Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [214]
Nowadays, Columbus the explorer is everywhere. Sculptures, monuments, and memorials of Columbus abound in public squares in Genoa, Barcelona, Madrid, Mexico City, Seville, and in cities throughout the Caribbean and the Americas. From street level these statues reveal themselves by turns as heroic, grotesque, and fearsome; they portray a gargoyle of conquest. Rivers, cities, towns, thoroughfares, and the nation of Colombia have been named in his honor.
In the United States especially, his example and his voyages answered an unceasing need for self-definition and identity. Beginning in the eighteenth century, his name was given to the capital of South Carolina, the capital of Ohio, and the mighty Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest. Through an act of Congress in 1871, the site of the nation’s capital was named the District of Columbia. New York City has Columbia University, Columbus Circle, and Columbus Avenue.
His marble statue sits atop a seventy-foot granite column rising above Columbus Circle. Designed by Gaetano Russo in 1892, the monument’s marble base proclaims:
To
CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS
The Italians Resident in America,
Scoffed at Before,
During the Voyage, Menaced,
After It, Chained,
As Generous As Oppressed,
To the World He Gave a World.
Columbus held up a mirror to the Old World, revealing and magnifying its inhumanity and greed along with its piety, curiosity, and exuberance. Columbus’s voyages revealed many harsh truths about the limits of human understanding, but it is too late to undo the consequences of these voyages. Their crimson thread is now woven deeply into the fabric of European and global history.
For all the scorn Columbus engendered, his four voyages constitute one of the greatest adventure stories in history. Although he was not the first explorer to glimpse or visit the distant shores of the Americas, his was the discovery that permanently planted the reality of the New World in the imagination—and political schemes—of the Old. Columbus forever changed the idea of what a European empire could be. He had the vision—and, at times, the delusion—to imagine, and to persuade himself and others that he had found something immense, important, and lasting.
For all their accomplishments and liabilities, Columbus’s voyages were just the beginning, setting in motion consequences—political, cultural, and scientific—that persist to this day. In its complexity and powerful contradictions, his example speaks more urgently than ever to our contentious era.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
During the years I worked on Columbus’s voyages, the comment I heard most frequently was “You mean he made four voyages? What happened on the others? Where did he go? Do the other voyages matter?” I replied that I thought the other voyages mattered greatly, that they were at least as important as the first, which, in context, set the stage for the later ones, each more adventurous and tragic than those preceding it. Many people helped make this idea a reality.
My literary agent, Suzanne Gluck, at William Morris Endeavor, once again demonstrated why she is the best. Her resourcefulness carried me through my Columbian labors. At WME, I also acknowledge the very capable assistance of Sarah Ceglarski, Caroline D’Onofrio, Elizabeth Tingue, and Eric Zohn.
In Wendy Wolf, editorial director of nonfiction at Viking Penguin, I feel fortunate to have found the ideal editor for this book. From the moment we started discussing Columbus’s voyages, we seemed to jump into the midst of a conversation that had been going on for some time. I also extend my appreciation to Susan Petersen Kennedy, Paul Slovak, Carolyn Coleburn, Hal Fessenden, Sharon Gonzalez, Carla Bolte, Sonya Cheuse, and Margaret Riggs at Viking Penguin in New York;