September 19, 2023 • 30 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, for generations, students in American elementary schools were taught Christopher Columbus “sailed the ocean blue” to discover America in 1492. Today, that lesson is changing in schools across the suburbs and country. Here to tell the story of Christopher Columbus is Laurence Bergreen, who wrote the definitive biography Columbus: The Four Voyages.
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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 fell
the ocean blue to discover America in fourteen ninety two.
Today that lesson is changing in schools across the country.
Here to tell the real story of Christopher Columbus is
(00:30):
Lawrence Bergreen, who wrote the definitive biography Columbus, The Four Voyages.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Let's take a listen. Hello. My name is Lawrence burg Green,
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 by the month. He's
(01:02):
a figure that 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
(01:24):
with each generation. He's been hated, 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 at all.
The flaws were huge, but also so were his accomplishments.
(01:48):
There's a reason why we remember Columbus. He tied together
with his four voyages, the Old World and the New
first of all, who was Columbus Christopher Columbus Colombo was
born in Genoa in fourteen fifty one. He was the
(02:10):
son of a weaver. He went to see at fourteen,
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 Genoese, he joined a colony of
expatriot Genoese sailors in Portugal. Later on he was exploring
(02:32):
the coast of West Africa and actually a board another
ship 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 map maker. This was kind of interesting because conceptions
(02:57):
of the world at that time were by our standards
faulty and misleading to an almost comical extent. Both Alomu's
maps and other maps of that era who reinforced the
belief that China and all the riches that Columbus eventually
went to seat from China lay just to the west
of the Americas, that the Pacific Ocean was not the
(03:19):
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 had known the
(03:43):
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
boldened to undertake it was based on a series of
fault this conceptions. It's just one of the many ironies.
(04:04):
He spent a lot of time getting backing for the voyage.
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 forty forty in those days
was late middle age, so he was, in a way
what seemed like the back nine of his career. On
(04:27):
the other hand, Columbus had some gifts, and his 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 boy
or a landmark, timing the distance it took to move
(04:48):
from one end of his ship to another. If it
sounds primitive, it was, but it also worked, so he
wasn't dependent on technology or intellectual constructs that were beyond
his kent. 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
(05:12):
than the mathematical calculations of the era's leading cosmographers. They
generally had never gone to see, 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
(05:33):
also had this conviction that he could sail from the
western coast of Spain to the eastern coast of 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 because he would have realized
(05:55):
how faulty his assumptions were. But he did have a
sin and so that God wanted him to do this.
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
(06:15):
don't mean a mild, prompting an intuitive one. I mean
actually hearing a voice. And we know that Columbus have
this experience of God speaking to him because he wrote
down what he thought God actually told him at critical times.
What was so remarkable about all this was that when
he set out on this voyage the very first time,
(06:38):
the one that we all study about in school, in
fourteen ninety two, 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 the dangers that he faced and his lack
of specific knowledge. And he made this voyage three more times,
(07:02):
each time improving based on hard won experience, until on
the last voyage he was able to cross the Atlantic
in only sixteen days. It was incredible. Of course, the
shorter the voyage, the less dangers you faced. There was
less danger of storms, less danger of dehydration, less danger
(07:28):
of you needs at sea, so this worked in his favor.
His crew on these voyages was very problematic because he
sailed on the first voyage just that day after the
Spanish Inquisition became the law of the land that was
intended to drive Muslims out of Spain, but it also
(07:52):
had ripple effects across Europe and all the way to Portugal,
and was really an important watershed and history. It was
the rainchild, 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
(08:15):
to get sort of backing from them, but I'd say
it was tentative. His first fleet was three cramped, leaking,
fragile vessels. They were old and falling apart. We would
call them rustbuckets, except they were made out of wood,
and they were small. The Santa Maria, which was the largest,
could hold only forty sailors.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
And you've been listening to historian Lawrence Bergreen 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 learned to get to 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 forty years old when he
tries to get the backing to do this, and forty,
as Lawrence pointed out, is the back nine of your
(09:17):
career back in the late fifteenth 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
when he wrote in his own journals and memoirs. A
really spectacular part of Lawrence's book is hearing about those
(09:41):
messages from God, from Columbus himself, and of course that
first voyage and those three sort of rickety ships. You're
going to hear more of the story of Christopher Columbus
with Lawrence Bergreen as our American stories continue, and we
(10:09):
continue with our American stories and the story of Christopher
Columbus as told by historian Lawrence Bergreen, let's pick up
where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
Now. Another one of Columbus's, it seems almost comical of 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 an 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
(11:51):
what he called the idol worshipers of the yeast. 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.
