Exiled Columbus

Still No Home for Replica Statue in Baltimore

Christopher Columbus is looking for a place to land and, just like in 1492, he doesn’t know where he’s going. The Columbus in question isn’t the intrepid Italian but rather a replica of a statue that was unceremoniously removed from its pedestal and thrown into Baltimore’s Inner Harbor in the wake of George Floyd’s 2020 murder.

Like Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starship, the original statue suffered a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” when it was tossed in the water, but an intrepid band of Columbus loyalists recovered the bits and pieces and a brand-new model, based on the original, was crafted by a Maryland artist.

Problem is, nobody seems to want it, or at least want it enough to accept the hassle of displaying a monument to such a controversial figure.

The Myth

While Italian-Americans have long used Columbus as a figurehead representing all that the Italian people have contributed to American culture and history, his treatment of indigenous people and the excuses that have been made to justify his abuse simply don’t stand up to scrutiny. The whitewashed history of Columbus and his “discovery” of the “New World” that was once taught to schoolchildren and promoted by Italian-Americans for decades just doesn’t square with reality.

Don’t take my word for it. Columbus’ own journals leave no doubt. While he praised the peaceful indigenous Taino he stumbled upon on his first voyage, he also considered them poor and unsophisticated, malleable, godless and easily converted to Christianity.

For the past two decades, when I’ve taught my 4^th graders about Columbus I always made a point of highlighting his positive traits. Was he brave and adventurous? Venturing into unknown waters in tiny wooden ships suggests he was. Was he persistent? His repeated efforts to win financial backing for his ventures appears to support that notion. Was he intelligent and capable? His ability to navigate and lead his men on a perilous journey bolsters the argument in his favor.

But his treatment of the Taino and other indigenous people he encountered on his four historic voyages has long been a black mark on the explorer’s legacy.  In the late 1500s, Columbus’ second son, Ferdinand, published a biography of his father in which he sought to temper criticism of his well-documented cruelty. Ferdinand even contended that his father’s efforts to convert the native people were divinely ordained and therefore, presumably, beyond reproach.  

Echoes of Ferdinand Columbus’ justifications are heard in what modern-day Columbus apologists say. The Knights of Columbus, a worldwide charitable and fraternal organization with more than 1.9 million members is, understandably, a fierce defender of the larger-than-life Columbus myth.

The Knights deny that Columbus was a violent man. Quite the contrary, they argue, he was too “indulgent” toward the indigenous people and his Spanish mates which would lead him to “take extreme measures against both when things got out of hand.”

Now that is some masterful spin! In just one paragraph, the Knights claim that Columbus was simply too kind but also capable of resorting to unnamed “extreme measures” to keep the colony humming.

Initially, Columbus thought the Taino could be easily subdued and converted. He traded trinkets with them and marveled at how they welcomed him and his men and “gave willingly whatever they had.”

Columbus and Genocide

But on his second voyage, when he learned that 36 Spaniards left behind after the first had been killed in retaliation for acts against the native people, Columbus unleashed cannon, cavalry, and vicious dogs against the Taino.

Columbus had overwhelming military superiority and no reason to suspect that the people he initially found to be peaceful and welcoming would begin hostilities. Yet, on the second voyage, before he learned of the Spaniards’ murders, he brought horses and attack dogs suggesting, perhaps, that he had ill-intent in mind when he set sail.

The contention that Columbus was anything but peaceful has been around for a very long time. Commemorating the 300th anniversary of his Columbus’ first voyage, author and geographer John Payne argued that treating the Taino as “free people” was simply inconsistent with the ultimate goal of the Columbus expeditions: the acquisition of gold. This goal couldn’t be realized without the help of the native people, but they were reluctant to willingly assist the Europeans. Facing disgrace for failing to bring back riches, Columbus “rescued” himself by deliberately damning “a harmless race of men to slaughter or slavery,” Payne wrote. Those who survived the initial onslaught died of disease and want, “the innocent but unrevenged victims of European avarice,” he said.

Not surprisingly, the Knights disagree with Payne’s description of Columbus’ acts. They argue that there was no “genocide” but acknowledge that many natives died from unfamiliar diseases and undefined “clashes between two very different cultures.” The Spaniards “never intended” to commit genocide, the Knights argue, claiming that killing off the native people would not have been in the Spaniards’ interest because the Taino were a “ready supply of native workers.”

A 19^th century lecture on the history of Haiti offers a fuller, more accurate account of the Knights’ undefined “clashes” between the cultures and some insight into the Spaniards’ use of indigenous labor.

