This is part of an ongoing series that will be posted each Monday. You can read the introduction to this series by clicking here.

Some say it’s Monday; I say it’s time for another session of Monday School – STILL “The Rational Corrective To All That Nonsense They Tried To Teach You Yesterday!” How nice that the U.S. Postal Service has suspended mail delivery today just so you won’t be distracted by nasty bills.

Today’s Lesson: Christopher Columbus Was One Of History’s Greatest Christians – Right?

Some might think so. After all, only two people in all of human history have official national holidays named after them in the United States and Columbus just happens to be one of them. And like the other person who has a holiday (the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.), there’s little doubt that Columbus was a Christian whose actions were often driven by his religious beliefs.

Unfortunately, and despite what generations of Americans have been taught, it now seems pretty clear that Columbus was far from a good man. Many would even go so far as to say that he was one of history’s greatest fiends and ought to be roundly condemned – not honored with a holiday.

The facts bear closer examination here for at least three reasons:

1) Columbus’s fiendishness seems to have flowed in large part from his Christianity and the Christian culture he was part of;

2) As with so many of the great Christian figures in history, the facts seem to have been ignored and distorted for generations in order to make Christians feel good about themselves, to diminish and demonize non-Christian cultures, and to minimize the bad behavior directly inspired by Christianity; and

3) The evils associated with Columbus, his religion, and factual distortion are hardly limited to one long-dead man but continue to manifest themselves in today’s headlines. In learning how to accurately examine and evaluate Columbus, we learn how to accurately examine and evaluate numerous contemporary figures whose bad behavior badly needs to be documented and revealed now – not 500 years after the fact.

A short but apparently accurate evaluation of Columbus can be found here for those of you who are either in a hurry or are inclined to reject out of hand anything I happen to post here.

The following, somewhat longer evaluation is based on my reading of the Encyclopedia Britannica, Richard Shenkman’s Legends, Lies, and Cherished Myths of American History (Harper & Row: 1988), and James W. Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (The New Press: 1995).

First, here are some of the things the Britannica says about Columbus:

“[H]is thoughts, writings, and actions at times suggested a man just this side of delusion….

“[H]e was a pirate in the service of Rene d’Anjou in 1472-73….

“Columbus discovered America by prophecy rather than by astronomy. ‘In the carrying out of this enterprise of the Indies,’ he wrote to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1502, ‘neither reason nor mathematics nor maps were any use to me: fully accomplished were the words of Isaiah’ – referring to a more or less apposite passage inIsaiah 11:10-12 – and, in fact, any writing became prophetic in his eyes when it could be interpreted as a forecast of his discovery….

“[H]e felt sure of having been divinely selected for a mission….”

The Britannica goes on to explain how Columbus derived his geography in large part from the apocryphal biblical Second Book of Edras. That book apparently indicates that the Earth is round and is six parts dry land to one part sea, among other things. Combined with other assertions and assumptions, these “truths” permitted Columbus to calculate that India ought to be where North America in fact is. Apparently Columbus never allowed the empirical evidence to interfere with this belief of his.

The Britannica goes on to say this:

“The monarchs [Ferdinand and Isabella] then decided to set up a special commission of ‘learned men and mariners’ to study Columbus’s proposals…. [This commission] made him wait four years. This was not, as is often asserted, because the commission was either incompetent or backward in its views but because Columbus was vague and secretive as well as incoherent….”

Once in the New World “he wandered among lovely islands to which he gave Spanish names, hoping ‘the Lord would show him where gold is born’…. He even thought of slavery…. He raised crosses everywhere, but he kept an eye on the material value of things even to the extent of seeing men as goods for sale. His honeymoon with the islanders may have ended on the day he removed by force seven of the inhabitants of Guanahani. They began then and there to think of the Spaniards as only a shade less tyrannical than the caniba or ‘cannibals,’ who from islands further to the south came to take them away and eat them….”

Once Columbus returned to Spain from his first trip to the New World, the Encyclopedia Britannica goes on to say, Ferdinand and Isabella “wished to send a second expedition as soon as possible; they also obtained two papal bulls granting them the Indies discovered and to be discovered and apportioning the undiscovered parts of the West between the two Iberian powers [i.e., Spain and Portugal - as if the West was the Pope’s to give away as he saw fit!]

“Wealth and honor were, indeed, his [Columbus’s]. He nonetheless insisted on being paid the prize of 10,000 maravedis promised to the first man of the crew to see land. The humble sailor who actually had sighted land went over to Morocco in disappointment and became a renegade….”

Richard Shenkman’s Legends, Lies, and Cherished Myths of American History (among other sources) reveals that this was hardly Columbus’s only crime.

