Christopher Columbus Belongs to All Americans
“Let those who are accustomed to finding fault and censuring ask, while they sit in security at home, ‘Why did you not do so and so under such circumstances?’ I wish they now had this voyage to make. I verily believe that another journey of another kind awaits them, or our faith is nothing.” So wrote Christopher Columbus of his contemporary critics, demonstrating his humor, diplomacy, and faith. All three were instrumental in his tumultuous career as an explorer and colonial governor.
When Columbus refused to let Spanish settlers enslave the native people of the islands, the Crown sent Francisco de Bobadilla to investigate. Bobadilla arrived eager for spoils, accused Columbus of misrule, and shipped him and his brothers back to Spain in chains; what followed in the colony under Bobadilla was brutality that history too often misassigns to the man he deposed. That unfair reassignment of blame still skews how many Americans see the first voyages.
Despite the sound bites used against him, Columbus showed respect for many indigenous people he encountered and sought to integrate them as baptized subjects of Spain. Born to a Genoese wool weaver, he was largely self-taught and spent years pressing a risky vision that most dismissed until patrons were found. He was an immigrant, an outsider, and a stubborn risk-taker whose combination of grit and faith left a complicated but undeniably formative legacy.
If a young reader’s first take on Columbus comes through Howard Zinn, give them Samuel Eliot Morison’s “Admiral of the Ocean Sea” as a corrective that restores context and complexity. If you want to awaken a dormant taste for real adventure, hand over Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s “The Worst Journey in the World,” a relentless, human account of Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated Terra Nova expedition of 1910-1913.
Garrard arrived on that expedition young, inexperienced, and technically unqualified; he won his place through connections and a sizeable donation, yet he quickly proved himself an asset. He endured savage cold, blinding whiteouts, and near-starvation without complaint, and those hardships shape the book’s moral center. His endurance and humility turn pages of misery into a study of character.
Cherry-Garrard does not sentimentalize failure; his prose is lean, wry, and unsparing about what exploration exacts from people. Beaten to the Pole by Roald Amundsen, Scott and four companions died on the return while still carrying diaries and the first Antarctic fossils back to the world. That grim fidelity to duty is both tragic and strangely noble.
With typical understatement, Cherry-Garrard called his adventure “the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised.” Those words remind us why hard stories stick: they expose how people behave when comforts vanish and character matters most.
Too many modern critics treat history like a weapon for present grievances rather than a field of inquiry, trimming facts to meet ideological ends. Their work is often driven by resentment and status seeking rather than a calm search for truth, and in their hands the past becomes a tool to extract power for particular groups. This frenzied “debunking” narrows our public conversation and cheapens shared civic memory.
The American founding mixes hard fact with edifying myth, and a stable republic knows how to hold both in view: confront genuine sins while keeping the inspiring stories that bind citizens. Clarifying the record and restoring civic narratives are complementary tasks that strengthen, not weaken, national life. Today, the holiday formerly known as “Columbus Day” is as good a time as any to begin that work.
