As I was reading Columbus’s first and second voyages I kept wondering how much of what was written was actually true. Just like mapping, history is also subjective and depends on who is writing. I vaguely remembered hearing a saying that history is written by the winners. Upon looking it up, I found that Winston Churchill said it and it is actually: “history is written by the victors”. But I think this definitely applies here. Columbus and his crew-members got to map out their journey and tell it as they wanted to. They were essentially the ‘victors’, being the ones to kill so many of the natives and conquer their land. As a result, they got to be the ones to say how their interactions with the natives went. In the chapters on the first voyage, Columbus describes how the crew members were attacked by the natives and had to fight them to defend themselves. I questioned whether the Europeans were not the ones to actually start the violence. Just from the reading I’ve gathered that lies and half-truths come easily to Columbus. In his letter to the King and Queen of Spain, Columbus called his voyage a ‘great success’ and claimed that they found gold and spices. However, in reality Columbus did not find any of these things and his voyage was not actually considered a success.
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This is actually something that I thought of very often, especially in the first voyage. Columbus goes to great lengths to tell of how how kindly he and his crew treated the natives. There is one interjection from the editor, who inserts a journal entry from a sailor on the trip. This sailor tells of how he whipped and assaulted a native woman, which presents a starkly different picture from the one that Columbus was trying to paint in his journal. I also had to keep the audience in mind – Columbus was likely aware that his logbook would be read by the king and queen, and thus was careful to describe in relatively positive terms his treatment of the natives, and the usefulness of the land in terms of conversion and resources. I thought all of this was very interesting!