(12:13):
But nobody really bothered at that time to think it
through until he actually went out on the voyage. He
also planned to meet Kubla Khan. He had official letters
from King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. The only problem was
that Kubla Khan had died decades ago. The Mongol Empire,
(12:34):
which he led was fading into oblivion. So it could
be said that 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 feudal effort to discover this maritime route
(12:56):
to China, Okay. 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
(13:18):
this process 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. But the Colombian exchange involved livestock, and scenes
(13:42):
and germs 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 fourteen ninety
two voyage, were tentative and respectful, he wrote, and he
(14:06):
was a big letter writer. I hope to win them
to the love and service of their highnesses, by which
he meant for mend Isbela and the whole Spanish nation.
They have no religion, but they are not idolators. They
believe that power and goodness dwell in the sky, and
are firmly convinced that I have come from the sky
(14:26):
with these ships and people. 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
(14:47):
the Caribbean. The Tayano was probably the most likely, and
they were fairly sophisticated, as he realized, and they were
not particularly hostile to Columbus or rival. Some of them
were very curious and welcomed him. However, some of the
behavior of Columbus's followers or those who came in after him,
(15:11):
was so outrageous that what we think of the as
the atrocities that we attribute to Columbus 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, Michelle de Cuneo, wrote about capturing
(15:33):
and raping a beautiful indigenous woman, whom he claims the
lord Admiral that was Columbus and gave to him. 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
(15:55):
Lennards were circulated around Europe and sensationalized this voice, so
the impression of it went from being one of trade
and a religious mission to one of complete exploitation. Columbus
also decided that one of the other tribes, the Caribs,
(16:16):
as opposed to the Taiano, 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
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
(16:40):
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 and set off a big reaction that changed the
color of everything. At the same time, while this was
(17:00):
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. This was first identified by Alfred Crosby at
the University of Texas at Austin, and it indicates the
(17:24):
change in commingling of bacteria and plants and animals between
the old world and the New beginning in fourteen ninety two,
and then the subsequent Four Voyages when there was a
cross fertilizing of these separate land masses brought about by
Columbus and his followers.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
And you've been listening to historian Lawrence berg Green tell
the story, the rich and complicated story, the nuanced story
of Christopher Columbus, one of the great storytellers in this country.
Lawrence is. His book is Columbus The Four Voyages. Urge
you to get it. You will not put it down.
Get two copies, give it to a friend. We learn
so much about the context and the times in which
(18:07):
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.
He started globalization, and it changed not only the New World,
(18:29):
it changed the old world too. Also a great discussion,
a great piece of storytelling 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
(18:50):
had on the native tribes that lived here before his arrival.
When we returned more of this remarkable story, this rich
and complicated story, the story of Christopher Columbus. Here on
our American stories, and we continue with our American stories
(19:41):
and with the story of Christopher Columbus is told by
Lawrence Bergreen. Let's pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
Columbus brought white potatoes, sweet potatoes, maize, and maniac, which
is a rather starchy root from the New World to
the back the old to 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
(20:35):
pathogens that were unknown. People didn't really know about germ
theory in those days. These pathogens had a devastating effect. Smallpox, malaria,
chicken pox, influenza, and yellow fever all came thanks to
Columbus and his men, not intentionally. He never decided, okay,
(20:56):
we're going to intentionally infect defenseless people in another land.
They didn't realize they were doing it. Some other effects
of this Columbian exchange alcohol and alcoholism. They weren't alcoholics
in the New World or alcohol before Columbus. Alcohol and
alcoholism devastated local populations. So, as you can see, this
(21:20):
Columbian Exchange was complicated and multi layered. Once that was started,
it could not be undone. Columbus's 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, when he got to the third voyage,
(21:42):
which was fourteen ninety eight and fifteen hundred. 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 four he had a very difficult time maintaining
order among the crew, and he had also had a
(22:03):
difficult time maintaining the pretense that he was going to
China or Asia. He was also undermined by his brother Martholomew,
who was much more interested in plunder and conquest and
did not share Columbus's messianic visions or ideals. At the meantime,
(22:25):
on this voyage 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
(22:46):
had discovered the entrance to Paradise, and in case you
were wondering, it was a little bit north of Venezuelas.
