Unmasking Christopher Columbus: Facts, Myths, And The Making Of A Legend

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Think misinformation started with the internet? We rewind five centuries to watch it form in real time. With historian Matthew Restall, we separate the historic Christopher Columbus from the patriotic mascot and the Italian American symbol, and we track how printing presses, royal propaganda, immigration waves, and modern media each remixed one navigator into many icons. The result isn’t a takedown or a hagiography—it’s a sharper lens for seeing how belief sneaks in where evidence thins.

We start by reframing Columbus within the bustling Atlantic world of the late 1400s: thousands of mariners, evolving ship design, and trade winds honed by experience. The first voyage made headlines; the second changed history by hardwiring Europe and the Americas together. Along the way, we challenge the empty-ocean myth, revisit the Barcelona court moment, and follow the often-misunderstood roles of the Pinzón brothers. Restall explains why loaded terms like genocide demand precision and how catastrophic disease spread complicates tidy moral scripts without erasing responsibility.

Then we open the myth factory. Columbus’s own ambition—rebranding Cristoforo Colombo as Don Cristóbal Colón—set the stage for centuries of speculation about origins and loyalties. The “biography” credited to his son turns out to be a stitched, translated palimpsest that fueled later legends. We map the rise of Columbiana in 1892, link patriotic rituals like the Pledge of Allegiance to that wave, and show how statues and holidays became proxies for debates over identity, nationhood, and migration. By disentangling the historic sailor from the symbols built atop him, we model a way to trade faith history for evidence—and to read today’s culture wars with cooler eyes.

If you’re ready to move beyond hot takes and into clear context—without losing the drama of discovery—press play. Subscribe, share with a friend, and leave a quick review telling us which Columbus you were taught and which one you see now.

Find Professor Restall.     https://matthewrestall.com/

W. W. Norton & Company  https://wwnorton.com/

Transcript

Cold Open And Host Intro

unknown 0:07

In 1492, I was terrified, kept thinking the Atlantic Ocean had no other side. But then I got three wooden ships from the King and Queen of Spain, and I sailed off, found America.

Why Columbus Still Matters Today

Meet Professor Matthew Restall

Michele McAloon 0:23

Sorry, couldn't resist. You've got Michele McAloon here. I am the host of Crossword, where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word. And we've got a book about Christopher Columbus, which, if you think he is dead and gone, you're wrong. Marco Rubio last Friday made a reference to Christopher Columbus during his speech at the Munich Security Conference. So Columbus lives, and we get to speak with Professor Matthew Restall to find out everything you've wanted to ever know about Columbus. It's such an interesting tale. I hope you enjoy the interview. And if you want to know more about me, find me at bookclues.com and tell a friend about my show. It's the best way to get the word out. Thank you. God bless guys. Happy listening. All right, folks, we have an interview today. And everybody who thinks that conspiracy theories and the information world, the digital age, has convoluted our thinking, have we got a character for you to talk about? I mean, this man, Christopher Columbus, he was the beginning of the conspiracy theories or proof that conspiracy theories or misinformation has been around for a long, long time. And we have Professor Matthew Restaw, he's a historian, he's an author of over 40 books. He has another book on Elton John, which looks fascinating. And the way this book that we are going to talk about today, The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus, if he has written the Elton John book in this style, it's a book well worth reading because the Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus is an absolutely fascinating book. He is currently the director of Latin American Studies at Pennsylvania State University, Penn State. Go Nitney Lyons, right? And he is coming to us, of course, from Pennsylvania. Professor Restall, thank you. And thank you for coming on the show and welcome to the show.

Professor Matthew Restall 2:25

Thank you, Michelle. Thank you for having me on the show. Thank you for reading the book.

Conspiracy Thinking Isn’t New

Michele McAloon 2:29

It was really interesting. You opened up the book with, I think, a very kind of it kind of tells his life. And it's in French, but I'm going to read it in English. All right. And that's the man is like the ocean. He has a tendency to the movement and a natural weight towards immobility. But and you leave off the last part of it which says, of the two contrary natures is born the equilibrium of his nature. And this was by one of, I think, Columbus's biographers first, La Martine, right?

Speaker 3 3:04

Yeah, yeah. I just I I love that quote. I thought it was very evocative and it said something about the subject matter and the fact that it introduced the concept of the ocean right there in the beginning was was really nice as well.

Michele McAloon 3:17

It's actually a great quote because when I saw it, I thought, wow, that is a great quote. Okay, let's start, let's not start with the misinformation. Give us some of the basic facts of his life. Supposedly he was born in a couple places, he has remains in a couple places, he was Jewish, practiced bestiality, please, folks. He was a controversial candidate for the sainthood. He's a founder of America, and he's a terrible genocidist. So who is this man? What are the bare bone facts of Christopher Columbus?

