Christopher Columbus is often celebrated as the discoverer of America, but this narrative is largely a myth. He never landed in the United States and instead arrived in the Caribbean, where he believed he had found Asia. His calculations were wildly off—off by up to four times—due to a flawed understanding of Earth's size. While he was ambitious and persuasive in securing funding, he was not a scientific pioneer, as the idea that Earth was round was already known to Europeans for centuries. Columbus called indigenous people “Indians,” a term that has persisted despite their distinct identities. His voyages were not exploratory adventures but colonial ventures driven by greed and a desire for lasting power. He established a system of tribute and forced labor that led to widespread suffering, famine, and the enslavement of thousands. Despite his own men's deaths and the collapse of his colony, the Spanish crown did not execute him but instead removed his authority and allowed him to sail one final time. His legacy is complex: he was not a heroic visionary or a monster, but a product of the colonial era, who enabled and participated in widespread violence and exploitation. The rediscovery of a 1500 royal investigation in the 2000s revealed the full extent of his cruelty, proving that his actions were not only wrong but systematically brutal—marking a shift in how historians view his role in global history.
He's the man who's credited with discovering America. A hero carved into hundreds of statues, holidays, celebrating his arrival, and also a man dragged home across the ocean in chains by his own king. Yeah, everyone thinks they know the story of Christopher Columbus. He sailed to Osha Blue in 1942, discovered America, met the natives, proved the world was round, yada, yada, yada. But the truth is, almost none of it happened the way you think. Honestly, Columbus never even landed in America. He didn't prove that the world was round, educated people already knew that, and discover America. I mean, there's already millions of people here, and Leap Ericsson and the Vikings already came by, you know, like four years before that. So what did Christopher Columbus discover? And why do we know his name? And how did he get the credit for discovering an entire continent that he never actually landed on? Well, today we're going to find out. We are going to open the journal that almost nobody reads and we're going to walk through Christopher Columbus' journey step by step, how he got the navigation map completely wrong, how he never actually knew where he was on the planet, and of course, the brutal savage and monstrous things he did, not only to the indigenous people he countered, but also to his own men. From the slave trades to four different voyages to the Chicago world's fair in 1893 to a 2002 episode of the Sopranos, and a royal investigation that vanished for 500 years, were also going to go into the complexity and nuance of what makes Christopher Columbus in some ways brave and heroic to specific people in this country. So this is the true story of Christopher Columbus that you've never heard in its entirety. So sit back, relax, and welcome to History Camp. What's up people and welcome back to History Camp. My name is Mark Gagnon and thank you for joining me in my tent where every single week we explored most interesting, fascinating, controversial stories from all history from all time forever. Yes, that is what I'm doing in this tent is I'm trying to figure out everything that's ever happened. Yeah, it's an audacious task, but I think it's one that we can do together. I'm trying to figure out all the stuff that's been going on in this big beautiful blue planet. And I want to tell it to you. Yeah, dude, you. Also, I want to say thanks for tuning in. Every time you click on an episode or like, comment, subscribe. Any of that stuff, you really help the show grow. You help the algorithm learn that this is actually good content. You tell the people at Google like, "Hey, these guys are doing a good job. You keep the lights on at the tent and you keep the fire burning here at the campsite. But not only do I want to thank you, I also want to thank the guy sitting to my right right here who I just love and I love hearing his voice. His name is Christos Pachinamitibos. How are you? What's up, Christos? We don't have time. I'm sorry. I know. I know. I know today you thought was going to be the day. But we're not talking about the Greeks. They were talking about the Italians. Talking about Old Christopher Columbus. Columbus, as they say. That's kind of the original. We'll get into that too. Now, before we jump into Columbus, I want to acknowledge, yeah. You're probably coming to this with some type of bias, one way or the other. I think people with history, they try to paint things as way too binary. They try to be like, "Oh, this guy way back in the day, half a century ago, half a millennia ago." He was an evil guy. Or he was a really great guy that did everything great. It's like, well, basically everyone from 100 years back was a mix of good and bad. Even today, everyone's a mix of good and bad. But like, it's a little easier to parse. If you go back 100 years plus, everyone did some terrible stuff. They were like, "Oof, that is awful." Whether it's racist, sexist, whatever, whatever. But then, we try to also paint people historically. He's like, "No, this guy's like the greatest. He's a hero. He's like a legend." And it's like, "Well, that's not true, either." So, my goal today is to break down the actual truth. Like, to go through the actual nuance. And I'm not coming in with an agenda. I don't want to paint Christopher Columbus as a great guy or a bad guy. I want to paint him as a guy in history. That did some good things and it did some bad things. And I think that is a true amongst all history. So, I truly don't have an agenda. I'm trying to come up with nuance. And ideally, by the end of this episode, whichever way you're coming in, you'll be like, "Oh, you know what? He actually was a little bit brave and, you know, did explore some things." Or, if you think he's great, you're going to be like, "Oof, all right. That stuff with the natives wasn't both an awesome." And ideally, we come away without looking at, you know, we're trying to look at Columbus as like a good guy or a bad guy. But rather an agent or, you know, a cog within a larger colonial scheme. And, yeah, I'll leave it at that. Now, Christopher Columbus is also the name of the guy that did Home Alone and Harry Potter, which is kind of funny. Chris Columbus, did you know that? He did Home Alone and Harry Potter. Yeah. If you watch Home Alone, let the credits roll. Chris Columbus. You're like, "What?" Different guy, evidently. Now, he is loved and hated by people all across the country. He's credited with discovering America, thinking that it was India. He named the locals Indians. And they were like, "No, we're not Indians. Classically we bit. We should check it out." And also, of course, spreading Christianity. He's also credited with colonialism, cruelty, I mean, disease, violence, all sorts of stuff that's not great. And we're just going to try to go into all of it and go through everyone's biases one by one. But just start out. Here is the good news for those who want the real Columbus story. He wrote a lot of stuff down. I mean, letters and reports and contracts and his own navigation notes and also a lot of weird biblical stuff. Towards the end, he was writing a bizarre religious scrapbook of biblical prophecies. It's pretty weird and it's good for us in the modern day because he documented himself so well that we can actually see how he even got to his conclusions and we can even check his work and see where he was wrong. So throughout the episode, we're going to keep going through the actual sources. And we'll be transparent about how good and the, I guess the epistemology rather, maybe of like each specific source and how we can really, really validate that. And the reason I bring that up is because there's one source I want to flag up top because it's the most famous, but it's also the trickiest. It's his original journal from his first voyage. It is a day-by-day log from 1492 and it's gone. It's lost completely. We do have a copy technically, which was like condensed decades later by the Spanish friar named Bartolome de la Casas. And he summarized some parts and he like straight up quoted other parts and sometimes he would like go back and forth between like two sentences. So when you hear Columbus's journal, you have to picture something that's passed through another set of hands before it reaches us. Now, Las Casas is really interesting because it seems like he really admired Columbus and he didn't really have a strong reason to make him look worse than he was. But at the same time, he also famously would spend the next 50 years of his life becoming a super-loud critic of Spanish cruelty in America. So he kind of holds both views, which means when the journal says something maybe not so flattering about Columbus, I think we can take it with some honesty because it's coming from a guy who has a personal preference to paint Columbus in a good light. So keep that in mind because in a few minutes, we're going to read exactly what he wrote. And honestly, it's kind of worse than he thought. All right, let's kill the biggest myth first. I don't even know if people still believe this. This is something that has been dispelled for me or like a few years ago. But maybe you heard that Columbus is the lone genius who set out to prove that the earth was round. He was going to the edge of the world and everyone was telling him like, don't go, they're going to fall off the edge and he was like, no, no, no. I'm going to prove that it's round. Well, it's a great story, but it's not true. The educated Europeans by the 1400s already knew that the earth was round. They had known this for almost like 2000 years since the ancient Greeks. Yeah, a man named Erosthenes had measured the entire planet back in 240 BC and was like shockingly close. Sailors would watch ships sink whole first over the horizon and they knew exactly what that meant. No one really needed convincing. You would see a ship coming up over the horizon. You'd see like the top of the mast first and then the rest of the ship would come up and they'd be like, oh, I guess it's going around like a circle. So the argument was never the shape of the earth. It was always the size. And on that question, Columbus was not the smartest dude in the room. He was the guy who was confident and also confidently wrong. Everyone agreed that you could theoretically sail west from Europe and you would hit Asia. The problem was how long would it take? And the problem was that they had no idea what the actual distance was. So experts said the ocean between was gigantic. They were like, it's far too wide for any ship of our time to cross before the crew was star or a storm would hit. You guys were just sick. And the experts were kind of right. There's a lot more to say about the sort of medieval world and their perspective on flat earth, which is actually super interesting. Maybe we're doing an entire episode just dedicated on that because I find it fascinating that there's kind of like a revisionist where people try to paint like people in the medieval times as like stupid and flat earthers and that people of the post-Renaissance were the actual enlightened ones that actually knew that the world was around. It seems like everyone at the time basically knew that it was around. They obviously had other debates, but that's a topic for another episode. So who is this guy? That is so sure that he could pull off something that all the experts were like, hey, this is, the ocean is too vast. You're not going to make it. Well, Columbus is born around 1451 in Genoa. And he was the son of a wool weaver, not exactly high-nobility. He never had a formal education. He basically taught himself. And he would teach geography and astronomy and navigation. And he'd picked it up just by reading and by spending his life really out in the ocean. He had sailed to Mediterranean and out into the Atlantic in 1479. In his mid-20s, his ship was actually attacked and sunk off the coast of Portugal. He supposedly grabbed onto a piece of the wreckage and swam to shore. And he settled in Lisbon and worked as a map maker. And it was there surrounded by charts and sailors and sort of like these tall tales and these rumors of what lie west of this continent that his one big idea took hold and he could just never let it go. Because here's the thing about Columbus. He was extremely ambitious, being born of maybe a wreck.
