixers for predatory competitive powers, in which the Ottoman Empire is one of the most notable. And I think if you miss that, if you just say, well, Columbus is a villain, end of story, he's greedy and he's violent. If you miss the context, then you miss what makes him tick. And I think all the time he's justifying this to himself, isn't he? I mean, he's always, when he's enslaving people, when he's sending them back, when he's behaving badly, he's agonizing about it and he's writing these letters and he's talking

to God about it and he really thinks he's doing the right thing. And he's always framing it in very overtly theologically, biblically infused terms. And I've said it before, I'll say it again. I think one of the recent intellectual trends in the study of history is that for lots of people who no longer count themselves as Christian, maybe not even familiar with the most basic elements of scripture. History has come to serve what scripture used to provide. It provides stories and narratives that enable people to understand what is good and evil. And the story of Columbus is a kind of paradigmatic example of that. And the paradox is that when people arraign Columbus as a satanic figure

whose evil has spilled into the present, they're kind of doing what Columbus did, which is to interpret the world and world events and the interplay of great men with geography in theological terms, in overtly moral terms. And whether that's a good or bad thing is perhaps a subject for another podcast. But the moralizing of Columbus is something that Columbus himself, that again, is something that Columbus brought to the new world. It's part of the Columbian exchange. It's true. It's an irony, isn't it, that so much of this debate is driven by the United States, by a country that Columbus didn't settle. And so, well, I was just going to maybe end this episode by saying a book recommendation, which isn't a work of history, but a novel, and not written by a European or by a novelist from the United States, but a Mexican, Carlos Fuentes.

Oh, yeah. Have you read Terra Nostra? No, I've read The Death of Artemio Cruz of artemia cruz and or the artemia cruz it would be rather and um the old gringo isn't he right the old gringo yeah he did but terra nostra is both his masterpiece and by far his most difficult book so he was inspired to write it by finnegan's wake oh my word but it but it's actually much more well it's infinitely more readable than than finnegan's wake but it's a very great counter well, it's infinitely more readable than Finnegan's Wake. But it's a very great counterfactual story in which Felipe Dos, Philip II, America still hasn't been discovered in his reign.

He's married to Isabel Tudor. So Elizabeth, Elizabeth I. So, you know, they've married. And the discovery of America is made in his reign. And all kinds of kind of weird stuff is going on. So you've got Don Quixote and all kinds of things. But it's a brilliant book that kind of transcends the terms of the debate that we've been talking about. Is it good or evil? Is he a hero or a villain? It's about the kind of overwhelming strangeness of the whole business and it brings it brilliantly alive and

it's really worth the effort of you know it is a quite a challenging novel but it's really i think worth reading and it kind of sits in the back of my mind as something that provides a kind of framing context for this whole story so the story of columbus the story of Cortez, the Aztecs are kind of key part of the narrative. And I highly recommend that. Oh, well, I like the sound of that. So I'm going to check that out because we will be returning

to this sort of territory in the autumn because we're planning a little series about the conquest of Mexico. So to some extent, that's what happens next. And again, that's a very dark

and bloody story, much contested by historians and probably much more complicated than we often imagine. So I suppose we haven't really answered the question, have we Columbus hero or villain? And I think one reason we haven't answered is because ultimately it's a pretty sterile question because there aren't really such things as heroes and villains in history, at least I don't think so. Well, it's a question for theologians. Yeah, I guess so i mean columbus

was a very profoundly human complicated difficult person i think it's fair to say some admirable qualities and some definitely less admirable ones and less admirable behavior a man who achieved remarkable things for good and for bad perfect a nicely evasive summation to end our own four voyages through the life and times of Christopher Columbus. So all that remains is to say farewell to my shipmate and we will see you

for our next voyage next week. Bye-bye. Adios. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com