Lately, I cannot help but notice how the tone about Columbus Day has changed from National Celebration to National Shame. Is this due? I have heard several different things from several different people. Can someone without bias explain this? Some of the evidence is relatively damning. Thanks!
I won't address the popular media treatment of Columbus, but I shall cite one of the several recent Columbus posts:
In that period, Spanish and Portuguese justification for slavery was derived from a series of papal bulls: the Dum Diversas of 1452 was promulgated by Pope Nicholas V to authorize Alfonso V of Portugal to conquer Saracens and pagans and consign them to "perpetual servitude." This should be seen as an exemption to a previous bull Sicut Dudum promulgated by Pope Eugene IV in 1435, which forbade enslavement of natives of Canary island who had converted to, or were in the process of being converted to, Christianity. The Dum Diversas was part of Pope Nicholas V's campaign against growing Ottoman strength in the Mediterranean and south eastern Europe. This power was later extended to the Spanish by Pope Alexander VI, in addition to the mandate to instruct inhabitants for conversion to Christianity, through Dudum Siquidem.
Since somebody brought up the Canary Islands, the papal bulls addressing those lands were the result of much discussion and debate between the Castilian crown, Portugal, and the Pope. Most importantly, it tied together evangelization and conquest. This is why the first instruction from the royals specifically states that the natives are to be treated kindly and conversion be the goal. Further, the text states, ".... beneath our lordship ..." meaning as subjects of the crown, whereas a slave is subject to their owner.
These points are why Columbus' proposal for slavery was rejected, and when he sent shipments of slaves anyway, their enslavement was considered illegal. By all accounts, Columbus was aware of this issue as can be read in his letters and publications.
Excessive cruelty has been discussed widely, in particular his use of bodily harm well beyond the norm used even by the Spanish Inquisition, in addition to general prohibition of giving conversion to Christianity. But if you insist here are several witness testimonies:
All of this can be read from Fernández-Armesto's Columbus and Bergreen's Columbus.
Specifically on the topic of genocide, there is a formal definition of the term and this has been addressed previously for example here.
Rather than discuss the definition of genocide, historians agree that Columbus did not intend to exterminate the native Americans he encountered. He did intend to and did commit very abusive exploitation. As a result, they suffered tremendously and a great many died, the latter leading to Spanish colonial administrators eventually bringing slaves from Africa to replace the lost labor.
On the subject of navigation, we can cite a previous post:
Even before Columbus had set off on his expedition, it was already generally accepted by scholars in Spain and Portugal that his estimate of the diameter of the earth was off, meaning that the earth was much larger than he claimed it to be.
Columbus was not a scholar, and he selectively read books that were either wrong or misinterpreted. The most important one was the work of Pierre d'Ailly, a French scholar and cartographer, whom Columbus misunderstood to have given an estimate of circumference of the earth to be around 30,000 km whereas in reality it is around 40,000 km. Further, he believed the land mass of Eurasia to be shorter than one accepted by most scholar, namely the old estimate of Ptolemy. Combining the two, he though that China were much closer westward than it really was (and still is!).
This was one reason that John II of Portugal rejected Columbus' proposal in 1485. However, Columbus came to the court of Isabella and Ferdinand in 1489 at the best possible time: they were just finishing off the Reconquesta and they were feeling threatened by progress made by Portuguese navigators. It wasn't long ago that they were in conflict with the Portuguese over the Castilian succession crises. So they decided to retain Columbus on their payroll, even if it took until 1492 for the famous expedition to launch.
When Columbus made landfall in Hispaniola, he claimed that it was not only on the way to China, but that it could be reached by ocean from there and that there was land mass nearby that was attached to China. If you look at a map such as one made in 1492 by Martin Behaim, you see that he expected to be able to sail westwards from Spain and reach China, and later on Columbus claimed that Hispaniola was merely a land mass "slightly" east of China.
This is why Columbus' further expeditions went farther southwards. The third voyage was to look for such an ocean route, instead they reached Trinidad, concluded that it was near a large land mass and then returned to Hispaniola. The fourth voyage searched for a passage through today's central America, similarly failed.
Around the time they were sailing along the Cuban coast, after weeks of frustration Columbus declared that he had sailed 370 leagues, claiming that Cuba must then be part of a huge continent connected to Cathay. He then forced all his crew members to swear an oath that Cuba was a continent, and that it was the largest land mass known, and that they were really on their way to China. All this, under threat of a large fine and having their tongues cut. Only his confidant was made exempt to this oath, reflecting his own self-doubt at such a pronouncement.
So while Columbus could continue in his navigational delusion until the last voyage, the Spaniards were more cognizant that they may in fact have discovered a new land mass not attached to China.
