October 8, 2025 • 36 mins
A complicated man in complicated times? A genocidal enslaving maniac? Or something in between? Bob voyages back in time with biographer Matthew Restall (The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus) to learn about the REAL Christopher Columbus. Together, they separate the flesh-and-blood navigator from the larger-than-life symbol of European conquest, examining Columbus’s ambitions, his treatment of Indigenous peoples, and how his image has been used for centuries to celebrate—and condemn— colonization.
GUEST: Matthew Restall, author of The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
People said to me, why are the little memes on
TikTok about Columbus raping manatees? Did he do that? There's
also stuff from there about Columbus like raping length to
have sex with goats and lamas and sold and of
course it's like that comes the point where you it
becomes funny, right, and abstood and ridiculous. But I felt
(00:23):
like I needed to explain that.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
You've reached American History Hotline. You asked the questions, we
get the answers, leave a message. Hey, they are American
History Hotliners. Your host, Bob Crawford here, happy to be
joining you again for another episode of American History Hotline.
You're the ones with the questions. I'm a guy trying
(00:50):
to get you some answers and keep those questions coming.
The best way to get us a question is to
record a video or a voice memo on your phone
and email it to an Americanhistory Hotline at gmail dot com.
That's Americanistory Hotline at gmail dot com. And remember we
are American History Hotline. Okay, today's question is about Christopher Columbus,
(01:16):
just in time for Columbus Day. Here to help me
answer this question today is Matthew Restall, director of Latin
American Studies at Penn State. He's the author of many books,
including When Montezuma Met Cortes and his latest, The Nine
Lives of Christopher Columbus. Matthew, thank you for joining me today.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
Thank you for having me. Bob. I'm a fan of
the hotline, and it's an honor to be here.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
It's an honor to have you. Okay, Matthew, here's the
question we were hoping you could help us with. It's
from Lakshmi in Key West, Florida. I recently watched the
show Yellowstone and there's a scene where a character talks
about how ruthless Christopher Columbus was. I know, some people
(02:03):
call him a hero, others call him a genocidal colonizer.
What was Christopher Columbus really like? Now, Matthew, Before before
you answer, and I know you're ready.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
To, I'm like chumping at the bit here, yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Shouting at the I actually have a clip from that
episode of Yellowstone. This is from season two, episode two.
That character speaking is Monica.
Speaker 3 (02:30):
When Christopher Columbus first came in contact with Native Americans,
it was the Arawalk people and the Bahamas. I'll read
to you from Columbus's journal. They willingly traded us to
everything they owned. They do not bear arms and do
not know them. For I showed them a sword, they
took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance.
(02:53):
They will make fine slaves. With fifty men, we could
subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
That diary passage is pretty damning on its face. Does
that clip need more context or does it speak for itself?
Speaker 1 (03:10):
Well, I think it needs I think it needs more context.
And when I get asked that question, it's very tempting
to slip into kind of academic speak in which I
don't really answer the question either way.
Speaker 3 (03:25):
Right.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
The way the professors love to do is like, well,
but before we answer the question, let me talk for
two hours about the history of colonization. But the reason
I get tempted to do that with that question is
because it's a question that is based on an assumption,
and the assumption I think is wrong. And the assumption
it's based on is that because Columbus was first, and
(03:51):
we can get into talking about that whether he really
was first or not, on what that means. But just
for the sake of argument right now, because he was first,
He was the first European there. He got there first.
Therefore everything that happened afterwards is his credit or his fault,
regardless of what position we're taking. Right if we think
of European colonization in the Americas as a good thing,
(04:15):
depending on what our position is, sometimes people adopt a
Christian viewpoint and say that Christianity was brought to native
people's therefore it was all a good thing. So if
you want to take that position, then Columbus gets credit
as being a kind of a holy hero, and for
that reason there was a big campaign to turn him
into a saint, into Saint Christopher in the nineteenth and
(04:37):
twentieth century. On the other hand, if you take the
opposite positions, they look, there's a lot of appalling things
happened after fourteen ninety two. In the centuries that followed,
there was the Transatlantic slave trade, ten to fifteen million
enslaved Africans brought against their will across the ocean. The
(04:57):
indigenous American population declined over the course of the next
hundred years by you know, just not getting into the
argument of how much, but clearly somewhere between seventy and
ninety percent, okay, which is absolutely catastrophic. And so if Columbus,
if we blame him for everything because he was the first,
(05:19):
there's really no way out of kind of defending that position.
And then once we make that assumption, you go in
and it's not hard to find him saying things which
seems to support the idea that he kind of invented
all the all the atrocities that happened after that.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
So what it sounds like you're saying to me is
Columbus kind of is a symbol as much as anything else.
He's he's he has become the face of colonization and
the destruction of native populations and all that is bad
with the European world.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
Absolutely, he's completely become a symbol. I mean, the historic Columbus,
who he really was and what he was really like
is kind of a separate conversation. It's a separate topic.
I'd like to kind of like veer into that in
a sec But as a yes, as a symbol, he's
not just one symbol. He's a kind of a multifaceted symbol,
which is where the title not to like immediately stop
(06:16):
plugging my book in our conversation, but the.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
Real plug away be shameless man, Well, it's be shamed.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
Nine lives, I mean nine lives. Obviously, it's like it's
a phrase that immediately resonates in English anyway, and other languages,
cats have fewer lives, by the way, which is I
found very interesting. Yes, but so I don't know what
happens if they want to translate the book into other
languages where cats have seven, six or seven lives, that
might be kind of an issue. It might have to
drop a couple of chapters. But seriously, nine lives. It's
(06:46):
really in a way, it's sort of like the nine Symbols.
Christopher Columbus is nine symbols. I mean, that's a terrible
title for a book. But I'm just picking up on
what you said, Bob and and and the historic Columbus
the way I treat him in the Boo book, he's
at really only the first two lives, and the rest
of those seven are all they all come after he dies.
So if you want to know what he was really
(07:08):
like as a person, that's certainly in the book. Uh.
And I certainly tackle that because I think when people
pick up a book about Christopher Columbus. They want to
know what he was like as a human being, and
I you know what I fear is that no one's
going to be satisfied. So if you think he's a hero,
he comes across as a very flawed hero in my book.
(07:31):
If you think he's a demon, you're going to find
evidence in the book of Me that seems to be
me kind of defending him. And that's because I really
tried to be kind of open minded and kind of balanced.
I wanted to know what he was really like.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
Okay, so let's get to what what he was really
like in a second. Let's set this the scene, like,
let's let's talk about the time in which he lived
and and and what he what inspired him to come here,
and what he found when he got here.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
Right, So, part of the context that we need in
order to understand Columbus is the context of Europe in
the fifteenth century. Right, He's born in the slap bang
in the middle of the fifteenth century. What is happening
at that particular moment, and what happens during the kind
of the next forty years. It's not he's in his
(08:23):
forties when he first crosses the Atlantic Ocean. So he's
not young anymore at all. I mean, with life expectancy
in the fifteenth century, he's sort of on the cusp
of old age. So what happened during those forty years
since we start to look at that, we realize that
Columbus is just one of thousands of mariners, explorers, slave traders, merchants,
(08:48):
and so on. He is not unusual or atypical in
almost any way, not even the fact that he's from Genoa.
