"When Worlds Collide"
 
by Kenneth Auchincloss
 
in "Newsweek" (Special Issue, Fall/Winter 1991, pp. 8-13)
 
	No, Columbus didn't discover America.  Let's lay to rest
that old notion right at the start.  First of all, the verb's all
wrong for our multicultural, interdependent, ultrasensitive
modern world.  "Discover" suggests that "we" went out and found a
strange and unknown "them."  If you are one of "them," you may
justly feel you are being patronized.  Then, too, it's pretty
clear by now that Columbus was not the first outsider to set foot
in the Western Hemisphere.  That distinction belongs to the
original human settlers, who probably crossed from Asia tens of
thousands of years ago.  Or, if we're not talking about the
aboriginal settlers, claims have been staked for various
"discoverers": second-century Jews, a Chinese Buddhist who may
have visited Mexico in the fifth century, the Irish monk Saint
Brendan, Prince Madoc of Wales and--most likely of all--Leif
Eriksson and the Norsemen who landed in "Vinland" in about A.D.
1000.  (All their claims are engagingly described by Donald Dale
Jackson in the September issue of Smithsonian magazine.)
	But even if they did reach the American continent, none of
them made a big deal about it--which Christopher Columbus, in
1492, emphatically did.  He left European settlers and animals
behind, he brought native people and odd vegetables back.  He
told tales of rich lands and potential treasure.  He inspired a
wave of explorers and adventurers to head west.  In short, he had
consequences.
	That is why, 500 years later, the world still takes notice. 
King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella ... the Nina, the Pinta and the
Santa Maria ... the excited shout from the crow's nest ... the
men wading ashore on a Bahamian island may all seem the stuff of
school pageants--simplistic, ritualized and more than a bit
quaint.  But they also mark one of the great collisions of human
history.  Imagine that a gigantic spaceship descended on our
planet tomorrow, filled with four-inch creatures of a color not
yet imagined by man.  That would perhaps be equivalent to the
encounter of the world's two hemispheres half a millennium ago.
	It was as if scattered pieces of the human puzzle were
fitted together at last.  Parts became a whole, and life was
transformed in a hundred ways.  New foods reshaped the diet of
both hemispheres; sugar, cattle and pigs moved west, the tomato
and the potato, cocoa and corn moved east.  The horse, hitherto
unknown in the New World, changed daily existence for the Indians
of the North American plains and made possible the world of the
gauchos.  The wheel, which the pre-Columbian civilizations of the
West used only in children's toys, revolutionized work and
travel.  Written language spread through the continent, replacing
either a ponderous system of hieroglyphics or nothing at all.
	Inevitably, there was havoc.  Diseases against which they
had no natural immunity took a terrible toll among the people of
the New World; smallpox alone wiped out many millions.  Germs
were the conquistadors' most devastation weapon; local
populations were so racked by illness that they could offer
little resistance to the European conquest.  Syphilis may have
spread in the opposite direction; it first appeared in Europe
after the conquistadors began returning from the Americas. 
Tobacco, its delights masking its dangers, was another gift from
the New World to the Old.
	Not only Europeans came over; soon Africans began arriving
in great numbers, as slaves.  They were brought in, at first, to
work the sugar plantations springing up on the islands of the
Caribbean; the local population was found to be unsuitable for
the work--or, in many instances, had been decimated by disease. 
Agriculture based on slavery spread both north and south.  The
Western Hemisphere's natives were thus not the only ones to
suffer from the European advance.  Columbus and his followers
sowed seeds of racial antagonism that tangle life in many parts
of the American continent to this day.
	Slavery, conquest, disease and humiliation--these are the
legacy of Columbus, in the eyes of some people today.  They see
nothing to celebrate in the 500th anniversary of his crossing;
instead, they think it should be an occasion for protest--or at
best a vast, doleful silence.  Some American Indians plan to hold
vigils for Mother Earth, stage a mock trial of Hernan Cortes or
retrace the 500-mile Trail of Tears, the Choctaw Nation's forced
walk from Mississippi to Oklahoma in 1831.  Many Latin Americans
are torn between pride in their Spanish heritage and outrage at
the treatment of Native Americans.  In Britain, playwright Harold
Pinter has formed a group called 500 Years of Resistance to
demonstrate against what it sees as a hateful record of
oppression.  And Kirkpatrick Sale has written a book, "The
Conquest of Paradise," indicting Columbus for crimes against
nature: inspired by greed, Sale's Columbus launches a campaign of
despoliation against the American environment that continues to
the present day.
	Fair enough--up to a point.  Much of the old "Columbus
sailed the ocean blue" lore does need refinement.  For one thing,
