Overall, historians view Columbus as one of many skilled navigators employed in the service of competing emerging empires who took the next logical step in expanding out into the Atlantic. Furthermore, he was extremely fortunate he ran into the Americas given his confidence in a smaller, and very inaccurate, circumference of the earth. In the modern U.S. he owes much of his current fame, and corresponding recent infamy, to myth building in the nineteenth century. That said, our modern perception of the events following his landing on San Salvador have been, and will continue to be, debated among anthropologists and historians and are of vital importance to our understanding of human history.

I'm not primarily a Columbus scholar. I will refer those interested to Restall's Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest, which I will cite heavily for the first two paragraphs, before expanding on my own research below.

In the context of expansion into the Atlantic Columbus took the next logical step. In the 1300s and 1400s navigators expanded out of the Mediterranean, regularly reaching the Azores, the Canary Islands, then the Cape Verde Islands. Portuguese explorers mapped the western coast of Africa and discussed their plan to round the continent with Pope Innocent VII in 1486, threatening to corner the market on trade with India. Rich sugar plantations were established on the Madeiras and the Canaries in the late 1400s, creating an unfortunate precedent for extreme violence, territory displacement, and enslavement of indigenous populations. Restall states

(Columbus's) discoveries were an accidental geographical byproduct of Portuguese expansion two centuries old, of Portuguese-Castilian competition for Atlantic control a century old, and of Portuguese-Castilian competition for a sea route to India older than Columbus himself. Furthermore, had Columbus not reached the Americas, any one of numerous other navigators would have done so within a decade. (p.9)

The tendency to interpret history from "great man" narratives distills this complex late fifteenth century game of empires to one person, Columbus, forgetting the larger historical and cultural context that created the conditions required to make landfall in the Caribbean. In the U.S. our modern focus on Columbus owes much to the formation of our creation myths, nineteenth century historians like Washington Irving, and the culmination of celebrations at the 1893 quadricentennial in Chicago that paved the way for Columbus Day to become an official holiday in 1912. Again, quoting from Restall...

our Columbus- the one of present-day myth, history, and debate-is not a fifteenth century man, but a nineteenth century one, with a twentieth century veneer. (p.11)

Now, how we view Columbus, his landfall in the Americas, and the legacy of all that followed is of extreme importance. Unfortunately, I believe there is a tendency in the popular sphere to emphasize a terminal narrative when discussing Columbus. I wrote more about this terminal narrative previously, and will quote from that post. In the Terminal Narrative the trajectory of Native American history is fundamentally altered after Columbus set foot on San Salvador. Contact marks the beginning of the end, an event horizon after which history could only flow on one inevitable and completely destructive course. The end is assured, the die is cast, and existing Native American populations lived on borrowed time, doomed to die fighting a lost cause.

The popular narrative, influenced by major popular nonfiction works and almost every textbook ever printed, uses 1492 as a dividing line to denote irrevocable change in the Americas. Unfortunately, recounting Native American history from a European perspective reinforces the idea of European actors and Native American reactors. This tendency defines Native American history only as it relates to European interests, and strips indigenous populations of autonomous actions independent of colonists. In reality the notion of an irrevocable break at contact failed to reflect the experience of people like the Maya, for whom conquest was simply a small blip in their larger perspective of history. Conquest was a protracted affair, and the successes of colonial enterprises resulted from centuries of conflict and negotiation. See this AMA on Native American Rebellion, Revolt, and Resistance for more info.

A recent reddit post shows this terminal narrative distillation of Columbus's legacy in the popular history sphere. Creeping determinism, “the sense that grows on us, in retrospect, that what has happened was actually inevitable” (Gladwell), influences every investigation of the past. Ignorance of the period and acceptance of simple myths allows creeping determinism to shape how we discuss the history of the Americas, making the end seem inescapable. But it didn’t have to unfold this way. Europeans entered a dynamic system with populations changing, growing, collapsing, dispersing, coalescing, making war, and negotiating peace. Colonial survival was not guaranteed. There are an infinite number of “what ifs” hidden under the hindsight bias of a terminal narrative. At every step along the way both the Europeans and Native Americans realized that conquest was a “close-run thing” (Restall). We do a disservice to the history of the New World when we assume there was only one possible way to arrive at this place and time.

I, and many scholars of the Americas, hope to shift the focus of this terminal narrative legacy, to interpret Columbus as a man, like many others, entering the dynamic history of the New World. Our task is not to label him, either as hero or villain, but to understand our shared history on these two continents.