Transcript of Was Christopher Columbus A Great Man? With Michael Knowles

Tomorrow is Columbus Day, and in honor of that, we have Michael Knowles, the host of the Michael Knowles show and resident expert on Christopher Columbus, joining us now. Hey, Michael, I wanted to get your perspective on this. Curious. One thing if it's changed over the years. So we've had a lot of criticism of Columbus and it's really ramped up in recent decades. This has started a while back, but now it's really amplified where you hear nothing but negatives. Do the critics have any merit to some of their complaints about him?

No, they don't. Though I'm thrilled to be here as the Italian correspondent of the Daily World. I'm the only one with some of that swarthy DNA. Some of that's paint on, but it's not. Yes, that's right. I love Columbus. I have defended him for a long time. And you're right, there have been waves of attacks, the most recent kicking off again in 2006. And the spate of headlines that inaugurated this was the suggestion that a new document uncovered that Columbus was really a terrible, no good, dirty run scoundrel. And there was some document that was circulating around the time in 2006. What they didn't tell you about the document, though, is that the document was authored by Francisco de Bobadilla, who was Columbus's chief political rival. So it would be like saying, hey, we now know the truth about Donald Trump. Look at this tweet by Hillary Clinton. Now we know. And ironically, Columbus, I think, has been maligned in part because he wasn't a particularly shrewd Machiavellian politician. And so his political rivals, he was the greatest navigator ever. He was an intrepid, deeply faithful man to whom we owe much of our civilization.

But he was not the most conniving politician. And so he was outflanked by other political rivals. And ironically, Carol Delaney, the Stanford historian, makes this point. Columbus is blamed for things that other people did. So when Columbus arrives, he explicitly tells the Spaniards not to mistreat the natives. For instance, the Taino Indians who they first encounter later settlers did in fact mistreat the Indians. Columbus would often intervene on their behalf and try to save their lives or prevent them from being otherwise brutalized. But he was blamed for that anyway. He was blamed for things that the other people did. I think that the attacks on Columbus these days are less about some new document being described. They're certainly less about the historical record. What they're really about is this broader cultural impulse to denigrate our own past. The people who built our Civilization, which is a kind of a suicidal ideology that is really divorced from the history.

And so in some ways, he's the avatar of Western civilization at that period. And in that sense, I mean, do you feel like he just operated within the norms of Western civilization at that time? Did he act above, in many ways, the expectation?

He did. He certainly did surpass the standards of his age. And he was an avatar of Western civilization, but I wouldn't call him normal. He was an extraordinary man in all ways. He's from Genoa. He, at a young age, manages to sail around just about everywhere, Iceland, all over the known world. And then he goes to Portugal and he says, I want to find a route to the Indies. And Portugal says, no, they couldn't convince the Crown. So then he goes to Spain and through basically sheer tyranny of will, just convinces Isabella and Ferdinand to fund his voyage. He's just packing up to leave. And finally, the keeper of the privy purse, whichever court official it was, comes in and tells him, okay, you got your money? And I think it was Bartolome de las Casas, the first resident bishop of the Americas. And a biographer of Columbus said it was because of his personality less than the plausibility of the claims. And de las Casas is really important too, because de las Casas was a major defender of the natives. He was one of the great defenders of indigenous people ever. And he remained an admirer of Columbus up until the end of his life.

And so I trust his perspective more than the perspective of some modern revisionist on, say, vox.com or something like that. But he was extraordinary in his boldness and not merely in his desire for commercial success. Yes, he wanted to establish new trade routes. Yes, he wanted to make money. But one of the motives for his voyage was actually to fund another crusade. We forget, in light of history, but 1492 is the end of the Reconquista. The Moors, the Muslims, had finally been vanquished from Spain after many centuries. You're at the end of the crusading era. And this dream, though, of defending Christianity in the Holy Land, of the strength of Christendom, is still there in Columbus mind. And he did not end up doing that, but his voyage ended up, of course, well, spreading Christianity to the rest of the world.

