Chapter 2

WHAT DID
COLUMBUS
REALLY DO?

In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed

the ocean blue.
In fourteen hundred and ninety-three, Columbus stole
all he could see.

—Tr a dit iona l Verse, Updat ed

A merican tex tbooks have gener ally presented

Christopher Columbus as America’s discoverer and first great
hero. Unfortunately, many of them have left out almost every-
thing that is important to know about Columbus and the Euro-
pean exploration of the Americas. Instead, they fill pages with
Copyright © 2019. The New Press. All rights reserved.

made-up details to tell a better story, one they think will make
readers identify with Columbus.
The traditional textbook account of Columbus goes some-
thing like this:

Born in Genoa, Italy, of humble parents, Christopher

Columbus became a skilled seafarer. He sailed the Atlantic
Ocean as far as Iceland and West Africa. His experiences
told him that the world must be round. This meant that the

Loewen, James W.. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Young Readers’ Edition : Everything American History Textbooks
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 18 F Lies My Teacher Told Me

fabled riches of the East—spices, silk, and gold—could be

reached by sailing west. This would replace the overland
route through the Middle East, which the Turks had closed
to Europeans.
Columbus asked many European monarchs to fund an
expedition westward to Asia. King Ferdinand and Queen
Isabella of Spain turned him down, but Columbus finally
got his chance when the queen agreed to pay for a modest
expedition.
Columbus outfitted three pitifully small ships: the Niña,
the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. The journey was difficult.
The ships sailed west into the unknown Atlantic for two
months. The crew almost mutinied and threatened to throw
Columbus overboard. Finally they reached the West Indies
on October 12, 1492.
Although Columbus made three more voyages to the
Americas, he never knew he had discovered a New World,
not a new route to the Asian lands known as the Indies. He
died ignored, disappointed, and penniless. Yet without his
daring, American history would have been very different.

Almost everything in this traditional account is either untrue

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or cannot be proven. Newer textbooks do better than older ones

in their treatment of Columbus and what happened after his
voyages to the Americas. Still, they get things wrong. Even
worse, they leave out much that could help students understand
the background and meaning of Columbus’s voyages.
Many textbooks fall short in four key areas. First is the voy-
ages to the Americas before Columbus. Second is the social
changes in Europe that led to Columbus’s voyages—and to
Europe’s domination of the world for 500 years afterward. Third

Loewen, James W.. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Young Readers’ Edition : Everything American History Textbooks
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 What Did Columbus Really Do? F 19

is the story of Columbus himself, and fourth is the question of

what Columbus actually did with his “discovery.”
Why the quote marks around discovery? Because words mat-
ter. How can someone “discover” what someone else already
knows and owns? For the same reason, calling the Americas a
New World is a problem, because people had lived in the Amer-
icas for thousands of years when Europeans arrived.
Textbook authors are struggling to move beyond Eurocen-
trism, or showing history from a limited, European point of
view. They do not always succeed. One of the newer books I
surveyed, A History of the United States, opened the first chap-
ter with “The discovery of America was the world’s greatest
surprise.” The authors meant Columbus’s discovery. Five pages
later, they try to take back the word, saying, “It was only for the
people of Europe that America had to be ‘discovered.’ Millions
of Native Americans were already here!”
Taking back words has little effect. The authors’ whole
approach is to show whites discovering nonwhites, rather than
two groups meeting each other. They are so Eurocentric that
they did not even include the people of Africa and Asia on the
list of those who had yet to “discover” America.
Copyright © 2019. The New Press. All rights reserved.

The Last “Discovery” of the Americas

Textbooks’ first mistake has usually been downplaying explor-

ers before Columbus. People from other continents reached
the Americas before 1492. If Columbus had never sailed, other
Europeans would soon have made the voyage. In fact, Europe-
ans may have been fishing off the coast of eastern Canada in the
1480s, and maybe much earlier.

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 20 F Lies My Teacher Told Me

The question of when and how the first people reached the
Americas, and where they came from, is covered in chapter 4.
But there is evidence of many expeditions that may have landed
in the Americas after those first inhabitants arrived but before
Columbus.
We owe that evidence to archaeologists, scientists who learn
about long-past societies from the physical objects they leave
behind. These researchers also find clues to the past in the
relationships among languages and in the genetics, or inherited
DNA patterns, of the modern descendants of earlier people.
Some archaeologists think that ancient Roman seafarers vis-
ited the Americas, because coins from the ancient Roman world
keep turning up all over the Americas. Native Americans also
crossed the Atlantic. Two of them were shipwrecked in Holland
in 60 b.c. and became major curiosities in Europe.
Historians and archaeologists do not agree about these and
other possible early voyages. Some of the evidence of them is not
strong. Still, if textbooks allowed controversy, they could show
students which claims rest on solid evidence and which are on
softer ground. They could challenge students to examine the
evidence and make their own decisions about what really hap-
pened. This would introduce young people to the materials that
Copyright © 2019. The New Press. All rights reserved.

researchers use to study the past—oral history, written records,

cultural similarities, language, genetics, and archaeology.
Unfortunately, textbooks seem to prefer certainty. In After
the Fact, a book for college history students, James West David-
son and Mark H. Lytle make the point that history is not a set of
facts but a series of arguments, issues, and controversies. But in
their high-school history textbook, The United States: A History
of the Republic, the same authors present history as answers, not
questions.

