As a kid in elementary school in the late eighties, I still remember how we were taught the standard Rip Van Winkle urban legend about Columbus being such a bold and daring shatterer of conventional medieval ignorance - pushed by the backwards, Inquisition-peddling Catholic Church - of the earth being a flat wafer with an edge somewhere out there on the water that you'd fall clear off of. In hindsight, I may have been the last generation in the public school system of this country in large urban areas to get such a positive - if still badly skewed - accounting of the great mariner who "found" America centuries after the Vikings already came here.
By the late nineties, Columbus Day was no longer celebrated by many Americans, but all the bad press that Old Christopher was by then getting about being a genocidal imperialist megalomaniac was only further obscuring what should have been an even bigger scandal all along: contrary to popular belief, Columbus went against scholarly wisdom based on the highly accurate scientific knowledge of his day, and not crude religious superstition, in venturing to sail westward and not eastward to reach the coveted riches of the Orient.
Indeed, as a more balanced and nuanced view of Christopher Columbus begins to emerge, both sides of the debate over his place in history have much food for thought: those who choose to dwell on the negative aspects of the Spanish colonial legacy are being compelled to temper their particular focus on him as some kind of unique and singular bearer of evil to the Western Hemisphere, whilst those who prefer to emphasize the positives have no choice but to acknowledge that, yes, the man apparently did have a screw or two loose.
The salient fact that should strike us in the 21st century is that America was finally permanently settled by Europeans - as opposed to merely passed by as another foraging station - on essentially the romantic whim of a Genovese adventurer whose sheer obsession with the idea of doing something out of the ordinary turned that whim into an actual enterprise. To reach that point in his own personal journey, Columbus had to be at least a wee bit loony, if you want to be realistic about it.
In the first place, he was pretty amazingly persistent. By the time Queen Isabella of Castille finally approved his first voyage of 1492, he had already dealt with a whole decade of rejection in all the royal courts of Europe of consequence that could finance his aspirations. You have to be rather thick-skinned - one might even say shameless - to still stick with such a horribly bad idea.
Now it'd be one thing if it was ignorance that was at the root of all that rejection; but the exact opposite was the case: the European monarchs at the time were Renaissance-enlightened sophisticates, not peasant bumpkins with no conception of ancient Greek mathematics and astronomy, which had long since established not merely the rough shape of the earth, but very well near its actual size as well. Surely, then, what in the blazes could Christopher have been thinking?
Apparently, he put all his faith in an outdated and inaccurate map which underestimated the circumference of the earth by at least several thousand miles - conveniently, one might add, the breadth of the Americas - and this is what ultimately led to his doom and disgrace at final failure to reach the Far East. But considering the weight of expert opinion against him, it's hard to imagine how he could have not wavered to the point of finally abandoning the westward expedition.
You might here interject that by 1492, he was such a desperate man - and Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain were so desperate to somehow dent the massive Portuguese lead on the high seas along all the eastward routes round Africa to find India - that the initial foray to the West Indies was literally a Hail Mary. But despite the undeniable element of truth to this, it hardly suffices to explain both his and the Spanish crown's eventual gamble: such ventures are in the end undertaken not out of pure desperation, but out of calculated risk.
Of course, the movies have done much to peddle the melodrama that Isabella was his lover - if not physically then at least emotionally - and that this was ultimately a kind of royal feminine self-indulgence. But this only shows how much of a deficit of logical explanation there is for the 1492 discovery there is whichever way you cut it for cerebral assessment.
What, then, are we left with? Columbus was crazy indeed - because he went against reason, not superstition, in persevering to secure his Occidental flirtation. When you look back at it over half a millennium later, you can only marvel at how God delights to use even the silliness of quixotic fantasy to fulfill His own inscrutable designs...because at least such puerile imaginings have a tendency of stretching the limits of human narrow-mindedness in a way that logic alone never could. Being all-knowing already, God needs idiots to help Him - not wise men.
All you can say, after all, is that America was indeed opened up for European colonization - and thus the religion of Christianity - in 1492 by an eccentric Italian dabbler in Mediterranean commerce, who turned a plan as outlandish in its literal end-of-the-world character as going through a fabled backdoor waterway to convince the Emperor of China to join a Crusade to liberate Jerusalem from the Muslims, into an epoch-changing event; and that this was the Divine Providence in action. Who else but a crucified Lord of Hosts could have even thunk it?
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