Morning News: Indigenuity
Fifteen years ago, the cinquecentennial of a certain “discovery” in 1492 was brushed over by pundits everywhere: Columbus had become an embarrassment to a militantly post imperial age. I couldn’t help thinking that it was just bad timing, and today I am proved right, by a story in the Times by Amy Harmon, “Seeking Columbus’s Origins With a Swab.”
In 2004, a Spanish geneticist, Dr. Jose A. Lorente, extracted genetic material from a cache of Columbus’s bones in Seville to settle a dispute about where he was buried. Ever since, he has been beset by amateur historians, government officials and self-styled Columbus relatives of multiple nationalities clamoring for a genetic retelling of the standard textbook tale.
The Times lists, in graphic form, the five most likely theories of Columbus’s background: the Genoese, the Catalan, the Portuguese, the Majorcan, and the Jewish. At the bottom of this list, there’s a lovely bouquet of other possibilities, one that ends with the Times’s own Manhattan-inflected whimsy:
Columbus may have been the son of Pope Innocent VIII or the King of Poland. He may trace his origin to the Balaeric island of Ibiza, or the Mediterranean island of Corsica [!!!!!]. He could be from Greece or Norway. Or. for that matter, from anywhere that people have DNA.
D’you see what I mean about timing? in 1992, Columbus was the European oppressor of indigenous Americans. But, just as there was hardly any Internet in those long-ago days (1992, not 1492), so the sleuthing possibilities of DNA had hardly begun to register on the popular consciousness. Now, however, having discovered for certain that “Anna Andersen” was not the Archduchess Anastasia of Russia, the world is clamoring to establish the true nature of Columbus’s own indigenuity.