After a long period of restricted travel, the pent-up desire to be somewhere else was unleashed again this year. Millions rushed to the airports, often to endure an experience almost as harrowing as that of Columbus in 1492. Travel wasn’t easy then, and it’s not easy now.
Some part of this year’s frantic mobility has been described as “revenge travel,” although it’s not entirely clear who is supposed to be the target of this revenge — perhaps the unfortunate officials who imposed travel restrictions during the pandemic. But, in effect, these tourists were taking revenge on the whole planet through the enormous pollution produced by their long-distance flights and massive cruise ships. Eventually the planet will take revenge on us, which may be cosmic justice but is not much consolation.
Christopher Columbus, whose bold and erratic voyages we celebrate today, was the great obsessive traveler of his time, but he created a different kind of pollution. Brave he certainly was, but when he so boldly sailed the ocean blue in 1492 Columbus, and his patron Queen Isabella, set a pattern of greedy imperialism for the whole western world which continues in the 21st century. According to one of his biographers, Columbus was driven by a "Burning desire to acquire riches, power and fame.”
His objective was to discover unknown worlds, ripe for exploitation. Today’s travelers go in search of known worlds that have already been thoroughly exploited, places they have already seen in a million photographs, guidebooks, TV shows and documentaries. There is even a lively market for travel to places where films were made, which I suppose is a way of voyaging into your own illusions.
Columbus was a loner and an explorer. The last thing he wanted to see was a familiar place. It was, in a way, the reverse of modern tourism, where the travelers pay for their experience. When Columbus found a new land, it was the locals who paid the price. This helps to explain why 13 states no longer celebrate Columbus Day, but instead have an Indigenous People’s Day or Native American Day
So Columbus was never an ideal national hero. He was a good organizer and, in 2023, he might have found employment as a cruise director except for his personality which was described by one biographer as that of a “Delusional megalomaniac.”
The first historian of the Americas, Bartolomé de Casas, wrote in 1542 that: “The discovery was, on the whole, a bad thing.” What Columbus brought to the New World was war, disease, despotism, racism, slavery and religious persecution — all the things that had made Europe such an interesting place for the previous thousand years. Even Columbus himself was not a winner in the end. He got little profit out of his dangerous voyages. He was appointed Governor General of his newly discovered islands. But he acted with such brutality that he was recalled by Queen Isabella and died in poverty and obscurity.
But he pointed the way westwards towards a new utopia. Columbus changed the world map and, metaphorically speaking, marked this continent like a treasure map with an X saying “This is where the money is.” In doing so, for better or worse, he launched one of the greatest continuing migrations in history.
