“In fourteen hundred and ninety two/Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” That little rhyme was something I learned I don’t know how many years ago, and it has proved to be a faithful friend. I never had any trouble remembering the date of Columbus’s famous voyage.
Columbus did not sail the ocean blue, of course. He sailed out into the unforgiving Atlantic Ocean. However the couplet: “One miserable August day/Columbus sailed the ocean gray” would be neither memorable nor useful.
Popular history is not what happened but what we imagine that we remember. Colorful characters and big events are memorable, especially if they can be made into poetry. There were some scurrilous verses – which I can’t repeat on radio – that helped British schoolboys remember the names and the peculiar characteristics of the six wives of Henry VIII. Paul Revere made a famous ride to warn that the British were coming, although I don't know what was so alarming about that. “Listen my children and you shall hear/Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere/On the eighteenth of April in seventy five/Hardly a man is now alive/Who remembers that famous day and year.” But of course we do remember it precisely because of Longfellow’s poem.
The habit of making history into verse is very ancient. It began as a way of remembering the past in cultures that had no writing, and it continued as a way of celebrating and memorializing great events. The problem was that, in the process of turning history into literature, certain inaccuracies crept in. Not to put too fine a point on it many of these epic poems are about as true to life as a Hollywood movie. Under the microscope of modern historians, for example, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey turn out to be just the kind of documentary reporting that you see on the big screen starring Brad Pitt.
This is unfortunate for those who care about historical accuracy. “Alone stood brave Horatius but constant still in mind/Thirty thousand foes before and the broad flood behind.” It’s a great story, but now the seed of doubt has been planted. Did Horatius really hold off the entire Tuscan army? It seems improbable.
“The Boy stood on the burning deck/Whence all but he had fled.” But did young Casablanca really choose to go down with his father’s ship at the Battle of the Nile when everyone else had abandoned it? If so, why?
Popular history is mostly fake news, but poetry at least gave it a certain dignity, and even grandeur. Nobody writes poems about history any more. The age of epic heroes is past. This raises the unromantic prospect of a true history based on recorded facts. True history will look just like real life – which it was – and will be far less easy to remember.
Columbus was lucky to make his mark five centuries ago. Even if he was a mere fortune hunter who discovered the wrong continent, his place in history is secure. The historian Daniel Boorstin called him “A hero of the imagination,” which is the best kind of hero to be. We should remember him that way, without too much skepticism. Perhaps, the gray Atlantic Ocean really was blue in fourteen hundred and ninety two.
Copyright: David Bouchier
