A lesson learned from COLUMBUS: THE FOUR VOYAGES, 1492-1506, by Laurence Bergreen

 Know what you’re good at, and quit while you’re ahead. 

Fewer figures in all human history are more pivotal than Christopher Columbus (he’s often listed as one of the 10 most influential people who’s ever lived), and few have been as polarizing. When I was in elementary school, Columbus was still taught to us as a daring hero (All millennials join in: “IN 1492, COLUMBUS SAILED THE OCEAN BLUE)!” Many modern progressives are more inclined to see Columbus as a monstrous figure, the beginning of a long process of destroying America’s indigenous populations and creating colonial empires in their wake; to this day, Americans debate intensely just how he should be remembered (most prominently in continued debates about how exactly we celebrate “Columbus Day).” The American obsession with debating Columbus has always been odd—the man himself not only never landed in what we know of as the United States today, but likely never even knew of its existence—but it has always been more around our own internal debates as a nation surrounding the legacy of colonization. Laurence Bergreen’s excellent 2011 book Columbus: The Four Voyages, 1492-1504 seeks to paint a picture of Columbus the man himself, whom according to Bergreen was neither a saintly explorer nor the monster his detractors wanted him to be, but rather a bold and daring visionary of a man who also was totally unaware of his own limitations, and as a result ended up in way over his head. 

As the old legend goes, Columbus alone of his day believed the world was round (an old 19th century story told to entertain children, which somehow got mistaken as historical fact for generations afterward), and believed that he could sail across the vast unknown oceans of the west to reach the riches of Asia on the other side of the world. As Bergreen notes, Columbus himself was a bit of an outsider, an Italian explorer and navigator and a deeply religious man who had a belief in his own destiny, hence why he basically sold his services to the highest bidder (which eventually became the Kingdom of Spain under Queen Isabella). Columbus could only be both right and wrong in a spectacular fashion. He was indeed correct that Europe’s new and improved sailing ships could cross the entire Atlantic Ocean intact, and reach a land mass on the other side; he just had vastly underestimated the size of the world (one reason why some prominent intellectuals refused to back his expeditions, a fact they ironically proved correct about), and had no clue just what lay in between him and his visions of Asia. 

Columbus was indeed a brave and brilliant explorer, and had a natural intuition in navigating the tides and winds of the sea. Life on a 15th century ship was a dull, ugly, and often brutal affair, filled with terrible food and water, strict discipline, and all sorts of terrible smells and medical maladies (fun factoid I never knew—Columbus' near blindness as he aged was likely exacerbated by his constant exposure to sunlight reflecting off the ocean’s surface, as this was an age before sunglasses). After weeks out on the open ocean and ignoring pleas from shipmates that he turn around, Columbus’ ships finally sighted an island (likely around what is today considered Haiti), and Columbus immediately claimed everything he saw in the name of the Spanish Empire and the Catholic Church. Of course, Columbus was nowhere near China or India, but until his dying day assumed he was (ignoring all evidence to the contrary). Intriguingly, Bergreen notes that not only did Columbus misname the “Indians” he encountered, but he also gave Spanish names to every geographic feature he “discovered,” and thus began the process of eliminating all the indigenous names those places had been known by for thousands of years. Columbus returned to Spain with fascinating peoples, animals, and plants that Europeans had never before seen, and thus began a frenzy for European expansion into the Americas that would last for centuries. 

It was for those grand accomplishments that Columbus became an eternal legend of human history, as Columbus was a great explorer; one thing he absolutely was not was a great administrator or diplomat, and yet that is exactly what he next attempted to become, thus exposing all his stunning flaws in the process. Columbus was obsessed with acquiring gold—partly because it was the only way for a low-born person to advance in medieval Europe, and partly because his expeditions left him with a huge debt to the Spanish crown—and in future voyages focused on trying to get the American Indians to acquire it for him. For a man who allowed such shocking crimes against them, he was not particularly cruel or sadistic by the standards of his day (he preferred to get the Indians to voluntarily work with him when possible), but he also asserted zero control over his own men, many of whom murdered and raped the Indians with impunity. He enabled a vast slave trade to begin in the new colonies he attempted to rule over, thus establishing a standard that would haunt the Americas for centuries afterward. He asserted so little control over his fellow Spanish colonists that there were constant rebellions against his administration, which eventually got him arrested and returned to Spain. 

It was actually frustrating reading Bergreen’s book, as I learned the story of a great explorer who never knew when to quit, and as a result repeatedly soiled his own legacy. A proud and vain man who was convinced of his own destiny, Columbus repeatedly demanded the right to command new voyages to the Americas (hence why he got four), in spite of repeatedly leading his colonies into disastrous results. Columbus’ vision of his closeness to God helped him to brave the Atlantic to “discover” the Americas; it proved counterproductive when he became convinced that he could actually find an entrance to Heaven from the sea, and wasted valuable men and energy searching for one. It’s no wonder we still intensely debate Columbus today, as people did so even in his own era (the famous Spanish priest Bartolome de las Casas celebrated Columbus’ achievements of exploration, while simultaneously damning him to Hell and holding him responsible for all the subsequent crimes against the American Indians). Columbus died at the relatively young age of 54 (likely from malaria he contracted in the Americas), still convinced both that he was close to Asia and that he would one day be given another voyage to try and find it. 

Overall, Bergreen writes an excellent book about Christopher Columbus that left me with a much deeper understanding of the man, both his achievements and his failures. Columbus proves that we should all try and learn what we’re good at, where we can really excel, and when we’ve reached levels where we’re probably in over our heads and need someone else with expertise to step in. Much of the travails of modern humanity can be traced to people believing they know better than everyone else, all evidence to the contrary. I am (hopefully) a good teacher, and I always try to get better, but one thing I am not is a school principal or powerful administrator—some things we just have to acknowledge we’re not qualified to handle!