So I don't think anybody else has ever found it
since then. Joking anyway, he wrote that each time I
sailed from Spain to the Indies, I found that when
I reached a point one hundred leagues west of the Azores,
the heavens, the stars, and the temperatures of the air
(23:09):
and the water of the sea abruptly changed. It was
as if the seas sloped upward. He was surprised because
he felt that the earth was sphercle. He believed it,
and he knew it to be true. He decided then
that the earth must be not round, but, as he
(23:30):
put it, quote the shape of a pair, 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 and more detastral 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
(23:52):
complications ensued to the point where Spain, for then at
Isabella decided to appoint an inspector to see what was
happening with Columbus. Because they were alarmed by reports of
cruelty and by Columbus's delusions. They appointed Francisco to Bobadilla,
(24:14):
and his idea was to try and clean up this
mess in Columbus. So he arrived in August of fifteen
hundred and wanted to 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.
(24:35):
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 doing the right thing,
and he boasted to Bobadia that five additional Spaniards were
(24:55):
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, it was exactly the opposite.
(25:15):
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.
(25:36):
One of the things we're 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 Tiato or other indigenous people's actually thought.
We can guess they're sometimes quoted that we can judge
(25:59):
or infer from their actions. Still, 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,
(26:22):
but as a harbinger of the end of time, because apparently,
in 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
(26:42):
drastic way. Many of them committed suicide. 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
(27:05):
a particularly tragic instance of unintended consequences. You could see
that the 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
(27:27):
complex figure and also a very important figure because the
results of his voyage are with us this day and
won't be undone. They are really permanent. So that makes
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
(27:50):
about our own susceptibility or fallibility, 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 berg Green 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,
(28:28):
almost a dual nature to almost everything that happens. Here's
the good, here's the bad. Much of it an undintended
consequence of this very new partnership, this new globalization. Columbus
brings white potatoes, sweet potatoes, and maize from the New
World to the old. And he brings wheat, turnips, apples,
(28:48):
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
imagine the country without these things. It's unimaginable. And of
course smallpox too, and other pathogens. And again he didn't
(29:10):
do it knowing that he was doing what he was doing.
These are undetended consequences of this new globalization, of this
new Columbian exchange. And let's not forget alcohol and alcoholism too,
again not done on purpose, that these were the undetended
consequences of Columbus's journey. Contradictions, my goodness, they're everywhere, and
(29:33):
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, he's lost his mind. The story in the
end shows the nature of Columbus ricocheng for on one
(29:55):
misperception and misconception to another, filled with both and inspired nature,
but also in the end all those flaws and fallibilities.
The story of Christopher Columbus in the end, the story
of humanity, 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 fell
the ocean blue to discover America in fourteen ninety two.
Today that lesson is changing in schools across the country.
Here to tell the real story of Christopher Columbus is
(00:30):
Lawrence Bergreen, who wrote the definitive biography Columbus, The Four Voyages.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Let's take a listen. Hello. My name is Lawrence burg Green,
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 by the month. He's
(01:02):
a figure that 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
(01:24):
with each generation. He's been hated, 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 at all.
The flaws were huge, but also so were his accomplishments.
(01:48):
There's a reason why we remember Columbus. He tied together
with his four voyages, the Old World and the New
first of all, who was Columbus Christopher Columbus Colombo was
born in Genoa in fourteen fifty one. He was the
(02:10):
son of a weaver. He went to see at fourteen,
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 Genoese, he joined a colony of
expatriot Genoese sailors in Portugal. Later on he was exploring
(02:32):
the coast of West Africa and actually a board another
ship 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 map maker. This was kind of interesting because conceptions
(02:57):
of the world at that time were by our standards
faulty and misleading to an almost comical extent. Both Alomu's
maps and other maps of that era who reinforced the
belief that China and all the riches that Columbus eventually
went to seat from China lay just to the west
of the Americas, that the Pacific Ocean was not the
(03:19):
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 had known the
(03:43):
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
boldened to undertake it was based on a series of
fault this conceptions. It's just one of the many ironies.
(04:04):
He spent a lot of time getting backing for the voyage.
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 forty forty in those days
was late middle age, so he was, in a way
what seemed like the back nine of his career. On
(04:27):
the other hand, Columbus had some gifts, and his 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 boy
or a landmark, timing the distance it took to move
(04:48):
from one end of his ship to another. If it
sounds primitive, it was, but it also worked, so he
wasn't dependent on technology or intellectual constructs that were beyond
his kent. 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
(05:12):
than the mathematical calculations of the era's leading cosmographers. They
generally had never gone to see, 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
(05:33):
also had this conviction that he could sail from the
western coast of Spain to the eastern coast of 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 because he would have realized
(05:55):
how faulty his assumptions were. But he did have a
sin and so that God wanted him to do this.
