Columbus Day: Celebrated or Tolerated?

Should his antics be celebrated in the twenty-first century?

Monday, October 10 was Columbus Day.  I almost forgot about it.  In fact, it seems like most people only remember it because it warranted a day off from high school.  Normally I would complain about ignorance, but in the case of Columbus Day, I actually think that remembering the day off is more worthwhile than celebrating the holiday itself.  I’ve always more or less held this belief and I recently did a little historical research on the subject.
Columbus Day is annually celebrated on the second Monday in October to commemorate Christopher Columbus’s first landing in the Americas on October 12, 1492.  It’s one of those Monday holidays like Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Memorial Day, Presidents’ Day and Labor Day.  Now, I’ve noticed that these holidays are usually very significant.  They honor serious, important things, like civil rights and people who lost their lives fighting for our country.  So, this Columbus guy must have been pretty awesome to be placed in the same crowd, right?  Let’s delve into a brief history lesson.

In the 1400s, there was a lot of competition going on between European countries, specifically involving trade with the distant East Indies.  Columbus had the brilliant idea to sail west from Europe to get to the Indies rather than sailing around Africa like everyone else.  After making some incorrect calculations, he became convinced that it could not only be done, but be done in a relatively short period of time.  He thought that the only thing lying between Europe and Japan was 3,000 miles of ocean. He spent years campaigning for his idea. Eventually, the king and queen of Spain agreed to fund his expedition. On October 12, 1492, Columbus’s three ships, the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria landed in the Bahamas.  They also travelled to Cuba and Hispaniola.  Deciding that he had found the East Indies, Columbus headed back to Europe bearing gold, artifacts and even some hostile natives kidnapped from Hispaniola.
The Europeans were so impressed with this expedition that Columbus actually received enough funding to make three more voyages to the “Indies” before his death in 1506.  After making a total of four expeditions to various locations in the Caribbean, Columbus passed away, still believing that he had discovered a revolutionary geographic shortcut.  So, the question I ask: why is he famous?

He set out on an expedition to find something that didn’t exist and convinced himself that he found it.  Four times.  A common misconception is that he discovered the Americas.  All he ever did was land there and claim he was somewhere else.  The Americas were never “discovered” by Columbus; the native people had already been living there for thousands of years.  The first Europeans to land in the Americas were Norse explorers from Scandinavia led by Leif Ericson, who predated Columbus by nearly 500 years.  Christopher Columbus did not discover America by any stretch of the imagination.

Columbus’s expeditions eventually generated a lot of publicity for the Americas.  It has been argued that his actions led to the settlement of the Americas, and therefore the near annihilation of the Native American peoples.  The natives’ history, culture and population were nearly eradicated when European settlers took over in the centuries following Columbus’s death.  For these reasons, Columbus Day is actually a fairly controversial holiday.  It isn’t even observed in California, Nevada or Hawaii, and South Dakota celebrates Native Americans’ Day instead.  Columbus’s historic blunders are also the reason that Native Americans are, to this day, still incorrectly referred to as “Indians.”
Again, why is this dude famous?  He didn’t come up with the idea that the world was round; that was pretty well known around the time he lived.  He couldn’t even research well; his calculations were far off because he didn’t know the size of the earth, the sizes of the continents or the distance between Japan and the coast of China.  All of this information was either known or had been accurately estimated by the 1400s, yet he got it all wrong.
As far as I’m concerned, Columbus’s achievements (which are few and unimpressive) do not warrant a national holiday in his honor.  He’s not a good excuse to have a day off, so you should just be thankful we got away with it in high school.  These are probably not the reasons Conn doesn’t observe Columbus Day, but they’re the reasons why I don’t have a problem with the non-practice.  Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but personally, I’m waiting for the day when schools stop bothering to educate students about this guy. •