Columbus and the Art of Misunderestimation

Statue of Columbus in the Library of Congress, Main Reading Room

In June I wrote an entry about my friend and former college roommate, Mike McCann, who has been teaching for many years at Lakeview Academy in Gainesville, Georgia. Mike acted as a terrific sounding board for me when I was writing A Little History of the United States. He is now using the book with his high school students and zipped me an email about what he had done as the term opened, focusing on Columbus’s first native contacts in the Americas. As I am hoping to write a bit more periodically on the subject of education and history, this "first encounter" seemed like a good place to begin. I’m hoping Mike will send me more dispatches as the school year progresses.
    I had commented in an earlier email how I’d been struck by Columbus’s boundless confidence in his ability to master the essentials of the Taino language after only a few days’ exploration. He reports that as he traveled from one new settlement to the next, the natives he had taken with him would run “from house to house, and to the towns around, crying out, “Come! come! and see the men from heaven!” Ah yes—perhaps an all too human temptation for Columbus to suppose that he and his fellow Europeans were seen as no less than gods by these people. It turned out that Mike was using the same primary sources to help students explore some of the less obvious crosscurrents in Columbus’s account of his first encounters with the Taino people. Mike’s report:

“Just off now into a scrambled day with college reps visiting throughout the day and with individual school pictures being taken. The Columbus bit you mentioned is truly hilarious and great to read with the students. We have in our primary source excerpt the passage where he says that the folks he's kidnapped cry out to their kin, "Come and see the men from heaven!"—and, lo and behold, everyone comes running with food and drink. I love it that Columbus kidnaps folks so they can learn his language, certainly not the other way around. In class we spoke much of the opening part of our selection which talks about the natives being naked, or mostly so—playing off of who a Christian European would identify as going about naked—from the Garden of Eden or in talk about the legends of Paradise being whisked off to somewhere in the oceans of the Southern Hemisphere, which Columbus was on the lookout for…to children who in their innocence don't know any better than going naked.
    “It's lovely how Columbus builds this picture of America from what he chooses to notice and interpret. But the very BEST is when he follows up the nakedness with the observation that these folks have no iron or metal to make weapons and they are clearly too timid to use weapons anyway. Okay, but THEN he observes, "They have an instrument consisting of a cane, taken while in seed, and headed with a sharp stick, but they never venture to use it." So, we've got these naked folks in all innocence standing around with some holding a sharp pointed stick, i.e., a spear, but of course they have no idea how to use it. Then moving right along Columbus indicates how the natives give away anything for nothing or in exchange for trash of the Spanish boats, and Columbus steps in to make sure the natives are not taken advantage of (the childhood theme again). Here, our class took a short diversion into talking about the Northwest Indians' custom of Potlatch—the extravagant feasts and the giving of gifts—and what the generosity of the natives might in fact be about—no evidence of that, of course, but just trying to play with the stories of Columbus further. Finally the tale of the sailors left behind when Columbus sailed home and how they discovered that the natives actually did have an idea of what to do with those pointy sticks—i.e., the Spanish colonists were all dead by the time Columbus returned on his second trip, having been killed by the inhabitants!
    “I like to start the year with this primary source because there are so many ways of entirely misunderstanding on the part of both cultures that can be imagined here and teased out in discussions with students—jimmying open the old text for curiosity and even play. It's similar to what a spiritual writer, Richard Rohr, comments when he says in an entirely different context, that ‘Mystery is not something you can't know— mystery is endless knowability.’
    “Well, got to get back to school -- wishes for your curious day. – Mike”

    As George Bush might have said, between Columbus and the Taino there was a bit of misunderestimation going on regarding cultural superiority. (Or perhaps I should  say misoverestimation?) For students new to such primary sources, it’s easy to glide along  without noticing at first some of the contradictions and underlying crosscurrents. I had a good deal of fun writing about the same problem, except instead of Columbus's recollections, I used Captain John Smith’s account of meeting the Powhatan Indians, in a book I did with Mark Lytle, After the Fact: the Art of Historical Detection. There, we discuss the long-contested question of whether readers can trust Smith’s version of his adventures. To quote from After the Fact:

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   Yet even if we grant Smith the virtue of honesty, significant problems remain when using his account; problems common to all historical evidence. To say that Smith is truthful is only to say that he reported events as he saw them. The qualification is not small. Like every observer, Smith viewed events from his own perspective. When he set out to describe the customs of the Chesapeake Indians, for instance, he did so as a seventeenth-century Englishman. Behind each observation he made stood a whole constellation of presuppositions, attitudes, and opinions that he took for granted without ever mentioning them. His descriptions were necessarily limited by the experience and education—or lack of it—that he brought with him.
    The seriousness of these limitations becomes clearer if we take a hypothetical example of what might happen if Captain Smith were to set down a history, not of Indian tribal customs, but of a baseball game between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees:

    "Not long after, they tooke me to one of their greate Counsells, where many of the generalitie were gathered in greater number than ever I had seen before. And they being assembled about a great field of open grass, a score of their greatest men ran out upon the field, adorned each in brightly hued jackets and breeches, with letters cunningly woven upon their Chestes, and wearinge uppon their heades caps of a deep navy blue, with billes, of a sort I know not what. One of their chiefs stood in the midst and would at his pleasure hurl a white hall at another chief, whose attire was of a different colour, and whether by chance or artyfice I know not the ball flew exceeding close to the man yet never injured him, but sometimes he would strike att it with a wooden club and so giveing it a hard blow would throw down his club and run away. Such actions proceeded in like manner at length too tedious to mention, but the generalitie waxed wroth, with greate groaning and shoutinge, and seemed withall much pleased."

    Before concluding any more than that Smith would make a terrible writer for the New York Post (we don’t even know if the Yankees won!), compare the description of the baseball game with the account by the real Smith, of what happened to him after his capture. (Smith writes in the third person, referring to himself as “he” and “Captain Smith.”)

    "At last they brought him to Meronocomoco, where was Powhatan their Emperor. . .Before a fire upon a seat like a bedsted, [Powhatan] sat covered with a great robe, made of Rarowcun [raccoon] skinnes, and all the tayles hanging by. On either hand did sit a young wench of 16 or 18 yeares, and along on each side the house, two rowes of men, and behind them as many women, with all their heads and shoulders painted red; many of their heads bedecked with the white down of Birds; but every one with something: and a great chayne of white beads about their necks. At his entrance before the King, all the people gave a great shout. The Queene of Appamatuck was appointed to bring him water to wash his hands, and another brought him a bunch of feathers, in stead of a Towell to dry them. Having feasted him after their best barbarous manner they could, a long consultation was held, but the conclusion was, two great stones were brought before Powhatan. Then as many as could layd hands on him, dragged him to them, and thereon laid his head, and being ready with their clubs, to beat out his braines, Pocahontas the Kings dearest daughter, when no intreaty could prevaile, got his head in her armes, and laid her owne upon his to save him from death: whereat the Emperour was contented he should live to make him hatchets, and her bells, beads, and copper. . ."

Without having read the account of the baseball game first, it would not be anywhere near as obvious just how little Smith has told us about what is going on here. Indeed, anyone who reads the Generall Historie or any of the captain’s writings will be impressed by their freshness and the wealth of detail. But that is because we, like Smith, are unfamiliar with the rituals of the seventeenth-century Chesapeake Indians. Quite naturally—almost instinctively— we adopt Smith’s point of view as our own. And that point of view diverts us from asking questions to which Smith does not have the answer. What, after all, is the reason the Indians painted their heads and shoulders red and wore white down on their heads? We know no more than we did when baseball players were described as wearing bright outfits with letters woven upon their chests.

And then we go on in After the Fact to speculate about what’s really going on when Pocahontas “saves” the life of Captain Smith. Smith tells it pretty much as a kind of adventure romance: hero saved by young damsel. (And this is not the first time he’s told such a tale. He narrates a similar adventure about his earlier travels in eastern Europe.) But Powhatan may have had his own reasons for threatening Smith’s life. Indeed, he may not have been intending to kill Smith at all, but merely subjecting him to a test of courage and making it clear that Smith and these strange new people from across the ocean were Powhatan’s vassals, not his superiors. When two differing cultures first meet, the chance for misunderestimation always remains high.