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
(06:15):
don't mean a mild, prompting an intuitive one. I mean
actually hearing a voice. And we know that Columbus have
this experience of God speaking to him because he wrote
down what he thought God actually told him at critical times.
What was so remarkable about all this was that when
he set out on this voyage the very first time,
(06:38):
the one that we all study about in school, in
fourteen ninety two, 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 the dangers that he faced and his lack
of specific knowledge. And he made this voyage three more times,
(07:02):
each time improving based on hard won experience, until on
the last voyage he was able to cross the Atlantic
in only sixteen days. It was incredible. Of course, the
shorter the voyage, the less dangers you faced. There was
less danger of storms, less danger of dehydration, less danger
(07:28):
of you needs at sea, so this worked in his favor.
His crew on these voyages was very problematic because he
sailed on the first voyage just that day after the
Spanish Inquisition became the law of the land that was
intended to drive Muslims out of Spain, but it also
(07:52):
had ripple effects across Europe and all the way to Portugal,
and was really an important watershed and history. It was
the rainchild, 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
(08:15):
to get sort of backing from them, but I'd say
it was tentative. His first fleet was three cramped, leaking,
fragile vessels. They were old and falling apart. We would
call them rustbuckets, except they were made out of wood,
and they were small. The Santa Maria, which was the largest,
could hold only forty sailors.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
And you've been listening to historian Lawrence Bergreen 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 learned to get to 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 forty years old when he
tries to get the backing to do this, and forty,
as Lawrence pointed out, is the back nine of your
(09:17):
career back in the late fifteenth 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
when he wrote in his own journals and memoirs. A
really spectacular part of Lawrence's book is hearing about those
(09:41):
messages from God, from Columbus himself, and of course that
first voyage and those three sort of rickety ships. You're
going to hear more of the story of Christopher Columbus
with Lawrence Bergreen as our American stories continue, and we
(10:09):
continue with our American stories and the story of Christopher
Columbus as told by historian Lawrence Bergreen, let's pick up
where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
Now. Another one of Columbus's, it seems almost comical of 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 an 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
(11:51):
what he called the idol worshipers of the yeast. 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.
(12:13):
But nobody really bothered at that time to think it
through until he actually went out on the voyage. He
also planned to meet Kubla Khan. He had official letters
from King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. The only problem was
that Kubla Khan had died decades ago. The Mongol Empire,
(12:34):
which he led was fading into oblivion. So it could
be said that 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 feudal effort to discover this maritime route
(12:56):
to China, Okay. 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
(13:18):
this process 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. But the Colombian exchange involved livestock, and scenes
(13:42):
and germs 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 fourteen ninety
two voyage, were tentative and respectful, he wrote, and he
(14:06):
was a big letter writer. I hope to win them
to the love and service of their highnesses, by which
he meant for mend Isbela and the whole Spanish nation.
They have no religion, but they are not idolators. They
believe that power and goodness dwell in the sky, and
are firmly convinced that I have come from the sky
(14:26):
with these ships and people. 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
(14:47):
the Caribbean. The Tayano was probably the most likely, and
they were fairly sophisticated, as he realized, and they were
not particularly hostile to Columbus or rival. Some of them
were very curious and welcomed him. However, some of the
behavior of Columbus's followers or those who came in after him,
(15:11):
was so outrageous that what we think of the as
the atrocities that we attribute to Columbus 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, Michelle de Cuneo, wrote about capturing
(15:33):
and raping a beautiful indigenous woman, whom he claims the
lord Admiral that was Columbus and gave to him. 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
(15:55):
Lennards were circulated around Europe and sensationalized this voice, so
the impression of it went from being one of trade
and a religious mission to one of complete exploitation. Columbus
also decided that one of the other tribes, the Caribs,
(16:16):
as opposed to the Taiano, 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
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
(16:40):
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 and set off a big reaction that changed the
color of everything. At the same time, while this was
(17:00):
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. This was first identified by Alfred Crosby at
the University of Texas at Austin, and it indicates the
(17:24):
change in commingling of bacteria and plants and animals between
the old world and the New beginning in fourteen ninety two,
and then the subsequent Four Voyages when there was a
cross fertilizing of these separate land masses brought about by
Columbus and his followers.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
And you've been listening to historian Lawrence berg Green tell
the story, the rich and complicated story, the nuanced story
of Christopher Columbus, one of the great storytellers in this country.
Lawrence is. His book is Columbus The Four Voyages. Urge
you to get it. You will not put it down.
