Why Are We Still Celebrating “Columbus Day”?

October 12, 2018 marks the 526th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival on the island of San Salvador in the Bahamas in 1492. You have doubtlessly heard much about the controversy surrounding Columbus Day (which actually fell on October 8 this year), but, surprisingly, most people do not know the full reasons why so many people are opposed to it.

This is because, for over a century and half, students have been taught a thoroughly inaccurate and glamorized tale about who Columbus was and what he did. Even today as educators and activists work to disseminate the horrifying truth about Columbus, the legend remains strong. In this article, I want to debunk a few of the most popular misconceptions about Columbus and expose some of the atrocities he committed.

#1. Columbus was not the first person to discover that the earth is spherical. In fact, his knowledge of geography was consistently poor, and sometimes ludicrously so.

In elementary school, most of us were taught that Christopher Columbus was the first person to propose that the earth is spherical, that everybody else at the time thought it was flat, and that scholars laughed at him, saying that, if he tried to sail across the Atlantic, he would fall off the edge of the earth. This whole narrative is completely untrue. In fact, as I discuss in much greater detail in this article I published in February 2019, by the time Columbus was born, the sphericity of the earth had already been universally accepted among educated people for over two millennia.

We do not know who the first person to propose the notion of the sphericity of the earth was. Later legends mentioned by the third-century AD Greek biographer Diogenes Laërtios in his book The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers attribute the idea of the sphericity of the earth to both the Greek philosopher Pythagoras of Samos (lived c. 570 – c. 495 BC) and the slightly later philosopher Parmenides of Elea (lived c. 515 – late fifth century BC), but both of these attributions are highly dubious. The attribution of the idea of the sphericity of the earth to Pythagoras in particular probably comes from a pseudepigraphical poem.

We do know, however, that, by around the end of the fifth century BC or thereabouts, the sphericity of the earth was common knowledge among educated people in the Greek world. The Athenian philosopher Plato (lived c. 428 – c. 347 BC) explicitly describes the earth as a sphere in his dialogue Phaidon 108a and his wording makes it sound as though this was common knowledge.

Plato’s student Aristotle of Stageira (lived 384 – 322 BC), whose writings were widely studied during Columbus’s lifetime, presents several cogent arguments in favor of the sphericity of the earth in Book Two of his treatise De Caelo. In the treatise, Aristotle appeals to the following pieces of empirical evidence:

• Gravity pulls all matter towards the center of the earth, which can only result in a planet that is roughly spherical.
• The earth always casts a circular shadow on the moon during a lunar eclipse. The only shape that always casts a circular shadow no matter what direction the light is coming from is a sphere.
• When a person travels north or south, the stars that are visible change, indicating that the surface of the earth must be curved.

Throughout the entire Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, anyone in Europe with even the vaguest smattering of education knew that the earth was spherical. Here is an excerpt from the very first chapter of a widely-used introductory astronomy textbook titled Tractatus de Sphaera, written by a medieval scholar named Johannes de Sacrobosco (lived c. 1195 – c. 1256 AD), in which he explains that the earth is spherical and presents empirical evidence in support of this fact, as translated by Lynn Thorndike:

“That the earth, too, is round is shown thus. The signs and stars do not rise and set the same for all men everywhere but rise and set sooner for those in the east than for those in the west; and of this there is no other cause than the bulge of the earth. Moreover, celestial phenomena evidence that they rise sooner for Orientals than for westerners. For one and the same eclipse of the moon which appears to us in the first hour of the night appears to Orientals about the third hour of the night, which proves that they had night and sunset before we did, of which setting the bulge of the earth is the cause.”

“That the earth also has a bulge from north to south and vice versa is shown thus: To those living toward the north, certain stars are always visible, namely, those near the North Pole, while others which are near the South Pole are always concealed from them. If, then, anyone should proceed from the north southward, he might go so far that the stars which formerly were always visible to him now would tend toward their setting. And the farther south he went, the more they would be moved toward their setting.”

