Columbus Day continues to be wrongfully maligned. If you measure greatness by sheer number of people affected by someone’s actions, it would be hard to find many people greater than Columbus. He did what no pre-Columbian explorer did: established a lasting link between the New World and the Old. Compare him to Neil Armstrong: The landing on the moon was a great symbolic and scientific achievement, but there are no lunar colonies, no interplanetary (or inter-satelliatary?) travel. No one has even been to the moon for thirty years. Compare Armstrong’s achievement to Columbus’: Within fifty years of his voyage, there were substantial Spanish settlements on Hispaniola, Cuba and in Mexico. The Inca and Aztec Empires had been brought to their knees, and the first Cathedral in the New World (in Merida, Mexio–I’ve been there; it was built with stones from Maya Temples and you can still see some traces of Maya drawings) was already built a few years later. Neither Ericsson nor Armstrong can boast of such a quick and impressive results of their voyages, and their failure to effect such results demonstrates Columbus’ greatness.

But Columbus’ greatness is thrown into even greater relief when you examine his and Ericsson’s long-term influence. I don’t believe there is any evidence that Columbus (or, for that matter, much of anyone else) had even heard of Ericsson’s voyage in 1492. Certainly none of the Spanish sources I’ve read on the issue make any reference to Ericsson. Ericsson accomplished nothing very constructive, and nothing at all that lasted. But look at Columbus’ long-term influence: The UN Declaration of Human Rights, the light bulb, The Catcher in the Rye, the theory of Continental Drift, Samba Music, and the Star Wars Trilogy, among other things, are inconceivable without Columbus’ voyage.

Moreover, Columbus is one of the few instances in the world where credit goes to the man who actually did the deed rather than monarch who sponsored him. Prince Henry of Portugal is called “the navigator” even though he never left Portugal. The tendency gets particularly bad with buildings: Louis XIV didn’t build Versailles; he paid other people to build it with money he extorted from peasants. The trend reaches its nadir in Tibet, where King Song-tsen Gampo is credited with building the Tsu Lha Khang with his own hands, multiplying himself into a thousand bodies so that he could work on all the different parts of the temple simultaneously. The peasants who really swung the hammers to build the temple get no credit at all. But Columbus does: while a lot of people know that he was in the pay of Ferdinand and Ysabel, it is he, who faced death, who lived on a tiny ship for weeks at a time, who gets the credit. Let’s not take it away from him.

To those who argue that, while Columbus may have been great, but was not good, I reply that goodness is not the issue at hand and that his goodness is cause for a certain amount of ambivalence. We who go to church are reminded weekly that the human race is a collection of sinners, and that pointing out the flaws of another individual is like shooting fish in a barrel. Of course Columbus had his faults and the momentous events that followed his voyage were full of suffering. Did anyone expect anything different? I would remind such detractors that for almost anyone living in Europe, Africa, or the Americas (including native Americans), wishing that Columbus had not sailed or that the connection that he forged had remained unfused, is like wishing your mother had not met your father. The last 519 years are unimaginable without Columbus, and so is anything in that period that you are pleased about, including your own birth. If you celebrate your birthday, it is not incongruous to celebrate Columbus, without whom so many of us would never have been born.

I read much of this post aloud to my housemates. I figured you’d want to know.