So most of most of the people that I'm talking
about are from Italian cities, dates, from Portugal, and from
southern Spain. Those your typical demographic. They're all male, right,
and they are literally thousands, and they are involved in
(09:11):
the sort of slow transformation of a huge trading network
that goes all the way through the Mediterranean and then
up around the coast of Europe up into kind of
northern Europe in order to link the Mediterranean worlds with
the rest of Europe by sea. And in the course
of the fifteenth century, those ships are sailing further and
further out and discovering islands in the Atlantic. One by one,
(09:34):
these islands are being discovered, and then they're being colonized.
They're being fought over by the Epe, by these European powers.
The Portuguese and the Castilians in Spain are literally fighting
over who can control these islands. The islands that are
close to Africa then become basis for after they've slaughtered
(09:55):
indigenous people and colonized, bringing enslaved Africans from Africa. So
they're kind of connecting the Atlantic African slave trade through
these islands. So the idea that there's Columbus with this
original idea in Spain, and then from Spain he just
suddenly like boom sales across the Atlantic. It makes a
(10:15):
great story, sure, you know, look, look, you know the
sort of the bad movies that have been done about it,
where they take all the context away. I get it.
From a storytelling or movie making point of view, it's
much better. You know, You've got this kind of lone
heroic figure who has this vision that no one else has.
(10:35):
But that's not true. He's he's not only one of
thousands of thousands, but he isn't even he doesn't even
really stand out as being particularly more visionary than the
rest of them. What he stands out at is being
a little bit more deluded. He's more capable of self delusion.
How so, well, you know, it's there's no knowledge of
(10:58):
how far it is to get to mainland, and there's
no reason for anybody to believe that a huge continental
mainland like the Americas exists. So the reasonable assumption is
that there's a series of islands. So just like they
find the Canary Islands, the Azores, Madeira and flow on,
(11:19):
that there's more islands like that. And in fact, it's
almost certain that before Columbus's lifetime and in his early years,
other mariners are making it all the way out well,
probably as Newfoundland. It could be actually hundreds of years
since fishermen sailing in the North Atlantic have seen Newfoundland.
(11:41):
And of course, as we now know that in a thousand,
one thousand ADS, so you know, five hundred years before Columbus,
Norsemen established a colony in Newfoundland. So there's that that
kind of information suggests as strongly that if you keep going,
(12:01):
you're going to find one island after another. However, the
actual size of the Earth is well known. Not only
is it known that the Earth is round, but the
size of the Earth is known, and therefore quite reasonably everybody,
from Portuguese and Spanish sailors to the advisors to the
(12:23):
Spanish monarchs say, look, you can't make it all the
way to Japan from Europe. It's just too far. You
can't our ship. The size of our ships means that
we can't go fast enough to get there in time
before we run out of food and so on. And
that's totally right. So what Columbus does is he starts
making the argument that actually the world is smaller than that.
(12:45):
So the world is smaller and that that distance. Imagine
if you would, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean has one
big ocean, with the America Sea as well. He just
shrinks that. He keeps coming up with these arguments to
make it smaller and smaller. That is, that shows an
incredible capacity for self delusion, which, of course there's always
(13:06):
somebody out there goes, yeah, the guy was brilliant, so
it was self delusional.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
But so but was he like a flat earther? Was
he like, I mean, like for his time? Would that
be the equivalent of a conspiracy theorist?
Speaker 1 (13:19):
Oh, I should have known you're going to lead us
down into that, into that rabbit hole. No, I don't think.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
I think he wasn't that deluded.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
No, I think this. I think conspiracy theory thinking is
definitely relevant to the Columbus story, but later, not during
his not so much during his lifetime. Now where conspiracy
theory stuff comes in in his lifetime because when he
comes back from the first voyage, only two of the
ships come back. One of the ships has has been trashed.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
The Nina, the Pinta, the Santa Maria.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
Yeah, and one of the ships get is trashed. It
runs aground, and so they pull it to pieces and
they leave the crew in the Caribbean with the pieces
to build kind of huts. And when they come back
on the second voyage, those people are all dead. They've
all been killed. They attacked the local indigenous people and
they started a war and they all got killed. Anyway,
that's another story. So when he comes back and says, oh, yeah,
(14:15):
we found like a whole bunch of islands, and in
fact these islands are off the coast of Asia. So
I was I was correct all along, then the conspiracy
theory stuff starts to circulate, saying, hm, there's no way
he could have known that, because he says, oh, I
knew it was that I knew it was there. I
had a vision from God. God told me. And they're like, yeah, right,
(14:37):
this guy is kind of a little crack pot. He's
a little weird. He was a weird guy, right, And
so they start saying, no, he knew about it, And
there's a conspiracy theory that circulates that becomes owners the
theory of the Unknown Pilot, and the theory, like all
good conspiracy theories, it starts with somebody saying, oh, he
probably there's probably some pilot who found those some pilot
(15:01):
meaning and navigator, right, who found those islands and came
back and told someone in a tavern and died. And
so then it becomes Columbus holding this old mariner who
tells him the story as he dies in Columbus's arms,
and then Columbus like hiding that story and not telling anybody,
(15:22):
and the whole thing kind of there's snowballs, and of
course the unknown Pilot is a Spaniard. There's immediately competition
between Columbus and his little group of loyalists and his
brothers and the Spaniards who are on the voyage over
who really was the who really was the discoverer.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
We're about to take a quick break. But before I do,
I want to let you know all about my new
book that's coming out soon. It's called America's Founding Son,
John Quincy Adams from President to political maverick. Pre order
your book today. It's available wherever you buy your books. Okay.
(16:07):
So Columbus he crosses the Atlantic, he comes to these islands,
and who does he meet there?
Speaker 1 (16:17):
And there he encounters indigenous pupils, Indigenous peopils in the islands,
about whom we now know, you know, a fair amount,
but not as much as we would like because of
how they get treated. So the question about Columbus and
his attitude towards indigenous peoples, particularly the quote from the
(16:40):
log right in which he's saying they're very meek, they
could easily be enslaved, and so on. Yes, So did
he actually write and say those things more or less? Yes.
It's important to note, as a kind of a sidebar,
that we actually don't have the original manuscripts of any
(17:01):
of his ship logs. We have them as they were
saved by a famous Dominican friar called Bartolome de las Casas,
and las Casas had his own agenda. Las Casas's agenda
was that Columbus was an agent of God, and Columbus
himself came to believe this, and he Las Casas was
(17:22):
convinced that Columbus's role as part of God's plan was
for Christians to discover the Americas so that Christians could
bring Christianity to indigenous peoples.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
So and by doing that, bring about the return of Christ. Yes, right, exactly,
all these peoples, we were all the same, we all
spoke the same Tower of Babel, were divided. We bring
them back together. Christ returns.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
Yes, because has why as of fourteen ninety two had
Christ not come back yet? Because not all people on
the planet have been given the opportunity to convert to Christianity.