The first passage to the Pacific Ocean, by land was by de Balboa in 1513. They crossed Panama successfully and reported their findings back in Spain. This was the point at which arguments that the Americas were attached to China became moot and lose all credibility.
Up to the end of his life, Columbus was selling the dual idea of being able to directly connect to the riches of China and India, and to reach Jerusalem from a new direction, thus taking the fight to the Ottomans from a different route.
I'm going to address one aspect of this has been popping up in the conversation around Columbus, and is ubiquitous in discussions of Native Americans in general. That is the idea that "diseases (specifically smallpox) killed 90%."
This is not generally put forth intentionally as apologia for Columbus or subsequent colonizers, but it essentially acts for the same purpose. It absolves those colonizers of the acts they did and the policies they instituted which acted to impoverish, malnourish, imperil, and exploit the native populations with regards to epidemics. Excessive work and tribute burdens; forced relocations; congregations dense, controllable settlements; enslavement; and outright violence all contributed to indigenous population decline. The 90% number includes those factors in increasing disease deaths, as well as and other independent causes of mortality.
This quote from Kelton (2007) Epidemics and Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast 1492-1715 is specifically talking about the Mission system in the Southeast, but is applicable to this conversation:
Catholic missions not only exposed Native peoples to deadly germs, but they also made indigenous bodies more vulnerable in other ways... Natives living in missions suffered from calorie deprivations, protein deficiency, and anemia. The Columbian Exchange thus became a nightmare for them, and estimates of population declines of 80 to 90 percent are not without merit. It must be emphasized, however, **that such a calamity occured not because of the independent behavior of invisible microorganisms, but because Spanish colonialism had forced dramatic changes in the disease ecology of its converted Native communities.*^
There's a whole other conversation to have about disease impact, but the point to remember about Columbus and the effect of epidemics during his time is that they mostly had not arrived.
I will repeat that: During Columbus' lifetime, the majority of the Afro-Eurasian diseases which would cause epidemics had not yet arrived.
Pathogens require hosts to carry them from place to place, and a several month ocean journey is not actually the most effective way to spread diseases. It requires an infected person to be well enough to board a ship, or be allowed to board a ship. It then requires the infection to persist long enough during the voyage so that there is still an infectious individual at the time of arrival. That individual must then interact with an indigenous person or persons in such a manner as to infect them. The specifics depend on the pathogen (and if there are vectors, etc.), but that is the general pattern
The point is, infectious diseases took years, and in most cases decades, to travel from Afro-Eurasia to the Americas. Smallpox, for instance, did not arrive until 1517, more than a decade after Columbus had died. Measles does not show up until the 1530s.
Noble (1988) Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492-1650 does a good job of assessing the early timetable of diseases. In Hispaniola, influenza broke out very early, on Columbus' 2nd Voyage in 1493, the pigs he brought with him most likely serving as a reservoir. After that though, we get only very vague descriptions of illness among both Native and Spanish which could be better described as the effects of dysentery, malnutrition, syphilis, and possible recurrences of flu, but nothing like the massive amount of deaths we associate with the smallpox epidemic which started in 1517.
Moreover, and to return to the point from Kelton about these diseases being inseparable from their social contexts, this was a period of brutal exploitation of the native Taino. Those within the Spanish sphere of influence were forced into deadly labor, taken as slaves to be sent to Europe, or had unrealistic tribute burdens of gold or cotton placed upon them, with the threat of mutilation if they were unable to fulfill the Spanish demands. Those Taino that fled the Spanish were equally at risk of brutal corporal punishment or execution if caught. Regardless, the net effect was to profoundly disrupt Taino society.
Livi-Bacci (2003) "Return to Hispaniola: Reassessing a Demographic Catastrophe" notes that it was this disruption of society, specifically the seperation of Tainos from their Cacique-led groups into essentially work gangs under the repartimiento system, that was a leading cause of mortality. Direct conflict and disease (not necessarily epidemic disease) played a role, but it was this breaking of society, which was vastly accelerated by the mostly male colonizers taking native women, which helped to first precipitate a massive population decline, and then aid in the utter devastation of the native population by subsequent epidemics.
He estimates a total population of 100K-400K for the whole of Hispaniola in 1492. A 1514 census taken for the repartimiento, which he finds accurate, counted only 24K natives. That is, at minimum, a 75% population decline, and years before smallpox even reached the Americas. It was the direct result of practices put into place by Columbus and subsequent governors of Hispaniola. Word of the atrocities on the island were reason that a panel of Heironymite friars were finally sent to investigate. They arrived just in time to record the outbreak of smallpox.
^(*h/t to /u/anthropology_nerd for this book recommendation.)
It's been covered here several times before: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1o3uek/the_oatmeal_just_released_this_post_about/
