Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

by Tom Phillips

The Bay of Pigs operation was almost certainly the most humiliating incident in America’s long-running and hilarious string of failures to overthrow the government of a small island situated right on its doorstep, although in fairness, it might not be the weirdest. (That would probably be the CIA buying up a large number of mollusks in an attempt to assassinate a scuba-diving Fidel Castro with a booby-trapped shellfish.)

  The basic plan went like this: the US would train up a group of anti-Castro Cuban exiles who would mount an invasion with American air support. Upon seeing their initial easy victories against the ramshackle Cuban military, the people of the island would greet them as liberators and rise up against the communists. Simple. It was what they’d already done to Guatemala, after all.

  The wheels started to come off when John F. Kennedy beat Richard Nixon to the presidency. The plan had been developed with the assumption that Nixon, previously the vice president and a supporter of the scheme, would be the new man in the Oval Office. Kennedy was considerably less gung ho and, not unreasonably, worried about starting a war with the Soviets, so he insisted on some changes: US backing for the operation had to remain completely secret (so no air support), and the landing site had to be changed to somewhere far from large civilian populations, somewhat undermining the “trigger a popular uprising” element.

  At this point it should have been clear that the already fairly optimistic operation should just be scrapped, because it didn’t make even a lick of sense anymore. And yet everybody just carried on as though it did. Questions weren’t asked, assumptions went unchallenged. The historian Arthur Schlesinger, an adviser to the Kennedy administration who opposed the plans, later said that the meetings about it took place in “a curious atmosphere of assumed consensus,” and that even though he thought the plan was stupid, in the meetings he found himself staying quiet. “I can only explain my failure to do more than raise a few timid questions by reporting that one’s impulse to blow the whistle on this nonsense was simply undone by the circumstances of the discussion,” he wrote. In fairness, we’ve all been in meetings like that.

  When the attack actually started, in April 1961, pretty much everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Without the US air force to take out Castro’s air force, the job was left to Cuban exiles flying bombers out of Nicaragua disguised to look like Cuban planes. The plan was to have one plane very publicly land in Miami, and the pilot to announce to the world that he was a defector from the Cuban military who had decided to bomb the air bases himself. This cunning ruse lasted about as long as it took people to notice that the plane wasn’t actually the same type used by the Cubans.

  The landing party, which was supposed to arrive secretly under the cover of darkness, was quickly spotted by some local fishermen, who, instead of greeting them as liberators, raised the alarm and then went to shoot at them with rifles. (“We thought, this is the invasion, boys, be careful! They are trying to invade,” one of the fishermen, Gregorio Moreira, recalled to the BBC on the fiftieth anniversary of the invasion.) The invaders quickly discovered that the beach they were supposed to take over the country from was actually quite hard to get off, and only got harder when large parts of the Cuban army (who turned out to be quite efficient, not ramshackle at all) quickly showed up and started shooting at them. Oh, as did a plane from the Cuban air force, which it appeared hadn’t been destroyed by the unconvincing fake bombers, after all.

  At this point, the beach force could really have done with some air support, but by now Kennedy was so unnerved by the fact everybody had seen through the “defecting Cuban pilots” trick that he refused to authorize it. So they remained stuck on the beach for several days, fighting an increasingly desperate defense with ammunition running low.

  Three days into the abortive invasion, it was clear that they were never getting off the beach without a dramatic intervention, and so finally Kennedy did an about-face and gave authorization for air support. But at this point, the Cuban pilots felt so betrayed by the way the mission had gone that they refused to fly. So the US dumped all pretense of not being involved, and drafted in members of the Alabama National Guard to fly the disguised bombers, which would be supported by a bunch of regular, extremely nondisguised US fighter planes. This might have given the landing party on the beach a fighting chance, except that in the final piece of glorious incompetency, they forgot that there’s a time difference between Nicaragua, where the bombers were, and Miami, where the fighters were, so the two sets of planes didn’t even manage to meet up. Several of them were shot down.

  The whole thing ended with the US a global laughingstock, Fidel Castro more firmly entrenched in power than ever and over 1,000 invading troops captured, who a few years later the US would have to pay a ransom of over $50 million to free.

  On the plus side, Kennedy learned from the decision-making failures—which might possibly have saved everybody in the world when it allowed cooler heads to prevail during the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year. And thankfully, such was the impact, the United States never again let itself get into a situation where its leaders would allow groupthink to push them into a poorly thought-out invasion based on shoddy intelligence with no clear plan or exit strategy.

  Oh.

  6 OF THE MOST POINTLESS WARS IN HISTORY

  The War of the Bucket

  An estimated 2,000 people died in this 1325 war between Italian city-states Modena and Bologna, which began when some Modenese soldiers stole a bucket from a well in Bologna. Modena won, and promptly stole another bucket.

  The Anglo-Zanzibar War

  The shortest war in history, at under three quarters of an hour. A Zanzibari sultan the British didn’t approve of claimed the throne, then barricaded himself in the palace, which the British proceeded to shoot at for a total of 38 minutes before he fled.

