Christopher Columbus (detail), from Alejo Fernández, La Virgen de los Navegantes, circa 1505 to 1536, Alcázares Reales de Sevilla.

In his magisterial biography, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, 1942, Samuel Elliot Morrison observes:

[Christopher Columbus did] more to direct the course of history than any individual since Augustus Caesar. …

The voyage that took him to “The Indies” and home was no blind chance, but the creation of his own brain and soul, long studied, carefully planned, repeatedly urged on indifferent princes, and carried through by virtue of his courage, sea-knowledge and indomitable will. No later voyage could ever have such spectacular results, and Columbus’s fame would have been secure had he retired from the sea in 1493. Yet a lofty ambition to explore further, to organize the territories won for Castile, and to complete the circuit of the globe, sent him thrice more to America. These voyages, even more than the first, proved him to be the greatest navigator of his age, and enabled him to train the captains and pilots who were to display the banners of Spain off every American cape and island between Fifty North and Fifty South. The ease with which he dissipated the unknown terrors of the Ocean, the skill with which he found his way out and home, again and again, led thousands of men from every Western European nation into maritime adventure and exploration.

The whole history of the Americas stem from the Four Voyages of Columbus; and as the Greek city-states looked back to the deathless gods as their founders, so today a score of independent nations and dominions unite in homage to Christopher the stout-hearted son of Genoa, who carried Christian civilization across the Ocean Sea.

An annual post.

Christopher Columbus (detail), from Alejo Fernández, La Virgen de los Navegantes, circa 1505 to 1536, Alcázares Reales de Sevilla.

In his magisterial biography, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, 1942, Samuel Elliot Morrison observes:

[Christopher Columbus did] more to direct the course of history than any individual since Augustus Caesar. …

The voyage that took him to “The Indies” and home was no blind chance, but the creation of his own brain and soul, long studied, carefully planned, repeatedly urged on indifferent princes, and carried through by virtue of his courage, sea-knowledge and indomitable will. No later voyage could ever have such spectacular results, and Columbus’s fame would have been secure had he retired from the sea in 1493. Yet a lofty ambition to explore further, to organize the territories won for Castile, and to complete the circuit of the globe, sent him thrice more to America. These voyages, even more than the first, proved him to be the greatest navigator of his age, and enabled him to train the captains and pilots who were to display the banners of Spain off every American cape and island between Fifty North and Fifty South. The ease with which he dissipated the unknown terrors of the Ocean, the skill with which he found his way out and home, again and again, led thousands of men from every Western European nation into maritime adventure and exploration.

The whole history of the Americas stem from the Four Voyages of Columbus; and as the Greek city-states looked back to the deathless gods as their founders, so today a score of independent nations and dominions unite in homage to Christopher the stout-hearted son of Genoa, who carried Christian civilization across the Ocean Sea.

An annual post.

Christopher Columbus (detail), from Alejo Fernández, La Virgen de los Navegantes, circa 1505 to 1536, Alcázares Reales de Sevilla.

In his magisterial biography, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, 1942, Samuel Elliot Morrison observes:

[Christopher Columbus did] more to direct the course of history than any individual since Augustus Caesar. …

The voyage that took him to “The Indies” and home was no blind chance, but the creation of his own brain and soul, long studied, carefully planned, repeatedly urged on indifferent princes, and carried through by virtue of his courage, sea-knowledge and indomitable will. No later voyage could ever have such spectacular results, and Columbus’s fame would have been secure had he retired from the sea in 1493. Yet a lofty ambition to explore further, to organize the territories won for Castile, and to complete the circuit of the globe, sent him thrice more to America. These voyages, even more than the first, proved him to be the greatest navigator of his age, and enabled him to train the captains and pilots who were to display the banners of Spain off every American cape and island between Fifty North and Fifty South. The ease with which he dissipated the unknown terrors of the Ocean, the skill with which he found his way out and home, again and again, led thousands of men from every Western European nation into maritime adventure and exploration.

