Climate change, an obsession of Christopher Columbus

First modification: 05/08/2022 – 15:50

By Ubaldo Bravo for RFI

Leaving mass he went where no European had ever gone before. That day, August 3, 1492, Christopher Columbus left the Port of Palos with a hundred men hoping to find a new route that would shorten the distance between Europe and India. However, after two and a half months of sailing across the Atlantic, the Genoese landed on an island in the Bahamas, whose Caribbean landscapes did not correspond to the expected trade route.

Back in Spain, Columbus had to render an account to the Catholic Monarchs and to the bankers of Seville, his financiers, to whom he described these islands as a commercial opportunity, provided the climate improved.

“Colón is going to transform his project of discovering a new route into an agricultural colonization project. That is why his second trip becomes a great expedition in which he takes cane and people with experience in this type of crop in the Canary Islands, since his new objective is to establish sugar plantations. [en las islas del Caribe]”, he explained to RFI the French historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, who highlighted the numerous references to the climate that Christopher Columbus makes in his travel diary.

“Why do you talk so much about it? First, because the Caribbean is in the so-called ‘torrid’ zone, that is, an area that was not interesting for trade, for cultivation. Columbus must then find a way to justify that these lands can be inhabited, when in reality they should not be. That is why his diary is full of descriptions about the beauty of nature”.

Trees whose trunks are tall and resistant like the masts of Spanish ships, fertile lands abundant with “good and healthy” waters, and a warm climate similar to a May night in Andalusia, are some of the descriptions of Columbus cited in the book “The revolts of the sky. A history of climate change”, co-written by French historians Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher.

However, when Columbus had to face the violent rains typical of the tropics, his commercial projects were threatened, since the paradisiacal image that he described to his sponsors contrasted with the storm clouds unknown to Europeans.

For this reason, the idea of ​​improving the climate became one of the main objectives of the Genoese navigator, according to French historians: it was necessary to deforest the islands, fell the trees that generate clouds and rain, and thus provide them with a climate optimal for sugar crops. This supposed improvement of the climate had been carried out previously by the Portuguese and Spanish, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, when they conquered the Canary Islands, the island of Madera, and Puerto Santo, located in the Atlantic, at the height of North Africa. “In other words, for them colonization would be a kind of climatic normalization,” Jean-Baptiste Fressoz explained to RFI.

Climate change as a project

“Colonization is going to drastically change the climate of large regions of the planet. The Spanish imperialists used climate change as an optimistic discourse: they said that the roads of the islands were not made by men, but by rabbits. It was the way of saying that the indigenous people did not work the land, that they did not own it. So improving the climate was an argument in favor of the Spanish empire in the debate over possession of the Indies”.

Published in 2020, the first chapter of the book co-written by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher is dedicated to the voyages of Christopher Columbus. In mid-August 2022, the second edition will be available in French bookstores. In this work, one of the historians’ objectives is to demonstrate that for five centuries the climate was used to justify European expansion: with Columbus the aim was to improve the climate of the Americas, in the 18th century the climate served to rank societies , and in the 19th and 20th centuries the French and British empires accused blacks and Arabs of having degraded the climate in Africa.

There is currently a debate about the historical responsibility that developed countries have for greenhouse gas emissions, the main cause of global warming, since they are the ones who have consumed the most fossil fuels in the last two centuries.