  The Football War

  In 1969, the long-simmering tensions between El Salvador and Honduras spilled over into actual war—largely sparked by violence during a series of tense World Cup qualifiers between the two countries. (El Salvador won the football; war was a draw.)

  The War of Jenkins’s Ear

  A war between Britain and Spain that lasted for over a decade and cost tens of thousands of lives started because in 1731 some Spanish privateers cut off a naval captain’s ear. By the time it was over it had expanded into the War of Austrian Succession, which involved just about every major country in Europe.

  The Chamber Pot Rebellion

  Robert Curthose was the eldest son of William the Conqueror who was moved to open rebellion against his father when William didn’t punish his two younger sons sufficiently after they tipped a full chamber pot over Robert’s head.

  The War of the Golden Stool

  A war between the British Empire and the Ashanti people of West Africa that started after the British governor threw a strop about the “ordinary chair” he was given and demanded to sit on the Golden Stool—a sacred throne nobody was allowed to sit on. The British won the war, but he never got to sit on the stool.

  7

  Super Happy Fun Colonialism Party

  The human compulsion to explore, to always seek out, new horizons is one of our defining characteristics. It’s why our species and its close cousins spread around the world multiple times in an evolutionary blink of the eye. And it’s the driving force that gave shape to the modern world—which is the dumb, chaotic and frequently wildly unfair product of millennia of migration and trade, colonization and war.

  It was that urge to explore that drove Christopher Columbus to set sail into the vast, empty blue waters of the Atlantic in 1492, only to end up crashing onto a load of rocks a few months later like an idiot.

  That year was right near the beginning of what is commonly called the “Age of Discovery,” although it was only really discovery if you weren’t one of the people already living in the places being discovered. The overland trade routes between Europe
and Asia that had been nice and easy to travel when the Mongol Empire stretched across much of Eurasia (again, more on that in a bit) were now blocked, thanks to a combination of the Black Death and the rise of the Ottoman Empire. And so Europe, buzzing with new technology and knowledge and hungry for riches, set its eyes to the sea instead. And what began as a drive for trade in Asia, Africa and the newly discovered Americas would quickly turn into missions of occupation and conquest.

  Pretty much everybody knows that Columbus discovered (well, “discovered”) the Americas by accident, running into the Caribbean by mistake while he was looking for a shortcut to India that didn’t involve going around the southern cape of Africa. But there are also a lot of misconceptions around exactly what his mistake was.

  In one common telling, he was essentially proved right, because he had confidence in his heretical theory that the world was round; meanwhile the credulous fools back home believed he was doomed to sail off the edge of the world. This is, I’m sorry to say, utter balls. In fact, pretty much every educated person in Europe at the time (and most of the uneducated ones, too) was fully aware that the world was a globe, and they’d known that for a very long time. It was such common knowledge that over 200 years before Columbus’s journey, the theologian Thomas Aquinas was casually using it in his writing as an example of something that everybody accepted to be true. Given that to this day there’s a persistent minority of people who still doubt the official story put out by Big Globe, the flat-earth theory may well be as popular right now as it was in the fifteenth century. In 2019, a group of flat-earthers are planning to organize a cruise for the flat-earth community, which should be an exciting opportunity for them to test out their theories. Well done, everybody, for that.

  So no, it wasn’t disagreement about the roundness of the earth. The skepticism about Columbus’s venture came from an entirely different source. The problem was that Christopher Columbus had utterly messed up his units of measurement, so got his sums completely wrong.

  His entire plan for the mission was based on his personal calculations of two things: how big the earth was, and how big Asia was. On both of these, he was wildly off. For one, he decided that Asia was an awful lot longer than it actually is (and it is pretty long), and that, as such, with a fair wind he’d eventually find Japan several thousand miles to the east of Japan’s actual location. But even worse, he based his calculations of the globe’s circumference on the work of the ninth-century Persian astronomer Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Kathir al-Farghani. This wasn’t a great start, as there had been more accurate estimates around since the Greek mathematician Eratosthenes of Cyrene pretty much nailed it 1,700 years earlier. But even that wasn’t Columbus’s biggest mistake.

  His biggest mistake was his assumption that when al-Farghani said “mile,” he was obviously talking about the Roman mile, which was around 4,850 feet. That is not what al-Farghani was talking about. He was talking about the Arabic mile, which is somewhere between 6,500 and 7,000 feet. So when al-Farghani said that something was a certain number of miles away, he actually meant a much, much bigger distance than Columbus realized.

  Fans of the movie This Is Spinal Tap will be familiar with what Christopher did there. He confused one unit of measurement with a completely different unit of measurement, and so came up with a model that was ridiculously small. Columbus thought that the world was only about three quarters of the size it actually is. Combined with his decision to relocate Japan by several thousand miles, the upshot was that he thought he needed to pack supplies for a much shorter journey than the one he faced. Plenty of his contemporaries were all like, “Think you’ve got the world the wrong size there, Chris,” but he remained convinced by his calculations. So on the whole, it was pretty lucky for him that he bumped into the Caribbean when he did. (Nobody had really given serious thought to the possibility that there was a whole extra continent in exactly the place that Asia wasn’t.)

