Christopher Columbus - The Diario of Christopher Columbus First Voyage

This is probably the most research I have put into a Small Works List entry. It often happens that I have no idea who the author is and what they have written that is most significant. I am thinking here of Ki No Tsurayuki and trying to track down what he wrote inside of the Kokin Wakashu. Then I think about Guaman Poma whose name couldn’t have been more obscure from me, but it was clear what the document he would be known for. Isaac Newton also presented some problems for me to get a document that I could actually understand. 

 

Christopher Columbus is probably one of the most famous, or infamous, people who ever lived. Towns, Countries, parks, statues, a national holiday that has recently been renamed (and for good reason), and there isn’t a clear book or text that he wrote? How odd is that? I did a bit of Googling and I found that Penguin Classics has a collection of documents that they package together and call it the 4 voyages. I ordered this book to find out that most of what is in that book is not directly written by Columbus himself. Then I found out that de las Casas abridged and translated Columbus’ first voyage log and included a portion of it in his History of the Indies. He actually translated the whole thing but that whole translation was lost from 1531 to the 1820s which is par for the course for these South American texts like Guaman Poma and Huarochiri Manuscript.

So, I checked out a bunch of different editions of this document and I finally found one that I liked which had the Spanish translation on one page and the English on the other. I found an Audible audiobook that was a faithful translation of just the first voyage and I listened to it in all one setting. It was a captivating account of a pretty terrible person trying to write a sort of travel brochure to the King of Spain and to the Church officials that would read his work and keep on the good side of each them. This is a deeply rhetorical document that tries to capture the essence of the voyage, make himself look as good as possible while having a pretty terrible trip by his own terms, not to mention the atrocities he admits to in his own journal.

 Listen, here is a thought experiment that I have asked several people in my life to get a baseline of what they remember about Columbus. Everyone can name the three ships. Everyone can name the year, and the basic outline of the story. Spanish (actually Italian) guy wants to find a new route to India for the spice trade and ends up finding a different place all together. But beyond that, what do you actually know about the voyages, what happened, and what happened just after it. I asked two Scottish friends of mine, I asked a young British student that I have, and a wide range of professors and family members and no one I know has any in-depth information about what happened on these voyages.

 

Columbus’ first voyage does not show a seasoned sailor in charge of the nature of the voyage, he doesn’t know where he is going and the first thing he does, literally on day one is he lies to his crew about how far they have actually gone. Before he really sets out in earnest, one of the ships has a broken rudder that cannot be repaired. Beyond this, when he gets to the ‘new world,’ Columbus doesn’t think that he would have made it to India, he thinks he would have made it to Japan but he knows that he hasn’t travelled far enough to get to Japan so he is confused as to where this place could be. As soon as he makes landfall, he asks the locals where the mainland is, where their king is, and who they are but he doesn’t have anyone with him that can translate for him. He references often how he communicates via symbols and hand gestures.

 

He describes the indigenous people like children, naïve and unprepared. He constantly references how they do not wear any clothes and how the women are beautiful. He describes them physically often and that they do not have any metal. The first people he meets do not seem to have a good handle on where other things are even in their own area of the world. He notices that some of them have gold in their noses, and so he knows they know what gold is and this is how he thinks these local people can be helpful to him and the cause of Spain. He askes them where they get their gold from but they don’t really tell him, and when they do they reference a place that they can’t help get him to. At some point, the captain of the Pinta decides he is done with Columbus and sets off on his own to find the gold he thinks he can find. Columbus takes captive some women and children to help him on board his ship and to convince the other islanders that he is not a bad person (weird choice). He says that every island he goes to the people flee before he gets there and thinks they are cowards. Word travels fast I imagine when a whole new civilization shows up and if he were a nice guy and would tell the whole story of what is happening here, maybe people would not keep fleeing before he gets to their island.