regular life, perhaps even, you know, maybe a little bit like lower class. He wanted wealth. He wanted glory. He wanted a title and a place in history. And in many ways, he was persuasive enough to spend years selling an idea that trained experts told him was flat out crazy. And a little fun fact about Columbus, like I mentioned earlier, his name wasn't actually Columbus for, you know, when he was like a young kid living in Italy or even in Portugal. He was actually called Christopher Colombo, that was like the Italian name they gave him. And then kind of everyone, what were you going to say, Chris? Christopher O. Christopher O. Christopher O. Colombo. But then it seems like basically everywhere else that he went, his name would suddenly change. So like, I mean, what is the Spanish column? Christopher Colombo. Christopher Colombo. We're just kind of nice. And then of course, it's the English they call him Columbus. Sorry, sorry, the Spanish called them Cristobal Colombo. Cristobal? Mm-hmm. Cristobal Colombo. That's nice. It's great. It's just funny because like every place that he goes, he gets kind of a different name. So we're calling him Columbus where he would probably have responded to Colombo or Colombo. Well, people are just trying to claim him. Yeah, I guess, which nowadays it's like, all right, you got it. So this guy is really interesting at his time because he is so ambitious. He is ambitious like to a fault. You got to think he is born to like a woolweaver, you know, he's not like of some type of status society. He's not the most educated guy. He's got no ability, no ability at birth. So he wants money and he wants glory and he wants a title and to be put into the pantheon of history. He's seeing all these other explorers and he's seeing other people get their names etched into stone. He's like, I want that. And he's actually really persuasive and persuasive enough to spend years basically selling an idea that a lot of the experts and the cartographers and the geographers of the time kept telling him was not only wrong, but just basically a death mission. And yeah, Columbus was eager, you could say, I mean, he was literally like kind of making his own math. He would kind of switch around the math of his own books. So he would take like the smallest guests for the size of the earth. And then the most generous guest for how far Asia stretched east and he like stacked every optimistic number on top of each other and tell the gap between Spain and Japan shrank to something that he could manage like you got to think like this is someone that wants something so bad that he's like, you know what, I'm going to kind of like fudge the numbers to then justify it. And he was wrong, extremely wrong. He figured the planet was about 18,000 miles around, which is shaving off like 7,000 miles and reality is closer like 25,000. So he thought that Japan was like 3,000 miles west of the Canary Islands, whereas the real distance was 12,000 miles. I mean, so he's off by like four times. He's not just off by like a little, he's off by like an ocean and two full continents. And it's funny because he was wrong, but that's exactly why he also got so lucky. He didn't succeed in his quest to go west because he was correct about his math. He succeeded because he was wrong and stumbled into something that no one expected. He sailed into a gap that he thought was small and then smashed into two continents that no one in Europe was really aware of at the time. If America hadn't existed and it really was just open waters to Asia, Columbus and every man with him would have just died of thirst in the empty Pacific and we'd probably never even have heard of his name. Like there's a guy before Mansa Musa of the Empire of Mali. He sailed west. This is like, I think like 1100s and he basically was just like, hey, there's something over there. I'm going and he just got on a boat and we never heard from again. And that's why I don't know his name. And that was probably what was going to happen to Columbus if the Americas weren't there. Because here's the thing about Columbus to lock in right now and it explains so much of everything that we're going to talk about next. When reality didn't match what Columbus expected, he didn't change his mind. He changed reality. He decide that Asia was really close. So no matter what he actually found there, he would bend and twist it until it pointed back to his reality. And it's an interesting trait because I find this with a lot of like entrepreneurs and a lot of like really big, larger than life, like ambitious people is that they get confronted with a problem. And then they tell people the problem and people like, yeah, that's a problem. And he goes, actually, it's not a problem. People would talk about Steve Jobs this way. They said he had a reality distortion machine that when you were with him, he could convince you of his reality. And then you would go explaining to someone else and they'd be like, that doesn't make sense. And they'd be like, yeah, but when I was with Steve, it did. And it seems like Columbus is tapping to that same level of persuasion and charisma. I mean, he was about to spend the rest of his life doing that. He was just like bending reality, starting the second that he touched land. But before we get to that, he had a much bigger problem than the ocean. No one wants to pay for this. And it took him literally years and like a last second Hail Mary Miracle to change the financing of this operation. Hey, real quick, most people who watch this channel aren't subscribed. And when you subscribe, you help the channel grow and you stay in the loop with every new drop, religion camp, history camp, and camp gagnon. Now, let's get back to it. So remember the other myth that I was talking about, the, you know, the lonely genius that would bring his, you know, math and his journey into courts in Europe with wealthy people and they all just kind of, you know, ignored him. Well, that's kind of true. People did laugh him out of the rooms and a lot of people did ignore him. And technically, if you go by the evidence of the time, they weren't really wrong to do that. Like, here's what happened. He pitched his vision to Portugal and Portugal passed. Not because they were stupid, just because they already had a better plan. They were going to creep down the coast of Africa to reach the riches of the east around the bottom of the continent. They didn't need a shortcut. And plus their experts thought that Columbus's numbers were fantasy anyway, which if you really look at the math, they kind of were. And then he took his pitch to Spain, obviously to Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic monarchs. And here's where the years of rejection part is actually true. The monarchs handed his proposal to a Royal Commission and this is basically a panel of experts led by the Queen's own confessor, a man named Tavavera. And that commission studied it and they were basically like, Hey, none of this really makes sense. Like, this is all the most generous interpretations of the distances and the size of the ship. It just doesn't seem like it's going to work. You're basically going to put a bunch of money into this operation. And it's going to go sink or it's going to be a mutiny or everyone's going to go die in the Pacific. And it's not really going to work. They basically said that the plan was, quote, impossible in vain. And basically they were just like, look, the mass and not here and this guy's dreaming. And for six years, Columbus basically just got the run around. Everyone was just like, yeah, let's circle back. Oh, it seems really interesting. Like the upside is pretty big, but it's not really good for us at the time. And at one point, he finally gave up on Spain entirely packed up, got on a mule and started riding north to then go pitch the king of France. And that's when the story turns on a dime because as Columbus is literally leaving, he's packing up his mule. He's about to go north and be like, huh, oh, help me get over to America, right? A man named Lewis, the Santajel, one of the crown's own finance dudes, the kind of the guy that like holds the purse for the monarchs. He goes to Queen Isabella and he made the case of his lifetime. His argument wasn't really about geography. It was more about FOMO. He was like, hey, do you really want to miss out on this? If Columbus takes this idea to France and he's right and the French king gives them all the money, well, Spain just offered and basically just handed a rival nation the keys to the world. And Santajel basically offered to help arrange the money himself and Isabella actually changed her mind and sent a royal guard galloping after Columbus to go bring him back. It's crazy. I mean, that's just like a power of negotiation. If you're willing to leave and walk away from the negotiation, that's a lot of leverage. That's basically what happened. He spent six years trying to convince these people and they kept on saying, no, no, no. You can literally think of it as like a company that you're starting and you keep on going to like different financing options, like different financiers to get money. And they're all like, no, no, we don't see it. No. And then you're like, all right, let me go to someone else and they're