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 What Did Columbus Really Do? F 21

People and cultures moved around the world long before

Columbus’s time. In a sense, Columbus’s voyage was not the
first but the last “discovery” of the Americas. What do we know
about some of the earlier ones?

Voyagers Before Columbus

Seafarers from Asia may have made it to the Americas. For

example, South America and the Asian islands of Indonesia are
separated by the Pacific Ocean, but they have similar styles of
blowguns and papermaking. Some researchers think this means
the two regions may have had contact thousands of years ago.
In the same way, Japan and Ecuador share similar pottery and
fishing styles. Could Japanese sailors have crossed the Pacific
before Europeans sailed into the Atlantic or the Pacific? If such
voyages did occur, were they explorations? Or were they epics
of survival, with boats blown off course to distant landfalls? We
will likely never know, but young people could be invited to
think about these and other questions.
The Phoenicians, a trading and seafaring people of the
ancient Mediterranean world, may have voyaged to the Ameri-
Copyright © 2019. The New Press. All rights reserved.

cas. It is possible that Phoenician ships, perhaps with West Afri-

cans aboard them, reached the Atlantic coast of Mexico around
750 b.c. Giant stone heads from that time, carved by the Native
people of Mexico, stand along that coast. They look like realistic
portraits of West Africans. The first white person to describe
them wrote in 1862, “[T]here had doubtless been blacks in this
region.” Others, however, think the statues are of Native leaders.
Evidence for possible African and Phoenician contact with
Mexico includes similarities in the design of looms for weaving

Loewen, James W.. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Young Readers’ Edition : Everything American History Textbooks
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Copyright © 2019. The New Press. All rights reserved.

Nine-foot-tall rock heads face the sea in southeastern

Mexico. They were carved by Native American people called
the Olmec. An archaeologist who helped uncover the Olmec
heads thought they looked African. Others have said they
look like certain facial expressions of Native children in the
region or even like sculptures in Southeast Asia. One theory
is that they represent Native kings.

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 What Did Columbus Really Do? F 23

cloth. Arab documents written centuries later seem to support

such voyages. Some scholars dismiss this evidence as weak—
but students could be encouraged to investigate, if their text-
books mentioned the possibility.
Most textbooks in my survey did mention the well-
documented expeditions of the daring Norse sailors sometimes
called Vikings. From the northern European region of Scandi-
navia they voyaged across the North Atlantic in stages. After
establishing colonies in the Faeroe Islands and Iceland, they
reached Greenland. Their Greenland colony lasted 500 years,
from 982 to around 1500. During that time the Greenlanders
traded with Europe. They also sailed west to parts of North
America. They visited Baffin Island, Labrador, and Newfound-
land in what is now Canada. They may even have reached New
England in what is now the United States.
The textbooks that mentioned the Vikings in North America
tended to say that they had no lasting importance. “They mere-
ly touched the shore briefly, then sailed away,” said one. But
Vikings built a settlement in North America and lived in it for
two years, until conflict with Native Americans caused them to
give up. Three hundred and fifty years later, the Norse were still
harvesting wood in Labrador for their Greenland colony.
Copyright © 2019. The New Press. All rights reserved.

The Norse discoveries remained known to Europeans for

centuries. In Scandinavia they were never forgotten. If Colum-
bus visited Iceland in 1477 as he claimed, surely he learned of
Greenland—and maybe of North America.
Even if the Vikings’ voyages to North America did little to
change the fate of the world, should textbooks leave them out?
Of course not! No, we include the Norse voyages to give a more
complete picture of the past. For the same reason, we could
include earlier voyages and let students weigh the evidence.

Loewen, James W.. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Young Readers’ Edition : Everything American History Textbooks
Get Wrong, The New Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/asulib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=548265
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 African or Irish?

Two other sets of voyagers might have reached the Americas before
Columbus, from Ireland and West Africa. How do textbooks treat them?
First, the West Africans. When Columbus reached Haiti, he found that
the native Arawak people had spear points made of a metal they called
“guanine.” The Arawaks said they got them from black traders who had
come from the southeast. The metal was a combination of gold, silver,
and copper. It was identical to material used by West Africans, who also
called it “guanine.”
Islamic historians recorded voyages into the Atlantic from West Afri-
ca starting in around 1311. A century later, Portugal began sending expe-
ditions to the coast of West Africa. They learned from these contacts that
African traders had been visiting what is now Brazil. In the modern era,
corpses have been found in Brazil that date from before Columbus’s voy-
age and contain traces of common African diseases. Other bits of evi-
dence from both sides of the Atlantic also suggest that Africans may have
crossed that ocean before Columbus.
The second set of voyages is supported by evidence only from Europe.
Irish legends written in the ninth or tenth century tell of monks who vis-
ited the “promised land of the saints” during a seven-year voyage cen-
turies earlier. The legends include fantastical details, such as holding
Easter Mass on the back of a whale and visiting a “pillar of crystal” and
an “island of fire.” Yet we cannot dismiss these legends as pure fantasy.
Copyright © 2019. The New Press. All rights reserved.

