Who was Christopher Columbus?

[jeanathon]

Dogs ripping out arms and legs? What kind of dogs did colombus have? Bears?
Just because it's written down doesn't make it true.
Oh brother.

[barnakiel]

Originally Posted by jeanathon

Dogs ripping out arms and legs? What kind of dogs did colombus have? Bears?
Just because it's written down doesn't make it true.
Oh brother.

But does not make it untrue either, just because you want it to be untrue.


Does it?


Columbus probably had some of these:


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perro_de_Presa_Canario


They are clearly able to rip apart any human. They can part a cattle in about 15 minutes.


https://perrosgatosonline.com/storag...a-canario8.jpg





barnakiel,
canary islands

[Rubicon King]

One of the best responses on how revisionist look at history... this same response approach can be applied to many other famous figures in our history. Well done!

Originally Posted by tomfl

Wow, the first blurb below the vid claims history books have ignored how Cloumbus treated the indians. What a silly claim, it has been well documented for as long as I can remember that he treated the badly. That in and of itself discredits the link.

There have been many disputes about just how much Columbus knew before he set sail and how he managed to get support for first voyage. He traveled widely in Europe and there is some evidence he met King Harold who told him about earlier Viking voyages, even providing him maps. Since the Vikings landed well North of Columbus's first landfall they encountered land well East of where Columbus did, and was expecting to make a land fall. See Arne's book for details.

What is unquestioned is that Columbus was one of the most skilled navigators of his age and used things like a primitive sextant along with Johann Muller's ephemeris; something few other navigators were aware of. Way back in 1963 I wrote a paper for my senior year in high school about why Columbus sailed and all these facts were noted in a book "Why Columbus Sailed"https://www.worldcat.org/title/why-c...ions%2021%20cm first published in 1939.

What is new in revisionist history, not just with Columbus plenty of other examples, it trying to impose today's morals on a bygone age.

[geoleo]

Originally Posted by boatman61

I thought the indigenous people of the Caribbean had already been wiped out by a cannibalistic warrior tribe that swept up through the islands from what is Venezuela today.
The Spanish in turn wiped out the Caribes.. some believe Columbus was really Portuguese..
They were after all the best navigators at the time and first circumnavigator's..

You Sir are actually factual-others here want badly to be SJW so they can virtue signal. Caribes were Cannibuls as were most of the coastal tribes along Brazil when Portugese "discovered" them lol

[MicHughV]

the biggest fallacy of them all....

CC discovered America....ha ha ha ha...he never set foot on this continent..

[barnakiel]

It was so long ago and the sources are scarce. We just do not know what kind of guy Columbus was.


We have guesses, we have opinions, but not enough knowledge.



He sure did not go out there to make friends with natives. He went there to fetch gold for the Spanish Catholic kings, and fame and fortune for himself. People preoccupied with riches are not commonly known to highly regard natives.


We cannot exclude that maybe Columbus was an aberration from the general rule, neither do we have any base to assume he was not.


He did not care much about other things than gold - he did not fetch any dictionaries, and only very weak and inaccurate information about Caribbean flora and fauna.


It was some 500 years ago and humanism was not very much en vogue in Catholic Spain. La conquista was just about to happen. There is a funny joke by Python on this one too.


Columbus sure can be seen as a vanguard of la conquista. Columbus day is still being celebrated by its right-wing proponents in Spain, but it faces strong criticism in South America:


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columb...s_celebrations


So. Oh. Doh. My 2 pesos of what Columbus was, or was not, maybe.


barnakiel

[Mickeyrouse]

Aside from all the pro-con about Columbus’ decency and his origins, he was a hell of a navigator. He found the Bahamas by accident- but was able to find his way home, and to repeat his trip ( more or less) on his return in 1493. For the curious, Samuel Elliot Morrison’s “Admiral of the Ocean Sea” is a great book and a great read. For details on the voyage of discovery there is “The Log of Christopher Columbus” translated by Robert Fuson, which is a contemporary translation of original source materials. It is also an extract of the analysis of the log by a National Geographic Society expedition in 1986 that re-tracked Santa Maria’s voyage across the Atlantic, and places the final arrival at Samana Cay, not Watling’s Island, the traditionally accepted landing site.

