The Untold Story of Christopher Columbus

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Today, that lesson is changing in schools across the country. Here to tell the real story of Christopher Columbus is Lawrence Burgreen, who wrote the definitive biography, Columbus, The Four Voyages. And we're telling this untold story of Christopher Columbus because today is Columbus Day.

Let's take a listen. Hello, my name is Lawrence Burgreen, and I've written a book about Christopher Columbus, Columbus, The Four Voyages. Of all the books I've written, I think this has been the most challenging and the most controversial because Columbus's reputation has been changing almost by the month. He's a figure that we all know about, and he's been devalued almost beyond recognition, torn down from statues, discredited over and over as if it were the first time. But as I discovered, the criticism of Columbus, intense criticism, was there almost at the beginning, it seems to get rediscovered with each generation.

He's been hated, considered a genocidal monster. I would like to discuss Columbus in three dimensions, if you will, to give a sense of what he was really like as a person with his flaws and all. The flaws were huge, but also so were his accomplishments. There's a reason why we remember Columbus. He tied together with his four voyages, the old world and the new. First of all, who was Columbus? Christopher Columbus, Colombo, was born in Genoa in 1451.

He was the son of a weaver. He went to sea at 14, which was common, and he had a very rough beginning. He sank in a bottle off the coast of Portugal.

He managed to paddle safely to shore on a piece of wreckage. And as a Genoese, he joined a colony of expatriate Genoese sailors in Portugal. Later on, he was exploring the coast of West Africa and actually aboard another ship, made it all the way to Iceland. So even as a young person, Columbus had been around, mostly as what we would call a merchant marine.

And he worked carefully with his brothers, especially his brother, Bartholomew, who was a mapmaker. This was kind of interesting because conceptions of the world at that time were, by our standards, faulty and misleading to an almost comical extent. Bartholomew's maps and other maps of that era reinforce the belief that China and all the riches that Columbus eventually went to seek from China lay just to the west of the Americas, that the Pacific Ocean was not the largest body of water on the planet, but could be traversed in maybe a few days. So the idea was that if you could only get to the beginning of the Pacific, to its western edge, that you would be able to get to China very quickly.

This was, of course, a huge mistake. Columbus, if he had known the reality of it and how difficult it was to get to China, probably would never have undertaken the voyage. There were a couple of other sailors and navigators who did. They were all lost. So the fact that he was emboldened to undertake it was based on a series of faulty misconceptions.

It's just one of the many ironies. He spent a lot of time getting backing for the voyage. He was in Portugal, wouldn't back him.

He finally went to Spain. And by that time, he was no longer a young man. He was 40.

40 in those days was late middle age. So he was, in a way, what seemed like the back nine of his career. On the other hand, Columbus had some gifts. And his main gift as a mariner, as a navigator, was what we call dead reckoning, sailing by the seat of his pants. If he wanted to estimate time and distances, he used very simple devices, such as a rope or a buoy or a landmark, timing the distance it took to move from one end of his ship to another. If it sounds primitive, it was.

But it also worked. So he wasn't dependent on technology or intellectual constructs that were beyond his ken. He also paid close attention to tides and to wind, to the color of the sea, the composition of the clouds. And these mattered a lot more to him than the mathematical calculations of the era's leading cosmographers. They generally had never gone to sea, but Columbus had.

And in his long apprenticeship, he had acquired a great deal of experience, which turned out to be very helpful, especially in an era of all these faulty maps. And he also had this conviction that he could sail from the western coast of Spain to the eastern coast of China without much of a problem. He was not familiar with the astrolabe. He did not steer by the stars.

If he had done that, again, he probably would have never set out on this voyage, because he would have realized how faulty his assumptions were. But he did have a sense that God wanted him to do this. At times, he even thought that God was speaking to him.

That wasn't that uncommon in those days. Many people felt that God was directly speaking to them about what they should be doing in life. When I say speaking, I don't mean a mild, prompting, and intuitive one.

I mean actually hearing a voice. And we know that Columbus had this experience of God speaking to him because he wrote down what he thought God actually told him at critical times. What was so remarkable about all this was that when he set out on this voyage the very first time, the one that we all study about in school in 1492, he went across the Atlantic with three ships, and it's the first time we know that Europeans had done this, with no loss of life. This is really remarkable considering the dangers that he faced and his lack of specific knowledge. And he made this voyage three more times, each time improving based on hard-won experience. Until on the last voyage, he was able to cross the Atlantic in only 16 days.