When the Norse first reached Iceland in the ninth century, they found
Irish monks living there. The crystal and the fire could have been an ice-
berg and Iceland’s volcanoes.
Five of the twelve textbooks in my original sample mentioned the pos-
sible Irish voyages. Not one mentioned the West African voyages. Why
would some textbooks mention Irish voyagers while none mentions
African ones? Could it be unwillingness to think that the first non-Native
voyagers to reach the Americas were black, not white?

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 What Did Columbus Really Do? F 25

Not from Scratch

Textbooks admit that Columbus didn’t start from scratch. Every

account of the European discovery of the Americas begins with
the voyages sent out between 1415 and 1460 by Prince Hen-
ry of Portugal. Often called Prince Henry the Navigator, he is
credited with discovering the Atlantic island groups of Madeira
and the Azores, and with sending ships down the west coast of
Africa. One of Henry’s expeditions, led by Bartolomeu Dias, is
recognized in textbooks as the first to sail around the southern
tip of Africa into the Indian Ocean.
The textbook authors do not seem to know that ancient
Phoenicians and Egyptians reached Madeira and the Azores and
sailed around Africa before 600 b.c. Prince Henry knew of these
Phoenician voyages. They inspired him to send his own expe-
ditions. But they clash with one of our social archetypes—the
idea that modern technology is a European development. The
Phoenicians’ early feats of sailing do not support the story that
white Europeans taught the rest of the world how to do things.
None of the textbooks in my survey gave the Muslims cred-
it for saving the works and wisdom of ancient Greek writers,
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for adding ideas from China, India, and Africa, and for passing
all of this knowledge along to Europe through Italy and Spain.
Instead, they showed Henry inventing navigation. Several books
told how “the Portuguese invented a new kind of sailing ship—
the caravel.” In fact, Henry’s work was based mostly on ship-
building ideas and methods known to the ancient Egyptians
and Phoenicians. These methods were developed further in
Arabia, China, and North Africa. Even the Portuguese word
caravel was based on the Egyptian word caravos.

Loewen, James W.. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Young Readers’ Edition : Everything American History Textbooks
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 26 F Lies My Teacher Told Me

Cultures do not form and grow on their own. The spread of

ideas may be the most important part of cultural development.
Contact between cultures often triggers a flowering on both
sides. Anthropologists, who study human behavior, societies,
and cultures, use the term syncretism to describe what happens
when ideas from two or more cultures combine to make some-
thing new.
Schoolchildren learn that Persian and Mediterranean civili-
zations flowered in the ancient world because they were located
on trade routes where cultures met and interacted. The story of
Prince Henry is a golden opportunity to apply this same idea to
Europe—but textbooks ignore it. One of them, The American
Way, even said that before Henry, “people didn’t know how to
build seagoing ships.” By “people” the authors meant “Europe-
ans.” It was a textbook example of Eurocentrism.

The Path to World Domination

American history textbooks do mention that social changes in

Europe led up to Columbus’s first voyage in 1492. But none of
those I examined gave an in-depth explanation of these chang-
Copyright © 2019. The New Press. All rights reserved.

es. Here is the story they told, pieced together with quotes from
different books:

“Life in Europe was slow-paced.” “Curiosity about the rest

of the world was at a low point.” Then, “many changes took
place in Europe during the 500 years before Columbus’s
discovery of the Americas in 1492.” “People’s horizons
gradually widened, and they became more curious about
the world beyond their own localities.” “Europe was

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 What Did Columbus Really Do? F 27

stirring with new ideas. Many Europeans were filled with

burning curiosity. They were living in a period called the
Renaissance.” “The Renaissance encouraged people to
regard themselves as individuals.” “What started Europeans
thinking new thoughts and dreaming new dreams? A series
of wars called the Crusades were partly responsible.” “The
Crusaders acquired a taste for the exotic delights of Asia.”
“The desire for more trade quickly spread.” “The old trade
routes to Asia had always been very difficult.”

The level of scholarship is discouragingly low. The authors

don’t seem to know that the Renaissance was syncretic, blend-
ing ideas from many cultures to form something new. Instead,
they argue for Europe’s greatness in terms of mental qualities,
such as “Europeans grew more curious.” This makes sociologists
smile. We know that nobody measured the curiosity level in
Spain in 1492, or can compare it to the curiosity level in, say,
Norway or Iceland in 1000, when the Vikings were voyaging.
Most textbooks note the increase in trade and commerce in
Europe. Some point out the rise of nation-states ruled by kings.
Otherwise, they do a poor job of describing the changes that
led to the age of exploration and conquest. Yet historians know
Copyright © 2019. The New Press. All rights reserved.

that six important developments in Europe paved the way for

Columbus’s voyages and the five centuries of European domina-
tion that followed.

