Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tainnor | Hacker News Reader

> I also don't understand why people get a boner with Columbus. It is since the Greeks that people knew the world was not flat, and the vikings (presumably Leif Erikson) landed in Canada much earlier after a quick hop from Greeland. The only questions left at that point were: how big is that land over there, and can you get to India traveling West? It's all good and stuff, but not mind-blowing to me.

Columbus was also famously a big idiot that just got lucky. He believed for some reason that the earth was much smaller than it actually was (contrary to established belief at the time) and that he could easily find a way to India by travelling over the Atlantic. If the Americas didn't exist, he and his crew would have died at sea. He remained convinced that the territory he discovered was part of India until his death.

View on HN

Also note that around the same time other European expeditions were making similar discoveries: 2 years before Columbus, Dias discovered the Cape of Good Hope and a decade later Da Gama braved 10,000 km of open ocean and discovered a sea route to India.

Discover of the West Indies was imminent. Columbus only won because he took an irrational gamble.

The Portuguese were doing the rational thing and taking the much rational and safer option.

Was anyone really going west before Columbus? Of course I assume the Portuguese might have discovered Brazil eventually anyway because of the ocean currents

Traveling west? Yes.

Traveling west, reaching land, leaving enough evidence to confirm the story five centuries later, making it back, and finally, convincing other people that it happened? No.

Yeah the Portuguese keeping Brasil secret is seductive conspiracy theory.

I think that America being there at all is super hindsight-y. A priori there were no states in America that had made contact with the people’s across Eurasia and Africa. There were the Vikings, and some northern nomads.

The Pacific is huge. So big that you can’t fit it all in one hemisphere. We have had long periods with single supercontinents and no other major landmasses.

Sailing west into the Atlantic as a European was a massive gamble. Matched only by the navigators of the South Pacific, and even then they were far more competent navigators of open ocean and had techniques that Columbus didn’t have. He just had heaps of money, some great boats, and huge will.

The Portuguese obviously discovered Brazil before Columbus (or worst case, contemporaneous), because of the dividing line drawn up in the Treaty of Tordesillas:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Tordesillas

It's not known how they did so (windblown fisherman, or expeditions that kept knowledge secret, probably both). The truth is that the passage from Europe to Cape of Good Hope - and back - is much more natural following trade winds via Brazil.

I am always skeptical of these people who row from Spain/Azores to the Caribbean or mainland S. America, because if you push a boat out from the Azores at the right time of year, that's exactly where you will go. If I look at the speed of the 'rowers', compared to the sea drift of a small boat, I find they reduced their time by 50-60%.

If someone puts up a small unattended sail, or even had a bigger wind cross-section of a larger boat (with unused oars :), they would beat the rower every time. There are several records of unmanned boats abandoned in storms, or torn lose from their anchors, which float the crossing in similar times. The rower only wins in calm seas. The exertion of the rower may be admirable, but the time and the crossing are not.

Coming back is similar, but more demanding. First, you have to go north to find the westerly trades and the Gulf Stream, but once you do, your passage will be swift. However, the seas of N. Atlantic are stormier and colder, so if anything goes wrong, you are in a lot more trouble.

I now see there is new evidence that Vikings made it to the Azores, and lived there for some time (mice genomes and DNA of fungi that live on domesticated animal droppings).

If they made it to the Azores, it would only take one storm, or a bold adventurer (not in short supply), to take one or more boats to the central Americas. There are legends of white bearded men in central American myths.

Too many big discoveries were made by people who were "too idiotic or hard headed" to realize that something is impossible. Clever and level headed people will look at an endeavour, calculate that the risk/reward is terrible and not even try. It takes a special kind of person to do this kind of stuff, and many die trying such that we don't even hear about them. The few who get lucky and succeed push humanity's reach to (literally) new frontiers and get remembered as great explorers.

So while I agree that a "lucky idiot" is often a good description for these efforts, I think it is very important that we do not diminish their importance. It took someone like Columbus to make this trip, and yes he had to get supremely lucky, it doesn't diminish from the fact that he took risks that paid off handsomely.

> Too many big discoveries were made by people who were "too idiotic or hard headed" to realize that something is impossible.

While this does sometimes happen, I do think that the more common situation is that people actually review the existing evidence and prior art and then they make a calculated (!) gamble - in fact, this is e.g. probably why the Wright brothers succeeded as pioneers of aviation as opposed to dozens of other people who would just try stuff more haphazardly and then end up dying in the process.

Not to mention that he was hugely genocidal and enslaved the Tainos; who really wants to lay claim to that.

