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Laurence Bergreen, more modestly, narrates the story of Columbus's ocean crossings, while Douglas Hunter's "The Race to the New World" traces links between John Cabot's project for an Atlantic crossing and that of Columbus, explaining apologetically ...
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Seeking to revolutionize views of the Age of Exploration, four books instead reveal more about the state of popular history.Article Comments (5)
History is the people's discipline?the only academic subject that demands no special professional training. Some of my favorite history books are by lawyers, journalists, scientists and nuns. To write well about history you do not need a Ph.D., just a few rare but accessible qualities: insatiable curiosity, critical intellect, disciplined imagination, indefatigability in the pursuit of truth and a slightly weird vocation for trying to get to know dead people by studying the sources they have left us. To write well about anything, of course, you also have to follow the advice that every writing course gives: Write about what you know. This year's finalists in the U.K. version of the television show "The Apprentice," whom the press lampooned for ignorance because they thought Columbus was British, would probably be ill-advised to write about the history of exploration.
Palgrave MacMillan, 277 pages, $27I puzzle, therefore, over the motives and wisdom of a clutch of writers? three popularizers and a retired anthropologist?who have just produced books about Columbus and a couple of his contemporary rivals. Nigel Cliff is a former drama critic, whose "Holy War" attempts to set the life of Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama in the context of what he represents as an enduring struggle between Islam and Christendom. Carol Delaney, the anthropologist, tries something similar for Columbus, claiming that the original motive of his transatlantic adventure was the conquest of Jerusalem. Laurence Bergreen, more modestly, narrates the story of Columbus's ocean crossings, while Douglas Hunter's "The Race to the New World" traces links between John Cabot's project for an Atlantic crossing and that of Columbus, explaining apologetically that, despite the book's title, there was no race.
Columbus, like Napoleon and Hitler, is an object of fascination among readers. Something of a crank himself, he notoriously attracts cranky authors, as crag calls forth to crag. There are innumerable books that purport to solve purported "mysteries"?decoding Columbus's secret messages, disclosing his secret identities, revealing his hidden motives, or "proving" that he was variously Spanish, Portuguese, French, Greek or Polish instead of accepting the incontrovertible evidence that he was Genoese. The four books under review exhibit none of the sensation-mongering that often inspires rash amateurs and greedy publishers. Other qualities, however, unite their authors: incompetence in research, a lack of critical discrimination and a chutzpah reminiscent of Columbus's own. Four authors have launched similar books at the same time, all bound for similar wrecks: They have embarked on their odysseys in leaky vessels, with sails full of hot air instead of a speeding wind.
Free Press, 319 pages, $26All four fall into the trap of mistaking the work properly called the "Libro de la primera navegación" for Columbus's shipboard journal, whereas it is a heavily edited version of an account constructed later in diary form. All tend to take Columbus, who was notoriously mendacious, at his word, accepting his self-created legend as a model of heroic perseverance, whereas the real Columbus was always changing his mind; we need to rebuild the adamantine tradition in mercury and opal. All these authors assume the veracity and authenticity of sources of doubtful authorship and unreliable date. All miss important documents and, therefore, key events.
Both Ms. Delaney's "Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem" and Mr. Bergreen's "Columbus: The Four Voyages" seem indifferent to coherent narrative or rational chronology. Ms. Delaney makes the Great Famine of 1315 strike "just as" trades inaugurated by the Infante Dom Henrique "were flourishing." Henrique was born in 1394. In a chapter, so garbled as to be nonsensical, on a rebellion that started on Hispaniola in 1497, Mr. Bergreen kills off the same character (a troublemaker named Adrián de Mujica) by different methods at an interval of 10 pages and six months. At one point he even confuses Columbus with his brother. All the authors under review make many howlers, but in this respect Mr. Bergreen is way ahead, managing a rate of one every nine or 10 pages.
Viking, 423 pages, $35Ms. Delaney's argument that Columbus was some kind of Christian crusader?if one can dignify her random assertions with that word?relies on the traditional chronology of Columbus's writings to suggest, among other things, the importance of his early references to Jerusalem. But she never realizes where the chronology is leading her wrong. Mr. Cliff tells us that he has "used contemporary travelers" to fill in the gaps in da Gama's story?but the travelers he uses are not all contemporary, and the routes they took are misleadingly various. Mr. Hunter makes the potentially interesting suggestion that Cabot's project was inspired by the famous Nuremberg globe-maker Martin Behaim, who supposedly made such ambitious plans for exploration that the author calls him the man who "should have been Columbus." But Mr. Hunter's knowledge of Behaim seems entirely based on research by a single 19th-century antiquarian. Without support from more recent scholarship, the speculation fails to carry conviction.
