Christopher Columbus has been a target of revisionist debunking as the New World prepares for the 500th anniversary of the European discovery. Once praised as a superb seaman by Samuel Eliot Morison, Columbus has shrunk to an incompetent bumbler in Kirkpatrick Sale’s book, The Discovery of Paradise—a paradise, the author argues, that Europeans despoiled. Going further, other protesters hand up the equivalent of a Nuremberg indictment. What happened after 1492, thunders the National Council of Churches, was ‘an invasion and colonisation with legalised occupation, genocide, economic exploitation and a deep level of institutional racism and moral decadence.’ This is partly true, but by the same selective reckoning Jefferson was a Virginia elitist and a slave-owning plutocrat.In his New York Times editorial (June 26,1991), ‘Columbus Was Not Eichmann,’ Karl E. Meyer affirms that, despite their cruelties, Spanish colonisers were not simply war criminals; and, whatever his faults, Columbus was not Eichmann. That anyone would suggest otherwise tells more about our own self-righteous age than that of Columbus.

Nobody can deny that the conquistadores thirsted for gold and glory, slaughtered Indians and imported African slaves. What needs to be added is that their excesses were searingly indicted by Spanish churchmen, notably by the Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas. His Very Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, published in Seville in 1552, remains the prime source for the worst horror stories of the Spanish conquest. His searing narrative, Meyer affirms, was seized upon by English Protestants to justify their own conquests.