Rediscovery of America

November 21, 1965
Plainfield

Rediscovery of America

[Editor’s Note: The most recent evidence strongly points to the Vinland Map being a forgery. Having said that, it is clear from other that Columbus was not the first to discover the New World; Viking settlements in Newfoundland predate Columbus’ journey by centuries.]

Adopting what seemed to many to be deplorable timing, Yale University on the day before Columbus Day, October 12, in this year of 1965 announced the publication of the “Vinland Map” which supposedly confirms the hypothesis that the Norsemen discovered the North American mainland somewhere around 1000. If so, Columbus did not discover America in 1492, but re-discovered it. I would like to place this controversy before you, not to settle historical debates, but rather to suggest that the contentiousness which this announcement provoked should remind us that religion should help us understand not only human foibles and human vanities, but also, religion should help us find for ourselves the positive and negative features of ancient discovery. We seek this understanding of historical human events not to debunk history and throw mud on honored names, but to establish directions for our ways and guidance in our moral problems of man and society.

No matter whether or not one accepts the new evidence which gives credit to the Norsemen for discovering North America, the impress of Columbus on our culture will not be eradicated easily or soon. Our cities are marked with Columbus Avenues, Columbus streets, and Columbus circles. Columbus, Indiana, Columbus, Georgia, and Columbus, Ohio are lettered on our maps. Our children sing, “Columbus the tem (sic?) of the ocean,” and our venerable statesmen meet in the District of Columbia. Columbia University is one of the great schools and the Columbia River is one of the mighty rivers of America. There would seem to be some awkwardness and much strangeness if we were to talk about Erickson Circle, Leif the Lucky, Ohio and if our judicial, legislative and executive branches of the government were to have their mail addressed to the District of Eric the Red.

In spite of natural Latin loyalties to Columbus and the voluminous press notices given the announcements and reactions, five weeks ago, most scholarly thought has agreed that there were voyages which reached the North American mainland as early as 1000 a.d. The famous historian, Samuel Eliot Morrison observed that this has been generally known since 1837. The scholarly studies have been in the direction of discovering if the Vikings had precursors in America. The Vinland Map, highly publicized by Yale, indicates that Leif Erickson had a partner, Bjarni Herjulfsson. One can speculate right away – maybe Bjarni’s real name was Barney, adding to the belief that the earliest discoverers of America were Irish monks. According to the legends of Brendan of Clonfert, son of Finnloger, they were in southerly parts of what is now the U.S. as early as 850. If one seeks to confuse the matter even more, there is some guessing that the Chinese had a colony in the Pacific Northwest as early as 449.

It is said that when Yale announced the Vinland Map, comedian Jimmy Durante, loyal to his background, remarked that “when Columbus arrived, he played only to Indians, there were no Norwegians in the audience.” This should be a reminder as Morrison wrote, “that the real discoverers of America were the Indians, who, tens of thousands of years before the Norsemen paid their brief visits had spread throughout the continent and established at least three great civilizations.”

So Columbus, Erik, Leif, Bjarni and all the others were re-discoverers of America.

But Columbus was the most important. His voyages are historically unquestioned. More than that, because his diaries are remarkable revelations of both greatness and meanness, what Columbus valued in the America he discovered can be of guidance to us in the America we are discovering.

Columbus has been honored as the brave, visionary explorer who sailed westward beyond the Gates of Hercules, left the Azores in the wake of his tiny fleet; and when he next hailed land, he carved his niche in history as the discoverer of America. He didn’t reach his objective, which had been China; and in the land he discovered, he passed over the real treasures and marked the islands of the Caribbean with the ugly scars of cruelty and the enslavement of human beings. This is said not in judgment of Columbus, for he was a product of his harsh times, not an enlightened humanitarian deeply convinced of the rights of all human beings. The voyages of Columbus although eventually ill-starred, were courageous adventures. When we reflect on the gold and lands he, his officers and sponsors were after and on the ways they behaved, we find encapsulated some of the great virtues and cruel evils that man exhibits.

When one reads the diary of Columbus and considers some of the deeds of this great Admiral, one cannot help but be struck by the grandeur and misery of man. The following lines from Columbus’ notes on his first voyage as his vessel was closely following the coastline of Cuba (Juana): “This island and all the others are very fertile to a limitless degree and this island is extremely so. In it there are many harbors on the coast of the sea beyond comparison with others which I know in Christendom, and many rivers, good and large, which is marvelous. Its lands are high, and there are in it many sierras and very lofty mountains, beyond comparison with the island of Tenerife. All are most beautiful, of a thousand shapes, and all are accessible and filled with trees of a thousand kinds and tall, and they seem to touch the sky. And I am told they never lose their foliage, as I can understand, for I saw them as green and lovely as they are in Spain in May, and some of them were flowering, some bearing fruit, and some in another stage, according to their nature. And the nightingale was singing and other birds of a thousand kinds in the month of November.”

