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Christopher Columbus — Description

We will never know the name of the first human explorer to step foot in the Americas, though a foot is as good a place to start as any. Approximately 22,000 years ago, a family left tracks in the lakeside mud of a gypsum beach, in what is today called White Sands National Park in New Mexico. These people left us no written word, no bones, no DNA, only trails in the sand that tell us that someone was here, and they were human. One set of footprints follows in step with those left by a giant ground sloth, marked for a meal, while a curious pack of dire wolves stalks the humans from not as far behind as comfort may warrant. They'd never seen a primate before, and whatever ancestral fear the mammoths of the Tularosa Basin had of humans had been left behind in Eurasia. The proboscidians drank, they observed, and the tiniest of the apelings observed back with bright, wondered eyes. These tiny toesies disappear and reappear alongside a larger set of footprints sporadically, a young woman asked for uppies by a child she cared enough for to oblige, perhaps to get a better look at the young of the herd, those snorting water up in their noses and swishing it back out, two species equally innocent as they explored their neighbor the World with touch and play.
Now, how (hell if) these people came to stroll through the Tularosa Basin 22,000 years ago is something nerds are still ripping each others’ throats out over to this very day, because it's hard to contextualize the complete picture when your box has all of one puzzle piece in it. It's a bracket, it tells us someone came through this way by this point in history, but as Bugs Bunny will tell you, there's a lot of ways to get to New Mexico, and not all of them are correct. The simplest explanation is that they just walked there, because like… they just could. Not only was there a land bridge connecting Chukotka to Alaska at the time, but there was an environmental superhighway running straight through from Doggerland to Wrangel Island. Both of these things are a consequence of the same phenomenon: the Last Glacial Maximum. Not the Ice Age, mind you, that's different. An “ice age” is just any age in which there is ice on Earth. We (for now…) are still in the Ice Age and have been since the end of the Eocene 34 million years ago. That is not today's tangent though.
The amount of ice on Earth ebbs and flows in relation to its tilt towards the Sun, causing “glacial” periods when the cold spikes up and “interglacial” periods when it spends a little time in the fridge to defrost. The Last Glacial Maximum, as you can probably guess, refers to the last time the Earth's glaciers reached their maximum coverage over the surface of the planet before falling off again. The glaciers first began to advance around 33,000 years ago and steadied out at their peak between 26,000 and 20,000 years ago. Now a consequence of having more than twice as much ice on the planet as there is on average today is that it gets drier across the board, because all the water that could be making the atmosphere gross and muggy, like it is right now in my beloved and eternal arch nemesis the State of Indiana, has instead crystallized at the poles or in the dirt as permafrost. From one end of Eurasia to the other, this created a cold, arid environment where little else was suited to grow but grass and shrubs, one giant tundra which we call the Mammoth Steppe, on account of the animals who sustained themselves off of these hardy plants. To me that's the most creatively inspiring juxtaposition about the Mammoth Steppe biome: it's just the Serengeti, but cold, and that simple aesthetic pleasure tickles me. I wish we still had hyenas in Europe or giraffes in Asia, how majestic is that?
Humans, I will argue, are specialized monster-slayers. There was once a time in real tangible history where the only genuine basis for political authority was if you slayed an actual breathing mythical beast, the way the gods intended kingship to work. Like oh why should we make you king of all people? “Well my buddies and I just punctured the heart of a 10-ton walking tank, so we offer the tribe warm furs, ivory tools galore, and enough meat to feed us for months.” No yeah fair enough, long live the king. Like yeah you may die in the attempt of stabbing a fucking elephant but it's just objectively worth it and better than eating squirrels. So, where mammoths roamed, people followed, from one side of the planet to the other, the long way around no less, and they'd already been in Beringia by the time that toddler was being carried on someone's shoulders at White Sands.
