In light of the atrocities precipitated by his famous voyage, Christopher Columbus can hardly be considered the hero America has made him out to be. He was a man with a passion for geography, eager to please the Spanish nobles who had sponsored him in his mission to reach the East by going west; he was also the harbinger of genocide in the Indies. But in the early 19th century, America was in need of a hero, and Columbus, “the discoverer of America,” fit the bill nicely. Although Columbus was not the hero he is commonly perceived as, American society was not wrong in idolizing him after the fact of his conquest.
There is little doubt Columbus and his contemporaries committed “irreparable crimes” against the Arawak of the Caribbean. During their invasion of the Indies, the Spaniards, according to the firsthand accounts of Bartolome de Las Casas, “not only stabbed and dismembered [the Indians], but cut them to pieces as if dealing with sheep in the slaughterhouse.” They were eager to wage “unjustly cruel and bloody wars,” aiming to acquire gold, slaves, and other valuable commodities by forceful means; or in the words of Las Casas: “to swell themselves with riches in a very brief time and thus rise to a high estate disproportionate to their merits.” Those Indians who were not killed were allocated to the gold mines or the cassava plantations, where they were quite literally worked to death. Additionally, the Spaniards brought with them from Europe such foreign diseases as small pox and measles, which ravaged the vulnerable Indian population. In 1494, two years after Columbus’s landing on Hispaniola, half of the 250,000 Indians on the island were dead.
The Spaniards’ avarice was a reflection of the European state of mind during the Renaissance. By today’s standards, the Spaniards would have been ostracized and condemned for their actions in the Caribbean; international law may have even demanded the judicial punishment of Columbus and the other Conquistadors. But there were no international courts in 15th century Europe, and through his actions Columbus was doing his homeland a great service by harvesting slaves and gold and other such valuables, so the genocide in the Indies went unpunished and widely unheard of.
Three centuries after Columbus’s expedition, revolution engulfed Britain's thirteen American colonies. In 1783, the United State of America won its independence from Britain, and all ties America had had with its fatherland were severed. America’s founding fathers were loath to be romanticized as heroes; they thought it undemocratic. So, fledgling America, having no substantive history of its own, found itself in need of a hero with whom to associate its national identity. Gradually, Columbus grew to fill this role.
As American Professor Michael Kammen reminds us: “societies in fact reconstruct their pasts rather than faithfully record them,” doing so “with the needs of contemporary culture clearly in mind.” In 1829, American writer Washington Irving published his “Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus,” an exaggerated account of Columbus’s travels and achievements. The novel grew rapidly in popularity amongst forward thinking Americans, for in Columbus, they saw a bit of themselves. He was the solitary individual who struck out against the unknown western seas, just as America was a nation striving to penetrate its vast western frontier. He was the underdog who overcame the cynicism of nobles, just as America had overcome their colonial rule. He was, or was perceived to be, all this and more; even today, when more facts on Columbus’s crimes have been uncovered, we celebrate a national holiday in his honor.
Columbus was made into the centerpiece of American mythology long after his actions in the Indies had run their course. The glorification of Columbus and the extirpation of the Arawak were unrelated events; the Columbus America knew and the Columbus who wiped out the Arawak were two different people. Columbus was not a killer in America’s eyes, whatever he may have been in waking life. And since, by the late 18th century, it was far too late to consider punishing Columbus for his crimes, there was no harm in remembering him as the bold and intrepid discoverer of America, just as there was no harm in the Athenians fervent belief in their unsubstantiated mythology. Both societies’ baseless hero histories served only to bolster morale, not to educate or dispense condemnation, and they served their purpose well. The American Columbus was less of a man and more of a legend, and in the context of American history, should be considered only as such.