Taking Myths Seriously, With Evidence

Saints, Devils, And The Middle Ground

Speaker 3 3:48

Yeah, that's a good question. And I I like how you you mentioned earlier conspiracy theories. And I just wanted to say while I remember, before I did the research on this book, I absolutely believed, as I I think a lot of people do, maybe most people, that we live in a world full of conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists because of the internet. Right? We we we look for reasons for that that seem recent. Some people want to blame particular politicians or what's going on in American politics or in global politics. A lot of people blame the internet. And when I did the research on this book, I discovered that conspiracy theories have not only been around for hundreds of years, but they have been determining how people see major historical figures and events for hundreds of years. Just that the mechanism whereby the conspiracy theories are spreading has changed. You know, the the medium or the media has changed, but other than that, they've been around. And that absolutely is a fundamental part of how we see Columbus and how we therefore have to kind of unsee that Columbus and see him differently. And all of the things you're talking about right there, you, you know, you you didn't repeat the phrase conspiracy theory, but you really jumped right into a lot of these, right? For example, let me just kind of pick up on one of the things that you said that a lot of people believe, particularly in Portugal and Spain today, that Columbus was secretly, secretly Jewish and secretly a spy working for, let's say, the king of Portugal or for Queen Isabel, right? That there's all kinds of covertness there, right? The idea is that there's a sort of a conspiracy going on right there in his lifetime. That's the idea. And then another conspiracy to kind of cover it up. And that all the people who insist that he's actually Italian are willingly or unwittingly part of a conspiracy to c to keep from us what his true identity is. And, you know, this is starting to sound kind of crazy. Obviously, there's a part of it that is, and it does seem kind of crazy. What I've tried to do here in this book is not talk about how the conspiracy theorists are all crazy, right? It isn't a book in which I'm trying to denigrate people's beliefs or make fun of them. That's kind of an important point to make right from the get-go, because if you go back through previous Columbus biographies and the literature to try to see what people have said about this before, you you'll find these mentioned, right? Obviously, I'm not the first person to point out that, you know, that people believe that he's not from Italy or that he was secretly Jewish, or he had a romance with Queen Isabel. Yeah, that he sexually assaulted manatees, or that he brought syphilis back to Europe. All I'm not the first one to mention it, but often they get mentioned in a way to say, well, that's not a obviously not serious. There's no evidence for that, it's ridiculous, and it gets denigrated and laughed at or buried in a footnote or something. And what I wanted to do was take all of these things seriously enough to actually investigate them, first of all, so that the reader can be like, okay, was Columbus this or that? And if not, why not? What you know, what is the evidence either way, so the reader can see what my opinion is, but also come to their own kind of conclusion and opinion. But also to take the next step and to explain why. Like, why? Why is it like this? Why is you know Columbus's life so kind of uh filled with these conspiracies and all of these different ideas and opinions and so on. And what is the origin of all of that? So, what I've tried to do is kind of give the reader a kind of a one-stop place to look at all of these, right? This isn't just about whether he was from Genoa or not. This isn't just about what kind of sex and love life did he have. This isn't just about the statues that are put up all over the United States and then get torn down in the 21st century, and not many of them do, but enough of them do that it people have the perception that there's a kind of a big assault on all of these statues. Like what is going on there? And and I want readers to see all of these things are connected. And in one medium-length book, you can kind of get an explanation for all of them. And sure, if you're really interested in one aspect of this, there's there's a whole other literature that you can go into. So when you say what was Columbus really like as a person, yes, that I hope you get a sense of what I what my opinion on that as a result of my research. And is it pretty mundane? Well, yeah. Try to again the the research with an open mind, right? That was important to kind of think about all right, what are my prejudices here? What is my opinion of Columbus? There's a spectrum in which some people see him as, you know, as the devil, right? That he's responsible for some of the great evils of the last 500 years in human history, like the transatlantic slave trade, like the collapse of the indigenous population in the Americas, right? People use the word genocide to apply here. It's completely not the right word. But nonetheless, I respect that that is how some people feel. And then on the other end of the spectrum, you know, there's still so much talk about him being a hero, being a saint. That was a real eye-opener for me. I knew that there was a campaign to canonize him, to make him a Saint Christopher, but I didn't realize how serious that campaign was and how long it lasted. When it went on for a century, into the way deep into the 20th century, it was taken very seriously. So I thought, okay, let me approach this as with an open mind, with a view to perhaps landing on one end or the other of the spectrum. Now, sometimes people are a little disappointed when I say, no, I kind of landed in the middle. And they go, well, that's boring. How wishy-washy is that? What do you mean? I can't remember one I I was uh talking to somebody on a podcast, oh she's an Englishman, and I can't remember the word he said that was not wishy-washy, but he was disappointed in that. He's like, Yeah, that's a little weak, or milk toast or something. I remember the word he used, but he felt as if I should have come down more on one side or the other.

History As Evidence, Not Faith

Michele McAloon 10:16

Well, Professor, let me hold you right there for just a minute. This is more of a book, yes, it is about Columbus. It's about Columbus's life. But I think the book is really important because it's a book about misinformation and how we need to really look at history and how we look at facts, and maybe to question and to understand that what we're looking at sometimes may not be the fact, that that history has to be greatly, greatly contextualized. It has to be deeply uh deeply researched, and this is where scholarship is so important. History is not a news flash, it's a study. And that's your book really shows that, I think.