Yet the great explorer who could respond with such poetic sensitivity to the great natural beauty of a new world, was the same man who began the West Indian Slave Trade, capturing natives and shipping them back to Spain. On June 24, 1495, 5 vessels crowded with slaves followed others who had previously carried their human cargoes of misery. The same man who rejoiced in nightingales in November tore men, women and children away from their lovely island homes. Weighted with irons and imprisoned in dark, cramped, airless holds, they were not even given a last look at the beautiful lands they were forced to leave forever.

All this becomes more pathetic, even inexplicable, when one considers the quality of the people Columbus enslaved. They were not savages who would have been better off as “Christians,” even though chained. Columbus himself testifies, (p. 197-8), to their character and hospitality, “It is true that after they have been reassured and have lost their fear, they are so guileless and so generous with all they possess that no one would believe it who has not seen it. They never refuse anything they possess if it be asked of them. On the contrary they invite anyone to share it, and display as much love as if they would give their hearts and whether the thing be of value or whether it be of small price, at once with whatever trifle of whatever kind it may be that is given them, with that they are content....

“... and they do not know any creed and are not idolaters, only they believe that power and good are in the heavens.

“... and this does not come because they are ignorant. On the contrary they are of acute intelligence, and are men who navigate all these seas, so it is amazing how good an account they give of everything.”

If only Columbus, instead of enslaving these bright, good people had tried to discover the secret of their generosity, the social origins of their good dispositions, the religious development of their faith in the power and good of the universe. Such findings would have taught us much, for America is emphatically being re-discovered in 1965 and all the recent years; and much more daring explorations are called for or we perish. If an explorer who knew nothing of us should put in at our harbors, would he find a consistent pattern of generosity, friendliness and a prevailing folk religion of simplicity and goodness?

True, our social services, charities, community enterprises, corporate organizations for production, banking, trade, our provisions for material security speak volumes for our national acceptance of responsibility for the welfare of the citizenry. We have considerable zeal for the education of all our people, along with confusion about the aims of education and the proper seat of responsibility for its accomplishment. A modern Columbus might be overwhelmed by the pile-up of wealth; and attracted by our passionate striving for recognition and status.

But other Americas are being discovered, too. We are discovering in these post-WW2 years that our national community is shadowed by fear of widespread development of nuclear weapons and increasing danger of their use by some nation.

On Sept. 17, 1492, Columbus recorded that the seamen began to murmur with fear. Nearly fifty days of sailing Westward without sighting land aggravated their fears of the unknown. These fears had been compounded by the strange deflections of the compass needle, by the startling streak of a large meteor and by the fearful experience of the Saragossa Sea, where the floating maze of sea-growth seemed almost like a supernatural barrier. But the Admiral kept sailing westward in spite of the community of fear aboard the little vessels.

We are re-discovering fear of the unknown in our day – fear of unknown events and impulsive fingers on atomic buttons. We are discovering we are a long day’s voyage from old and comfortable ways. The future is unknown and the compass needle of international prediction is fluctuating erratically. We are discovering to our chagrin that our country is looked upon by many others in the world as a threat to peace. Perhaps we ought to study the charts of living more closely. Bishop Robinson of Woolwich, England, famous for his “Honest to God” book wrote equally provocatively in CHRISTIAN MORALS TODAY, “... the unbreakable rules propounded by Christians always turn out to be about sex and not about war.”

Did we not re-discover America in the news stories this week when it was disclosed that the Secretary General of the U.N. had secured approval from North Vietnam to sit down and talk peace, but that our State Department had flatly rejected the opportunity? The best that can be said about such national policy is that an astonishing lack of candor has been demonstrated. If the North Vietnamese can be called intransigent and stubborn, then we have earned a similar label in the eyes of much of the world.

When the Committee on Social Responsibility moved us so deeply with their service, were they not portraying an America whose rediscovery is laced with both optimism and pessimism?

Depending upon one’s sophistication, it is either shocking or ironic that when Southern Rhodesia declared its independence of the British Commonwealth in order to prevent the African majority from obtaining liberties, rights and the vote, their Southern Rhodesia Declaration of Independence copied the phrases from our Declaration of Independence. It may be painful to our pride, but perhaps the white Rhodesians, who will not give up power and special privilege, chose our Declaration of Independence because, although our Founding Fathers wrote of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, these were not for all Americans. Indians and Negroes, for example were excluded and the consequences in human suffering have been incalculable. In the one hundred eighty nine years since 1776, it has still not come home fully to us that unless human rights exist in actual practice for all persons, then to boast unseemly of our achievements of freedom for all is a snare and a delusion. We should be shocked to discover that Southern Rhodesia has modeled on our Declaration of Independence its national profession of constitutional freedoms but which actually are disenfranchisement. Perhaps if we are properly shocked, we may become more aware that each of us needs to discover in himself the courage and creativity to reduce the disproportion between the ideal and the actual in the dimension of equality of opportunity in employment, housing, education and justice.

