Just Who Was That Man?

By ROBERT HUGHES

Has the 500th anniversary of the first voyage of Christopher Columbus added to the primary evidence about him -- what he did, how he thought, what kind of man he was? Not by much.

No new letters to or by Columbus have been found. Neither have traces of any wrecked ships from his four voyages, though newly found documents in Seville have cast some light on the rigging and fitting of the little Nina.

In 1492 Columbus left 39 men from the crew of the wrecked Santa Maria to fend for themselves at La Navidad in Haiti. When he came back for them on his second voyage, they had all been killed by the Lucayo tribesmen. Archaeologists at this first Spanish settlement in the Americas have dug out some shards of Venetian glass and the bones of a 15th century pig. At Isabela in the Dominican Republic, where Columbus founded Spain's first colony on his second voyage in 1493, some evidence is turning up about the layout of the town, its artifacts (including a crucifix, possibly the first in the New World) and the colonists' interaction with the natives.

But to expect dramatic discoveries to appear on cue for 1992 is unrealistic. The Holy Grail of Columbus studies would be the long-lost original log of his first voyage to what he called "the Indies," which exists only in a badly garbled abridgment made after his death by the Spanish priest Bartolome de las Casas. Las Casas, who wrote voluminously on the Spanish colonization of the New World, was not a mariner, and his version is filled with errors that have caused endless dispute over such basic matters as Columbus' course on his historic sail and where his little fleet made landfall. Candidates for this honor include San Salvador, Grand Turk, East Caicos, Semana Cay, Conception Island and half a dozen others. In these, as in a myriad other matters, we still don't know enough about Columbus and never will.

In part, the celebration of 1992 will have done its job if it erases a number of the apocrypha patched onto the figure of the Discoverer, as the 19th century called him. Some are obviously false, such as the tenacious story that Queen Isabella sold her jewels to pay for his first voyage, or that the Santa Maria was crewed by convicts, or that Columbus was trying to prove the world was round. (No educated person in the late 15th century, and no mariner either, believed otherwise.)

The 500th anniversary may also force a new awareness in school curriculums of the immense role played by Spaniards in early colonial America. Up to now they have been all but shunted out of view behind the screen of Anglo founder- images (the Pilgrim Fathers, Raleigh in Virginia). This can do good, not because it may pump up the "self-esteem" of Hispanic schoolchildren (the purpose of history is not to make people feel better), but because it accords with a large truth shrouded, at present, in omissions and lies. Columbus himself has been presented as Castilian, Catalan, Corsican, Majorcan, Portuguese, French, English, Greek and even Armenian. He was, in fact, Italian: born in Genoa in 1451, the son of a weaver.

Columbus' sense of his humble origins was crucial. He was determined to transcend them; his means would be navigation. At first he wanted to succeed through trade. Sea trade was the lifeblood of Genova la superba, proud Genoa. As a merchant navigator, Columbus sailed all over the Mediterranean, to the Guinea coast of Africa and as far north as Ireland. He may have gone as far as Iceland too. Sometime between 1478 and 1484, the full plan of self- aggrandizement and discovery took shape in his mind. He would win glory, riches and a title of nobility by opening a trade route to the untapped wealth of the Orient. No reward could be too great for the man who did that.

This drive is one of the few attributes of Columbus that all the surviving sources agree on. It was clear to the crew of the Santa Maria as the little fleet was pitching and rolling west in 1492, with no land yet in sight and mutiny brewing. According to Las Casas' account, some of the men argued that "it was great madness and self-inflicted manslaughter to risk their lives to further the mad schemes of a foreigner who was ready to die in the hope of making a great lord of himself." They planned to pitch him overboard at night as he fiddled with his quadrant, trying to take a reading of the polestar.

No authentic portrait of Columbus done from life exists, but there are verbal descriptions: tall, a long face, ruddy skin, reddish hair that turned white in middle age. Adopting Spain as his homeland in 1484, Columbus was never to use Italian in his writings. But he soon became bookworm enough to be seen as an amateur geographer as well as a mariner, and to accumulate a large library. Alas, only four of these volumes survive with his annotations.