“Again, that same man now could see stars which formerly had always been hidden from him. And the reverse would happen to anyone going from the south northward. The cause of this is simply the bulge of the earth. Again, if the earth were flat from east to west, the stars would rise as soon for westerners as for Orientals. which is false. Also, if the earth were flat from north to south and vice versa, the stars which were always visible to anyone would continue to be so wherever he went, which is false. But it seems flat to human sight because it is so extensive.”

Not only do medieval writers consistently describe the earth as a sphere; medieval depictions of the earth consistently show it as a sphere as well. For instance, below is a twelfth-century manuscript illustration from the Liber Divinorum Operum by Hildegard of Bingen, showing the earth as a sphere. Notice that the people and trees are correctly shown extending from the earth radially:

Here is a fourteenth-century illustration from a manuscript copy of L’Image du Monde, originally written by the French priest and poet Gautier de Metz in around 1246:

Where, then, did the whole story come from about Columbus being laughed at and ridiculed by scholars for thinking that the world was round come from? As it turns out, the whole story was invented out of whole cloth by the American writer Washington Irving (lived 1783 – 1859), the same man who wrote The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and “Rip Van Winkle.” In January 1828, Irving published a largely fictional biography of Christopher Columbus titled A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, in which he portrayed Columbus being mocked by scholars for believing in the sphericity of the earth.

Despite being almost completely fictional, Irving’s biography became wildly popular. It was required reading for many students in schools all across the United States. It soon became widely accepted as the authoritative account of Columbus’s life. By the end of the nineteenth century, more than 175 different editions of it had been printed.

Irving’s purpose in writing his biography was to entertain, not to convey accurate historical information. The main reason why Irving claimed that people in the 1400s believed the earth was flat was simply because he thought it made the story more entertaining. He also wanted to portray Columbus as a hero in line with the Romantic notions of his time: a brilliant freethinker and a rebel against society.

This was not based on who the historical Columbus actually was, but rather on the sort of hero Irving thought his audience would be most likely to sympathize with. Irving, a Protestant of Scottish descent, may have also had a more sinister motivation to portray the Spanish Catholic scholars Columbus was debating with as ignorant, stubborn, and arrogant.

In historical reality, Columbus was mocked by scholars, but not for believing that the earth was round. The real reason why scholars saw him as delusional had nothing to do with the shape of the earth and everything to do with the size of the earth. You see, in the third century BC, the Greek geographer Eratosthenes of Kyrene (lived c. 276 – c. 195 BC) calculated the approximate circumference of the earth within a remarkable degree of accuracy. His calculations were well known to scholars in western Europe during Columbus’s lifetime.

Because it was well known that the ocean between Europe and Asia was incredibly vast and no one knew that the Americas existed, experts were convinced that a journey across the Atlantic would be an impossible suicide mission. Columbus, however, influenced by the absurdly inaccurate estimates of the Italian astronomer Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli (lived 1397 – 1482), insisted that the ocean between Portugal and Japan was much smaller than most scholars at the time believed and that would take a few weeks to sail across at the very most.

Needless to say, this notion is utterly ridiculous. That is why, when Columbus first submitted his plans for a voyage to India across the Atlantic to King John II of Portugal in 1485, the scholars John II showed the plans to warned that Columbus was delusional. John II, quite reasonably, turned Columbus down. In 1486, Columbus appealed to King Ferdinand II of Aragorn and Queen Isabella I of Castille, but, after consulting with their own scholars, who likewise concluded that Columbus’s predictions for the size of the Atlantic Ocean were mathematically implausible, they turned down his proposal as well.

Nonetheless, out of fear that he might go back to John II, they gave him an annual allowance from the crown and ordered every city in Spain to give him free food and lodging. These efforts to appease Columbus proved futile and, in 1488, he appealed to John II again. Once again, his proposal was denied. Columbus also appealed to both Genoa and Venice and was, again, rejected by both. He even sent his brother to the court of King Henry VII of England, but England was unwilling to sponsor Columbus’s preposterous schemes either.

