Discovering Columbus : Program at UCLA Explores a New World of Information About His Achievements

On the 15th floor of a Westwood Village office building, earnest academicians scratch their heads, asking the same question about Christopher Columbus that they might well have asked more casually about Richard M. Nixon 15 years ago: What did he know and when did he know it?

For years, a select number of specialists in fields such as Latin American history, Spanish and Italian languages, ethnic studies, cartography, cosmology, philology and literature have been marshaling their resources, preparing for the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ discovery of the New World in 1492.

They are motivated not by the glee of celebration but by the unprecedented chance to meld many avenues of little-noticed scholarship into a years-long public examination of Columbus--the man, the journey and the chain reaction of cultural and political explosions he set off.

Columbus Mania

A significant amount of the work is being coordinated out of a small suite of offices that houses UCLA’s 1992 Quincentenary Programs, created earlier this year by the university chancellor’s office to produce a wide range of Columbus seminars, lectures and exhibits, some of which will begin as early as next year.

“If you look through textbooks, what you usually get is a very romantic, mythic notion of Columbus. Most people only know that in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue,” said Clorinda Donato, executive editor of the Quincentenary Programs and a teacher of French and Italian at Cal State Long Beach.

“Very few people know what sorts of things he was exposed to, his schooling, how much he knew about the world,” Donato said.

“This is a process of trying to unpack Columbus’ intellectual baggage,” said Geoffrey Symcox, a UCLA history professor.

Symcox is associate director of the most ambitious of the Quincentenary Programs, a massive compilation and translation of documents related to Columbus, including his complete writings, which while tantalizingly extensive do not include any writings made before the journey that would nail down precisely what Columbus thought he would find.

Medical History Study

Between now and 1992, the Quincentenary Programs will bring together public health and Chicano studies experts to examine how Spanish medical traditions differed dramatically from the traditions of “New Spain’s” natives.

They will exhibit paintings that illustrate the landscapes of Columbus’ life in Italy, Greece, Spain and the Caribbean. They will bring 25 college professors to a five-week workshop, underwritten by the National Endowment for the Humanities, to study Columbus’ intellectual and cultural origins.

They will bring distinguished Italian scholars--including history and archeology professor Anunciada Colon-Carvajal, a descendant of Columbus--to UCLA to teach quarter-year classes.

The programs are the brainchild of Fredi Chiappelli, who conceived of them in the early 1980s as director of UCLA’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

Chiappelli later retired but retained the title of director emeritus of the center and kept hard at work on the Quincentenary Programs--so hard, his staff said, that he is currently hospitalized for treatment of a recurring heart problem aggravated by exhaustion.

In academic centers in the United States, Italy and Spain, similar work has been going on during much of the 1980s.

Pennsylvania Artifacts

In New Jersey, Joseph Laufer, a former Latin American studies teacher, has been publishing a newsletter called Discovery Five Hundred since 1984. Laufer’s curiosity ranges from charting the number of American cities named Columbus (27) to conducting interviews with little-known figures, such as the owners of a Boalsburg, Pa., chapel that houses artifacts from the Columbus family chapel, including the original entrance door.

Scholars hope that programs like UCLA’s will tie together enough disparate fields of study to give new perspective to complex issues such as the clash of values between those who discovered the New World and the inhabitants they subjugated. By contrast, Symcox said, when the 400th anniversary celebration was conducted, much of the writing took a “triumphant” tone, failing to sufficiently address the values that were lost as Indian civilizations were eventually conquered.

Students of Columbus also hope to paint a multidimensional portrait of the man for a public that has been exposed to little discussion about him.

“You get perhaps three minutes about him in a Western civilization lecture as an undergraduate,” Symcox said.

Because so many people are aware that Columbus did not know precisely which continent he discovered, there is a belief that he was an unsophisticated mariner who succeeded because of stubbornness, not skill.

“Columbus,” proclaimed Italian historian Paolo Emilio Taviani, “was a veritable genius in the broadest sense of the word.”

Cutting Edge of Science

“He was far more in touch with advanced scientific and humanistic learning,” Symcox said. “He read a lot, he was in touch with Toscannelli (a 15th-Century Italian mathematician whose theories on the possible crossing of the Atlantic at Portugal’s latitude was believed to have inspired Columbus’ voyage), he was in touch with people on the edge of cosmology, he’s looking at ancient texts and making notes.”

Columbus’ son Ferdinand recorded an incident in 1504 in which Columbus’ knowledge that there would be a lunar eclipse allowed him to cow the natives of the West Indies island of Hispaniola into providing food for his hungry crew. Otherwise, he warned, the moon would “rise angry and in flame to indicate the evil that God would inflict on them.”

“We hope when the dust settles” from the conferences between scholars that “we will have a much better idea of what Columbus thought he was up to,” Symcox said. “The idea for the moment is to figure out much more clearly what was in Columbus’ mind.”

A transcription of the journal Columbus kept during his journey from Spain has long been in print, but the journal itself has never been found.

“All we have are second-hand versions,” Symcox said. “In the back of your mind there’s always this journal in a dusty old room somewhere in the Spanish archives. . . .”

” . . . And somebody’s going to publish it in 1992,” laughed Lori Stein, director of the UCLA Quincentenary Programs, “and put us out of business.”