At a time when millions of people are on the move from Africa and the Middle East, hoping to find new lives and new opportunities in Europe, it is worth remembering that Christopher Columbus too was a migrant, and probably an unwelcome one. The people of the Americas were not pleased to see him, and even less pleased to see the hordes of European migrants who followed in his footsteps.
Columbus was following a pattern as old as history of east to west migration. It is always westwards, ever westwards. Only rarely do migrants choose to go the other way, like the Chinese who came to America in the 1800s. But the Chinese were in an awkward position. If they moved west they would have found themselves in Russia, which is nobody’s idea of the Promised Land.
For whatever reason, perhaps because the earth spins anticlockwise, the west is the preferred direction of human migration, the direction of hope. “Go West, young man” advised the author Horace Greeley in the 1860s, when the west was the land of opportunity. The end of the rainbow is always in the west, and it is always déjà vu all over again when we get there. When today’s migrants from the Middle East reach Europe and find that it is not quite the paradise they imagined, they will look towards America, as did our ancestors. And indeed no sooner had the early migrants to America set foot in new world than they promptly set off again westwards. Some got stuck in the Midwest, but millions made it all the way to California, at which point they had reached the end of the rainbow. Unfortunately California is not actually paradise. I know, I’ve been there. But once you stand on the shore of the Pacific there is nowhere else to go. That’s why the dream factories of the world are located there, on the edge, where real dreams have to stop.
Columbus made three more perilous voyages after the one in 1492 that we celebrate today, which seems like a classic case of the triumph of hope over experience. But that’s the nature of migration. It’s not a rational choice but the pursuit of a fantastic vision. We can’t blame Columbus for trying. Fantastic visions are what history is all about.
It is sad in a way that we can now see the planet as a whole, and that it is circular like history itself. There’s no escaping from the logic of a circle. If you keep on going in the same direction you will end up where you started as Columbus did, disgraced and impoverished in 1504. The grand illusion that kept him going was to find a westward passage to the fabled wealth of the East. But a great big disappointing continent blocked the way, so Columbus beat back against the westerly winds to claim the reward for his discovery. Here too he was disappointed. His Patrons King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella were not interested in geography – they wanted money. Five hundred years before the appearance of Wall Street, there was very little money to be had in America, so Columbus was considered a failure. Now might be a better time for him to make the voyage. But undocumented economic migrants are never welcome, no matter how many risks they take to follow their dream.
Copyright: David Bouchier