In general, scholars typically say that the men who explored
and conquered the New World were motivated by “God, Gold, and Glory.” That is, they were essentially motivated by
the desire to convert the “heathens” to Christianity, by the desire to get
rich, and by the desire to become famous.
To a certain degree, all of these factors are present in Christopher
Columbus’s arrival in the Americas.
Columbus’s main intention was never to land in China, although he did
intend on making a stop there[1]. The reason that he called the people Indians
was because he believed that he had arrived in the East Indies, by which he
means Indonesia.[2]
Contrary to the popular Gershwin
song, Columbus’s contemporaries knew that the Earth was not flat and had known
so since the time of Archimedes[3]. In fact, during his third journey, Columbus
wrote that he “always read that the world, land and water, was spherical… and I
find that it is not round as they describe it, but that it is the shape of a
pear”.[4] He did, however, calculate the size
incorrectly. He used Ptolemy’s geography
and the Imago Mundi (Image of the World), which was based on Muslim scholarship,
and thus overestimated the size of Asia and underestimating the size of two
oceans.[5] Ptolemy, for instance, wrote in one of his
books that Europe and Asia covered about 180 degrees in longitude, when in fact
the mainland covers closer to 200 degrees[6]. This also means that he underestimated the
circumference of the earth by about a quarter.
Columbus also read the works of Marinus of Tyre, who overestimated
Europe and Asia as taking up 225 degrees longitude.
Another one of his important
motivations was that he wanted for his geographical ideas about the way that
the world was sized and shaped to be proven correct. He was certain that Asia was much closer to
Europe than everybody else thought. He
believed that the world in general was much smaller than was (and is) commonly
thought. He thought that going west from
Europe would be a shortcut to Asia, and that this journey would prove him
correct.
In his defense, he was traveling
through almost completely unknown waters, relying only on a technique known as
dead reckoning[7]
in which a sailor works out his position on the globe using only his speed, the
direction that he is going, and the time, which back then was timed via
hourglass. That makes it rather
difficult to hit a continent. However,
Columbus did not actually hit a continent, he only landed on some islands, so
opinions on his sailing skills could probably go either way. One of the reasons that Europe in general was
trying to explore ways to get to the Orient was due to the Catholic Church’s
restrictions on diet and meat consumption.
Thus there was great interest in finding new fishing grounds. This suggests that the primary motivation for
these travels was an economic one.
Columbus made four journeys to the
New World, the last three of which were fairly calamitous.[8] His first journey was rather small and he
landed on a tiny Caribbean island, which he named San Salvador[9],
which was called Guanahani by the local natives. He convinced the king and queen of Spain,
Ferdinand and Isabella, to fund his to fund his voyage by promising wealth and
Christian conversions of the natives, hopefully to sign them up for yet another
crusade. There is a long standing myth
that he somehow tricked Ferdinand and Isabella into paying for his trip. However, they had, in fact, commissioned two
different sets of experts to analyze his plans, both of whom advised against
it. In fact, they said the enterprise
was “not a proper object for their royal authority to favor an affair that
rested on such weak foundations, and which appeared uncertain and impossible to
any educated person, however little learning he might have.”[10] Even so, Ferdinand and Isabella funded the
expedition, partially because they were filled with Christian zeal after
expelling the Muslims from Granada and had also just passed the Alhambra
Decree, pushing the Jewish population out of Aragon and Castille and their
territories and possessions.
Incidentally, this was probably also
the reason that they wanted Columbus to bring back gold. The king and especially the queen wanted to
fund a crusade to “take Jerusalem back” from the Muslims that lived there. It was a fairly common belief in the Middle
Ages that, if Jerusalem was not returned to the hands of the Christians, that
the world would be faced with an apocalypse of sorts. Columbus himself subscribed to these
beliefs. He actually calculated that it
would be only 155 years before the end of the world, according to various parts
of the Bible.[11] Both Columbus and the king and queen of Spain
were interested in evangelizing the natives.
When the Mongols had taken over China, they had sent for a number of
holy men from different religions in order to decide which one to choose. Despite the fact that the Ming dynasty had
reclaimed China and ended the Mongol Empire around 1368, he still reminded
Ferdinand and Isabella of how many times the Great Khan had “...sent to Rome to
ask for men learned in our Holy Faith in order that they might instruct him in
it and how the Holy Father had never provided them; and thus so many peoples
were lost, falling into idolatry and accepting false and harmful sectas and
Your Highnesses… thought of sending me,
Christo ´bal Colo ´n to the said regions of India to see the said princes and
the peoples and the lands, and the characteristics of the lands and of
everything, and to see how their conversion to our Holy Faith might be
undertaken.”[12] He had the idea that Christian countries
could attempt to attack Jerusalem from the west while the Great Khan could
march from the east.[13]
On November 6th 1492, he wrote that
he believed that they might be converted to Christianity if he knew anyone who
spoke their language. He also wrote that
he hoped that King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella would attempt to convert them
with the zeal with which they expelled the Jews and Muslims from Spain earlier
that year. He wrote on the 12th that he
believed that converting the natives would gain Spain “great dominions and
riches” and on the 27th, he discouraged them from allowing anybody but Catholic
Christians from visiting the New World so as to discourage heathen influences
on the Indians.
