You may be aware this Monday is a federal holiday, Columbus Day. The post office won’t be open, but we won’t get a day off from class. And we shouldn’t. Christopher Columbus was a terrible human being who wasn’t nearly as notable as he gets credit for and does not deserve a federal holiday.
Maybe you were taught in school Columbus somehow “proved” Earth is round. What a load of garbage! The ancient Greeks (and Indians) knew very well Earth is approximately spherical. One Greek, Eratosthenes, was even able to calculate the Earth’s circumference to a remarkably accurate margin using only simple mathematics and ingenuity.
Even throughout the Middle Ages, knowledge of a round Earth was widespread (the Earth’s circular shadow on the moon during lunar eclipses being a pretty big hint). Even the most basic navigation techniques using the stars required Earth to be round.
In fact, plenty of ancient and medieval navigators had already figured it was technically possible to reach Asia by sailing west from Europe (they, of course, didn’t know the Americas were in the way), but knew anyone who attempted such a voyage would die of starvation or thirst long before they got there, as ships back then weren’t nearly big enough to carry the necessary supplies.
Columbus, however, believed the circumference of Earth was considerably smaller than it was (even though it had been calculated mathematically 1,500 years before), and when he died, he still believed he had gone to Asia. And we gave this idiot a national holiday!
So, no, none of Columbus’s crewmen were afraid of falling off the edge of the world. They were just afraid of dying. This lie of Columbus discovering Earth’s roundness was actually made up by Washington Irving in the 1800s.
In addition, Columbus gets a lot of credit for “discovering” the New World, but this too is false – Leif Ericsson and the Vikings made it to North America nearly 500 years before Columbus. And if we want to stop being racist and Eurocentric, we can remember human beings were in the Americas over 13,000 years before Columbus!
OK, despite these criticisms, Columbus did have a pretty large impact on history by helping usher in the Age of Discovery. But he was a genuinely awful person. He enslaved countless natives, and during his second voyage, he carried out mass genocide against the Taino people of Hispaniola (modern-day Haiti and Dominican Republic).
After sending many Taino to Europe to be sold into slavery, he demanded all of the remaining natives to work only to bring gold to him. As Hispaniola doesn’t really have much gold, Columbus and his men hunted down and systematically killed the Taino who tried to escape. In only 60 years, the population of Taino fell from an estimated 250,000 to a few hundred.
Later, after tricking colonists into settling there with tall tales of the riches of the New World, he served as governor of Hispaniola, where he acted tyrannically, frequently using torture methods to get his way.
All in all, Columbus was essentially a medieval Hitler with less technology and resources to carry out his evil ways.
And we’re missing something else big here: Columbus never landed in the present-day United States other than Puerto Rico. He sailed around in the Caribbean and on the coast of Central and South America some, but he never visited the contiguous 48 states.
So why did we give him a holiday at all? If we’re going to give one to someone who never came to this country, why not at least give it to Leif Ericsson, who wasn’t an genocidal maniac and got here 500 years earlier.
The university made the right decision by not giving us the day off. If anything, we should spend Columbus Day remembering what a horrible person he was. His voyage did set the Age of Discovery in motion, but his treatment of Native Americans began a pattern that ended in their near-extermination from both continents of the New World.
Columbus Day should be immediately removed from the list of federal holidays, as should any other holiday honoring an architect of genocide or a miscredited “discovery.”
Harry Nelson is the opinion editor of The Reflector. He can be contacted at [email protected].