Columbus Day? Really?

Alright, as you may know, yesterday was the anniversary of Columbus's invasion - er, discovery - of America, though we celebrate it on the second Monday in October so postal workers and bank tellers can have the day off.

Exactly why do we celebrate Columbus Day anyway, when the whole man's legacy is a fraud? No, I'm not talking about his cruelty toward the native Caribbean peoples, although that's something to consider. I'm referring to the twin focal points of Christopher Columbus's legacy - one, that he proved the world was round by sailing west towards the Indies for the Spanish nation and two, that he had discovered America.

I have some news from you, dear readers. The story that Columbus proved the world was round was started by Washington Irving. The ancient Greeks proved the world is round by noting that during an eclipse, the earth casts a spherical shadow on the moon. Irving popularized the notion that Columbus demonstrated the sphericity of Earth by including in his biography of the Italian navigator an embellished account of Columbus's meeting with the professors of the University of Salamanca in Spain. Columbus, said Irving, explained his theory that the world was round by insisting that one could reach the Far East by sailing west, with Salamanca's professors in awe of Chris's audacity.

Irving embellished through his teeth. The professors at Salamanca disputed Columbus's claims of reaching the Indies by sailing west not because of doubts of the sphericity of the planet but because they assumed that Columbus had underestimated the width of the Atlantic Ocean. They were right.

Columbus went anyway, got lost, ended up on an island in the Caribbean and, somehow, assumed he'd made it to Celebes or Timor or wherever. But at least he realized he had in fact discovered a new land, right?

Wrong! Despite several follow-up voyages - he claimed Puerto Rico for Spain on his return to the Caribbean in 1493 - Columbus would eventually die (in 1506) still believing that he had found a new route to the Indies. So too believed the king and queen of Spain, Chris's chief benefactors, until 1513, when Vasco Nunez de "Rocky" Balboa discovered Panama and became the first European to see the Pacific Ocean from its eastern shore. (As Balboa said when he landed in Panama, "Isthmus be the place!")

Oh, give Columbus a break, you're saying, at least he was the first European to set foot in the Western Hemisphere. No, he wasn't. Leif Ericsson, the Norse explorer, and his band of merry Norsemen founded a settlement called Vinland on Newfoundland Island, now a part of Canada. The Norsemen founded their settlement - which didn't last, because the native people drove them out - sometime in the late tenth century, half a millennium before Columbus arrived in the Bahamas.

Personally, I don't even think Columbus sighted the Bahamian island he called San Salvador. I think that what happened was that a crewman on the Santa Maria tapped Columbus on the shoulder, pointed out to the horizon, and said, "Pardon me, Captain, but isn't that land over there?"

So not only do we have a day to honor a genocidal maniac, we celebrate a genocidal maniac who didn't know squat about astronomy, sold his services to the highest bidder (if he'd sailed for France instead of Spain, the French would have colonized South America instead - meaning that Paraguayans would be eating snails and Argentines would be making philosophical movies), got lost because he didn't ask for directions, and didn't even stick around for long once he got here. There are plenty of Italians worth celebrating in this country - namely Garibaldi, who helped create the modern Italian state in 1861 - and Italian-Americans continue to honor a guy who stumbled into history by discovering a hemisphere by accident? Get with the program, people!

What day should Columbus Day be anyway? October 12? The second Monday of the month? How about October 21? See, in 1492, the Julian calendar was still used by the West; the Gregorian calendar took effect ninety years later. As of 1492, the Julian calendar was off by nine days. October 21 would be Columbus Day, according to the way time is recorded today.

Ah, forget it. How about this for an idea? Today the Canadians celebrate Thanksgiving, probably due to an earlier harvest up north. I propose that we do away with Columbus Day altogether and move Thanksgiving into its place on the calendar. Not to put ourselves in sync with Canada, but to move it farther from Christmas. Does it really make sense to have a big turkey dinner on Thanksgiving only to follow it with another big turkey dinner for Christmas a month later?

In the meantime, Italian-Americans ought to find themselves another ethnic hero. That Columbus hangup isn't going to play so well with an ever-growing Hispanic population. :-|