It was incredible. Of course, the shorter the voyage, the less dangers you faced. There was less danger of storms, less danger of dehydration, less danger of mutinies at sea.

So this worked in his favor. His crew on these voyages was very problematic because he sailed on the first voyage just the day after the Spanish Inquisition became the law of the land. That was intended to drive Muslims out of Spain, but it also had ripple effects across Europe and all the way to Portugal, and was really an important watershed in history. It was the brainchild, if you could call it that, of the Catholic monarchs of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella. Because Columbus was not able to get backing in Portugal, he was able to get sort of backing from them. I'd say it was tentative. His first fleet was three cramped, leaking, fragile vessels. They were old and falling apart, we would call them rust buckets, except they were made out of wood, and they were small.

The Santa Maria, which was the largest, could hold only 40 sailors. And you've been listening to historian Lawrence Burgreen tell the story of Christopher Columbus in a way you've probably never heard it before. It's complicated and it's nuanced. And like any human being, this man had his flaws, but my goodness, his virtues, his talents, you're hearing about some of them. By the way, if he had not known how difficult it was we learn to get to China, he probably would have never embarked on the voyage in the first place, the irony of ironies. And he's 40 years old when he tries to get the backing to do this.

And 40, as Lawrence pointed out, is the back nine of your career back in the late 15th century. And of course, how he knew what he was supposed to do, well, he knew it because he'd heard from God. And I mean, he thought he literally heard from God. And that's what he wrote in his own journals and memoirs. A really spectacular part of Lawrence's book is hearing about those messages from God. You're going to hear more of the story of Christopher Columbus with Lawrence Burgreen, because today is Columbus Day. As our American stories continue. Hyundai is back with the all-electric IONIQ 6. It has a range of up to 360 miles and can charge from 10% to 80% in as little as 18 minutes on a DC ultra-fast charger. But are there any drawbacks to the EV lifestyle?

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That's why he makes sure to share his financial tips on his podcast, Life as a Gringo. On Heart of the Game, we're talking with some of the most successful families in sports to learn what's really making them tick from staying healthy to fostering strong family bonds. We'll hear from athletes such as Kurt Warner on what lessons are being passed down to a new generation of athletes. There is a level when we play that we feel we're invincible. You feel like it's not going to happen to you, but then anytime it does, whether it's you suffering an injury or teammates suffering a traumatic injury, that's what stops you in your tracks. And it makes you go, okay, we're not invincible. And it becomes more personal.

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Let's pick up where we last left off. Now, another one of Columbus's, it seems, almost comical misconceptions was that he was going to sail to China in these ships. Therefore, he brought translators with him ready to interpret Chinese once they reached Asia. Where did he get these ideas from? Well, like everybody in Europe at that time, he got them from Marco Polo's popular travels. Marco Polo went over land rather than sea for the most part and dictated a very popular account of his adventures. Some of it was embellished.

Some of it was drawn from other accounts that he'd heard that he included in his own. In general, it painted a picture of this mythical China or Asia that Columbus thought he was reaching as a place of great luxury, of gold, and sensual gratification. The idea was he would go there and bring back spices, which were very important and easy to transport.

Gold, a little more difficult because it had to be mined or stolen. And much, much more ominously, slaves. Slavery at that point was very common throughout Europe. He also had another mission, which partly contradicted this one, was that he wanted to bring, and he was quite serious about this, Christianity to what he called the idol worshipers of the East. He felt that his name, Christopher Columbus, meant Christ Bearer, and he had a messianic sense of this.

Now, this didn't square with the idea of slavery, because if you had slaves, and he wanted to convert people, they couldn't be Christians. But nobody really bothered at that time to think it through until he actually went out on the voyage. He also planned to meet Kublai Khan. He had official letters from King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. The only problem was that Kublai Khan had died decades ago.

The Mongol Empire, which he led, was fading into oblivion. So it could be said that, I think with some fairness, that Marco Polo's travels, which in many ways were accurate, misled rather than inspired Columbus. And he spent his entire career for voyages in a futile effort to discover this maritime route to China. Okay, in the process, he stumbled across what we know and now, and now called the New World. And that was the beginning of what we also call globalization.

