September 14, 2026 • 30 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Christopher Columbus sailed west in 1492, convinced he could reach Asia across the Atlantic. He was wrong about where he was going, wrong about the size of the world, and yet skilled and determined enough to complete a voyage that would change it forever. Over four expeditions, Columbus explored the Caribbean, encountered peoples unknown to Europeans, pursued gold and converts, and struggled disastrously to govern the colonies he helped establish.
Laurence Bergreen, author of Columbus: The Four Voyages, shares the complicated story of the ambitious mariner behind the legend.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue with our American stories. For generations, students
in American elementary schools were taught that Christopher Columbus sailed
the ocean blue to discover America in 1492. Today, that
lesson is changing in schools across the country. Here to
tell the real story of Christopher Columbus is Lawrence Bergreen,
(00:32):
who wrote the definitive biography, Columbus, The Four Voyages.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Let's take a listen.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
Hello, my name is Lawrence Burgreen, and I've written a
book about Christopher Columbus, Columbus, The Four Voyages. Of all
the books I've written, I think this has been the
most challenging and the most controversial, because Columbus's reputation has
been changing all by the month, He's a figure that
(01:03):
we all know about, and he's been devalued almost beyond recognition,
torn down from statues, discredited over and over as if
it were the first time. But as I discovered, the
criticism of Columbus, intense criticism, was there almost at the beginning.
It seems to get rediscovered with each generation. He's been hated,
(01:28):
considered a genocidal monster. I would like to discuss Columbus
in three dimensions, if you will, to give a sense
of what he was really like as a person, with
his flaws and all. The flaws were huge, but also
so were his accomplishments. There's a reason why we remember Columbus.
(01:51):
He tied together with his four voyages the old world
and the new. First of all, Who was Columbus? Cristoforo
Columbus was born in Genoa in 1451. He was the
son of a weaver. He went to sea at 14,
(02:13):
which was common, and he had a very rough beginning.
He sank in a bottle off the coast of Portugal.
He managed to paddle safely to shore on a piece
of wreckage, and as a Genoese, he joined a colony
of expatriate Genoese sailors in Portugal. Later on, he was
exploring the coast of West Africa and actually aboard another ship,
(02:36):
made it all the way to Iceland. So, even as
a young person, Columbus had been around, mostly as what
we would call a merchant marine. And he worked carefully
with his brothers, especially his brother, Bartholomew, who was a mapmaker.
This was kind of interesting because conceptions of the world
(02:58):
at that time were, by our standards... faulty and misleading
to an almost comical extent. Bartholomew's maps and other maps
of that era reinforced the belief that China, and all
the riches that Columbus eventually went to seek from China,
lay just to the west of the Americas. That the
(03:18):
Pacific Ocean was not the largest body of water on
the planet, but could be traversed in maybe a few days.
So the idea was that if you could only get to.
The beginning of the Pacific to its western edge, that
you would be able to get to China very quickly.
This was, of course, a huge mistake. Columbus, if he
(03:42):
had known the reality of it and how difficult it
was to get to China, probably would never have undertaken
the voyage. There were a couple of other sailors and
navigators who did. They were all lost. So the fact
that he was emboldened to undertake it was based on
a series of faulty misconceptions. It's just one of the
many ironies. He spent a lot of time getting backing.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
For the voyage.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
He was in Portugal, wouldn't back him. He finally went
to Spain. And by that time, he was no longer
a young man. He was 40. 40 in those days
was late middle age. So he was in a way
what seemed like the, quote, back nine of his career.
On the other hand, Columbus had some gifts, and his
(04:31):
main gift as a mariner, as a navigator, was what
we call dead reckoning, sailing by the seat of his pants.
If he wanted to estimate time and distances, he used
very simple devices, such as a rope or a buoy
or a landmark, timing the distance it took to move
from one end of his ship to another. If it
(04:51):
sounds primitive, it was, but it also worked, so he
wasn't dependent on on technology or intellectual constructs that were
beyond his ken. He also paid close attention to tides
and to wind, to the color of the sea, the
composition of the clouds. These mattered a lot more to
him than the mathematical calculations of the era's leading cosmographers.
(05:17):
They generally had never gone to sea, but Columbus had,
and in his long apprenticeship, he had acquired a great
deal of experience, which turned out to be very helpful,
especially in an era of all these faulty maps. And
he also had this conviction that he could sail from
the western coast of Spain to the eastern coast of
(05:39):
China without much of a problem. He was not familiar
with the astrolabe. He did not steer by the stars.
If he had done that, again, he probably would have
never set out on this voyage again. because he would
have realized how faulty his assumptions were. But he did
have a sense that God wanted him to do this.
(06:03):
At times he even thought that God was speaking to him.
That wasn't that uncommon in those days. Many people felt
that God was directly speaking to them about what they
should be doing in life. When I say speaking, I
don't mean a mild prompting, an intuitive one. I mean
actually hearing a voice. And we know that Columbus had
(06:23):
this experience of God speaking to him because he wrote
down what he thought God actually told him.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
At critical times.
Speaker 3 (06:32):
What was so remarkable about all this was that when
he set out on this voyage, the very first time,
the one that we all study about in school in 1492,
he went across the Atlantic with three ships, and it's
the first time we know that Europeans had done this,
with no loss of life. This is really remarkable, considering
(06:54):
the dangers that he faced and his lack of specific knowledge.
