As Kirkpatrick Sale points out in The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy (453 pages Knopf. $24.95), “God, gold and glory” has been the typical historian’s shorthand for what the European explorers had in mind when they descended on the Western Hemisphere, and in the case of Columbus, gold led the list.
Sale, author of “Power Shift” and “Human Scale,” doesn’t much like Columbus. He portrays the admiral as bigoted, close-minded, brutal, secretive, paranoid, materialistic and fatalistically indifferent to the world of nature. On top of that, he was a lousy administrator and occasionally not even a very good sailor: on his fourth voyage he let two of his boats rot so badly they had to be beached in Jamaica. He was also courageous, dauntless, visionary. In short, he was a very complicated man.
“The Conquest of Paradise” is only the first of what promises to be a flood of books pegged to the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s maiden voyage in 1492, and it’s likely that a lot of those books will indulge in the sort of hagiography that has obscured the man for centuries. The myths have left Columbus looking like one of the cartoon balloons that hover over the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. If Sale wants to let a little of the gas out of the legend, he couldn’t have picked a better moment.
But Sale isn’t just hero-bashing. Yes, it’s fun to find out that Queen Isabella didn’t have to hock her jewelry to finance Columbus, and that he stared down no mutiny on that first trip, but the author has more on his mind. He zeroes in on Columbus’s relentless materialism and on his view of nature as little more than a store shelf to be inventoried and swept clean. The admiral, says Sale, was the epitome of the corrupt and malignant culture he left behind–a Europe decimated by plague, terrorized by the Inquisition and hypnotized by the concept of Apocalypse.
Greedy louts: “All the talk about taking Christianity and civilization to the heathen, or building a City on the Hill for the perfection of the human spirit, or finding outlets for European creativity and imagination, even when genuinely meant, was just so much ancillary camouflage,” Sale insists. He sees the explorers and later settlers as no more than greedy, ethnocentric louts. The only attribute he won’t deny is their zeal, for theirs “was an age, as it has been said, that in its expansion brought to perfection every deadly sin but sloth.”
But to make his case, Sale leaves out a lot. The accomplishments of the nascent renaissance get short shrift. Progress, as far as he’s concerned, is a dubious notion: wouldn’t we all be better off if we learned like the Native Americans, to live in ecological harmony with the earth and (wisecracking, for once) our “beaver brothers”? Too pat by half, but to say Sale oversimplifies is not to say he’s wrong. He may be shrill, but he’s got 600 years of environmental degradation on his side of the argument.
That despoliation, too, all started with Columbus, whose view of nature in his journal amounted to describing trees as “very green” and “very big.” So it makes sense, on the eve of our 500th anniversary, to root around in the baggage brought over by the first man off the boat. Sale’s book is as infuriating as it is illuminating, but it is always readable. He makes a good start at discovering where we went wrong and how we might set things right in what even Columbus thought was Paradise itself.