Now, we can debate endlessly whether this was a good thing or a bad thing. But once Columbus had started this process of going back and forth between what we now call the Americas and Spain and Europe, there was no stopping it. And it wasn't just trade and it wasn't just geopolitics. It was also what we call the Columbus exchange. But the Colombian exchange involved livestock and seeds and germs and other things that could not be undone because what you left behind stayed and transformed the landscapes of both the old world and the new. On the first voyage, his initial contacts, this was the 1492 voyage, were tentative and respectful.

He wrote and he was a big letter writer. I hope to win them to the love and service of their highnesses by which he met Ferdinand and Isabella and the whole Spanish nation. They have no religion, but they are not idolaters. They believe that power and goodness dwell in the sky and are firmly convinced that I have come from the sky with these ships and people. This is because they are not stupid.

Far from it. They are men of great intelligence, for they give a marvelously good account of everything. But they have never before seen men clothed or ships like these. Columbus was probably talking about one of two tribes in the Caribbean. The Taíano was probably the most likely and they were fairly sophisticated as he realized and they were not particularly hostile to Columbus's arrival.

Some of them were very curious and welcomed him. However, some of the behavior of Columbus's followers or those who came after him was so outrageous that what we think of as the atrocities that we attribute to Columbus were actually perpetrated by those who came afterwards, sometimes in his name and sometimes independently. Some of the worst of them, for example, one of his lieutenants, Michel de Cuneo, wrote about capturing and raping a beautiful indigenous woman whom he claims the Lord Admiral that was Columbus gave to him. And then he writes about how she was unwilling and scraped her with his fingernails so that he wished he had never laid eyes on her.

Finally, he got a piece of rope and punished her with it. These kinds of letters were circulated around Europe and sensationalized this voyage. So the impression of it went from being one of trade and a religious mission to one of complete exploitation. Columbus also decided that one of the other tribes, the Caribs, as opposed to the Taino, were cannibals. And he wrote after the second voyage that the Caribs eat the male children, that they have been adopted by their women and only bring up the children of their own women. So in other words, they eat the children of a rival indigenous people.

And then to top it off, he reported that they say that human flesh is so good that there is nothing like it in the world. Well, again, these kinds of accounts electrified Europe, Spain, and not in a good way, and set off a big reaction that changed the color of everything. At the same time, while this was going on, unknown to Columbus and his sailors in Europe, something maybe more important was going on, and one that continues to this day. And that's the Columbian Exchange, which I mentioned earlier.

This was first identified by Alfred Crosby at the University of Texas at Austin. And it indicates the exchange and commingling of bacteria and plants and animals between the old world and the new, beginning in 1492 and then the subsequent four voyages when there was a cross-fertilizing of these separate land masses brought about by Columbus and his followers. And you've been listening to historian Lawrence Burgreen tell the story, the rich and complicated story, the nuanced story of Christopher Columbus, one of the great storytellers in this country, Lawrence is. His book is Columbus the Four Voyages. I urge you to get it. You will not put it down.

Get two copies, give it to a friend. We learned so much about the context and the times in which he lived. Lawrence isn't one of those historians who judge people out of context, but yet he's honest as honest can be.

The full picture, the good, the bad, and the ugly. And my goodness, the international trade lanes that Columbus started, he started for better or worse, global trade. He started globalization and it changed not only the new world, it changed the old world too. Also a great discussion, a great piece of storytelling on how Columbus viewed the native tribes and more importantly, how people used his name to do just, well, tragic and ugly things. And of course, some of Columbus's own writings and the impact they had on the native tribes that lived here before his arrival. When we return, more of this remarkable story, this rich and complicated story, the story of Christopher Columbus on this Columbus Day, here on Our American Stories.

Hey, this is Lance Bass from Frosted Tips. So my husband Michael and I just took an amazing road trip to the I Heart Radio Music Festival in Vegas. And thanks to Hyundai, we were able to record a special episode just for you guys along the way. We're so excited to take you on this journey with us. You're not gonna wanna miss this one, right, babe?