So once you've found that as a whole continent of people,
and Christians just need to get there and give them
that opportunity, and then the Second Coming will occur. And
(18:16):
so Columbus does not have this idea in his head
in fourteen ninety two, but by the time of his
third set, certainly his fourth voyage, he definitely convinces himself
not only that he is that agent of God, but
even that his life and his discovery of the Americas
is prophesied in the Old Testament. He really kind of
(18:37):
gets that kind of deluded about his role, and he thinks, oh,
and the whole point is not just about converting indigenous
peoples and the Second Coming, but it's grander than that.
Speaker 3 (18:47):
Is.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
Now the goal that we're going to find in the
Americas will use to fund the recapture of Jerusalem. Now
we can destroy you know, Judaism and Islam and the
whole thing. Right, That's that's sort of the crusade. Although
there's also another at talking of conspiracy theory, another conspiracy
theory angle on this of people who think that Columbus
(19:10):
was actually Jewish. Well, we can come. We can circle
back round to that one in a minute. So, I mean,
you know, I'm not sure really fully yet answered the
question about Columbus's attitude towards indigenous people's and slavery. So, yes,
he says that, and I think it's important to recognize
that he does believe that enslaving indigenous peoples is just fine,
(19:33):
and not only that, but let's round them up and
ship them back to Spain to be slaves there. And
I should note that tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of
indigenous people in the century beginning with fourteen ninety two
going forward end up being enslaved, and certainly in the
(19:55):
hundreds of thousands half a million become enslave, but a
good percentage of those is not clear yet. How many
end up back in Spain as enslaved people is living
out their lives and they get enslaves as children, and
they live and have their own children's on or remain
slaves in Spain and work their way into the slave
system in Europe. So he's talking about a system that
(20:17):
is already in place and that he's going to really
kind of take off. So does he believe that? Does
he say that? Yes? Does he invent that system? Absolutely not.
Is it surprising that he says that? Absolutely not. In fact,
if he says, if you've got Columbus writing out and saying, no,
these people should not be enslaved, that's not right. Enslaving
(20:40):
them is morally wrong and we should not do that,
that would have been strange. That would have been kind
of astonishing.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
So Matt who holds the purse strings.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
Yeah, the perse strings. Okay, So there's some great it
kind of myths and legends about this, right about the
relationship between Columbus and Queen Isabelle of Castile, that she
pawns her jewels to pay for his voyage is completely
not true that there's some kind of romance between them.
There's like zero evidence of that. In fact, the more
(21:13):
I got to know Columbus, the where I realized this
guy has not done as a romance with anybody. He's
he has two sons, one and one each by a
different woman, And I'm not sure there was a romance
involved in any of that at all. This is not
something that he cares about. What absolutely not. Where does
the money come from? You know, some of it is
from is guaranteed by the crown, but mostly it's private investment,
(21:38):
and it's investment from Spanish merchants and sailors and so on.
So the the pin Thon brothers pi n z O
n or z O n the pen Thon brothers of
pen Son brothers from Palos, they play really really important
role in not only in the first voyage, but in
(22:00):
in subsequent voyages as well, providing ships, personnel and so on.
And they have they have what Columbus doesn't have. Columbus
doesn't have anything. He doesn't have he doesn't have ships,
he doesn't have sailors who are loyal to him, he
doesn't have family connections. So that I would say that,
you know, it's about investment and return on investment. Now,
(22:20):
once he comes back and shows evidence of wealth, then
further investment comes. But you know, but this is a
little bit like the struggling band who get their first
record deal and then they first record comes out and
it goes to number one, and everyone thinks they must
be rolling in money, and they certainly seem to be
(22:42):
piling in and out of limos in new clothes, and
there seems to be a lot of partying going on,
expensive level partying. And then people really confused and don't
undertam why it is that this band has no money
at all, that they are completely broke. You, Bob, understand
how it work.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
I do, yeah, that the money was never yours to
uh to spit. The money is basically, the record label
is the bank. They're a bank.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
That's right now. Sometimes when you become very successful over
a prolonged period of time and you enter into prolonged
and negotiations probably lawsuits with your original manager and your
label and so on, you might actually get some money
and then that cause that confuses people even more because
they're like, but Paul McCartney's worth a hundred billion dollars
or whatever.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
The key is these days to sell tickets. If you
can sell tickets and you're a band, but you're not
making you're not making money on the music.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
Okay, So let's take it back.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
Okay, right, I would.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
I'd love to talk about that, but let's take it
back to Columbus. Why did I bring that up as
an analogy? Obviously most ways the analogy is absurd, but
but it's fun and it might help us to understand.
Right at the beginning, Columbus doesn't have money. He's not
He doesn't come back from these early voyages rich, right,
So where does the money come from. It comes from
(24:00):
colonial enterprises, comes from colonial endeavors, and what those colonial
endeavors are based on is credit. It's all about advanced
credit and any discovery any wealth that is brought back
gold that is pulled out of placer mines in the Caribbean,
and then later when the Spaniards get onto the mainland
(24:21):
in diskis discover other sources of wealth, particularly gold and silver.
That is all goes to pay off creditors and get
more credit. It's kind of a massive Ponzi scheme. I mean,
the whole Spanish Empire and in some ways all the
European empires in the Americas are kind of Ponzi schemes
that are based on the assumption that there's even more
wealth coming around the corner. Right. It's like you'll hit
(24:42):
records like it doesn't matter, because the next one will
be bigger and bigger, and then there'll be more more
money coming. Now, that's not to say that Columbus dies impoverished.
That's part of the legend of Columbus. Oh, he's he's
not appreciated. The Spanish crown doesn't appreciate all that they
he does for them, and he died. He doesn't die
poor at all. His contract guarantees certain kinds of incomes
(25:06):
and revenue, but that contract is constantly being renegotiated by him,
and he is essentially doing during his that final kind
of fourteen years of his life from when he gets
the original contract when he dies. He's doing a little
bit the same thing that bands do when they kind
of then start arguing and doing their managers and so on,
(25:27):
and that then continues for hundreds of years. So immediately
upon his death, his son who inherits the title, which
is an important title, which is Admiral of the Ocean
Stea and of the Indies that title, and it comes
with a certain income which is equivalent to several million
dollars actually at one point maybe as much as five
(25:49):
or six million dollars a year as just straight income, right,
with a potential for much much, much more than that
if you can claim all the other titles. His son
immediately sues the Spanish crown, and so there are now
lawsuits that go on on and off for hundreds of
years between columbus descendants and the Spanish Crown, and then
(26:09):
between Columbus's descendants between his heirs over that money. So, yes,
there's money, but where does the money come from. It
comes from enterprises of colonial exploitation in the Americans. It
doesn't actually come directly from you know what Columbus himself
does now to kind of wrap this up, what is
the most lucrative enterprise that Spaniards are engaging in in
(26:33):
the Caribbean in Columbus's lifetime? And let's even take it
a little beyond that, say, his son's lifetime.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
I'm guessing it's not T shirt sales.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
It's not merchandise. Okay, if they'd had that idea, we
could be horrified by that in the twenty first century. No,
it's well, now I'm laughing, and I'd feel like I
can't laugh because I'm going to tell you what the
truth is. It's slavery. Yeah, So when you realize that, like, wait, wait,
(27:03):
what do you mean slave people? Like, well, that's that's
how that's how the whole thing keeps going through enslaving people.