I don't know that Columbus was genocidal. He was a slaver, rapist, murderer, gold digger and all-round motherfucker for sure, so much so that the Spanish monarchy sent an envoy to arrest him, bring him back to Spain to be tried, and threw him in jail I think for a couple years. Aside from gold and spices sent from him back to the Spanish monarchs after his first arrival, he also sent back slaves and the queen was, presumably, utterly disgusted. But as far as I know, his exploits did not amount to "genocidal". I'm less certain about this than my other points, though.

Closer to "genocidal" would be Hernan Cortes, who pretty much took down the Aztecs.

> Closer to "genocidal" would be Hernan Cortes, who pretty much took down the Aztecs.

Well that's what you get when you go about enslaving and committing genocide against your neighbours for centuries prior. Cortes didn't even have to try - all the neighbouring nations eagerly joined the Spanish to wipe out the Aztecs. Even after that, the Aztecs weren't wiped out - they were just converted hard to Christianity and assimilated into Spanish society, even though they even had their own divisions in the armed forces. They eventually culturally assimilated the rest of the meso-Americans and gave us what Mexican culture is today.

Now what happened to the Maya is a tragedy. Books burnt, people enslaved and relegated to the lowest rung even today.

The Maya suffered for sure, but they survived in numbers that exceed all of native American population in the US, for example, and kept their language. Others had it much worse.

But not their history, literature, wealth, or power. They were reduced from an empire to a group of often landless peasant farmers.

Discrimination against the Maya happens even today, even in countries where they're part of the majority population (or close to majority).

Calling Cortes genocidal is also quite farfetched, considering that he conquered the Aztec territory, despite being vastly outnumbered, because every native tribe and settlement they found on the way banded together to overthrow the Aztec.

I wouldn't call the Aztecs genocidal either, despite the ritual sacrifices, brutal treatment of other peoples, and everybody in mesoamerica who came to know them hating them so much that they preferred the uncertain fate of joining the white bearded men from the east.

Yeah I think the light use of the word genocide doesn't make justice for the instance where there was actual genocide, which is when you murder people with the explicit intent of destroying a nation/culture/group.

The cheapening of the word genocide by applying it loosely is indeed ugly and dangerous.

The approach of colonizers from the west in the new world was broadly genocidal though. Like, "we want to live here, so go on git." Killing buffalo to literally starve natives, for example. Allowing natives in occupied lands to be only slaves or dead, for example. Even if it doesn't 100% fit whatever hard definition you're using, it approximates it pretty goddamn well.

Cortez only had about 500 soldiers. He didn't even had the permission of the Spanish crown, it was a private enterprise. How did he conquered a city of warriors with a population of 300K ? The Aztecs were tyrants that had abused their neighboring states for decades. Cortez built alliances with Tlaxalans and other tribes. There were battles, a small pox epidemic and a lot of blood. But Cortez was overall a great diplomat that took all the cities under Aztec control one by one until only Tenochtitlan remained.

Thanks for adding.

def genocidal: relating to or involving the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.

Pedantic to say that Columbus subjugating entire people groups with mass murder doesn't qualify here. The manpower skew was huge, so how exactly did they subjugate the Tainos without genocide? 7M tainos died when all was said and done.

7M tainos by the hand of Columbus and his crew?

I don't question that what the Spanish accomplished was a massacre. I just question whether that can be attributed to Columbus himself. He did 3 trips to the Americas, none of which lasted very long:

1st Voyage - 1492-1493

2nd Voyage - 1493-1496

3rd Voyage - 1498-1500

You don't have to personally perpetrate or even succeed to be genocidal right? If your intention is "drive out the natives and eradicate them because they're pests unless enslaved" that's genocidal.

Are we ready to change the name to "United States of Cyndi" then?

Or you think that Americo Vespucci was a saint?

I don't see anybody lobbying for that. Maybe this recent revisionist movements are formed by a bunch of hypocrites?

To be fair- they all were and are like that, back then and now. It just that the industrialization dividend created a cultural power asymmetry which made those nightmares a permanently one sided affair for a while.

Why do we need "to be fair" about who we celebrate? I don't understand why anyone is arguing the point that we shouldn't celebrate people who did awful things.

They also weren't all the same. Not everyone goes around enslaving people and using their life to seek riches and fame. I don't think anyone complains about historical figures who, flaws and all, fought for higher ideals like personal liberty.

Because they were all horrible people? The atctecs were the russians of south america- a grueling empire, that had it won the run to steam ships first would have invaded africa and europe, to build human sacrifice pyramids?

They are just characters, surfing the waves of technological change and resulting cultural power asymmetries. They are surprisingly irrelevant and replaceable. But they are the representatives of cultural deficiencies, propelled onwards by geography and circumstances into moments of clarity, where one party is thrown into a "catchup" race at all costs to prevent the other from overtaking it now or later.

You can just not celebrate columbus; I don't think anyone is poorer for it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com