ABOVE: Columbus Before the Queen (1843) by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze

In 1492, Columbus appealed to Ferdinand and Isabella, now joint monarchs of the unified Spain, at the Alcázar of Córdoba. Isabella, taking the advice of her confessor, turned Columbus down again. Columbus was leaving the city on a mule in despair when Ferdinand, worried about the slim possibility that Columbus might actually be right and that he might go to John II of Portugal, intervened. The two monarchs sent the royal guards to escort Columbus back to the palace. They were still convinced that Columbus would be a failure, so they gave him a crew of ninety convicts, an old carrack called the Santa María, and two old caravels.

All three ships given to Columbus for his first voyage were at least second or third-hand, several decades old, in poor condition, and not originally built for sea exploration. In other words, they were precisely the kind of ships that Spain could easily afford to lose at sea. Contrary to popular belief, the names of the three ships on Columbus’s first voyage were not “the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María” because the names Niña and Pinta are both nicknames; they were not the actual names of the ships. The actual name of the Niña was the Santa Clara. The actual name of the Pinta is unknown. The Santa María was originally known as the Gallega, but it was renamed La Santa María de la Inmaculada Concepción (commonly shortened to just Santa María).

The two monarchs promised Columbus that, if his voyage was successful, he would be appointed Admiral of the Ocean Sea, Viceroy and Governor of all the new lands he discovered, that he would be granted ten percent of all revenues from all the new lands he discovered in perpetuity, and that he would be permitted to buy one eighth interest in any commercial venture involving the new lands of any kind and would also receive one eighth of the profits. The expectation, of course, was that Columbus and his crew would die at sea, in which case they would never have to give him any of the rewards they promised him and all they would lose from the adventure would be three old ships they did not need and a few convicted criminals they did not want.

Just as all the scholars had repeatedly warned, Columbus’s predictions for the size of the ocean between Europe and Asia turned out to be dead wrong. He left the Canary Islands on September 6, 1492 and, by the time his ships reached San Salvador on October 12, he was nearly out of food and supplies and his crew was ready mutiny.

Columbus had thought the distance from the Canary Islands to Japan was only about 3,700 kilometers; in reality, it is roughly five times that distance. If the Americas had not been in the way between Columbus and Asia, he and all his crewmembers would have died at sea for certain, just as all those mocking scholars had predicted. In other words, the only reason why Columbus made it to the Americas at all is solely because he turned out to be one extraordinarily lucky idiot.

#2. Columbus did not really “discover” the Americas either.

Christopher Columbus is most famous for having supposedly “discovered” the Americas. The problem is that, like the whole story about him being the first to argue that the earth is a sphere, this one is largely a misconception. There were already people living in the Americas for millennia before Columbus ever set foot there. Archaeological evidence indicates that native Americans crossed over into the Americas between roughly 13,200–15,500 years ago.

Modern historians believe that the indigenous population of the Americas in the 1400s immediately before European contact was over 50 million people, with some historians arguing that there may have been over 100 million. The number of people living in the Americas was comparable to the number of people living in Europe. You can hardly say that someone “discovered” a continent when there were already millions of people living there.

The pre-Columbian peoples of the Americas were not all just living in scattered woodland huts either; some of them had built massive and thriving cities. Some of these pre-Columbian cities in the Americas include: Cahokia (the largest urban center of the Mississippian people in what is now southwestern Illinois), Tenochtitlan (the capital of the Aztec Empire in what is now central Mexico), Cusco (the capital of the Inca Empire in what is now Peru), and plenty of others. The islands Columbus himself explored alone were already inhabited by roughly a quarter million people belonging to the Taíno nation, who lived in towns of varying sizes, some of the largest of which may have had populations of roughly 3,000 people.

Columbus was not even the first European to settle in the Americas; the Norse established a colony at L’Anse aux Meadows in what is now the Great Northern Peninsula in Newfoundland in the late tenth or early eleventh century, roughly 400 years before Columbus. The village was first uncovered by archaeologists in 1960 and has been conclusively identified as a Norse settlement, making it the only definitive pre-Columbian European settlement in the Americas.