“Beringia” is the name of that land bridge between Chukotka and Alaska, after the Bering Sea which it is now submerged under. Because of the LGM, all that water sucked up into glaciers lowered global sea levels by some 130 meters (426 feet), creating a clear path that'd walk you from the Mammoth Steppe right down into the Great Plains. Material culture from this corridor is hard to come by because most of it is underwater, in the Arctic Circle. Genetic evidence however suggests that the common ancestors of most Native Americans alive today became isolated from their Siberian relatives by 23,000 years ago, lining up nicely with when the land bridge jammed up. While the sea levels had shrunk, there's a tradeoff that eventually tilts over as the Maximum maxes out. There's two geologically distinct chunks of ice which has torn up the continent I'm standing on: the Cordilleran Ice Sheet, which extended over what we now call the Yukon, and the Laurentide Ice Sheet, which covered… pretty much all of fucking Canada all the way down to my beloved and eternal arch nemesis, the State of Indiana. These two sheets squeaked together nice and firm to form a wall of ice stacked 3 kilometers up, little shy of 2 miles. The human population became stranded from their neighbors on either side of the Pacific, until someone figured out there was another way in.
See even that far north, the coastline of the Pacific Ocean is rimmed by an extremely fertile kelp forest ecosystem which linchpins the presence of abundant marine resources for anyone who can work out how to extract them. By about 17,000 years ago, the genetic ancestors of most indigenous peoples of the Americas (and of their domestic doggos, delightfully enough) bypassed the ice wall by way of these whale-roads and spread rapidly across the continent, presumably because if you have to choose between the Arctic Circle and the Mississippi River Valley as your home, you're picking God's green soil. Hilariously, a corridor opened between the Laurentide and Cordilleran Ice Sheets during the Younger Dryas, 13,000-ish years ago, as if the Earth herself threw up her hands like okay okay the jig is up, clearly I can't ground you.
There was more megafaunal food in the Americas than anyone knew what to do with, so eventually they fashioned an industry out of it. We call that industry the “Clovis”, after the nearest town to the type site in New Mexico, though the oldest sites are the Aubrey from Texas and El Fin del Mundo in Sonora, both approximately 13,400 years old. The Clovis Culture is defined by the way these peoples knapped their flint, specifically the way they'd knock a fluted notch out the bottom of their spearpoints to create a sort of socket for gripping it to the stick. They're usually found in association with slain proboscidians: mammoths, mastodons, and even some gompotheres that have apparently held out this long. There is only a single human found in association with these tools, Anzick-1, not even two yet, from Wilsall, Montana, dated to about 12,900 years ago. The child was reburied on June 28, 2014 on request of seven related indigenous tribes, who sent 30-some representatives to conduct the service and lay the boy back in the sacred earth.
The peoples of the Canadian Arctic are actually a much later arrival, curiously. There's a people whom the modern Inuit remember by the name “Tunitt”, and whom archeologists identify as the Dorset Culture. These Dorset people are the descendants of a migration into a by-now-cut-off Alaska from Siberia about 3200 BCE, bringing with them the bow and arrow technology that would then be introduced into the rest of the continent. Most Dorset found steady (if brutal) habitation in the Arctic Archipelago, though sites have been found as far south as the island which is called “Ktaqmkuk” in the Algonquian tongue of the modern Mi'kmaqs, and which colonial governments refer to today as “Newfoundland”.
In the final year of the tenth century CE, something far worse than invaluable driftwood thudded boots on the Tunitt's shores. Remembered by the Inuit as shy and private, the Tuniit hid in the woods while they watched strangers in strange furs and clothes that glistened like that chunk of space iron that fell on Greenland around the same time. The visitors hauled barrels of fermented berry juice into their dragon-headed kayaks and turned right back around into the sunrise from which they came. Shortly after, one of these pasty, hairy strangers returned on an unwelcomed voyage of exploration in their land. Nine Tuniit hid under their skin-canoes to observe what exactly these foreigners wanted, but unfortunately they wanted them. The strangers’ leader upturned their hiding spot and slew all but one of them, who rowed back to his village like lightning and brought an army to repulse the murderers like thunder. The outsiders abandoned their camp, and their leader, named Thorvald Eiriksson, brother of Leif, became the first known European to be buried under American soil, after taking an indigenous arrow in the armpit. A decade or so later, the Norsemen under the leadership of Thorfinn Karlsefni tried to reestablish a village on the island, the timber was just too good to pass up, and you can still see the settlement’s outline at L'Anse aux Meadows today. The “Skrælingjar”, as the sagas called the natives, were anxious, especially with the fuming muskox-lookin-thing the Norse had brought with them barely containable in its pen. Though the language barrier was insurmountable, it nonetheless takes few words to barter. The Skrælingjar offered exotic pelts in exchange for iron swords, but Thorfinn forbade the surrender of his weapons and offered this unheard-of snack called “cheese” instead. The ensuing shitting of tunics soured the Skrælingjar further towards the vikings who had poisoned their lactose intolerant community, and their attempt to just steal their steel the following summer broke all hell loose. The only viking willing to stay and defend her longhouse was Leif's sister Freydís, eight-months pregnant and wielding the sword of a fallen comrade like a bat out of Fólkvangr. The Norse never returned after that, obviously not welcome in these woods, and the disease-struck Tuniit would be replaced by the coming migration of the Inuit from Siberia shortly thereafter.
