00:00:00.100Welcome to Bitchy History, the American History podcast that isn't afraid to tell you that Christopher Columbus would have his own story arc on Criminal Minds if he was around today.0.99
00:00:14.220Welcome back! Last Monday we were looking at the Age of Exploration and how that would eventually play into the colonization of the Americas by Europe.0.81
00:00:21.800Today we'll continue that by discussing the discovery of America, by Western Europe at least.
00:00:26.960We talk about this discovery far too much, considering how Western Europeans are actually the last continental area to discover the Americas.
00:00:35.360Last and best remembered, or something like that, I guess.
00:00:38.980When talking about the discovery of the New World, Columbus usually tries to suck all of the oxygen out of the room when it comes to the discovery of the Americas.
00:00:46.700That credit freely belongs to Leif Erikson as far as Europe is concerned
00:00:51.060Who made it to what's now Newfoundland and Canada
00:00:53.580About 500 years before Columbus put his genocidal feet on Caribbean soil
00:00:57.380There are actually two accounts of Leif's visit to Canada
00:01:02.260In the Saga of Eric the Red, it says that Erikson's ship drifted off course
00:01:05.980While returning to Greenland from Norway
00:01:07.660And he disembarked in what is now Nova Scotia
00:01:10.240Another 13th century tale titled The Saga of the Greenlanders
00:01:13.940says that Erikson learned of the new land from another seaman a decade earlier and that Erikson
00:01:18.860sailed there on purpose, landing first in an icy region he named Helloland, believed now to be
00:01:23.580Baffin Island, and the heavily forested Markland, thought to be Labrador, before eventually making
00:01:29.000his way to the more hospitable Vinland. Unlike later European colonizing attempts,
00:01:34.420Leif appears to have had very little interaction with the natives of the area, and what little he
00:01:38.700had seems to have been friendly, at least more friendly than the interactions his brother
00:01:43.080Thorvald Eriksson had with the natives when he followed up his brother's expedition a few years
00:01:47.300later. He spent about two years exploring the coast of Vinland, but eventually hostilities
00:01:52.020grew between his expedition and the natives, and Thorvald was fatally wounded in a battle and
00:01:56.780supposedly buried somewhere on the North American coast, though we don't know where. After the Eriksson
00:02:01.940brothers, there's a lengthy gap in well-known explorations of the Americas, not starting again
00:02:06.620until the Age of Exploration. Now, I was going to try to speed run my normal lecture on the general
00:02:12.660history of some of the most famous early european explorers of the new world but i very quickly
00:02:17.420remembered that when i do history content i am physically incapable of speed running anything
00:02:22.480because there's always just one more teeny tiny little factoid that i think is super interesting
00:02:27.000and i have to try to squeeze in and this is why the number one complaint about my university class
00:02:31.980is that it's very lecture heavy but you are all here of your own free will so there are a number
00:02:38.560of relatively well-known explorers who ventured across the ocean to check out the new world
00:02:42.520I could probably fill an entire episode with random facts and stories about various sailors
00:02:47.300and explorers from this period, but for today, I want to mostly focus on the Spanish colonial
00:02:52.380exploits. That said, we are going to start with an Italian because he's the one the continent is
00:02:57.560named after. That Italian would be Amerigo Vespucci. He was an Italian merchant, explorer,
00:03:03.380and navigator from Florence. Between 1497 and 1504, Vespucci participated in at least two
00:03:09.100Atlantic voyages, the first for Spain and the second for Portugal. He would then go on to
00:03:13.600publish two booklets, or at least they were published under his name, which contained some
00:03:17.900colorful descriptions of the New World. Like how he thought that the natives lived for 150 years
00:03:24.160and rarely fell ill, and he also believed that native men let poisonous animals bite their
00:03:28.980genitals in order to make them, and I quote, swell up to such a huge size that they appear0.95
00:03:34.560deformed and disgusting. This was apparently to better please their women sexually. I have so many0.99
00:03:40.380questions. Like, where did he get this idea? Why was he looking at their genitals? Was he jealous?
