Columbus and Clive

Christopher Columbus, Failure A sentimental imagining of the explorer’s deathbed. (Library of Congress) No matter how widely he had been hailed as a hero 14 years before, by 1506, when he died (500 years ago today), Christopher Columbus was all washed up.

Crowds from across Spain lined the streets of Seville in 1493 to welcome him home from his first voyage to the Americas, but he already hadn’t found what he was looking for, a seaway to India’s spice-trade ports. He never would, though the search consumed the rest of his life. A little genocide here, some slavery there, several mutinies, and multiple executions of crew members later, and Columbus fell out of favor with the Spanish crown and the public. When he died he was surrounded by family and by the trappings of his substantial income. But he went to his grave with the gouging sense of injustice he couldn’t forgive and of failure he couldn’t explain.

His reputation began to sour during his second expedition. Flush with the success of 1492, he had been named viceroy and governor of all the islands he discovered. Some 1,400 men jostled for berths on his 17 ships bound for the gold-studded heaven on earth in the west. But the large crew was difficult to feed, and the work to be done—digging canals, searching for gold—was backbreaking. —Christine Gibson is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.

Robert Clive, 1725–74, British soldier and statesman who was instrumental in securing Great Britain's interests in India.

He went to India in 1743 as a clerk for the British East India Company and entered the military service of the company in 1744; he soon distinguished himself in the fighting against the French. Clive's brilliant capture of Arcot (1751) and the relief of the siege of Trichinopoly (1752) thwarted Dupleix, who had been on the verge of achieving French hegemony in S India. In 1757, Clive, then governor of Fort St. David near Madras (now Chennai), recovered Calcutta (now Kolkata) from the nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-Daula. Then, after defeating the nawab at Plassey, he replaced him with the more compliant Mir Jafar. Bengal thus passed under effective British control, and Clive became the first governor. His victories over the Dutch at Biderra (1759) consolidated the British position as the dominant European power in India.

Returning (1760) to England, he was given an Irish peerage as Baron Clive of Plassey. As governor of Bengal again from 1765 to 1767, Clive greatly reduced corruption and inefficiency in a formerly disordered administration and reached a settlement with the states of Bihar and Orissa. But his assumption of the right to collect the revenues of those states involved the company in the complexities of wide territorial administration, which it was ill equipped to handle. This was one of the factors that eventually led the British government to assume responsibility for British rule in India. After his return to England, Clive was bitterly attacked by politicians and others and was accused by Parliament of peculation. He was acquitted (1773) after a long investigation, but, broken in health, he committed suicide. CUPEn