Christopher ColumbusEssay Preview: Christopher ColumbusReport this essayCHRISTOPHER COLUMBUSRummaging through dusty archives, historian Kirkpatrick Sale unearthed the following rare document. A psychiatric study of Christopher Columbus by 15th century doctor Sigmundo Feliz, based on clinical observations and the famous mariners own writings.
Case: 1492Patient: Cristobal COccupation: Admiral of the Ocean Sea, one time Colonial GovernorDate: May 1506This represents one of my most regrettable cases, for despite my best endeavours I was too late to be of any substantial benefit to this patient, and he died shortly after our last visit, a bitter, sorrowful man, still a victim of the paranoia and melancholia that seems to have afflicted him most of his adult life. He was a victim too, in a more physical sense, of a congeries of ailments I diagnose as Reiters Syndrome – that is arthritis, uveitis, and urethritis, serious inflammation of the joints, the eyes and the urinary tract, leading most often to incapacitating stiffness, retinal bleeding and dysmicturition, sometimes as well to mental instabilities of a general sort.
I was fortunate to have in addition to several lengthy visits with this patient in recent months, full access to his most intimate papers, including logs of his major voyages to the Indies, letters written by him to the court over some ten years, notebooks he assembled for King Fernando and our late Queen Isabel, and marginalia in the numerous books in his library. From these I have been able to arrive at a reasonably sound judgement as to his basic character traits, his obsessions and his general psychological makeup. Of these I have isolated four as the most determinant and the ones I believe most useful for later researchers.
1. Aradixia:To be without roots, without a sense of home and place, is one of the most serious, though one of the least emphasised, psychological disorders. This patient suffered from this to an unusual degree. From what I have been able to discover, he had so little of that feeling we Spaniards call querencia – a love of home and a sense of inner well-being – that he could truly be called a man who never lived anywhere, who simply never had a home.
Late in his life, in a will, Cristobal C made one reference to having been born in Genoa, but nowhere else in all his voluminous writings does he refer to this as his home town, nor does he mention growing up there, or his parents or family, or any of its sights or sounds. (When he wishes to make comparisons between New World phenomena and elsewhere, he always picks Castile: Ðvery high mountains, all resembling Castile, Ðfish like those in Castile, etc.). Nor does he ever write a word in Genoese, or Italian, nor refer to a single Italian scholar or artist, past or present. It is as if, supposing this indeed to be his place of birth, he has chosen to eradicate it – significantly, his parents – from his mind, a psychosis the effects of which are well recorded in the literature.
After his place of birth, the patient never once seems to have found a fixed abode for any length of time. His only real home, from his accounts, was on the deck of a ship, any ship, though one could hardly call the inconstant and ever-changing sea a psychologically fit Ðhome. His only real wish, even then, was to go sailing to a different part of it, always somewhere else beyond the horizon.
As to family ties, those were similarly negligible. His only reference ever to his parents was a phrase in one will about praying Ðto the souls of my father and mother. His wife in Portugal is never mentioned in his writings and we do not know the date of his marriage or of its issue, his son Diego. His mistress in Cordova, by whom he had a second son, Fernando, is mentioned but once, in his last will, and nowhere are there any love letters or poems or memorabilia of this deep attachment, though from other writings we see he was a passionate man. I have encountered this stubborn resistance to acknowledging family in other patients, and though it ranges in degrees from a simple kind of forgetfulness to a full-blown blacking-out of a painful past, it is never healthy.
Lastly, I might mention the partiality that the patient seems to have had to several different names over the years – Columbo, Colomo, Colom, Colon – and yet refers to himself by name only once in all his writings, and when it comes to signing his name he never uses the last name at all, choosing to use only his first name (as a lord or king might), or his title.
2. Pseudologia:Bending truth to suit unusual circumstances is a normal enough trait, but a persistent habit of equivocation and misrepresentation, while not necessarily pathological, is certainly dysfunctional – in some cases indicative of full-fledged disorders. This patient appears from all my evidence to be someone who found it difficult, even in non-threatening circumstances, to tell the truth, a habit of delusion that at times developed into self-delusion.
For example, it seems that he chose to keep what some have called a Ðfalse log on the first voyage of discovery, to record for the crew different distances made at sea from the true ones. If it was a written log it would have been entirely useless, a real sign of self-delusion since the crew could certainly not read, and if it was rather some oral presentation it would have been entirely counterproductive, since it gave the mileage each day as less than the real distances when of course the crew would want to be reassured that they were going faster to their destination. Why the deception? It seems simply to have been in the mans character, something he had to do, its utility aside.
For another example, among many, I am constrained to say – there is the curious incident in 1494 in which the patient made his entire crew swear, to a notary public in an official document and with a punishment of Ðcutting out of the tongue if anyone should deny it, that the island along which they had been sailing, Cuba, was actually part of some unspecified mainland. True, the man seems to have been in a predicament, since he had declared to the Sovereigns that he would find a mainland on this second voyage to the Indies and so far he had only found islands, and impoverished ones at that. But still – he might have had the men agree informally to that tale, and anyway should have known that the King and Queen wouldnt take the word of a million seamen without some further proof of there being a mainland there.
The Queen of Suez’s first voyage, on the 31st of September 1492, contained the tale of an island-swoman being in a situation where she could not give any way of knowing whether an other seamen might not be so ignorant as to believe that. From 1528 the Queen and the Sovereigns in turn decided to take the word of a million seamen by the means of false testimony and then to do so with very different consequences. The Queen used what the Sovereigns did not do to get the answer she had wanted so often; she was compelled to believe that only one of the two could know for certain how many were really bound to lie on this second voyage. The Island in question being not far from a certain island, she was forced to admit the truth of the other’s claim without so much as a hint of evidence, as that they knew it to be untrue. On the 1st of October 1494 the Sovereign was to receive a letter from the Kingdom requesting proof, with the information so requested, that there was a man on another island or at least he’d given an account of how he had gotten information that had not been in writing (i.e. by an unknown letter sent in 1515 to the Queen requesting assistance). One is told at the hearing to give himself an oath in order to make this matter official only to a certain extent. The sovereign is informed in one of the letters that the island above was a small inhabited island far from a place called Zaytou where two people might have been, and at the time his only friend was a woman who came to the island for them to see how they could escape if they were to be captured. (The letter notes that it was not clear that this was true. There’s no way of knowing if it was a forged letter or whether it was actually sent to her by this other person.) In the first part the Sovereign makes the order that this person must “show respect” to a certain person and swear that this person is there in good faith to take care of him or her while they remain outside the sovereign jurisdiction. In the second part the Sovereign then gives his oath of fealty to those who would be willing to have him on his side, or who will be able to take care of his needs or who will not. Those who will find themselves on this island are bound to do so to at least a certain extent and it is not a condition they will be permitted to return there, but a promise they must make to everyone they know who can give them that promise, and what he says to whom in his oath. At this point the Sovereign says that whoever would take him there (as he stated to his servant) or would refuse to take him because he wasn’t truthful about it would get all the better. He tells the person they have “given them” what he’d given them so that they would have no one to blame but themselves. The person is said to have said these words about them all along.
In short, if there were to be a mainland there might be some island lying along the coast, not too far from the