00:03:46.400But to be honest, while I say I have a lot of questions, I would actually rather that none of
00:03:50.640those questions be answered ever, which is a rare thing for me to say. Like a lot of explorers at
00:03:56.920this time, his writing is very much focused as a sort of ethnographic look at the peculiarities
00:04:01.420of the native tribes he encountered he was much more respectful than some clearly having some
00:04:06.180respect for the tribes and not treating them as less than human in his descriptions he even wrote
00:04:10.880that he found the women to be tolerably beautiful but he was more than a bit preoccupied with their
00:04:15.640lack of clothing and sexual habits both publications surprise surprise were popular and widely read in
00:04:21.560Europe and this popularity is how Amerigo's name ended up associated with the entire continent
00:04:27.620See, in 1507, a German cartographer named Martin Waldseemuller created a map known as the Universalis Cosmographa,
00:04:34.840which was the first map to use the name America for a continent.
00:04:38.240In this case, it was the title given to what is now South America.
00:04:41.320This was done in Amerigo Vespucci's honor, likely because his books about his travels were so widely read in Europe at the time.
00:04:47.860Amerigo became America when Waldseemuller Latinized Vespucci's name.
00:04:52.300The connection between Waldseemuller's map and Amerigo probably didn't hurt sales of the print
00:04:56.920either since Amerigo's books were already widely read, which had to be helpful since maps couldn't
00:05:01.880have been that big a seller, right? I am saying that while explicitly ignoring the three different
00:05:07.120maps I have framed on my own home office wall right at this moment, one of them being a print
00:05:11.540of the Waldseemuller map. The Spanish are really the ones who do the bulk of early colonization
00:05:16.960and exploration of the Americas, especially in South America. There are a number of famous
00:05:21.540explorers who worked for Spain during this period. We'll start this off by discussing Vasco de Balboa.
00:05:27.360Explorer, governor, and conquistador, he founded the first permanent European settlement on the
00:05:31.820mainland of America, the settlement of Santa Maria l'Antigua del Darion in 1510 in what is now
00:05:36.960Colombia. He was also the first American explorer to lead an expedition that reached the Pacific
00:05:41.620Ocean from the New World, which he accomplished by sailing through the Isthmus of Panama in 1513.
00:05:47.360Ferdinand Magellan was a Portuguese explorer at first, but he would become a subject of the
00:05:51.660Spanish monarchy in 1518, and it is his 1519 Spanish expedition to the East Indies across
00:05:57.320the Pacific Ocean to open a maritime trade route, which would cement his fame in history.
00:06:02.100A large part of this was his discovery of the Magellan Strait, an interoceanic passage in
00:06:06.400southern Chile. His crew would go on to complete the first circumnavigation of the globe, though
00:06:10.940Magellan himself would die in 1521 before that voyage was completed.
00:06:15.460Hernán Cortés, of course, was less of a Spanish explorer and more just a conqueror.
00:06:19.980Cortés was part of the generation of Spanish explorers and conquistadors who began the first
00:06:24.060phase of major Spanish colonization in the Americas. Cortés executed a very successful
00:06:29.040strategy of allying with some indigenous people against others. After he overthrew the Aztec0.94
00:06:33.920Empire, Cortés was awarded the title of the Marques of the Valley of Oaxaca. In 1541,
00:06:39.440Cortes returned to Spain, where he would die six years later of natural causes.
00:06:44.060Cortes perpetuated one of the most destructively violent wars of the Spanish in the New World,
00:06:48.700but he wasn't always competent at it. In his third letter, Cortes writes this about the siege
00:06:54.260of Tenochtitlan. Since our powder was running very short, we had spoken over a fortnight before
00:06:59.420of making a catapult, and although we had no engineers really competent to undertake it,
00:07:04.580yet some carpenters offered to make a small one. The catapult took some four days to put into
00:07:08.920position even after it appeared in the square meanwhile our indian allies were proclaiming to1.00
00:07:13.680those in the city and what a marvelous manner we were going to kill them all both hopes however0.50
00:07:18.380were doomed to disappointment for neither did the carpenters succeed in working their engine
00:07:22.220nor did the inhabitants though frightened make any move towards surrender so that we were obliged to
00:07:27.220cover up the failure of the catapult by saying that moved by compassion we were unwilling to
00:07:31.980kill them all so yes that meme you've seen about how embarrassing the spanish trebuchet slash
00:07:37.700catapult construction was that failed utterly was true. We've got at least three corroborating0.99
00:07:43.540sources on it from both the Spanish and Mexico side of the war. Of course, the Spanish weren't0.81
00:07:48.800happy to stop with the destruction of the Aztecs. Francisco Pizarro would soon follow up with his0.98
00:07:53.680conquest of Peru, where he would decimate the Incan Empire. In 1529, about eight years after
00:07:59.040Cortes' siege, Pizarro obtained permission from the Spanish crown to lead a campaign to conquer
00:08:04.060Peru. Pizarro captured the Incan Emperor Atahualpa at the Battle of Cajamarca in November of 1532.
