Reflections on Christopher Columbus

(by decorahnews.com's Ben Gardner):

In Jill Lepore's brilliant book "These Truths: A History of the United States," the historian and "New Yorker" contributor deftly illuminates the complex and problematic beginnings of the United States. She begins with Columbus in 1492 and provided for me great clarity regarding the political and economic forces compelling Spain's expansion into the "New World."

In the fifteenth century, Lepore explains, Spain's power was waning, due in part to the "Islamic world's monopoly on trade" in the Mediterranean. Spain "began looking for routes to Africa and Asia that wouldn't require sailing across the Mediterranean," writes Lepore. Columbus' journey in 1492 would be an offshoot of this, an attempt by Spain to find a new way to India and material wealth.

Instead of landing in India, Columbus and his crew landed in Haiti. As Lepore recounts, to the natives, the island was called Haiti. Columbus, believing the natives had no name for their property, called the island Hispaniola ("the little Spanish island"). Lepore notes, "There were about three million people on that island [Haiti], land of mountains, when Columbus landed; fifty years later, there were only five hundred; everyone else had died."

But before the native population was decimated, in October 1492, Columbus decreed the island of Haiti and its inhabitants as possession of the king and queen of Spain. "This act was both new and strange," writes Lepore. "Marco Polo, traveling through the East in the thirteenth century, had not claimed China for Venice; nor did Sir John Mandeville, traveling through the Middle East in the fourteenth century, attempt to take possession of Persia, Syria, or Ethiopia." The next year, a Spanish-born pope would make an additional decree claiming for Spain huge expanses of American land inhabited by millions of natives.

A consequence of this massive Spanish conquest was that, "Between 1500 and 1800," writes Lepore, "roughly two and a half million Europeans moved to the Americas; they carried twelve million Africans there by force; and as many as fifty million Native Americans died, chiefly by disease."

For Europeans, America's vast geography was an agricultural and economic opportunity to feed and clothe a European population consistently beset by famine. Consequently, Lepore argues, "The European extraction of the wealth of the Americas made possible the rise of capitalism: new forms of trade, investment, and profit. Between 1500 and 1600 alone, Europeans recorded carrying back to Europe from the Americas nearly two hundred tons of gold and sixteen thousand tons of silver."

In addition to taking possession of material property, European powers took possession of people. Ten years prior to landing on Haiti, Columbus had worked as a sea captain for Portuguese slave traders. In 1492, after returning from Haiti to Spain, Columbus reported to the king and queen of Spain that enslaving the natives would be easy work. On his return to Haiti in 1492, Columbus' crew quickly enslaved the natives and forced them to work in sugar and gold mines.

Disease would also accompany Columbus in 1493 on his return journey to Haiti. Accompanying the fleet of seventeen ships and twelve hundred men, Lepore notes, were "battalions of diseases" that natives—because of their extreme isolation—were susceptible to. Lepore notes, "Of one hundred people exposed to the smallpox virus for the first time, nearly one hundred become infected, and twenty-five to thirty-three died. Before they died, they exposed many more people: smallpox incubates for ten to fourteen days, which meant that people who didn't yet feel sick tended to flee, carrying the disease as far as they could go before collapsing."

As disease spread among the natives, so too did Spain's territorial control in the Americas. Shortly after advancing into North America in 1513, Spanish territory, Lepore notes, "spanned not only all of what became Mexico but also more than half of what became the continental United States, territory that stretched, east to west, from Florida to California, and as far north as Virginia on the Atlantic Ocean and Canada on the Pacific."

In addition to the diseases that accompanied the men on Columbus' second voyage, there were also, Lepore notes, "seeds stuck to animal skins or clinging to the folds of cloaks and blankets, in clods of mud. Most of these were the seeds of plants Europeans considered weeds, like bluegrass, daisies, thistle, nettles, ferns, and dandelions. Weeds grow best in disturbed soil, and nothing disturbs soil better than an army of men, razing forests for timber and fuel and turning up the ground cover with their boots."

It's a tragic, arresting, and complicated image: the advance of a simple weed as it proliferates across a land with deep history, while close behind trails the spread of disease, enslavement, and Europe's economic growth. In my mind, these images flow into each other, creating a roiling, toxic, churning river of memory and power and violence.

I often need images or metaphors to make sense of vast, complicated phenomena. And I can't help but think of dandelions and their annual reemergence—followed by our desire to extinguish them—as somehow emblematic of the deep roots of American history and our desire to expunge the tragic parts of the history of this land.