Ultimately, of course, the Norse abandoned all their colonies in North America and mostly forgot about North America’s existence, although they continued to tell stories of a land across the Atlantic Ocean, which were eventually written down as Old Norse sagas.

ABOVE: Modern reconstruction of a medieval Norse sodhouse at the L’Anse aux Meadows settlement in Newfoundland, the only definitive pre-Columbian European settlement in the Americas, dating to roughly four hundred years before Columbus’s arrival in San Salvador.

Finally, there is the problem that Christopher Columbus never realized that the lands he explored belonged to a continent totally unconnected to Asia that was previously unknown to Europeans, nor did he realize that there was an entire vast ocean between the lands he explored and the Asian continent. Instead, he remained thoroughly convinced that the lands he had spent so much time exploring were islands off the coast of Asia.

In fact, this obstinate refusal to accept what was becoming an increasingly obvious fact is probably the reason why, in 1507, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller chose to name the lands Columbus had explored “America,” after the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci (1454 – 1512). In 1502, Vespucci had become the first to demonstrate that Brazil and the Americas were not part of Asia, but rather an entirely separate landmass.

ABOVE: The Universalis Cosmographia, a map created in 1507 by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller, includes the earliest known occurrence of the name “America,” after the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci, who proved that the Americas were not part of Asia in 1502.

The dark side of Christopher Columbus

It is not Columbus’s geographic incompetence that makes Columbus Day so controversial, though. The reason why Columbus is so controversial is primarily because of his brutal and sadistic mistreatment of the native peoples of the land he explored. Many people are vaguely aware that Columbus did some bad things, but few are aware just how horrifying some of the things he did really were. We will start at the beginning, with the mildly depraved and work our way up to the downright appalling. Columbus himself describes his first experience with the native Taíno people on San Salvador in a letter written to Ferdinand and Isabella in 1493 on his way back to Spain from his first voyage:

“They have no iron or steel, nor any weapons; nor are they fit thereunto; not because they be not a well-formed people and of fair stature, but that they are most wondrously timorous… such they are, incurably timid… They are artless and generous with what they have, to such a degree as noone would believe but him who had seen it. Of anything they have, if it be asked for, they never say no, but do rather invite the person to accept it, and show as much lovingness as though they would give their hearts…
…Their Highnesses may see that I shall give them as much gold as they may need, with very little aid which their Highnesses will give me; spices and cotton at once, as much as their Highnesses will order to be shipped, and as much as they shall order to be shipped of mastic… and aloe-wood as much as they shall order to be shipped; and slaves as many as they shall order to be shipped.”

In other words, no sooner had Columbus finished praising the natives for their generosity than he was already beginning to think of ways to capture them to bring them back to Europe as slaves. In his journal, he wrote, “…the people here are simple in warlike matters… I could conquer the whole of them with fifty men and govern them as I pleased.”

These tyrannical aspirations would soon be fulfilled. For the time being, however, Columbus was forced to settle for merely capturing the natives and selling them into slavery. On his first voyage, Columbus captured twenty-five Lucayo people to bring back to Europe to sell into slavery; all but seven of them died of disease on the voyage back across the Atlantic. Capturing slaves and selling them in Europe became a major objective for all of Columbus’s future voyages.

To this end, Columbus and his men ultimately played a pivotal role in establishing the trans-Atlantic slave trade. American historian James W. Loewen states, “Columbus not only sent the first slaves across the Atlantic, he probably sent more slaves – about five thousand – than any other individual… other nations rushed to emulate Columbus.”

For his second voyage, which set out from Cádiz, Spain on September 24, 1493, Columbus was given seventeen ships and over 12,000 men. His primary objective for this voyage was to establish permanent colonies in the New World in the name of Spain. His crew included soldiers, farmers, priests, and others from a diverse array of occupations. On November 3, Columbus and his men spotted the island of Dominica and then Marie-Galante. They journeyed north through the Lesser Antilles, the Virgin Islands, past Puerto Rico, and back to Hispaniola, which he had visited on his first voyage.

