Happy Columbus Day!

In fourteen-hundred-and-ninety-two,

Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

I remember learning that ditty way back when I was in early elementary school. Back then, Columbus Day was observed on October 12 every year, even if it wasn't on a Monday.  In first grade, we celebrated by crafting the explorer's three ships, the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, out of halved walnut shells.  Each student got to make three ships!  (It was a big deal....)  I remember choosing the biggest walnut shell I could find to be the Santa Maria, because that flagship, captained by Christopher Columbus himself, was known to be bigger than the other two.  Then, I pressed a marble-sized ball of gray, oil-based clay into the bottom of each shell-boat, and stuck a toothpick in for the mast.  I must have used old-fashioned paste to attach one rectangular paper sail to each mast.  I think we got to float our ships in a small tub of water in our classroom before taking them home.

As we worked, our teacher, Miss Thomas, told us how Christopher Columbus had set sail from Spain with his three ships, hoping to sail all the way around the world to reach the Indies.  At that time, most people believed that Columbus was the first European to set foot on the Americas, so we said that he "discovered " America.

Since then, it has been proven that Norse explorers had been to America much sooner than Columbus.  Communication was difficult back then, so the people in Spain had no way of knowing that some Scandinavian explorers did it first.  And, it shouldn't have mattered much to Columbus, anyway, because he didn't set out with the intent of discovering a new world.  He just wanted to find a simpler way to reach Japan.  Unfortunately, he had no idea how vast our world really is, so he was mistaken when he dubbed those Caribbean islands the "Indies."  Yet, he was on the right track when he figured out that he could travel west around the world to reach the East.  His misguided attempt to sail around the world made Columbus the first of many explorers who, for better or worse, came to the new land.

These days, it isn't quite politically correct to celebrate Columbus Day.  I understand the reasons:  it's true that the early explorers violated the rights of the native inhabitants of the lands they came to conquer, that they introduced the slave trade to this part of the world, that they plundered all the gold they could find.  I suppose I could argue that that's just the way things were done back then, in the fifteenth century.

History can't be changed, but perhaps we can learn from the past, if we take the time to study it.

One thing is certain:  those three-masted sailing ships were awesome!  And anyone who was daring enough to try to navigate one through that immense, mysterious ocean, clear around the world, must have been exceedingly brave. Even first graders can understand that.