And he made this voyage three more times, each time
improving based on hard-won experience, until on the last voyage,
he was able to cross the Atlantic in only 16 days.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
It was incredible.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
Of course, the shorter the voyage, the less dangers you faced.
There was less danger of storms, less danger of dehydration,
less danger of mutinies at sea. So this worked in
his favor. His crew on these voyages was very problematic
(07:39):
because he sailed on the first voyage just the day
after the Spanish Inquisition became the law of the land.
That was intended to drive Muslims out of Spain but
it also had ripple effects across Europe and all the
way to Portugal, and was really an important watershed in history.
(08:02):
It was the brainchild, if you could call it that,
of the Catholic monarchs of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella. Because
Columbus was not able to get backing in Portugal, he
was able to get sort of backing from them, but
let me say it was tentative. His first fleet was
Three cramped, leaking, fragile vessels. They were old and falling apart,
(08:26):
we would call them. Rust buckets, except they were made
out of wood. And they were small. The Santa Maria,
which was the largest, could hold only 40 sailors.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
And you've been listening to historian Lawrence Burgreen tell the
story of Christopher Columbus in a way you've probably never
heard it before. It's complicated and it's nuanced. And like
any human being, This man had his flaws, but my goodness,
his virtues, his talents. You're hearing about some of them.
By the way, if he had not known how difficult
(08:57):
it was, we learn, to get to China. Of course,
they were looking for a shorter route. He probably would
have never embarked on the voyage in the first place.
The irony of ironies. And he's 40 years old when
he tries to get the backing to do this. And 40,
as Lawrence pointed out, is the back nine of your
(09:17):
career back in the late 15th century. And of course,
how he knew what he was supposed to do, well,
he knew it because he'd heard from God. And I mean,
he thought he literally heard from God. And that's what
he wrote in his own journals and memoirs. A really
spectacular part of Lawrence's book is hearing about those messages
(09:42):
from God, from Columbus himself. And of course, that first
voyage of and those three sort of rickety ships. You're
going to hear more of the story of Christopher Columbus
with Lawrence Burgreen as Our American Stories continues. And we
(10:09):
continue with Our American Stories and the story of Christopher
Columbus as told by historian Lawrence Burgreen.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
Let's pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 3 (10:20):
Now, another one of Columbus's, it seems, almost comical misconceptions
was that he was going to sail to China in
these ships. Therefore, he brought translators with him ready to
interpret Chinese once they reached Asia. Where did he get
these ideas from? Well, like everybody in Europe at that time,
(10:43):
he got them from Marco Polo's popular travels. Marco Polo
went over land, rather than sea for the most part,
and dictated a very popular account of his adventures. Some
of it was embellished. Some of it was drawn from
other accounts that he'd heard that he included in his own.
(11:05):
In general, it painted a picture of this mythical China
or Asia that Columbus thought he was reaching as a
place of great luxury, of gold, and sensual gratification. The
idea was he would go there and bring back spices,
which were very important and easy to transport, gold, a
(11:29):
little more difficult because it had to be mined or stolen,
and much, much more ominously, slaves. Slavery at that point
was very common throughout Europe. He also had another mission,
which partly contradicted this one, was that he wanted to bring,
and he was quite serious about this, Christianity to what
(11:52):
he called the idol worshippers of the East. He felt
that his name, Christopher Columbus, meant Christ-bearer, and he had
a messianic sense of this. Now, this didn't square with
the idea of slavery, because if you had slaves, and
he wanted to convert people, they couldn't be Christians. But
(12:13):
nobody really bothered at that time to think it through
until he actually went out on the voyage. He also
planned to meet Kublai Khan. He had official letters from
King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. The only problem was that
Kublai Khan had died decades ago. The Mongol Empire, which
(12:34):
he led, was fading into oblivion. So it could be said,
I think with some fairness, that Marco Polo's travels, which
in many ways were accurate... misled rather than inspired Columbus.
And he spent his entire career, four voyages, in a
futile effort to discover this maritime route to China. Okay,
(12:59):
in the process, he stumbled across what we know and
now and now called the New World. And that was
the beginning of what we also call globalization. Now, we
can debate endlessly whether this was a good thing or
a band thing. But once Columbus had started this process
(13:20):
of going back and forth between what we now call
the Americas and Spain and Europe, there was no stopping it.
And it wasn't just trade, and it wasn't just geopolitics.
It was also what we call the Columbus Exchange.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
But the.
Speaker 3 (13:44):
And other things that could not be undone because what
you left behind stayed and transformed the landscapes of both
the old world and the new. On the first voyage,
his initial contacts, this was the 1492 voyage, were tentative
and respectful. He wrote, and he was a big letter writer,
(14:08):
I hope to win them to the love and service
of their highnesses, by which he meant Ferdinand and Isabella,
and the whole Spanish nation. They have no religion, but
they are not idolaters. They believe that power and goodness
dwell in the sky and are firmly convinced that I
have come from the sky with these ships and people.
(14:28):
This is because they are not stupid. Far from it.