Michele da Cuneo, a childhood friend of Columbus who accompanied him on his second voyage, proudly describes how Columbus gave him a native woman as a sex slave, who was at first unwilling to let him ravish her, but he tortured her until she agreed to let him do whatever he wanted to her:

“While I was in the boat, I captured a very beautiful Carib woman, whom the said Lord Admiral [i.e. Columbus] gave to me. When I had taken her to my cabin she was naked—as was their custom. I was filled with a desire to take my pleasure with her and attempted to satisfy my desire. She was unwilling, and so treated me with her nails that I wished I had never begun. But—to cut a long story short—I then took a piece of rope and whipped her soundly, and she let forth such incredible screams that you would not have believed your ears. Eventually we came to such terms, I assure you, that you would have thought that she had been brought up in a school for whores.”

If you think that is horrifying already, just wait; things get way, way worse. In a letter written in around 1500 to Doña Juana de la Torre, the sister of one of his leading crew members on his second voyage, Columbus himself boasts in his own words of one of the ways in which he made money on his recent third voyage, in which he had continued exploring part of the Caribbean and begun exploring the northeast coast of South America. Columbus writes, as translated by George F. Barwick:

“Now that so much gold is found, a dispute arises as to which brings more profit, whether to go about robbing or to go to the mines. A hundred castenelloes are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten are now in demand.”

That is right. Apparently Columbus was not just a sex trafficker, but a child sex trafficker.

Christopher Columbus was not only brutal in his enslavement of native peoples; he was also cruel to his own Spanish subjects. A forty-eight-page report written by Francisco de Bobadilla, Columbus’s successor as the governor of the colony of Hispaniola, contains eyewitness testimony from twenty-three of Columbus’s Spanish subjects on his behavior during his seven-year governance of the colony. The report describes in horrifying detail how he frequently employed maiming and mutilation as punishments, even for minor offenses.

For example, the report states that Christopher Columbus once punished a man for stealing a piece of corn by having the man’s nose and ears sliced off and selling him into slavery. When a woman showed the audacity to insinuate that Columbus might be of lowly birth, his brother Bartolomeo had her paraded through the streets naked and then had her tongue cut out. Christopher praised Bartolomeo for “defending the family.” When the native subjects rebelled against him, Columbus brutally massacred them and had their bloody and dismembered corpses paraded through the streets to discourage future revolts.

Things ultimately ended badly for Christopher Columbus and his brothers’ rule of Hispaniola. In August 1498, his subjects rebelled; they were incensed at the discovery that the New World was not overflowing with mountains of gold, as Columbus had deceitfully promised them to convince them to come with him. Meanwhile, sailors and colonists who had returned to Spain were lobbying the king and queen to have Columbus removed from power, telling them of his disgraceful mismanagement and tyranny. Columbus responded to this situation by having some of the rebel colonists hanged.

Meanwhile, Columbus was beginning to attract criticism from some Catholic clergy. You see, the church in those days prohibited Christians from being taken as slaves and, if a slave converted to Christianity, he or she was required to be set free. According to some critics, Columbus wanted to capture as many slaves as possible to make as much money for himself as he could, so he was deliberately avoiding converting native peoples to Christianity so that he could sell them into slavery.

In 1500, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain sent emissaries to remove Columbus from his position as governor of Hispaniola, arrest him and his brothers, and bring them back to Spain. Columbus and his brothers were thrown in prison, where they stayed for six weeks until King Ferdinand ordered them to be released. The king and queen met with the Columbus brothers shortly thereafter and agreed to fund Columbus’s fourth and final voyage, but they refused to reinstate him as governor of Hispaniola.

Apart from the report from Francisco de Bobadilla, even more horrifying information about Columbus’s mistreatment of native peoples comes from the book A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, written in around 1542 by Bartolomé de las Casas (lived c. 1484 – 1566), an early colonist in the Americas whose father had been one of Columbus’s crew members on his second voyage. Las Casas was a passionate defender of the native peoples and fierce advocate for their rights and human dignity.