People have been in the Caribbean for about 7000 years, our oldest archaeological site being Banwari Trace on the island of Trinidad. If we're talking the Bahamas specifically, the Three Dog Site reveals a date of approximately 660 CE for the arrival of their first peoples, ancestors of the Lucayan and Taíno peoples who had sailed up from the Greater Antilles and permanently settled. The Three Dog Site, curiously enough, was dug up on the same island which hosted the herald of their doom, an island called Guanahani until October 12, 1492. The Lucayans had watched these three massive fuck off canoes lurch their way from over the horizon and onto their shores all through the previous night. Come daylight, the ships made landing, and out dropped strange men with an emaciated complexion and an amount of clothing which felt extremely unnecessary. The Lucayans were curious, friendly, and though the strangers spoke such unparsable nonsense as “yaaargh” and “me booty”, they seemed to reciprocate their hospitality. The strangers offered ornate glass beads which sparkled unbeheld colors in the glory of the Sun, and even let them have their fancy red hats! In exchange, the Lucayans offered things of their land unseen before by the strangers: parrots, cottonballs, and javelins of true aim. Above all, however, it was their metals that piqued so much curiosity. The foreigners seemed interested in the islanders’ gold nose rings, while the Lucayans wanted to hold the silvery ornaments that hung on the foreigners’ belts. This request was granted, and the strangers laughed at the one man who grabbed their swords by the blade end and cut his hand. It was only a few days before their guests brought out similarly ferrous reeds which belched fire like those furious mountains in the Lesser Antilles, and kidnapped seven of their tribesmen against their will.
“Hi I'm Cristoffa Corombo!” said Christopher Columbus, persistent lunatic, “and this is a gun!”
The asshole whose name we Latinize into “Christopher Columbus” and slap all over a rather tasteless holiday would've called himself “Cristoffa Corombo” in his native Genoese dialect. He was born in the later half of 1451 to Domenego Corombo, a small-time weaver and cheesemaker, and Suzanna Fontannarossa, who was out of Domenego's league. Cristoffa was the eldest of all his siblings, growing up having to help his dad feed the mouths of Bartholomew, Giovanni Pellegrino, Giacomo, and Bianchinetta. The teenaged Cristoffa brought home bacon as a sailor’s apprentice, and his skill at sea was evidently sustainable enough that he'd continue this education even as the family skipped down to Savona in 1470 to facilitate Domenego's dream of running a tavern. The boy's maritime talent got him hooked up on runs as far as Chios and Tunis, on the outer bounds of Genoa's conquests. By 1474 though he had found business as a quite esteemed corsair in Portuguese Madeira. A “corsair” is what in the Caribbean would be called a “privateer”, they're pirates with permits. Stealing from others was literally Cristoffa's source of income. It got him stranded at sea in 1476 when he got counter-privateered by the French. He had to float on a plank of wood and shuffle his feet back to Lisbon to explain to his monarch the total loss of his investment.