some of its is wrong.  Past ages tended to define the Admiral of
the Ocean Sea in their own image: the rugged individualist, the
heroic pioneer, the commoner who bent kings and queens to his
will--that was what was celebrated in the United States 100 years
ago, in 1892.  Past ages, too, have told the story mostly through
European eyes: schoolchildren were taught about Columbus as a
part of the European Age of Discovery, and they learned how
treasures from the New World transformed the economy of the Old. 
The religious mission of the Spaniards and Portuguese, to spread
the Christian Gospel to the pagan tribes of the New World, was
taken for granted.  As more is discovered about the indigenous
people of the Western Hemisphere, for whom Columbus's arrival was
pretty much a disaster, more of their story can be told.
	The problem is that those who denounce Columbus today, like
those who used to glorify him, are looking at history through
contemporary glasses.  For all sorts of reasons, minority
populations, non-European cultures and tropical forests enjoy a
lot of sympathy these days.  If these are your primary concerns,
it's fairly easy to paint Columbus and the early explorers as
people who oppressed the local residents, smashed alien
civilizations and chopped down a lot of trees.  It's a damning
portrait.  But it also leaves a lot out.
	Above all, it leaves out the fact that this encounter was
inevitable.  This is not simply to state the obvious: that if
Columbus hadn't set sail in 1492, some other European voyager
would have made the trip soon afterward.  The key point is that
whoever made the first crossing and whenever it occurred, the
consequences for the people of the Western Hemisphere would not
have been much different.  To expect otherwise is to ask that
history be rolled back long before 1492 and that its course be
plotted along other lines entirely.
	In particular, European civilization would have to be
recast.  What drove Columbus westward was not just a search for a
lucrative new trade route to Asia.  It is too simplistic to
picture him and the other European explorers as mere money-
grubbers, early real-estate developers who lucked into an entire
continent to subdivide.  money was obviously important to them,
but they were also animated by a certain restlessness and
curiosity.  The voyage into the unknown, after all, had been part
of European culture since the days of Odysseus.  To some degree
this questing instinct was bound up with religious zeal: look,
for example, at the search for the Holy Grail and the history of
the Crusades.  On a more mundane level, it was often a social
necessity: families were large, houses were small, land was
scarce, and so young people were encouraged to leave home and
seek their fortune.  Missionaries set out to preach the Gospel. 
Merchants set out to find new goods and new markets to sell them
in.  Armies sometimes led this process, sometimes followed.  The
spread of Western civilization was built on intrusion, intrusion
almost as a way of life.
	Today, it's fashionable to think of all that as hateful.  It
is linked with imperialism, colonialism and racism--the great
perjoratives of our time.  But this intrusive habit is also
linked with some qualities that we find more attractive: a
fascination with new ideas, a knack for scientific discovery, an
ability to adapt and change.  The impulses that lay behind the
voyage to the New World were by no means so uniformly nasty as
they are sometimes portrayed.
	By the same token, the civilizations of the Western
Hemisphere were not so uniformly admirable.  Much is now made of
how well native societies were adapted to the environment, how
they respected the rain forest and the prairie.  Less is made of
the more horrific habits of some native societies: endemic
warfare, torture and human sacrifice.
	There is a danger, then, that this 500th anniversary of the
East-West encounter will be just as distorted as past ones--
though in a different way.  That will surely happen if it becomes
an occasion for pursuing modern political agendas.  Better to do
as the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural
History has done with its "Seeds of Change" show: don't look for
heroes and villains, look at the vast changes that were wrought. 
Because of what happened in 1492, life in much of the world has
never been quite the same.  Not everyone will find this an
occasion to celebrate.  But it was indisputably one of the great
divides in human history, an event to marvel at and to learn
from.
	Almost 70 years ago, Stephen Vincent Benet wrote "John
Brown's Body," an epic poem about another collision that produced
tremendous suffering and large consequences, the American Civil
War.  At the end of this work, he wrote some lines that might
usefully echo through our commemorations of the voyages of
Columbus:
 
		So, when the crowd gives tongue
		And prophets, old or young,
		Bawl out their strange despair,
		Or fall in worship there
		Let them applaud the image or condemn
		But keep your distance and your soul from them ...
		If you at last must have a word to say,
		Say neither, in their way,
		"It is a deadly magic and accursed,"
		Nor "It is blest," but only "It is here."