Where does that "1492/ocean blue" thing about Columbus come from? And what was Columbus’s deal, anyway?

SDStaff Gfactor replies:

OK, Yen, your question first. There is in fact more to a poem containing those lines, but they seem to have originated elsewhere.

Some sources attribute the 1492-ocean-blue couplet to a 1919 poem called “The History of the U.S.” by a 17-year-old intellectual prodigy named Winifred Sackville Stoner Jr. Reportedly a fluent speaker of Esperanto at age 5 (as Winifred Sr., a noted educator, informed the New York Times ), at 13 she published a book called Facts in Jingles [.pdf] , consisting of useful information rendered in easily memorizable light verse (i.e., “jingles”). “The History of the U.S.” is a series of such jingles, only the first of which is about Columbus:

Two obvious points: (1) she’s a little off on the facts, as Columbus never set foot on any land that would later become one of the 50 states, and (2) she sure wasn’t a prodigy at writing poetry. The remaining 18 stanzas* run down various key dates in United States history, culminating with the end of World War I:

And that’s that, right? Not quite — Winifred’s famous first line can’t be considered her own, as it appeared in newspapers a decade before her birth. For instance, the March 4, 1892 issue of the Miami Leader included a piece about a New York girl who aspires to intellectualism but is “greatly handicapped by a faulty memory.” A friend suggests that she use rhymes to help her remember dates, and provides our couplet as an example. When the friend later runs into her at a party, the girl brags about her mastery of the couplet system and recites:

So it seems Winifred may have taken an already well-known rhyme as the starting point for her miniature epic of doggerel.

Now Gary: Columbus wasn’t dragged off his fourth, and last, voyage — it was his third, when he was arrested on the island of Hispaniola in 1500.

Let me give you some background. After he’d convinced Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain to fund his voyages, Columbus bargained with them over what he was to receive from the expeditions. The negotiation resulted in a document popularly known as the Capitulations of Santa Fe. Some of the major perks included power (he was to be named Admiral of the Ocean Sea and governor of all lands he discovered) and money (he was to get a 10 percent cut of whatever he found). On his second expedition, Columbus was assigned the task of colonizing Hispaniola; under the Capitulations, Columbus became governor of the colony. Unfortunately, he stank at governing. He faced rebellions and mutinies, and (here’s your answer, Jeff) he acquired a habit of killing and enslaving the natives — making Isabella unhappy, as she understood them to be Spanish subjects.

After myriad complaints, the king and queen sent an investigator named Bobadilla who showed up, found seven bodies hanging from the gallows, and immediately had Columbus taken into custody. Perhaps one of Columbus’s true accomplishments was seeing this moment as an opportunity — he played it for all it was worth, insisting on remaining in chains all the way back to Spain, even though he could have had them removed. Columbus lost his offices after this, but was not otherwise punished. (As we’ll see, this episode actually played a part in making Columbus a figure in United States legend.)

But you asked about his fourth voyage, on which he set out to find the strait, once navigated by Marco Polo, leading through the Indies to the Indian Ocean. As I said, he wasn’t forcibly removed from command, and he wasn’t “stark raving mad from syphilis.” But some say he was nuts by then, and no wonder: he was suffering from painful lower extremities, bleeding eyes, and periods of blindness. (It’s likely he had reactive arthritis, sometimes called Reiter’s syndrome.) Columbus scoured the coast of Central America looking for a strait that was nearly half a world away, off Singapore. The expedition ended badly: beset by storms, Indian attacks, and shipworm, Columbus wound up stranded in Jamaica. He spent the remainder of his life suing the Spanish government over its failure to keep the promises made in the Capitulations.

And as far as I can tell, Tetsuro, these days Columbus is credited with only a few accomplishments. For example, it’s well understood now that he didn’t prove the world was round. The idea wasn’t really controversial in his day, actually, having been around for centuries. (Here’s a globe from right around 1492.) Experts of the time agreed with Columbus that the earth was spherical but argued that its circumference was such that his ships couldn’t carry enough provisions to make it westward to the Indies; he thought the trip would be much shorter. As it turns out, they were right and he was wrong, but running into the Americas bailed him out. Had there been only ocean between Europe and the Indies, as he believed, the expedition would have failed.

So Columbus’s major contribution to history — and it’s a big one — is introducing Europeans to the New World, which led to cultural exchange, commerce, and exploration, and eventually to the discovery of the real westward route to the Indies. Most would argue that the exchange was pretty one-sided: the Europeans got land, slaves, and gold, while the aboriginals got dispossessed, enslaved, and infected. In any case, Columbus didn’t immediately get credit even for this. As Martin Dugard notes in his book The Last Voyage of Columbus (2005), “Until very late in the eighteenth century, it was common knowledge that the New World was discovered by the intrepid Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci,” while Columbus was “written off as a minor Renaissance explorer – when he was remembered at all.”