Though Columbus was already a first-rate practical sailor, his idea of the unexplored Atlantic was formed as much by books as by navigation: writings of the ancients (Pliny, Strabo and especially Ptolemy), medieval cosmographers, collections of "marvels." These gave him a framework in which to sell his plans to patrons: his letters to Ferdinand and Isabella, King and Queen of Spain, begging their patronage for the "Enterprise of the Indies," are full of appeals to the authority of older writers.

On what? On the belief that one could reach China and "Cipangu" (Japan) by sailing west. No European ship had reached the Orient by sailing east around the bottom of Africa yet, either. But Columbus was convinced that the westward passage would be shorter and easier. The enterprise of the Indies had nothing to do with discovering America, or even with any suspicion that America existed. Columbus was looking for China and Japan, and long after reaching the Caribbean he remained convinced, against any and all evidence, that he had done so.

Columbus was in fact a very rigid man, and his inflexibility combined with piety and opportunism to produce behavior not far from paranoid. His growing ambition encouraged the belief, typical of obsessed loners, that everyone except God was against him. He was so certain that his enterprise of the Indies was a fulfillment of God's designs that he even greeted the wreck of the Santa Maria as a sign of divine approbation. He had an apocalyptic turn of mind.

Columbus could be extremely petty, as when he claimed for himself the prize money he had promised to the first crewman to sight westward land. His reports to the crown were absurdly self-serving, especially those composed after the first voyage, which are a tissue of hustling lies about "incredible amounts" of gold and spices -- which, however, got him 17 ships for the second voyage. His fixations often skewed his charting, so that Columbus mistook islands for continental coasts and thus claimed to have found what he had not.

But lies and self-delusion, inflated claims, greed and chart errors were the common currency of exploration. Columbus' mistakes, for instance, were no worse than those of the 16th century navigators who blundered out into the Pacific in search of gold and terra australis, the antipodal continent. And unlike others, Columbus got across the Atlantic and found something -- not Asia, but something -- in the West.

The current prejudice against the word discovery, in the context of Columbus' efforts, is interesting. There has never been a shortage of claims and hypotheses about alternative "discoveries" of America. It seems quite certain that the first Europeans to reach the mainland of North America (which Columbus never did: the closest he got to it was Venezuela) were the Vikings, who created a short-lived settlement in Newfoundland around the year 1000.

One need not pay too much attention to other candidates. Irish legend has it that St. Brendan and some monks reached the New World in a coracle, and one particularly choice theory holds that a Cherokee inscription in a burial mound at Bat Creek in Tennessee, found in 1889, was actually in Hebrew, left by Jewish refugees fleeing Roman persecution in the 2nd century. Others hold out for Japanese fishermen blown off across the Pacific in 3000 B.C., and (most recently) an unknown Spanish mariner who supposedly reached the Bahamas in the 15th century, struggled back across the Atlantic and entrusted his map and logs to Columbus, who concealed his knowledge of them to reap the glory of discovery for himself. But then, why leave out the extraterrestrial beings who landed in Peru to create the vast Nazca earth drawings?

The point about discovery is not that someone floats ashore somewhere, by accident, leaving no traces. The American continental coast from Tierra del Fuego to the Aleutians in the west and Baffin Bay on the east coast is such a vast catchment area for the globe's wind and water currents that it is inconceivable that non-native people should not have fetched up there before Columbus. But the essence of discovery is that the voyage is repeatable. It entails documentation -- logs and records. The discoverer is the person who gets from known A to unknown B, returns to A, and can then get back to B again. Columbus' claim to be a discoverer is, admittedly, a function of European consciousness. It exists only in a European cultural frame -- the native cultures and civilizations of America knew very well where they were. But this does not make it unreal. The achievement of Columbus' first voyage in 1492 was to open a route to the New World that could be sailed again, by himself and others, over and over -- and was.

In this sense, he united the Western and Eastern hemispheres of the world across the Atlantic. No man had done so before. Our traditional reverence for his feat is Eurocentric in essence; as the world's focus shifts toward the Pacific, the ocean of the future, Ferdinand Magellan and Captain James Cook -- the latter being a better candidate for the greatest mariner and "encounterer" in human history -- may assume the same dimensions for our descendants that Columbus had for our immediate ancestors. But in the meantime, we should not allow our reaction against the myth of Columbus as Renaissance Ulysses, Romantic hero and near saint to obscure his actual achievement.

With reporting by Cathy Booth/Miami