"Columbus Redux: Great Sailor's Exploits More Fiction than Fact"
 
by Lorenzo Chavez
 
in "Times of the Americas" (April 17, 1991, p. 12)
 
"The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian
Legacy" by Kirkpatrick Sale.  (Alfred E. Knopf, 201 E. 50 St.,
New York, NY 10022.)  1990.  453 pages.  $24.95.
 
     Kirkpatrick Sale dedicates his book, "The Conquest of
Paradise," to his wife and "to those who were here first."  This
sets the tone and point of view for this thoroughly-researched
book that tends to focus on the environmental and ecological
impact on the New World inhabitants from the 1492 Great Discovery
up to the upcoming 1992 Quincentenary.
     For those anxiously awaiting the Quincentennial
celebrations, commemorative speeches, plaques, dedication
ceremonies, historical proclamations or a trip to Seville or
Barcelona in 1992, this book may spoil the party.  But like most
medicines, it may at first be unpalatable, but necessary.
     Sale, two-time winner of the Columbus Quincentennial
Scholarship from the Newberry Library in Chicago, carefully
dissects the myths and controversies about Columbus' age,
birthplace, ethnicity, the actual location of his remains and the
unanswerable landfall question.  In an often entertaining tongue-
in-cheek fashion he questions and disputes the tales of
"historiofabulists" who have perpetuated a romanticized version
of the Captain General.
     Sale looks at Columbus' actions and behavior in the context
of the 15th century late Middle Ages in Europe, a dark time
filled with pestilence, misery and famine.
     Much ink has also been spilled over Columbus' ethnic origin. 
Depending on the author, Columbus is variously claimed to be an
Italian, Portuguese, Catalan, a Swiss, Armenian or Greek.  None
of this is too important to Sale, who is more intrigued,
fascinated and appalled at the ecological and social collision
between the Old World and the New World.  America was not
"discovered" by Columbus; it was "invaded" by Columbus whose
three ships traveled across 3,000 miles of ocean with a combined
crew of 90 men driven by the Three G's: God, Gold and Glory--not
necessarily in that order.  To Europeans, the New World was as
close to paradise as they could hope and imagine.  Unfortunately
(or inconveniently) for the invaders, it was already inhabited by
a native population with already-established social and cultural
systems.
     Europeans, says Sale, searched for salvation in the New
World.  "They thought first that exploration was salvation, and
they went at that with a vengeance, and found new foods and
medicines and treasures, but that proved not to be; that
colonization and settlement was salvation, and they peopled both
continents with conquerors, and it was not that either; that
progress and power and technics wrested from the new lands was
salvation, and they made mighty nations and towering cities in
its service, but it was not even that."
     True "salvation" says the author, might have come from
recognizing and accepting what was already there: "...
integrative tribal ways, the nurturant communitarian values, the
rich interplay with nature that made up the Indian cultures."
     Sale's book is a must-read for those clinging to the
mythologized and glorified Columbus, the New World hero who tried
to "civilize" the natives.  But it is also essential for
detractor and critics who view him as a self-serving, deceptive,
boastful sailor who became the world's most successful real
estate agent after decimating the indigenous population.
     La Leyenda Negra, or Black Legend, recounting the Spanish
annihilation of the Indians in Mexico and Peru is given only
passing general reference.  But the author is careful to note
that the destruction of native populations by the English and the
Spanish differed "only in scale, not in severity."  If Sale's
heavy-handed approach to Columbus, one of the world's most
venerated heroes, makes the reader uncomfortable, that is his
intent.
     Perhaps because this is a book about Columbus, little is
said about the large social, economic and cultural gap that still
exists today between the two Americas, particularly a comparison
between Protestant English colonization in the North and the
Catholic Spanish miscegenation that occurred in Latin America.
     The impact of Columbus' initial contact with the New World
and the subsequent European expeditions are nothing short of
revolutionary.  Simon Bolivar once said: "To judge revolutions
and their leaders, we must watch them at close range and judge
them at a great distance."  And so it is with Columbus, that we
have the distance of five centuries to analyze the man but few
non-conflicting and historically accurate materials to get a
glimpse up close.  As Sale says about many of the European
records and observations of the native inhabitants: "Much has
been written but little is known."