In his book, Las Casas claims that, at one point, after Columbus’s slave workers quickly began to die at an exponential rate due to mistreatment and disease, Columbus himself issued a decree that every native over the age of thirteen was required to supply him with one hawk’s bell full of gold powder every three months. Those who brought the proper amount of gold were given copper tokens to wear around their necks. If any Spaniard caught a native without a visible copper token, he was required to chop the native’s hands off and leave him to die of blood loss.

ABOVE: The Spanish colonist Bartolomé de las Casas provides us with horrifying, although possibly exaggerated, accounts of Columbus’s alleged cruelty to the native Taíno people of the Caribbean.

To be clear, Bartolomé de las Casas was not an unbiased reporter, since he had a polemical agenda to portray current Spanish policies towards the natives as cruel and inhumane and thereby prove the need for drastic reform. Many historians believe that many of his accounts of the cruelty of Spanish colonists are probably somewhat exaggerated, but much of what he tells us about Columbus squares well with what we know about Columbus’s cruelty from other sources (particularly with his apparent fondness for dismembering people).

Christopher Columbus’s dark legacy

If the things Columbus himself did were not horrible enough, his legacy was even worse. Bartolomé de las Casas gives extensive accounts of the brutality of the Spanish colonists in the Caribbean who followed in Columbus’s footsteps. The following passage is just a brief representative example:

“They forced their way into native settlements, slaughtering everyone they found there, including small children, old men, pregnant women, and even women who had just given birth. They hacked them to pieces, slicing open their bellies with their swords as though they were so many sheep herded into a pen. They even laid wagers on whether they could manage to slice a man in two at a stroke, or cut an individual’s head from his body, or disembowel him with a single blow of their axes. They grabbed suckling infants by the feet and, ripping them from their mothers’ breasts, dashed them headlong against the rocks. Others, laughing and joking all the while, threw them over their shoulders into a river, shouting, ‘Wriggle, you little perisher.'”

Las Casas filled his entire book with reports just like this one. Once again, while these lavish descriptions are probably greatly exaggerated, they do reflect the grim reality that the colonists generally had very few reservations about maiming and killing the native inhabitants of the lands they were colonizing.

Meanwhile, the first European colonists in the Americas brought with them the same diseases from the Old World that had ravished the population of Europe for over the past two millennia: smallpox, typhus, measles, influenza, bubonic plague, cholera, malaria, tuberculosis, mumps, yellow fever, pertussis, and dozens of others. Most Europeans by the 1500s had evolved at least some level of protective immunity to these diseases, because everyone who was especially vulnerable to them had already been killed in massive pandemics such as the Antonine Plague (165–180 AD), the Plague of Justinian (541–542 AD), and the Black Death (1347–1351), each of which is thought to have killed roughly between 30–60% of Europe total population, as well as in smaller, local epidemics.

All these diseases, however, were completely foreign to the New World and the native peoples had no immunity to any of them. As a result of all these diseases being introduced at once, the native Americans almost immediately began to drop like flies. The diseases rapidly spread across the Americas in a matter of just a few years to all parts of the continents, including ones Europeans had no idea even existed, killing millions of people as they went.

The sheer levels of death and disease can hardly even be fathomed by people today. By 1600, just over a century after Columbus’s arrival, the indigenous population of the Americas had plummeted by perhaps as much as 90% in some areas, a death toll that far exceeds that of any other pandemic in all of human history. To exaggerate only a little bit, by the time the bulk of English settlers began to arrive in the future United States in the late 1600s, the Americas were like a post-apocalyptic world. (I will talk more about this in a post coming up in November for Thanksgiving.)

ABOVE: Illustration from the Florentine Codex (compiled between 1555–1576), showing Nahua people of modern-day Mexico suffering and dying of smallpox during the era of the Spanish conquest

Of course, no one could have possibly known what devastating effect that European diseases would have on the native population beforehand. Certainly neither Columbus nor anyone else had any idea what massive death and devastation that his colonies and the ones following immediately afterwards would cause. Nonetheless, in hindsight, knowing what we do now about the carnage and death left behind by the introduction of European diseases should give us serious doubts about wanting to celebrate the man who inadvertently started it all.

