The First Wise Traveler to the West - The Wise World Traveler: Becoming a Part of All that You Meet - page 10

2. The First Wise Traveler to the West
They all laughed at Christopher Columbus
When he said the world was round…
But who's got the last laugh now
— Ira and George Gershwin [18]
Christopher Columbus, so popular legend suggests, discovered America. When all of
Europe said the world was flat, Columbus claimed the world was round. To finance his
voyage of discovery, Queen Isabella pawned her jewels, and when news of his discovery
reached Europe, scholars were so amazed and so given to doubting Columbus's accom-
plishment that geographers named the newfound lands after an altogether different person,
Amerigo Vespucci.
So much for legend. The truth is less romantic. With royal consent, money for the voy-
age came from the coffers of the Spanish Inquisition. The experience of sailors brought evid-
ence that the world was round. Many had sailed to the horizon; none had fallen off the earth,
even at its farthest horizon. And the name given to the New World—“America”—came
from the Latin version of Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine nobleman who followed Colum-
bus's westward route in 1501, kept charts more accurate than those of Columbus, and did
what Columbus failed to do—explore the mainland of both North and South America. The
400 th anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the Americas (1992) was a time to challenge the
Columbus legend. A Norwegian flotilla of replica Viking longboats crossed the Atlantic to
call attention to Leif Erikson's landing in Canada in the year 1000. Spokespersons for Nat-
ive Americans decried the name Columbus had bestowed on them: he called them Indians,
in his mistaken belief that he had arrived in the Indies, the generic term for the Far East.
Native Americans objected to the myth that Columbus had “discovered” them. “We
were here and had been here for 30,000 years! If anyone was lost, it was Columbus!” they
sneered. They demanded apologies from descendants of the Europeans who had come to
the “New World” after 1492, newcomers who robbed and killed Native Americans, threw
them off their land, and broke the harmony with nature in which they had once lived. Schol-
ars (Native Americans and others) have also offered credit-debit statements of what Native
Americans gained and lost through contact with Europe's settlers.
WHO WAS CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS?
But what of the man who started it all, Christopher Columbus? His biographers offer con-
flicting portraits. To some, he is a hero, an inspired thinker, a brilliant navigator. To others,
he is vain, arrogant, grasping, and a paranoid twister of truth. Most all agree that he is not an
easy man to know.