Setting the record straight

Restoring Columbus’ place among the greats

By Ben Chapman
From the October 2005 Print Edition

It’s the month of October, and you know what that means! Yes, leaves are falling, midterms are coming, and the rainy season is about to begin. But that’s OK, because we have great holidays to look forward to, like Halloween and everyone’s favorite, Indigenous People’s Day!

You’ve been waiting a long time for this holiday, and preparing for it is tough. First, you have to reserve Sproul Plaza for a “Viva La Raza!” rally in the afternoon. Second, you have to call up every high school and middle school in the Bay Area in order to populate your rally. Third, you have to make sure your friends take good notes in class, because after ditching lecture to scream up and down all day, you’ll need to study for your midterm But it’s all worth it, right?

Not so fast there, buddy. What if I said you didn’t have to go through all that trouble? What if I told you that it was OK to call the holiday Columbus Day? What if I even told you that Columbus Day is a good thing?

Popular historian Howard Zinn immortalized the notion that Columbus Day is racist in the first chapter of his seminal work, A People’s History of the United States, writing that “By the year 1515, there were perhaps fifty thousand Indians left. By 1550, there were five hundred.” Christopher Columbus and his men raped, pillaged, plundered, and acted like brutes. It is estimated that Columbus killed 50 to 60 million Native Americans.

But that’s not what we celebrate on Columbus Day. No one would argue that capturing slaves is a good thing. The point of Columbus Day is to mark the great discovery of an entire continent that we now call home. To say that celebrating Columbus Day is an act of racism would mean to say the discovery of America was a racist act. The logic doesn’t quite work. How can the discovery of a landmass be racist?

The discovery of America notwithstanding, how bad was Columbus? The key word in the above quote from Zinn is perhaps. New studies, according to Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen’s A Patriot’s History of the United States, show that Indian populations couldn’t have been as large as originally thought. Some claim that there were around 56 million Natives around the time of Columbus. Others claim that there were nearly 100 million. But these figures seem wildly inflated, and recent studies show that there were probably around 4 million Native Americans when Columbus first discovered America. That makes it hard for Columbus to have killed 50 million of them.

Another wild claim is that Columbus engaged in biological warfare, spreading diseases that wiped out the Native populations. However, new evidence suggests that there were rampant epidemics in America long before Columbus. Tuberculosis was already widespread among the Natives. And of course, Indians were more than happy to share syphilis with their European guests, along with polio and herpes.

It’s important to keep in mind that no one in 1492 knew what a microbe was, and anyone who would have suggested such a thing probably would have been burned at the stake. It’s hard to launch biological warfare if you don’t know how.

As for the Natives who died by the sword — or cannon — how innocent were they? Warfare was known to the Natives long before Columbus landed. Intertribal wars were rampant. Unbeknownst to many students of history, Natives were killing each other left and right as different tribes competed over land and resources, similar to the small-state diplomacy seen in medieval Europe. The only difference between intertribal feuds and the war with the Spaniards was the technological advancements in weaponry. Also, it should be noted that in Montezuma’s Aztec empire in central Mexico, about 4,000 innocent Native civilians were slaughtered by other Natives in a ritualistic human sacrifice in honor of Emperor Montezuma’s coronation.

I do not excuse the atrocities of the Europeans. I merely wish to view Columbus from a different angle, rather than the usual Columbus-committed-genocide-and-he-is-Adolf-Hitler point of view. Such a momentous historical figure deserves to be treated fairly. Any good historian must, of course, give credit where credit is due.

Columbus was brave. The sea route to Asia that he attempted to navigate had never been tried before, and although it is true that the earth’s spherical shape was known to many at the time, the size of the ocean was not, let alone the fact that a continent stood in the way. Columbus even faced the threat of mutiny from his own men, just days before land was sighted. Why did Columbus decide to go through with all that?

The cynical, and mostly true, reason is gold and riches. But also the desire to explore. Spain and Portugal were competing to find newer and better trade routes to Asia in order to provide fine and exotic products to Europeans. Is that racist?

So now that you know celebrating the discovery of a continent is a good thing, you can call off the rally now and go to class. In Berkeley. California. America. You know who to thank for that.

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