Lest you feel bad for the guy's misfortune, he got to marry a princess in 1479. Well okay, Filipa was the daughter of the governor of Porto Santo Island but that governor's boss was the king himself so in this economy it's practically the same thing. Columbus had shmoozed his way into the Portuguese royal court, and it's there he'd hear whispers of this insane scheme that just might be crazy enough to work. See, Marco Polo had brought home in 1295 all sorts of wacky tales in his misinformed travel guide, bafflingly incorrect on the size of the landmass he'd supposedly spent two decades wandering through. His geography supposed that Asia was just kinda… smeared over half the globe, and yes it was a globe. The oldest surviving globe in the world is the Behaim Globe, published coincidentally enough in 1492, and it pretty much shows you exactly what Columbus thought the world looked like. He was well aware that the Earth is round. He was a navigator, not knowing what shape the thing he was navigating is would be anywhere from inadvisably reckless to downright suicidal. In case the way ships dip under the horizon didn’t make it obvious enough, Eratosthenes proved it for everyone all the way back in the 3rd century BCE with one sun dial in Alexandria and another in Syene to compare shadows along the curvature. Assuming the Earth to be a perfect sphere (it's not quite actually, we're spinning like a ballerina and our skirt is twirling out more around the equator, but I digress), and knowing the equations for wedges in a circle, Eratosthenes calculated that the Earth must be about 250,000 stadia. That's about 25,000 miles, shockingly spot on for the actual 24,900 mile circumference of the thing you're standing on.
Columbus though fudged the map to align with Marco Polo's map because if it were true, it could make him rich. Polo would have you believe that sailing about 4,000 miles due west of Portugal would land you on the island of Cipango, which today we call Japan and is in fact some 10,000 miles west of Portugal. The willful ignorance promised an island paradise where the walls are made of grubby, glistening goooooooold, and the surrounding Indies would introduce a head-spinningly new palette of hikingly expensive spices to suckers in Europe, if only Columbus could find a dope to siphon money out of for the expedition. Columbus, his hair prematurely white at the age of just 33, brought his crackpot scheme to King John II in 1484. Literally every other advisor in King John's court however told him no, the Earth is in fact 250,000 stadia in circumference, you'd be giving this guy money just to commit some grand suicide. Besides, once Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, it proved that you could just go around Africa to reach the Indies anyway, and proof is much more profitable than potential.
Columbus was rejected as a persistent lunatic and took his idea to Portugal's nemesis, Spain, in 1486. He sought an audience with King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, and though he was heard more than he had been in Portugal, they told him they just didn't have the money for it rn, they'd been wasting it all trying to Reconquista their neighbors. Wanting to keep a pin in the idea though (and to prevent Columbus from taking it to their enemies instead), the Catholic Monarchs paid Columbus an allowance of 14,000 maravedís (gold-silver coins that are difficult to convert to modern money but that was basically the annual salary for a sailor in those days) to stay in Spain until their war with Granada was concluded. For a while, that was fine by Columbus, he'd even met a hot piece of ass to replace his wife who had died in 1485, a Spanish heiress named Beatriz Enríquez de Arana who produced his son and biographer, Ferdinand.
The war dragged, however, and Columbus was already impatient by the time they finally called him back to court on January 12, 1492. He stormed out of the palace when after all this time, the monarchs shuffled their feet and awkwardly told him that their victory over Granada was pyrrhic, and they couldn't afford to finance his adventure after all. Fuck it, Columbus growled, his brother Bartholomew had connections with the King of France, maybe that direction would be more productive. Ferdinand's treasurer, Luis de Santángel, caught him right as he was about to leave the city gates, however, and said hey hey hey, that sucked and I'm sorry, but if you're right about this then I really want to see you succeed, give me one last chance to talk to Queen Isabella? Fine, Columbus agreed, one last chance and only one, and as it turned out one was all that was needed. Santángel was loaded, and he offered Queen Isabella 17,000 florins out of his own pocket to help supplement the cost of the mission. Three ships, Santángel persuaded her, just three ships wouldn't sink their wallets that hard, and if the ocean swallows them, the only one who really loses is Columbus anyway.
So it was that on August 3, 1492, Columbus launched his mission off the port of Palos de la Frontera as a Spanish Admiral commanding the vessels Pinta, Niña, and Santa María on a voyage they weren't guaranteed to come back from. Indeed, from the Canaries it was four straight weeks of sailing through nothing but open ocean, and that recipe for mutiny was only stalled by the promise of a 10% share of whatever amount of gold they were able to loot and bring home, but greed can only support a person's psyche for so long. Columbus was already looking over his shoulder at his dirty-eyed crew when on October 11, the Pinta signaled to the flagship that crewman Rodrigo de Triana had spotted land ho, and Columbus collapsed into thankful prayer for his good fortune. They made landfall on Guanahani, claimed for Spain and tactlessly renamed to San Salvador by Columbus, the following sunrise, believing they had finally reached the Indies, and by extension labeled the people they took hostage “Indians”. Enslavement was always the goal. The first thing Columbus remarked about these hospitable people was that “they should be good servants”.