No, you won't. Here's a quick preview. You can listen now wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, I love memory lane. Let's go down it. Take us back to the NSYNC tour bus days. Look, I loved being on the tour bus. I don't sleep better than when I'm on a bus. And then your friends get to join you on the road and family. That was always fun. Because especially during the height of NSYNC, my friends were in college. So they would jump on the road with us a few dates and have the best time ever. But I also had to share a bus with Joey Fatale. But the good thing is eventually when we made it, we had a bus at a shower on it.

This episode is brought to you by the all electric Hyundai IONIQ 5 and IONIQ 6. State Farm is committed to being your top choice when ensuring the things that matter to you. My cultura podcast host, Dramos, also believes in the power of financial knowledge. That's why he makes sure to share his financial tips on his podcast, Life as a Gringo. Do you personally have your own sort of calculator as far as mentally when you want to treat yourself to something?

Because I do agree we all deserve to be living the life that we want to live. But how do we do it in a responsible way that we know we genuinely can afford it? Yeah, I think for me personally, if I have to buy it on a credit card, I'll use the credit card for points.

But if I can't pay that card at the end of the month, free and clear, then I truly can't afford it. That's just it for me. There is a level when we play that we feel we're invincible. You feel like it's not going to happen to you. But then anytime it does, whether it's you suffering an injury or teammates suffering a traumatic injury, that's what stops you in your tracks. And it makes you go, okay, we're not invincible. And it becomes more personal.

It's a part of the process to have to work through those things, you know, and understand the risks that go into it and understand the rewards or the love for the sport. Listen to Heart of the Game every Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we continue with our American stories and with the story of Christopher Columbus as told by Lawrence Burgreen. Because today is Columbus Day.

Let's pick up where we last left off. Columbus brought white potatoes, sweet potatoes, maize, and manioc, which is a rather starchy root from the New World to the back of the old to Europe. And he brought wheat, turnips, barley, apples, and rice from Europe to the Americas. They made a big difference because they enabled the people in the Americas who started growing them to rapidly increase the population there.

But there was more, got more complicated. Columbus and his men brought horses, cattle, sheep, and goats to the New World. We have to imagine what it was like without horses, without cattle before them. They also brought back to Europe pathogens that were unknown. Remember, people didn't really know about germ theory in those days. These pathogens had a devastating effect. Smallpox, malaria, chickenpox, influenza, and yellow fever all came thanks to Columbus and his men. Not intentionally. He never decided, okay, we're going to intentionally infect defenseless people in another land.

They didn't realize they were doing it. Some other effects of this Columbian exchange, alcohol and alcoholism. They weren't alcoholics in the New World or alcohol before Columbus.

Alcohol and alcoholism devastated local populations. So as you can see, this Columbian exchange was complicated and multilayered. Once that was started, it could not be undone. Columbus's first voyage was relatively quick. As I mentioned, it seemed to be successful. The second voyage was meant as a follow-up.

He wanted to capitalize on it. Finally, when he got to the third voyage, which was 1498 and 1500, in a way, this was the most complicated of all. And we see a lot of the contradictions in the Columbus voyages coming to the fore. He had a very difficult time. He had a very difficult life. He had a very difficult time maintaining order among the crew. And he had also had a difficult time maintaining the pretense that he was going to China or Asia.

He was also undermined by his brother, Bartholomew, who was much more interested in plunder and conquest and did not share Columbus's messianic visions or ideals. In the meantime, on this voyage, he seemed to be losing his mind, or at least temporarily losing his reason. On this third voyage, once he discovered Venezuela, another major accomplishment, but again, not China, he decided that he was sailing uphill, as he wrote about, which of course one can do, and that he had discovered the entrance to Paradise. And in case you were wondering, it was a little bit north of Venezuela, so I don't think anybody else has ever found it since then.

Joking. Anyway, he wrote that, Each time I sailed from Spain to the Indies, I found that when I reached a point a hundred leagues west of the Azores, the heavens, the stars, and the temperatures of the air and the water of the sea abruptly changed. It was as if the seas sloped upward. He was surprised because he felt that the earth was spherical. He believed it, and he knew it to be true. He decided then that the earth must be not round, but as he put it, the shape of a pair, which is round everywhere, except at the stalk, where it juts out a long way. At this point, he seemed to be more and more detached for reality, and he then talked about this watery summit that he found.

