Columbus Dei

The Colonel doesn't understand the big deal about Columbus.

Seriously, he got lucky.

Timing is everything and the Genoese (Italy didn't exist at the time) map-maker hit the court of Ferdinand and Isabella at just the right time.  The rulers of the united kingdoms of Castile and Aragon (Spain didn't exist at the time) were feeling froggy after finally running the last of the Moors out of the Iberian peninsula and they jumped at the chance to enrich themselves with the opening of a new trade route to the Orient.

But, if Columbus hadn't gotten backing from the court of Castile, the Colonel feels quite comfortable in positing that another intrepid explorer from any one of a number of European countries would have very soon found his way across the Atlantic and washed up on a beach in the Caribbean or found shelter in a bay along the North American eastern seaboard.  It was just a matter of time.

Heck, French fishermen were already sailing pretty darn close.  And, we don't need to even begin a discussion about Norse longboat landings several centuries prior to that of Columbus's leaky second-hand caravels.  

It's a bit ironic, since Columbus was in search of a westward sailing route to China, that there's fairly good circumstantial evidence that a Chinese mariner hit the west coast of North America seventy years before Columbus bumped into the Bahamas.

The Colonel's point, blunt as it may be, is that we make far too much of a big deal out of Columbus (Cristobal Colon).  His "discovery" of the "new world" was a happy accident (happy, unless you happened to be an Arawak) that would have been accomplished by somebody else within a very few years.

(For the Bama and LSU fans who may have stumbled upon this blog whilst searching for pachyderm print toilet paper or a corn dog recipe, the Arawaks mentioned above were the inhabitants of the Caribbean islands when Columbus arrived.  They no longer exist.) 

And, while we're on the subject (if tangentially) of European exploitation of the Western Hemisphere, can we please dispense with the tired, and quite specious, argument that the "native" inhabitants of the Americas would have continued to live peaceful, noble lives in complete harmony with their environment if not for European interference.   

First of all, even the most cursory examination of Amerindian history reveals rampant inter-tribal warfare (replete with massacres, displacement, and -- gasp! -- cultural appropriation), large-scale terra-forming and nature-displacing city-building, and wholesale destruction of local environments.   

Second, even if Europeans had not attempted to colonize in the Americas and only contented themselves with establishing trade with the Amerindians, there would still have been no way to prevent the introduction of diseases for which the Amerindians had no natural resistance and from which perished upwards of 90% of the native populations extant in the Western Hemisphere at the end of the 15th Century, C.E.

Granted, the next three centuries of European exploitation of the Americas were replete with actions judged heinous by our "modern" sensibilities -- slavery and forced labor chief among them.  But, to assume that those practices began with the exploitation of the Americas, and were the exclusive province of European cultures, plumbs the depths of historical ignorance.

So, let's cool the Columbus jets, shall we?  Let's put his accomplishment in the proper perspective -- recognition, without lionization or stigma.