 

This is a deeply fraught text that sort of exudes the reason in and of itself why this story is not remembered in any coherent way because from the beginning this was a stumble into an invasion story and Columbus realized that pretty quick. He figures out pretty quickly that there was no mainland, and that each one of these islands is basically a self-sufficient but deeply under-resourced community that does not have to protect itself from invaders because there are none. Each island is aware of and is terrorized by an island of cannibals nearby but they know where those people are and have ways of dealing with them. The Spanish ships offer something totally new for these people and by Columbus’ admission enter into relationship with him in a fairly trusting way. Columbus takes this as naivete and weakness which is odd because this is all that he prepared for.

Columbus is a bad dude, that’s the long and short of it and the reason why this book isn’t more widely read is because people knew it and didn’t want to tell that story. He is also a bad sailor. He runs his only ship aground on a sand bar in what he talks about as some of the most wide open harbors in the world. He goes to bed and leaves his second in command in charge of the night watch, and that person entrusts this duty to a ‘boy’ who doesn’t get a name. This is not very good sailing we are doing here.

 

By the end of his trip, he finally runs into these cannibals who attack his ship when he is getting ready to leave. They get the best of him, but they chase them away pretty quickly and it feels like Columbus saves this incident for last to sort of position the narrative that he gave these people a chance, that he offered them a peaceful diplomatic approach and they respond by attacking him. I don’t think I will read the 2^nd, 3^rd or 4^th journey as I imagine it will only get worse but I feel like this is Columbus way of setting the stage for what happens next.

 

Washington Irving – The Life of Christopher Columbus

 It is hard to piece together without getting way down in the weeds here, but it appears that by the time Columbus’ voyage logs are rediscovered in the early 1800s, this is when Washington Irving gets involved to write the comprehensive biography of Columbus. Irving is an interesting choice for this because of his background with writing local legends and folklore which is definitely the stank he puts on the Columbus account. It seems to be that the concept of the earth being flat and that story line being a crucial part of the Columbus narrative is a totally fabricated notion wholly invented by Irving. I talked with a astronomer friend of mine who seems to agree with this notion thought he was not aware of exactly where this idea came from. I have included the quote as I can see it from Irving’s biography of Columbus volume 1.

 

I will note here that this idea is not mentioned once in the First voyage, not even referenced. Columbus thought he was going to land in Japan first and then work his way down to India from there. Columbus knew the world was round and knew where Japan would be the most eastern island he would approach first.

Irving believes that Lactantius and Augustine were the leading theological thinkers during Columbus’ time which is a weird thing to think. I imagine Aquinas might figure more prominently then but whatever.

“The passage cited from Lactantius to confute Columbus, is in a strain of gross ridicule, unworthy of so grave a casuist. “Is there any one so foolish, ” he asks , “as to be lieve that there are antipodes with their feet opposite to ours ; people who walk with their heels upward, and their heads hanging down ? That there is a part of the world in which all things are topsyturvy: where the trees grow with their branches downward , and where it rains , hails and snows up ward? The idea of the roundness of the earth," he adds, “was the cause of inventing this fable of the antipodes, with their heels in the air; for these philosophers , having once erred , go on in their absurdities, defending one with another.”

More grave objections were advanced on the authority of St. Augustine . He pronounces the doctrine of antipodes incompatible with the historical foundations of our faith; since , to assert that there were inhabited lands on the oppo site side of the globe , would be to maintain that there were nations not descended from Adam , it being impossible for them to have passed the intervening ocean. This would be, therefore, to discredit the bible , which expressly declares , that all men are descended from one common parent . 

Such were the unlooked - for prejudices which Columbus had to encounter at the very outset of his conference, and which certainly relish more of the convent than the university. To his simplest proposition, the spherical form of the earth , were opposed figurative texts of scripture . They observed that in the Psalms the heavens are said to be extend ed like a skin*, that is, according to commentators, the curtain or covering of a tent, which among the ancient pastoral nations was formed of the skins of animals; and that St. Paul, in his Epistle to the Hebrews, compares the heaven to a tabernacle, or tent, extended over the earth, which they thence inferred must be flat” (Irving 76).