You're literally going island to island or on the coasts
and going into villages and you're rounding people up, and
the people who are worth the most are the people
who are the easiest to capture. So it's children and women.
(27:24):
There was, so it's more than men, and the men
are the ones who are most likely to try and
defend their families, and they can be and then they're
killed or sometimes they managed to enslave them as well,
so you you know you're not purchasing them. I mean,
most of the enslaved Africans who are acquired during the
Transatlantic slave trade from Africa are purchased through trade because
(27:47):
African kingdoms still have power. European colonial powers don't have
the ability to destroy those African kingdoms and create colonies,
large colonies in Africa. That doesn't happen until the nineteenth century.
But indigenous people's living in small city states or stateless
(28:08):
communities on islands and on the coasts simply don't have
the ability to resist when a ship pulls up with
cannons and armed guys who are simply there, you know,
to raid and seize people, and then they sell them
in the burgeoning slave markets on the islands and then
back in Spain. That that brings the greatest amount of money,
(28:30):
It's the greatest source of income and also encourages further credit. So, look,
Columbus is part of this system. Does that, you know,
make him some kind of hero. It's hard to see that,
but absolutely not. But he also doesn't in no way
does he create this system, and he would be absolutely
(28:51):
powerless to stop it. So I mean, do we all
kind of go back and see what kind of guy
is is Columbus? You know, what would it be like
to have him on American History hotline, right, to have
him in a room talking to him? He would talk
even more than I do. You would not be able
to shut the guy up. He had a reputation for
being incredibly garrulous. He talks and talked and talked, and
(29:15):
now it sounds like I'm about to insult myself now,
which is totally fine. He talks and talks. He was
incredibly egomaniac. I think he was just astonishingly self centered.
So I really investigated Columbus with an open mind. I mean,
the purpose of the book is not primarily it's not
(29:35):
a biography. I mean, it is a biography, but it isn't.
My concern was to answer not only questions that people
might have about the historic Columbus, but also, let's just
leap all the way to kind of the extreme end.
When people said to me, why are their little memes
on TikTok about Columbus raping manatees? Did he do that?
(29:57):
There's also stuff from there about Columbus like raping, wanting
to have sex with goats and lamas and so on,
And of course it's like that comes a point where
you it becomes funny, right, and absturd and ridiculous. But
I felt like I needed to explain that. You know,
then there's an explanation with the explanation has to be
(30:20):
kind of tapped into a larger explanation, which is which
is the purpose of the book here. So I approached
Columbus with an open mind. I had previously done the
same in investigating Montezuma and Cortez on a different book,
which we'll talk about on another occasion. Bob and I,
(30:43):
my opinion of Cortez changed fairly dramatically. I thought he
was probably a somewhat unpleasant character, and by the time
I got to the end of researching that, but this
guy is just an absolute monster. I mean, he's just horrific.
I did not come to the conclusion that Columbus was
a monster, not in the same way I did. He's
clearly very intelligent, kind of impressive in many ways. He
(31:06):
had no education, despite the kind of legends about that.
So it comes from very modest background. Self taught. He
teaches himself to read, he teaches himself to speak and
read multiple languages. He never writes Spanish particular, he never
really becomes fluent in writing it. He tries to writing
(31:26):
Latin and it's pretty bad and so on. But the
fact is it's all self taught. And he's also teaching
himself navigation that he must have learned from Pilots when
he went to see when he was in his early twenties.
But he's kind of an impressive guy in this sense,
but he becomes so single mindedly self absorbed. It's all
(31:49):
it's all ultimately about him, and then what he can
do to ensure his legacy in founding a noble dynasty
in Spain. Now we don't when he gets this idea,
but it seems one would imagine that when he's in
he leaves general when he's in his twenties, and then
(32:10):
in his twenties he spends most of his twenties in Lisbon.
Were based in Portugal, and the evidence seems to suggest
that that's when he got this idea that if you
sail out into the ocean, into what they call the Ocean,
see what we call the Atlantic, there are islands out there,
and you can find these islands, and you can essentially
make yourself kind of lord of these islands. It's kind
(32:30):
of this chivalric dream, and then you can elevate yourself
to the nobility and you go back to the king
of Portugal saying you could be the King of the islands.
But I'm going to be the lord, I'm the viceroy,
I'm the ruler of it, and I'll have all these
titles and then they will be passed down to my
son and his son and so on. As a way
(32:52):
of kind of erasing what he thought was embarrassing. Is
his background. You know, his father was like a wool weaver,
ran a tavern for a while, father was a cheesemaker.
You know, this is like modest people, modest working class
people in Genua in the fifteenth century. And he was
embarrassed by that background and he didn't want to pass
(33:12):
that on to his son's. So there's a kind of
a social mobility ambition that is absolutely all consuming and
becomes more and more so during his lifetime. And the
last thing I'll say is, well, does he achieve it? Yes,
he does. So if you want to be impressed by that,
that's fine. Be impressed. He's a kind of a you know,
(33:34):
self made man, and he you know, he passes that
title on. There is today in Spain a Don Cristoval Cologne,
a Christopher Columbus, who is the twentieth in line, who
holds the title Admiral of the Ocean sea, and he's
you know, an aristocrat, a businessman, a sailor, he's had
(33:56):
a he was in the Spanish navy, right, he's exactly
if Columbus could somehow have seen, you know, five centuries
forward and seen his descendant, I think, well, no, he
was a guy who was never satisfied. I think you
and I, Bob will be satisfied with that. He would say, well,
that's great, but why is he not Viceroy of Mexico? Right?
Speaker 2 (34:19):
A complicated man in complicated times. Columbus was was a
man of his times, is what this sounds like. You're
telling me.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
See, maybe we should have written this book together. It
would have been shorter, because you're right. No, you're absolutely right.
He was a man of his time and that and
it was a grim time.
Speaker 2 (34:41):
It was a grim time he was.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
Yeah. I think we sort of spent half an hour
answering that first question, but I mean that's a good
way of putting it right. Yes, he was. He was
a man of his time. But it was a time
in which it was okay to invade someone else's country
and kill them and enslave them. It wasn't okay, but
everybody people complained, but and then people complain in Spain,
(35:04):
but generally it was okay.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
I've been talking with Matthew Restahl, director of Latin American
Studies at Penn State. He's the author of many books,
including When Montezuma Met Cortez and his latest, The Nine
Lives of Christopher Columbus. You can find out more about
his book in our show notes. Matthew, thank you for
joining us today on American History Hotline.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
You've been listening to American History Hotline, a production of
iHeart Podcasts and Scratch Track Productions. The show is executive
producer is James Morrison. Our executive producers from iHeart are
Jordan Runtall and Jason English. Original music composed by me
Bob Crawford. Please keep in touch. Our email is americani
(35:56):
History Hotline at gmail dot com. If you like the show,
please tell your friends and leave us a review in
Apple Podcasts. I'm your host, Bob Crawford. Feel free to
hit me up on social media to ask a history
question or to let me know what you think of
the show. You can find me at Bob Crawford Base.
(36:17):
Thanks so much for listening, See you next week.
