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.
But falsehood and ingratitude are sins against Nature, and Nature is
not to be trifled with. Already we feel, or ought to feel, the smart of
her lash. Our follies are finding us out. Our Columbian Exhibition has
for its chief exhibit our national stupidity, and displays our shame.
Our Congress “improves the occasion” to make a disgraceful surrender
to the Chadbands and Stigginses of churches by a bitter observance of
the Sabbath. Managers of the show steal the first one thousand dollars
that come into their hands by bestowing them upon a schoolgirl related
to one of themselves, for a “Commemoration Ode” as long as the language
and as foolish as its grammar—the ragged, tagless and bobtailed yellow
dog of commemoration odes. And _this_ while Whittier lived to
suffer the insult, and Holmes to resent it. What further exhibits
of our national stupidity and lack of moral sense space has been
engaged for in the world’s contempt one can only conjecture. In the
meantime state appropriations are being looted, art is in process of
caricature, literature is debauched, and we have a Columbian Bureau
of Investigation and Suppression with a daily mail as voluminous as
that of a commercial city. If at the finish of this revealing revelry
self-respecting Americans shall not have lost through excessive use the
power to blush, and all Europe the ability to laugh, another Darwin
should write another book on the expression of the emotions in men and
animals.
That nothing might be lacking to the absurdity of the scheme, the
falsehood marking all the methods of its execution, we must needs avail
ourselves of an alteration in the calendar and have two anniversary
celebrations of one event. And in culmination of this comedy of
falsehood, the later date must formally open, with dedicatory rites, an
exhibition which will not be open for six months. One falsehood begets
another and another in the line of succession, until the father of them
all shall have colonized his whole progeny upon the congenial soil of
this new Dark Continent.
Why should not the four-hundredth anniversary of the rediscovery
of America have been made memorable by fitly celebrating it with a
becoming sense of the stupendous importance of the event, without
thrusting into the forefront of the rites the dismal personality of
the very small man who made the find? Could not the most prosperous
and vain people of the earth see anything to celebrate in the four
centuries between San Salvador and Chicago but it must sophisticate
history by picking that offensive creature out of his shame to make him
a central, dominating figure of the festival? Thank Heaven, there is
one thing that all the genius of the anthropolaters can not do. Quarrel
as we may about the relative claims to authenticity of portraits
painted from description, we can not perpetuate the rogue’s visible
appearance “in his habit as he lived.” Audible to the ear of the
understanding fall with unceasing iteration from the lips of his every
statue in every land the words, “I am a lie!”
1892.