Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, October 10, 1994 TAG: 9410110007
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Monty S. Leitch
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Well, actually it was a sailor named Rodrigo who first sighted land. And even he can hardly be said to have "discovered" a land already well-peopled for at least 10,000 years. Likely, considerably longer.
And then there were the Vikings, who'd set up and then abandoned a colony in Greenland some 500 years before Columbus first gave a thought to honor and fortune. Surely that was discovering a piece of the New World, too.
Nevertheless, we all remember this: "In fourteen-hundred-and-ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue." Despite the inaccuracy it implies.
Columbus-bashing is easy, even popular. What I've been wondering is this: how he came, in the first place, to get nearly sole credit for something he didn't quite do.
Why did fame strike him? Why does fame strike some and completely elude the grasp of others engaged in the same pursuit?
Even others who may have succeeded first?
What mechanism drives mythology?
Of course, if Columbus were winning acclaim now for some spectacular accomplishment - despite counterclaims and evidence to the contrary - we'd explain it away by crediting his P.R. man. (Or woman.)
You know how this works: Once we really do have a comprehensive health-care plan, "authors" will come out of the woodwork. And some one of them will get the credit. But who? And how? And why? And will it be the right someone at all? Historians will argue for centuries. Advocates will take sides.
All the while, some unnamed career bureaucrat in the Department of Health and Human Services will be the one. She'll be shouting, "It was me! It was me!" till she's blue in the face, but no one will hear. Poor ol' sailor Rodrigo ended up a renegade in Morocco.
Are these matters of fate? Destiny, kismet, predestination? Luck, providence, fortune (good or bad), chance?
Certainly they're matters of mystery and enigma. Conundrums within conundrums.
Columbus believed that he was destined by God to discover a route around the world, which he believed to be pear-shaped. He based his calculations of the Earth's size on the apocryphal historian Esdras, and took literally the prophet Isaiah's promise that there lived still a remnant of the Lord's people. They had to be living somewhere else if they weren't living there with Columbus, et al., in some part of the known world. He believed he'd go find them.
Well, he found somebody, didn't he? But I guess he gave up on them being the remnant of God's chosen people, since he took one look at them and thought, "Slaves! Money!"
Still, the way things have turned out, with his notoriety and all, Columbus's own explanation for his fame seems as good as any. Can we really say that he was so wrong to think of himself as the one "destined" for something grand? The one divinely selected for this particular purpose? After all, he's the one we've named.
The one we still name.
Monty S. Leitch is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
by CNB