like, wait. If he's right, the upside is so big that he finds a new trade route going to Asia. We got to get on this. And that's basically what happened. They were just like, okay, it's going to be a large chunk of money to throw into this. But if he's right, the upside is so big that it's worth it. And so here's what actually got all of this off the ground because the crown's money still wasn't enough on its own. Columbus needed real sailors to believe in him. And in the port town of Palos, he got the most important yes of all. A man named Martin Alonso Pintón. Pintón was the opposite of Columbus. He was a respected veteran local navigator that everyone in town trusted. He was, you know, just a very standard issue like, I'm going to get stuff done. He wasn't crazy ambitious, but he was just super solid. And when Pintón threw his own money in, his own reputation and his own recruiting muscle behind the voyage, immediately all the sailors and the crew followed sailors who wouldn't cross the ocean for this unproven foreign dreamer in Christopher Columbus. They would cross it for Pintón. And this wasn't just like one man against the world anymore. This was a risky startup and Columbus finally had investors and crew. And all of a sudden the whole plan starts to come together. And on April 17th, 1492, they signed the deal. This moment is called the capitulations of Santa Fe. And honestly, if you look at what's in it, the whole heroic like voyage of discovery thing doesn't really hold up because this doesn't read like paperwork for a scientific expedition. It's a power sharing agreement for an empire that doesn't exist. So let me explain. According to the agreement, Columbus gets the title admiral of the ocean sea, named Viceroy and governor of any land that he finds and a personal cut and a percentage of all the wealth that comes with it. And on top of that, it's all hereditary. So this agreement would be passed down to his sons forever. That's pretty good. Now, before Columbus had seen
one grand of sand on the far side of the ocean, he already negotiated to rule and profit from land that he hadn't reached yet, filled with people that he had never met or didn't really care if they existed. He wasn't just asking Spain to fund a trip, he was drawing up the blueprint for a kingdom that in a way he wanted to control and own and ultimately hand down as his legacy. So every seizure, every act of force we're about to go through, none of that is a part of a corrupted noble mission. It's kind of the contract from the start. It's like, hey, you're gonna get a percentage of whatever you find. So who cares who's there? It's yours for the taking and the more you take, the more you're able to cement your own legacy and give to your kids. Now, we have a crazy ambitious guy who is kind of fudging the numbers and way too optimistic who's now convinced a very established veteran sailor to go with him and he's also convinced a bunch of other crew to now go with that sailor and he convinced a country to financially back a trip that is on paper completely impossible and all of this is to lock in generational wealth for him for all eternity. So with that, let's get on the boats. Three ships left the Spanish port of Palos in August of 1492. Benina, the Pinto and of course the Santa Maria and then came weeks of open ocean. And then at two in the morning on October 12th, 1492, a lookout screams and he says, land, they discover a small island and the people who live there, they called it the guanani somewhere in the Bahamas and Columbus basically jumps on a boat, rose ashore and planted the royal flags and held like a little ceremony claiming the whole place for Ferdinand and Isabella. He renamed it San Salvador where it's literally means holy savior. Now, this is his very first official act to declare the whole place property of a king and queen on the other side of the planet. No one really talks to the local people and in Columbus's world you don't really have to. That's not what colonialism was about and that's not him by the way. That's just what conquistadors did. You didn't conquer the world by showing up and like saying please, you just went and took it. Hey guys, we're gonna take a break real quick because this episode is sponsored by Brunt Workwear. I got the Marin boot right here and what immediately stood out to me about this is the quality. They feel substantial, they are genuinely comfortable and just being honest, they are a really good looking boot. I like them, I wear them. This is even the pair that I wear. The pair that I wear is at my house and they're absolutely dirty right now. 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Finally, the world starts. Not like a unique place with its own, you know, long-running history and civilizations. The Smithsonian describes a Caribbean as a crowded thriving world. Diverse, it was self-sufficient. They had their own communities linked, you know, across the water by trade that had been running for thousands of years by this point. And Columbus looked at it and he was like, dude, we made it to Asia. We did it. I didn't know Asia had such beautiful beaches or like coconuts, but hey, we're here. Now in his head, he wasn't picturing a brand new part of the world. He was sure that he had reached the far edge of the Indies, which back then was Europe's big blurry sort of catch-all name for basically all of Eastern Asia. So like India, China, Japan, the Spice Islands. And the European imagination, it all kind of was smeared together into one distant, super rich like East, like just like a capital E East. So when Columbus hit these islands, he didn't think like, hey, I'm on a new continent with a new people. He thought, I'm on the doorstep of the richest trading region on earth, I finally hit my jackpot. I'm going to be rich forever. And my kids will always be taken care of. That's one assumption is basically why 500 years later, we still use the wrong word. Now he didn't necessarily think that he was in India, as we know it today, but Columbus did believe that he landed in the Indies, which is why he met the people. And he basically was like Indians, literally like Indians. And that's the word that he used. It could possibly be like the longest-running error in all of human history that defined an entire continent of people. And it started right there on a beach in the Bahamas in October of 1492. And if you've heard Lucy K's joke on this, it's so funny. But it's like Christopher Columbus just shows up and he's like, you guys are Indians. And they're like, no, we're natives. And he goes, nah, you're Indians. Like he just keeps the wrong word, no matter what happens. Which again, it kind of goes into like his delusional kind of like, I'm just going to fit my reality to whatever's happening situation. Where everyone's kind of looking and they're like, they don't really look like the people over in India. And he's like, I don't care. I'm here to discover India and I discovered India, or the Indies rather. Now that's actually the other crazy thing about all this. Columbus never set foot in the United States, like as we know it today. Like we credit him for discovering the country, but he was so far south, he was never actually in America. Which is kind of funny. We call Washington DC like District of Columbia, like based off of Christopher Columbus. And he never was there. Like in my mind, like kind of like fuzzy wise before really doing this, I was like, yeah, he landed somewhere like Florida or something, right? Not even close. And if you remember, America actually got the same from a completely different guy. A Matago Vespucci, a different Italian explorer who did wind up on the North American continent, but not until 1497, which I'm sure Columbus is pissed about. He's like, dude, I want the legacy. I want this whole country to be called Columbia. Like, why is it called America? Like dude, this guy came way after me. I was actually the first one to even get close, right? It was kind of funny. Close windows cigar, yeah, right? Also thank goodness, America was his name because like America's a good name. Like it sounds nice, America. It's like a nice name. Imagine his name was like Kevin, Kevin Vespucci. And everyone's just like, ah, yeah, this is the United States of Kevin. He just covered it, so we got to give it to him. Not great. We would have switched that up immediately. Sorry if your name's Kevin out there. Now, this is basically what happens in 1497 with America Vespucci. He was positive that he was in like the Asia mainland. This is like the Asia that everyone's talking about. He's like, I think we're in Japan. He literally called it Sipungo, which is the European name for Japan at the time. So he sent men inland with a letter of introduction. And he was like, we can't just take this because it's technically a sovereign nation of Japan. So we are going to address the Grand Khan, the emperor of China fully expecting to be escorted into a golden imperial court with like classic Chinese kind of architecture. And that's not what they found. They found like little villages, no Khan, no palace, no gold. I mean, if you look at the map, it's kind of comical. He was off by an entire hemisphere, but it didn't matter. He remained convinced that the East, that he was.