The whole history of the Americas stem from the Four Voyages of Columbus; and as the Greek city-states looked back to the deathless gods as their founders, so today a score of independent nations and dominions unite in homage to Christopher the stout-hearted son of Genoa, who carried Christian civilization across the Ocean Sea.

An annual post.

John Cabot

Glenn Reynolds links a 2005 posting from Jim Bennett that contends that America’s been celebrating the wrong Italian.

During the 19th century, Columbus was reinvented by Washington Irving and his successors as a sort of Yankee visionary entrepreneur before his time. His specific roots in time, space, and culture as a Genoese in the service of Spanish monarchs was downplayed; what was celebrated was his seeming prescience and capacity for self-reinvention.

In fact Columbus did have some such characteristics; entrepreneurism is often a leap into the unknown, and he was neither the first nor the last to set out to seek one thing and discover another, nor to venture on the basis of mistaken calculations and assumptions. There was, it is true, a certain Enron-like quality to his mileage calculations.

Subsequently, this useful narrative was seized upon and expanded by Catholic immigrant communities eager to demonstrate that Catholicism was not inconsistent with being American. Italian immigrant groups found Columbus a particularly appealing figure; here was an Italian Catholic already elevated to heroic status by the Americans they sought to join. Columbus Day became established as an American holiday, but for reasons and with symbolism quite different from those for which it is celebrated in Latin America..

Now, of course, Columbus Day is under attack as a holiday in the United States by the forces of political correctness. This is primarily an effect of the Calvinist Puritan roots of American progressivism. Just as Calvinists believed in the centrality of the depravity of man, with the exception of a miniscule contingent of the Elect of God, their secularized descendants believe in the depravity and cursedness of Western civilization, with their own enlightened selves in the role of the Elect.

I do not particularly sympathize with the demonization of Columbus Day by the politically correct, although I do not think the injustices suffered by our Siberian-American fellow immigrants should be glossed over. However, I think Columbus Day should be reconsidered as a U.S. holiday for a different reason. I am fundamentally in agreement with the Hispanosphere nationalists on one point: Columbus’s voyage was very specifically the initiation of the contact between Spain and Spanish America. Neither the settlement of Brazil nor of English-speaking North America were direct consequences of Columbus’s voyages, and would probably have happened had Columbus never returned with the news of his landing.

The Portuguese discovery of Brazil was, after all, the accidental by-product of their ongoing exploration of Africa. The English-speaking world, on the other hand, began its expansion into North America as a consequence of John Cabot’s voyage of 1497.

It makes more sense to think of the European encounters with the Americas as three distinct main streams: one was the Spanish movement to the Caribbean, Mexico, Peru, and ultimately other areas, stemming from Columbus’s voyage; another was the Portuguese movement to Brazil, which was intimately linked to their explorations of Africa predating Columbus; and the third was the stream of peoples from the British Isles and ultimately elsewhere to North America to found the nations of the North American Anglosphere. These three distinct streams founded the three principal cultural-linguistic communities of the Americas.

Although Cabot’s voyage to Newfoundland was undoubtedly spurred by news of Columbus’s voyages, the expanding English maritime enterprise would sooner or later have recapitulated the Viking achievements in the North Atlantic. There are interesting conjectures about prior voyages from the British Isles to North America before Columbus, from Bristol fishermen working the Grand Banks (not unlikely) to other, more speculative theories, such as Farley Mowat’s ideas about voyagers from the Orkneys preceding the Vikings in the Dark Ages.

Whatever the realities of these theories, it is the expansion of the cultures and traditions that form the template on which today’s societies in the U.S. and English Canada that we should commemorate. Columbus, whatever his merits and demerits may be, is in this regard beside the point. If Americans of Italian descent wish to point with pride to a predecessor in discovery, perhaps we should look at Giovanni Caboto, another Italian navigator. Moving to England, he adopted the English style of his name and became known to history as the discoverer … John Cabot.