1. Advances in military technology. Around 1400, European

rulers began ordering ever-bigger guns. They learned to
mount them on ships. This arms race grew out of the end-
less wars among Europeans. Military advances also includ-
ed archery, siege warfare, and drill, which means training

Loewen, James W.. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Young Readers’ Edition : Everything American History Textbooks
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 28 F Lies My Teacher Told Me

soldiers to move in formations. Eventually, Europeans used

their advanced weapons against other peoples. They (we)
still do.

2. New forms of social technology. In the years before

Columbus, Europe made wider use of new tools for man-
aging information, money, and people. One tool was the
printing press. Another was a new type of bookkeeping
that was based on the decimal system, which Europeans
picked up from Arab traders. A third tool was bureaucra-
cy, a form of organization with a head (such as a king or
an elected or appointed leader) who gives some power to
others (usually appointed by the head) to carry out duties
and policies. A bureaucracy may have many levels of pow-
er, from directors to the managers beneath them to the
workers at the bottom. People today think bureaucracies
are slow and inefficient, but they work better than many
other ways of getting things done. At the time of Colum-
bus’s voyages, bureaucracy let rulers and merchants govern
far-flung ventures efficiently.

3. Changing values. Piling up wealth and dominating people

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came to be seen as the way to be admired on earth and saved

in the afterlife. As Columbus put it, “Gold is most excellent;
gold constitutes treasure; and he who has it does all he wants
in the world, and can even lift souls up to Paradise.” Sources
from Columbus’s time are perfectly clear about his motives.
Michele de Cuneo, who went to Haiti with Columbus in
1494, wrote, “After we had rested for several days in our set-
tlement, it seemed to the Lord Admiral that it was time to
put into execution his desire to search for gold, which was

Loewen, James W.. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Young Readers’ Edition : Everything American History Textbooks
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 What Did Columbus Really Do? F 29

the main reason he had started on so great a voyage full of so

many dangers.”
Columbus was no greedier than the Spanish, English, or
French. But most textbooks downplay the pursuit of wealth
as a reason for coming to the Americas. Even the Pilgrims
left Europe partly to make money, but you would never know
it from our textbooks.

4. The nature of European Christianity. Europeans believed

in a religion that could and should be spread to other peo-
ples and cultures, one that served as a reason for conquest.
(Followers of Islam share this characteristic.) Typically, after
“discovering” a new group of American Indians, the Span-
iards would read aloud—in Spanish—a statement called the
Requirement. Here is one version:

I implore you to recognize the Church as a lady and

in the name of the Pope take the King as lord of this
land and obey his [commands]. If you do not do it . . .
I will enter powerfully against you all. I will make war
everywhere and every way that I can. I will subject
you to the yoke and obedience to the Church and to
Copyright © 2019. The New Press. All rights reserved.

his majesty. I will take your women and children and

make them slaves. . . . The deaths and injuries that
you will receive from here on will be your own fault
and not that of his majesty or of the gentlemen that
accompany me.

The audience for these speeches, of course, could not

understand what was said or agree to it. So they became fair
game for conquest.

Loewen, James W.. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Young Readers’ Edition : Everything American History Textbooks
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 30 F Lies My Teacher Told Me

5. Success in taking over islands. In the years before Columbus,

European rulers successfully took over island societies in the
Mediterranean and the eastern Atlantic. In Malta, Sardinia,
the Canaries, and later Ireland, they saw that island con-
quest was a route to wealth.

6. Disease. Diseases unknown to the Americas, such as small-

pox, cowpox, influenza, and bubonic plague, arose in the
connected continents of Eurasia and Africa. As you’ll see in
chapter 3, these diseases played a big part in the European
conquest of the Americas. (They also helped Europeans take
over Hawaii and Australia.) Most textbooks now include dis-
ease when they talk about the arrival of Europeans in the
Americas. They typically say little or nothing about the other
five factors listed above.

Europeans on Top

High-school students don’t usually think about the rise of

Europe—and later North America—to world domination. It
seems natural, not something that has to be explained. Deep
Copyright © 2019. The New Press. All rights reserved.

down, our culture encourages us to imagine that we are richer

and more powerful because we are smarter. (Who, exactly, is
this “we”?)
No solid or reliable studies show Americans to be smarter
than other people. But because textbooks don’t identify the real
causes of European domination, or encourage us to think about
them, the notion that “we’re smarter” festers as a possibility.
So does the idea that “it’s natural” for one group to dominate
another. The way American history textbooks treat Columbus

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Get Wrong, The New Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/asulib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=548265
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 Bad Meat or Bad History?

