Exploring ‘Columbus’ : PBS Hopes Miniseries on His 1492 Voyage, Aftermath Has the Impact of Last Season’s ‘Civil War’

The opening sequence in “Columbus and the Age of Discovery,” the PBS miniseries that begins Sunday night, depicts water so green and clear lapping against replicas of the Italian mariner’s ships that--to eyes used to seeing the ocean from urban shores--the scenes look like they were filmed at Disneyland.

As it turns out, the sea as shown in “Columbus” is the real thing--filmed as replicas of the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria made their way along Columbus’ route during the production of the series.

And therein, in the very fact that one has to look twice to find the truth, lies the paradoxical lesson not only of Columbus himself, but also of any attempt to examine the wrenching changes wrought by his endeavors.

It was 499 years ago that a young Genoese merchant-explorer, financed by Spain, bumped into the wrong continent. In his wake is a history that, like the real waves slapping against the false Nina, has left us with a confusing blend of fantasy and reality.

Christopher Columbus--his real name was Cristoforo Colombo--”was created by history and in turn created history,” said Zvi Dor-Ner, executive producer of the series.

The son of a weaver--the series takes viewers to the house in Genoa’s wool-working district where he grew up--Columbus began to work on sailing ships at the age of 15. He wanted to go to China, then a center of world finance and culture, and other parts of Asia, where he hoped to grow rich exporting spices and gold to Europe.

But, the series says, the powerful Muslim empires to the East stood in his way. The ocean voyage West was to be an alternative route.

The story of his trip--and of the massive global changes that followed it--is the subject of “Columbus and the Age of Discovery,” which will air in seven hourlong installments over four nights (at 8 p.m. Sunday through Wednesday on KCET Channel 28 and KPBS Channel 15; at 7 p.m. Sunday through Wednesday on KVCR Channel 24, and Oct. 14-15 and Oct. 21-22 on KOCE Channel 50).

PBS executives are hoping that “Columbus,” which cost $5 million and took 2 1/2 years to make, will be the 1991 equivalent of last year’s enormously successful “The Civil War.” Like Ken Burns’ epic tale of the war between the states, “Columbus” is being packaged as a miniseries and promoted as a special event.

“Whether it will strike that same chord or reach the same audience (as ‘The Civil War’), it’s hard to say,” said Melinda Ward, director of performance and cultural programming at PBS. “But we certainly view it as the same sort of monumental, definitive series.”

For the Europeans, Columbus’ voyage brought expansion of empire and, eventually, its rise from a continent secondary in importance to Asia and North Africa to a dominant position in world politics. European nutrition was revolutionized by the importation of potatoes from the New World, and people on the Continent later came to see the Americas as a haven from oppression and economic strife.

But for the people who were already here--Columbus called them Indios, thinking he was in India, and the name stuck--the arrival of the Europeans meant diseases that killed millions, and slavery, religious persecution and wars that killed millions more. For Africans, who were brought by the millions to work plantations after the native populations dwindled, it meant a terrific escalation of slavery, as well as forced emigration.

“It’s a fantastic yarn,” Dor-Ner said. “And it’s the key to our history.”

Because the arrival of the Europeans brought great power to some while wreaking incredible destruction on the lives of others, the story of Columbus is intensely controversial. Not surprisingly, the series has already begun to engender criticism.

“People have not seen it but there are assumptions being made,” said Dor-Ner, explaining that he has already begun to receive letters about the series. “(Some fear) that we want to put Columbus on a pedestal and they feel that is inappropriate. Others feel that the pedestal is not high enough.”

Rayna Green, director of the American Indian program at the Smithsonian Institution and a Cherokee from Oklahoma, quit as an adviser to the series last year, saying that she was uncomfortable with its direction.

“It seemed that they were not going to treat what happened in North America, that they were concentrating on South America in order to stay away from some very difficult issues,” Green said.

She said that she began to fear that the series would concentrate so much on the point of view of the Europeans that, while it might address the invaders’ impact on the Indians, it would not be likely to tell their personal stories, or chart the heroism of those who managed to survive the onslaught.

Dor-Ner said that Green is correct about the series not spending much time on North America and the problems confronted by American Indians in the area that is now the United States. But he insisted that the omission was not made for political reasons, or to avoid grappling with the notion that the Europeans devastated Indian populations.

“What we went for were some patterns,” Dor-Ner said. “We tried to examine the early relationships between natives and Europeans, and tried to suggest that they had applications for the future.”

Green’s departure left the series without a major Indian adviser, a development that makes some American Indians skeptical that their point of view will be adequately portrayed.

The series does, however, spend more than three of its seven hours discussing the impact of the arrival of the Europeans on native peoples.

Franklin Knight, a professor of Latin American and Caribbean history at Johns Hopkins University who served as an adviser to the project, said that the series’ approach was to try to lay out the facts of post-Columbian history by themselves, and let any moral lessons be drawn by the viewers.

“I don’t see history and social change in moral terms of good and bad, right and wrong,” Knight said. “I see ages being very complicated, and I see people as being savage then and now.”