  It’s probably worth adding that his erroneous assumption about which kind of mile al-Farghani was talking about reflects some pretty Eurocentric thinking on Columbus’s part! But let’s be honest: this was nowhere near the worst thing Christopher Columbus did because his thinking was too Eurocentric.

  It’s tempting to wonder how different world history might have been if Columbus had been better at math and so never set out on his voyage. The answer is: probably not much, except maybe some more people might speak Portuguese now. The Portuguese were the best sailors and navigators in Europe at the time (Columbus’s expedition was only funded by Spain because Portugal rejected it first, on the grounds that they knew perfectly well he’d fucked the math), and they would land on various bits of the Americas in the following years. Pedro Álvares Cabral reached Brazil in 1500. One year later, the Corte-Real brothers reached either Labrador or Newfoundland, where in a sign of things to come they promptly kidnapped 57 natives and sold them as slaves.

  In fact, the thing that would really have made a difference to the history of Old World–New World relations is if anybody, literally anybody, had been able to constrain their natural impulse to murder or kidnap the first people they met. A whole five centuries before Columbus, the Vikings were the actual first Europeans to establish a settlement in the Americas, with Leif Eriksson setting out from the Viking colony on Greenland and coming upon what they decided to call Vinland (“Wine Land,” which was likely modern-day Newfoundland). Compared to barren and extremely un-fun Greenland, the woods and fruits of Vinland should have been great news for the Vikings, and they did indeed establish a trading colony there for some years. Unfortunately, their prospects for trade with the locals of Vinland (likely the Thule people, or Skraelings as the Vikings called them) were somewhat diminished by what happened the first time they encountered each other.

  This was the first meeting between Europeans and Americans in recorded history, and it went something like this: the Vikings found a group of 10 natives sleeping under their upturned canoes, and so they murdered them.

  For fuck’s sake, guys.

  Unsurprisingly, after that the locals weren’t terribly keen on trading with the Vikings, and skirmishes between the two groups were common—including one battle in which the fearsome Vikings, armed with swords, were almost defeated by “a pole with a huge knob on the end” (likely an inflated animal bladder), “which flew over the heads of the men and made a frightening noise when it fell.” The Vikings were so scared of the novelty balloon that they would have lost the fight if Freydis Eriksdottir, Leif’s sister, hadn’t alarmed the Skraelings in turn by exposing her breasts.

  As a result of this and other less weird battles, the Vinland settlement never really got off the ground. The Vikings of Greenland abandoned it after a decade or two. What’s more, the Greenland settlement itself—which only came into existence in the first place because Erik the Red had been exiled there for murdering people—gradually withered and died over the following centuries, as the rest of the Vikings back in Nordic lands largely stopped paying attention to it.

  If things had gone a bit differently on Vinland, ideally with less murder, then history might genuinely have taken a different course. An established trading route between the Americas and Europe, with all the exchange of knowledge and skills that can lead to, might have resulted in a more gradual exposure between the two populations. It could have meant that the gap in technology and military might that made European colonization in the sixteenth century such a one-sided affair would have been less dramatic. (It might also have given the Americans more time to slowly develop resistance to Old World infectious diseases, rather than getting hit with a mother lode of them all at once.)

  Equally, things might have been different if Abubakari II, the ruler of the Malian empire in the fourteenth century, had come back from his voyages. The emperor of one of the world’s largest and wealthiest empires at the time, spanning much of West Africa, he gave up his throne, his power and his riches in order to satisfy h
is curiosity about whether there was a “bank” on the other side of the ocean. In 1312, he set sail from modern-day Gambia, supposedly with a fleet of 2,000 ships—none of which were ever seen again. Some Malian historians argue that he may in fact have reached the shores of Brazil, but even if he did, he never made it back, which let’s be honest is a fairly crucial component of the exploration business.

  Or perhaps it could never have been different, and this is just the way we are. When you zoom out far enough, a lot of human history is just the story of empires rising and falling and killing the crap out of each other. Like agriculture, and leaders, and war—all the things that in turn helped to kick off the age of empire—they don’t necessarily win because they’re the best long-term plan for humanity, but because once somebody decides to do it, pretty much everybody else has to join in or get crushed. It’s like a bar fight in an old Western, except lots of people don’t get up when the piano starts playing again.

  When Columbus managed to accidentally sink the Santa María on the shores of Hispaniola in 1492, the population of the indigenous Taíno people on the island numbered in the hundreds of thousands. A little over two decades later, after the Spanish introduced mining, slavery and disease, there were only 32,000 of them left. Columbus was bad at math, sure, but it definitely wasn’t his worst mistake.

  * * *

  It isn’t necessarily the job of historians to make moral judgments on the past. They seek to uncover, to describe and to contextualize; to understand and explain how lives long past were lived; and to trace the intertwining webs of power and conflict that gave rise to the world we live in today. You can do all that without passing comment on whether those things were virtuous or wicked. Indeed, given the headache-inducing complexity of it all, it’s rarely a simple job to get all judgy about the past.

  Fortunately, getting all judgy about the past is exactly the job of this book, so let’s quickly clarify something: colonialism was bad. Really, really bad.