00:08:11.040A ransom for the emperor's release was demanded, and the Atahualpa people filled a room with gold,
00:08:16.740but Pizarro charged him with various crimes and executed him in July of 1533 regardless.
00:08:22.000The first time we see the reason for don't negotiate with terrorists or pay the ransom
00:08:26.600being a solid foreign policy decision. The same year, Pizarro entered the Inca capital of Cuzco
00:08:32.780and completed his conquest of Peru. In January of 1535, Pizarro would found the city of Lima.
00:08:39.300Now, of course, as we've gone through this list, you may have noticed that I have blatantly skipped
00:08:44.580an entire chunk of history. There is a glaringly obvious name that has not been concluded, and that
00:08:49.420is because I have saved the worst for last. Now, believe me, I am not saying that any of these
00:08:54.420European explorers weren't awful in their own right, but the Spanish seem to have been uniquely0.99
00:08:59.360horrific during this period, and that trend started out along with the first of the explorers0.81
00:09:03.940that Spain sent off to the New World in 1492. Christopher Columbus, Italian explorer born in
00:09:09.840Genoa, best known for being the first European contact with the Caribbean and Central America.
00:09:15.140He planned to seek a western route to the East Indies with the funding of Spain, hoping to find
00:09:19.200a shorter route for the spice trade. This obviously didn't work, but for years Columbus insisted that
00:09:24.560he had in fact made it to the indies if you're my age you probably remember the little ditty we all
00:09:30.220learned in school in 1492 columbus sailed the ocean blue i'm honestly not sure on the provenance
00:09:37.200of this particular rhyming couplet but longer forms of the poem exist the longer version that
00:09:42.420i can typically find online includes this frighteningly reductive understanding of the
00:09:47.400relationship between columbus and the natives the air walk natives were very nice they gave the
00:09:53.360sailors, food, and spice. Columbus sailed on to find some gold to bring back home, as he'd been
00:10:01.400told. He made the trip again and again, trading for gold to bring to Spain. The first American?
00:10:11.280No, not quite. But Columbus was brave, and he was bright. We cheer for him and say hooray,
00:10:19.320especially on Columbus Day. Honestly I'm not sure if I'm more offended by the fact that they tried
00:10:26.320to rhyme again in Spain in this book or with the horrific whitewashing of history. Now it's
00:10:32.480definitely the whitewashing obviously but the rhyming is pretty bad. Now I'm not saying that
00:10:38.200the gory details of the real story of Columbus that I'm about to share with all of you should
00:10:42.540be taught to kindergartners but the least we could do is not teach them that it was some friendly
00:10:46.900get together where everyone shared their toys and got along? Because it absolutely wasn't. It was an
00:10:52.240immensely horrifying genocide. When Columbus arrived in the Caribbean, his first landing
00:10:57.340place was an island in the Bahamas known to the natives as Guanahani. He would subsequently visit
00:11:01.900the islands now known as Cuba and Hispaniola, establishing a colony in what is now Haiti.
00:11:06.940After he arrived, he would send letters back to Spain about what he had found there.