They are men of great intelligence, for they give a
marvelously good account of everything, but they have never before
seen men clothed or ships like these. Columbus was probably
talking about one of two tribes in the Caribbean. The
Taino was probably the most likely, and they were fairly sophisticated,
(14:55):
as he realized, and they were not particularly hostile to
Columbus's arrival. Some of them were very curious and welcomed him. However,
some of the behavior of Columbus's followers, or those who
came after him, was so outrageous that that what we
think of as the atrocities that we attribute to Columbus
(15:19):
were actually perpetrated by those who came afterwards, sometimes in
his name and sometimes independently. Some of the worst of them,
for example, one of his lieutenants, Michel de Cuneo, wrote
about capturing and raping a beautiful indigenous woman whom he
claims the Lord Admiral, that was Columbus, gave to him.
(15:41):
And then he writes about how she was unwilling and
scraped her with his fingernails so that he wished he
had never laid eyes on her. Finally, he got a
piece of rope and punished her with it. These kinds
of letters were circulated around Europe and sensationalized this voyage.
So the impression of it went from being one of
(16:04):
trade and a religious mission to one of complete exploitation.
Columbus also decided that one of the other tribes, the Caribs,
as opposed to the Taino, were cannibals. And he wrote
after the second voyage that the Caribs eat the male
children that they have been adopted by their women and
(16:29):
only bring up the children of their own women. In
other words, they eat the children of a rival indigenous people.
And then to top it off, he reported that They
say that human flesh is so good that there is
nothing like it in the world. Well, again, these kinds
of accounts electrified Europe, Spain, and not in a good way,
(16:51):
and set off a big reaction that changed the color
of everything. At the same time, while this was going on,
unknown to Columbus and his sailors in Europe, something maybe
more important was going on. and one that continues to
this day. That's the Columbian Exchange, which I mentioned earlier.
(17:15):
This was first identified by Alfred Crosby at the University
of Texas at Austin, and it indicates the exchange and
commingling of bacteria and plants and animals between the Old
World and the New, beginning in 1492 and then the
subsequent four voyages, when there was a cross-fertilizing of these
(17:40):
separate landmasses brought about by Columbus and his followers.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
And you've been listening to historian Lawrence Burgreen tell the story,
the rich and complicated story, the nuanced story of Christopher Columbus,
one of the great storytellers in this country, Lawrence says.
His book is Columbus, The Four Voyages. I urge you
to get it. You will not put it down. Get
two copies. Give it to a friend. We learn so
(18:05):
much about the context and the times in which he lived.
Lawrence isn't one of those historians who judge people out
of context, but yet he's honest as honest can be.
The full picture, the good, the bad, and the ugly.
And my goodness, the international trade lanes that Columbus started,
he started, for better or worse, global trade.
Speaker 2 (18:25):
He started globalization.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
And it changed not only the New World, it changed
the Old World, too. Also, a great discussion, a great
piece of storytelling there. on how Columbus viewed the native tribes,
and more importantly, how people used his name to do just, well,
tragic and ugly things. And of course, some of Columbus's
own writings and the impact they had on the native
(18:51):
tribes that lived here before his arrival. When we return,
more of this remarkable story, this rich and complicated story,
the story of Christopher Columbus, here on Our American Stories.
(19:38):
And we continue with our American stories and with the
story of Christopher Columbus as told by Lawrence Burgreen.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
Let's pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 3 (19:50):
Columbus brought white potatoes, sweet potatoes, maize, and manioc, which
is a rather starchy root from the New World to
the back, the old Europe. And he brought wheat, turnips, barley, apples,
and rice from Europe to the Americas. They made a
big difference because they enabled the people in the Americas
(20:12):
who started growing them to rapidly increase the population there.
But there was more, got more complicated. Columbus and his
men brought horses, cattle, sheep, and goats to the New World.
We have to imagine what it was like without horses,
without cattle before them. They also brought back to Europe cattle.
(20:35):
pathogens that were unknown. Remember, people didn't really know about
germ theory in those days. These pathogens had a devastating effect. Smallpox, malaria, chickenpox, influenza,
and yellow fever all came thanks to Columbus and his men.
Not intentionally. He never decided, okay, we're going to intentionally
(20:58):
infect defenseless people in another land. They didn't realize they
were doing it. Some other effects of this Colombian exchange,
alcohol and alcoholism. They weren't alcoholics in the New World
or alcohol before Columbus. Alcohol and alcoholism devastated local populations.
(21:19):
So as you can see, this Colombian exchange was complicated
and multi-layered. Once that was started, it could not be undone.
Music Columbus' first voyage was relatively quick. As I mentioned,
it seemed to be successful. The second voyage was meant
as a follow-up. He wanted to capitalize on it. Finally,
(21:41):
when he got to the third voyage, which was 1498
and 1500, in a way, this was the most complicated
of all, and we see a lot of the contradictions
in the Columbus voyages coming to the fore. He had
a very difficult time maintaining order among the group. and
he had also had a difficult time maintaining the pretense
(22:06):
that he was going to China or Asia. He was
also undermined by his brother, Bartholomew, who was much more
interested in plunder and conquest and did not share Columbus's
messianic visions or ideals. At the meantime of this voyage,
(22:26):
he seemed to be losing his mind, or at least
temporarily losing his reason. On this third voyage, once he
discovered Venezuela, another major accomplishment, but again, not China, he
decided that he was sailing uphill, as he wrote about, which,
of course, one can't do, and that he had discovered
(22:47):
the entrance to paradise. And in case you were wondering,
it was a little bit north of Venezuela, so I
don't think anybody else has ever found it since then.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
Joking.