People said to me, why are the little memes on
TikTok about Columbus raping manatees? Did he do that? There's
also stuff from there about Columbus like raping length to
have sex with goats and lamas and sold and of
course it's like that comes the point where you it
becomes funny, right, and abstood and ridiculous. But I felt
(00:23):
like I needed to explain that.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
You've reached American History Hotline. You asked the questions, we
get the answers, leave a message. Hey, they are American
History Hotliners. Your host, Bob Crawford here, happy to be
joining you again for another episode of American History Hotline.
You're the ones with the questions. I'm a guy trying
(00:50):
to get you some answers and keep those questions coming.
The best way to get us a question is to
record a video or a voice memo on your phone
and email it to an Americanhistory Hotline at gmail dot com.
That's Americanistory Hotline at gmail dot com. And remember we
are American History Hotline. Okay, today's question is about Christopher Columbus,
(01:16):
just in time for Columbus Day. Here to help me
answer this question today is Matthew Restall, director of Latin
American Studies at Penn State. He's the author of many books,
including When Montezuma Met Cortes and his latest, The Nine
Lives of Christopher Columbus. Matthew, thank you for joining me today.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
Thank you for having me. Bob. I'm a fan of
the hotline, and it's an honor to be here.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
It's an honor to have you. Okay, Matthew, here's the
question we were hoping you could help us with. It's
from Lakshmi in Key West, Florida. I recently watched the
show Yellowstone and there's a scene where a character talks
about how ruthless Christopher Columbus was. I know, some people
(02:03):
call him a hero, others call him a genocidal colonizer.
What was Christopher Columbus really like? Now, Matthew, Before before
you answer, and I know you're ready.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
To, I'm like chumping at the bit here, yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Shouting at the I actually have a clip from that
episode of Yellowstone. This is from season two, episode two.
That character speaking is Monica.
Speaker 3 (02:30):
When Christopher Columbus first came in contact with Native Americans,
it was the Arawalk people and the Bahamas. I'll read
to you from Columbus's journal. They willingly traded us to
everything they owned. They do not bear arms and do
not know them. For I showed them a sword, they
took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance.
(02:53):
They will make fine slaves. With fifty men, we could
subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
That diary passage is pretty damning on its face. Does
that clip need more context or does it speak for itself?
Speaker 1 (03:10):
Well, I think it needs I think it needs more context.
And when I get asked that question, it's very tempting
to slip into kind of academic speak in which I
don't really answer the question either way.
Speaker 3 (03:25):
Right.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
The way the professors love to do is like, well,
but before we answer the question, let me talk for
two hours about the history of colonization. But the reason
I get tempted to do that with that question is
because it's a question that is based on an assumption,
and the assumption I think is wrong. And the assumption
it's based on is that because Columbus was first, and
(03:51):
we can get into talking about that whether he really
was first or not, on what that means. But just
for the sake of argument right now, because he was first,
He was the first European there. He got there first.
Therefore everything that happened afterwards is his credit or his fault,
regardless of what position we're taking. Right if we think
of European colonization in the Americas as a good thing,
(04:15):
depending on what our position is, sometimes people adopt a
Christian viewpoint and say that Christianity was brought to native
people's therefore it was all a good thing. So if
you want to take that position, then Columbus gets credit
as being a kind of a holy hero, and for
that reason there was a big campaign to turn him
into a saint, into Saint Christopher in the nineteenth and
(04:37):
twentieth century. On the other hand, if you take the
opposite positions, they look, there's a lot of appalling things
happened after fourteen ninety two. In the centuries that followed,
there was the Transatlantic slave trade, ten to fifteen million
enslaved Africans brought against their will across the ocean. The
(04:57):
indigenous American population declined over the course of the next
hundred years by you know, just not getting into the
argument of how much, but clearly somewhere between seventy and
ninety percent, okay, which is absolutely catastrophic. And so if Columbus,
if we blame him for everything because he was the first,
(05:19):
there's really no way out of kind of defending that position.
And then once we make that assumption, you go in
and it's not hard to find him saying things which
seems to support the idea that he kind of invented
all the all the atrocities that happened after that.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
So what it sounds like you're saying to me is
Columbus kind of is a symbol as much as anything else.
He's he's he has become the face of colonization and
the destruction of native populations and all that is bad
with the European world.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
Absolutely, he's completely become a symbol. I mean, the historic Columbus,
who he really was and what he was really like
is kind of a separate conversation. It's a separate topic.
I'd like to kind of like veer into that in
a sec But as a yes, as a symbol, he's
not just one symbol. He's a kind of a multifaceted symbol,
which is where the title not to like immediately stop
(06:16):
plugging my book in our conversation, but the.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
Real plug away be shameless man, Well, it's be shamed.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
Nine lives, I mean nine lives. Obviously, it's like it's
a phrase that immediately resonates in English anyway, and other languages,
cats have fewer lives, by the way, which is I
found very interesting. Yes, but so I don't know what
happens if they want to translate the book into other
languages where cats have seven, six or seven lives, that
might be kind of an issue. It might have to
drop a couple of chapters. But seriously, nine lives. It's
(06:46):
really in a way, it's sort of like the nine Symbols.
Christopher Columbus is nine symbols. I mean, that's a terrible
title for a book. But I'm just picking up on
what you said, Bob and and and the historic Columbus
the way I treat him in the Boo book, he's
at really only the first two lives, and the rest
of those seven are all they all come after he dies.
So if you want to know what he was really
(07:08):
like as a person, that's certainly in the book. Uh.
And I certainly tackle that because I think when people
pick up a book about Christopher Columbus. They want to
know what he was like as a human being, and
I you know what I fear is that no one's
going to be satisfied. So if you think he's a hero,
he comes across as a very flawed hero in my book.
(07:31):
If you think he's a demon, you're going to find
evidence in the book of Me that seems to be
me kind of defending him. And that's because I really
tried to be kind of open minded and kind of balanced.
I wanted to know what he was really like.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
Okay, so let's get to what what he was really
like in a second. Let's set this the scene, like,
let's let's talk about the time in which he lived
and and and what he what inspired him to come here,
and what he found when he got here.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
Right, So, part of the context that we need in
order to understand Columbus is the context of Europe in
the fifteenth century. Right, He's born in the slap bang
in the middle of the fifteenth century. What is happening
at that particular moment, and what happens during the kind
of the next forty years. It's not he's in his
(08:23):
forties when he first crosses the Atlantic Ocean. So he's
not young anymore at all. I mean, with life expectancy
in the fifteenth century, he's sort of on the cusp
of old age. So what happened during those forty years
since we start to look at that, we realize that
Columbus is just one of thousands of mariners, explorers, slave traders, merchants,
(08:48):
and so on. He is not unusual or atypical in
almost any way, not even the fact that he's from Genoa.
So most of most of the people that I'm talking
about are from Italian cities, dates, from Portugal, and from
southern Spain. Those your typical demographic. They're all male, right,
and they are literally thousands, and they are involved in
(09:11):
the sort of slow transformation of a huge trading network
that goes all the way through the Mediterranean and then
up around the coast of Europe up into kind of
northern Europe in order to link the Mediterranean worlds with
the rest of Europe by sea. And in the course
of the fifteenth century, those ships are sailing further and
further out and discovering islands in the Atlantic. One by one,
(09:34):
these islands are being discovered, and then they're being colonized.
They're being fought over by the Epe, by these European powers.
