Reflection on Columbus

Reading about Columbus in The Conquest Of America was a very thought-provoking experience. Columbus comes off in the book as a highly eccentric person at best, and a total lunatic at worst. He seems so irrational and downright deluded that it’s almost hard to hate him, because if he really was so out of his mind as to punish people for suggesting that Cuba was an island just because he wanted to have reached Asia, how could he have hoped to comprehend or draw any logical conclusions from his interactions with the native americans? While I had always known Columbus had all the closed-mindedness and religious rigidity of the times, I had never heard just how bizarre a person he was. Perhaps his exploits in the new world weren’t quite what would be expected of a typical European explorer. If another person had discovered America instead of Columbus, surely they would have had a different approach.

The question, however, becomes how different? After all, while Columbus was undoubtedly someone who would seem strange to anyone, in any time era, were his overall actions in the Americas that far from the norms of the times? While his sponsors were taken aback by his enthusiasm, and his crew noted how odd his behavior was, he ultimately did not get labeled as someone who was famed as being chronically deluded. Even modern times, with the sharp increase in acknowledging Columbus as being nothing close to a hero, usually emphasizes the quest for gold and ill treatment of the natives he recorded in his letters, not his convictions that mermaids existed. Perhaps we are viewing him from too far in hindsight, from a time when logic rather than faith was the norm, for if he had truly been considered as strange as he would today, the reputation would have followed him. We see mild versions of this even nowadays, with the flaws and eccentricities of various public figures being brushed over as not being a big deal in their lifetime, only to provoke outrage much later on. What is considered normal for a culture steadily changes over time, and it was clear that even if Columbus's actions did not represent an average European, they were not wild enough to severely damage his reputation as the great discoverer of America for many centuries.