Spain’s other reason for paying for
his voyages was because they wanted to get into the pepper business[14]. One of the main reasons that Columbus was
attempting to find a faster route to Asia in the first place was to get to the
spice islands there. Spices were
incredibly valuable at the time, so a faster way there would have been highly
profitable, for both him and Spain at large.
It would allow them to pay for their crusades. However, for the most part, he failed to find
riches and returned with few spices and no gold.
Columbus, again like Ptolemy,
believed that places that had similar latitudes to each other would share the
same attributes. Things like spices,
jewels and other kinds of wealth were often found in the tropics, so he
reasoned that if he sailed west and south, he would find the same
materials. He thought that by sailing in
that direction that he would discover lush tropical islands filled to the brim
with “the richest in gold, silver, pearls, and precious stones and infinite
peoples; and that in that direction he expected to reach land belonging to
India…”[15] He was also told that islands that were
inhabited by people with dark skin were always especially fruitful.[16]
He did return to Spain with a few
hundred Indian slaves, though most of them were sold and subsequently
died. Also in his quest for gold,
Columbus would have the hands cut off of any natives who did not return with his
or her three-month quota worth of gold.
According to him, the native people were savage cannibals, with dog-like
noses that beheaded their enemies and then drank their blood. The slave trade was found to be unprofitable,
because of the high death rate due to disease and other causes. Thus, Columbus made the decision to focus on
the gold aspect of his mission.
Although, he did write, “Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on
sending all the slaves that can be sold.” [17]There
is an opinion among some scholars that the motivation for gold was primarily
for the sake of the Holy War and for Ferdinand and Isabella, but Columbus
himself said that “Gold is the most precious of all commodities; gold
constitutes treasure, and he who possesses it has all he needs in the world, as
also the means of rescuing souls from purgatory, and restoring them to the
enjoyment of paradise”[18]
Spain was also in a subtle
competition with Portugal. The
Portuguese had recently sponsored Bartolomeu Dias in his expedition to
circumnavigate Africa. He was able to
successfully navigate his way around the Cape of Good Hope, and found what was
for a long time the quickest way to Asia, and specifically India, from Western
Europe. As a result, Portugal controlled
the ports and were largely uninterested in Columbus’s plans to get to Asia by
sailing a dangerous and potentially expensive voyage across the Atlantic.
Columbus had many reasons to attempt
to sail to the Indies. He and his
benefactors wanted to fund a righteous war in the Middle East, and they wanted
to convert the natives that lived there, partially to recruit them for their
cause. Columbus needed to find gold,
silver, and spices, and though he did reintroduce Europe to the New World, he
ultimately failed in his mission. This
was partially due to the completely unforeseen continents that were blocking
his way and partially because he was a rather substandard navigator using
outdated measurements and techniques.
[1]
Ibid., 55. <-- Whoops!
[2]
Ibid., 17.
[3]
Christopher Columbus, Journal of
Christopher Columbus (during his first voyage, 1492-93) and documents relating
to the voyages of John Cabon and Gaspar Corte Real (Farnham, England :
Ashgate, 2010), 5.
[4]
Cecil Jane, ed., Select Documents
Illustrating the Four Voyages of Columbus (Hakluyt Society, 1933), 2:28-30.
[5]
Christopher Columbus, Journal of
Christopher Columbus (during his first voyage, 1492-93) and documents relating
to the voyages of John Cabon and Gaspar Corte Real (Farnham, England :
Ashgate, 2010), lii-liii.
[6]
Ptolemy. Trans. by Jacobus Angelus (c. 1406), Geographia.
[7]
Ibid., 180.
[8]
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Columbus
(New York : Oxford University Press, 1991).
[9]
Christopher Columbus, Journal of
Christopher Columbus (during his first voyage, 1492-93) and documents relating
to the voyages of John Cabon and Gaspar Corte Real (Farnham, England :
Ashgate, 2010), 36.
[10]
David Boyle, Toward the Setting Sun:
Columbus, Cabot, Vespucci, and the Race for America (New York: Walker &
Co., 2008), 131.
[11]
Delno West and August Kling, The Libro de
las profecı´as of Christopher Columbus (Gainesville, Florida: University of
Florida Press, 1991), 23-26.
[12]Christopher
Columbus, The Diario of Christopher
Columbus’s First Voyage to America 1492–1493 (Norman and London:University
of Oklahoma Press, 1989), 19.
[13]
Ibid., 129.
[14]
Christopher Columbus, Journal of
Christopher Columbus (during his first voyage, 1492-93) and documents relating
to the voyages of John Cabon and Gaspar Corte Real (Farnham, England :
Ashgate, 2010), 6, 65, 67, 70, 143, 154, 164.
[15]
Nicolas Wey Gomez, Tropics of Empire: Why
Columbus Sailed South to the Indies (M.I.T. Press, Cambridge Mass, 2008),
49, 141.
[16]
Ibid., 185.
[17]
Hans Koning, Columbus: his enterprise
(New York : Monthly Review Press, 1976), 84-85.
[18]
Cecil Jane, ed., Select Documents
Illustrating the Four Voyages of Columbus (Hakluyt Society, 1933), 4:196
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