Just Who Was That Man?

Has the 500th anniversary of the first voyage of Christopher Columbus added to the primary evidence about him -- what he did, how he thought, what kind of man he was? Not by much.

No new letters to or by Columbus have been found. Neither have traces of any wrecked ships from his four voyages, though newly found documents in Seville have cast some light on the rigging and fitting of the little Nina.

In 1492 Columbus left 39 men from the crew of the wrecked Santa Maria to fend for themselves at La Navidad in Haiti. When he came back for them on his second voyage, they had all been killed by the Lucayo tribesmen. Archaeologists at this first Spanish settlement in the Americas have dug out some shards of Venetian glass and the bones of a 15th century pig. At Isabela in the Dominican Republic, where Columbus founded Spain's first colony on his second voyage in 1493, some evidence is turning up about the layout of the town, its artifacts (including a crucifix, possibly the first in the New World) and the colonists' interaction with the natives.

But to expect dramatic discoveries to appear on cue for 1992 is unrealistic. The Holy Grail of Columbus studies would be the long-lost original log of his first voyage to what he called "the Indies," which exists only in a badly garbled abridgment made after his death by the Spanish priest Bartolome de las Casas. Las Casas, who wrote voluminously on the Spanish colonization of the New World, was not a mariner, and his version is filled with errors that have caused endless dispute over such basic matters as Columbus' course on his historic sail and where his little fleet made landfall. Candidates for this honor include San Salvador, Grand Turk, East Caicos, Semana Cay, Conception Island and half a dozen others. In these, as in a myriad other matters, we still don't know enough about Columbus and never will.

In part, the celebration of 1992 will have done its job if it erases a number of the apocrypha patched onto the figure of the Discoverer, as the 19th century called him. Some are obviously false, such as the tenacious story that Queen Isabella sold her jewels to pay for his first voyage, or that the Santa Maria was crewed by convicts, or that Columbus was trying to prove the world was round. (No educated person in the late 15th century, and no mariner either, believed otherwise.)

The 500th anniversary may also force a new awareness in school curriculums of the immense role played by Spaniards in early colonial America. Up to now they have been all but shunted out of view behind the screen of Anglo founder- images (the Pilgrim Fathers, Raleigh in Virginia). This can do good, not because it may pump up the "self-esteem" of Hispanic schoolchildren (the purpose of history is not to make people feel better), but because it accords with a large truth shrouded, at present, in omissions and lies. Columbus himself has been presented as Castilian, Catalan, Corsican, Majorcan, Portuguese, French, English, Greek and even Armenian. He was, in fact, Italian: born in Genoa in 1451, the son of a weaver.