Speaker 3 10:59

It's it's about evidence, right?

Michele McAloon 11:01

And absolutely facts.

Speaker 3 11:03

Yeah. The book is not intended to be a polemic. It's try I try not not to be partisan.

unknown 11:10

Right.

Speaker 3 11:10

I try not to contribute to, you know, 99% of the literature on Columbus is partisan. Somebody has a particular position to promote. That's why they kind of come to come to the topic in the beginning. And I'm trying not to do that. And so that's sort of why I was sort of justifying, look, this is this is my opinion on Columbus based on how the evidence struck me, right? Sort of invented a word, and I keep waiting for somebody to say, oh, no, that word has already been invented by somebody else, because it must have been, but I couldn't find it anywhere, and that's faith history. Yeah. So it's yeah, it's all one word. So the H does kind of double duty, right? The end of faith in the beginning of history. Faith history, it's not about religion. I'm imagining maybe in religious studies it's been it's been used, but I couldn't find it.

Michele McAloon 11:59

I haven't heard it, I haven't mastered the screen theory.

Many Columbuses: American And Italian American

Speaker 3 12:01

Well, maybe no one has used it before because it's actually a bad idea. It's a crap word. But anyway, there's the that that's it's in the book there. And what is it, what what faith history is, is when people say, Well, I believe that's what happened. I believe that that's the Columbus is this or that, and I believe this is what happened in his life or since then. As soon as people start talking like that about belief, it means that they are approaching it not primarily from an evidentiary position, but from a place of faith or conviction or belief that actually is about something else, right? To my mind, what was so fascinating and fun about doing the research on this, and what I hope is readers sort of see as the strength of the book is that it covers so many different places. It it goes into so many different topics and is about so many other things. You wanted to talk about what Columbus is like in his life, and we'll certainly come back to that. I'm not trying to skirt that topic, but to jump to the end of the book, the ninth life, the final life is about the Italian American Columbus, who is the Columbus who's sort of being evoked now, you know, with the talk of putting a statue of him on the White House lawn and so on. That statement is aimed at Italian Americans. That's all about the Italian American Columbus. And that is about Italian migration. There's a whole story there, which I which is, you know, briefly tell in the book, which is really nothing to do with the historic Columbus at all. Italian American Columbus is different from the American patriotic Columbus, who is also different from the historic Columbus. So I I realize, you know, I didn't want to give these Columbus's sort of silly names, right?

Speaker 4 13:45

Right, sure.

The Historic Columbus In Context

Speaker 3 13:46

I didn't kind of want to label them. I'm just talking about American Columbus, Italian American, historic Columbus. It's easy to get those confused, but that's kind of the point. They are confused. Pronouncements are made or executive orders or whatever you want to call about Columbus, you can see the confusion is embedded in there. And then the way that people respond is also confusing these different Columbuses. And I think by separating them out and identifying them and showing that these Columbuses are actually about very different things, it makes the whole subject so much more clear. So let's go back to the historic Columbus, like who was he and so on, and and and why I come down with this supposed wishy-washy middle ground about him that he wasn't a saint or a devil. It's by placing him in a historic context that separates him out from everything that happens after his after his life, right? And then you can see he's just a fairly uh normal, in so many ways, typical seaman, mariner, merchant mariner from a northern Italian city-state, and one of thousands of men like him from northern Italian city-states, particularly from Genoa, Venice, Florence, or from uh the Iberian Peninsula. You know, the two Spanish kingdoms. Spain's not united. Spain doesn't really exist politically in his lifetime, it's sort of coming into being during his lifetime. But the two dominant kingdoms, Aragon and Castile, so we're talking about Aragon, Castile, and Portugal. These are the countries, these are the kingdoms or city-states that are producing these merchant mariners that are spending their, devoting their lives to extending trade routes out into the Atlantic Ocean. So there's a phenomenon here of exploration into the Atlantic doing exactly what Columbus does. So he he's not on his own at all. That's the first thing to kind of have to understand how typical he is. And once you do that, first of all, it makes the whole phenomenon make much more sense. Right, sure. Um, but secondly, he becomes less of a larger-than-life figure. When you make him kind of this sort of extraordinary, unique, larger-than-life figure, of course, he's then going to end up being the devil or the saint, right? Of course, there's going to be kind of an extreme opinion about who he was and what he does. The notion of him as a hero, right? That word that gets attached to him, that he's a hero, doesn't make any sense when you think about the historic Columbus himself. How is he a heroic figure? He's not a heroic figure. He's a hero if you think of him in terms of the the 19th and 20th century perceptions of him, right? As a as somebody who makes possible, let's say, the modern United States. Okay. So I understand that. I have respect for that particular opinion. There are people who say, look, this is about my patriotism, this is how I feel, whatever it is about democracy in the world, about the modern world.

