An appendix to A Sickness of the Heart

2009, HarperCollins, NY, Chapter 7, pages 177-204 of 1492: The Year the World Began

In this, the strongest chapter in his book—a strong enough work to rate chapter-by-chapter reviews—Armesto paints the most unflattering and most human picture of Columbus I have read in over a dozen accounts.

The author begins by detailing the counterintuitive fact that medieval explorers wanted to explore against the wind so that they were assured a return power source. Columbus’ willingness to sail with the wind at his back marked him as a nut.

Columbus himself was by turns a mystic, a fantasist, a pragmatist, a bold-faced liar, and above all greedy. The day after he promised “the lookout’s share” for the first sailor to sight land, a sailor sighted land. He then reneged on his promise and took the share himself, saying that he knew that land was there by arcane means already.

In Armesto’s hands Columbus is more than a bumbling and lucky schemer, but a prefect case study for why Europeans linked the worlds of Europe, Asia and Africa with the 'new' ‘Fourth World’. Europeans used technology borrowed from their Asian betters from a less informed cultural base.

White supremacists, in their various guises, would have us believe it was a bold expression of eugenics. Black militants would have us believe it was a scheming expression of dysgenics.

There is one aspect of European—particularly Iberian and Italian—culture that I have read about and considered in the context of the ferocity of conquistador behavior; the popular literature of the time, the 15th Century equivalent of the comic book. Columbus and those adventure mad murderers that followed in his wake grew up reading fabulous tales of blood-drenched adventure. And, just as the equestrian class was being eclipsed by foot soldiers and artillery on the European battlefield seaborne adventures to exotic fairytale kingdoms became a reality, a place to vent the knightly impulse and quench their thirst for adventure in blood. Armesto is the author to finally articulate ‘fantasy literature’ as causal to European expansion, so I should let him have the last word:

“We have seen evidence of only one feature of European culture that did make the region peculiarly conducive to breeding explorers. They were steeped in the idealization of adventure.”

Never, it appears, should we underestimate the impact of geeks like Columbus and their improbable dreams.