When talking about the European voyages of “discovery,” some teachers

still teach what I was told decades ago. Europeans needed the spices of
“the Indies” to disguise the taste of bad meat, but the Muslim Turks had
cut off the spice trade. This forced Europeans to find sea routes to Asia.
Three books in my original sample repeated this story. It is a complete
falsehood.
As early as 1915, historian A.H. Lybyer disproved the story. Turkey had
nothing to do with the development of new sea routes from Europe to the
Indies. The truth is that the Turks had every reason to keep the old trade
route open, because they made money from it.
This particular error was again exposed in a 1957 book called The Mod-
ern Researcher, which has been used in many college history departments.
Some textbook authors probably read The Modern Researcher during their
own educations. If so, the information did not stick. Maybe blaming the
Turks for keeping pepper and cinnamon from Europeans fits better with
the Western idea that Muslims are likely to be unreasonable or nasty.
Not a single textbook I examined told that in 1507 the Portuguese
fleet blocked the Red Sea and Persian Gulf. Portugal did this to stop trade
between Europe and the Indies along the old route, because Portugal
controlled the new sea route around Africa.
Copyright © 2019. The New Press. All rights reserved.

supports this tendency not to think about domination and how

it comes about.
The traditional picture of Columbus landing on the Ameri-
can shore shows him dominating immediately. He’s dressed like
a king, and the Native Americans are nearly naked. In reality,
he would have been very hot, dressed like that in the Bahamas.
But the appearance of domination is based on fact, in a way:
right off the boat, Columbus claimed everything he saw. When

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Get Wrong, The New Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/asulib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=548265
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 32 F Lies My Teacher Told Me

textbooks celebrate this or fail to question it, they suggest that

taking the land and overpowering the people was unavoidable,
maybe even “natural.” This is a shame. Columbus’s voyages
could be a splendid opportunity to teach about the social chang-
es in Europe that I described earlier in this chapter.
As official missions of a nation-state, Columbus’s last three
voyages are perfect examples of the new Europe. Columbus
carefully documented the voyages, including descriptions of the
native people as ripe for conquest. He had personal experience
of the Atlantic islands recently taken over by Spain and Portu-
gal. He also had experience with the slave trade in West Africa.
Columbus’s purpose from the beginning was not exploration
or even trade. It was conquest and riches, with religion as a cov-
er. Merchants and rulers paid for the voyages, and the second
voyage, in particular, was heavily armed. If textbooks included
these facts, they might lead students to think intelligently about
why the West still dominates the world today.

Building a Better Myth

Take a moment to look back at the traditional textbook story

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about Columbus that opens this chapter. How much of it is

based on fact?
Many aspects of Columbus’s life remain a mystery. He
claimed to be from Genoa, Italy, and there is evidence that he
was. There is also evidence that he wasn’t. He did not seem able
to write in Italian, even to people in Italy. Some historians think
he was a converso—a Jew who had converted to Christianity—
from Spain, a country that pressured its Jews to convert. There
are other theories about his origins as well. Historians who have

Loewen, James W.. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Young Readers’ Edition : Everything American History Textbooks
Get Wrong, The New Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/asulib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=548265
Created from asulib-ebooks on 2021-10-22 06:53:58.
 Why does this T-shirt show six
different faces of Christopher
Columbus? Because although
many pictures of him exist,
not one was made during his
lifetime. We have no idea what
Columbus really looked like—
although most textbooks
include a portrait of him.

spent years studying Columbus say that we cannot be sure of

his class background, either.
We do not even know for certain where Columbus thought
he was going. Some evidence says he was trying to reach Japan,
Copyright © 2019. The New Press. All rights reserved.

India, or Indonesia. Other evidence suggests that he wanted to

reach “new” lands in the West. One possibility is that he wanted
to find new lands, but said his goal was India so that monarchs
would back his venture.
Disagreements among textbooks seem pretty scary. What was
the weather like during Columbus’s first trip? Land of Promise
said his ships were “storm-battered.” American Adventures said
they enjoyed “peaceful seas.” (Columbus’s journal says the
weather was fine.) How long was the voyage? Two months,

Loewen, James W.. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Young Readers’ Edition : Everything American History Textbooks
Get Wrong, The New Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/asulib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=548265
Created from asulib-ebooks on 2021-10-22 06:53:58.
 Advertisers use the Columbus myth to sell all kinds of things—
this ad promoted daring and courageous stockbrokers! The fake
flat-earth story pops up many times in popular culture. In the
movie Star Trek V, for example, a character says, “The people of
your world once believed the earth to be flat; Columbus proved
it was round.” Of course, he did no such thing.
Copyright © 2019. The New Press. All rights reserved.

according to one textbook, but nearly a month according to

another. (One month is correct.)
To build a better myth, American culture held on for a long
time to the idea that Columbus boldly forged ahead while every-
one else thought the world was flat. The truth is that in 1491
most people knew that the world is round. Sailors in particular
can see the roundness of the earth as ships disappear over the
horizon—first their hulls, then their masts and sails, and finally
the flags or pennants on top. Fortunately, the flat-earth fable is