Michele McAloon 16:53

And Professor, he never set foot in the United States. No. This is what this is just amazing to me. Yeah.

Speaker 3 17:01

Yeah. Exactly. In terms of his ideas and so on, it just the connect it doesn't work at all as a connection.

Michele McAloon 17:06

No, it doesn't.

Speaker 3 17:07

But it makes sense when you think of the American, the patriotic American Columbus.

Speaker 4 17:11

You add it, right.

Patriotism, Statues, And 1892

Speaker 3 17:13

The country in the world that embraced Columbus the most. So more statues, for example, in this particular country than all the other countries in the world put together, more places named after him, and any kind of criteria that you come up with is the United States. And what and not just at any point, but specifically the United States in the 19th century, when the United States is creating itself, it has become independent and then is defining what the country is. Who gets to rule the country, who gets to say how it is defined, and so on. I mean, this is a debate, conflict that is very much still going on today in the 2020s. There's nothing new about it. It's been going on since, let's say, exactly 250 years. We've now created a country. Exactly what is this country? How is it different from other countries and so on? So the 19th century is a crucial, crucial period in that process of national invention and creation. And Columbus is appropriated as part of that process. So he becomes kind of the grandfather of the nation to Washington the Father. The new capital city is called the City of Washington in the District of Columbia. So the signaling is incredibly clear. From the moment when that decision is made, you go through a hundred years up until 1892, that the development of what I call Columbiana, right? It's the whole kind of global industry surrounding anything to do with Columbus, including all these inventions and all these other Columbuses. Columbiana just takes off and grows generation after generation after generation. And the big peak is in 1892, celebrating the 400th year anniversary. And there's so many things about American patriotism that gets consolidated or created around 1892. Like I was stunned to discover that American children saying the Pledge of Allegiance every morning in school dates from that peak moment of Columbiana. They don't talk about Columbus when they say the Pledge of Allegiance, but it's the quadricentennial and all of the patriotism that was attached to Columbus is when other patriotic rituals are being institutionalized, like the saying saying of the Pledge of Allegiance. And of course, Columbus Day is a greatly misunderstood thing, right? This idea that, well, we had this Columbus Day and then it's been abolished and now we have to bring it back. In fact, Columbus Day has been pronounced by presidents many, many times.

Michele McAloon 19:50

Right, sure. And it wasn't just Trump. It was, it's been repeated. The it's been repeated. So if you look at the United States, what's happening in the United States in 1892 when this patriotism, this is a a period of intense immigration, correct? In the United States. And they attach themselves to this man named Christopher Columbus, who let me but I have to ask you a question. From the very beginning, in his life, it really wasn't until his son started writing about him, right? His second son, Fernando, that started he's the one that kind of started the ball rolling on this myth of his father. His illegitimate son, right?

Speaker 3 20:40

You can go into your local library and find editions in English of a book which purports to be a biography of Columbus by his son, right?

Michele McAloon 20:51

Vita, right? Or it's called the Vita or La Casa.

The Son’s Biography That Wasn’t

Speaker 3 20:54

Exactly. The life of Columbus. The Life of Columbus. This is a book that I was, you know, aware of all the way back when I was in graduate school, right? I happened to get my PhD, and I'm going to reveal how old I am, got my PhD in the year of the Quincentennial in 1992. And so Columbus was completely unavoidable. I was very much aware of Columbus, had to read things about him in my early years teaching history classes, and I still have to talk about Columbus in the classroom. But so I was aware of this work, The Vita, and I assumed, people generally do that, okay, well, this is it's billed as the a life of Columbus by his son. That's what it is. And I and I kind of read it as such and saw that previous historians had talked about, you know, how what an important source this was, and how how kind of sincere and faithful it was. Look, this can be taken on face value because this is the guy's son who wrote it. There were so many things about this book and doing the research of this book that was surprising to me that. That kind of forced me to rethink things that I had assumed for decades. It was incredibly stimulating, kind of, you know, intellectually exciting. And it sounds very kind of history professor nerd, but it really was. And one of them was realizing that wait a minute, this book, no, it wasn't actually written. It isn't a book. It wasn't written by his son. The history of the manuscripts is incredibly complicated. This son we're talking about, his illegitimate second son, Fernando Hernando, created an incredible library in Seville, paid for with money that essentially came from the wealth that Columbus had accrued from his voyages. At the time, the largest private library is in Europe, possibly in the world. And considering how recent printing was, it was the largest library of printed books that had ever been created up to that point. It's an absolutely astonishing thing.

Michele McAloon 22:59

He was a purveyor of information.