Objections

I have heard a lot of objections and excuses for why, in spite of all the awful things Columbus did, it is still appropriate that we should honor him. Here is a sound debunking of a just a few:

“Well, Columbus may have been a bit of a jerk, but we should still honor him for all the good he did.”

First of all, “kind of a jerk” is a serious understatement when describing a man who captured and sold thousands of people into slavery and routinely had his subjects dismembered and executed in horrifying ways as punishments for relatively minor crimes. Second of all, accidentally stumbling across the Americas does not make up for the hundreds of people he sold into slavery, mutilated, and/or killed.

“Well, the native Americans killed each other and engaged in behavior equally as savage as what Columbus did, so why are we blaming him?”

It is true that many of the native peoples Columbus encountered were violent towards each other, but that does not in any way excuse what he did to them. Whether one person’s actions are morally justifiable is not determined in relation to other people’s actions. Furthermore, different native tribes in the Caribbean had different cultures and some were generally more peaceful than others, so we cannot generalize that they were all violent.

“Columbus was a product of his times and, those days, everyone was brutally sadistic.”

I agree that we should judge historical figures by the standards of their own times rather than anachronistically imposing modern conventions on them, but, in this case, it is abundantly clear that people in Columbus’s time knew full well that the way he was behaving was tyrannical and wrong. That is why his Spanish subjects rebelled against him, why the king and queen removed him from his position as governor, and why Bartolomé de las Casas railed against him for his mistreatment of the natives.

“Sure, Columbus did some bad things, but George Washington owned slaves, so are you going to say we should stop celebrating George Washington’s Birthday (which is also a federal holiday)?”

The problem here is that, yes, George Washington owned slaves, but he also played a pivotal role in helping the United States win and retain its independence and in shaping our country’s constitution and the presidency. There are plenty of good things Washington did that we can justly honor him for. With Columbus, on the other hand, the only thing he did for our country was the result of a ridiculous mistake that he never even admitted. That is not even mentioning the fact that Columbus actually never set foot on any part of the land that would later become the mainland United States, since his explorations were confined to the Caribbean and South America.

ABOVE: Map of all four of Christopher Columbus’s voyages. He never actually set foot on any part of the land that would later become the mainland United States.

The origins of Columbus Day

At this point, you all may be wondering, “How did we even start honoring this man to begin with?” This is actually a very interesting question, because, during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, in the British colonies that would later become the United States, Columbus was not generally seen as particularly important in the history of North America.

Columbus was not totally obscure in colonial America; plenty of people during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries had heard of him. Nonetheless, the Italian explorer John Cabot (lived c. 1450 – c. 1500), who sailed under the sponsorship of King Henry VII of England, was honored as the true discoverer of America, because he explored the northeast coast of North America in 1497, which made him the first European known at the time to have explored any part of mainland North America.

Then the Revolutionary War changed everything. The American patriots fighting for independence from the British crown needed a historical figure to rally behind as their hero. This hero needed to be stubborn, persistent, a rebel with a cause, and, above all, he needed to be someone who was neither British nor in league with the British. Christopher Columbus, an Italian employed by the Spanish Crown, fit the bill. That is how our nation’s capital, the District of Columbia, was named after him.

The publication of Washington Irving’s A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus in January 1828 popularized the already growing fame of Christopher Columbus in the United States. Irving transformed Columbus from a small-time explorer with a legacy championed by a small, but growing, number of prominent devotees into a full-fledged national hero—a lover of adventure and exploration and the ideal paragon of the American spirit. The true, historical Columbus was forgotten, supplanted almost entirely by Irving’s glamorized idol.

In the late nineteenth century, when Italian Catholic immigrants came over to the United States in large numbers, they were widely hated by the Anglo-American Protestants who were already living here. Italian-Americans were mostly confined to lower-paying jobs involving difficult manual labor and they often lived in unsatisfactory parts of cities and towns. They were widely seen as lazy and unprofitable members of society. Their Catholicism in particular was widely seen as a dangerous threat to the national security of the United States.

