Christopher Columbus, first idiot
A quandary in pan-American history
Every year Christopher Columbus finds a way to wash back up on the shores of public discourse, like so many pieces of the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. This year I saw two things. First was this ingenious campaign by the Spaniards, who mustered a retinue of researchers to claim not only that Columbus was Spanish (and not Genoese and therefore Italian) but also crypto-Jewish, one of the “new Christians” who converted or outwardly converted to escape persecution in early modern Spain. A brilliant move in pursuit of a legacy that grows less attractive by the year. We’ll have to see how the Italians respond.
The other little tidbit was a video put out by the Argentine government hailing Columbus’s legacy, a country with one of the looser connections to Columbus’s legacy, being located thousands of miles from anywhere he visited and having been an utterly marginal part of the Spanish Empire—but neo-Hispanicism is just part of the lexicon of provocation for the Latin American right today, and the video provoked the outrage it was meant to provoke among the online left. In the U.S., the fights over Columbus get passionate enough, but—like the culture-war clashes over the legacy of the Spanish missions in California—at the end of the day it’s an argument about the merits of someone else’s colonialism.
Recently I’ve been reading through documents from the Cuba Reader, in Duke U.P.’s excellent series of collections of primary documents from the history of Latin American republics—and the first document is from Columbus. There’s something undeniably exciting about reading his descriptions of the island, the first penned by a European. This exhilaration has to be set against, not only the killing and the cruelty that we know followed, and the whole conversation of morality and conquest begun by de las Casas—but also the delusion and the mercenary spirit that motivated it. The problem of judging Columbus is, it seems to me, in some sense the problem of American history writ large. And by “American” in this case I really mean all the Americas, north, south and central.
We all know the outline of the case. Columbus, it seems, was possessed by a conviction that he could chart a new course to the Indies. He lobbied a series of courts in Europe to provide him the funds to attempt this. His conviction was delusional and was proven false. He never admitted it. In his delusion he inaugurated a new phase in the history of the world. (That’s not to say that there were not others, that there would have been others were it not for him, that the “discovery” would have been made in any case—clearly there was something in the air in Europe at the time, and Columbus, wherever he was really from, had breathed it in deeply—but in him we can see the shapes of the symptoms clearly.)
It is tempting to romanticize Columbus’s delusion, and many have thought to make him into a Quixote, whose absurd dream of a route to the Indies heroically unleashed forces of modernity and globalization (or spread the holy truth of Christianity to barbarous shores: however you prefer). But the truth seems to be that this delusion was a mercenary one: the project was a mercantile one, to do with trading routes and the flow of commerce, not to do with anything heroic about civilization. Columbus hoped to gain from it personally. Not that we should think of him as self-interested in a conventional sense. There are safer and more reliable methods of enriching oneself than trying to seek funding from European royal courts for a voyage in search of a new route to the Indies.
Columbus was possessed by a mercenary delusion. In that regard we can truly call him a pioneer, because since his arrival the history of the New World has been full of characters possessed in similar fashion. He seems to have been an idiot: arbitrary and misguided as captain, dumbfounded by the marvels of these exotic shores, which he saw without comprehending; vicious and ineffective as a colonialist, resourceful only in saving his own skin (at the end of the fourth voyage)—and wrong until the day he died. But he was the first idiot, the idiot whose idiocy cut so broad and deep that we’re still totaling up the toll—and the first of many “first idiots” to come.
I’m reminded of William Walker, the “filibuster” who I wrote about in American Affairs recently, as a kind of model for a recurring theme in American political economy. Walker was a kind of freelance colonialist, of a type that was common at the time, when the frontier chaos of nineteenth-century America spun loose into scattershot imperialism. His strategy was to start the colonial project himself, as a private actor, and later try to get the U.S. state involved to cement his gains. This was actually more or less what happened successfully in Texas and in California, although we don’t like to think about that.
Walker was less successful. In California in the years after 1848 he first tried leading an expedition into Sonora, trying to jumpstart an effort to carve off more of Mexico and take it for the United States. Too greedy—that didn’t work. So he tried Nicaragua next, which at the time was strategically essential because, in those days before the transcontinental railroads, the way to get to California was to traverse Central America by land and then take a steamer up. Walker managed to insinuate himself as president of Nicaragua and ruled for a few years before a Costa Rican-led army ousted him and he fled back to the U.S. An absurd enough story, but what’s most remarkable is that he then spent years trying to revive the project, now rebranded as a proslavery undertaking, to try to win Southern support, and wrote a book about his exploits, before going back to Central America to try once more to take over the region for America. Walker had by this point run afoul of a number of powerful interests scheming to profit from a canal to span the Atlantic and Pacific, not only Vanderbilt but also the British Empire, into whose clutches he now fell, and who handed him over to the Hondurans, who executed him. Walker, a failed Columbus, died for his mercenary delusion. What to make of that?
I think too about the character in Bolaño’s 2666 in that dusty hardworking violent northern Mexican city who keeps returning to the bar where the owners hate him, keeps returning in search of something, in order to prove something, even if what it turns out he is blindly seeking is death.
There’s a problem of judgment when it comes to first idiots. They often cause and sometimes personally administer cruelty and death. Also nothing is the same in their wake: they have “greatness” in the morally neutral sense. They loom large. But on a broader scale they have no idea what they’re doing. They always have an idea about what they’re doing but it’s always completely wrong. And it’s not enough to say that the actions were groundbreaking even if the idea was wrong because the actions depend so much on the mindless idea. To call these idiots heroes is ridiculous, but to call them villains seems in a certain sense unnecessarily generous—to consciously do evil you have to understand the situation, and they never do. Children whose tyrannical behavior in a made-up game batters the very real world down to its core. It’s hard to write history in a continent where first idiots loom so large, figures who in every way are the diametric opposite of the intellectual.
There’s a song on Tropicália, ou Panis et Circencis, the iconic 1968 album with Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso and the rest, called “Três Caravelas,” about Columbus. The lyrics are hagiographic and penned, apparently, by a couple of Spaniards back in the fifties, later adapted into Portuguese before being given this rendition by a bunch of musical-cultural-political renegades working under Brazil’s right-wing military dictatorship.
Viva Cristóvão Colombo
Que para nossa alegria
Veio com três caravelas
A Pinta, a Nina e a Santa Maria
Long live Columbus, who for the sake of our happiness, came with three caravels: the Pinta, the Niña, and the Santa Maria. There’s something wicked in Caetano’s delivery, something dripping with sarcasm. Yes, for the sake of our happiness—that’s right. It’s a good song, and like other songs Caetano sings half in Portuguese and half in another language, there’s something wonderful about how he digs into the first verse that he sings in Portuguese. A fitting mocking little scrape and bow to the great man, the carver of the wound, the first idiot.