who was expecting was just the next island. He's like, all right, we're not there yet, but we just go a couple more feet. We're gonna get there. Now, of course, we're kinda having some fun here because at this point, at this point in the story, it is kinda funny, but it takes a turn because it's not just what he decided to do with the land, but the dark area here is what he decides to do with the people. So here's what makes Columbus a more multi-dimensional character. Because so far in the story, we have a Columbus who's like really ambitious, he's eager, he's not taking no for an answer, he's trying to get funding for his mission, and he finally does it, and he discovers a land that no one in Europe had ever discovered before. And at this point, you're like, man, this is really kind of amazing. What a great guy. And what's weird is that his relationship with the locals at times could be genuinely and almost like tenderly kind. And then on the very same page, he basically like sizes them up like livestock. And that's what makes this story complicated because both are true and both are straight up in writing. I mean, he wrote that the people were gentle and generous and they brought gifts for food and they swam out to the ships and they gave freely and they expected nothing back. He even noted with real wonder that they carried no iron weapons at all. And then, and basically the next line, he wrote down what that meant to him, which is brutal. This is his journal on October 14th, 1492, two days after he lands. This is what he says. These people are very simple as regards to use of arms with 50 men. They could all be subjugated and made to do whatever we want. All right, Chris, why'd you have to do that? Why'd you have to do that, right? You could have just been like, man, they're so nice, they're cool, we can trade with them. We can maybe set up like a little outpost, but no. He's just like, yeah, we'll just round him up. 50 dudes, we got him. So he's already plotting to take advantage of these people who have literally just shown him nothing but kindness and generosity so far. And again, I don't wanna make like the noble savage kind of thing where people tend to try to paint like all indigenous and native people are just like nice and hospitable and they do, and they just like to eat fruit and have sex and they just hang out. Look, they also were fighting and they can be, you know, completely violent to each other. But so far, based off Columbus's own account, that's not the case that he's getting. He's getting a pretty nice sort of entry and welcome. And in the very same journal entry, almost like an aftertodd, he mentions something else that he'd already caused to be taken, seven of them, like caused to be taken in such a funny way to say it. He wanted to bring seven of these indigenous people back to Spain to learn the language so that they could serve as interpreters. So take the whole sequence. He arrives, claims the land, admires the people, and then measures how easily he could break them. And then he's like, I'm gonna take a few of them by force and keep them, you're coming with me and just kidnap them. And this will be the pattern for Columbus's future expeditions too. But again, I want to remind everyone that Columbus wasn't some type of unique evil. He's not like a Hitler character, or he's just like, I'm gonna take over the world. The Portuguese were already doing this all over Africa. And the Spanish were already doing this. Columbus is a piece of the colonial machine. And of course, I'm not saying colonialism is good. I'm just saying Columbus is doing what is expected of a leader of an expedition within this colonial era, which is morally treacherous. And at the same time, Columbus went sailing west, his own bosses, Ferdinand and Isabella, they were finishing a decades long conquest of the Canary Islands just off the coast of Africa. The Native people there were called the Gwanchis. And the Spanish were doing to them precisely what Columbus was about to do in the Caribbean. Conquer them, take all their land, ship them off to be sold to slaves in the Spanish markets. And the campaign wrapped up in 1496, meaning it was happening while Columbus was making this voyage. So this is the world that Columbus came from and Slaven the people that you discover isn't his twisted invention. And again, it's not justifying, it's not right. It is just a standard business model of the age one that his own sponsors were already running and kind of expected of him. And these are things that are being done to people that most of us still have never even heard of to this day. And again, none of that makes it okay. But it does tell you something important. Columbus wasn't a monster who was breaking the rules. He was honestly, unfortunately, a guy who was just following them. Now, back on his Benyola, the clock was ticking because Columbus had made a very specific promise to get this whole thing funded. He promised gold, mountains of gold. And so far, he hasn't found any gold. He had to start moving quickly and he had a fleet to answer for and a crown back in Spain expecting a return on his investment. And basically nothing to show for it. That pressure, that desperate mounting need to produce gold that he wasn't finding is about to turn a bad situation that's not great for the natives into a horrifying one. Now, before the gold, one more thing goes terribly wrong. In December 1492, Columbus reaches a big island that the Taino call Aiti, which you maybe know what it is. Haiti, Aiti. He renamed it Hispanyola and he met a powerful local chief, a Kaseek, named Guacanagari. That's basically what he does. He shows up on this little island and he's like, all right, I'm at this guy, this chief is pretty nice. And then on Christmas Eve, everything goes terribly wrong. The Santamaria, his flagship, his biggest ship, drifted into a reef in the dark and got stuck and they threw cargo overboard, tried to basically tow her off with the Nina but the tide never came. And so by the morning, the boat is finished. Now, here's the tragic and truly brutal part of the story. It was Guacanagari's own people who paddled out in canoes and saved them. Literally, they went and hauled the cargo and timber off this stuck ship that's like getting crushed and all the men that are dying and they do it so carefully that Columbus wrote an amazement that not even a single shoelace went missing. The first European foothold in this part of the world was built literally out of a broken Spanish ship and the kindness of the Tyno people. Columbus took the salvaged wood and built a little fort and he named it La Navidad. Literally Christmas after the night that it all began. He left 39 men behind and he basically told them to hunt for gold promised that he was gonna come back. And at this point, he sailed home to Spain to announce his triumph. Now, I just wanna pause for a moment here because you're gonna get this bit told to you in different ways depending on who you listen to. La Navidad was an early Spanish fort. It was not the first European settlement in the Americas. The Vikings beat them there by like 500 years just up in like Newfoundland, Nova Scotia of Canada. There's another story, obviously, which we can do a whole episode on them, which we actually should if you can note that Chris does. But I just wanna be clear and give credit where credit is due. Anyway, Columbus sailed home a superstar. By 1493, there's a letter announcing discovery and it hit the printing presses of Europe and just exploded. It ran 17 editions in four years which was an insane print run for the 1490s. I mean, we're watching in real time one of the first celebrities in history to get manufactured by a printing press. It's like you can almost think of it like discovering like the moon if that ever happened. Like it basically like, hey, we sent guys up to the moon and this is what they found. And like everyone is watching their TV's been like, I can't believe this is really happening. This is basically like that level of excitement and anticipation and celebrity status. But there's those 39 men they got left behind, remember? These are the guys that the Tyno people, you know, like they're hanging there at the, you know, La Navidad. And remember the people that actually did this that hauled all the shoelaces and all the rest of the cargo out of the surf. Well, when Columbus comes back nine months later, it's, I mean, pandemonium. La Navidad was just ashes. Every single man that he left there was dead. And what exactly happened is still debated, I mean, to this day. So Guacanagati blamed a rival chief. But honestly, the likeliest trigger is probably way more simple. The man that Columbus left behind had one mission. Columbus was like, hey, look for gold, take whatever you can, try to survive. And so they probably started seizing gold and seizing women and taking things from the very people who had just saved their lives. And so the locals were like, ah, no, you just came to our house, we helped you out. And now you're gonna take from us like, no, you're done. So the first Spanish outpost of the new world didn't fall to a storm or a disease or bad luck. It fell because probably entitled "Cunkey Store Behavior." Again, we don't know. This is contested, but that's just, I think the thing that makes the most sense. Because those men thought everything and everyone in the world was for their taking. And they didn't just have the arms, the resources to prove it against the natives. And their mind, they were like, all of this is ours. And they were just outnumbered by the natives to really prove it. So that blueprint was already responsible for the lives of Columbus's men and for many of the locals. But it was the scale to lands and people and numbers that will absolutely be the most devastating part of this story because this same exact mindset is about to kill tens of thousands of people. So this brings us to Columbus's second voyage. And this time he's not playing with like three little ships and like a hopeful theory anymore. All of his math and his opinion, which was technically wrong. But he was like, I'm proven right. Everything I fought for was proven right. I've been trying to do this expedition for years. And I am absolutely on it. And now he's got way more resources. So by 1493, he's got funding, way more money. And we're talking 17 ships, like 1200 people. I mean, like colonialists and soldiers and priests and horses and livestock, everything. And this wasn't a scouting run anymore. This was a full-on invasion. Like, hey, we know what's going on there. We're going and we're taking everything. So Columbus sailed back and found La Navidad and ashes completely destroyed. And without missing a beat, he moved east any bill.