Origins, Ambition, And Reinvention

Exploration As A Larger Movement

Speaker 3 23:01

But Fernando's library, and he also catalogues it. So he's he's sort of one of the first people to attempt to create what we think was kind of modern cataloging of libraries and books. The point of mentioning all of this is his biography of his father is nowhere mentioned. Not only is there not a copy of it in his library, or what survives of his library, but part of the library gets scattered. Some of it still survives in Seville today. We know a lot of the books that were in the library that have gone, it's not even listed there. And so, you know, brilliant scholars, literature scholars before me, have analyzed the manuscript and have shown how, yes, there were probably parts of it that originated with some things that had been written by Fernando, but large parts of it were not. They were written later, they were copied from other things and so on. There's all kinds of stuff in there that's made up. The original manuscript would have been in Spanish, whatever that is, that's long lost. It's then something is then created in Venice, and the oldest version of it we have is published in Italian, which is then translated back into Spanish, and then there's English for it's an incredibly complicated manuscript that is not simply his son's biography of the father. That's simply not what it is. This kind of answers your question. The fact that it's complicated and is attributed to Fernando, but isn't really by him, is all part of the generation of this kind of notion of mystery, right? What are the conspiracy theories about Columbus? When do they originate? They go all the way back to his sons and actually to Columbus himself, because he was embarrassed by his origins. So here, let's kind of just step back and all the way back to the beginning where you said, what was Columbus, you know, what was he really like, and so on. Yeah, who was the dude? Yeah. He was absolutely hell-bent on achieving social mobility. So he comes from this very modest background in Genoa. His father was a weaver of wool and traded in wool. His you know, grandfather was a cheesemaker. He achieves some social mobility initially by taking to sea. Genoa has a kind of a little trading empire in the Mediterranean. It sort of clings to this hillside with kind of mountains behind it and looks out into the ocean. And taking to the sea is really the only way of achieving any kind of mobility, obviously physical mobility, but social mobility. But Columbus, at some point, and there's no evidence that he was educated, that he was even literate, you know, until he taught himself to read when he was in his twenties after he left Genoa, when he got to Portugal. But at some point, he imbued the spirit of romances of the day, right? This idea that you could, if you take to this very kind of romantic notion of uh seafaring life, if you take to the sea, you can discover an island and you can become king of that island. You can sort of create your own kingdom. It's romantic, it's swashbuckling, it's daring do, it's all of these kinds of things. You can see how this kind of stuff appealed to people in the 19th century, the great heyday of romanticism. Right. Okay. And so he decided that he was going to do whatever he needed to do to achieve social mobility. And he succeeds. At some point, in adulthood in his 20s and 30s, he gets this idea that he wants to found a dynasty and for his sons to grow up in court as pages to the king. He achieves that. His two sons, the legitimate one, the illegitimate one, they are taken from their mother and stepmother, right? So the he only marries once. It's a Portuguese woman who's the mother of his first son, but she dies soon after that. And then he has an illegitimate son by a teenage girl in Córdoba in Spain. And at some point, that young woman is bringing up his second son, and he leaves his older son with her as well, because he's now beginning to do his voyages crossing the ocean, the Atlantic Ocean. So those boys are taken from their mother/slash stepmother and deposited at court to be brought up as pages. And he's absolutely committed to achieving that ambition. Part of it is therefore to downplay his origins, because they are embarrassing. Not to be embarrassing to be Italian or to be Genoese, because a significant percentage of noble families, aristocratic families in Seville, for example, actually are descended from Genoese merchants. The Genoese connection to Lisbon and to Seville is very strong and deep-rooted. But that he comes from such a modest background, right? Who are his people? They're not anybody. He's embarrassed by that. And so he kind of downplays it and plays up instead the whole the fact that he is a Colón. He's not Colombo, not from Genoa. He is he is Colón, the Spanish version of his name. And Colón is not that rare, unusual. It's not a super common name in Spanish, but it's not that unusual of a name. So he is Don Cristobal Colón. He's now a Spanish nobleman, the founder of a noble dynasty, and he kind of plants the seeds of this mystery himself by trying to promote himself as no, I, you know, it's not that we have anything of him actually outright saying, Yeah, I'm not really from Genoa, I'm actually from Spain. But in terms of how he presents himself and promotes himself and his sons, he's planting the seed of this sort of what would come out centuries later, people saying, Yeah, that's because he really wasn't from Genoa. He was really from, you know, Galicia in Spain, or from southern Portugal, or from Mallorca, or from, you know, from Corsica, whatever.

Michele McAloon 28:58

You know, I think they have him born everywhere, don't they?

Speaker 3 29:00

Yeah. They do, yeah. I can't remember what the number is in is in the book. It's like 17 different claims or something of different places. More than dozens and dozens of claims, but 17 different places all around, mostly in Iberia and in the in the Mediterranean.

Michele McAloon 29:17

And one in Greece, too, right? He was Greek.

Speaker 3 29:19

There's a Greek, yeah. I mean, that is admittedly.

Michele McAloon 29:23

That one's a stress.

Speaker 3 29:25

I could not find a lot of that claim does not have traction today, as far as I could tell. But some of them have actually grown and are bigger than they ever were. Okay. The one from Galicia or Galicia is very strong today, and the Portuguese one is as well. Um and that was actually you the the seed of the book for me. You'll remember, Michelle, the beginning of the book. I talk about how I came to this project.

