October 16, 2007
Visits
My calendar took little note of Columbus Day last week on October 12. You remember, he was the explorer who set out to find the new world because spices were so important and cholesterol hadn’t been invented yet. Rather than a new world, what he found was a world altogether as old as and maybe in better shape than the one he left, with a native welcoming committee already intact, and without any spices worth writing home about.
Actually, the natives were minding their own business until Columbus made it his. I suppose they were surprised and maybe even glad for some diversion until they got his courtesy gifts of a new disease along with Italian and irregular verbs.
Columbus was one of our earlier immigrants who was even less invited. We didn’t fence him out though we might have been better off and suffered one less parade had we done so. Instead, we later on started making over him in a different way from our more recent immigrants who are also looking for a new world and having to learn English and its infinitely more irregular verbs and whatever.
We pay little attention to the other Europeans who had off and on visited the Americas earlier. There are varied theories of contact by East Asians, Phoenicians, let alone the native Americans themselves who were already here and reasonably satisfied, thank you.
But Columbus’s expedition triggered a great wave of European interest in the “New” World. Unlike the earlier visitors, Columbus aggressively made do about his discoveries and arranged for return voyages. Actually, he may have started one of the earlier travel agencies. There’s little evidence that he did, although the whole country’s been full of immigrants of one kind or another ever since.
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