The Portuguese and the Castilians in Spain are literally fighting
over who can control these islands. The islands that are
close to Africa then become basis for after they've slaughtered
(09:55):
indigenous people and colonized, bringing enslaved Africans from Africa. So
they're kind of connecting the Atlantic African slave trade through
these islands. So the idea that there's Columbus with this
original idea in Spain, and then from Spain he just
suddenly like boom sales across the Atlantic. It makes a
(10:15):
great story, sure, you know, look, look, you know the
sort of the bad movies that have been done about it,
where they take all the context away. I get it.
From a storytelling or movie making point of view, it's
much better. You know, You've got this kind of lone
heroic figure who has this vision that no one else has.
(10:35):
But that's not true. He's he's not only one of
thousands of thousands, but he isn't even he doesn't even
really stand out as being particularly more visionary than the
rest of them. What he stands out at is being
a little bit more deluded. He's more capable of self delusion.
How so, well, you know, it's there's no knowledge of
(10:58):
how far it is to get to mainland, and there's
no reason for anybody to believe that a huge continental
mainland like the Americas exists. So the reasonable assumption is
that there's a series of islands. So just like they
find the Canary Islands, the Azores, Madeira and flow on,
(11:19):
that there's more islands like that. And in fact, it's
almost certain that before Columbus's lifetime and in his early years,
other mariners are making it all the way out well,
probably as Newfoundland. It could be actually hundreds of years
since fishermen sailing in the North Atlantic have seen Newfoundland.
(11:41):
And of course, as we now know that in a thousand,
one thousand ADS, so you know, five hundred years before Columbus,
Norsemen established a colony in Newfoundland. So there's that that
kind of information suggests as strongly that if you keep going,
(12:01):
you're going to find one island after another. However, the
actual size of the Earth is well known. Not only
is it known that the Earth is round, but the
size of the Earth is known, and therefore quite reasonably everybody,
from Portuguese and Spanish sailors to the advisors to the
(12:23):
Spanish monarchs say, look, you can't make it all the
way to Japan from Europe. It's just too far. You
can't our ship. The size of our ships means that
we can't go fast enough to get there in time
before we run out of food and so on. And
that's totally right. So what Columbus does is he starts
making the argument that actually the world is smaller than that.
(12:45):
So the world is smaller and that that distance. Imagine
if you would, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean has one
big ocean, with the America Sea as well. He just
shrinks that. He keeps coming up with these arguments to
make it smaller and smaller. That is, that shows an
incredible capacity for self delusion, which, of course there's always
(13:06):
somebody out there goes, yeah, the guy was brilliant, so
it was self delusional.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
But so but was he like a flat earther? Was
he like, I mean, like for his time? Would that
be the equivalent of a conspiracy theorist?
Speaker 1 (13:19):
Oh, I should have known you're going to lead us
down into that, into that rabbit hole. No, I don't think.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
I think he wasn't that deluded.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
No, I think this. I think conspiracy theory thinking is
definitely relevant to the Columbus story, but later, not during
his not so much during his lifetime. Now where conspiracy
theory stuff comes in in his lifetime because when he
comes back from the first voyage, only two of the
ships come back. One of the ships has has been trashed.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
The Nina, the Pinta, the Santa Maria.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
Yeah, and one of the ships get is trashed. It
runs aground, and so they pull it to pieces and
they leave the crew in the Caribbean with the pieces
to build kind of huts. And when they come back
on the second voyage, those people are all dead. They've
all been killed. They attacked the local indigenous people and
they started a war and they all got killed. Anyway,
that's another story. So when he comes back and says, oh, yeah,
(14:15):
we found like a whole bunch of islands, and in
fact these islands are off the coast of Asia. So
I was I was correct all along, then the conspiracy
theory stuff starts to circulate, saying, hm, there's no way
he could have known that, because he says, oh, I
knew it was that I knew it was there. I
had a vision from God. God told me. And they're like, yeah, right,
(14:37):
this guy is kind of a little crack pot. He's
a little weird. He was a weird guy, right, And
so they start saying, no, he knew about it, And
there's a conspiracy theory that circulates that becomes owners the
theory of the Unknown Pilot, and the theory, like all
good conspiracy theories, it starts with somebody saying, oh, he
probably there's probably some pilot who found those some pilot
(15:01):
meaning and navigator, right, who found those islands and came
back and told someone in a tavern and died. And
so then it becomes Columbus holding this old mariner who
tells him the story as he dies in Columbus's arms,
and then Columbus like hiding that story and not telling anybody,
(15:22):
and the whole thing kind of there's snowballs, and of
course the unknown Pilot is a Spaniard. There's immediately competition
between Columbus and his little group of loyalists and his
brothers and the Spaniards who are on the voyage over
who really was the who really was the discoverer.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
We're about to take a quick break. But before I do,
I want to let you know all about my new
book that's coming out soon. It's called America's Founding Son,
John Quincy Adams from President to political maverick. Pre order
your book today. It's available wherever you buy your books. Okay.
(16:07):
So Columbus he crosses the Atlantic, he comes to these islands,
and who does he meet there?
Speaker 1 (16:17):
And there he encounters indigenous pupils, Indigenous peopils in the islands,
about whom we now know, you know, a fair amount,
but not as much as we would like because of
how they get treated. So the question about Columbus and
his attitude towards indigenous peoples, particularly the quote from the
(16:40):
log right in which he's saying they're very meek, they
could easily be enslaved, and so on. Yes, So did
he actually write and say those things more or less? Yes.
It's important to note, as a kind of a sidebar,
that we actually don't have the original manuscripts of any
(17:01):
of his ship logs. We have them as they were
saved by a famous Dominican friar called Bartolome de las Casas,
and las Casas had his own agenda. Las Casas's agenda
was that Columbus was an agent of God, and Columbus
himself came to believe this, and he Las Casas was
(17:22):
convinced that Columbus's role as part of God's plan was
for Christians to discover the Americas so that Christians could
bring Christianity to indigenous peoples.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
So and by doing that, bring about the return of Christ. Yes, right, exactly,
all these peoples, we were all the same, we all
spoke the same Tower of Babel, were divided. We bring
them back together. Christ returns.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
Yes, because has why as of fourteen ninety two had
Christ not come back yet? Because not all people on
the planet have been given the opportunity to convert to Christianity.
So once you've found that as a whole continent of people,
and Christians just need to get there and give them
that opportunity, and then the Second Coming will occur. And
(18:16):
so Columbus does not have this idea in his head
in fourteen ninety two, but by the time of his
third set, certainly his fourth voyage, he definitely convinces himself
not only that he is that agent of God, but
even that his life and his discovery of the Americas
is prophesied in the Old Testament. He really kind of
(18:37):
gets that kind of deluded about his role, and he thinks, oh,
and the whole point is not just about converting indigenous
peoples and the Second Coming, but it's grander than that.