Speaker 3 (22:56):
Anyway, he wrote that Each time I sailed from Spain
to the Indies, I found that when I reached a
point a hundred leagues west of the Azores, the heavens,
the stars, and the temperatures of the air and the
water of the sea abruptly changed. It was as if
the seas sloped upward. He was surprised because he felt
(23:20):
that the Earth was spherical. He believed it, and he
knew it to be true. He decided then that the
Earth must be not round, but, as he put it, quote,
the shape of a pear, which is round everywhere except
at the stalk, where it juts out a long way.
At this point, you know, he seemed to be more
(23:41):
and more detached from reality, and he then talked about
this watery summit that he found. He didn't believe anyone
could actually, quote, ascend to the top. More complications ensued,
to the point where Spain for then and Isabella decided
to appoint an inspector to see what was happening with
(24:04):
Columbus because they were alarmed by reports of cruelty and
by Columbus's delusions. They appointed Francisco de Bobadilla, and his
idea was to try and clean up this mess in Columbus.
So he arrived in August of 1500, and wanted to
(24:25):
see what was actually going on. He was actually there
in Santo Domingo. And what he saw was worse than
anyone back in Spain had imagined. He was confronted by gallows,
rotting corpses. And who was overlooking this was Columbus's other brother,
not Bartholomew, but Diego. And he felt that he was
(24:48):
doing the right thing. And he boasted to Bobadilla, that
five additional Spaniards were to be hanged the next day.
The reason was because he believed that they were going
to stage a mutiny or a rebellion against Columbus and
his two brothers. So he felt that he was carrying
out the wishes of Spain by doing this. Of course,
(25:12):
it was exactly the opposite. Executing Spaniards was, of course,
an extremely grave offense. So he found himself jailed. And
the search went out for Columbus himself, who now found
himself in big trouble and spent most of his life
under suspicion for these atrocities. One of the things we're
(25:37):
lucky about with Columbus is that we have so many
different impressions of what he was really like. However, there
is one important part, crucial part of the story that
we don't know about. We don't know what the Taino
or other indigenous peoples actually thought. We can guess, they're
sometimes quoted, we can judge or infer from their actions. Still,
(26:02):
it's largely based on speculation. And, you know, we can
speculate in favor of one side or another, but there
is some sense they did regard Columbus as a messiah too,
but not in the sense that Columbus thought of himself
as bearing a divine message. but as a harbinger of
(26:24):
the end of time. Because apparently, and some people have suggested,
that there was a myth that was prevalent or a
belief among the Taino and other peoples that when ships
like this appeared, that was the end of the world. Therefore,
they responded in a drastic way. Many of them committed suicide.
(26:47):
They jumped off of cliffs. They poisoned one another. Columbus
saw some of this and was absolutely mystified about that,
and he had no way of knowing why this was
happening without realizing that he had actually unintentionally triggered it.
So this is a particularly tragic instance of unintended consequences.
(27:12):
You can see that Columbus throughout these voyages and throughout
his life ricocheted around from one misconception to another, from
misplaced idealism to unintentional or overlooked cruelty. That makes him
an extraordinarily complex figure and also a very important figure
because the results of his voyage are with us to
(27:34):
this day and won't be undone. They are really permanent.
So that makes him one of the most important figures
in the history of exploration, if not history, both for
better and for worse. And I think he speaks a
lot to the human condition about our own susceptibility or fallibility,
(27:54):
about both inspiring and deleterious effects of belief. That's why
he still grips our imagination as well as our intellect.
Speaker 1 (28:07):
And a terrific job on the editing, production, and storytelling
by our own Greg Hengler. And a special thanks to
Lawrence Burgreen. His book, Columbus, The Four Voyages. When you
get it, you will not put it down. Go to
Amazon or the usual suspects. Again, it's Columbus, the four voyages.
And what a story he told, so complicated, almost a
(28:29):
dual nature to almost everything that happens. Here's the good,
here's the bad, much of it an unintended consequence of
this very.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
New partnership, this new globalization.
Speaker 1 (28:41):
Columbus brings white potatoes, sweet potatoes, and maize from the
new world to the old, And he brings wheat, turnips, apples,
and rice from Europe to the Americas. Mutual benefits there.
He also, my goodness, brings so many more things. Horses, cattle, sheep,
and goats from Europe to the New World. Can you
(29:02):
imagine the country without these things?
Speaker 2 (29:04):
It's unimaginable.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
And, of course, smallpox, too, and other pathogens. And again,
he didn't do it knowing that he was doing what
he was doing. These are unintended consequences. of this new globalization,
of this new Colombian exchange. And let's not forget alcohol
and alcoholism too. Again, not done on purpose, but these
(29:27):
were the undetending consequences of Columbus's journey. Contradictions, my goodness,
they're everywhere. By the way, we live with them in
our own lives too as human beings. But they all
come to the fore, including that last trip. His own
brothers turn out to be a real problem in his life.
