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By Root 3120 0

army of activists and scholars has bombarded the public with condemnations of the man and his works. They have called him brutal (he was, by today’s standards) and racist (he wasn’t, strictly speaking—modern concepts of race had not yet been invented); incompetent as an administrator (he was) and as a seaman (he wasn’t); a religious fanatic (he surely was, from a secular point of view); and a greedy monomaniac (a charge, the admiral’s supporters would say, that could be leveled against all ambitious souls). Colón, his detractors charge, never understood what he had found.

Completed in 1992, this huge, cross-shaped memorial to Columbus in Santo Domingo was designed by the young Scottish architect Joseph Lea Gleave, who attempted to capture in stone what he regarded as Columbus’s most important role: the man who brought Christianity to the Americas. The structure, he said modestly, would be “one of the great monuments of the ages.” (Photo credit 1.2)

How different it was in 1852, when Antonio del Monte y Tejada, a celebrated Dominican litterateur, closed the first of the four volumes of his history of Santo Domingo by extolling Colón’s “great, generous, memorable and eternal” career. The admiral’s every action “breathes greatness and elevation,” del Monte y Tejada wrote. Do not “all nations … owe him eternal gratitude”? The best way to acknowledge this debt, he proposed, would be to erect a gigantic Columbus statue, “a colossus like the one in Rhodes,” sponsored by “all the cities of Europe and America,” that would spread its arms benevolently across Santo Domingo, the hemisphere’s “most visible and noteworthy place.”

A grand monument to the admiral! To del Monte y Tejada, the merits of the idea seemed obvious; Colón was a messenger from God, his voyages to the Americas the result of a “divine decree.” Nonetheless, building the monument took almost a century and a half. The delay was partly economic; most nations in the hemisphere were too poor to throw money at a monstrous statue on a faraway island. But it also reflected the growing unease about the admiral himself. Knowing what we know today about the fate of the Indians on Hispaniola, critics asked, should there be any monument to his voyages at all? Given his actions, what kind of person was buried in the golden box at its center?

The answer is hard to arrive at, even though his life is among the best documented of his time—the newest edition of his collected writings runs to 536 pages of small print.

During his lifetime, nobody knew him as Columbus. The admiral was baptized as Cristoforo Colombo by his family in Genoa, Italy, but changed his name to Cristovao Colombo when he moved to Portugal, where he was an agent for Genoese merchant families. He called himself Cristóbal Colón after 1485, when he moved to Spain, having failed to persuade the Portuguese king to sponsor an expedition across the Atlantic. Later, like a petulant artist, he insisted that his signature be an incomprehensible glyph:

(No one is sure what he meant, but the third line could invoke Christ, Mary, and Joseph—Xristus Maria Yosephus—and the letters up top may stand for Servus Sum Altissimi Salvatoris, “Servant I am of the Highest Savior.” Χρο FERENS is probably Xristo-Ferens, “Christ-Bearer.”)

“A well-built man of greater than average stature,” according to a description attributed to his illegitimate son Hernán, the admiral had prematurely white hair, “light-colored eyes,” an aquiline nose, and fair cheeks that readily flushed. He was a mercurial man, moody and inconstant one hour to the next. Although subject to fits of rage, Hernán remembered, Colón was also “so opposed to swearing and blasphemy that I give my word I never heard him say any oath other than ‘by San Fernando.’ ” (St. Ferdinand). His life was dominated by overweening personal ambition and, arguably more important, profound religious faith. Colón’s father, a weaver, seems to have scrambled from debt to debt, which his son apparently viewed with shame; he actively concealed his origins and spent his entire adult life striving