Not only did Cabot’s discoveries spark the great stream of human migration that became the English-speaking New World, he was himself a precursor of the millions of Italians who crossed the Atlantic to North America and became part of the English-speaking world, to its and their own enrichment.

I do not join in the politically-correct denigration of Columbus. But I do raise the question of whether, by celebrating him rather than John Cabot, we of the Anglosphere may be celebrating the wrong Italian.

RTWT

The “District of Cabotia”? “Cabotia, the gem of the ocean!” I don’t think so.

Christopher Columbus (detail), from Alejo Fernández, La Virgen de los Navegantes, circa 1505 to 1536, Alcázares Reales de Sevilla.

In his magisterial biography, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, 1942, Samuel Elliot Morrison observes:

[Christopher Columbus did] more to direct the course of history than any individual since Augustus Caesar. …

The voyage that took him to “The Indies” and home was no blind chance, but the creation of his own brain and soul, long studied, carefully planned, repeatedly urged on indifferent princes, and carried through by virtue of his courage, sea-knowledge and indomitable will. No later voyage could ever have such spectacular results, and Columbus’s fame would have been secure had he retired from the sea in 1493. Yet a lofty ambition to explore further, to organize the territories won for Castile, and to complete the circuit of the globe, sent him thrice more to America. These voyages, even more than the first, proved him to be the greatest navigator of his age, and enabled him to train the captains and pilots who were to display the banners of Spain off every American cape and island between Fifty North and Fifty South. The ease with which he dissipated the unknown terrors of the Ocean, the skill with which he found his way out and home, again and again, led thousands of men from every Western European nation into maritime adventure and exploration.

The whole history of the Americas stem from the Four Voyages of Columbus; and as the Greek city-states looked back to the deathless gods as their founders, so today a score of independent nations and dominions unite in homage to Christopher the stout-hearted son of Genoa, who carried Christian civilization across the Ocean Sea.

An annual post.

What do you know? There is one rational adult in a position of responsibility in Connecticut, New Britain’s 33-year-old Republican mayor Erin Stewart.

The Hartford Courant reports:

New Britain’s controversial Christopher Columbus statue won’t be heading to storage — at least not yet.

Mayor Erin Stewart on Thursday vetoed the common council’s decision to take down the statue, meaning the issue will drag into January or possibly beyond.

After learning of her decision Thursday afternoon, a top council Democrat said he’ll try to get his colleagues to override it next month.

In a statement condemning “cancel culture,” Stewart warned taking down the monument would set a bad precedent. …

The veto was the latest twist in a local culture battle that began with the nationwide campaign to pull down Columbus statues after the George Floyd protests in June.

Republican leaders and Italian-American groups in New Britain largely pushed to keep the city’s statue in McCabe Park, while Puerto Rican activists, the New Britain Racial Justice Coalition and council Democrats argued it should be moved off city property.

The arguments largely mirror those in cities across the country: Columbus’ defenders portray him as a brave explorer and symbol of Italian-American heritage, while critics say he was a genocidal slave trader and racist.

But earlier this month, several council Republicans sided with Democrats in a 10-4 vote to take it down.

Stewart said Thursday that they never explained how the city would pay to remove it, nor what would replace it at the park. She signaled that she might reconsider if the council provides detailed answers,

“If the council is going to retire Columbus, they ought to have a concurrent and concrete plan for what will go in its place,” she wrote, saying anything less would be an affront to Italian-Americans.

Democratic Alderman Chris Anderson, one of the most outspoken voices demanding removal of the statue, said Thursday afternoon that he’ll look to override the veto next month. That would take 10 votes; currently the council has 14 members because Democrat Emmanuel Sanchez’s seat has been vacant since he resigned last week.

If the Republican aldermen who voted with Democrats also vote to override the veto, they’d prevail. But the GOP caucus has long been loyal to Stewart, and Alderman Sharon Beloin-Saavedra was the only Republican who has appeared passionate about removing the statue.