What The First Voyage Really Meant

Michele McAloon 29:55

It is. It's it's actually fascinating. One of the things you bring up, though, about this man is that him sailing westward, and which I think his first voyage, he goes to the Bahamas, right? He finds the beautiful island of Bahamas, which, you know, Carnival Cruise goes every day from New York. But that he was not a phenomena. He didn't start the phenomena. He was part of a complex movement that was happening anyway. And so he slips in, kind of slips into the stream of other explorers. He doesn't create something, he is created by something that is already happening.

Why The Second Voyage Changed Everything

Speaker 3 30:34

Yeah, exactly. So there are two things that are that are already happening and have been happening all through his lifetime, and even going back a couple of hundred years. One is sailing out into the Atlantic to discover what islands are out there. Because there are islands, right? So they they find those are Canary Islands, you know, Madeira, the Azores, and so on. Once you get to the Azores, which are found you know long before Columbus's life, you're halfway there. You're halfway to Newfoundland, for example, right? There's not only an understanding that there are islands out in the Atlantic, but these are islands also that some of them have people on that can then be mistreated, uh, conquered, they can be settled, can be part of trading networks, and so on. So the idea is, well, just to keep see how far you can sail out. And that involves developing ships that can sail faster and further. So that sort of technological change has been going on. The Portuguese are kind of leading that process. And also figuring out where the winds are, the currents. Because you can't just sail out in any direction. In fact, the reason why the Azores had had not already become a base for the Portuguese to discover the Americas long before Columbus is that that's where the wind come in towards Europe. The wind, it's a gyre or a big circle. You need to actually sail south before you can go west. The Canary Islands turn out to be the perfect launch board for that. And as it so happens in the competition between Spaniards and Portuguese to control the islands in the Atlantic, the Portuguese have the Azores, Portuguese have Madeira, the Spaniards have the Canaries. And so that's why these are sort of the preconditions that need to be in place. Columbus has a contract with the Spanish monarchs. They control the Canaries, they're in the process of consolidating the conquest of the Canaries. Therefore, that's the launch point. You sail from Spain to the Canaries and then from the Canaries across. So that process of sailing further and further out has been going on. You're talking about thousands of sailors, eventually hundreds of ships going out. It was just a matter of time, I would argue, within that decade of the 1490s. So we're not talking about, you know, centuries or decades, we're talking about years before someone else caught the right winds, you know, narrowed down where you have to sail south and west to get across, to look for more islands, and just happen to run right across into either the sort of northern part of South America that sticks out or the Caribbean Islands, because that's where the winds take you in. That's the first thing. The second thing is around the time Columbus is born, the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East takes Constantinople, but and that becomes Istanbul.

Speaker 4 33:32

1450, right?

Speaker 3 33:33

And it is to this day. Yep.

Speaker 4 33:35

Yep.

The Atlantic Was Crowded, Not Empty

Speaker 3 33:36

And what that means is it the enity between Islam and Christianity. Islam is now almost entirely not entirely, but almost entirely united and in one empire, and then Christianity is sort of competing kingdoms. But that enity means that access to trade routes in Asia is is compromised, or if not cut off. And so they're looking for another way to get there. And that means you've got to sail south. Either you sail south and get around Africa, and that happens in the 1490s. You know, maybe there's a way you can go west and do it and do it that way. So they're totally aware that the earth is round, they know how big, and when I say they, I mean all the it's just generally known in the 15th century. But when Columbus goes to the king of Portugal and goes to the monarchs in Spain and says, I think I can get to Asia just by sailing west, they go, Yeah, but you can't because it's too far and you'll die on the way. We can't sail at sea for that many months. You'll never be able to do it. And so Columbus's response is, oh, you've got the size of the earth wrong. It's actually much smaller than it is. He's wrong, right? They know. They know, they don't know the Americas are there. They assume there's islands along the way, but they don't know the Americas are there. So they know more or less how far it is if you sail from Spain to Japan. Imagine that there's no Americas and the Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean, it's just one huge ocean. They know how far that is, and they know you can't do it. So he's trying to kind of make this particular case, and they're saying, no, the Portuguese they know the way to do it is to sail around Africa, which they do around the same kind of time. And the Castilians are like, well, we sort of are losing this race. So sure, have a go, and assuming that he'll find some islands or whatever, and that they can kind of extend their control in the Atlantic through those islands. So there's these two things already going on, and neither of them does he have kind of a new or innovative way of doing it. His way of doing it is to argue that the earth is smaller than it really is, and so to have a kind of a wrong-headed idea. Is that genius? You know, does he have incredible insight and so on? No, not really. He's hoping, right? When they have these conversations, somebody said, well, but he's pretty ballsy, right? I mean, that's pretty gutsy to go out there. I'm like, yes, okay, I I definitely will concede that. It's considered at the time to be really foolish, but isn't those that's just flip side of the same coin, right? It's right, right. Yeah. I always try to be fair, right, when I realize I'm beginning to kind of downplay Columbus, to be fair, to try to kind of be balanced about how I talk about him. When he returns from that first voyage, that he is a huge celebrity.