Speaker 3 (18:47):
Is.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
Now the goal that we're going to find in the
Americas will use to fund the recapture of Jerusalem. Now
we can destroy you know, Judaism and Islam and the
whole thing. Right, That's that's sort of the crusade. Although
there's also another at talking of conspiracy theory, another conspiracy
theory angle on this of people who think that Columbus
(19:10):
was actually Jewish. Well, we can come. We can circle
back round to that one in a minute. So, I mean,
you know, I'm not sure really fully yet answered the
question about Columbus's attitude towards indigenous people's and slavery. So, yes,
he says that, and I think it's important to recognize
that he does believe that enslaving indigenous peoples is just fine,
(19:33):
and not only that, but let's round them up and
ship them back to Spain to be slaves there. And
I should note that tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of
indigenous people in the century beginning with fourteen ninety two
going forward end up being enslaved, and certainly in the
(19:55):
hundreds of thousands half a million become enslave, but a
good percentage of those is not clear yet. How many
end up back in Spain as enslaved people is living
out their lives and they get enslaves as children, and
they live and have their own children's on or remain
slaves in Spain and work their way into the slave
system in Europe. So he's talking about a system that
(20:17):
is already in place and that he's going to really
kind of take off. So does he believe that? Does
he say that? Yes? Does he invent that system? Absolutely not.
Is it surprising that he says that? Absolutely not. In fact,
if he says, if you've got Columbus writing out and saying, no,
these people should not be enslaved, that's not right. Enslaving
(20:40):
them is morally wrong and we should not do that,
that would have been strange. That would have been kind
of astonishing.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
So Matt who holds the purse strings.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
Yeah, the perse strings. Okay, So there's some great it
kind of myths and legends about this, right about the
relationship between Columbus and Queen Isabelle of Castile, that she
pawns her jewels to pay for his voyage is completely
not true that there's some kind of romance between them.
There's like zero evidence of that. In fact, the more
(21:13):
I got to know Columbus, the where I realized this
guy has not done as a romance with anybody. He's
he has two sons, one and one each by a
different woman, And I'm not sure there was a romance
involved in any of that at all. This is not
something that he cares about. What absolutely not. Where does
the money come from? You know, some of it is
from is guaranteed by the crown, but mostly it's private investment,
(21:38):
and it's investment from Spanish merchants and sailors and so on.
So the the pin Thon brothers pi n z O
n or z O n the pen Thon brothers of
pen Son brothers from Palos, they play really really important
role in not only in the first voyage, but in
(22:00):
in subsequent voyages as well, providing ships, personnel and so on.
And they have they have what Columbus doesn't have. Columbus
doesn't have anything. He doesn't have he doesn't have ships,
he doesn't have sailors who are loyal to him, he
doesn't have family connections. So that I would say that,
you know, it's about investment and return on investment. Now,
(22:20):
once he comes back and shows evidence of wealth, then
further investment comes. But you know, but this is a
little bit like the struggling band who get their first
record deal and then they first record comes out and
it goes to number one, and everyone thinks they must
be rolling in money, and they certainly seem to be
(22:42):
piling in and out of limos in new clothes, and
there seems to be a lot of partying going on,
expensive level partying. And then people really confused and don't
undertam why it is that this band has no money
at all, that they are completely broke. You, Bob, understand
how it work.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
I do, yeah, that the money was never yours to
uh to spit. The money is basically, the record label
is the bank. They're a bank.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
That's right now. Sometimes when you become very successful over
a prolonged period of time and you enter into prolonged
and negotiations probably lawsuits with your original manager and your
label and so on, you might actually get some money
and then that cause that confuses people even more because
they're like, but Paul McCartney's worth a hundred billion dollars
or whatever.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
The key is these days to sell tickets. If you
can sell tickets and you're a band, but you're not
making you're not making money on the music.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
Okay, So let's take it back.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
Okay, right, I would.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
I'd love to talk about that, but let's take it
back to Columbus. Why did I bring that up as
an analogy? Obviously most ways the analogy is absurd, but
but it's fun and it might help us to understand.
Right at the beginning, Columbus doesn't have money. He's not
He doesn't come back from these early voyages rich, right,
So where does the money come from. It comes from
(24:00):
colonial enterprises, comes from colonial endeavors, and what those colonial
endeavors are based on is credit. It's all about advanced
credit and any discovery any wealth that is brought back
gold that is pulled out of placer mines in the Caribbean,
and then later when the Spaniards get onto the mainland
(24:21):
in diskis discover other sources of wealth, particularly gold and silver.
That is all goes to pay off creditors and get
more credit. It's kind of a massive Ponzi scheme. I mean,
the whole Spanish Empire and in some ways all the
European empires in the Americas are kind of Ponzi schemes
that are based on the assumption that there's even more
wealth coming around the corner. Right. It's like you'll hit
(24:42):
records like it doesn't matter, because the next one will
be bigger and bigger, and then there'll be more more
money coming. Now, that's not to say that Columbus dies impoverished.
That's part of the legend of Columbus. Oh, he's he's
not appreciated. The Spanish crown doesn't appreciate all that they
he does for them, and he died. He doesn't die
poor at all. His contract guarantees certain kinds of incomes
(25:06):
and revenue, but that contract is constantly being renegotiated by him,
and he is essentially doing during his that final kind
of fourteen years of his life from when he gets
the original contract when he dies. He's doing a little
bit the same thing that bands do when they kind
of then start arguing and doing their managers and so on,
(25:27):
and that then continues for hundreds of years. So immediately
upon his death, his son who inherits the title, which
is an important title, which is Admiral of the Ocean
Stea and of the Indies that title, and it comes
with a certain income which is equivalent to several million
dollars actually at one point maybe as much as five
(25:49):
or six million dollars a year as just straight income, right,
with a potential for much much, much more than that
if you can claim all the other titles. His son
immediately sues the Spanish crown, and so there are now
lawsuits that go on on and off for hundreds of
years between columbus descendants and the Spanish Crown, and then
(26:09):
between Columbus's descendants between his heirs over that money. So, yes,
there's money, but where does the money come from. It
comes from enterprises of colonial exploitation in the Americans. It
doesn't actually come directly from you know what Columbus himself
does now to kind of wrap this up, what is
the most lucrative enterprise that Spaniards are engaging in in
(26:33):
the Caribbean in Columbus's lifetime? And let's even take it
a little beyond that, say, his son's lifetime.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
I'm guessing it's not T shirt sales.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
It's not merchandise. Okay, if they'd had that idea, we
could be horrified by that in the twenty first century. No,
it's well, now I'm laughing, and I'd feel like I
can't laugh because I'm going to tell you what the
truth is. It's slavery. Yeah, So when you realize that, like, wait, wait,
(27:03):
what do you mean slave people? Like, well, that's that's
how that's how the whole thing keeps going through enslaving people.
You're literally going island to island or on the coasts
and going into villages and you're rounding people up, and
the people who are worth the most are the people
who are the easiest to capture. So it's children and women.
(27:24):
There was, so it's more than men, and the men
are the ones who are most likely to try and
defend their families, and they can be and then they're
killed or sometimes they managed to enslave them as well,
so you you know you're not purchasing them. I mean,
most of the enslaved Africans who are acquired during the
Transatlantic slave trade from Africa are purchased through trade because
(27:47):
African kingdoms still have power. European colonial powers don't have
the ability to destroy those African kingdoms and create colonies,
large colonies in Africa. That doesn't happen until the nineteenth century.