Many Americans believed that Catholics were incapable of loyalty to their new country, since they maintained a higher loyalty to the Pope in Rome. In effort to show that Italians had made important contributions to American society, Italian immigrants seized Christopher Columbus as their patron. For instance, they held a massive celebration on October 12, 1866 in New York City in honor of Columbus’s first voyage. In 1882, the Irish-American Catholic priest Michael J. McGivney founded a Catholic fraternal organization in New Haven, Connecticut, called the “Knights of Columbus.”

Columbus’s popularity, however, received a massive boost in 1893 when President Rutherford B. Hayes advocated that every American should celebrate October 12 of that year as the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in San Salvador. It was as part of this nation-wide celebration of Columbus that the socialist activist Francis Bellamy wrote the original version of the Pledge of Allegiance. This pledge was recited by students all across the country for the first time in honor of Columbus. This cemented Columbus’s already existing associations with patriotism and the American spirit in the minds of an entire generation of schoolchildren. That same year, the city of Chicago hosted the World’s Columbian Exposition, a world’s fair in honor of Columbus’s supposed “discovery” of the “New World.”

Columbus Day was first declared a state holiday in Colorado in 1905 and it became a statutory holiday in 1907. In 1934, the Knights of Columbus and the Italian-American community of New York City, led by the businessman and newspaper magnate Generoso Pope, lobbied extensively for Congress to pass a bill requesting the president to make an annual declaration of October 12th as Columbus Day. Congress passed the bill in April and it was signed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The bill signed by President Roosevelt did not make Columbus Day a federal holiday, but, in 1966, an Italian-American named Mariano A. Lucca began lobbying to make it one. These efforts resulted in success and, in 1968, Columbus Day became an official federal holiday.

ABOVE: Advertisement for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois in 1893, celebrating the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in San Salvador. The exposition was a massive boost to Columbus’s popularity.

In the years since then, however, many Americans have increasingly come to recognize the terrible effects that our ancestors’ colonization had on the indigenous peoples of this continent. Starting in the 1960s, when the rights of native Americans received invigorated attention, Christopher Columbus’s reputation has steadily declined. Yet, astonishingly, a poll from October of last year shows that 58% of Americans support Columbus Day as a federal holiday, which is 8% more than supported it in 2015.

Make no mistake: Columbus was a tremendously historically significant individual and I am not in any way suggesting that we should wipe him out of the history books. We should continue to teach students about him and what he did, but we need to let go of the myths. We should teach Columbus for what he was: a largely incompetent fortune-seeker who just got plain lucky.

Above all, it is absolutely baffling why we still have a federal holiday in honor of him, especially when the only two other people who share that honor are George Washington and Martin Luther King Jr. (Technically, George Washington’s Birthday is usually replaced with Presidents’ Day, in honor of all presidents past and present, but it is still officially listed as a federal holiday under the name “George Washington’s Birthday.”) I completely understand the desire to honor Italian Americans and the contributions they have made to our country, but we can do that without honoring a man whose actions ought to be morally appalling to any reasonable human being.

Some have proposed that Columbus Day be replaced with a generic holiday honoring Italian Americans and their contributions to American culture. I have no problem with this idea. We could create essentially an Italian version of Saint Patrick’s Day. On the other hand, if Italian Americans still want a famous Italian historical figure to celebrate, there are literally thousands of famous Italians who have made invaluable contributions to modern society and who never committed any moral atrocities on the scale of those committed by Columbus (eg. Giovanni Boccaccio, Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarch, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, etc.).

There have been countless Italian and Italian American writers, philosophers, scientists, artists, social reformers, and others who are a thousand times more worthy to be celebrated than Christopher Columbus. You can really just take your pick which one(s) you want to celebrate. Just preferably do not pick someone who raped, pillaged, enslaved, mutilated, and murdered hundreds of people. That should be fairly simple.