By William C. Shelton

(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries of The Somerville News belong solely to the authors of those commentaries and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville News, its staff or publishers.)

There is so much in our past of which Americans can be justly proud, but that we never learn in school—stories of great courage, innovation, endurance, and self-sacrifice. At the same time, we celebrate stories that just aren’t true.

Our national holidays reflect this pattern. In February, we honor our two greatest presidents, Americans who really were extraordinary leaders and extraordinary people.  At Thanksgiving, we retell a feel-good story whose underlying truth is rather more complex. And among our most misleading myths is the one that we repeat on our next national holiday, Columbus Day.

This is the story that I was told in elementary school: In the 15th Century, Europeans thought the world was flat. But in Genoa lived a young merchant’s clerk who embodied the American virtues of common sense, daring, and entrepreneurial spirit. The ships that he watched sailing out of the harbor seemed to sink lower on the horizon as they sailed into the distance, until they disappeared. He reasoned that this optical phenomenon occurred because ships were sailing around the curve of a round world.

With pluck and determination, he tried to persuade Europe’s powerful to invest in an expedition that would circle the earth. It would open a direct sea route to the mysterious East. He finally found visionaries in Spain’s King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. They provided him with three small ships, and he sailed west.

It was a long journey of hardship and privation. Columbus’ sailors were superstitious and mutinous in their fear that they would fall off the earth. But Columbus’ courageous leadership prevailed. In the end, he discovered a whole “new world,” launching a new chapter in human history.

The story that historians tell is considerably different. Greeks in the 3rd Century BC knew that the earth was round.  Using an obelisk‚Äôs shadow, a long hike to the outpost of Sayene, and the Pythagorean theorem, a librarian in Alexandria had calculated the earth‚Äôs circumference to within 240 miles of its true measure. Informed Europeans of Columbus‚Äô day knew that the earth was round.

The Spanish nobility were 2 percent of the population and owned 95 percent of the land.  They had recently unified as a nation-state, driven out Jews and Moors, and wanted gold, which they imagined to be in abundance in Asia. Hostile Turks controlled the land routes. So the Spanish monarchs promised Columbus that he could have 10 percent of the gold and governorship of the lands that he found.

The first sailor to sight land was to receive an annual pension of 10,000 maravedis for life. In the early morning of October 12, 1492, a sailor named Rodrigo saw the moon shining on white sands and cried out. Columbus took the reward for himself instead.

Arawak Indians wearing small gold ear ornaments swam out to greet the new arrivals. Columbus took some of them prisoner and forced them to guide him to the gold‚Äôs source.  They sailed to an island that he named Hispa√±ola, now the location of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

The natives were, in Columbus’ words, “so naïve and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone.” So Columbus built a fort from timbers of the wrecked Santa Maria and began slaughtering the Arawak who would not give him what he wanted.

He persuaded the Spanish monarchy to finance a new expedition of 17 ships and 1,200 men. When he couldn‚Äôt find gold, he sent 500 hundred Arawak to Spain as slaves.  Of these ‚Äúbest specimens,‚Äù 200 died in route.

Columbus ordered that all natives, 14 years and older, be required to produced a quota of gold each month. Those who did were given a copper token to wear about the neck.  Those found without tokens had their hands cut off and bled to death. Those who resisted were hung or burned to death.

After two years, half of Hispa√±ola‚Äôs 250,000 natives had died from murder, mutilation, or suicide. When the Spaniards accepted that there was no more gold, they enslaved the Arawak on huge estates. By 1515, 50,000 Arawak remained alive.  By 1550, there were 500.

I don’t imagine that we’ll stop celebrating Columbus Day in the foreseeable future. But it would be good if we marked that date with some humility, remembering that we get into trouble when we uncritically accept broad statements about other peoples. One example that comes to mind is Dick Cheney’s assurances that ordinary Iraqis would welcome American troops with jubilation, that liberated oil revenues would finance the war, and that Iraq would become a Middle Eastern beacon of democracy.