Christopher Columbus
Now note how the historians, the biographers and the commentators, the ponderous and the mawkish, the smug and the pedantic alike all fail to see why their hero was laughed at. His name was Cristo-fero Colombo, to us a good enough label for tying to any man, but to the Italians and all educated persons of that age, a joke. The words mean literally the Christ-Carrying Dove. Suppose a modern man with some invention or a great idea, called himself Mr. Christ-Carrying Dove, and tried to get capitalists in New York or London to finance his enterprise! In the end he changed his name to Cristoval Colon and got himself financed, but by that time his hair was white, and his nerve was gone, and his health failing.
In the ninth century the vikings sailed from Norway by the great circle course north of the gulf stream. They had no compass or any instruments of navigation, and they braved the unknown currents, the uncharted reefs, the unspeakable terrors of pack-ice, berg-streams and fog on Greenland’s awful coast. They made no fuss.
But Columbus sailing in search of Japan, had one Englishman and one Irishman, the rest of the people being a pack of dagoes. In lovely weather they were ready to run away from their own shadows.
From here onward throughout the four voyages which disclosed the West Indies and the Spanish Main, Columbus allowed his men to shirk their duties, to disobey his orders, to mutiny, to desert and even to make war upon him.
Between voyages he permitted everybody from the mean king downward, to snub, swindle, plunder and defame himself and all who were loyal to him in misfortune. Because Columbus behaved like an old woman, his swindling pork contractor, Amerigo Vespucci, was allowed to give his name to the Americas. Because he had not the manhood to command, the hapless red Indians were outraged, enslaved and driven to wholesale suicide, leaping in thousands from the cliffs. For lack of a master the Spaniards performed such prodigies of cowardice and cruelty as the world has never known before or since, the native races were swept out of existence, and Spain set out upon a downward path, a moral lapse beyond all human power to arrest.
Yet looking back, how wonderful is the prophecy in that name, Christ-Carrying Dove, borne by a saintly and heroic seaman whose mission, in the end, added two continents to Christianity.
This text mainly contradicts a Life of Columbus, by Clements R. Markham, C. B. Phillip & Son, 1892.
Americus Vespuccius