a new town that he named La Isabella, after the Queen, of course. And we don't have to guess how it went, because archaeologists have been digging up La Isabella for decades, and we can literally tell about the disaster in what got left behind in the ground itself, and to put it pretty simply, it was bad. So first, you know, the colonial folks got sick, and the food ran out, and the land, and the climate was fighting them at basically every turn, and the gold. I mean, the gold, the Columbus, was basically promised in that famous letter, like the whole reason that the men crossed the ocean, like it wasn't there, at least not in the amounts that everyone was dreaming about. So now you've got 1200 angry, hungry feverish men who were told that sailing to Paradise was going to save them. Well, now they're stranded in a place that's trying to kill them with no treasure to show for it, and it's that desperation that drove the Spanish to these unthinkable ends. So instead of admitting to Spain and to the crown, that the easy gold that he had promised them was just a fantasy, he decided to squeeze the wealth out of the only resource that was actually there. And he's sitting there on his ships looking at this beautiful wasas, and he's like, I don't see any gold, I don't see any like spices, I don't see anything that's really valuable here, except the people. So by 1495, he rolled out a tribute system, and this part is documented closely, not just by his critics, but by his own son. So that gives us some validation from multiple different angles. So every tayano on the gold bearing part of the island ages 14 and up had to deliver a set amount of gold dust. The measure was a hawks bell, a little bell filled with gold every three months, bring the gold, you get a copper token to wear around your neck. This is proof that you paid, and it was good for three more months of survival. But if you failed to bring the gold, the punishment was savage. Here's the trap though, there just wasn't enough gold. Most of the island barely had any gold at all. So people who couldn't meet the quota for treasure that wasn't in the ground, they had no choice but to run. So many of them fled to the mountains or just abandoned their villages and left their fields unplanted. And when the crops didn't get planted, famine came. So Columbus's own tribute system didn't just fail to find gold because there wasn't that much gold there. Anyway, it manufactured starvation for the whole island because the people that knew how to grow the food left. Now, I want to be careful here because you're going to hear, you know, graphic sort of viral claims about these specific tortures for missing quotas. Some of it is documented, but some of it is also centuries of exaggeration piled on top. And historians, like legit historians that, you know, I'm not a historian, like actual historians will argue over which is which. So to keep it simple, we can say that the system is the horror and the system is what's beyond dispute. You don't even need to embellish like the horrors of it. It's already damning and grotesque just the way that it is, like forcing people on their own land to try to form a tribute for some random dude and some random king that they never met. And ultimately, when the people leave, it causes massive chaos and famine. And when the Tiano tried to fight back, which they did over and over, Columbus answered with war and slave raids. And in 1495 operation, his men rounded up roughly 1600 Tiano and the strongest few hundred were then shipped across the Atlantic to be sold. So when Columbus couldn't find a country's goal to sell, he basically just started selling the people instead. But here's what happened to Columbus himself through all of this. This is a man who promised the king queen of, you know, one of those powerful countries in Europe, all of the riches of Asia. He negotiated himself titles and a percentage in an empire for his kids. And what did he actually deliver? I mean, he set up one for it. They got burned down. He set up a colony that got murdered. He had boat loads of human beings instead of gold that he swore was waiting. And the dream that he sold to get funding is now falling apart in front of him. And every ship is heading back to Spain, carrying a word of how Columbus actually might not be as competent as everyone thought. He's not just failing. He's failing badly and the monarchs and ocean away from him are starting to hear that their admiral of the ocean might actually be running a very expensive project into the ground. So back in Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella were listening and the complaints kept on coming in every different sailor was coming in front of them being like, hey, the chaos is crazy. Hey, the cruelty is super bad. You know, 39 of our original dudes, they all got murdered and there's no gold actually. And finally, the king queen decided they'd heard enough and they sent someone across the ocean to find out exactly what was going on in Columbus's new colony. And that someone was about to put this admiral of the sea in chains. Yeah. So by the year 1500, Columbus had a serious problem. And for once, it wasn't the native people. It was his own people. His rule over his Spaniola was falling apart. The Spanish colonists, his own men had turned on him. There were shortages and factions and just open mutiny. And Columbus ran the colony with a brutal force and not just against the Taino, but against the Spaniards too. But and we haven't mentioned this in the story yet. Christopher wasn't the only Columbus running the island. He actually installed his brothers as his lieutenants. His brother Bartholomew was made Adela Tando, basically military governor and ran the colony in Columbus's place whenever he was off exploring or meeting with a chief or whenever he's back in Spain. Bartholomew was the one who founded the city of Santo Domingo, which still stands today as the capital of the Dominican Republic. And the youngest brother as well, Diego was left holding the reins too when the other two were out in the countryside, basically crushing rebellions or doing whatever they were doing. So this wasn't one governor that the, you know, colonists were furious at. It was the entire family. It was the entire Columbus name. And it basically, they dug into every level of power running the island like it was their private inheritance, which per the contract it technically was. I mean, there were hangings and floggings and public punishments all to keep a starving mutinous colony in line. So at 1500 Ferdinand and Isabella sent a royal official named Francisco de Bobadilla and basically handed him the authority to investigate and to arrest and to, you know, basically the power to take command of this entire colony if he has to. Basically, they're like, Hey, you are officially us this admiral, the sea Christopher Columbus, I think is losing his head. So you got to control this thing. Now, before you decide if Bobadilla is the good guy, basically coming in to save the day, just take a breath because he wasn't some noble crusader. He was a royal fixer sent to yank a valuable colony back under the crowns control with every incentive to build the hardest case that he could against the Columbus family. But the thing is he didn't really have to exaggerate. Things were really bad. When Bobadilla arrived, he reportedly saw the bodies of executed Spaniards hanging in the town square. He learned that Columbus had just hanged several more of his own men. Within days, he rested all three of the Columbus brothers clamped them into iron chains and then threw them onto a ship bound for Spain. Once the ship was safely see the captain came to him almost embarrassed and offered to strike off the chains. Columbus said, "No, I have been placed in chains by order of the sovereigns." He said, "And I shall wear them until the sovereigns themselves order them removed." And he meant it. He dragged those chains, basically like clanking deliberately through the streets of Spain when he landed. He kept them on in his room for the rest of his life. He wanted them almost like a souvenir of how badly Spain had wronged him. Like he's kind of thrown himself like a little pity party. He's like, "No, these are my chains. No, no, no, no, no. You can't take them off. I'm a bad boy." Because in Columbus's mind, remember, he was never the villain of the story. He was actually a hero doing a service for the Spanish, for Isabella and Ferdinand, and he was the one that was wronged. And we'll see more of that in the end as he talks about it. But basically for 500 years, we mostly only had the secondhand accounts of what Bobadilla actually found. The original investigation was lost. That is until the mid-2000s. When a Spanish archivist named Isabel Aguiar, going through a bundle of uncatalog documents in the National Archive, actually found it. Yeah, the actual report, 23 sworn testimonies from the year 1500 that nobody had read in legit centuries. And she and the historian Consuelo Verella published it, and it made a huge splash on how we approach his story in history. Because this wasn't Columbus's enemies talking smack about him. These are some of the 23 witnesses, some of which were his own supporters, and even they described a colony ruled by you know, cruelty and terror. Tongues and ears and noses cut off as punishment, a woman paraded naked through the streets and brutalized on the order of Columbus's own brother for the crime of suggesting that the admiral was born of a low class. As Verella herself put it, even the people who loved Columbus couldn't deny the atrocities of how he was running this colony. And here's why the document matters so much because for five centuries up until the actual discovery of the document, you could actually kind of wave away the atrocities. You can say like, oh it was slander. It's people jealous. It's other explorers that wish those them. It's just allegations. It's not true. This report really kind of closed the door. It is a sworn testimony from people who were actually there in the time. And it didn't just confirm the cruelty. It reached across 500 years and had a hand in rewriting the reputation of one of those famous explorers in all of history. But the crown isn't done with Columbus just yet because for all of this, the chains, the bodies, the testimony, what Spain decided to do with Columbus next is almost harder to believe than the crimes themselves. Ferdinand and Isabella, they let Columbus go. They decided that the chains had gone too far. They'd wanted him removed and not humiliated and they just set him free.