It wasn’t until after the American Revolution that Columbus attained exalted status. According to the University of Virginia’s Capitol Project, “having effected a violent separation from England and its cultural and political icons, America was left without history — or heroes. … A new national story was needed, yet the Revolutionary leaders, obvious choices for mythical transformation, were loath to be raised to their pedestals.” Instead, they picked Columbus. As John Noble Wilford suggests in The Mysterious History of Columbus (1991), Columbus made a fitting hero for the new republic – he was “the solitary individual who challenged the unknown sea,” just as the U.S. faced an uncertain future.

In 1785 Phillis Wheately wrote the poem “To His Excellency George Washington,” in which the U.S. is referred to as “Columbia.” In 1787 American poet Joel Barlow chimed in with a work called Vision of Columbus, which described the explorer as “the Sage, the first who dared to brave / The unknown dangers of the western wave, / Who taught mankind where future empires lay,” and turned his detention and demotion into a kind of martyrdom: ” … kings and nations, envious of his name, / Enjoy’d his toils and triumph’d o’er his fame, / And gave the chief, from promised empire hurl’d, / Chains for a crown, a prison for a world.” By 1792, there was a movement to officially name the country Columbia. In 1807 Barlow recast his 20-year-old poem as the Columbiad, “turning it,” say Stephen Summerhill and John Williams in their Sinking Columbus (2000), “into a secular vision of America’s destiny with Columbus as that destiny’s prophet.” Columbus came to symbolize the spirit of progress, and later got adopted as a symbol by various ethnic groups. In other words, his image has, unsurprisingly, changed with the times.

*Here’s the whole thing:

References:

Adavasio, J.M. & Page, Jake, The First Americans: In Pursuit of Archaeology’s Greatest Mystery (2002)

The Arawaks: http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~sd65/carib_history/arawaks.htm

“Arthritis Expert Re-Examines Death of Christopher Columbus,” http://medicineworld.org/cancer/lead/10-2005/arthritis-expert-re-examines-death-of-christopher-columbus.html

Crosby, Alfred, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (30th Anniversary ed. 2003)

Delaney, Carol, “Columbus’s Ultimate Goal: Jerusalem,” Comparative Studies in Society and History (2006), 48: 260-292

Dugard, Martin, The Last Voyage of Columbus: Being the Epic Tale of the Great Captain’s Fourth Expedition, Including Accounts of Swordfight, Mutin, Shipwreck, Gold, War, Hurricane, and Discovery (2005)

“Explorers, Pioneers, and Frontiersmen: Christopher Columbus 1451-1506,” u-s-history.com: http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1033.html

Huyghie, Patrick, Columbus Was Last : From 200,000 B.C. to 1492, a Heretical History of Who Was First (1992)

Loewen, James, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (1995)

Lybyer, A. H., “The Ottoman Turks and the Routes of Oriental Trade,” The English Historical Review, Vol. 30, No. 120. (Oct., 1915), pp. 577-588

Malone, Ted, Yankee Doodles: A Book of American Verse (1943)

Mann, Charles, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (2005)

Menzies, Gavin, 1421: The Year China Discovered America (2002)

Nader, Helen & Formisano, Luciano, The Book of Privileges Issued to Christopher Columbus by King Fernando and Queen Isabel 1492-1502 (2004)

Phillips, William & Phillips, Carla, The Worlds of Christopher Columbus (1992)

Pickering, Keith, The Columbus Navigation Homepage, http://www.columbusnavigation.com/cctl.shtml

Restall, Matthew, Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (2003)

Reston, James, Dogs of God: Columbus, the Inquisition, and the Defeat of the Moors (2005)

Schoenrich, Otto, The Legacy of Christopher Columbus: the Historic Litigations Involving His Discoveries, His Will, His Family, and His Descendants … Resulting From the Discovery of America. Compiled from archives in Spain, France and the Americas. (1949)

Seed, Patricia, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640 (1995)

Stavans, Ilan, Imagining Columbus: The Literary Voyage (1993)

Summerhill, Stephen & Williams, John, Sinking Columbus: Contested History, Cultural Politics, and Mythmaking During the Quincentenary (2000)

Tirado, Thomas, “Christopher Columbus,” http://www.millersville.edu/~columbus/columbus.html

Weatherford, Jack, “Examining the Reputation of Christopher Columbus,” http://www.hartford-hwp.com/Taino/docs/columbus.html

Wilford, John Noble, The Mysterious History of Christopher Columbus: An Exploration of the Man, the Myth, the Legacy (1991)

SDStaff Gfactor, Straight Dope Science Advisory Board

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