He didn't believe anyone could actually, quote, ascend to the top. More complications ensued to the point where Spain, for a minute, Isabella, decided to appoint an expector to see what was happening with Columbus, because they were alarmed by the reports of cruelty and by Columbus's delusions. They appointed Francisco de Boba dia, and his idea was to try and clean up this mess in Columbus.

So he arrived in August of 1500 and wanted to see what was actually going on. He was actually there in Santo Domingo, and what he saw was worse than anyone back in Spain had imagined. He was confronted by gallows, rotting corpses, and who was overlooking this was Columbus, Columbus's other brother, not Bartholomew, but Diego. And he felt that he was doing the right thing, and he boasted to Boba dia that five additional Spaniards were to be hanged the next day. The reason was because he believed that they were going to stage a mutiny or a rebellion against Columbus and his two brothers. So he felt that he was carrying out the wishes of Spain by doing this.

Of course, it was exactly the opposite. Executing Spaniards was, of course, an extremely grave offense. So he found himself jailed, and the search went out for Columbus himself, who now found himself in big trouble, and spent most of his life under suspicion for these atrocities.

One of the things we're lucky about with Columbus is that we have so many different impressions of what he was really like. However, there is one important part, crucial part, of the story that we don't know about. We don't know what the Taino or other indigenous peoples actually thought. We can guess. They're sometimes quoted. We can judge or infer from their actions. But still, it's largely based on speculation.

And we can speculate in favor of one side or another. But there is some sense they did regard Columbus as a messiah too, but not in the sense that Columbus thought of himself as bearing a divine message, but as a harbinger of the end of time. Because apparently, and some people have suggested, that there was a myth that was prevalent or a belief among the Taino and other peoples, that when ships like this appeared, that was the end of the world. Therefore, they responded in a drastic way. Many of them committed suicide.

They jumped off of cliffs. They poisoned one another. Columbus saw some of this and was absolutely mystified about that, and he had no way of knowing why this was happening without realizing that he had actually unintentionally triggered it. So this is a particularly tragic instance of unintended consequences. You could see that Columbus throughout these voyages and throughout his life ricocheted around from one misconception to another, from misplaced idealism to unintentional or overlooked cruelty. That makes him an extraordinarily complex figure and also a very important figure, because the results of his voyage are with us to this day and won't be undone.

They are really permanent. So that makes him one of the most important figures in the history of exploration, if not history, both for better and for worse. And I think he speaks a lot to the human condition about our own susceptibility or fallibility, about both inspiring and deleterious effects of belief. That's why he still grips our imagination as well as our intellect. And a terrific job on the editing, production, and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler. And a special thanks to Lawrence Burgreen. His book, Columbus, The Four Voyages. When you get it, you will not put it down.

Go to Amazon or the usual suspects. Again, it's Columbus, The Four Voyages. And what a story he told, so complicated, almost a dual nature to almost everything that happens. Here's the good, here's the bad, much of it an unintended consequence of this very new partnership, this new globalization. Columbus brings white potatoes, sweet potatoes, and maize from the new world to the old. And he brings wheat, turnips, apples, and rice from Europe to the Americas.

Mutual benefits there. He also, my goodness, brings so many more things, horses, cattle, sheep, and goats from Europe to the new world. Can you imagine the country without these things?

It's unimaginable. And of course, smallpox too, and other pathogens. And again, he didn't do it knowing that he was doing what he was doing. These are unintended consequences of this new globalization, of this new Columbian exchange. And let's not forget alcohol and alcoholism too.

Again, not done on purpose. Contradictions, my goodness, they're everywhere. By the way, we live with them in our own lives too, as human beings. But they all come to The Four, including that last trip.

His own brothers turn out to be a real problem in his life. And by all accounts, by the end of that third voyage, Columbus, well, he's lost his mind. The story in the end shows the nature of Columbus, ricocheting on one misperception and misconception to another, filled with both an inspiring nature, but also in the end, all those flaws and fallibilities.

The story of Christopher Columbus, in the end, the story of humanity, human nature, and the story of early America on this Columbus day, here on Our American Stories. Introducing Uber Teen Accounts, an Uber account for your teen with always-on enhanced safety features. Your teen can request a ride when you can't take them. You'll get real-time notifications along the way. Your teen can feel a sense of independence. You can follow their entire route on a live tracking map. Your teen will get assigned the top-rated drivers. Thank you.

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