Who Sailed the Ocean Blue?

If your library is like mine, then most of the Columbus-related books in your collection are exactly 17 years old. That’s because 1992 was the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage, and stacks of children’s books were published in honor of the event. Incidentally, 1992 was also the year I was in fourth grade. I am vaguely aware of learning about Columbus’s voyage in elementary school, but the version of the story I remember goes something like this: Columbus was a very daring navigator. His crew thought they were lost. Then someone yelled “Tierra! Tierra!” and they traded with the Native Americans. The end. I had no idea that Columbus had anything to do with the slave trade or the massacre of Native Americans, nor did I know about his later arrest and return to Spain in chains.

Obviously, my elementary school version of this story left many things out—not least of which was the other people who were affected by his voyage. What about the Taino and Caribe people who lived on the islands Columbus explored? What about the Spanish sailors who were left behind to start a colony in the Bahamas? What about the Scandinavian and Asian explorers who came before? What about the African slaves who were soon brought to work the colonial soil? When I was in elementary school, there may not have been many children’s books about these people. But historical discoveries in the 1990s have increased our information about these groups and changed our perception of the consequences of Columbus’s voyage.

When I started looking at books that told the story of Columbus’s voyage, the first group of people I focused on was the Native Americans. Many of the books I looked at used the same adjective to describe them: naked. Other words that appeared frequently were “generous,” “naive,” and even “primitive.” These descriptions reflect Columbus’s own observations. Fortunately, there are a number of books that tell the story of Columbus’s arrival from the perspective of Native Americans. Ann Rossi’s Cultures Collide (National Geographic, 2004) begins with a description of how the Spanish must have looked to the Taino: “The Taino lived in a hot climate so they did not need much clothing. The Spaniards wore lots of clothing, shoes, and even armor!” In concise, illustrated chapters, Rossi lists the things the Native Americans and European settlers learned from one another. Rather than putting events in chronological order, this book shows how life changed for both Native Americans and Europeans because of the contact between their cultures. Jim Corrigan’s Europeans and Native Americans (Mason Crest, 2002) takes a more traditional approach, focusing on the conflicts between European explorers and Native American kingdoms. However, the author describes the battles from the perspective of Montezuma and Atahualpa rather than Cortes and Pizarro. Corrigan’s book has a slightly higher reading level, appropriate for upper elementary and middle school readers.

These two books are helpful because they cover the same historical events from a different perspective. However, there are also some recent books that include new information. Marc Aronson and John W. Glenn’s The World Made New (National Geographic, 2007) summarizes recent research on the number of people in the Americas in the 1400s and covers the biological and culinary consequences of contact between Americans and Europeans. In fact, this ambitious book claims to look at the entire age of exploration “with the widest possible view” in 64 pages. I think it would have taken a few more pages for the authors to answer all the questions they raise in the introduction, and sometimes they fall back on the European perspective. (Check out chapter headings like “Consequences: How the Explorers Changed the World.”) Nevertheless, this book has plenty of information presented in a mix of time lines, concise text, maps, and images.

A book that seems to pick up where The World Made New leaves off is Charles C. Mann’s Before Columbus: The Americas of 1491 (Atheneum, 2009). This adaptation of the author’s adult book synthesizes new historical discoveries into a detailed portrait of the early Americas. It also explores the question of why small groups of Europeans were able to defeat huge, complicated societies like the Aztec and the Inca. Older books blame it on guns, armor, and horses. Mann complicates the theory of European military superiority by citing genetics, disease, geography, and internal politics as factors as well. Columbus is only mentioned on two pages, but that’s the point—this book covers many of the things the conventional Columbus story leaves out. Its length and breadth make it appropriate for a high school collection, but it contains unique information that ought to be available to younger audiences, too.

Of course, Native Americans aren’t the only group of people who deserve more than a cameo role in the Columbus story. What do we know about Columbus’s crew, apart from the fact that they were frightened and mutinous? Although Columbus was Italian, the men he sailed with were Spanish, and interactions between Spanish and indigenous populations in the Americas are the original source of Latino culture. James Lincoln Collier’s Christopher Columbus: To the New World (Marshall Cavendish, 2007) provides some names and faces for the Spanish sailors. For example, he introduces readers to Pinzon, a Spanish captain who secured and supplied two of the ships for the voyage, convinced the hesitant local sailors to sign on, and pressured Columbus to change course so they made landfall in the Bahamas. If Pinzon hadn’t died before making it to the Spanish court, he might have received as much attention as Columbus. Roger E. Hernández’s Early Explorations: The 1500s (Marshall Cavendish, 2008) points out that American history books often give more credit to English-speaking settlers than Spanish-speaking ones, but the names of many states and geographic features underline the Spanish influence. Hernández does a clever dance between celebrating the Spanish culture of the conquistadors while acknowledging that “even as they brought Western ideas to the areas they explored, they conquered those areas with much bloodshed and abuse of Native Americans.” This book is sure to spark debate in high school classes when contrasted with books that sharply criticize the conquistadors.

Another group of people sometimes left out of the Columbus story—and sometimes treated as myths—are the explorers who came before Columbus. Russell Freedman’s Who Was First? Discovering the Americas (Clarion, 2007) covers Chinese and Viking explorers and offers theories about the first humans to populate the Americas. In fact, Freedman works backward, starting with Columbus and concluding with a chapter on archaeological evidence of ancient Americans. His narrative style, and the way he debunks myths and describes ocean voyages, makes for a thrilling read, and the sepia-toned design of the book reminds me of an old leather-bound folio. Coming from a Scandinavian family, I grew up with a “Leif Landed First” magnet on my fridge, so I was thrilled to learn that Leif Erickson was more than a folk hero. It’s just as important for students to learn that, in the early 1400s, Chinese explorers sailed armadas of treasure ships to faraway ports in Africa and the Middle East—maybe even the Americas. Freedman points out that Columbus’s voyage is considered special because it was followed by sustained contact between two continents—not because it was the first of its kind.

There’s one more group of people who were immediately affected by Columbus’s voyage: Africans. The slave trade already existed in Europe, but it was Columbus who created a new market for it in the Americas. He started by enslaving Native Americans, and soon the colonists under his governance were importing slaves from Africa. James Haskins and Kathleen Benson’s Bound for America: The Forced Migration of Africans to the New World (HarperCollins, 1999) is the best book I know for connecting slavery to the Columbus story. It begins by comparing Europe in 1492 with Africa in 1492. What’s most startling are the similarities: both continents had about the same population, composed mostly of farmers, ruled by kings, and dotted with major cities. But the slave trade that started in the 1400s has left the two continents in very different situations 500 years later.

If you put these books together, you can see that the story of Columbus’s first voyage is a global story that can be told from a number of perspectives. Some of those clashing perspectives are expressed within the borders of my own city. Just this year, the university on the East side of town changed the name of their October recess from “Columbus Day Weekend” to “Fall Break” in response to students’ protest. That same weekend, the Italian neighborhood on the other side of town will again honor Columbus with a three-day festival and parade. Librarians need to be prepared to answer reference questions about why Columbus is such a controversial figure. To do this, we must evaluate our collections and look for parts of the story in a number of places. In my collection, I found related books in the 920s (Biographies), the 970s (History of North America), 380s (Commerce, Communications and Transportation), 910s (Geography and Travel), and 390s (Customs, Etiquette and Folklore). While some parts of our collection are self-service (the books on dinosaurs and crafts are pretty easy to locate), there’s a big role for librarians in helping students research Columbus. That role begins with building a balanced collection.