“Unbeknown to much of the public, he was directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of Arawak Indians on Haiti….

“His first encounter with the Arawaks could not have gone better. He himself wrote that the natives on the island ‘are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone.’

“Columbus, however, did not reciprocate the Indians’ kindness. Under pressure to bring back riches to Spain, he required Indians over fourteen years old to make regular contributions of gold. Indians who did not comply, according to historian Howard Zinn, ‘had their hands cut off and bled to death.’

“Those Indians who weren’t killed were often enslaved and shipped to Spain. On one trip, 500 Arawak men, women, and children were loaded onto ships bound for the Old World; during the voyage 200 died. Far from feeling guilty about the practice of slavery, Columbus boasted about it. ‘Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity,’ he wrote, ‘go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.’ Within two years of Columbus’s arrival, says Zinn, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti had died ‘through murder, mutilation, or suicide.’ Under Columbus’s Spanish successors the mistreatment continued. In 1515 there were just 50,000 Indians left. In 1550 only 500 remained. By 1650 there were none.

“Yet such is the desire for heroes Columbus will probably always be revered. [Prize-winning historian Samuel Eliot] Morison says he ought to be, for although he had his faults, ‘they were largely the defects of the qualities which made him great….’

“Howard Zinn chides Morison for acknowledging mass murder on one page, then ignoring it later on. To bury the facts, he says, ‘in a mass of information is to say to the reader with a certain infectious calm: yes, mass murder took place, but it’s not that important – it should weigh little in our final judgments.’”

It is Prof. James W. Loewen who presents the most devastating critique of Columbus and the myth that has grown up around him, however. Almost 40 pages of his Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong is devoted to pointing out and correcting the many common errors American History textbooks make about Columbus. Here are just a few of the highlights:

Historians have identified at least 14 different groups of people who might have made it to the New World before Columbus. A chart on page 38 gives a list along with a summary of the evidence.

“Most Europeans and Native Americans knew the world to be round…. Washington Irving wins credit for popularizing the flat-earth fable in 1828. In his bestselling biography of Columbus, Irving described Columbus’s supposed defense of his round-earth theory before the flat-earth savants at Salamanca University. Irving himself surely knew the story to be fiction. He probably thought it added a nice dramatic flourish and would do no harm. But it does. It invites us to believe that the ‘primitives’ of the world, admittedly including pre-Columbian Europeans, had only a crude understanding of the planet they lived on, until aided by forward-thinking Europeans. It also turns Columbus into a man of science who corrected our faulty geography….

“Columbus… and his royal sponsors were devout orthodox Catholics, not humanists.” (Despite this, at least one commonly used American History text claims Columbus “had the humanist’s belief that people could do anything if they knew enough and tried hard enough.”)

“[A]massing wealth and dominating other people came to be positively valued [by Columbus and Christian Europe] as the key means of winning esteem on earth and salvation in the hereafter. As Columbus put it, ‘Gold is most excellent; gold constitutes treasure; and he who has it does all he wants in the world, and can even lift souls up to Paradise.’… But textbooks downplay the pursuit of wealth as a motive for coming to America when they describe Columbus and later explorers and colonists. Even the Pilgrims left Europe partly to make money, but you would never know it from our textbooks….

“Europeans believed in a transportable, proselytizing religion that rationalized conquest. (Followers of Islam share this characteristic.) Typically, after ‘discovering an island and encountering a tribe of Indians new to them, the Spaniards would read aloud (in Spanish) what came to called ‘the Requirement.’ Here is one version:

“‘I implore you to recognize the Church as a lady and in the name of the Pope take the King as lord of this land and obey his mandates. If you do not, I tell you that with the help of God I will enter powerfully against you all. I will make war everywhere and every way that I can. I will subject you to the yoke and obedience to the Church and to his majesty. I will take your women and children and make them slaves… The deaths and injuries that you will receive from here on will be your own fault and not that of his majesty nor of the gentlemen that accompany me.’ [Emphasis added]

“Having thus satisfied their consciences by offering the Indians a chance to convert to Christianity, the Spaniards felt free to do whatever they wanted with the people they had just ‘discovered.’”

When the people Columbus discovered resisted his attempts to enslave them, he resorted to war. Loewen quotes historian Kirkpatrick Sale and Ferdinand Columbus’s biography of his father as saying, “The soldiers mowed down dozens with point-blank volleys, loosed the dogs to rip open limbs and bellies, chased fleeing Indians into the bush to skewer them on sword and pike, and ‘with God’s aid soon gained a complete victory, killing many Indians and capturing others who were also killed.’”

According to Loewen “Spaniards hunted Indians for sport and murdered them for dog food….

