Yesterday, while I was walking through the Botanical Gardens in Kingstown, the capital of the small island nation of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, someone gave thanks to Captain Bligh in rhyme for giving breadfruit to the island and thus allowing them not only to feed themselves but also to export provisions to other countries in the Caribbean like Trinidad & Tobago.  Yet to the people of Pitcairn Island, descendants of the mixture of ancestry between Polynesian women and the mutineers of the HMS Bounty, Bligh was some sort of tyrannical despot on-board whose failure to stop the mutiny on his ship allowed one of the smallest human societies to develop.  So in two island cultures, the same man is a great hero for having provided for the well-being of a nation as well as ensuring it has enough to eat and another the same man’s supposed cruelty is the cause for the culture’s existence to begin with.  This is by no means an isolated problem, but it demonstrates the way that identity conflicts make it hard to appreciate people for their full role in history.

Today, as I write this, it is Columbus Day as it is celebrated in the United States in at least some places.  And this day has proven to be remarkably unpopular because Christopher Columbus’ legacy is tied up with all kinds of questions about the nature of the spread of European culture around the world.  Now, I am admittedly a biased person, but as a European-American of northern and western European ancestry, I do not feel this spread to be a bad thing.  To be sure, it was like all human endeavors, a mixture between good and evil, but compared to the alternatives it was a very good thing.  I was born in North America and have traveled around the world and by and large the world has been made a better place thanks to the presence of European efforts, whether that involves the benefit to lifespan due to health improvements and economic wealth due to industrialization and the spread of Christianity as well as beneficial aspects of Western legal culture.  Indeed, if one compares the fate of colonies under American or European mandates and their fate as generally incompetently run independent states, “one person, one vote, one time” is a far less pleasant alternative than to be under benign imperial rule, even if I am in general no great friend of imperialism.  Benign law and order is to be preferred to anarchy or to domestic tyranny, which are the options most of the world has to deal with because it lacks the culture of restraint by which civil servants can behave in a sufficiently non-corrupt fashion to preserve the potential for well-being in a given society.  These conditions do not exist everywhere, and where they exist European settler culture has a great deal of influence in its existence, even given the imperfections of that historical legacy.

What can we blame Christopher Columbus for?  That he mistakenly thought he had found a route to China and the East Indies when he had “discovered” a hemisphere that was capable of being settled and exploited by a host of European nations and their people over the course of more than five hundred years and going strong?  Did Columbus cause the genocide that has been calculated for the native peoples of the continent?  No.  Were the native inhabitants of North and South America some sort of noble peoples who had escaped from the sins and evils of the Old World?  No, as the behavior of the Caribs in seeking the conquest of the Caribbean islands or the massive human sacrifices of the Aztecs or the brutal conflicts of the Inca can well attest to.  And those are just the ones we know about because Europeans were able to witness them going on and record them for posterity.  Was Cahokia an oppressive government?  More than likely.  It is not as if imperialism and brutality were things that were imported from Europe; they were indigenous products of the indigenous civilizations of North and South America in the preconquest period.  Let us be honest with ourselves and with others, Columbus is hated by those who hate what European culture and its various offshoots (some of which I like a lot better than contemporary European culture) has to offer and wish not to recognize its importance or its legitimacy.  And I am not among the people who has a problem with the spread of European culture and people.  After all, those demographic shifts made life a lot better for me and for my own ancestors, and for a great many people who have been able to follow their example, and what is not to celebrate about that?