00:11:10.900In those letters, he described the natives. These people are very simple as regards to the use of
00:11:16.140arms as your highness will see from the seven that I caused to be taken to bring home and learn0.94
00:11:21.300our language and return with 50 men they can all be subjugated and made to do what is required of
00:11:26.940them and they have no iron or steel or weapons nor are they capable of using them although they
00:11:33.480are well-built people of handsome stature because they are wondrously timid now as I say to my
00:11:39.940students on the first day of the semester it is incredibly important that we remember to look at
00:11:44.940historical context in the analysis of the actions of a historical figure. And it's absolutely true
00:11:50.900that many of the explorers and colonial governors of this period treated the natives horrifically.
00:11:55.280But even by his own contemporary standards, Columbus was an outlier in his blatant cruelty.
00:12:01.74056 years after Columbus arrived in the New World, only 500 of the original 300,000 native
00:12:07.460inhabitants of the islands would still be alive. Between 1494 and 1496, during the midst of
00:12:13.880Columbus's governorship of the Indies, a hundred thousand of the natives would die, half of them
00:12:19.620to mass suicide, which they preferred to the cruelty and enslavement that they were put through
00:12:23.900by Columbus and the Spanish. Natives jumped from cliffs, poisoned themselves, even starved0.93
00:12:28.860themselves because death was better than what awaited them if they had to live under Spanish0.98
00:12:32.680rule. Columbus kidnapped native tribesmen and sent them to Europe as slaves. In one instance,
00:12:38.400Columbus ordered 1,500 men and women seized. 500 were sent to Spain as slaves with about 200
00:12:43.740of those dying on the voyage. Columbus also used the natives as slaves on their own land,
00:12:48.800generally doing hard labor and gold mining. This was brutally hard work and anyone not pulling
00:12:53.420their weight could expect whippings or the loss of ears, limbs, or even their life. Something like
00:12:58.44010,000 natives lost hands dying from blood loss because they could not provide the required tithe
00:13:03.520of gold to Columbus and the Spanish monarchs. And it wasn't just Columbus who was horrifying in his
00:13:08.700treatment of the natives. His own men were happy enough to follow his example, especially when it1.00
00:13:13.260came to horrifying acts of sexual assault against native women during columbus's second expedition
00:13:18.040to the americas one member of the expedition wrote while i was in the boat i captured a very
00:13:23.260beautiful woman whom the lord admiral columbus gave to me when i had taken her to my cabin she
00:13:28.240was naked as was their custom i was filled with the desire to take my pleasure with her and0.98
00:13:32.420attempted to satisfy my desire she was unwilling and so treated me with her nails so that i wished1.00
00:13:37.440i had never begun i then took a piece of rope and whipped her soundly and she let forth such1.00
00:13:42.120incredible screams that you would not have believed your ears eventually we came to such1.00
00:13:46.440terms i assure you that you would have thought she had been brought up in a school for whores
00:13:51.260in the year 1500 columbus wrote in a letter there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for0.52
00:13:56.580girls those from nine to ten are now in demand and for all ages a good price must be paid0.54
00:14:02.320the level of absolute cruelty and inhumanity visited upon natives by columbus and his men
00:14:08.060would make a season of Law & Order SVU seem like an after-school special, to be honest.
00:14:12.920And before you think that Columbus treated natives that way
00:14:15.500just because he didn't really see them as human,
00:14:17.860the natives weren't the only people that Columbus visited
00:14:20.360his particular brand of sadistic authoritarianism on.
00:14:23.680The Spanish under his control got plenty of it as well.0.87
00:14:26.920He ordered at least a dozen Spaniards to be whipped in public,0.91
00:14:29.720tied by the neck, and bound together by the feet
00:14:32.060for trading gold for food to avoid starvation.
00:14:35.020To quote Lawrence Berggren's book, Columbus, The Four Voyages,
00:14:38.060He ordered a cabin boy's hand nailed in public to the spot where he had pulled a trap from the river and caught a fish.
00:14:44.320Whippings for minor infractions occurred with alarming frequency.
00:14:47.880Columbus ordered one wrongdoer to receive a hundred lashes, which could be fatal, for stealing sheep, and another for lying about the incident.
00:14:54.460An unlucky fellow named Juan Moreno received a hundred lashes for failing to gather enough food for Columbus's pantry.
00:15:01.900In the end, Columbus would be removed from office as governor and returned to Spain in chains to be tried for his crimes.