RTWT

I think she has a good chance of winning. There are a lot of Italians in Connecticut. And how come the Puerto Ricans, descendants of the Spaniards after all, are on the wrong side? Did some Marxist professor convince them that they all descend from Caribbean cannibals?

Walter Donway defends Columbus Day (If anything, I’d say conceding too much to the misrepresentations and false charges of the slanderers of the great Navigator).

[T]hose who agitate for the replacement of Columbus Day with [Indigenous Peoples Day] … assert that the arrival of Columbus and European civilization launched the exploitation, enslavement, and genocide of what Columbus dubbed the “Indians.” The charge of “genocide” is grotesquely distorted by some of the worst scholarship in recent history.

Historians set the stage for this by means of a vigorous bidding war. Best estimates made before the allegation of genocide arose were that at its population peak there were a million or so Native Americans north of Mexico. As “genocide” became the issue, the estimates soared to five million, 12 million, 18 million… This laid the foundation for labeling what happened to the natives as the worst genocide ever committed and a “holocaust” to dwarf Nazi Germany.

Whatever size the population, at least 70 percent and up to 90 percent of deaths resulted from diseases brought by Europeans, above all, smallpox. Genocide? The argument, apart from citing one poorly documented alleged attempt to infect hostile tribes by spiking blankets with smallpox, is simply that all deaths the Europeans caused were genocidal.

Without doubt, arrival of Europeans in North America, upon which I will focus, here, began a long process of conflict and cooperation, treaty agreements and wars, unstoppable European expansion and bitter armed resistance of tribes, technological dominance of the advanced European culture over primitive tribal culture, and, most tragically and devastatingly, the introduction of new diseases from Europe to which the native population had no immunity and succumbed in virulent epidemics.

It is established that by 1900 there were fewer than 250,000 Native Americans in United States territory. If we take as our estimate of the original native population one made in 1928, long before the genocide craze, then that population declined from 1,152,950 at the time the Europeans arrived to 250,000 some 400 years later—a loss of 850,000.

That was the cost of the European settlement of North America and it was borne by natives. So what was the benefit? To put the matter most boldly—but, I think, to identify its pivotal historical essence—there is this statement by Dr. Michael Berliner, who is quoted as saying that Europeans brought to the New World

…reason, science, self-reliance, individualism, ambition, and productive achievement” where there was “primitivism, mysticism, and collectivism” in economic arrangements…

And cannibalism, torture as routine for dealing with those outside the tribe, incessant wars of conquest over other tribes, slavery, and human sacrifice. Also, zero progress in science, including medicine, and near zero progress in technology.

Does that matter? No. Not when we are discussing recommendations for mandated national holidays and that one replace another. We can celebrate native American tribal culture as the first to settle the huge North American continent and create a spectrum of variations from the agricultural—to the splendid if murderous light cavalry of the Comanche—to the elaborate structures and settled ways of the Pueblos. We can celebrate all that, even recognizing the “sadistic cannibalism” of the Caribs, the routine infliction of torture, and the murderous conquest of tribe by tribe.

Similarly, we can celebrate Columbus Day as marking the opening of the New World to the Old, altering history in unimaginably far-reaching ways for the human race. Even if Columbus combined brilliant navigation and courage with behavior condemned as atrocious by his peers.

In conclusion, it makes no sense to replace Columbus Day with IPD unless you are promoting the view that European settlement should be viewed as evil, not celebrated, and that tribal culture should be valorized. And that is dead wrong, I think, and worse than wrong. In the perspective of history, unfailingly harsh when one culture and society are displacing others, the European settlement of the Americas represented an enormously beneficial, decisive stride for the human race. Just contrast the Carib culture with the U.S. Constitution.

RTWT

Christopher Columbus (detail), from Alejo Fernández, La Virgen de los Navegantes, circa 1505 to 1536, Alcázares Reales de Sevilla.

