Bloody explorers! You ponce off to some bloody unknown land, come home with a tropical disease, a suntan and a bag of brown lumpy things, and Bob’s yer uncle, everyone’s got a picture of you in the lavatory! I mean, what about the people that do all the work?” – Rowan Atkinson, “Blackadder II”
As you may well have guessed by the quotation above, Columbus Day is right up there in my holiday priorities with “National Whack Your Neighbor With A Salmon Day.” However, since people on both sides have pressed the issue, I shall chime in.
First off, why do we hail Christopher Columbus as some sort of great explorer? His claim to fame was that, in trying to get to China, he found an extraordinarily large rock in his path. He never even got to the continent proper! He discovered the Caribbean, for crying out loud, not North America. Secondly, he wasn’t even the first to make it to the Western Hemisphere. Leif Eriksson, a Viking explorer, landed in what is today Canada and established a small colony about 500 years before Chris was even a zygote. However, the Vikings’ whole “burn everything in Europe” policies left them with bad PR, so there’s no Eriksson, Ohio. Almost 25,000 years before Eriksson, Indo-Asiatic peoples came over a land bridge in what is now the Bering Sea between present-day Russia and Alaska, and settled on the two hospitable continents previously unoccupied.
The only reason that we hail Columbus with a holiday is that he had the good sense to actually record what he was doing. His was a discovery by accident, and a relatively minor one at that. He just doesn’t rate a national holiday. He should barely rate a paragraph or two in history.
Yet the people on the other side aren’t swaying me either, in their attempts to demonize Columbus the man, instead of his contemporaries. I doubt that Christopher Columbus was a slave trader. It seems a little hard to swallow. Historically, what were Columbus’ infractions? First, he unleashed diseases unknown in the Americas on the people there. Shacking up with farm animals for a thousand years gave the Europeans immunities to these bugs. Chalk this one up to the Europeans having no idea of medicine or personal hygiene.
Second, he DID open the floodgates to Balboa, Pizzarro and other conquistadors who heard the streets in this new world were paved with gold, and were determined to take everything they could carry without thought to how many natives they had to run through. This also led to people like George Custer, who single-handedly sparked a war with Crazy Horse in 1876 to gain silver in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Columbus was, therefore, indirectly responsible for Andrew Jackson’s “Trail of Tears.”
Still, what is disrupting a commemoration of a five-hundred-year-old event going to do? How is banishing Columbus’ name from public discourse going to undo the events that transpired? The genie has been let out of the bottle. There isn’t much that can be done now, save the deportation of everybody coming to this continent after 1492.
But as for a day for Columbus? Keep it, jettison it with extreme prejudice, I don’t care. To paraphrase from the same program I quoted in the beginning:The return of Christopher “Ooh, Look At What Big Ships I’ve Got” Columbus is a matter of supreme indifference to me.