“Columbus not only sent the first slaves across the Atlantic, he probably sent more slaves – about five thousand – than any other individual…. A particularly repellent aspect of the slave trade was sexual. As soon as the 1493 expedition got to the Caribbean, before it even reached Haiti, Columbus was rewarding his lieutenants with native women to rape…. Columbus wrote a friend in 1500, ‘… there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten are now in demand.’….

“Of the twelve textbooks, only six mention that the Spanish enslaved or exploited the Indians anywhere in the Americas. Of these only four verge on mentioning that Columbus was involved….”

Loewen goes on to indicate the sort of nonsense that can flourish in a society so estranged from the truth:

“In 1989 President Bush invoked Columbus as a role model for the nation: ‘Christopher Columbus not only opened the door to a New World, but also set an example for us all by showing what monumental feats can be accomplished through perseverance and faith.’”

It would seem that President Bush was either ignorant or deceptive when he said these things.

The remarks delivered today by his son might be even worse.

Two key passages: “ The journey of the explorer from Genoa is one of the great stories of daring and discovery. And the journey of millions of immigrants from Italy is also a story of discovery and bravery, and that journey has enriched our country, that’s really what we’re celebrating today. America is a stronger and finer nation because of the influence of Italian Americans…. The faith of the Italian-American community in God is an important part of our nation’s fabric. The faith in family, the love of life and the commitment to our country are great gifts. Italian Americans share those gifts generously. And that is why we celebrate Columbus Day.”

So, we celebrate Columbus Day because he was Italian? Or do we merely say things like this when we’re running for re-election and we’re willing to kiss the butts of any group of people who might vote for us? (I dare you to try to read the President’s remarks in their entirety without gagging. I don’t think I’ve come across so much shameless brown-nosing since I watched a fellow student trying to avoid detention in junior high.)

Adding absurdity to all the pandering: Columbus may not have been Genoese or Italian at all. According to the Britannica, “There is no explicit statement by him declaring himself Genoese. He never went back to Genoa. He never wrote in any form of Italian – not even to his brothers or to Genoese persons and institutions – but always in Spanish.” It also points out that he fought on the side of Portugal against Genoa in at least one battle and cannot be called a Genoese patriot. If Columbus actually DID come from Genoa, as President Bush claims, it would seem that the President was actually praising a 15th century John Walker Lindh in his remarks today. Was that really his intent?

According to Loewen, some historians believe Columbus was actually from Portugal, Corsica, or Spain. If they’re right, it would seem that a president willing to go to war over non-existent weapons of mass destruction has no problem using a murderous, slave-trading non-Italian as an excuse to celebrate Italian Americans….

At least the official statement that the White House released today in honor of Columbus Day seems to have gotten it right when it mentions that Columbus made fourjourneys to the “New World.” Unfortunately, it also completely overlooks the nature of those journeys. I’ve already described some of what happened during the first three. Let’s close today’s lesson by considering the fourth….

According to the Britannica, it was a mess. Columbus was expressly forbidden to go to Espanola; he went there anyway. He suffered numerous mutinies. Living more in a dream world than the real one, he sent off letters to Ferdinand and Isabella assuring them that he was just ten days from the Ganges River – and that Panama was next to Cathay (i.e., China). Storms battered his ships. He reported hearing voices from on high. After a year of waste and madness, he finally returned to Europe for the last time.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about his fourth journey, however, is why he wanted to make it. Again, in the words of the Britannica, “Columbus, now frustrated in his dreams of greatness in the New World, cast about for another grand work to achieve and found it in his biblical, prophetic mind: he would liberate Jerusalem. He did not need to consult cosmographers, merchants, or ambassadors. He read the prophets and having collected all the texts he could showing that Jerusalem would be liberated by Spain, he presented his Book of Prophecies to the king and queen.” His fourth trip to the New World was approved and undertaken in order to obtain the gold he needed to finance a new Crusade into the Middle East.

He ended up dying in 1506 instead.

In 1513, his remains were given a holy burial on the grounds of a monastery in Seville.

In 1542, the remains of both Columbus and his son were disinterred and transferred to Hispaniola where they were entombed in the cathedral of Santo Domingo.

As far as I can determine, the Catholic Church has never apologized for the crimes of one of its most famous members, let alone acted to throw his icky bones out of its cathedral.

As far as I can determine, there is no plan for the Knights of Columbus – a Catholic organization – to change its name. Indeed, its official website still talks about how its founders were “bound together by the ideal of Christopher Columbus, the discoverer of the Americas, the one whose hand brought Christianity to the New World.” If they know what else that hand did, they’re not publicizing it. Typical, isn’t it?

Hope you have a good day regardless.