In his magisterial biography, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, 1942, Samuel Elliot Morrison observes:

[Christopher Columbus did] more to direct the course of history than any individual since Augustus Caesar. …

The voyage that took him to “The Indies” and home was no blind chance, but the creation of his own brain and soul, long studied, carefully planned, repeatedly urged on indifferent princes, and carried through by virtue of his courage, sea-knowledge and indomitable will. No later voyage could ever have such spectacular results, and Columbus’s fame would have been secure had he retired from the sea in 1493. Yet a lofty ambition to explore further, to organize the territories won for Castile, and to complete the circuit of the globe, sent him thrice more to America. These voyages, even more than the first, proved him to be the greatest navigator of his age, and enabled him to train the captains and pilots who were to display the banners of Spain off every American cape and island between Fifty North and Fifty South. The ease with which he dissipated the unknown terrors of the Ocean, the skill with which he found his way out and home, again and again, led thousands of men from every Western European nation into maritime adventure and exploration.

The whole history of the Americas stem from the Four Voyages of Columbus; and as the Greek city-states looked back to the deathless gods as their founders, so today a score of independent nations and dominions unite in homage to Christopher the stout-hearted son of Genoa, who carried Christian civilization across the Ocean Sea.

An annual post.

Christopher Columbus (detail), from Alejo Fernández, La Virgen de los Navegantes, circa 1505 to 1536, Alcázares Reales de Sevilla.

In his magisterial biography, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, 1942, Samuel Elliot Morrison observes:

[Christopher Columbus did] more to direct the course of history than any individual since Augustus Caesar. …

The voyage that took him to “The Indies” and home was no blind chance, but the creation of his own brain and soul, long studied, carefully planned, repeatedly urged on indifferent princes, and carried through by virtue of his courage, sea-knowledge and indomitable will. No later voyage could ever have such spectacular results, and Columbus’s fame would have been secure had he retired from the sea in 1493. Yet a lofty ambition to explore further, to organize the territories won for Castile, and to complete the circuit of the globe, sent him thrice more to America. These voyages, even more than the first, proved him to be the greatest navigator of his age, and enabled him to train the captains and pilots who were to display the banners of Spain off every American cape and island between Fifty North and Fifty South. The ease with which he dissipated the unknown terrors of the Ocean, the skill with which he found his way out and home, again and again, led thousands of men from every Western European nation into maritime adventure and exploration.

The whole history of the Americas stem from the Four Voyages of Columbus; and as the Greek city-states looked back to the deathless gods as their founders, so today a score of independent nations and dominions unite in homage to Christopher the stout-hearted son of Genoa, who carried Christian civilization across the Ocean Sea.

An annual post.

The Guardian reports on the discovery of a bibliophilic treasure house.

[A] huge volume containing thousands of summaries of books from 500 years ago, many of which no longer exist… has been found in Copenhagen, where it has lain untouched for more than 350 years.

The Libro de los Epítomes manuscript, which is more than a foot thick, contains more than 2,000 pages and summaries from the library of Hernando Colón, the illegitimate son of Christopher Columbus who made it his life’s work to create the biggest library the world had ever known in the early part of the 16th century. Running to around 15,000 volumes, the library was put together during Colón’s extensive travels. Today, only around a quarter of the books in the collection survive and have been housed in Seville Cathedral since 1552.

The discovery in the Arnamagnæan Collection in Copenhagen is “extraordinary”, and a window into a “lost world of 16th-century books”, said Cambridge academic Dr Edward Wilson-Lee, author of the recent biography of Colón, The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books.