And by all accounts, by the end of that third voyage, Columbus, well,
(29:48):
he's lost his mind. The story in the end shows
the nature of Columbus, ricocheting from one misperception and misconception
to another. filled with both an inspiring nature, but also
in the end, all those flaws and fallibilities. The story
of Christopher Columbus, in the end, the story of humanity,
(30:09):
human nature, and the story of early America, here on
Our American Stories.
And we continue with our American stories. For generations, students
in American elementary schools were taught that Christopher Columbus sailed
the ocean blue to discover America in 1492. Today, that
lesson is changing in schools across the country. Here to
tell the real story of Christopher Columbus is Lawrence Bergreen,
(00:32):
who wrote the definitive biography, Columbus, The Four Voyages.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Let's take a listen.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
Hello, my name is Lawrence Burgreen, and I've written a
book about Christopher Columbus, Columbus, The Four Voyages. Of all
the books I've written, I think this has been the
most challenging and the most controversial, because Columbus's reputation has
been changing all by the month, He's a figure that
(01:03):
we all know about, and he's been devalued almost beyond recognition,
torn down from statues, discredited over and over as if
it were the first time. But as I discovered, the
criticism of Columbus, intense criticism, was there almost at the beginning.
It seems to get rediscovered with each generation. He's been hated,
(01:28):
considered a genocidal monster. I would like to discuss Columbus
in three dimensions, if you will, to give a sense
of what he was really like as a person, with
his flaws and all. The flaws were huge, but also
so were his accomplishments. There's a reason why we remember Columbus.
(01:51):
He tied together with his four voyages the old world
and the new. First of all, Who was Columbus? Cristoforo
Columbus was born in Genoa in 1451. He was the
son of a weaver. He went to sea at 14,
(02:13):
which was common, and he had a very rough beginning.
He sank in a bottle off the coast of Portugal.
He managed to paddle safely to shore on a piece
of wreckage, and as a Genoese, he joined a colony
of expatriate Genoese sailors in Portugal. Later on, he was
exploring the coast of West Africa and actually aboard another ship,
(02:36):
made it all the way to Iceland. So, even as
a young person, Columbus had been around, mostly as what
we would call a merchant marine. And he worked carefully
with his brothers, especially his brother, Bartholomew, who was a mapmaker.
This was kind of interesting because conceptions of the world
(02:58):
at that time were, by our standards... faulty and misleading
to an almost comical extent. Bartholomew's maps and other maps
of that era reinforced the belief that China, and all
the riches that Columbus eventually went to seek from China,
lay just to the west of the Americas. That the
(03:18):
Pacific Ocean was not the largest body of water on
the planet, but could be traversed in maybe a few days.
So the idea was that if you could only get to.
The beginning of the Pacific to its western edge, that
you would be able to get to China very quickly.
This was, of course, a huge mistake. Columbus, if he
(03:42):
had known the reality of it and how difficult it
was to get to China, probably would never have undertaken
the voyage. There were a couple of other sailors and
navigators who did. They were all lost. So the fact
that he was emboldened to undertake it was based on
a series of faulty misconceptions. It's just one of the
many ironies. He spent a lot of time getting backing.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
For the voyage.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
He was in Portugal, wouldn't back him. He finally went
to Spain. And by that time, he was no longer
a young man. He was 40. 40 in those days
was late middle age. So he was in a way
what seemed like the, quote, back nine of his career.
On the other hand, Columbus had some gifts, and his
(04:31):
main gift as a mariner, as a navigator, was what
we call dead reckoning, sailing by the seat of his pants.
If he wanted to estimate time and distances, he used
very simple devices, such as a rope or a buoy
or a landmark, timing the distance it took to move
from one end of his ship to another. If it
(04:51):
sounds primitive, it was, but it also worked, so he
wasn't dependent on on technology or intellectual constructs that were
beyond his ken. He also paid close attention to tides
and to wind, to the color of the sea, the
composition of the clouds. These mattered a lot more to
him than the mathematical calculations of the era's leading cosmographers.
(05:17):
They generally had never gone to sea, but Columbus had,
and in his long apprenticeship, he had acquired a great
deal of experience, which turned out to be very helpful,
especially in an era of all these faulty maps. And
he also had this conviction that he could sail from
the western coast of Spain to the eastern coast of
(05:39):
China without much of a problem. He was not familiar
with the astrolabe. He did not steer by the stars.
If he had done that, again, he probably would have
never set out on this voyage again. because he would
have realized how faulty his assumptions were. But he did
have a sense that God wanted him to do this.
(06:03):
At times he even thought that God was speaking to him.
That wasn't that uncommon in those days. Many people felt
that God was directly speaking to them about what they
should be doing in life. When I say speaking, I
don't mean a mild prompting, an intuitive one. I mean
actually hearing a voice. And we know that Columbus had
(06:23):
this experience of God speaking to him because he wrote
down what he thought God actually told him.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
At critical times.
Speaker 3 (06:32):
What was so remarkable about all this was that when
he set out on this voyage, the very first time,
the one that we all study about in school in 1492,
he went across the Atlantic with three ships, and it's
the first time we know that Europeans had done this,
with no loss of life. This is really remarkable, considering
(06:54):
the dangers that he faced and his lack of specific knowledge.
And he made this voyage three more times, each time
improving based on hard-won experience, until on the last voyage,
he was able to cross the Atlantic in only 16 days.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
It was incredible.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
Of course, the shorter the voyage, the less dangers you faced.