Get two copies, give it to a friend. We learn
so much about the context and the times in which
(18:07):
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.
He started globalization, and it changed not only the New World,
(18:29):
it changed the old world too. Also a great discussion,
a great piece of storytelling 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
(18:50):
had on the native tribes that lived here before his arrival.
When we returned more of this remarkable story, this rich
and complicated story, the story of Christopher Columbus. Here on
our American stories, and we continue with our American stories
(19:41):
and with the story of Christopher Columbus is told by
Lawrence Bergreen. Let's pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
Columbus brought white potatoes, sweet potatoes, maize, and maniac, which
is a rather starchy root from the New World to
the back the old to 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
(20:35):
pathogens that were unknown. People didn't really know about germ
theory in those days. These pathogens had a devastating effect. Smallpox, malaria,
chicken pox, influenza, and yellow fever all came thanks to
Columbus and his men, not intentionally. He never decided, okay,
(20:56):
we're going to intentionally infect defenseless people in another land.
They didn't realize they were doing it. Some other effects
of this Columbian exchange alcohol and alcoholism. They weren't alcoholics
in the New World or alcohol before Columbus. Alcohol and
alcoholism devastated local populations. So, as you can see, this
(21:20):
Columbian Exchange was complicated and multi layered. Once that was started,
it could not be undone. Columbus's 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, when he got to the third voyage,
(21:42):
which was fourteen ninety eight and fifteen hundred. 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 four he had a very difficult time maintaining
order among the crew, and he had also had a
(22:03):
difficult time maintaining the pretense that he was going to
China or Asia. He was also undermined by his brother Martholomew,
who was much more interested in plunder and conquest and
did not share Columbus's messianic visions or ideals. At the meantime,
(22:25):
on this voyage 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
(22:46):
had discovered the entrance to Paradise, and in case you
were wondering, it was a little bit north of Venezuelas.
So I don't think anybody else has ever found it
since then. Joking anyway, he wrote that each time I
sailed from Spain to the Indies, I found that when
I reached a point one hundred leagues west of the Azores,
the heavens, the stars, and the temperatures of the air
(23:09):
and the water of the sea abruptly changed. It was
as if the seas sloped upward. He was surprised because
he felt that the earth was sphercle. He believed it,
and he knew it to be true. He decided then
that the earth must be not round, but, as he
(23:30):
put it, quote the shape of a pair, 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 and more detastral 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
(23:52):
complications ensued to the point where Spain, for then at
Isabella decided to appoint an inspector to see what was
happening with Columbus. Because they were alarmed by reports of
cruelty and by Columbus's delusions. They appointed Francisco to Bobadilla,
(24:14):
and his idea was to try and clean up this
mess in Columbus. So he arrived in August of fifteen
hundred and wanted to 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.
(24:35):
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 doing the right thing,
and he boasted to Bobadia that five additional Spaniards were
(24:55):
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, it was exactly the opposite.
(25:15):
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.
(25:36):
One of the things we're 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 Tiato or other indigenous people's actually thought.
We can guess they're sometimes quoted that we can judge
(25:59):
or infer from their actions. Still, 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,
(26:22):
but as a harbinger of the end of time, because apparently,
in 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
(26:42):
drastic way. Many of them committed suicide. 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
(27:05):
a particularly tragic instance of unintended consequences. You could see
that the 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
(27:27):
complex figure and also a very important figure because the
results of his voyage are with us this day and
won't be undone. They are really permanent. So that makes
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
(27:50):
about our own susceptibility or fallibility, 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 berg Green 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,
(28:28):
almost a dual nature to almost everything that happens. Here's
the good, here's the bad. Much of it an undintended
consequence of this very new partnership, this new globalization. Columbus
brings white potatoes, sweet potatoes, and maize from the New
World to the old. And he brings wheat, turnips, apples,
(28:48):
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
imagine the country without these things. It's unimaginable. And of
course smallpox too, and other pathogens. And again he didn't
(29:10):
do it knowing that he was doing what he was doing.
These are undetended consequences of this new globalization, of this
new Columbian exchange. And let's not forget alcohol and alcoholism too,
again not done on purpose, that these were the undetended
consequences of Columbus's journey. Contradictions, my goodness, they're everywhere, and
(29:33):
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, he's lost his mind. The story in the
end shows the nature of Columbus ricocheng for on one
(29:55):
misperception and misconception to another, filled with both and inspired nature,
but also in the end all those flaws and fallibilities.
The story of Christopher Columbus in the end, the story
of humanity, human nature, and the story of early America.
Here on our American stories.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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