Highlights Archives
Christopher Columbus: Hero or Villain?
The veneration of Columbus began a little more than a century ago. As late as 1886 there were just two public statues of him in the U.S. It was the World's Columbian Exposition in 1892 that turned him into an icon to be revered, not just for being an expert navigator and courageous sailor but also for opening the Americas to European settlement. Appleton's Cyclopedia of American Biography, a standard scholarly tool of the day, summed up Victorian attitudes when it said of him: "The name and fame of Columbus are not local or limited; they do not belong to any single country or people. They are the proud possession of the whole civilized world. In all the transactions of history there is no act which for vastness and performance can be compared to the discovery of the continent of America." So his name and image began to appear on everything from sales catalogs to steamships.
Even then, some people wanted to deflate his reputation. University of Wisconsin Professor Rasmus Anderson, for example, argued for the notion (since proven correct by archaeological work) that the Vikings had in fact visited North America long before Columbus.
In our own times, scholars have pointed out that his treatment of Native Americans, like that by other conquistadors, was often brutal and capricious. They also point out that the movement he started resulted in the deaths of millions of people. A recent summary of the evidence on European contact with the Americas, 1491: New Revelations of the Americans Before Columbus, by science reporter Charles C. Mann, concludes that 75 to 95 percent of the Native American population — one-fifth of the planet's residents — succumbed to disease in the generations that followed Columbus.
Despite these findings by historians, archaeologists and anthropologists, a survey printed in Oxford University's Public Opinion Quarterly found that "most Americans continue to admire Columbus because, as tradition puts it, 'he discovered America,' though only a small number of mainly older respondents speak of him in the heroic terms common in earlier years. At the same time, the percentage of Americans who reject traditional beliefs about Columbus is also small."
So was Columbus a hero or a villain? You can make up your own mind by looking at the eyewitness accounts in our American Journeys online collection. You can read a firsthand description of his landfall as well as one of the first instances of resistance made by Indians to European invasion. In all, eight original documents about the four Columbus expeditions, totaling some 400 pages, are available online in American Journeys. These include the log of the 1492 voyage and reports by colonists Diego Alvarez Chanca and Bartoleme de Las Casas on his second and third voyages. You can also see there some of the earliest pictures of Columbus (not made by eyewitnesses, unfortunately), including a meeting with Caribbean Indians from Johann Gottfriedt's 1655 Newe Welt vnd Americanische Historien.
In his own day, Columbus was not revered as a great discoverer. Caught in Spanish political turmoils, he warred against competing colonial officials, was arrested and brought back to Europe in chains, and plagued by ill fortune. He died three weeks after his principal supporter, Queen Isabella, on May 20, 1506, convinced that he had reached Asia and utterly ignorant of the extent of the Americas. As with most historic figures or events, a dualistic "hero or villian" approach merely oversimplifies a richly complex and fascinating subject. Go see for yourself, and make up your own mind.
American Journeys was created in 2002-2003 with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Since then more 300,000 pages of its primary sources have been downloaded, and this fall it has received more than 700 visits a day by students all around the world.
:: Posted October 11, 2005
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