Loewen, James W.. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Young Readers’ Edition : Everything American History Textbooks
Get Wrong, The New Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/asulib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=548265
Created from asulib-ebooks on 2021-10-22 06:53:58.
 Columbus’s coat of arms proves that he knew he had discovered
a continent—even though some textbooks claim he died without
realizing it. On his third voyage, Columbus passed the Orinoco
River. He knew it was too big to come from a mere island, and
he wrote, “I have come to believe that this is a mighty continent,
which was hitherto unknown.” He later added a continent to his
coat of arms (lower left).
Copyright © 2019. The New Press. All rights reserved.

all but dead. Only one of the textbooks I examined for the first
edition of this book still repeated it. That book later changed the
“flat-earth” story to “superstitious sailors . . . fearful of sailing
into the oceanic unknown.”
Sadly, other errors in the traditional Columbus story remain
uncorrected. Some versions contain details supported by no evi-
dence at all.
To build a better myth, authors tell of Queen Isabella send-
ing a messenger galloping after Columbus and pawning her jew-

Loewen, James W.. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Young Readers’ Edition : Everything American History Textbooks
Get Wrong, The New Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/asulib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=548265
Created from asulib-ebooks on 2021-10-22 06:53:58.
 36 F Lies My Teacher Told Me

els to pay for the expedition. This fable is meant to make the
odds against Columbus seem even greater.
To build a better myth, textbooks describe Columbus’s ships
as tiny and awkward. By today’s standards maybe so, but in their
time they were well-suited to Columbus’s purpose.
To build a better myth, some textbooks have blown the
crew’s complaints into a near mutiny. Traditional versions of
the story make the sailors seem superstitious and cowardly,
while Columbus appears brave, wise, and steadfast. But sources
from Columbus’s own time give different versions of the sailors’
behavior and Columbus’s reactions. It seems likely, as one biog-
raphy of Columbus says, that “[t]hey were all getting on each
other’s nerves, as happens even nowadays.”
To build a better myth, some textbooks have claimed that
Columbus faked the entries in his ship’s log to make the voyage
seem shorter than it really was. A History of the United States
says that this showed that “Columbus was a true leader” because
he did not want his men to feel they had gone too far from home.
This detail seems meant to make readers think that the people
who run things are smart, while those at the bottom are stupid
and anxious. But Columbus himself wrote in his journal that he
had faked the log entries in order to keep his route secret.
Copyright © 2019. The New Press. All rights reserved.

To build a more moving myth, textbooks have Columbus come

to a tragic end—poor, sick, and unaware of his great achieve-
ment. In reality, he died well-off and left money and a title to his
heirs. His own journal shows clearly that he knew he had reached
a “new” continent—“hitherto unknown,” as he put it. Surely this
and all the other changes and additions to the historical record
are meant to make readers identify with Columbus.
Finally, many of the textbooks I examined did mention that
after the first voyage, Columbus made three more trips to the

Loewen, James W.. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Young Readers’ Edition : Everything American History Textbooks
Get Wrong, The New Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/asulib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=548265
Created from asulib-ebooks on 2021-10-22 06:53:58.
 A Spaniard Switches Sides

Some Spaniards of Columbus’s time, such as Bartolomé de Las Casas,

stood against the cruelty that Columbus brought to Haiti. Las Casas
began as an adventurer and became a plantation owner. Then he
switched sides, freed his Native Americans, became a priest, and fought
desperately for humane treatment of the Indians. Las Casas called the
slave trade one of “the most unpardonable offenses ever committed
against God and mankind.” He helped get Spain to pass laws that pro-
tected some Indians. Textbooks that gave the full story of Las Casas
would show students an idealist and activist they could admire.

Americas. But most of them did not find space to tell us how he
treated the lands and people he “discovered.”

Conquest and Enslavement

In his four voyages to the Americas, Christopher Columbus

introduced two things that changed the modern world and rev-
olutionized relations among races. One was the taking of land,
wealth, and labor from Native American peoples. Coupled with
Copyright © 2019. The New Press. All rights reserved.

disease, this nearly wiped out some of those peoples. The other
was the transatlantic slave trade. This created a racial under-
class in the Americas.
Most of the islands Columbus reached were inhabited by the
Arawaks. Columbus’s first impression of these Native Ameri-
cans was positive. He wrote in his journal that they were “very
handsome,” with eyes “large and very beautiful.” Seeing a few
golden ornaments, Columbus “gathered from them by signs”
that gold could be found on the other side of the island, which

Loewen, James W.. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Young Readers’ Edition : Everything American History Textbooks
Get Wrong, The New Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/asulib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=548265
Created from asulib-ebooks on 2021-10-22 06:53:58.
 38 F Lies My Teacher Told Me

was probably one of the Bahamas. When he got there, he saw

several peaceful villages and wrote these menacing words: “I
could conquer the whole of them with 50 men and govern them
as I pleased.”
On that first voyage, Columbus kidnapped ten to 25 Arawaks
and took them back to Spain, along with parrots and gold trin-
kets. Only seven or eight Arawaks survived the journey, but they
caused a stir in the royal court. The Spanish monarchy promptly
outfitted Columbus for a second voyage with seventeen ships,
1,200 to 1,500 men, cannons, crossbows, guns, mounted sol-
diers, and attack dogs. The purpose was conquest.
Columbus reached Haiti and demanded that the people
turn over food, gold, cloth—anything the Spaniards wanted,
including women. American Indians who committed even
minor offenses had their noses or ears cut off to show what
the Spaniards could do. Finally, the Natives had enough and
tried to fight back with their only weapons, stones and pointed
sticks. This gave Columbus an excuse to make war. Bartolomé
de Las Casas described the force Columbus used to put down
the rebellion:

For this he chose 200 foot soldiers and 20 cavalry, with

Copyright © 2019. The New Press. All rights reserved.

many crossbows and small cannon, lances, and swords, and

a still more terrible weapon against the Indians, in addition
to the horses: this was 20 hunting dogs, who were turned
loose and immediately tore the Indians apart.

Naturally, the Spanish won. Then, because Columbus had

not yet found much gold but needed to take something back
to Spain, he held a great raid and took a thousand captives.
Columbus was excited. “In the name of the Holy Trinity, we can

Loewen, James W.. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Young Readers’ Edition : Everything American History Textbooks
Get Wrong, The New Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/asulib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=548265
Created from asulib-ebooks on 2021-10-22 06:53:58.
 Columbus Landing in the Bahamas (above) is typical of the
heroic treatment of Columbus in most textbooks. Created by
John Vanderlyn in 1847, it is one of eight huge “historical” paint-
ings in the U.S. Capitol. An alternative illustration might show
the impact of Columbus and his followers on the Americas. For
example, in around 1588 Theodor de Bry illustrated the “New
World” in woodcuts, some of which show Native people suffering
under the Spanish (below). They were seen throughout Europe
and helped give rise to the “Black Legend” of Spanish cruelty.
Other nations used the Black Legend to criticize Spain’s behavior
in its colonies, mostly out of envy. But textbooks have usually
shown the activities of Columbus and his men as glorious.
Copyright © 2019. The New Press. All rights reserved.

Loewen, James W.. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Young Readers’ Edition : Everything American History Textbooks
Get Wrong, The New Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/asulib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=548265
Created from asulib-ebooks on 2021-10-22 06:53:58.
 40 F Lies My Teacher Told Me

send from here all the slaves . . . which could be sold,” he wrote
to the Spanish king and queen.
Hispaniola, or “little Spain,” the renamed colony in Haiti,
became a nightmare. Spaniards hunted American Indians for
sport and murdered them for dog food. The Natives had to pro-
vide the Spaniards with either gold or cotton. Those who met
their quotas were given brass tokens to wear. The tokens were
good for three months. Indians caught with out-of-date tokens
had their hands cut off.
All of these gruesome details are available in letters from
Columbus and members of his expedition and in the writing
of Las Casas, the first great historian of the Americas. Most
textbooks in my survey made little or no use of these sources. If
they did use them, they chose passages that reveal nothing bad
about Columbus.
The Spaniards’ demands were impossible for the Indians
to meet. So Columbus introduced the encomienda system, in
which he “gave” whole Indian villages to Spanish colonists.
Because this system of forced labor was not called slavery, it
escaped the criticism that slavery received. The encomienda
system later spread across Spain’s new colonies in Mexico, Peru,
and Florida.
Copyright © 2019. The New Press. All rights reserved.

Native Americans couldn’t stand the cruelty. They commit-

ted suicide by the hundreds. Women refused to bear children
or even killed their babies “so as not to leave them in such
oppressive slavery,” as a Spaniard wrote in 1517. To her cred-
it, Queen Isabella was against outright enslavement. She even
returned some American Indians to their homelands. But oth-
er nations rushed to copy Columbus. Portugal, England, and
France shipped whole populations of Native Americans off in
bondage.

Loewen, James W.. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Young Readers’ Edition : Everything American History Textbooks
Get Wrong, The New Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/asulib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=548265
Created from asulib-ebooks on 2021-10-22 06:53:58.
 Portraying Columbus and
the “New World”

The combination of the slave trade and new European diseases destroyed
American Indian populations. Whole regions of the Americas were emp-
tied. The deaths of the Indians meant that enslaving Indians could not
solve Europeans’ demand for cheap labor. As a result, Europeans turned
to large-scale slave traffic in the opposite direction, from Africa to the
Americas. Columbus’s son started this trade, on Haiti. Then, in 1519, Hai-
ti became the site of the Americas’ first large-scale slave revolt when
blacks and Native Americans banded together. The Spanish did not
bring the uprising under control until the 1530s.
Of the eighteen textbooks I examined, one new one, The Americans,
revealed the conflict on Haiti. It quoted Las Casas, who wrote that the
savage methods of the Spanish would end only “when there are no more
land or people to subjugate and destroy in this part of the world.” One
of the older books, The American Adventure, associated Columbus with
slavery. One old and one new one let it go with something like “Colum-
bus proved to be a far better navigator than governor.” The other books,
old and new, mostly adore him.
Clearly, most of these textbooks were not about teaching the true
history of Columbus. They seemed to be about building character. They
treated Columbus as America’s origin myth: He was good and so are
we. Presidents still say these things: in October 2017, President Donald
Copyright © 2019. The New Press. All rights reserved.