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See, look, with the sun setting of the crusades, now we have a new crusade which is pushing into the new world. In some ways this fills this, this maybe desire, that's a cultural desire. And here we have somebody at the forefront of it. You mentioned his political rivals. You know, most people all of history, we get a reductive version of it, which is what we're hearing. The criticisms of him. It's simple, it's easy, it's an easy narrative, but it's far more complicated. Can you speak to some of those, the political elements that shaped our view of him now retroactively?

Yes. I mean, you're talking about the first experience of modern colonialism. That's what Columbus is dealing with. And I guess the question we have to ask ourselves is how much can we expect of one man? This is a man who made it across the ocean using nothing more than dead reckoning. He didn't even have an astrolabe on the first voyage, okay? And he suppressed mutinies and he was able to make it to the Americas. But he wasn't the greatest bureaucrat, okay? He wasn't the greatest colonial administrator. So he was outflanked by men who were crueler and more cutthroat and bloodthirsty than he was. He ends up going back in chains at one point because he's so beaten by his political rivals. And there were all sorts of calumnies levied against him. He fought them for the rest of his life. It was convenient for the Spanish Crown to believe some of the calumnies, his supposed mistreatment of the Indians, because then the Spanish Crown could justify not paying him what the Crown owed him for his journey. So there were also political motivations in the Old World. It's not to say that Columbus was guiltless, but if you look at the historical record, he was simply on the point of the treatment of natives.

He was a far greater defender of the natives than basically anyone else on the voyage. And it's reached such a fever pitch of hysteria that some people will even accuse Columbus of genocide.

Oh, yeah, you hear that a lot.

You hear a lot. Now, this is, of course, totally absurd, because Columbus not only does not wipe out all of the natives, he creates a new people called Hispanics, called Latinos. Latinos are part European, part indigenous. There was a lot of intermarriage between the Spaniards and the natives. We would not have Hispanics today were it not for Christopher Columbus. So if you like your Latino neighbor, please thank Christopher Columbus. The line is totally absurd, but this is what happens when history is reduced merely to ideology. And so the ideology motivating the calumnies on him is anti American, broadly anti Western. And this man is as clear a pinnacle of Western civilization as anyone else.

You've been tracking the criticism against him in part because you've gotten a lot of blowback for defending him over the years. Do you sense that there is a shift in that? In 10 years, we'll celebrate him again or not? Is it too far gone, the narrative too entrenched?

Yes. I think that the fashionable hatred of country has fallen away. I don't want to read too much into a single election, but the fact that President Trump won the popular vote in 2024 running on these kinds of cultural issues, on the meaning of patriotism, the defense of the men who built our country, we sometimes only track that back to Washington or the Mayflower, but it goes back further, goes back to Columbus. I think it's clear that once again, patriotism has returned, because patriotism is a natural human longing, and it's an extension of filial piety in many ways. So you can't suppress it forever. And when the historical record is laid out and people's natural longings for patriotism are no longer suppressed, you know Columbus is going to fare very well because, you know, even the partial truths that you see in the Columbus calumnies, such as, say, his ill treatment of the Carib Indians, well, the Carib Indians were introduced to Columbus because the Taino Indians, the nice Indians, had scars all over their bodies because the Caribs were these bloodthirsty savages.

How dare you say that?

I know you're not allowed to say it, but that's where we get the word cannibal from, actually comes from Caribe. And the Caribs would eat people, including babies. Samuel Elliot Morrison, who's a Pulitzer Prize winning historian, Harvard historian, but we'll forgive him for that. He says that they considered babies to be a particularly toothsome morsel. Okay. You know, just as with any people, the natives had some good ones, they had some not so good ones. The Spaniards had some good ones, some not so good ones. But when it comes to the case of Columbus, he was one of the good ones.

It's almost like human beings have a sinful nature.

I'm not sure I don't.

I'm working on a theory.

Where did you get that idea from?

Thanks so much. In 10 years, we're going to have you back on to see whether or not we have Columbus Day celebrated by all of America or not. But thank you so much for coming.

On this best case. We can toast to Columbus. Worst case, we know. Eat one of those toothsome morsels. We've become so barbaric.

I might pass. Thanks so much, man. Talk soon. That was Michael Knowles, host of the Michael Knowles show, and this has been a weekend edition of Morning Wire.