Howard Zinn isn’t the first crank to come up with crack pot theories about Columbus.
Columbus’ journal – perhaps of the most important documents dealing with the discovery of the Americas – is the primary source for nearly all scholarship concerning his first voyage, even crack pots like Zinn had to rely on it.
Radicals, past and present, have attempted to discredit the journal, some claiming it was fake or that he didn’t write it, pointing to minor discrepancies in the copy such as mistaking east for west in the navigation portions.
It has been the target of every writer with a peculiar theory,” wrote Samuel Eliot Morison in his Pulitzer Prize winning biography, and who considered the most reliable Columbus historian (and who Zinn frequently disparaged even to the point to naming his book after Morrison’s).
Some of these crack pot theories include that Columbus was never seeking the Orient when he set sail, that he had been to America before under a different name, and that another person actually did the discovery, not Columbus.
So, it was only natural that Zinn would build his crack pot theories on these Journals, too, although for large tracks he quoted the journals by stealing them from other crack pot writers who had preceded him.
Some of these other theories include the paranoid tale that Columbus got secret information from the Scandinavians in Iceland – a popular myth spouted from the mouths of the contemporary Woke crowd.
As with Zinn, some of these other crack pots sought to discredit the authenticity of these journals even as they perused through them looking for fodder to attack him.
Zinn followed a long line of people desperate to pain Columbus in a bad light, using Columbus’ own words to convict him as a mass murderer.
Zinn, Critical Race Theory people and 1619 Project may have resorted to sources from the time known as the “Black Legend,” a massive anti-Spanish propaganda campaign waged by seafaring competitors such as the Dutch and England, both of whom later raided Spanish ships and absconded with gold.
The most outrageous claims made against the Spanish about torture and murder in the New World came from these sources. While there is significant truth to Spanish cruelty, the figures quoted are often extremely exaggerated. Zinn, who stole from other radical historical studies, quoted the death of Native Americans (mostly due to disease) in the area where Columbus landed at about three million, when more reliable sources claim fewer than one million lived in the region at the time.
Even Morison, appears to have used some of “Black Legend” material in his accounts, although it is clear he relied heavily on the journals as well.
But the only reliable information about Columbus’ first voyage of discovery, and from which 98 percent of everything written, comes out of these journals.
Columbus recorded everything from the day’s work, course taken, lands discovered to long descriptions of people, places, fauna and flora, conclusions and possible future colonial policies as well as other things.
Unfortunately, the original document was lost, but several copies of it were made, from which an abstract was created by Bartolome de las Casas, a Spanish priest, historian and missionary, which was checked against the copies for accuracy.
Las Casas left out many of the nautical details and sometimes inserted comments of his own, clearly disguisable from Columbus’ comments.
More contemporary historians – especially those dealing with navigation – attest to the authenticity of the journal, attributing the minor mistakes to scribes who copies off the original.
It is this abstract that is the primary source for the first voyage – although some historians, including
Some errors such as reporting seeing an island that later turned out to be low clouds, Columbus did not change from his journal.
“Columbus always let his mistake stand,” Morison noted. “Crackpot critics of Columbus always base their theories on a presumed going-over of the journal by Columbus or Las Casas.”
Zinn, when he used the journal, routinely misquoted the accounts, breaking up things, sometimes using segments of the journal written days apart to imply things Columbus never said or meant and to use the journal as proof of Columbus’ alleged motives, which in full context would have exonerated him
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