There was less danger of storms, less danger of dehydration,
less danger of mutinies at sea. So this worked in
his favor. His crew on these voyages was very problematic
(07:39):
because he sailed on the first voyage just the day
after the Spanish Inquisition became the law of the land.
That was intended to drive Muslims out of Spain but
it also had ripple effects across Europe and all the
way to Portugal, and was really an important watershed in history.
(08:02):
It was the brainchild, if you could call it that,
of the Catholic monarchs of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella. Because
Columbus was not able to get backing in Portugal, he
was able to get sort of backing from them, but
let me say it was tentative. His first fleet was
Three cramped, leaking, fragile vessels. They were old and falling apart,
(08:26):
we would call them. Rust buckets, except they were made
out of wood. And they were small. The Santa Maria,
which was the largest, could hold only 40 sailors.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
And you've been listening to historian Lawrence Burgreen tell the
story of Christopher Columbus in a way you've probably never
heard it before. It's complicated and it's nuanced. And like
any human being, This man had his flaws, but my goodness,
his virtues, his talents. You're hearing about some of them.
By the way, if he had not known how difficult
(08:57):
it was, we learn, to get to China. Of course,
they were looking for a shorter route. He probably would
have never embarked on the voyage in the first place.
The irony of ironies. And he's 40 years old when
he tries to get the backing to do this. And 40,
as Lawrence pointed out, is the back nine of your
(09:17):
career back in the late 15th century. And of course,
how he knew what he was supposed to do, well,
he knew it because he'd heard from God. And I mean,
he thought he literally heard from God. And that's what
he wrote in his own journals and memoirs. A really
spectacular part of Lawrence's book is hearing about those messages
(09:42):
from God, from Columbus himself. And of course, that first
voyage of and those three sort of rickety ships. You're
going to hear more of the story of Christopher Columbus
with Lawrence Burgreen as Our American Stories continues. And we
(10:09):
continue with Our American Stories and the story of Christopher
Columbus as told by historian Lawrence Burgreen.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
Let's pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 3 (10:20):
Now, another one of Columbus's, it seems, almost comical misconceptions
was that he was going to sail to China in
these ships. Therefore, he brought translators with him ready to
interpret Chinese once they reached Asia. Where did he get
these ideas from? Well, like everybody in Europe at that time,
(10:43):
he got them from Marco Polo's popular travels. Marco Polo
went over land, rather than sea for the most part,
and dictated a very popular account of his adventures. Some
of it was embellished. Some of it was drawn from
other accounts that he'd heard that he included in his own.
(11:05):
In general, it painted a picture of this mythical China
or Asia that Columbus thought he was reaching as a
place of great luxury, of gold, and sensual gratification. The
idea was he would go there and bring back spices,
which were very important and easy to transport, gold, a
(11:29):
little more difficult because it had to be mined or stolen,
and much, much more ominously, slaves. Slavery at that point
was very common throughout Europe. He also had another mission,
which partly contradicted this one, was that he wanted to bring,
and he was quite serious about this, Christianity to what
(11:52):
he called the idol worshippers of the East. He felt
that his name, Christopher Columbus, meant Christ-bearer, and he had
a messianic sense of this. Now, this didn't square with
the idea of slavery, because if you had slaves, and
he wanted to convert people, they couldn't be Christians. But
(12:13):
nobody really bothered at that time to think it through
until he actually went out on the voyage. He also
planned to meet Kublai Khan. He had official letters from
King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. The only problem was that
Kublai Khan had died decades ago. The Mongol Empire, which
(12:34):
he led, was fading into oblivion. So it could be said,
I think with some fairness, that Marco Polo's travels, which
in many ways were accurate... misled rather than inspired Columbus.
And he spent his entire career, four voyages, in a
futile effort to discover this maritime route to China. Okay,
(12:59):
in the process, he stumbled across what we know and
now and now called the New World. And that was
the beginning of what we also call globalization. Now, we
can debate endlessly whether this was a good thing or
a band thing. But once Columbus had started this process
(13:20):
of going back and forth between what we now call
the Americas and Spain and Europe, there was no stopping it.
And it wasn't just trade, and it wasn't just geopolitics.
It was also what we call the Columbus Exchange.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
But the.
Speaker 3 (13:44):
And other things that could not be undone because what
you left behind stayed and transformed the landscapes of both
the old world and the new. On the first voyage,
his initial contacts, this was the 1492 voyage, were tentative
and respectful. He wrote, and he was a big letter writer,
(14:08):
I hope to win them to the love and service
of their highnesses, by which he meant Ferdinand and Isabella,
and the whole Spanish nation. They have no religion, but
they are not idolaters. They believe that power and goodness
dwell in the sky and are firmly convinced that I
have come from the sky with these ships and people.
(14:28):
This is because they are not stupid. Far from it.
They are men of great intelligence, for they give a
marvelously good account of everything, but they have never before
seen men clothed or ships like these. Columbus was probably
talking about one of two tribes in the Caribbean. The
Taino was probably the most likely, and they were fairly sophisticated,
(14:55):
as he realized, and they were not particularly hostile to
Columbus's arrival. Some of them were very curious and welcomed him. However,
some of the behavior of Columbus's followers, or those who
came after him, was so outrageous that that what we
think of as the atrocities that we attribute to Columbus
(15:19):
were actually perpetrated by those who came afterwards, sometimes in
his name and sometimes independently. Some of the worst of them,
for example, one of his lieutenants, Michel de Cuneo, wrote
about capturing and raping a beautiful indigenous woman whom he
claims the Lord Admiral, that was Columbus, gave to him.