Trump said that Columbus “inspired countless others to pursue their

dreams and their convictions.”
Textbook authors who used Columbus to build character clear-
ly had no interest in telling what he did with the Americas once he
reached them. Yet that is half of the story, and perhaps the more
important half.

Loewen, James W.. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Young Readers’ Edition : Everything American History Textbooks
Get Wrong, The New Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/asulib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=548265
Created from asulib-ebooks on 2021-10-22 06:53:58.
 42 F Lies My Teacher Told Me

The Clash of Cultures

Columbus’s second expedition launched what journalist Kirk-

patrick Sale has called “the clash of cultures that was to echo
down five centuries.” To understand either European or Ameri-
can history, it is necessary to know something about Columbus’s
harsh treatment of the Native Americans. His methods are a
major part of his legacy. After all, they worked. They drove the
American Indians into servitude or death.
The voyages of Columbus forever changed the Americas, but
they brought almost as much change to Europe. Crops, animals,
diseases, and ideas began to cross the Atlantic in both direc-
tions. In 1972, historian Alfred W. Crosby Jr. coined the term
“Columbian exchange” for this vast and far-reaching process.
One result was the rise of racial thinking. People in Europe
before Columbus didn’t think of themselves as “white”—they
were Spanish, French, and so on. But once the transatlantic
slave trade was under way, Europeans started to see themselves
as having something in common, as opposed to Native Ameri-
cans and Africans. They began to see “white” as a race and to
see “race” as an important characteristic.
Copyright © 2019. The New Press. All rights reserved.

Politically, the Americas puzzled Europeans. Were the

Native Americans examples of simpler, better societies from
the dawn of time, or were they primitive savages? How could
large, complex societies have arisen in Mexico and Peru without
social organizations like Europe’s? How could Native groups
like the Iroquois Confederacy in New York or the Choctaws
in Mississippi and Alabama govern large areas without much
of a hierarchy—a system based on levels of power, status, and
authority?

Loewen, James W.. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Young Readers’ Edition : Everything American History Textbooks
Get Wrong, The New Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/asulib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=548265
Created from asulib-ebooks on 2021-10-22 06:53:58.
 What Did Columbus Really Do? F 43

The Americas changed more than just the way Europeans

thought. Almost half the major crops now grown throughout
the world originally came from the Americas. Adding Amer-
ican corn to African diets caused the population of Africa to
grow, boosting the slave trade to the Americas. Adding Amer-
ican potatoes and corn to European diets caused a population
explosion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, especially
in northern Europe. This fueled the flow of Europeans to the
Americas and Australia. It also shifted power northward with-
in Europe, from Spain and Italy to England, France, Germany,
and Russia.
Gold, silver, and other resources from the Americas enriched
Europe. The precious metals replaced land as the basis for
wealth and social status. Europe’s new wealth undermined pow-
er in other parts of the world.
Not one textbook in my original sample talked about the
global effects of the Columbian exchange. Since that time, the
idea has seeped into American history textbooks. Most of them
now credit American Indians with developing important crops.
They also recognize that Europeans and Africans carried dis-
eases, as well as animals such as pigs, horses, and cattle, to the
Americas.
Copyright © 2019. The New Press. All rights reserved.

Yet the two-way flow of ideas still goes largely unnoticed.

This robs young people of the chance to appreciate the role of
Native American ideas in forming the modern world.

Two Views of Columbus

Some people have attacked the portrait of Columbus I present

here as too negative. But I am not saying that we should start

Loewen, James W.. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Young Readers’ Edition : Everything American History Textbooks
Get Wrong, The New Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/asulib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=548265
Created from asulib-ebooks on 2021-10-22 06:53:58.
 44 F Lies My Teacher Told Me

teaching American history by crying that Columbus was bad

and so are we. History is more complicated than that.
Columbus’s conquest of Haiti was an amazing feat of courage
and imagination. It was also an outburst of bloody violence that
set a pattern for enslavement and for genocide, the destruction
of entire peoples. Columbus is important because he was both a
heroic navigator and a great plunderer. If he were merely a nav-
igator, he might be only a footnote in history textbooks, like the
Vikings. Instead, he launched a great change in the world. After
him, the world became divided between the exploiters and the
exploited, the developed and the underdeveloped.
When history textbooks leave out the causes of Europe’s
world domination, they offer history designed to keep us from
asking important questions. When they glorify Columbus, they
nudge us toward identifying with an oppressor. Perhaps worst
of all, when textbooks paint a simple portrait of a godly, heroic
Columbus, they provide a feel-good history that bores everyone,
especially kids.
Copyright © 2019. The New Press. All rights reserved.

Loewen, James W.. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Young Readers’ Edition : Everything American History Textbooks
Get Wrong, The New Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/asulib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=548265
Created from asulib-ebooks on 2021-10-22 06:53:58.