The indigenous people welcomed Columbus and his men “with veneration, imagining them to be messengers from that beautiful world which they had pictured to themselves would be their abode after death, and were rewarded by them with slavery, torture, and finally extermination,” the lecturer noted.

The “inoffensive, confiding people” who accepted Columbus “were too ignorant of the art of civilized man, long to resist the devices of the crafty and covetous Spaniards,” he continued. “Tribute and exaction were demanded—resistance was overcome by the aid of bloodhounds, and they were subjected to a state of cruel servitude—all feeling of humanity in regard to them had fled from their oppressors—they were tasked beyond their strength, and in fifteen years their number were reduced to about sixty thousand!” There were an estimated 300,000 when Columbus arrived.

The Knights also push back on the idea that Columbus was solely interested in gold—though his own journals show an abiding interest in the precious metal. To defend him, the Knights create the specious argument that the explorer has been criticized for allegedly using his interest in converting the native people to Christianity as a way to mask his true interest in the gold. It seems not to have dawned on the Knights that Columbus could have had two, simultaneous interests. Maintaining that Columbus’ religious devotion absolves him of his sin of greed would be laughable if it weren’t so cynical.

The Slave Trade

Finally, the Knights tackle the biggest blight on the great navigator’s legacy: the slave trade. The Knights flat-out reject the notion that Columbus started the slave trade, contending that he “was not interested in the slave trade; his goal was to set up a trading post or, later, an agricultural colony.” But as with their argument about whether Columbus was a violent man, the Knights immediately concede that Columbus did take slaves “as prisoners of war” and when he found “violations of natural law, such as human sacrifice or cannibalism.” They claim slavery “was never the admiral’s intention, except as a--not very effective--way to maintain order in unprecedented circumstances.” So, which is it? Did he institute the slave trade? Did he do just a little enslavement? Did he enslave people to maintain law and order? Did he enslave people to win the approval of his financing monarchs in Spain?

Again, Columbus’ own journals say a lot. The Taino’s welcoming attitude astounded Columbus but also led him to conclude that their openness and astonishment at the arrival of people so unlike them could be used against them.

“(T)hey appeared to be very poor people in all respects,” Columbus wrote soon after his first encounter. “They go about as naked as the day they were born, even the women…. They carry no weapons, and are ignorant of them; when I showed them some swords, they took them by the blade and cut themselves…. I believe they would readily become Christians; it appeared to be that they have no religion. With God’s will, I will take six of them with me for Your Majesties when I leave this place.”

Several days later, while searching for gold, Columbus ordered his men to seize several male Taino “and have them brought away with me.” He then sent men to a nearby house where they captured seven female Taino “some young and some adult” who could also be brought back to Europe. He did this because, based on experiences with men from other lands who had come to Spain, “men behave better in Spain when they have women of their own land with them,” he said.

On this topic, the Knights are silent. Columbus might not have intended to “institute” the slave trade but he did take the first natives from their homes and brought them to Spain to serve as “servants” for the nobles, a euphemism often used by slaveholders centuries later on their sprawling southern plantations. Whatever his intent, Columbus’ actions established a trade route that would ruthlessly carry countless enslaved people for centuries to come.

A Statue in Limbo

It’s been more than a year since the new Columbus statue was finished, but there’s still no word on where it will be displayed. The initial thought of placing it back on its original pedestal was quickly scrapped. Displaying it at an Italian church was broached, but that too was scuttled out of concerns that it would again be damaged or toppled.

The Columbus statue brought down in 2020 was the newest of three Columbus monuments in Baltimore. The oldest, donated by French Consul to the City of Baltimore in 1792, sits in Herring Run Park. In 2017, it too was vandalized. A Columbus statue, erected in 1892 in Druid Hill Park, has also been defaced. The future of all three memorials remains clouded by activists’ threats.

As debate over the fate of memorials continues, the fundamental question must be asked: Why were they put up in the first place? If the Columbus statues aim to honor not just the man but Italian contributions to American history--as contemporaneous accounts of their dedication ceremonies suggest—that needs to be made clearer if they are to survive.

But flatly denying the Italian explorer’s many flaws and deplorable acts—or, worse yet, justifying them on “religious” grounds--diminishes the very people the memorials were meant to uplift.

https: www.kofc.org/en/news-room/columbus/index.html

Account of Christopher Columbus. (1792, September 1). Aurora General Advertiser. p. 2.

Mr. Godfrey’s Lecture before the Lyceum. (1842, March 23). Bangor Daily Whig p. 2.