To some extent, scholars may have encouraged these amateurs' imprudence by publishing English translations of many of the sources. Translated sources attract errors just as translated scriptures foment heresies, and when the inexperienced attempt their own translations, the results can be even worse. Mr. Bergreen, Mr. Cliff, Mr. Hunter and Ms. Delaney do not have the linguistic skills to master the literature on their own. They all seem to be illiterate in Latin and imperfectly assured in handling the sources in Romance languages. In Mr. Hunter's case the deficiency is fatal, as his grounds for linking Cabot and Columbus rest largely on a glaring mistranslation, which warps a difficult but perfectly intelligible and well-known document, in which a Spanish ambassador in England compared the two explorers. Mr. Hunter mistakes a neuter pronoun for a masculine one, making the ambassador call Cabot the man "from the Indies," whereas the text really refers to "the business of the Indies."
HarperCollins, 547 pages, $29.99None of these writers has understood the historical context that makes the events of the 1490s intelligible. For Mr. Hunter, Mr. Bergreen and Mr. Cliff, at least, some knowledge of the history of navigation would obviously be desirable, but all fail to comprehend Columbus's celestial methods because none of them is aware of recent scholarship in Spanish and French. Because they have not read crucial work in Spanish, Mr. Bergreen and Ms. Delaney misrepresent Columbus's motive?which was social ambition, inspired in part by his self-modeling on fictional heroes such as the Alexander of a Spanish metrical romance, who discovered India by sea, or the storm-tossed protagonist of the Romance of the Cavalier. They also fail to grasp the importance of how private enterprise, rather than royal patronage, financed his voyages.
Mr. Cliff's passages on economic history show that he is unaware of the scale or extent of Indian Ocean trade before Vasco da Gama, or of the place of Europeans in it, or of the expansion of trade by traditional routes thereafter. Though he represents Vasco da Gama's explorations as episodes in the history of religion, he traduces theology and church history. He says, for instance, that Arianism (the doctrine that the persons of the Trinity are not co-equal) "taught that Jesus was purely human" and that Nestorians "believed that Christ had two natures," whereas the exact opposite is true (they thought Christ was two persons). Mr. Cliff also ignores the literature on factionalism at the Portuguese court, without which it is impossible to make sense of Vasco da Gama's career. Ms. Delaney shares Mr. Cliff's interest in chiliastic myths but has no talent for spotting them. She ignores the messianic traditions and longstanding Jerusalem obsessions of the Aragonese court?which would provide her with a better explanation than her own for Columbus's references to Jerusalem. Indeed, she misses the best evidence for her own case?Columbus's accounts of his own mystical experiences.
As a study of the adventurer's life and an essay on how he has been perceived by later generations, Sanjay Subrahmanyam's 'The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama' (1998) is unsurpassed. For those in search of the most up-to-date scholarship, 'Vasco da Gama and the Linking of Europe and Asia' (2000), edited by Anthony Disney and Emily Booth, paints in the global background, while the best brief guide to the Portuguese context is 'Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, 1400-1800' (2007), edited by Francisco Bethencourt and Diogo Curto.
The world is still waiting for a good study of Cabot, but as a brief account Samuel E. Morison's 'The European Discovery of America' (1972) is a swashbuckling classic. The most useful digest of sources is 'The Cabot Voyages and Bristol Discovery Under Henry VII' (1962)
A. Williamson. The late Alwyn Ruddock was at work on a long-promised study when she died, unhelpfully ordering the destruction of her work in progress. Under Evan Jones at Bristol University, the painstaking Cabot Project is working to retrace her steps but has published disappointingly little so far.
Columbus was extraordinarily prolific in his autobiographical writings. But many of these, which I collected in 'Columbus on Himself' (2010), are unreliable. Several of my own books are concerned in part with crafting pithy, reliable accounts of the truth. Carla and William Phillips's 'The Worlds of Christopher Columbus' (1992) similarly provides much needed context. Dedicated readers with knowledge of Spanish can catch up on post-1992 scholarship with 'Cristóbal Colón' (2006), edited by Carlos Martínez Shaw and Cecilia Parcero Torre.
I could multiply the dispiriting litany of errors, but it is more interesting to try to understand what drives these writers to parade their inadequacies in the marketplace. It is tempting to blame postmodernism, which has blurred the difference between drivel and truth; or the popularity of television-history, where no standards of veracity or scholarship apply; or the temptations aroused by vulgar sensationalists, who have made fortunes by proclaiming the peripeties of the Holy Grail and "proving" that the medieval Chinese discovered Rhode Island. I suspect, however, that the very virtues of my discipline are responsible for the vices of the writers who abuse it. Because history is the people's discipline, books about it are relatively salable?invitingly so, to indolent cupidity. History's accessibility to non-specialists makes it seem dangerously, delusively easy.
Academic historians tend to welcome recruits from other ranks, like owls nurturing cuckoos, and applaud the intrusions of neophytes with a glee that physicians, say, would never show for faith-healers or snake-oil salesmen. I am afraid it is time for historians to wipe the smiles from our jaws and start biting back. If escape from the poverty of your own imagination is your reason for exploiting the stories history offers, or if you are taking refuge from another discipline in the belief that history is easy, without bothering to do the basic work, you will deserve to fail.
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