The Case for Explorers’ Day
6 min read
More than 530 years after Christopher Columbus led an expedition across the Atlantic Ocean to the New World, many Americans still see the navigator as a symbol of their country’s origins. Others see him as a progenitor of colonialism, enslavement, and genocide. So the day that honors him, the second Monday of October, is unusually polarizing among federal holidays. Just 16 states will observe Columbus Day this year. Some states and many cities instead observe Indigenous Peoples’ Day. That counter-celebration, proposed in the late 1970s, was first adopted by Berkeley, California, to protest the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage.
President Joe Biden has managed this national divide by marking both Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples’ Day in separate White House proclamations. But rather than divide up for rival civic holidays, Americans should come together for a compromise celebration: World Explorers’ Day.
If the word explorer makes you think, fondly or angrily, about a group of 15th- and 16th-century European seafarers––Vasco da Gama, Juan Ponce de León, Ferdinand Magellan––you’re thinking too narrowly. The urge to explore propelled the earliest humans to leave Africa, the nomads who crossed the Bering Strait, and the seafarers who settled the Polynesian islands. It drove Leif Erikson, Ibn Battuta, Zheng He, Amelia Earhart, Jacques Cousteau, Yuri Gagarin, and Neil Armstrong.
Explorers’ Day would extol a quality common to our past and vital to our future, honoring all humans––Indigenous and otherwise—who’ve set off into the unknown, expanding what we know of the world.
Critics of Columbus Day are less at odds with its originators than one might expect. In the influential revisionist history A People’s History of the United States, published in 1980, Howard Zinn points to Columbus as the cause of the European invasion of the Americas, noting that he engaged in killing and enslavement and blaming him for the destruction of Indigenous civilizations in the New World. “To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to deemphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice,” Zinn writes. “It serves—unwittingly—to justify what was done.”
That argument resonates widely today.
Columbus was an obscure figure in the 13 colonies that would become the United States: There were no celebrations or commemorations in 1692 to mark the 200th anniversary of his voyage. As the tercentenary of the voyage approached, however, Americans were forging a new nation and were eager for a new founding mythology that minimized Britain.
The explorer was suited to this purpose––monuments, place names, and local celebrations in his honor proliferated in ensuing decades—in part because his most famous deed wholly defined him. As Ed Burmila wrote in The Nation, “Almost nothing was known about Columbus in the American colonies at the dawn of the Revolution. The few written records of his voyages, including a biography by his son Ferdinand and a 16th-century history by Bartolome de Las Casas, were unavailable in the New World and were not translated into English until much later.”
Most Americans wouldn’t encounter a detailed biography of Columbus until 1828, when Washington Irving published A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. And that account is widely judged inaccurate in ways that favor Columbus––it even popularized the myth that, at the time Columbus sailed, most Europeans believed the world was flat.
In 1892, when President William Henry Harrison declared the first Columbus Day, he too had political motives: The prior year, 11 Italian immigrants had been lynched in New Orleans, sparking conflicts with the Kingdom of Italy that included recalled ambassadors, talk of war, and an indemnity payment to family members of survivors. Proclaiming a celebration of Columbus was intended to smooth diplomatic relations and win support from Italian American voters (never mind that Columbus had sailed on behalf of Spain in an era that predated Italian nationhood). In 1934, when Congress made Columbus Day a holiday, crediting the seafarer with “the discovery of America” (never mind that he’d never set foot on any land that is now America), it was partly due to lobbying from Italian American groups. Thereafter, Italian Americans treated the holiday as a celebration of their people and their resilience against xenophobia.
Of course, unlike the first Americans to celebrate Columbus, we know today that he committed many sins, and that several of his peers regarded him as a rogue by the standards of their own time. He lied to his own men from the start, keeping a fake captain’s log on his initial voyage. His patron Queen Isabella was appalled by contemporaneous accounts of his ruthlessness as an unqualified governor of a New World colony. Catholic investigators of Spanish behavior in the New World cataloged his cruelty and killing. He was once arrested and imprisoned by the Spanish for his crimes. And by all accounts he took and sold slaves.
Clearly, Columbus is no hero as a man in full; yet, as an explorer, he showed heroic bravery and skill. For those reasons, a day dedicated to celebrating only him makes less sense than including him as one notable among many on Explorers’ Day. In that way, we could honor his inspiring contributions to humanity without seeming to excuse his worst deeds. And we could include other explorers.
Admittedly, Explorers’ Day would encompass multiple humans who conquered and enslaved. But Indigenous Peoples’ Day similarly encompasses all of the New World peoples who enslaved others long before 1492, tribes that traded in African slaves into the 1800s, and brutal hegemons such as the Aztecs, who warred with neighbors, sacrificed humans, and ran extractive empires. These facts in no way excuse the atrocities that Columbus and other Europeans perpetrated. But they underscore that no past civilization upheld modern human rights, enlightenment universalism, and anti-racism.
Learning about the best of Indigenous civilizations and peoples is still worthwhile, of course. And I suspect that Americans may well learn more about such peoples if exposed to their exploratory feats, just as the feats of European explorers fuel interest in their origins and societies.
Anyone dazzled by Columbus’s voyages will be stunned by the even more impressive discovery, exploration, and settlement of the Polynesian islands, undertaken many centuries before. As Christina Thompson put it in Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia, all islands in a 10-million-square-mile area, including Hawaii, were originally settled by an innovative, highly capable voyaging people, originating in Southeast Asia, who “had no knowledge of writing or metal tools—no maps or compasses—and yet they succeeded in colonizing the largest ocean on the planet, occupying every habitable rock between New Guinea and the Galápagos.” They created “the largest single culture area in the world” at the time. Which historical reenactment would you find more daunting: crossing the Atlantic on a ship such as La Niña or reaching Easter Island, 1,100 miles from its nearest neighboring island, without instruments, in a canoe?
The challenge of a big, diverse country like the United States is coexisting peacefully and cooperating constructively to solve common problems despite differences in backgrounds, cultures, and values. Civic holidays assist in that project by celebrating what unites us.
A nationwide embrace of Explorers’ Day may seem unlikely, when Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples’ Day already have their partisans. But as we’ve seen with Martin Luther King Day, which was controversial when first established and is now celebrated in all 50 states, culture wars don’t have to last forever. A compromise around Explorers’ Day is worth pursuing as a new, unifying synthesis of traditions. All of us are descended from explorers and beneficiaries of them. In that spirit, on the second Monday of this month, I will celebrate Explorers’ Day.
