European vision: The Patron Saint of Transatlantic Travel

Cristóbal Colón’s journal, Nov. 6, 1492:
"And they are very respectful and not very black. . . ."

Whatever his religion or social ethic, Colón unfailingly presented himself as the man of the hour, and always in Christian terms. He announced his find as “the great success which our Lord has granted me” and pronounced it, at the end of his letter, “an event of such high importance, in which all Christiandom ought to rejoice, and which it ought to celebrate with great festivals and the offering of solemn thanks to the Holy Trinity.” He also, habitually, emphasized the meaning of his Christian name Cristóbal—“Christ-bearer”—by signing himself with a Greek-Latin hybrid of it, “Xristo-ferens.” Christian apologists who followed him, looking to his name for evidence of divine sanction, also pointed out that his Spanish surname means “dove.”

If Colón, then, was not only an ironical marrano but some sort of Christ-bearer in his own right, he may well have viewed himself seriously as an alternative messiah for a new start across the water. Christian idealists coming later would view him a little as that (see UTOPIA). Either way, whether driven by personal vision or something more orthodox, he clearly led a heavily Christian invasion with a name perfect for the job, drawn from Christianity’s patron saint for travelers.

The original St. Christopher, the story was, had been a hermit asleep beside a bridgeless river. Awakened by a child’s voice from the dark, he rose and carried a boy to the other bank, almost drowning under the unexpected weight—like “the weight of the world.” When the hermit expressed amazement, his human cargo revealed its actual identity: “Marvel not, Christopher, for thou hast indeed borne upon they back the whole world and Him who created it. I am the Christ whom thou servest in doing good.”

Time has worn heavily on both Christophers. At the 500th anniversary of his coming, a dark side was discovered in the Christ-bearer, as historians finally adknowledged that he also was the first carrier of such Old World accessories as slavery, disease, the lust for gold and the destruction of native populations. St. Christopher himself, in 1969, was discovered by the Catholic Church to have been almost entirely legendary—and his name was duly purged from the saints list, his feast day, July 25, eliminated.

For Jews, Colón’s discovery of another world did in fact prove timely and fortunate, so that the legend of a Jewish colony across the sea became a self-fulfilling prophecy, over time. After tens of thousands of Spanish Jews had lost their gold as well as their lives, Colón’s “India” would become the Jews’ land of refuge—a gathering place and a mustering point for their eventual return to the original “Land of Promise,” the ethnic homeland of Palestine. For “India’s” natives—who would suffer even more grievous losses from his discovery—there would be nowhere else to go. They remain “Indians” to this day.

The Old World Paradise, meanwhile, has duly been rediscovered in the Old World, not the new: the lower Tigris-Euphrates river delta of Iraq, heart of the ancient “Fertile Crescent.” The presumed site of the biblical Eden is now a ruined wetland where the sacred ibis nears extinction, called by the United Nations Environmental Program one of the worst environmental disaster areas in the world, as threatening as the loss of Amazon rainforest in the “New World.” Decades of water diversion for dams by neighboring Turkey and Syria did some damage. Then in 1991 Saddam Hussein punished Eden’s current residents, the rebelling Marsh Arabs, by burning their villages and draining the marshes. The marshlands already had been reduced by 93 percent when international conservationists, the next year, launched a reclamation project, Eden Again. Their best-case outcome: restoration of a mere third of the paradise lost—but that was before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.