The day the Genoan waded ashore

It's that time of year again, Columbus Day. Cue the tiresome (and increasingly irrelevant) debate about Christopher Columbus: He was a peerless explorer! He was a destroyer of worlds! He was not! Was so! Was not! ... and so on. On October 12, 1492, the Admiral of the Ocean Sea discovered an island in The Bahamas (the Arawak natives called it Guanahani, he called it San Salvador) after a 5-week voyage across the Atlantic. At daybreak, the Old World splashed ashore warily into the New World, formally setting in motion the forces that would reshape both worlds for better and worse. The tall, 41-year-old Genoan who stood on the beach that day almost certainly did not look like the portrait (by Sebastiano del Piombo) shown above. Signor Colombo was a fair-skinned (and therefore perpetually sunburned) Italian with graying auburn hair. On the day he "christened" Guanahani for Spain, his light hazel eyes beheld an exotic land (he later wrote) "full of trees of endless varieties, so high they seemed to touch the sky."

As the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa María swayed in the rolling swells offshore, First Contact began quietly, peacefully and perhaps poignantly. It was of course a mirage. It only took hours for the Admiral of the Ocean Sea to dismiss the Arawak as easy prey to be "converted to our holy faith" -- by force if necessary. Already, he and his band of proto-conquistadors hungrily eyed the gold, the "little bits of this metal hanging at their noses." And so the great but bloody history that would ultimately lead to us began. The story of how Columbus came to be venerated (albeit falsely) as the Discoverer of America is, like most myths, a long and tortured one. His actual historic portrait bears little resemblance to the glamorized version of him. Laurence Bergreen (author Columbus: The Four Voyages) is among those who best sum him up:

Columbus was a vain, deluded, and Quixotic leader. And he was also a courageous and peerless navigator. He was not any one of these things; he was all of these things, many faceted and contradictory. The facts of his voyages to the New World are not in doubt—with the notable exception of the precise location of his first landfall—but interpretations grow more divergent all the time. For better or worse, or rather, for better and worse, he has left his improbable, indelible mark on the American spirit and on history.

Happy Columbus Day, warts and all.