Reel History 1: Christopher Columbus: 1492: Conquest of Paradise and Christopher Columbus: The Discovery

Gerard Depardieu as Christopher Columbus, 1492: The Conquest of Paradise

Americans have been celebrating Columbus' achievement of miscalculating the distance to Asia since Independence. And it makes sense - the country can trace its foundations back to the year 1492 with the discovery of a new landmass that would take centuries to fully explore (plus 1492 makes for a pretty nifty poem when rhymed with 'ocean blue'). Columbus is an ancestral American, the first American.

And really, the people of the United States have always loved Columbus. In 1792 they had celebrations commemorating the 300th anniversary of the discovery of North America, but they were lucky enough not to have the technology to celebrate it with dull major motion pictures; they made Columbus Day a federal holiday in 1937; they even made a crappy Sopranos episode about it! It was the worst one.

But sarcasm can't diminish what was accomplished by Columbus. He set the stage for New World colonization and expanded the known globe by thousands of miles, maybe (according to Charles Van Doren) "the greatest addition to human knowledge ever made by one man."  The world was changed because now there was more of it. And more land means more wealth to make your own.

That's the kind of image conjured up by the title our first picture, 1492: Conquest of Paradise, one of two movies released on the 500th anniversary of the historic voyage - the Howard Zinn idea of Columbus the tyrant, the conqueror of the indigenous and slaughterer of primitive peoples. Ridley Scott's movie (released October 9, 1992, three days before the official 500th anniversary) doesn't fully play this hand, however. It tries to find a middle ground on Columbus, the great man of unmatched ambition and first tyrant of the new world (inevitably settling on the former) that makes for a rather boring movie.

Played by the miscast Gerard Depardieu, Columbus in 1492 is a tragic hero, a man with a crazy dream who does essentially the right thing, but other people mess it up for him. He's a man without control because Depardieu plays him in such a subdued manner, when by all accounts the real Columbus was a passionate man. Depardieu's Columbus only loses his composure when the savage natives attack his colony, and in what is probably the most offensive detail in the movie, Columbus kills a native warrior who makes explicit animal sounds as he fights.

For all its faults, 1492 at least notes some of the megalomania that often gets lost in details - being brought home from the New World in chains for being a tyrant, insisting to his final days that he had found Asia But even this latter detail is played with Columbus as a victim, be it of forces beyond his control or his own dreams. This is a role suited for Klaus Kinski in a Herzog film, unfortunately far from what we ended up with.

I'm not going to lie, I couldn't find Christopher Columbus: The Discovery, the other movie released in 1992, anywhere. Not at the library, not on the Internet for 'free', not on Netflix. For all I know, they only released stills of Marlon Brando and made a poster. But from what I gather, it is bad. A 4/10 on IMDB, a dismal 7% on Rotten Tomatoes, with critic Paul Brenner calling Marlon Brando's performance the worst of his career (Brando gets top billing despite not playing the namesake character). Maybe it's so bad they don't want anyone to see it, but that unfortunately it means I can't compare it to 1492: Conquest of Paradise, so I'll take a Columbus biopic I could find: 1949's Christopher Columbus.

Christopher Columbus is a stereotypical take on the story: played by Frederic March, Columbus wants to find an alternate route to Asia, finds what he thinks is Asia, treats indigenous peoples with respect (on camera, that is), comes home a hero. He brings home a talking parrot (saying 'long live the queen' and 'hurray for the admiral') and the natives he kidnaps do a nice exotic dance for everyone. Everything is happy and shiny and fun. It's like an elementary school telling of the story, not a serious biopic. Though it does eventually include the inconvenient details - disease and death and slavery and whatnot - all that is told in the last ten minutes with a series of quick scenes, portrayed matter-of-factly with mostly exposition. Columbus eventually comes out mostly unscathed, and the movie ends with him ironically (hindsight being our friend) worrying about his legacy. Like 1492, this movie was dreadfully dull, but at least this movie has the hilarious image of Chris himself body-slamming a sailor during a mutiny.

As recounted in the prologue, Columbus falls for the idea that everyone in 15th century Europe believed the earth was flat. This myth comes from the Washington Irving biography of Columbus published in 1828, and is peddled as fact all the time in popular storytelling, even in the rigorously academic Looney Tunes version. This is probably because it provides simple motivation for the children's story version of Columbus, in order to avoid messy, complex discussions of theology, colonialism, and greed. In reality, most people thought the earth round since the time of Aristotle, and it had been reinforced many times before Columbus was born.

Both movies add the religious perspective to the Columbus story that you hardly ever hear about, one that played a huge role yet is routinely dropped from the simplistic stories. Placed within the context of the Spanish Inquisition, 1492 is heavy on the religious symbolism, telling the story of a man sent on a quest from God. And from what I gather, this was an accurate portrayal of Columbus, because he was by all accounts quite the fanatic. He was convinced that a verse in the second book of Esdras (apocryphal in both Catholic and Protestant teachings) was good proof that he could reach the Indies by sailing west; 6:42 reads:

Upon the third day Thou didst command that the waters should be gathered in the seventh part of the earth; six parts hast Thou dried up and kept them, with the intent that some of these, being planted by God and tilled, might serve Thee.

This was part of his argument to the Catholic monarchs of Spain that the western route was the one to take, and he convinced these incredibly religious leaders with this evidence. Columbus clung to Biblical prophecy all his life, and thought his voyage was divine and he a 'messenger of a new heaven' to the pagans he would encounter. 1492 portrays the religious aspect a little more complexly, adding a narration of Columbus from his log, taken October 21, 1492, nine days after landing:

If the natives are to be converted to our ways, then it will be by persuasion and not by force.