But indigenous people's living in small city states or stateless
(28:08):
communities on islands and on the coasts simply don't have
the ability to resist when a ship pulls up with
cannons and armed guys who are simply there, you know,
to raid and seize people, and then they sell them
in the burgeoning slave markets on the islands and then
back in Spain. That that brings the greatest amount of money,
(28:30):
It's the greatest source of income and also encourages further credit. So, look,
Columbus is part of this system. Does that, you know,
make him some kind of hero. It's hard to see that,
but absolutely not. But he also doesn't in no way
does he create this system, and he would be absolutely
(28:51):
powerless to stop it. So I mean, do we all
kind of go back and see what kind of guy
is is Columbus? You know, what would it be like
to have him on American History hotline, right, to have
him in a room talking to him? He would talk
even more than I do. You would not be able
to shut the guy up. He had a reputation for
being incredibly garrulous. He talks and talked and talked, and
(29:15):
now it sounds like I'm about to insult myself now,
which is totally fine. He talks and talks. He was
incredibly egomaniac. I think he was just astonishingly self centered.
So I really investigated Columbus with an open mind. I mean,
the purpose of the book is not primarily it's not
(29:35):
a biography. I mean, it is a biography, but it isn't.
My concern was to answer not only questions that people
might have about the historic Columbus, but also, let's just
leap all the way to kind of the extreme end.
When people said to me, why are their little memes
on TikTok about Columbus raping manatees? Did he do that?
(29:57):
There's also stuff from there about Columbus like raping, wanting
to have sex with goats and lamas and so on,
And of course it's like that comes a point where
you it becomes funny, right, and absturd and ridiculous. But
I felt like I needed to explain that. You know,
then there's an explanation with the explanation has to be
(30:20):
kind of tapped into a larger explanation, which is which
is the purpose of the book here. So I approached
Columbus with an open mind. I had previously done the
same in investigating Montezuma and Cortez on a different book,
which we'll talk about on another occasion. Bob and I,
(30:43):
my opinion of Cortez changed fairly dramatically. I thought he
was probably a somewhat unpleasant character, and by the time
I got to the end of researching that, but this
guy is just an absolute monster. I mean, he's just horrific.
I did not come to the conclusion that Columbus was
a monster, not in the same way I did. He's
clearly very intelligent, kind of impressive in many ways. He
(31:06):
had no education, despite the kind of legends about that.
So it comes from very modest background. Self taught. He
teaches himself to read, he teaches himself to speak and
read multiple languages. He never writes Spanish particular, he never
really becomes fluent in writing it. He tries to writing
(31:26):
Latin and it's pretty bad and so on. But the
fact is it's all self taught. And he's also teaching
himself navigation that he must have learned from Pilots when
he went to see when he was in his early twenties.
But he's kind of an impressive guy in this sense,
but he becomes so single mindedly self absorbed. It's all
(31:49):
it's all ultimately about him, and then what he can
do to ensure his legacy in founding a noble dynasty
in Spain. Now we don't when he gets this idea,
but it seems one would imagine that when he's in
he leaves general when he's in his twenties, and then
(32:10):
in his twenties he spends most of his twenties in Lisbon.
Were based in Portugal, and the evidence seems to suggest
that that's when he got this idea that if you
sail out into the ocean, into what they call the Ocean,
see what we call the Atlantic, there are islands out there,
and you can find these islands, and you can essentially
make yourself kind of lord of these islands. It's kind
(32:30):
of this chivalric dream, and then you can elevate yourself
to the nobility and you go back to the king
of Portugal saying you could be the King of the islands.
But I'm going to be the lord, I'm the viceroy,
I'm the ruler of it, and I'll have all these
titles and then they will be passed down to my
son and his son and so on. As a way
(32:52):
of kind of erasing what he thought was embarrassing. Is
his background. You know, his father was like a wool weaver,
ran a tavern for a while, father was a cheesemaker.
You know, this is like modest people, modest working class
people in Genua in the fifteenth century. And he was
embarrassed by that background and he didn't want to pass
(33:12):
that on to his son's. So there's a kind of
a social mobility ambition that is absolutely all consuming and
becomes more and more so during his lifetime. And the
last thing I'll say is, well, does he achieve it? Yes,
he does. So if you want to be impressed by that,
that's fine. Be impressed. He's a kind of a you know,
(33:34):
self made man, and he you know, he passes that
title on. There is today in Spain a Don Cristoval Cologne,
a Christopher Columbus, who is the twentieth in line, who
holds the title Admiral of the Ocean sea, and he's
you know, an aristocrat, a businessman, a sailor, he's had
(33:56):
a he was in the Spanish navy, right, he's exactly
if Columbus could somehow have seen, you know, five centuries
forward and seen his descendant, I think, well, no, he
was a guy who was never satisfied. I think you
and I, Bob will be satisfied with that. He would say, well,
that's great, but why is he not Viceroy of Mexico? Right?
Speaker 2 (34:19):
A complicated man in complicated times. Columbus was was a
man of his times, is what this sounds like. You're
telling me.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
See, maybe we should have written this book together. It
would have been shorter, because you're right. No, you're absolutely right.
He was a man of his time and that and
it was a grim time.
Speaker 2 (34:41):
It was a grim time he was.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
Yeah. I think we sort of spent half an hour
answering that first question, but I mean that's a good
way of putting it right. Yes, he was. He was
a man of his time. But it was a time
in which it was okay to invade someone else's country
and kill them and enslave them. It wasn't okay, but
everybody people complained, but and then people complain in Spain,
(35:04):
but generally it was okay.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
I've been talking with Matthew Restahl, director of Latin American
Studies at Penn State. He's the author of many books,
including When Montezuma Met Cortez and his latest, The Nine
Lives of Christopher Columbus. You can find out more about
his book in our show notes. Matthew, thank you for
joining us today on American History Hotline.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
You've been listening to American History Hotline, a production of
iHeart Podcasts and Scratch Track Productions. The show is executive
producer is James Morrison. Our executive producers from iHeart are
Jordan Runtall and Jason English. Original music composed by me
Bob Crawford. Please keep in touch. Our email is americani
(35:56):
History Hotline at gmail dot com. If you like the show,
please tell your friends and leave us a review in
Apple Podcasts. I'm your host, Bob Crawford. Feel free to
hit me up on social media to ask a history
question or to let me know what you think of
the show. You can find me at Bob Crawford Base.
(36:17):
Thanks so much for listening, See you next week.
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark
My Favorite Murder is a true crime comedy podcast hosted by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark. Each week, Karen and Georgia share compelling true crimes and hometown stories from friends and listeners. Since MFM launched in January of 2016, Karen and Georgia have shared their lifelong interest in true crime and have covered stories of infamous serial killers like the Night Stalker, mysterious cold cases, captivating cults, incredible survivor stories and important events from history like the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. My Favorite Murder is part of the Exactly Right podcast network that provides a platform for bold, creative voices to bring to life provocative, entertaining and relatable stories for audiences everywhere. The Exactly Right roster of podcasts covers a variety of topics including historic true crime, comedic interviews and news, science, pop culture and more. Podcasts on the network include Buried Bones with Kate Winkler Dawson and Paul Holes, That's Messed Up: An SVU Podcast, This Podcast Will Kill You, Bananas and more.