What Columbus Discovered, Er . . . Uncovered

What if Columbus had GPS on his Santa Maria ship, and managed to spell and input “India” correctly and find his way around Africa to the Indian Ocean and land in India? Would the people Columbus found be called Columbians?

But alas, it wasn’t to be. The race was on in 1492. The Turks controlled the land route to Asia, and Portugal was competing against Spain to find the fastest sea route to land of spices, India. Who could get there first?

So hurry, Christopher Columbus, set sail right away and go find a western passage to India before anyone else does, said the Queen and King of Castile. And so he did.

Taking a crew of 90 men and three ships, Columbus lands in the Bahamas two months later. He stumbles on the Caribbean islands on his way to Asia but never actually sets foot in the United States. He writes about the people who greet him, the Tainos. Columbus is the first to call the indigenous tribes “Indian,” because mistakenly, he believes the Caribbean islands are part of India. His first impressions of what we now know was the Taino tribe are recorded in his journal entry below:

 “It appears to me, that the people are ingenious, and would be good servants and I am of opinion that they would very readily become Christians, as they appear to have no religion. They very quickly learn such words as are spoken to them. If it please our Lord, I intend at my return to carry home six of them to your Highnesses, that they may learn our language.”

Christopher Columbus, Journal of His First Voyage, Markham, pp. 37-38

From his journal, one can see that from the very beginning, it was about “taking the Indians to Spain” and teaching the Indians “our” language and “our” religions. That’s why Native Americans see Columbus as the guy who left a legacy of slavery and disease that killed thousands of indigenous.

In fact, four California cities, Berkeley, Oakland, Pasadena and Santa Cruz do not even celebrate Columbus Day. Instead, October 13 is celebrated as "Indigenous People's Day." The state of South Dakota celebrates Columbus Day as "American Indian Day."

Still, many of us celebrate Columbus as a brilliant navigator who discovered the New World, even if the lands were “new” only to the Europeans and not to the indigenous who were already living there.

Some 531 years later after that event, Columbus lives on as an icon. Though Columbus was stripped of all his titles when he died, fame did come to him after his death. Today, we have a whopping 601 monuments to honor him throughout the world, according to Peter van der Krogt, who maintains a website which catalogues Columbus monuments, and half of them are located in the United States.

The indigenous in the United States have their tribal imprint on our 50 states, with half of the states carrying an indigenous name besides the one state generically named Indiana.

Amerigo Vespucci, on the other hand, gets one Grazzini statue of himself at the Uffizi gallery in Florence for recognizing that the lands Columbus had discovered were not part of Asia but in fact, another continent. But didn’t Amerigo win the bigger prize? After all, two continents and one country are named after him. Oh, that’s another story.