That immortal ass, “the average man,” sees with nothing but his eyes. To him a planet or a star is only a point of light—a bright dot, a golden fly-speck on “the sky.” He does not see it as a prodigious globe swimming through the unthinkable depths of space. With only the heavens for company the poor devil is bored. When out alone on a clear night he wants to get himself home to his female and young and—unfailing expedient of intellectual vacuity—go to bed. The glories and splendors of the firmament are no more to him than a primrose was to Peter Bell. Let us leave him snoring pigly in his blankets and turn to other themes, not forgetting that he is our lawful ruler, nor permitted to forget the insupportable effects of his ferocious rule.
1903.
COLUMBUS
THE human mind is affected with a singular disability to get a sense of an historical event without a gigantic figure in the foreground overtopping all his fellows. As surely as God liveth, if one hundred congenital idiots were set adrift in a scow to get rid of them, and, borne by favoring currents into eyeshot of an unknown continent, should simultaneously shout, “Land ho!” instantly drowning in their own drool, we should have one of them figuring in history ever thereafter with a growing glory as an illustrious discoverer of his time. I do not say that Columbus was a navigator and discoverer of that kind, nor that he did anything of that kind in that way; the parallel is perfect only in what history has done to Columbus; and some seventy millions of Americans are authenticating the imposture all they know how. In this whole black business hardly one element of falsehood is lacking.
Columbus was not a learned man, but an ignorant. He was not an honorable man, but a professional pirate. He was, in the most hateful sense of the word, an adventurer. His voyage was undertaken with a view solely to his own advantage, the gratification of an incredible avarice. In the lust of gold he committed deeds of cruelty, treachery and oppression for which no fitting names are found in the vocabulary of any modern tongue. To the harmless and hospitable peoples among whom he came he was a terror and a curse. He tortured them, he murdered them, he sent them over the sea as slaves. So monstrous were his crimes, so conscienceless his ambition, so insatiable his greed, so black his treachery to his sovereign, that in his mere imprisonment and disgrace we have a notable instance of “the miscarriage of justice.” In the black abysm of this man’s character we may pile falsehood upon falsehood, but we shall never build the monument high enough to top the shadow of his shame. Upon the culm and crown of that reverend pile every angel will still look down and weep.
We are told that Columbus was no worse than the men of his race and generation—that his vices were “those of his time.” No vices are peculiar to any time; this world has been vicious from the dawn of history, and every race has reeked with sin. To say of a man that he is like his contemporaries is to say that he is a scoundrel without excuse. The virtues are accessible to all. Athens was vicious, yet Socrates was virtuous. Rome was corrupt, but Marcus Aurelius was not corrupt. To offset Nero the gods gave Seneca. When literary France groveled at the feet of the third Napoleon Hugo stood erect.
It will be a dark day for the world when infractions of the moral law by A and B are accepted as justification of the sins of C. But even in the days of Columbus men were not all pirates; God inspired enough of them to be merchants to serve as prey for the others; and while turning his honest penny by plundering them, the great Christopher was worsted by a Venetian trading galley and had to pickle his pelt in a six-mile swim to the Portuguese coast, a wiser and a wetter thief. If he had had the hard luck to drown we might none of us have been Americans, but the gods would have missed the revolting spectacle of an entire people prostrate before the blood-beslubbered image of a moral idiot, performing solemn rites of adoration with a litany of lies.
In comparison with the crimes of Columbus his follies cut a sorry figure. Yet the foolhardy enterprise to whose failure he owes his fame is entitled to distinction. With sense enough to understand the earth’s spheroid form (he thought it pear-shaped) but without knowledge of its size, he believed that he could reach India by sailing westward and died in the delusion that he had done so—a trifling miscalculation—a matter of eight or ten thousands of miles. If this continent had not happened to lie right across his way he and his merry men would all have gone fishing, with themselves for bait and the devil a hook among them. Firmness is persistence in the right; obstinacy is persistence in the wrong. With the light that he had, Columbus was so wildly, dismally and fantastically wrong that his refusal to turn back was nothing less than pig-headed unreason, and his crews would have been abundantly justified in deposing him. The wisdom of an act is not to be determined by the outcome, but by the performer’s reasonable expectation of success. And after all, the expedition failed lamentably. It accomplished no part of its purpose, but by a happy chance it accomplished something better—for us. As to the red Indians, such of them as have been good enough to assist in apotheosis of the man whom their ancestors had the deep misfortune to discover may justly boast themselves the most magnanimous of mammals.
And when all is conceded there remains the affronting falsehood that Columbus discovered America. Surely in all these drunken orgies of beatification—in all this carnival of lies there should be found some small place for Lief Ericsson and his wholesome Northmen, who discovered, colonized and abandoned this continent five hundred years before, and of whom we are forbidden to think as corsairs and slave-catchers. The eulogist is always a calumniator. The crown that he sets upon the unworthy head he first tears from the head that is worthy. So the honest fame of Lief Ericsson is cast as rubbish to the void, and the Genoese pirate is pedestaled in his place.