Michele McAloon 36:39

He is, he does achieve celebrity status at that point, right?

Speaker 3 36:43

It's pretty clear. Nobody goes, oh, he's discovered America, right? I mean, even they wouldn't have used that word, but you know what I mean. They're saying, oh, he's discovered a whole continent. He's found some islands, but a bunch of islands, right? And it's quite clear just from that first voyage that this is more than just another kind of version of the canaries or the Azores or the archipelago centered on Madeira. This is more than that. This is an extensive collection of islands. And there's debate. Now he's saying, oh, these are just off the coast of Asia. We were like, really? No, that that that's not true. They so these are new islands way out in the middle of the ocean. This is I wonder how many there are. I mean, it's it's a big deal. And he, you know, he brings people back with him. It's debatable how to the degree to which they go back voluntarily, they understand what's going on. Is this essentially the beginning of the enslavement of indigenous peoples who are end up being enslaved by the hundreds of thousands, even though it's very quickly made illegal? Still by the end of the century, several hundred thousand indigenous people are enslaved, and many are brought back to Spain, Portugal, Italy, even in Genoa. They're indigenous peoples sold as slaves in Genoa within Columbus's lifetime and in through into the 16th century. They're not supposed to be, but they are. So they're indigenous peoples being brought back. They are settling in Europe as enslaved peoples, and some even as as free migrants and so on. But it well, the point is about his celebrity status. It is very intense. It's absolutely kind of life-changing for him.

Michele McAloon 38:16

And this is sailing the ocean blue in 1942. I mean, in uh 1492, right?

Disease, Collapse, And Misused Terms

Scholarship Over Sentiment: Final Takeaways

Speaker 3 38:21

Yeah, so 1493. I mean, I think that was it was my old undergrad mentor, Felipe Fernandez Armesto, who wrote what I think is the best sort of straight biography of Columbus, published a long time ago in 1991. And he writes about how the meeting that Columbus has with the Spanish monarchs in Barcelona is kind of like this peak point in of his life. And I thought about that and kind of investigated that notion. I thought, yeah, that really is it. So 1493 comes back from his first voyage. He's gone with three ships, one wrecks in the Caribbean, so there's two that come back, and the other ship is captained by a Spaniard, in fact, is a Spanish family who are the prime investors and sort of captains involved in this first voyage, the Pinzon, Pinzon or Pinthon. And Pinthon is the captain of the other ship, and they kind of race back. They're in competition, they have had a falling out on the voyage, and Pinthon is keen to beat Columbus back so he can go to the Spanish monarchs. Columbus gets back before him and gets to the monarchs before Pinthon, and Pinthon actually dies soon after he gets back to Spain. And so he's never able to present kind of his case, which would have been that actually I was the one who did it. It was me, it was me and my brothers. We actually the ones who made this discovery. We were the ones who provided, you know, the ships. Right. Um we were the ones who were making the right decisions. This Genoese guy, this Colombo, he, if we hadn't been there, he would never have made it back. There's kind of an argument that that they would have made that they never get to make, although the Pinthon, the other the brothers continue to sail on voyages across the ocean. They make the case, and actually the span the Spanish crown effectively buys that, say buys that argument. It's a different phrase, but they buy the right to argue that it was really the pinthons, and therefore all the wealth that is accrued that comes from that discovery should actually go to the Pinthon family, but that means it goes to the crown. That means that when Columbus finally tracks down the monarchs, why Barcelona? Because there is no capital. Spain doesn't really exist politically. It's a collection of kingdoms, and so the monarchs, the king of Aragon is married to the Queen of Castile, right? So that's kind of how Spain comes into existence. But they're peripatetic. They move around, they don't have a capital city. And that's how they are kind of holding this patchwork kind of unit that is that we think of as now Spain, that is becoming a kingdom and then an empire, how they hold it together. So he eventually is able to get an audience of them in Barcelona because that's where they happen to be. He presents the material objects, the loot that he's brought back, and the individuals, the Native Americans from the islands, the Taino. That is a huge deal. There's an account of his voyage that he writes that is then edited and doctored to make it kind of an appropriate vehicle for sort of propaganda for this for the Spanish monarchy. And that is published in multiple languages. He is the closest thing you can get in, you know, the in the 1490s to an international celebrity.

Michele McAloon 41:54

Well, I'm kind of worried what's Elon Musk's heritage going to be in 500 years.

Speaker 3 41:59

That's that's what it's about, right? Are people gonna be saying your name hundreds of years from now?

Michele McAloon 42:03

100 years from now to live forever. But you okay, one of the things I thought was really interesting that you brought up in the book is that you had he had four voyages, but the first voyage was not, even though he got the most celebrity off of that voyage, it was kind of the second and third ones that were actually truly significant, right?