But neither movie shows his beliefs with a nuanced view. At the beginning of 1492, Columbus is seen witnessing the brutal deaths of several people convicted by the Spanish Inquisition, but this doesn't shake his faith in the Catholic institution or have any bearing on his actions later in the movie, making it a strange detail to include.

The motivations of Columbus can't simply be explained. He was motivated by religion, sure, but also by greed, fame, adventure, a myriad of things, and this makes him harder to portray on film. The geopolitical forces that shaped Columbus are so broad that they make it hard to summarize him in this post. But his demands reflected his need for power and personal glory: he would be knighted, appointed Admiral of the Ocean Sea, made the viceroy of any new lands, and awarded ten percent of any new wealth.

In the end, though, Columbus was taken back to Spain in chains, having ticked off his benefactors with the way he ran the New World operation. But really, they could have seen it coming. In an entry Columbus wrote in his log shortly after the first landing at the Bahama Islands, he said:

They brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned. They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.

It's funny, because in Christopher Columbus, he forces a sailor to trade a native at least a hawks' bell for a piece of gold jewellery, in a detail that's supposed to make him look like a generous benefactor. But when he returned on his second voyage the following year, he came with 17 ships and 1000 men in an effort to colonize, finding the island of Hispaniola as a suitable home and making the capital of his new territory Santo Domingo. He also sent a letter to the Queen asking for permission to enslave indigenous peoples. Though permission was flatly denied, he went ahead and did it anyway, forcing natives to work on mines and farms. According to Spanish historian Consuelo Varela, "Columbus' government was characterized by a form of tyranny," and he used many acts of torture to punish the new people under his rule. "Even those who loved him had to admit the atrocities that had taken place."

In 1502, the Spanish court sent Francsico de Bobadilla to replace Columbus as governor of the Indies, and there he was met with many complaints about Columbus and his two brothers, Bartolome and Diego. Bobadilla arrested the three of them, and wrote up a report that was lost until 2006. In it, he transcribes testimonies of more than 20 people, both enemies and supporters, describing brutal treatment of their subjects over their rule. One incident saw Columbus punishing a man for stealing corn by cutting off his nose and ears and selling him into slavery. Bartolome de las Casas, the son of a priest who accompanied Columbus on his second voyage and a priest himself, describes in his History of the Indies: 

 Endless testimonies...prove the mild and pacific temperament of the natives... But our work was to exasperate, ravage, kill, mangle and destroy; small wonder, then, if they tried to kill one of us now and then... The admiral (Columbus), it is true, was blind as those who came after him, and he was so anxious to please the King that he committed irreparable crimes against the Indians.

According to las Casas, male and female slaves did not see the each other during mining operations that could last up to 10 months, and up to a third of male slaves died during each these periods.

1492 does what the antiquated Christopher Columbus does, portraying the Admiral of the Ocean as a pious soul who just gets carried along with common European brutality. In one scene, the commanding officer cuts off the hand of a native for lying about the location of the gold. Columbus is in Europe at the time and had no control over the situation, and this is really one of the only moments of brutality included in the movie. It's more concerned with Columbus' tragic failure than what lead to it.

The religiosity of Columbus, something worthy enough to play a major role in both movies, did not prevent him from allowing exploitation of the indigenous populations. And the counterpoint that Columbus was just acting as someone of that time doesn't really hold water when taking into account how other people of just as strong a faith acted at the time- not just de las Casas and Bobadilla, but also Pope Paul III, who issued the Sublimus Dei in 1537 forbidding the enslavement of indigenous Americans. What was Columbus' religiosity for, then, if it didn't guide him in the moral direction?

I had a history teacher who warned of 'tearing down the individual', where a new version of history was popularized in an attempt to cast the heroes of the past in a damning light. But it's not fair to the victims to only recall Christopher Columbus the groundbreaking navigator, because there was so much left in Columbus' character, and more of it comes out with newly discovered primary documents, like the Bobadilla report. According to some, like Felipe Arnesto of History Today, he's a hero to the United States because the Founding Fathers needed a hero myth on which to base the new American values:

Joel Barlow's poem, The Vision of Columbus, appeared in 1787, Columbus remained a model for nineteenth-century Americans, engaged in a project for taming their own wilderness. Washington Irving's perniciously influential History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus of 1828 – which spread a lot of nonsense including the ever-popular folly that Columbus was derided for claiming that the world was round – appealed unashamedly to Americans' self-image as promoters of civilisation.

So in 1992, 500 years after Columbus sailed the ocean blue, Hollywood released two movies - one incredibly boring, one (though I can't say for sure) terrible - in commemoration. But maybe the man didn't deserve much better than that.

NEXT TIME: Comparing the actors to what Columbus actually (maybe) looked like; and we jump forward 100+ years to the founding of Jamestown with Disney's Pocahontas and Terence Malik's The New World. 

The Toscanelli map of the hypothetical westward route to Asia, which Columbus took on his first journey. For reference, Cippangu is Japan.

Consuelo Varela quotes come from http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/aug/07/books.spain. 

Felipe Arnesto quote comes from http://www.historytoday.com/felipe-armesto/columbus-hero-or-villain

Bartolome de las Casas quote comes from Wikipedia, which sites the book History of the Indies as its source for the quote.