Think about it. This weird Italian guy has gone to every place of power in the Western World with his “crazy” idea to find another route to China, same as if today a nobody opens a GoFundMe requesting you send him money so he could go to Mars.
In this 15th Century search for investors, he finally bumps into one woman, a queen from a country that just finished several centuries worth of warfare and expelled the Islamic Assholes who invaded and subjugated her people for over seven centuries. Now, the country is plum broke, debts are sky-high and officially the kingdom cannot afford two quarters rubbed together for insane exploration when the scientific consensus of the day is that there is nothing out there and that those who take the trip, will face death,
The Spanish Queen, she has ‘nads the size of Miura bulls and something tells her this deranged Eye-talian might be on to something. She collects whatever jewelry she has left and tell the Crazy Man from Genoa “I’ll put money on your GoFundMe and we will split the profits of whatever you found.” HOLY SHIT BATMAN! PURE BRUTAL INVESTMENT CAPITALISM!.
Columbus ten proceeds to find ships equivalent of mounting a space program with the leftovers of the 1960s Russian and American Space Program and a bunch of rejects that failed shop in High School. He takes to the seas…and damn! he actually was right and hits the biggest jackpot in the history of humanity. He is proven right and becomes rich, Queen Isabella’s gamble and investment also is proven right (And she gets to tell her King Hubby “I told you so”) and she becomes richer than Oprah.
And you still wonder why the Left hates Christopher Columbus much? He embodies what they hate: Self Determination and will power.
PS: And stop whining about Leif Garret Erickson and those who “may” have come before: They were too drunk or stupid to understand what was in front of their faces. They were losers.
I’m of the changing mindset that Columbus wasn’t all that school has taught us.
He absolutely wasn’t the first to discover the country.
There were Norse settlements in Canada over 1,000 years ago.
http://www.livescience.com/37189-new-viking-voyage-discovered.html
Was Columbus’ team the first to dock in Plymouth (because they needed beer)? Probably.
http://beersportsbabes.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/pilgrim-mayflower1.jpg
Unless you want to count the Mashpee, Wampanoag or Nauset Indian tribes…then definitely, not.
There are well documented discoveries of Norse land claim markers in MN, IL, MA, and NY, to name only a couple.
http://www.hurstwic.org/history/articles/society/text/other_artifacts.htm. Boston, Newport, Berkley…
Oh – trivia; Dighton Rock in Taunton.. I’ve drank some beers on top of it in my youth 😉
Not to mention that more and more historical evidence is being found that shows the Spaniards were hardly benevolent explorers.
http://nativeamericanhistory.about.com/od/nativeconceptsandperspectives/a/Christopher-Columbus-S-Legacy-Uncensored.htm
“Under Columbus’s leadership, the Arawaks were forced under the encomienda system (a system of forced labor that sidestepped the word “slavery”) to mine for gold and produce cotton. When gold was not found, the irate Columbus oversaw the hunting of Indians for sport and dog food. Women and girls as young as nine or 10 were used as sex slaves for the Spanish. So many Indians died under the encomienda slave system that Indians from neighboring Caribbean islands were imported, and eventually from Africa. After Columbus’s first kidnapping of Indians, he is believed to have sent as many as 5,000 Indian slaves across the Atlantic, more than any other individual.”
Not looking like the happy go lucky, plucky, adventurer the history books turn him and his crews out to be. Least not the lessons I remember as I kid. The more we learn, the more we realize they were humans capitalizing on a lesser culture for their own benefit.
And they accomplished what? Zilch. The use of certain types of mold in the healing arts was done by the centuries, but it took one British guy realizing it by accident that maybe there was a much bigger potential behind the molds and thus Fleming developed penicillin.
Not, they were not, specially after Columbus returned the second time and found out that the crew they left behind had been introduced to the concept of “barbacoa” (BBQ) in a very intimate way: The inhabitants of the islands were cannibals, something that does not get passed on because the stupid concept of The Noble Savage. Just a reminder that the word “caribe” where Caribbean comes from (and the idea of luxuriant cruises in cool ships) means cannibal. The little fish known by most as piranha is also called caribe. So the Spaniards were assholes in the late 15th and most of the 16th Century? Yup. It was a brutish time, but I do not make the mistake of trying to shove their behavior under the magnifying glass of XXI “morals” as it distorts history and certainly I am not going to say that Columbus was responsible for all the misdeeds done in the New World since he had lost control of the exploration process by 1501, his fourth trip was a mess and could not get backup from the already established colonies and was gone by 1504 (pretty much expelled by those who came after his second trip) and died back in Spain in 1506 .
The shit is Columbus is the obviously easy target because of visibility. Maybe Cortez gets a mention against the Aztecs and surely Pizarro is barely and afterthought. Hell, you hear nothing of the Portuguese explorers and they took out a huge chunk of land and they did not behave like Doctors Without Borders themselves.
One thing is to do a truly fact-finding study of past events, the other is historic revisionism for the sake of political bullshit. Colombus dared and won. Anything else is sour grapes.
Two things to comment on.
First, Plymouth was founded by the Pilgrims, traveling aboard the Mayflower—A hundred and twenty some years after Columbus. Plymouth and Columbus, unrelated.
Second,
“The more we learn, the more we realize they were humans capitalizing on a lesser culture for their own benefit.”
That pretty much describes every country during all history. The exploration age brought cultures a-clashing, and the expansion of territory, and wealth to those that played. None of the countries doing the exploring and expanding gave two shits about the indigenous peoples they encountered if the indigenous peoples weren’t going to comply and comport themselves to the explorers wants and needs. Chris Columbus and his crew were hardly unique in that regard.
But, as Miguel points out, looking back through history at what they did under the lens of our morals is distorting history. Every nation that explored took slaves, raped, pillaged, killed or converted the locals they found. That was how business was conducted then. We can safely say from our perch up here that they were “wrong” or “bad” for doing it that way, but it simply was the way things were done then. Saying Chris Columbus is less of a an example of a good explorer because he did the same things others in his time period did is silly, at best, and dishonest to history.
Did indigenous peoples suffer because Chris Columbus crossed the ocean blue? Yup. The same as they would have suffered if anyone else in the same time period had done so. Not to mention how those peoples might have (and probably would have ) suffered even if Columbus never came their way. The noble savage myth makes it seem like these poor people were just living the dream, hunting, fishing and generally peaceful, with an idyllic life. Reality says they were not.
Most of the cultures the explorers encountered were barely out of the stone age, and only a few into or around the bronze age. Medicine was next to nonexistent, they warred amongst themselves, taking slaves and raping the women (and sometimes children), education was pretty much nonexistent, some of them practiced human sacrifice and at least one was cannibalistic.
Whether Columbus or any other explorer ever showed up, these people weren’t destined for some utopia in the New World until those darned Europeans showed up.
Actually, the Hurstwic article is a refutation of the bogus claims of Norse artifacts.
Ah damn it – sorry. I skimmed it and it looked like it’d support the points I was trying to make.
Good catch.
Hear me, priveledged companions, time is ours.
Hyououin Kyouma’sChristopher Columbus’s mind knows no limits! NEITHER DOES HIS REACH! Heave anchor, this ship of fools is about to embark!