Columbus pushed forward, exploring several small islands in the Bahamas before coming across an enormous landmass on October 28. It was so large he figured he must've finally reached the Chinese mainland, but he found no great imperial cities as Marco Polo had described, and the natives insisted that it was an island too. They called it Juana, we today call it Cuba. Continuing onwards, the Santa María ran aground on the island of Haiti (which Columbus called Hispaniola) on November 28. They abandoned ship, blew it apart with their cannons just to scare the shit out of the locals, then used the remains to construct a fort called La Navidad from which those locals could be pacified and subjugated. By this point, word was spreading just as fast as the violent sickness which followed these intrusive warlords, and the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean began to understand the message loud and clear: fight back, or die. On January 13, 1493, Columbus's landing on the eastern side of Haiti was repulsed by Ciguayos warriors, and by all outward appearances it had seemed like they'd finally driven this pox back where they came from once and for all.
While I'm sure legends were sung of this victory, it wasn't to last. Columbus had looped his fleet back around through the Azores and landed back in the same port from which he departed on March 15. Of the ten indigenous hostages Columbus had taken captive, only one hadn't succumbed to disease by the journey's end. Columbus adopted this boy as “Diego” and indoctrinated him as an interpreter for the second voyage, because of course there was going to be a follow up. While Portugal complained that Spain's sponsorship of the conquest of these islands violated their territorial treaties, eventually leading Pope Alexander VI to draft the Treaty of Tordesillas and divide the world between their tentative compromise, the rest of Europe was enthralled with the report Columbus brought home. A whole New World, ripe for the picking, but conquest first requires data. Columbus relaunched from Cádiz on September 25, 1493, this time decked with a fleet of seventeen ships boarded with investors, colonization supplies, a young Ponce de León, and a pack of prattling priests, convinced as they were that the initial warm welcome from the “Indians” meant they were already open to mass conversion to Catholicism on threat of violence.
Instead they found all the remnants of their first colonization attempt in ruins. Having sailed up from the more southward landing in the Lesser Antilles (stopping along the way to resupply on the island of Boriquen on November 19, Columbus called the land San Juan Bautista, we today call it Puerto Rico), the fleet arrived back at La Navidad on November 20, or at least what was left of it. In Columbus's absence, the fort had been ransacked and the 39 lackeys he had left behind had all been killed by the Taíno resistance movement. In response to obviously not being wanted in this land, Columbus decided the only measured response was to have 1,500 Taíno slaughtered, saving only the fittest 500 of them to be shipped off to the slave markets in Seville. He placed the encomienda under the direction of his brother Diego so that he could fuck off to explore Cuba and Jamaica without having to worry his tiny mind about anyone trying to overthrow his governance. Columbus was still convinced that Cuba was China, he even forced his men to swear an oath agreeing with him. Can't have any loose lips letting his moneylender know her investment hadn't actually reached the Indies afterall. Surely that anxiously awaited city of gold was waiting for them just around the corner! His efforts to find the Khan and his court fraught, however, Columbus set sail back for Spain on March 10, 1494, and arrived back in Cádiz on June 11.
By this point, Columbus's investors began to grow suspicious, not only of the massively underestimated gold haul he was drip-feeding them, but also towards the conduct he and his brothers had instituted as the despotic overlords of the Caribbean. Though the royals financed a third voyage, this one came with only six ships and no volunteers. Columbus was a professional pirate though, so he was no stranger to bribing or shanghaing sailors to get his boats staffed. His crew of prisoners left port at Sanlúcar on May 30, 1498 and took a more southernly route, arriving on the island of Trinidad on July 31. From there the Paria Peninsula was within sight, and they made landfall on the South American coastline on August 5. Columbus was so taken aback by the natural beauty of the Orinoco River that he believed he'd found one of the four confluences of the Garden of Eden, then probably crunched the numbers in his head how much he could sell it for.