“It’s a discovery of immense importance, not only because it contains so much information about how people read 500 years ago, but also, because it contains summaries of books that no longer exist, lost in every other form than these summaries,” said Wilson-Lee. “The idea that this object which was so central to this extraordinary early 16th-century project and which one always thought of with this great sense of loss, of what could have been if this had been preserved, for it then to just show up in Copenhagen perfectly preserved, at least 350 years after its last mention in Spain …”

The manuscript was found in the collection of Árni Magnússon, an Icelandic scholar born in 1663, who donated his books to the University of Copenhagen on his death in 1730. The majority of the some 3,000 items are in Icelandic or Scandinavian languages, with only around 20 Spanish manuscripts, which is probably why the Libro de los Epítomes went unnoticed for hundreds of years…

After amassing his collection, Colón employed a team of writers to read every book in the library and distill each into a little summary in Libro de los Epítomes, ranging from a couple of lines long for very short texts to about 30 pages for the complete works of Plato…

Because Colón collected everything he could lay his hands on, the catalogue is a real record of what people were reading 500 years ago, rather than just the classics. “The important part of Hernando’s library is it’s not just Plato and Cortez, he’s summarising everything from almanacs to news pamphlets. This is really giving us a window into the entirety of early print, much of which has gone missing, and how people read it – a world that is largely lost to us,” said Wilson-Lee.

Wilson-Lee and Pérez Fernández are currently working on a comprehensive account of the library, which will be published in 2020.

RTWT

HT: Karen L. Myers.

Christopher Columbus (detail), from Alejo Fernández, La Virgen de los Navegantes, circa 1505 to 1536, Alcázares Reales de Sevilla.

In his magisterial biography, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, 1942, Samuel Elliot Morrison observes:

[Christopher Columbus did] more to direct the course of history than any individual since Augustus Caesar. …

The voyage that took him to “The Indies” and home was no blind chance, but the creation of his own brain and soul, long studied, carefully planned, repeatedly urged on indifferent princes, and carried through by virtue of his courage, sea-knowledge and indomitable will. No later voyage could ever have such spectacular results, and Columbus’s fame would have been secure had he retired from the sea in 1493. Yet a lofty ambition to explore further, to organize the territories won for Castile, and to complete the circuit of the globe, sent him thrice more to America. These voyages, even more than the first, proved him to be the greatest navigator of his age, and enabled him to train the captains and pilots who were to display the banners of Spain off every American cape and island between Fifty North and Fifty South. The ease with which he dissipated the unknown terrors of the Ocean, the skill with which he found his way out and home, again and again, led thousands of men from every Western European nation into maritime adventure and exploration.

The whole history of the Americas stem from the Four Voyages of Columbus; and as the Greek city-states looked back to the deathless gods as their founders, so today a score of independent nations and dominions unite in homage to Christopher the stout-hearted son of Genoa, who carried Christian civilization across the Ocean Sea.

An annual post.

The Hill reports:

The city council of San Jose, Calif., voted Tuesday to remove a statute of Christopher Columbus from the lobby of its city hall.

The council is giving the area’s Italian-American community six weeks to relocate the statue, The Mercury News reported. If they haven’t done so by then, it will be placed in storage.

“I think everyone’s been twisting themselves into pretzels to avoid hurting people,” said Mayor Sam Liccardo, according to the news outlet. “Let’s stop twisting ourselves. Let’s see if we can at last put this behind us and focus on what’s positive, and there’s a lot positive in our community to honor.”

The Brown Berets, a pro-Chicano group, helped lead a push to have the statue removed from public land, calling it “a symbol of genocide” that glorified European colonialism and violence against Native Americans after Columbus’s 1492 voyage to America.

“He belongs in history books,” Councilwoman Sylvia Arenas said, according to the Mercury News. “I don’t believe he belongs in our City Hall.”

The statute of the navigator had been vandalized twice. A man once reportedly smashed the statue’s face with a sledgehammer while shouting “murderer” and “genocide.”

RTWT

I picture Mayor Liccardo waking up in a blood-soaked bed and finding some Brown Beret heads keeping him company.

What is these beaners’ major malfunction anyway? They are Hispanic, for Christ’s sake. They should be proud of Columbus who sailed under the Spanish flag. They ought to trace their descent from “stout Cortez” and the Conquistadors. But in our completely screwed-up era, it’s victims and whiners who get all the power, so they prefer to consider themselves descendants of human sacrificing savages.