00:15:08.060Columbus's little torture-porn governorship was upended when an official for the crown of Castile named Francisco de Bobadilla arrived in the Indies with the purpose of investigating accusations against Columbus for his mishandling of the colony.
00:15:21.980Accusations included accepting bribes, enslaving natives, underpaying their taxes, and mishandling the rebellion of Francisco Roldan and committing treason.
00:15:30.840Bobadilla's report stated that the governance of Columbus had been disastrous and that he had seriously abused his authority as governor.
00:15:38.060Notably, it wasn't really the violence toward the natives that angered Bobadilla.
00:15:42.140It was the fact that Columbus had overstepped his authority when it came to the Spanish under his control.
00:15:47.920For instance, he had hanged five Spaniards for committing atrocities without sending them to Spain for a trial.
00:15:53.620I shudder to think what Columbus might have considered to be atrocities.
00:15:58.240Overall, the issue that was taken with Columbus by the Spanish was likely caused by the fact that his actions negatively impacted the profitability of the colony.
00:16:05.760It becomes much harder to make a profit, after all, when all your slave labor has committed suicide or been brutally maimed and murdered by the governor.
00:16:13.640Regardless of the exact reason for his arrest, when the architects of the Spanish Inquisition decide that you're a little bit too cruel for their taste, you may have made some critical errors.
00:16:24.160Of course, despite his arrest, Columbus was never really held accountable for his actions.
00:16:28.440He was stripped of his titles, but set free once he reached Spain.
00:16:31.920And again, this period of atrocities might be slightly worse than those of other colonial governors,
00:16:36.260but Columbus alone was not responsible.
00:16:38.580The arrest of Columbus and his removal from power as governor
00:16:41.200did not end the atrocities against natives by any means.
00:16:44.160We know that because while Columbus was shipped back to Spain in 1500,
00:16:48.900Bartolomé de la Cassis wrote about the atrocities of the Spanish in detail
00:16:52.620after his time in the New World from 1502 to 1515,
00:16:56.260writing that while there, he saw cruelty on a scale no living being has ever seen or expects to see.
00:17:02.500And of course, Hernan Cortes and Francisco Pizarro would commit numerous atrocities during their time in the New World as well,
00:17:08.620destroying cultures and attempting wholesale genocide, just as Columbus had done.
00:17:12.320But the main issue here that my students always struggle with is that Cortes and Pizarro don't have a national holiday named after them.
00:17:19.840So why, with all the historical evidence of his atrocities, has Columbus become an American icon?
00:17:25.480Not only did he not discover the new world, but he was objectively a horrifying human being even by the standards of his own day.
00:17:33.100So what the hell is up with Columbus Day?
00:18:04.880One of the largest mass lynchings in the United States would occur in 1891 in New Orleans,
00:18:09.480when 11 Sicilian immigrants were killed.
00:18:11.760The first official commemoration of Columbus's journey occurred in 1892,
00:18:15.680just one year after the New Orleans lynchings.
00:18:17.920It's not a coincidence that President Benjamin Harrison called for this national observance of Columbus Day then, on the 400th anniversary of Columbus's arrival.
00:18:26.540As an Italian explorer, many Italian-Americans saw celebrating the life and accomplishments of Christopher Columbus as a way for Italian-Americans to be accepted into the mainstream.
00:18:35.580It wasn't until 1934 that Columbus Day became a federal holiday during Franklin Roosevelt's administration, but that first celebration of Columbus Day wasn't really about Columbus at all.
00:18:45.060It was more of an attempt to encourage Americans to accept that Italian immigrants were Americans as well.
00:18:50.960Given what we know about Columbus now, it still makes a lot more sense to celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day instead.
00:18:56.780But somehow it does help to know that Columbus Day was not intentionally meant to be a celebration of a 15th century psychopath.0.96
00:19:03.960Once again, thank you for tuning in to listen to me bitch about history.
00:19:07.200Come back on Thursday when we'll be discussing what some of the early colonial systems in America looked like
00:19:11.920and how different European countries differed in how they approached colonization.
00:19:16.160And please remember that you can find links to join the podcast Discord,
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