A balanced look at Columbus

Never again may mortal men hope to recapture the amazement, the wonder, the delight of those October days in 1492 when the New World gracefully yielded her virginity to the conquering Castilians.

Samuel Eliot Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea

So was Christopher Columbus a good guy or a bad guy? To those eager to tear down statues honoring anyone less than perfect according to the holier-than-thou standards of today's left, he was clearly a bad guy. Samuel Eliot Morison, in his classic 1942 study of Columbus Admiral of the Ocean Sea, takes a more balanced approach. To him Columbus was an usually good man for his time — the 15th and 16th centuries — but like everyone else from Adam to Zinn, a flawed man.

He may have never realized what he had discovered, believing until his death that he had found a shorter route to the East Indies instead of what he had actually found, what is now called the West Indies, but he was nevertheless an outstanding sailor, according to Morison. He just believed the world was much smaller than it actually is. The author himself sailed a similar route in a similar kind of ship in order to better appreciate the man's achievement in an age with such primitive instruments for navigation.

A deeply religious man, Columbus made prayer a daily part of the routine aboard his three ships and did his best to keep his men in line when they mixed with the naked natives they found on the islands. Yet Columbus himself viewed these peaceful people as potential slaves and captured a few to take back to Spain. Trading trinkets for gold was a major objective of his travels about the islands. Morison writes, "If gold or something else of great and immediate value had not been discovered, the conquest of the New World might have been a brighter page in the history of Christianity."

For some reason Columbus chose the slowest of his three ships, the Santa Maria, as his flag ship, meaning that the Nina and Pinta had to deliberately show their pace going west so that Columbus could keep up. The leader of the expedition was usually the follower. The Santa Maria went aground in the Indies, so Columbus moved to the speedier Nina, yet still managed to be aboard the second ship to return to Spain with the news of the discovery. The jealous Portuguese twice slowed his progress on the return, and briefly he feared for his life at their hands. Yet he did return to Spain, was honored by the king and queen and led two more voyages of discovery.

On the way west, mutiny was his greatest danger, and Morison suggests that had land not been spotted when it was, Oct. 12, 1492, Columbus might have had real problems with his impatient men.

Columbus was a controversial figure even in 1942, and Morison does his best to sort through the conflicting claims to get to the truth. If only he were alive today to defend his besieged, imperfect hero.