By 1500, rumors of Columbus's corruption and tyranny had become too loud to ignore. On August 23, chief justice Francisco de Bodadilla arrived on Haiti to investigate and ultimately replace Columbus's viceroyality. He found an island riddled with violence and disease. Columbus had long stopped pretending to be equals with the local caciques, and had enslaved for gold mining whoever was left after the smallpox epidemic worked its way through some 3 million people who'd never encountered this European virus before. It wasn't just indigenous uprising Columbus wouldn't tolerate though. He'd hang his insurgent subordinates and maim anyone who spoke ill of him and his relatives, making examples through torture, severed hands, and public parades of humiliated, desecrated corpses. Bodadilla saw more than enough, clasped the Columbus brothers in irons, and shipped them off to rot in a Spanish prison for six weeks.
Columbus wrote an appeal to the Catholic Monarchs that his chains were itchy and he was so booooored wah wah wah, but it was primarily his exaggeration that he'd found literal fucking Paradise off the coast of South America that convinced the king and queen to release him. You know, because the first thought a rational human being has upon finding the actual Garden of Eden is “oh cool, the money dimension must be right around the corner then!” They set Columbus free just so he could go back and try to find whatever was directly behind Paradise, though they declined to reinstate him as governor, passing that honor instead to the emotionally dead cold heart of Nicolás de Ovando on September 3, 1501.
By this point his inflated sense of his role in history was going to his head. He'd always believed his voyages were divinely ordained, but now he was starting to get weird, bestowing the title of “Christbearer” upon himself and ranting about his destiny to take Jerusalem and establish the Catholic Monarchs as the sole rulers of a new world order in his Book of Prophecies, drafted shortly after his release from prison. This was his headspace when he launched his fourth and final voyage from Cádiz on May 9, 1502, and while it was wigging out even the monarchs whom he put on such a high pedestal, no one expected this gouty, arthritic, brain-fogged husk of a man to last much longer on this mortal coil anyway. Spain had more stolen gold than they knew what to do with at this point, might as well let him tucker himself out. He was forbidden, however, from stepping foot anywhere near Haiti ever again.
Columbus completely disregarded this stipulation, reaching Santo Domingo on June 29 and demanding to be let in. Hilariously, Ovando told him to fuck off, and Columbus was forced to get back to what he was paid to do here in the first place: explore the mainland coast. His attempts to land in Central America were dogged the entire way by hostile natives, disease, ships getting eaten out by shipworm, and that notorious Caribbean weather. In June 1503, Columbus's crew had veered too far off course, and they were marooned on the coast of Jamaica, largely (and intentionally) forgotten by those who had the resources to rescue them. Two of his ship captains, Diego Méndez and Bartolomeo Fieschi, dug out a canoe and rowed to fetch help on July 17. Their arrival in Haiti after hauling ass across 450 miles of open ocean was met by an Ovando who thought this misfortune was absolutely hysterical. The governor didn't send a rescue team until June of the next year, lol. By the time Columbus hobbled back into Sanlúcar on November 7, news had spread that his primary patron, Queen Isabella, was dying, and there was nothing of Columbus in her will when the deep sleep took her on the 26th. Columbus did not receive his tenth of the profits, because that arrangement was between the king and the governor of the Indies, and Columbus was not the one holding that title anymore. He collapsed into his sick bed for the next few months, angry, delusional, ostracized, and robbed of the very riches he had ruined so many innocent lives to obtain. He died in Valladolid on May 20, 1506, a cheat and a loser who ruined everything he touched to his bitter, pathetic end.
Design notes, I feel like there's a distinct lack of artwork out there of Christopher Columbus the dread pirate lord. It's always some plucky cartoon adventurer whose story is not as suitable for children as some people would like it to be, or he's portrayed as a fully fledged knight dressed to the saintly nines for King and Cross. Nah I needed this guy to look like the saltiest most debaucherous fucker you have ever been shanghaied by on the seven deadly seas. This is a man who only ever saw the face of God as a reflection in gold doubloons, like Milton's Mammon. Only the scurviest of sea dogs could look at the untouched beauty of South America, literally convinced that it's Heaven on Earth, and then think wow, I wonder how much I can sell this for. Fuck you, Christopher Columbus, and your stupid hat.