Speaker 3 42:19

Yeah, this is a counterfactual that makes no sense. But if you think of the fact that there was a Viking colony in Newfoundland 500 years earlier, and there were, you know, a couple of several generations of Europeans there in the Americas before Columbus. People often like to point that out. This is all part of kind of the debate over Columbus in the 19th century, right? He didn't really he wasn't first, he really didn't discover America. That's not even talking about the indigenous peoples who've been there for tens of thousands of years. That's right. But the sort of the counter-argument is, yeah, because Columbus wasn't there first, but it's it's his voyages that lead to the complete transformation of the world, right? You that that way you're then once the Americas are then connected to Europe, Asia, and Africa, you're now moving towards human beings and sort of a single globe for the first time in human history, and that is that ends up being completely life-changing. I mean, the world we live in today simply would not exist in almost every conceivable way, was not for that moment. But if he comes back in 1493 and then no one else follows up, let's just say he dies and they sail out there and they it it doesn't make any sense, but so I'm saying so nonsensical, counterfactual, but just imagine no one else goes back. His impact, the impact to that first voyage is nothing. The Spaniards he leaves behind, and there's Spaniards who are left behind, they take the wood and the metal parts from the wrecked ship in order to found a city or a town and to build it. And that's supposed to be the beginning of European or Spanish colonization in the Americas. They all die. They mistreat the local indigenous peoples, they start fighting among themselves. By the time Columbus returns, they're all dead. So their impact would have been almost nothing, even if you say, yeah, but there's always already the beginning of the spread of epidemic disease. The likelihood that that jumped from Hispaniola, the island where those Spaniards were, to other islands, to the mainland and somehow. In the long term, there would have been no real impact. The indigenous Americas would have been kind of exactly the same. So, yes, you're totally right. What is the voyage that really changed it? The second voyage. Thousands of Europeans. Let me make an important point here is when I was working on this book, I I kept coming across over and over these maps of the Atlantic.

unknown 44:38

Right.

Speaker 3 44:39

And they will be familiar to you, Michelle. Or probably I would be amazed if there's a single person listening to this podcast who has not seen one of these maps, maybe even way back when they were in high school or whatever. And it's the Atlantic Ocean, and then you've got these four lines. Sometimes they're different colors, or sometimes there's sort of different dots, to show the four Columbus voyages. These are his four voyages across the Atlantic. And I thought, oh yeah, that's a good thing to have in any book so that people can see where he sailed. I mean, I'm talking about wind currents and how you have to go from here. You cross in the north back to Europe and you go kind of south to get across to the Americas. And then I thought, wait, this is completely misleading. These maps are part of the problem. They don't clarify, they actually confuse. They mislead because you look at those maps and you get the impression that this is an empty ocean. And the only person crossing that ocean between 1492 and 1504 is Christopher Columbus. There he is, this pioneer, this huge empty ocean that he alone is crossing. The fact is, is that even before his first voyage, and immediately in the wake of that first voyage, there are hundreds of ships sailing out. There's thousands of people. So, you know, his second voyage, yes, that's the next big one. But there's immediately other people sailing. Portuguese, Italian, Spaniards, trying to find their own ways. Once that colony in Hispaniola, right, those folks die, new Spaniards come, and after that, they're there for good. It's just a wave. They are there. It's wave after wave. And they are constantly going back and forth. And by the time you get to his his fourth voyage, he's totally marginalized in a process which has now spread all through the Caribbean and into the circumcaribbean, right along the coast. Now the Portuguese have now discovered Brazil. That happens at the end of the decade. The French are beginning to cross. I mean, it it is a huge phenomenon of Europeans crossing and waves and waves that is very quickly dramatically changing the Americas. The population is beginning to collapse from waves of epidemic disease. Do what do you want to talk about genocide? Not really, but genocide is intentional. But the that word is created, invented after the Second World War in the wake of the Holocaust. This is a very specific term.

Closing Thanks And Book Recommendation

Michele McAloon 47:08

Right, absolutely. I tell you, Professor Restall, this is it is a fascinating book because again, it shows how information flows or doesn't flow throughout the centuries, but also how information is used and abused. So whatever we're looking at today is not unique. This is something in our human story. And we need heroes, we need people to look up to, but and we've actually created a lot of these. This is absol actually fascinating. It's nine chapters. Professor Resthal has great photos in it, and it actually gives some great detail. I mean, your reference list is just amazing. That is truly this is scholarly work. This isn't emotional work. He's not digging down on Columbus, he's not celebrating Columbus. He really is showing what a scholar is supposed to do to lay out the facts using the best known resources. And you know what, Professor Rustra, you do a great job of doing that. And and you tell a heck of a story along the way. So I can't recommend this book enough, folks. You don't write a book about Santa Claus. Let's leave him alone. But if you want to really understand Columbus, this is the book, but also in understanding Columbus, understanding our uh a bit of our own history, information history, of European history, of really and w what knowledge is supposed to do to understand ourselves better, correct?

Speaker 3 48:40

Well, Michelle, you do a great job of promoting my book, of describing my book. I couldn't definitely could not put it as well as you just did.

Michele McAloon 48:49

Well, it works very well because this is very readable, and it is. It's just an enjoyable book to read, and it really is like, wow, I didn't know that. Thank you very much.