(15:41):
And then he writes about how she was unwilling and
scraped her with his fingernails so that he wished he
had never laid eyes on her. Finally, he got a
piece of rope and punished her with it. These kinds
of letters were circulated around Europe and sensationalized this voyage.
So the impression of it went from being one of
(16:04):
trade and a religious mission to one of complete exploitation.
Columbus also decided that one of the other tribes, the Caribs,
as opposed to the Taino, were cannibals. And he wrote
after the second voyage that the Caribs eat the male
children that they have been adopted by their women and
(16:29):
only bring up the children of their own women. In
other words, they eat the children of a rival indigenous people.
And then to top it off, he reported that They
say that human flesh is so good that there is
nothing like it in the world. Well, again, these kinds
of accounts electrified Europe, Spain, and not in a good way,
(16:51):
and set off a big reaction that changed the color
of everything. At the same time, while this was going on,
unknown to Columbus and his sailors in Europe, something maybe
more important was going on. and one that continues to
this day. That's the Columbian Exchange, which I mentioned earlier.
(17:15):
This was first identified by Alfred Crosby at the University
of Texas at Austin, and it indicates the exchange and
commingling of bacteria and plants and animals between the Old
World and the New, beginning in 1492 and then the
subsequent four voyages, when there was a cross-fertilizing of these
(17:40):
separate landmasses brought about by Columbus and his followers.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
And you've been listening to historian Lawrence Burgreen tell the story,
the rich and complicated story, the nuanced story of Christopher Columbus,
one of the great storytellers in this country, Lawrence says.
His book is Columbus, The Four Voyages. I urge you
to get it. You will not put it down. Get
two copies. Give it to a friend. We learn so
(18:05):
much about the context and the times in which he lived.
Lawrence isn't one of those historians who judge people out
of context, but yet he's honest as honest can be.
The full picture, the good, the bad, and the ugly.
And my goodness, the international trade lanes that Columbus started,
he started, for better or worse, global trade.
Speaker 2 (18:25):
He started globalization.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
And it changed not only the New World, it changed
the Old World, too. Also, a great discussion, a great
piece of storytelling there. on how Columbus viewed the native tribes,
and more importantly, how people used his name to do just, well,
tragic and ugly things. And of course, some of Columbus's
own writings and the impact they had on the native
(18:51):
tribes that lived here before his arrival. When we return,
more of this remarkable story, this rich and complicated story,
the story of Christopher Columbus, here on Our American Stories.
(19:38):
And we continue with our American stories and with the
story of Christopher Columbus as told by Lawrence Burgreen.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
Let's pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 3 (19:50):
Columbus brought white potatoes, sweet potatoes, maize, and manioc, which
is a rather starchy root from the New World to
the back, the old Europe. And he brought wheat, turnips, barley, apples,
and rice from Europe to the Americas. They made a
big difference because they enabled the people in the Americas
(20:12):
who started growing them to rapidly increase the population there.
But there was more, got more complicated. Columbus and his
men brought horses, cattle, sheep, and goats to the New World.
We have to imagine what it was like without horses,
without cattle before them. They also brought back to Europe cattle.
(20:35):
pathogens that were unknown. Remember, people didn't really know about
germ theory in those days. These pathogens had a devastating effect. Smallpox, malaria, chickenpox, influenza,
and yellow fever all came thanks to Columbus and his men.
Not intentionally. He never decided, okay, we're going to intentionally
(20:58):
infect defenseless people in another land. They didn't realize they
were doing it. Some other effects of this Colombian exchange,
alcohol and alcoholism. They weren't alcoholics in the New World
or alcohol before Columbus. Alcohol and alcoholism devastated local populations.
(21:19):
So as you can see, this Colombian exchange was complicated
and multi-layered. Once that was started, it could not be undone.
Music Columbus' first voyage was relatively quick. As I mentioned,
it seemed to be successful. The second voyage was meant
as a follow-up. He wanted to capitalize on it. Finally,
(21:41):
when he got to the third voyage, which was 1498
and 1500, in a way, this was the most complicated
of all, and we see a lot of the contradictions
in the Columbus voyages coming to the fore. He had
a very difficult time maintaining order among the group. and
he had also had a difficult time maintaining the pretense
(22:06):
that he was going to China or Asia. He was
also undermined by his brother, Bartholomew, who was much more
interested in plunder and conquest and did not share Columbus's
messianic visions or ideals. At the meantime of this voyage,
(22:26):
he seemed to be losing his mind, or at least
temporarily losing his reason. On this third voyage, once he
discovered Venezuela, another major accomplishment, but again, not China, he
decided that he was sailing uphill, as he wrote about, which,
of course, one can't do, and that he had discovered
(22:47):
the entrance to paradise. And in case you were wondering,
it was a little bit north of Venezuela, so I
don't think anybody else has ever found it since then.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
Joking.