They never gave him back the empire, they never restored him as governor. The hereditary kingdom that was ridden into that beautiful contract was for all intents of purposes, basically dead in the water, and they actually let him sail one more time. A fourth voyage in 1502, which raises a question, why would a man drag to him and chain stripped of his kingdom, stripped of his legacy, and based all of his money, ever get back on a boat for the country that humiliated him? Well, honestly, because Columbus still thought that he was right. He still believed Asia was out there. He thought it was just right on the other side, just the next island, just beyond the next stretch of coast. Obviously, he never found it. Because it wasn't there, storms just shredded his ship, he ended up marooned on Jamaica for an entire year, still convinced that China was just right there. He had already touched the mainland of South America on his third voyage, an entire continent that no one in Europe knew was there, and it changed his mind about nothing. He decided like, hey, I found the edge of Asia. Or maybe I found the edge of the Garden of Eden, and he threw himself into a strange final project. A book of biblical prophecies, arguing that his voyages were a part of God's plan to end the world and retake Jerusalem. Yeah, he stopped seeing himself as like an explorer for Spain and started seeing himself as like, oh, God ordained me. God put me on this path to do this work for some type of greater purpose that I'm not aware of. Which again, is like classic entrepreneur stuff. Like I've heard people talk about this all the time, and like, books and biographies about, you know, like Robert Barons and stuff, where they're like, God gave me this money. Like I am successful because God wants me to do something with this. And Columbus starts getting to that point near the end of his life. Now Christopher Columbus died in Valedolid, Spain in May of 1506. He was still pretty wealthy, still clutching some of his titles and still to his very last breath convinced that he had at some point somehow reached Asia. He didn't discover America. To him, America was just the thing in his way to discovering his true riches, which were in Asia. Now, here's what's messed up about all this. That is not why America chose to remember him. The Columbus that you grew up with, the noble discoverer, you know, like he's got the holidays, got the statues. That version of Christopher Columbus didn't really exist when the real one was living, or even when he died. It had to be built up and you can actually watch America build this legacy brick by brick. And also you can kind of see why America as a nation did it. Here's the truth about Columbus. The young United States didn't inherit him. They adopted him right after the revolution and the reason is kind of funny. The rebels needed an origin story that wasn't British. Think about it. You just fought a bloody war to rip yourself away from England. The last thing you want is a founding story that is connected to the English crown. It's like, okay, we kicked out the English, but also like we're very happy that the English founded this land. So they need a founding myth and every nation has this, right? Like the Romans have like Remus and Romulus, like different native people have like a cave in the ground that is the belly button of earth that birthed all of humanity. And the revolutionaries, despite being someone more modern, they needed a version of this. And then they have this Italian sailor that's working for Spain who reached the new world a full century before Jamestown and better yet, a man that the history books said had been mistreated and betrayed by a European monarchy. Hey, that kind of sounds like what we're doing. So for a brand new nation that had just done the exact same thing to its own king, Columbus was perfect. He wasn't English and he had been wronged by the monarchs of the old world, just like the new revolutionaries had. So America went all in. Kings College in New York renamed itself Columbia. The new national capital became the district of Columbia Columbia, even became a poetic nickname for the country itself. And in 1792, 300 years after the landing, a newer group that you know better as the political machine to Manny Hall, they threw the very first Columbus day celebration in American history. Now here's a funny thing. One historian who dug into these early celebrations found that most Americans at the time didn't know anything about Columbus. They'd never really even heard of him. They just needed the symbol of a brave sailor that discovered this land. And you know, basically like was wronged by the monarchs. And a hundred years later, one American city was about to fill that symbol bigger than anyone else ever had, pump it full of electricity, and turn it into a glowing dream. And that city is Chicago. The 400th anniversary of Columbus's voyage landed in 1892. And America decided to throw the biggest party that the country had ever seen and they're calling it the world's fair. So after a vicious bidding war over where the fair would be held, you know, New York wanted it, St. Louis wanted it, but ultimately went to Chicago and it opened in 1893 and it was called, of course, the world's Colombian exposition. Now you have to understand what Chicago was actually trying to do here. This was a city still haunted by the great fire of 1871. And this is a fire that literally burned the entire city to the ground 20 years earlier. It was still fighting a reputation as like a filthy, brawling kind of dangerous sort of frontier town on the way to the west. And the fair with Chicago shot at basically telling the entire world, hey, look what we are. We are a modern city. We are a beautiful metropolis. They city on the hill. And so they didn't build a fair. They built an entire city. So architect Daniel Burnham and his team raised an entire fake city of gleaming white palaces along the lakefronts. So like columns and domes and reflecting pools. And at night, they lit up the entire thing with electric light, which most Americans had never even really seen up close to that time. And it glowed in the dark and people literally called it the white city. There were around like 21 million visitors at a time when the entire US population was about like 65 million. So you can just think of how packed and popular this party was. What's funny is this is actually where the first Ferris wheel was born. It was basically built to outdo the Eiffel Tower from the last big world's fair in Paris. The modern pledge of allegiance was written for these surrounding celebrations. And this one event burnt so deeply into the city's soul that today, one of the four stars on Chicago's flag stands for it. And the whole spectacle, the electricity, the white city, all of it was draped over the name of Christopher Columbus. But nobody there was thinking about a confused, chained up navigator that had brutalized an indigenous population as well as his own people. They'd taken his name and stretched over something completely different, a story that America wanted to tell about itself. Columbus had become basically a standard for progress, for technology, for bravery, for a nation with a God-given destiny to sweep across a continent and to build a shining civilization out of nothing. So souvenirs from the fair literally pictured Columbus floating alongside American presidents stitched right into the national photo album as a founding mythological figure. And that's what Columbus represented to the majority of Americans, but there is one group of immigrants who needed him for something else. Not for technology, not for manifest destiny or rejecting the crown, but for survival. To this group of immigrants, Columbus's claim on America was their birthright. So two years before the white city and Chicago ever lit up, there was one of the most savage and brutal nights in American history. In the late 1800s, Italian immigrants specifically, the Sicilians were pouring into the United States and America hated them. Not like, oh, we dislike them, they hated the Italians. They were smeared as criminals, they were racially suspect, they weren't really white, they weren't Christian, they were Catholic, and they were definitely not American. So in 1890, the New Orleans police chief was murdered on the street and this suspicion instantly fell on the Italians of the city. So 19 of them were rounded up, some were tried, and the jury acquitted them, or it couldn't really reach a verdict because they probably didn't do it. But of course, the city didn't accept that as an answer. So on March 14th, 1891, a mob of thousands of people, but I mean, some estimate into the hundreds, but likely thousands led by some of the city's most prominent citizens stormed into the prison and they dragged out 11 Italian men. None of them convicted of anything, by the way, shot them, and put their bodies on display. And crazy enough, it remains the largest mass lynching in American history, which is pretty crazy to say for America, right? A country that has kind of had a long history of lynchings of different kinds. This is the largest mass lynching and you would assume it would be the black or the African American population in America, but it's not as the Italians. The next day, newspapers across the country, including the New York Times, praised it. That's the America that Italian immigrants were living in and moving to. Now what does this have to do with Columbus? Well, that lynching set off an international crisis, Italy severed diplomatic ties, people whispered about war. They were like, or the Italians can invade America and the American president at the time, Benjamin Harrison, he needed something as a peace offering. He needs something that would calm down Italy as a nation and win over Italian American voters. So in 1892, 400 years after the landing, he proclaimed the very first national Columbus day. And this changes everything that you thought you knew about this holiday. The first Columbus day in American history wasn't really born to celebrate a voyage or to celebrate Columbus or his bravery. It was born in part as an apology and a peace offering for a lynching of innocent Italian immigrants. And it was literally a president using the nation's hero Columbus to tell a modern day Italian story and to tell the Italians like, Hey, you guys actually belong in America and to get the rest of the country to change their tune. And that very proclamation is what fed directly into the giant 1892 celebration.
