Columbus was lucky to live in what we these days call “The Age of Discovery,” when there were many new lands still to be discovered. Five hundred years later, what we see on the world map is what we get, now and forever. Space, the final frontier, has turned out to be full of nothing but the debris of old rockets. It’s a sobering thought.
Even when Señor Columbus sailed the ocean blue in fourteen hundred and ninety-two, he didn’t expect to find any unknown lands. His map showed the great Atlantic Ocean to the west of Europe with a few islands scattered in the middle of it, and China and the East Indies on the other side. This was where Columbus expected to arrive. Instead, he bumped into the beautiful island of San Salvador.
We celebrate Columbus as the Great Navigator and the discoverer of the New World, even though he never set foot on Long Island, or Connecticut, or even New Jersey, which is hard to miss. And, of course, mainland America had already been discovered hundreds of years before. Perhaps we should really be celebrating a blond Viking in a funny hat: Leif Ericsson.
Explorers like Columbus suffered an extreme form of common human disease – restlessness, wanting to know what’s over the next horizon. Why else did our ancestors migrate all the way from sunny Africa to freezing North Dakota? We need to keep moving and some people, like Columbus, just don’t know how to stop.
What was the result? Columbus himself got nothing good out of his heroic voyages. He was appointed Governor General of the newly discovered Caribbean islands. But he acted with such arrogance and brutality towards the inhabitants that he was returned to Spain in disgrace. He was later pardoned by King Ferdinand, but he was never given another such golden opportunity and died in poverty and obscurity. If I hadn’t failed Latin at school, I would be tempted to say sic transit Gloria mundi, but I won’t.
Consider what the world would have been like if Ericsson and Columbus, Marco Polo, David Livingstone, Francis Drake and all the other explorers had just stayed at home. That blank space across the western ocean would have remained blank, and Native Americans would never have been deprived of their lands and forced into the casino business. All the hyphenated Americans would be living in their original countries with their historic cultures, and the English would be in England, still speaking their own language. The American Revolution of 1776 would never have happened, and so the French Revolution of 1789 would almost certainly never have happened either. It’s hard to imagine what Europe would be like today without Hollywood movies, MacDonalds, jazz, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, the nuclear bomb, artificial intelligence, and all the other great American inventions.
The question that comes inescapably to mind every Columbus Day is this: as the future stretches endlessly in front of us on the same small and overcrowded planet, where on Earth are we going to discover our next brave new world?
