Columbus, Marco Rubio, and the Nations

I wouldn’t have taken a more than average interest in Christopher Columbus if ill-informed and sometimes ill-intentioned people hadn’t made it necessary. Fairfax County, Virginia, where I’ve lived for more than thirty-five years, abolished Columbus Day in 2020 as a paid holiday, but schools are closed today anyway – to celebrate “Indigenous Peoples’ Day.” The state legislature did the same for all of Virginia, as have other states, in effect replacing our Western Christian heritage with – frankly – they know not what. Now, Columbus, like all of us, was an imperfect human being. But unlike most of us, he was also a great human being, who carried out one of the most daring feats in history, which remains of central importance to the Americas, the Church, and the whole world. The more you know about him, the clearer that becomes.

It’s a symptom of our current moment that few people bother to learn – or teach – about him, beyond the blanket condemnations of Columbus as the origin of virtually everything bad that’s happened in the Americas since 1492. (Somehow, by the same illogic, he gets no credit for the good things that have happened on these shores.) And while there’s much to admire in some native groups, and to lament in the way they’ve been treated, there’s also much to deplore. Columbus was partly motivated by the desire to “preach the Gospel to all nations.’ He was right to do so.

You don’t have to turn to the Mayan, Aztec, and Incan cultures built on human sacrifice to understand that. Anyone who looks, for instance, at how the North American Martyrs (Catholics and others used to, and should again) were brutally tortured and killed – the way all prisoners, native and European, were treated by several Northeastern tribes....

In Chapter 16 of Candide, Candide and Cacambo are in South America and have been captured by the Oreillons who are preparing to eat them.

Candide has Cacambo (who providentially understands the local language) tell them "what dreadful inhumanity it is to cook men, and how un-Christian." Cacambo tells them that "natural law teaches us to kill our neighbor, and this is how everyone acts everywhere. If we don't exercise the right of eating him, that's because we have other things to make a good meal with; but you don't have the same resources as we do; certainly it is better to eat your enemy than to abandon the fruits of your victory to crows and ravens."

“The Lakota-Sioux arrived in the West after being on the losing end of a war with other tribes in Minnesota in the late 1700s. . . .They waged genocidal war on other tribes before they took over the Black Hills from the Cheyenne. . . .They did the exact same thing that the United States did to drive the Lakota out.”

Pretty much all of world history is about one tribe or nation displacing another tribe or nation. The only thing that's changed is that we now have idiots running around who think that they're being virtuous by making empty apologies for what their distant ancestors did to someone else's distant ancestors centuries ago.

My main beef with the Columbus story has nothing to do with how he allegedly mistreated the natives. I just wish that people would stop propagating the myth that everyone but Columbus thought the Earth was flat and he alone had the insight to know that he wouldn't fall off the edge of the Earth when trying to circumnavigate (as I and most other people were told in elementary school). Pretty much all educated people knew that the Earth wasn't flat from the time of the ancient Greeks on - Columbus was a different sort of outlier because as a navigator, he made his own (incorrect) estimate of the Earth's circumference that made it seem like circumnavigation would be a much shorter trip than it really was.

“The state legislature did the same for all of Virginia, as have other states, in effect replacing our Western Christian heritage with – frankly – they know not what.”

Because if you don’t understand your past, it can be re-written by those who want to impose a dictatorship.

Columbus, like most educated people, knew that the world was round. His error, and the reason most nations rejected his plan, was he underestimated the size of the earth. Eratosthenes figured it to be roughly 24,000 miles—this was in 240 BC. Columbus thought it was ~ 18,000 miles.

Using Marco Polo’s book, he figured that the ‘Indies’ would be roughly 2500 miles west of Spain. In 1492 Spain had just completed the Reconquista and was willing to back the voyage. Columbus found pretty much what he expected to find—natives with long black straight hair, little in the way of beards on the men, dark, but not black skin, speaking a language no one understood and all kinds of exotic flora and fauna, just as Polo described the Indies in his book.

Did Columbus ever realize that he wasn’t in the Indies he was aiming for? Don’t know, but his agreement with the Spanish crown depended on his ‘discovery’ being the real Indies. And that led to his downfall.

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