Columbus and Asimov - 24 April 1992

Last Monday in Seville, the King of Spain opened what is to be the last world's fair of this century. This great exhibition, in which 110 nations are taking part, has been anticipated and planned for many years. There never was any doubt that it would be held in Spain, for the original idea, nurtured down a decade at least, was to celebrate the proudest event in Spanish history that is also a decisive event in world history, nothing less than the discovery 500 years ago in October, of the New World, of the Americas, by the man the Spanish have preferred to call Cristóbal Colón to soften or glide over the fact, which very many Spaniards still dispute, that he was an Italian.

But it's also a fact that Columbus tramped around Europe for 10 years, looking to find a sponsor for his wild idea of discovering an ocean route to the spice islands of the Indies and to China and Japan. And that at the end of that time, after everyone to whom I spoke of this enterprise, thought it a mere jest, the King and Queen of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella, eventually agreed to back him. So it is positively bizarre to report that in the grand opening ceremony last Monday, King Juan Carlos never mentioned the name, in any language, of Christopher Columbus.

The royal house of Spain is at the moment only the most conspicuous of the institutions, the people, that find themselves embarrassed this year by the name and the voyage of Cristoforo Colombo. I was surprised the other week, to discover in a small gathering, that this embarrassment was news to many Europeans. Well three or four years ago, in several cities in this country, embarrassment was the last emotion felt by the officials who were planning this year's celebration, particularly in towns and places named after the great discoverer: Columbus, Ohio, Columbia, South Carolina, Columbia University.

I don't know what's happened to these festival plans but I do know that many of them have been modified, shall we say, and in the cities and countries of Central and South America, have been either abandoned or turned into memorial marches. At the end of last year, on the verge of the 500th anniversary, street marches, angry rallies, public petitions in the countries colonised by Columbus and his successors, were mounted as a token of what might happen if there were to be actual celebrations of Columbus's discovery. Why?

The reason for this massive turnaround can be simply explained by substituting one word for another. To the Spanish, who landed in the hemisphere in, we believe, San Salvador in 1492, to all the subsequent colonisers, to the following historians and all the generations of white Europeans and Americans, Columbus's first voyage was a voyage of discovery. But to the Native Americans, the Indians from the Canadian tundra to the tip of Cape Horn, to the Aztecs, the Mayans, the Incas, the Cherokees, the Iroquois and scores of other Native American nations, the word was not discovery but invasion.

An American poet, William Carlos Williams, a doctor, long ago made the point in one sentence: "History begins for us, us Americans, with murder and enslavement, not with discovery." I don't believe that that line or the essay that embodied it caused much of a stir at the time. Dr Williams died almost 30 years ago, but he was an oddity. His father was English but his mother was Puerto Rican and he knew from boyhood on, how the native peoples of Central and South America felt about the Columbian conquests. Now the knowledge of that felling, of the substitution of enslavement for discovery, has come surging up among the millions of Hispanic immigrants here and in the countries of South and Central America, as in the past 20 years or so, they have tried to liberate themselves from dictatorships, from peonage, from skimping poverty. Their historians, their politicians, their writers, their public men and women have, by an impulse as sudden and massive as a tidal wave, looked at the standard American and Spanish histories of Columbus and rewritten them in anger.

I'm not sure and I haven't read anybody who is sure, why this happened and why, as a hemispheric movement, it happened so late. Nothing new of consequence has come to light about the aims and the progress of Columbus throughout the Central American lands, that he roamed and conquered. His men and the ones who came after have always been known and still are, as the conquistadores, the conquerors. The record of Columbus's suppression of native religions, torturing of peoples who resisted conversion to Christianity, enslaving of populations, all this has been exhaustively documented since the eyewitness reports first sent by Spanish priests back home, together quite often with heartfelt protests against the brutality of their own soldiers.

Twenty years ago I did a television series on the history of America and I started, of course, with Columbus's voyage from the evening of 2 August 1492, when he and his entire crew went ashore for confession. The crew consisted of one Portuguese, one other Italian, one converted Jew, they thought he'd be useful because he spoke Arabic, which everybody thought then was similar to Chinese, and 38 Spaniards. So I say the entire crew went ashore for confession and on the morning of the 3rd set sail from Palos. I think it was some time in the early autumn that the BBC put on a special showing, on a screen in a London theatre, of the first episode. Among the many VIPs gathered there was a representative from the Spanish embassy, the Minister for Culture, I believe, if there was such a post. Now when we came to Columbus's progress through the Bahamas and Haiti and then Cuba, I told naturally of what was entailed in his mission, which was to replenish the Spanish treasury and to save the world including the distant world of China and Japan for Christ. In his contract it was triumphantly declared that this was an expedition for gospel and for gold.

At some point in the showing of my film we came to see a succession of prints and drawings of the cruelties of the Spanish conquest throughout Central America and Mexico, the exhaustion of whole populations in the mines, how the marching orders prescribed a ruthless routine: round up the natives, prohibit their religion, enslave them, exhaust the gold and move on. At that point the Spanish minister in the audience stomped out, positively shouting, the black legend, the black legend. It's an old story, an old slander so far as the Spanish are concerned and one can sympathise with them on one score. The impression always left that the Spanish were uniquely heartless and brutal, I came then to write, the point is that the Spanish got there first, they probably behaved no worse than any other Europeans would have done. British schoolbooks confidently picture the English sea-dogs, Drake and Hawkins as honest, dauntless men but Drake's brutalities in sacking the cities of the west coast of South America is a horrid byword and Hawkins spent many untroubled years in the Spanish slave trade.

The unpleasant, to us, fact is that the 15th, 16th centuries bred in every country in Europe, including Britain, tough men whose definition of brutality began with stretching on the rack. This fault did not prevent Columbus from being a great sailor, a physically courageous man and a maniacally devout Christian. There's no more to say except that of course if you and I were the heirs of these ancient peoples, were mountain hermits, impoverished slum dwellers, still practically enslaved Haitians, we should feel the same.

There's one heartening item of the anniversary, a genuine, unashamed celebration. Next Monday evening at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, the president of Turkey will preside over a banquet of 500 guests to recall that in 1492 also, after Spain had thrown the Moors out, they then banished all the Jews. Monday's occasion is to celebrate the Sephardic Jews who took refuge in Turkey and down the past 500 years have lived peaceably with the Moslems and, according the president, have brought distinction to the art, culture and society of Turkey.

Some topic came up a week or two ago which prevented my talking about a great man. I must say a word or two about him now. Isaac Asimov died on 6 April at the age of 72. It was too early for him. He'd written over 500 books but I'm sure he had another 100 or so in his head and on his calendar. Asimov was known to science fiction buffs for creating the first humane robots but what was most impressive about him was the range, the fluency and the splendid simplicity of his writing about science, about everything from space travel to the cell structure of an ant.

I imagine he had the largest command of the whole of science of anyone who ever lived. He read about every new discovery in every branch of science and he would sit down at his word processor for 12 hours a day and with relish explain it to you and me, saying to himself, of course, that's how it was bound to work. He was a warm, gentle man, a total lack of arrogance, he looked like your favourite funny schoolmaster got up as Mr Gladstone in a school play. I met him in the early '60s. He joined with me the editorial advisory board of an encyclopaedia. I wish I'd known him better. This sublime, brainy man, who ranged comfortably through galaxies, who was more at home aboard a satellite, than most of us are on a sailboat, he had a flaw. He lasted with us no more than two annual meetings which were held in pleasant places in the Americas and Europe. Of course we flew there. Not Asimov. He was terrified of flying, he never did it.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC. Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.