Below is an excerpt from听Columbus: His Enterprise听by Hans Koning, a revisionist biography that tells the true history of the life and voyages of Christopher Columbus. When it was first published by Monthly Review Press, author Kurt Vonnegut shared that he was 鈥渕ore grateful for that book than any other book I have read in a couple of years.” Today, we are grateful to have the chance to revisit and relearn Columbus鈥� story, from his childhood to his return home as a man in disgrace.听
Fanatical and extreme as it may be, I find it very hard to think of any shadings or nuances in a character portrait of Christopher Columbus.
Grant him the originality and fierce ambition needed to set that western course. But what else is there to say? Here was a man greedy in large ways, and in small ways–to the point where he took for himself the reward for first sighting land from the Pinta lookout. Cruel in petty things, as when he set a dying monkey with two paws cut off to fight a wild pig; cruel on a continental scale, as when he set in motion what de las Casas called “the beginning of the bloody trail of conquest across the Americas.”
There were a few worldly men around, too, who were not “of their time.” Pedro Margarit, who sickened at the treatment of the Arawaks, who left Hispaniola and spoke against Columbus at Court. In another theater, a man such as the Portuguese Alfonso de Albuquerque, who treated his subjects in Portuguese India as fi they were people.
We may try to redeem him by stating that he was a man of his time. That is certainly true. And it is to the greater glory of those men who were not “of their time”: de las Casas, who in vain fought for half a century to save the Indians; Antonio de Montesinos, a Dominican friar who preached in Santo Domingo in 1511, “I am a voice crying in the wilderness.” (He was recalled shortly thereafter.) It would be the lives of those very few men who would, it such were possible, save the honor of that Holy Faith in whose name a continental massacre was committed.
But men like these were pathetically few in number, and still are. The Spaniards cut off the hands of the Arawaks who didn’t come in with enough gold. More than four hundred years later, Brazilian entrepreneurs cut off the ears of the Indians who didn’t come in with enough wild rubber. The Spaniards threw the Indian children in the sea, shouting, “Boil in hell, children of the devil.” The United States General Westmoreland announced, “An Oriental does not prize his life like we do.” He used new and improved napalm, while the Spaniards in Hispaniola used green wood for burning the Indian caciques in order to make them suffer and scream longer as an example for the others, of course…
Perhaps we will come to say that Columbus was not only a man of his time, but that he was a man of his race. The word “race” may no longer be accepted in science because it cannot properly be defined. That does not prevent us all from knowing quite well what is meant by “the white race”; but let us say then that Columbus was a typical man of the (white) West. And the West has ravaged the world for five hundred years, under the flag of a master-slave theory which in our finest hour of hypocrisy was called “the white man’s burden.” Perhaps the Master-Race Nazis were different from the rest of us, mostly in the sense that they extended that theory to their fellow whites. (In doing so, they did the subject races of this world a favor. The great white-race civil war which we call World War I weakened Europe and broke its grip on Asia and Africa.) I am not ignoring the cruelties of other races. They were usually less hypocritical, though; they were not, in Marx’s phrase, “civilization mongers” as they laid waste to other lands. But they too fill the pages of history with man’s inhumanity to man.
What sets the West apart is its persistence, its capacity to stop at nothing. No other race or religion or nonreligion ever quite matched the Christian West in that respect. Of course those others did not as a rule have the technology and the means to go on and on. The West did, and does–that same persistence has given it its power for good and for bad. We may end then by saying that Columbus was but one frightening example of the corruption of unchecked power, such as precisely the West used to wield.
And there was nothing to check the Spaniards, whose steel, horses, and gunpowder made them invulnerable. Any check on their power would have had to come from inside themselves. Inside themselves was lust for gain and the Christian faith. The two did not appear to be in conflict.
Undoubtedly, the Spaniards were Christians. But that manifested itself in surprising ways. De las Casas reports how they made low, wide gallows on which they strung up the Arawaks, their feet almost touching the ground. Then they put burning green wood at their feet. These executions took place in lots of thirteen. Thirteen Arawaks were hanged each time. Why? This was “in memory of Our Redeemer and His twelve Apostles.”
De las Casas continues to say that chiefs and nobles were usually not hanged like that, but burned to death on grids of rods. Once, he writes, a captain complained that he couldn’t sleep because of the cries and he ordered the victims strangled. But the constable (“and I know his name and the names of his family in Seville”) instead put sticks over their tongues so that they could not make a sound, and “roasted them slowly, as he liked.” Men, women, and children on Columbus’ Hispaniola were hacked to pieces, and those pieces were sold from stalls to the Spaniards for feeding their dogs. It was considered good military policy to give these dogs a taste for Indians.
De Bry, an etcher from the Dutch Lowlands, has illustrated the conquest. Those faces, under the pointed helmets, with the little triangular beards, look on coldly as the Indians are strangled, burned, and cut down. They are the stuff of nightmares.
The curse of the conquest still lies over most of Latin America. Here the encomiendas continue in a more subtle form, and the very few still own the very many. South of the United States border, October [14] is now commemorated as “the day of the race. ” The race, that is, as it now exists, of mixed Spanish and Indian and African stock.
You cannot find fault with that. That race, la raza, is a reality. These children of conquerors and slaves are the only achievement of the conquest, the only wealth it produced. For all the gold and silver stolen and shipped to Spain did not make the Spanish people richer. It gave their kings an edge in the balance of power for a time, a chance to hire more mercenary soldiers for their wars. They ended up losing those wars, anyway, and all that was left was a deadly inflation, a starving population, the rich richer, the poor poorer, and a ruined peasant class.
Perhaps in the children of la raza lies the hope for a final reconciliation of this war that Europe and its white outposts have waged on America and Africa.
But up north we call October [14] “Columbus Day.” Are we committed then to continue in that bloody track? Shouldn’t we try to have our thoughts, on the anniversary of the day it all began, run in a new direction? Shouldn’t we change that name?
Our false heroes have long burdened our history and our character. Shouldn’t we wind up that Enterprise of Columbus and start thinking of a truly New World?
Hans Koning (1921-2007) was a journalist and novelist. He is the author of Columbus: His Enterprise, The Almost World, The Conquest of America, Pursuit of a Woman on the Hinge of History, and many other books of fiction and nonfiction, plays, screenplays, travel books, and articles for magazines like the New Yorker. Four of his novels were made into films. Koning was born in Amsterdam (as Hans Koningsberger), fought with the Dutch Resistance and the British Army during the Second World War, and traveled widely before settling in the United States.
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