Columbus Day
Today, October 12, 2016 is Columbus Day – a national holiday
that began in New York City in 1792 as a means to honor the Italian population of
our young nation in the city of New York. No doubt the decision to honor Columbus via
a national holiday was aided by the poem that we all learned in grade school: ‘In
14 hundred 92 Columbus sailed the ocean blue.’
The rest of the poem goes like this,
In 1492, Columbus
sailed the ocean blue,
He had three ships
and sailed from Spain,
He sailed through
sunshine wind and rain.
He sailed by night,
he sailed by day;
He used the stars
to find his way …”
The poem generally lauds Columbus and his sailors for their courage,
nautical skills, and newfound knowledge that the earth was round, not flat.
Surely, the poem seems to say, the great sailor Columbus is deserving of a hero’s
acclamation. None of us who were born before 1950 had any reason to doubt the
veracity of the poem and/or the wisdom of a national holiday honoring the great
sailor that began in 1937. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Congress ordered the holiday,
bowing to lobbying by the Knights of Columbus, who wanted a Catholic hero to be
honored.
Now, there is a movement afoot to change Columbus Day. Some radicals wish
to abandon this national holiday and replace it with a day honoring native
Americans. What? Shall we lose another of our sacred heroes and send him to the
scrap heap? Is this another instance of a cultural change which provokes professional
football players to sit during the national anthem? It must surely be a liberal
plot to … (you supply the reason).
Before we get upset about the loss of another beloved national symbol,
a review of the facts is in order. First of all, historians tell us that
Columbus never set foot in North America. His four voyages to the New World in 1492, 1493,
1498 and 1502 landed him in the Bahamas, Central and South America, not North
America. Nevertheless, Columbus was first in what began as a whirlwind of
European visits to the New World. (Indians would call them invasions, not visits.)
Certainly Columbus’ trips were historic -indeed, his trips provoked in a change
human history, ushering in what is known as the Columbian Exchange — the
historic exchange of plants, animals, disease, culture, technology and people
between the Old and New Worlds. The Old World, for example, got gold, chocolate,
tobacco, corn and other plants while the New World got wheat, bubonic plague,
chickenpox, cholera, malaria, measles, smallpox, typhoid, and other diseases, all
of which decimated the populations of native Americans.
For
his part, Columbus profited mightily from his voyages. He returned with gold
for the King of Spain that he stole from the indigenous people in the New World.
He obtained the gold by force, killing and maiming natives and forcing them to
bring the gold to his fleet. After they complied, he put them in chains and
threw them in the holds of his ships to sell them as slaves upon his return to
Spain. This turned out to be only partially successful – many of the natives
died during the long voyage since Columbus was stingy with food and water. He
threw those who died overboard plus any other living Indians that didn’t meet
with his approval. Each of his four voyages was marked by increasingly savage
treatment of natives that he incorrectly labeled as Indians since he thought he
had sailed to India, not the New World.
Even by the standards of the
time, Columbus’ behavior was abhorrent, and by today’s measures both criminal
and cruel in extreme. His notoriety for being the first to the New World is now
known to be wrong – he was preceded by at least 500 years by Vikings who
visited North America first. Sadly, Columbus voyage marked the beginning of a
series of European invasions by armed warriors who laid waste to indigenous
peoples wherever they met them. It is time that we end the charade of honoring
a sadistic leader who brought so much misery to so many.
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