U Thant, Secretary General of the U.N. is aware of the serious nature of the issue, writing in the April 65 issue of THE COURIER, “There is a clear prospect that racial conflict, if we cannot curb and finally eliminate it, will crow into a destructive monster compared to which the religious an ideological conflicts of the past and present will seem like family quarrels.”

There was another rediscovery of America in my experience this week. Like many persons, I have ... certain hunches and felt certain amounts of uneasiness about the engineered illusions of some varieties of advertising, but I was somewhat surprised to read excerpts from a speech made by Dean Robert O. Schultze last Wednesday to the annual meeting of National Advertisers. (See NY Times, 11/18/65). These comments really reveal more about us as consumers than they represent any indictment of advertising:

“We have long known that this (advertising) was no simple or straightforward venture.

“We need misinformation, we need illusion .... And much of contemporary advertising addresses itself to this need, to our need to be misled not only about products and services – how superior they are – but about ourselves – how successful, popular, handsome, beautiful, good we are or may become; and about life – how simple it is, how friendly, how full of pleasures and gustoes and rewards.”

Dr. Schultze said also that another function of advertising is that “it sensitizes us to the fact that our world is a highly manipulative one, and that getting along for many of us these days more and more involves the ability to manipulate, to sell, perhaps to con our children, our associates, our wives and husbands or subordinates and superordinates – and perhaps most of all – ourselves.”

But Dr. Schultze is not alarmed at all for he sees advertising “as a conservative element in society – one that provides a ballast, a stabilizing factor in a rapidly changing environment.”

Then the capstone of the quotes. “In this sense American advertising rather resembles the Baptist Church, the American Medical Association, the Republican Party, the American Legion and the Ivy League colleges.”

Are we now rediscovering an America where a major stabilizing force in our society is illusion and misinformation?

Just one more example: the other night, driving through the industrial complex on the way to NYC, the man with me asked, “where are the alabaster cities?” Of course we were thinking of Katherine Lee Bates’ great hymn – purple mountain majesties, the fruited plain, the shining and the gleaming alabaster cities. Perhaps we are a little late in discovering that the air is tainted, the waters polluted, the mountains scarified and the plains wasted.

Anyone can think of examples, A water engineer ... eloquent at an Adult Progress Committee describing our mismanagement of our most essential resource – clean water. But long ago I read that Lake Tahoe, one of the most beautiful bodies of water on our planet was rapidly becoming polluted because of excess commercial expansion and inadequate sewage regulations. Conservation and beautifying the landscape is now receiving considerable Federal attention, but some areas may be beyond reclamation.

Now this foregoing section on the rediscovery of America may have seemed like a Roman candle, popping off briefly about Vietnam, Southern Rhodesia, advertising, pollution and waste – popping off with a spark, then fading and falling into frustration and inertia – is that the way a sermon ends? Well, no one person can handle many of the problems of modern man unless he plunges only into the most shallow soundings of each. Few, if any of us can charge off in all directions and be any more effective than was Don Quixote. There is nothing more frustrating than to be engaged with all problems and [be] master of none.

Furthermore, I surmise that few experiences can be more irritating than to be among a captive audience and be expected to listen to a moralizing preacher embark on a Cook’s tour of people’s alleged faults and presumed failings, while he blithely entertains a completely unrealistic view of the interests, energies and moral convictions of most of the people.

Yet, what would you? Any look at any part of history discloses the plain reality that the higher values must be maintained with considerable labor by overworked and overstressed minorities in the midst of uncaring or overwhelmed majorities.

In Act 4, Sc. [4], Hamlet soliloquizes,

“What is a man
If is chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed?

Sure he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust in us unus’d.”

Recently I heard a story – somewhat silly – but making a point: an inexperienced officer was drilling a squad of soldiers in a field that ended abruptly at sheer cliffs that descended 1000 feet or more to the rocky shore of the English Channel. After a series of squads left and squads rights, etc., the inexperienced officer found he had the squad marching toward the cliff; and couldn’t think of the proper command which would turn them about and prevent disaster. As he stood, tongue-tied, the corporal spoke up, “For goodness sake, sir, say something, if only ’goodbye.’”

So it is with the numerous, painful problems and dilemmas in the re-discovered American – nuclear powered, urbanized, tense, increasingly automated in a social sea rising with a great tide of expectations from those who have never had their rightful opportunity for equal liberties, security and self-fulfillment. Those who are concerned ought to say something. If a person can not speak and be informed on many issues, he can on a few – or one. Every important issue needs the strength of more participation, if only one more. The higher values are maintained by minorities who work in the midst of apathetic or callous majorities.

We will rediscover America for ourselves as individuals when on one, or more vital issues. We make our knowledge adequate, our voice heard and our influence felt. The last verse of William De Witt Hyde’s hymn (311) compresses the meaning in four lines,

“Since what we choose is what we are,
And what we love, we yet shall be,
The goal may ever shine afar -
The will to win it makes us free.”