Speaker 3 (22:56):
Anyway, he wrote that Each time I sailed from Spain
to the Indies, I found that when I reached a
point a hundred leagues west of the Azores, the heavens,
the stars, and the temperatures of the air and the
water of the sea abruptly changed. It was as if
the seas sloped upward. He was surprised because he felt
(23:20):
that the Earth was spherical. He believed it, and he
knew it to be true. He decided then that the
Earth must be not round, but, as he put it, quote,
the shape of a pear, which is round everywhere except
at the stalk, where it juts out a long way.
At this point, you know, he seemed to be more
(23:41):
and more detached from reality, and he then talked about
this watery summit that he found. He didn't believe anyone
could actually, quote, ascend to the top. More complications ensued,
to the point where Spain for then and Isabella decided
to appoint an inspector to see what was happening with
(24:04):
Columbus because they were alarmed by reports of cruelty and
by Columbus's delusions. They appointed Francisco de Bobadilla, and his
idea was to try and clean up this mess in Columbus.
So he arrived in August of 1500, and wanted to
(24:25):
see what was actually going on. He was actually there
in Santo Domingo. And what he saw was worse than
anyone back in Spain had imagined. He was confronted by gallows,
rotting corpses. And who was overlooking this was Columbus's other brother,
not Bartholomew, but Diego. And he felt that he was
(24:48):
doing the right thing. And he boasted to Bobadilla, that
five additional Spaniards were to be hanged the next day.
The reason was because he believed that they were going
to stage a mutiny or a rebellion against Columbus and
his two brothers. So he felt that he was carrying
out the wishes of Spain by doing this. Of course,
(25:12):
it was exactly the opposite. Executing Spaniards was, of course,
an extremely grave offense. So he found himself jailed. And
the search went out for Columbus himself, who now found
himself in big trouble and spent most of his life
under suspicion for these atrocities. One of the things we're
(25:37):
lucky about with Columbus is that we have so many
different impressions of what he was really like. However, there
is one important part, crucial part of the story that
we don't know about. We don't know what the Taino
or other indigenous peoples actually thought. We can guess, they're
sometimes quoted, we can judge or infer from their actions. Still,
(26:02):
it's largely based on speculation. And, you know, we can
speculate in favor of one side or another, but there
is some sense they did regard Columbus as a messiah too,
but not in the sense that Columbus thought of himself
as bearing a divine message. but as a harbinger of
(26:24):
the end of time. Because apparently, and some people have suggested,
that there was a myth that was prevalent or a
belief among the Taino and other peoples that when ships
like this appeared, that was the end of the world. Therefore,
they responded in a drastic way. Many of them committed suicide.
(26:47):
They jumped off of cliffs. They poisoned one another. Columbus
saw some of this and was absolutely mystified about that,
and he had no way of knowing why this was
happening without realizing that he had actually unintentionally triggered it.
So this is a particularly tragic instance of unintended consequences.
(27:12):
You can see that Columbus throughout these voyages and throughout
his life ricocheted around from one misconception to another, from
misplaced idealism to unintentional or overlooked cruelty. That makes him
an extraordinarily complex figure and also a very important figure
because the results of his voyage are with us to
(27:34):
this day and won't be undone. They are really permanent.
So that makes him one of the most important figures
in the history of exploration, if not history, both for
better and for worse. And I think he speaks a
lot to the human condition about our own susceptibility or fallibility,
(27:54):
about both inspiring and deleterious effects of belief. That's why
he still grips our imagination as well as our intellect.
Speaker 1 (28:07):
And a terrific job on the editing, production, and storytelling
by our own Greg Hengler. And a special thanks to
Lawrence Burgreen. His book, Columbus, The Four Voyages. When you
get it, you will not put it down. Go to
Amazon or the usual suspects. Again, it's Columbus, the four voyages.
And what a story he told, so complicated, almost a
(28:29):
dual nature to almost everything that happens. Here's the good,
here's the bad, much of it an unintended consequence of
this very.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
New partnership, this new globalization.
Speaker 1 (28:41):
Columbus brings white potatoes, sweet potatoes, and maize from the
new world to the old, And he brings wheat, turnips, apples,
and rice from Europe to the Americas. Mutual benefits there.
He also, my goodness, brings so many more things. Horses, cattle, sheep,
and goats from Europe to the New World. Can you
(29:02):
imagine the country without these things?
Speaker 2 (29:04):
It's unimaginable.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
And, of course, smallpox, too, and other pathogens. And again,
he didn't do it knowing that he was doing what
he was doing. These are unintended consequences. of this new globalization,
of this new Colombian exchange. And let's not forget alcohol
and alcoholism too. Again, not done on purpose, but these
(29:27):
were the undetending consequences of Columbus's journey. Contradictions, my goodness,
they're everywhere. By the way, we live with them in
our own lives too as human beings. But they all
come to the fore, including that last trip. His own
brothers turn out to be a real problem in his life.
And by all accounts, by the end of that third voyage, Columbus, well,
(29:48):
he's lost his mind. The story in the end shows
the nature of Columbus, ricocheting from one misperception and misconception
to another. filled with both an inspiring nature, but also
in the end, all those flaws and fallibilities. The story
of Christopher Columbus, in the end, the story of humanity,
(30:09):
human nature, and the story of early America, here on
Our American Stories.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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