Reclaiming Columbus and a Vision of Discovery

Columbus did not set out to discover something new but rather to reclaim that which was lost.

Jonathan Richie is currently a senior reporter for The Dallas Express covering Texas politics and a doctoral candidate at Liberty University studying early American legal development. He previously obtained a master’s in History at Liberty and an undergraduate degree in Classics at Houston Christian University. You can find him on Twitter (or X) @JRichieDX.

In 2023, the push to supplant the traditional Columbus Day with the euphemistic “Indigenous Peoples’ Day” continues its long march. Many, unfortunately, have given up the fight at this point since Columbus — a 15th-century Catholic sailor — just might not be a saint by the standards of the 21st-century secular church. 

To abandon the Admiral of the Ocean Sea in the face of the progressive onslaught would be not only an unnecessary retreat but a tragic unmooring from one of our most important cultural anchors. His miraculous endeavor and vision of discovery marks the beginning of the American spirit, and it must be maintained. Columbus, it is often forgotten, did not set out to discover something new but rather to reclaim that which was lost. When the Genoese sailor began his first voyage in 1492, he did not contemplate new worlds but a reconnection to the old. 

Islam had conquered Jerusalem and cut off ancient trade routes to the Orient. They were only just pushed out of the Iberian Peninsula when Columbus persuaded the Catholic sovereigns of Spain that fortune and allies in India could be reached by crossing the Atlantic. He envisioned an ascendant Europe using the funds to liberate the Holy City in a new crusade.¹ “I protest to your Highnesses that all the profits of this my enterprise may be sent in the conquest of Jerusalem,” Columbus wrote to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella.²

The voyages of Columbus also cannot be divorced from the religious vision he had for the discovered lands — one that involved evangelism, conversion, and education of the natives as citizens of Spain with full rights.³

I could sense His hand upon me … and He unlocked within me the determination to execute the idea ... Who doubts that this illumination was from the Holy Spirit? I attest that He, with marvelous rays of light, consoled me through the holy sacred Scriptures, a strong and clear testimony.⁴

However, for several decades now, it has become the clever and academic thing to disparage the memory of Columbus, slander the Admiral, and remove his statues. Despite the shrill clamor of activists, the assault on Columbus is nothing new. In Washington Irving’s benchmark 1828 biography of Columbus, he noted:

There is a certain meddlesome spirit, which, in the garb of learned research, goes prying about the traces of history, casting down its monuments, and marring and mutilating its fairest trophies. Care should be taken to vindicate great names from such pernicious erudition. It defeats one of the most salutary purposes of history, that of furnishing examples of what human genius and laudable enterprise may accomplish.⁵

The same work is occurring today as the man who charted the course for the next chapter of human history is being replaced by the conquered people who inhabited the land previously. In a revolt against several hundred years of moral improvement, economic success, and scientific achievement sparked by the discoveries of Columbus, the Ivory Tower class says we ought to celebrate cultures drenched in the atrocities of cannibalism, slavery, human sacrifice, and other indescribable horrors. 

As Fernando Santos-Granero documented, anywhere from 20% to 40% of all natives were enslaved in the pre-Columbian Americas, and “wherever European conquistadors set foot in American tropics, they found evidence of indigenous warfare, war captives, and captive slaves.”⁶ There was no noble savage, and the Europeans, for all their faults, did not introduce conflict and sin into some Garden of Eden by landing on new shores. 

Instead of an imperfect man of religious faith who started America on a path of civilization, the progressive ideologues demand we pay homage to those who ripped hearts out of captives’ chests as if the sins of Columbus and those who followed were somehow of an equal measure.

But what more is lost if we discard the Discoverer?

Early American leaders saw Columbus as integral in understanding the project of the new nation. Columbus was “the type of the American character,” a Pennsylvanian delegation noted in 1812. They urged that their fellow “citizens need nothing but to be resolved and justly confident in themselves, to conquer, like Columbus, and the heroes of their own revolution, the seemingly stupendous obstacles which infatuated injustice opposes to the accomplishment of their final and permanent emancipation.”⁷

For centuries, Columbus was understood as an example of how men could overcome humble beginnings to achieve Herculean feats. He opened the world and planted seeds of a nation that would, through many setbacks, hardships, and difficulties, advance the cause of liberty, rightly understood, more than any other. Furthermore, throughout his life, he continually pointed to the one true God as the ultimate source of anything worthy of discovery. 

“No one should be afraid to take on any enterprise in the name of our Savior, if it is right and if the purpose is purely for his holy service,” Columbus reminds us.⁸ Today, there is not much left to discover, but there is much to be recovered. For America to once again become the shining city on a hill that it was so often claimed to be, we must remember the Admiral and take up his courageous enterprise in the name of Christ the King.

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1. Cf. Carol Delaney, Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem (New York: Free Press, 2011).

2. Christopher Columbus, “December 26, 1492,” Journal of Christopher Columbus (London: Hakluyt Society, 1893), 139.

3. Jonathan Richie, “Columbus and the Context of Colonization,” WallBuilders (November 27, 2019), https://wallbuilders.com/columbus-and-the-context-of-colonization/.

4. Christopher Columbus, trans. Kay Brigham, “Letter from the Admiral to the King and Queen,” Christopher Columbus’s Book of Prophecies (Fort Lauderdale: CLIE Publishers, 1992), 178-179.

5. Washington Irving, A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (London: John Murray, 1828), 1.64-65.

6. Fernando Santos-Granero, Vital Enemies: Slavery, Predation, and the Amerindian Political Economy of Life (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 1, 226-227.

7. “Proceedings at Philadelphia,” The Niles Weekly Register (May 30, 1812), Vol. 2, No. 39, 204.

8. Christopher Columbus, trans. Kay Brigham, “Letter from the Admiral to the King and Queen,” Christopher Columbus’s Book of Prophecies (Fort Lauderdale: CLIE Publishers, 1992), 182-183.