and the white city that rose in Chicago the year after. I mean, Chicago is a massive hub for Italian Americans. And so for this to be the Columbus world's fair, I mean, they were like, dude, this is massive. Like, we are officially welcome in this nation. This is our country and it's actually discovered by one of our own. Now, hopefully this shows you why Columbus mattered so much to Italian Americans and why it's more complicated than what people on the internet will tell you. They're like, oh, yeah, the Italians, the races, genocide, whatever. Of course, they don't care, you know, they love Columbus. It's like, well, it's deeper than that and more nuanced. And when you actually understand the context, it makes way more sense. Because you're like, okay, they didn't really know anything about Columbus's, like, you know, brutal colonialist history. They don't know what he did to the Spaniards. They definitely don't know what he did to the Taino or any other indigenous people. They just know he's Italian. He was brave. He came to America. And that's good enough for them. He was a figure that the whole country was suddenly celebrating. And they put him on statues and on money and on a national holiday. He was one of them, an Italian, a Catholic. He was there and he was their claim to America. And there were even groups like the Knights of Columbus who pushed the Italian immigrant cause for decades, state by state. And crazy enough, even after all this Columbus day didn't become a fixed holiday, like the way we know it until 1971. And it would eventually take a while to make it federal. And they actually did a whole episode about this in the sopranos. It's in, I forgot which season, season three or four. But it basically comes out, and it's all about how the Italian American men in the story are fighting back against the crowds who are trying to petition to abolish Columbus day. And it's actually, I think an interesting sort of telling representation to an entire community of people, like basically like who this guy is and what it means to them. And it shows sort of like these Sicilian energy when it comes to this person and why they cared about Columbus in the first place. So Columbus day was never really about just Columbus. It was about spreading a story about pushing a narrative to convince Americans to accept the new guys to accept us as Italians. I'm using the royal us. I'm not Italian. But to accept the Italian people and they were like, "Hey, this guy is one of ours." He discovered America, so buzz off. And on top of that, they're looking at Columbus. It's like a mascot. He's just like a, he's like a figurine. It's like, you know, it's, he's like Zeus or something. Sorry, Chris. So for millions of Italian-American families, this was a hard one symbol of dignity, but quite literally in the aftermath of their own people's blood. And that meaning is very real and it doesn't, you know, it doesn't evaporate just because the man of the center of it did monstrous things. The symbol of Columbus helped change the entire narrative for Italian Americans. And it's exactly this type of moral nuance that makes the fight over Columbus today so hard because there's another group of Americans for whom the same exact name also means something extremely real, like something extremely horrible and unfathomable. And that, of course, is the natives. So for the people whose ancestors were already in America in 1492, the descendants of the Tyno, the indigenous people across America, Columbus was never a symbol of belonging. He was the front edge of catastrophe. Now, the pushback against celebrating him is not whatever you may have heard, a recent invention of social media. It grew for decades out of indigenous activism, out of historians actually reading the documents out of communities that never once stopped remembering their own version of what actually happened in 1492. And then, of course, with the discovery of new journals and new testimonies, it becomes harder to fully mythologize who Christopher Columbus was and it becomes easier to see him for some of the atrocious things that he did. And the deepest objection isn't even the one you would expect. It's not just, oh, Columbus was cruel. Though we've spent this whole episode, you know, kind of watching that play out. It's about the one word that we started with discovery. Because to say that Columbus discovered America is to quietly say that America's story begins the moment that Europeans get here. And it erases everyone who's already there. The millions of people, the nations, the trade routes, the thousand years of, how many long just fine before the Spanish showed up. So discovery isn't only inaccurate. It's a decision about whose history we're deciding to tell. And there's a lot of implications in the language that people use. It was discovered for who. I mean, just Europe, basically. And that's what the fight over a statue or a holiday is actually about. It's not one man's biography. It's about where we're actually starting the story, which is why Indigenous People's Day exists now. It's celebrated in place or alongside Columbus Day and a growing number of cities and states. And it's not exactly meant to be an attack on this dead explorer, but more realistically an argument about the story itself and how it's inaccurate because it left out all the chapters that came before his. And I think that's the real collision. It's not, you know, cartoon heroes versus cartoon villains, but two very true things basically crashing on the same Monday and October. So for millions of Italians, Columbus is the symbol that let their grandparents claim a country that once killed their own people in the streets. And for millions of Indigenous people, Columbus is the beginning of the end of their entire world and their existence as they know it. And both of those are true. And that tension isn't a problem to be solved by like picking a side. It's just the honest, difficult human facts of history that both of them are simultaneously true. Which again, history is never as clean as the statues make it out to be. So the funny thing with all this is that Columbus died without ever really knowing where he was. He stood on the edge of the world and it was so vast that it would take Europe centuries to even really map it out. And it wasn't China, even though Columbus died completely confident that it was. The rest of his life, he was standing somewhere beautiful for its own reason and insisting that it was something else. And we like to think that we're past that, you know, that we at least that we know where we are. But we look at what history did to him. It took a man who was lost and it made him into the story of how America got found, right? Quote, unquote, found. We built a white city out of lights and we kind of named that celebration for him. We celebrate the anniversary of his voyage. We carved him into stone and taught our kids his name. Well, you know, none of us ever really learned the name Tyeno. So every one of those monuments does the same thing that his journal did. It stands on a different ground. We built a white city out of light and we learning named that celebration after him. We completely mythologized and kind of overlooked all the atrocious things that he did and just created a figure, a mascot to justify our existence as a nation, as Americans. And yeah, of course, colonialism is dark and devastating and a very real part of history. But the truth is it's not just American history. It is a global history. It is a human history. And that doesn't, again, make it okay. It's not trying to make light of what Columbus was guilty of. But it honestly does in a way kind of make him less remarkable. He's not some amazing guy who discovered America. I mean, people are there. He's also not like some uniquely horrible monster that did uniquely atrocious things. He was one follower, a middle manager and a massive colonial system that subjugated human beings on an extremely frequent basis. And not only to indigenous folks or foreign folks, but to their own people. And they treated land and cultures like property to be absorbed and conquered. And of course, colonized. But this is what I do find remarkable about Columbus. Not that Columbus got the math wrong five hundred years ago. But that getting it wrong meant that he happened upon something that Europe had no idea was there. And what that turned out to mean to Americans hundreds of years later is hilarious. Columbus had no idea what he actually started. And that latest gentleman is a brief history of Christopher Columbus. Cristófo Colombo, as they say. What if, I mean, a fascinating story. I didn't really realize until doing research for this that he was legit kind of arrested by the by like of an attaché of the crown. That it was ferdin and his fellow that were like, hey, go down there and go get Columbus because he's wiling up. That's wild. And he was also in chains in South America. Yeah, I didn't know this. Did you know that they would ever taught me that in history class? Well, they wouldn't. Why not? I'm just like, dude, this is the history class that I wish I got is like, hey, tell me actually what happened. I'm not going to lose my mind. I can deal with the fact that Christopher Columbus means a lot to one people while he also means a terrible thing to another people. I can recognize that Christopher Columbus was brave. I can recognize that Christopher Columbus was like daring and ambitious and embodied a lot of great qualities. I can also recognize that he was like a brutal dictator that hung and killed his own men without trial. Then obviously subjugated a bunch of natives. I can recognize that also left his own guys on an island who then got massacred. Yeah. And also boys were rolling out, but he set them up so bad. If he was just like, hey, create like a little fort, be super nice to the natives chill with them, chat with them. You know, I mean, if you guys get to flirting who knows one thing leads to another, see what happens. But instead they just were like, all right, this gold is ours. But also they just went in with like an evil mindset. Again, it's not really their fault and like a way like, of course, every person has free will and they're entitled to. Are they responsible for what they do? But it's like, yeah, you're a part of a colonial system. This is what colonists do. Like they go to place and they go, this is mine. He shows up and puts a flag there, which is also funny because we think they were past this. What do we do when we went to the moon, put up a flag? Nice old red, white and blue, which is so funny that we're just like, well, this is ours now. I mean, technically no one owns the moon. I actually think there's like international law about that. But it is a funny thing that we're like, and this is America. Yeah. Like no one checked if there were people there. And I think a lot of people look at the moon thing and they're like, yeah, of course, there's no people there. Of course, you can put a flag there. And that's what the colonists also thought about land on earth. You got to think like the Bahamas or Jamaica or Panama.
or Haiti or Santa Domingo. All these places for the Europeans is space. And Christopher Columbus is not a sailor, he's an astronaut. You know what I mean? And there's no communication of like, "Hey, this is us." - That all. - That's it. And so like the way that we look at astronauts now, we're like, "Dude, they put a flag on the moon, that's sick." That's the way that they felt about them going to, you know, going to DR and putting a flag there. Which again, I'm not saying it's right. I'm just saying all of us like to take a moral high ground when we look at history. And we're like, "Dude, those people are so bad." Like I would never do that. It's like we are them now. We just have a different overt and window of what's morally acceptable. And again, not saying that it's right. I'm just saying we should look at history with like a breath, a little bit of nuance, understand the complexities of how these systems work, understand that there's atrocities that happen then, that we would never do now. And there are atrocities happening right now, that people in 500 years will be like, "Oh, these people were all morally reprehensible." I hope, I hope that things evolve in such an ethical way that people in 500 years look at all of us. And they're like, "Oh, these people were disgusting." They were eating meat. They were just slaughtering animals by the millions. They were destroying the Amazon. They had people working. They made prisoners work all the time for no money. They're gonna be like, "Why aren't people protesting?" Jeffrey Epstein, they had like a famous guy that was hanging out with presidents. That was also like a trafficking of kids. Why were people in the streets? And all of us are gonna have to be like, "Oh, I think that's the game was on." We're just gonna be like, "Oh, yeah, I don't know. It was busy. I was working." So it's easy to hold up a magnifying glass in history and be like, "Oh, those people are evil. I would never have done that." They had probably not. You probably would have been just as evil. So, all right, we all are. I'm not saying I'm better. I'm just saying we are human and unfortunately, human atrocities are kind of the name of the game when you're living as humans. But who knows, it seems like we're getting better. You're about year. That's all we can hope for. Now I'm on a tangent. But what do you guys think? If you're Italian, what does Columbus mean to you? If you're not Italian, maybe you're native, what does Columbus mean to you? How do you interpret this human being both as an actual person and the actual facts of his life and his journals, but also in sort of like the mystical version? How do you perceive him as a, that's kind of like a mascot, as a symbol of what your thoughts are? Also, a couple little camp bullets. And before we leave, I want to say thank you again for tuning in. If you are interested in religious content, great news. We have an entire channel dedicated to that. It's called Religion Camp. If you like crazy deep dives on conspiracies, myths, legends, the topics of the day, well, great news. Camp Gagnon is for you that is our main channel with interviews with people way smarter than me. Also, we have a secret society. Yeah, you're going to get every episode of this show. Plus all of our shows completely add free. You're also going to get monthly zooms and bonus episodes that never go out to the public and all that is yours for a small sacrifice of five dollars a month. Now, I just want to say if you like to rock with the history viable, you are in the right spot. This is history camp. We do these episodes every single Wednesday. And I will see you guys in the future to talk about the past piece. Hey, guys, if you love conspiracies and hypothetical history, well, I want to invite you to check out signal 33. This is a companion pod to our podcast here at camp. It's made and edited by the same team that runs all of our shows and I choose the topics every single week. So check it out, subscribe and start the dialogue in the comment section.
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
Christopher Columbus never landed in the Americas as widely believed; he sailed south and missed the continent entirely, landing in the Caribbean instead.
Columbus was deeply mistaken about the Earth's size and distances, believing the world was much smaller than it actually is, which led to his fatal miscalculation.
The idea that he discovered America is a myth—he was convinced he had reached Asia, and he named the indigenous people "Indians," a term that persists in history despite being factually incorrect.
Columbus was not a lone genius; he was an ambitious, persuasive figure who convinced investors and officials through flawed math and emotional appeal, not scientific proof.
His voyages were driven by a desire for wealth and legacy, and he secured titles and hereditary rights to rule and profit from lands he had not yet seen.
Columbus’s treatment of indigenous people—through forced labor, tribute systems, enslavement, and violence—was standard colonial practice of the time, not uniquely monstrous.
His journals and records, especially his original diary, have been lost or altered, with later summaries like those by Bartolome de la Casas offering a biased but valuable perspective.
A royal investigation in 1500 exposed the brutality of his rule, with witnesses describing horrific punishments, and this evidence was long ignored until rediscovered in the 2000s.
Summary:
Christopher Columbus is often celebrated as the discoverer of America, but this narrative is largely a myth. He never landed in the United States and instead arrived in the Caribbean, where he believed he had found Asia. His calculations were wildly off—off by up to four times—due to a flawed understanding of Earth's size.
While he was ambitious and persuasive in securing funding, he was not a scientific pioneer, as the idea that Earth was round was already known to Europeans for centuries. Columbus called indigenous people “Indians,” a term that has persisted despite their distinct identities. His voyages were not exploratory adventures but colonial ventures driven by greed and a desire for lasting power.
He established a system of tribute and forced labor that led to widespread suffering, famine, and the enslavement of thousands. Despite his own men's deaths and the collapse of his colony, the Spanish crown did not execute him but instead removed his authority and allowed him to sail one final time. His legacy is complex: he was not a heroic visionary or a monster, but a product of the colonial era, who enabled and participated in widespread violence and exploitation.
The rediscovery of a 1500 royal investigation in the 2000s revealed the full extent of his cruelty, proving that his actions were not only wrong but systematically brutal—marking a shift in how historians view his role in global history.
FAQs
No, Columbus never landed in what is now the United States. He sailed to the Caribbean and reached islands in the Bahamas, which were part of North America, but he was far south and never entered the mainland of the continent as we know it today.
Columbus named the indigenous people 'Indians' because he believed he had reached the East Indies, a term used in Europe to refer to Asia. This mislabeling has persisted and is considered a significant historical error, as the people were native to the Americas, not India.
No, the idea that the Earth was round was already known to educated Europeans by the 1400s, based on ancient Greek science and observations of ships disappearing over the horizon. Columbus did not prove this concept; it was already widely accepted.
Columbus is credited despite not being the first to reach the Americas. He was the first European to sail west and return with a documented account, which helped establish the idea of a new world and gave his name to the continent through the term 'America.'
Columbus's voyages were marked by misjudged geography, a harsh colonial mindset, and brutal treatment of indigenous peoples. He established systems of forced tribute, slavery, and violence, which led to widespread suffering and death among native populations.
In 1500, a royal investigator named Francisco de Bobadilla exposed the cruelty in Columbus's colony. Columbus and his brothers were imprisoned and chained, but the king and queen later freed him, stripping him of his titles and authority, and allowing him one final voyage.
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