[geoleo]

Originally Posted by barnakiel

It was so long ago and the sources are scarce. We just do not know what kind of guy Columbus was.


We have guesses, we have opinions, but not enough knowledge.



He sure did not go out there to make friends with natives. He went there to fetch gold for the Spanish Catholic kings, and fame and fortune for himself. People preoccupied with riches are not commonly known to highly regard natives.


We cannot exclude that maybe Columbus was an aberration from the general rule, neither do we have any base to assume he was not.


He did not care much about other things than gold - he did not fetch any dictionaries, and only very weak and inaccurate information about Caribbean flora and fauna.


It was some 500 years ago and humanism was not very much en vogue in Catholic Spain. La conquista was just about to happen. There is a funny joke by Python on this one too.


Columbus sure can be seen as a vanguard of la conquista. Columbus day is still being celebrated by its right-wing proponents in Spain, but it faces strong criticism in South America:


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columb...s_celebrations


So. Oh. Doh. My 2 pesos of what Columbus was, or was not, maybe.


barnakiel

What is "Humanism"? Is it related to Socialism?

[requiem]

¿Por qué no los dos?

Reading the Diario on a dark night, reliving those fateful days so long ago can be its own experience. What happened after the landfall cannot change that.

Someone on this forum mentioned Arne Molander's book (Egg Island / Eleuthera theory), and there's an overview of the various landfall site candidates at The Columbus Landfall Homepage. That site was by the late Keith Pickering, who advocated for the Plana Cays site, but also ranks Samana Cay as one of the theories with good support. Molander took the "Columbus knew far better than most what he was doing" route, whereas Pickering went with the "he wasn't that skilled and had to doctor the numbers" approach. This is one argument on which the DNA testing has the potential to trigger a significant re-assessment.

As to revisionism, my take is that what's presented in elementary schools is often sanitized, and similarly in previous centuries there was a great deal of virtue signaling as justification to "save" or "improve" aboriginals. Certainly among historians such relevations are hardly new, but popular culture tends more to rely on schoolhouse myths (perhaps one of the most famous being the flat earth ideas).

Morals seem to have changed surprisingly little over the millennia. Rather the shift seems more to be in how broadly we consider others worthy of the same consideration we extend to those we consider "civilized". Brutality, regardless of century, almost always requires some denial of the victims' humanity, often supported with a claim of unfortunate necessity. One can read Polybius and see the same moral considerations we might expect in a modern debate, and one can look into the 20th century and see similar brutalities as reported from the Columbian era. Technology changes, and customs change, but people remain largely the same. What documents survived seem consistent in their assessment of Columbus' brutality; there is far less evidence to argue the opposite.

[carlosproa]

The Spanish crown was as detailed oriented as the Germans were during wwII. Anybody itching to get original documents can go to Seville (Sevilla) Spain and go to the Archivos de Indias and get quite a bit of details.
Colombia was a complicated man. An Italian who worked for the Portugal crown as they developed the routes to India, by being Italian, he would never be able to achieve a high maritime title in Portugal. So he and his brother were accused to steal information from the Portuguese crown and offer it to the newly Unified Spanish Crown (Aragon crown,et al defeating the moors, etc) as long he would be named the High Admiral. As for being cruel or unusual, he was a man of his times. Let’s not forget that at that time, a kid stealing an apple in England was doomed to hang till death for the entertainment of the crowd.

[carlosproa]

Originally Posted by CarlF

As with most things in history - and today - the real truth can be found by "following the money"

A controversial - but much more interesting - version of the Columbus story was that Columbus was actually a secret agent for Portugal who's job was to trick the Spanish into giving up rights to the sea route around Africa to the Far East.

His job was to pose as a Spanish noble and convince the Spanish that they could easily get to the spice islands by sailing West instead of sailing around Africa - that the distance was short and no huge landmass (like the 3000 mile wide American continent) blocked the trip.

The Portuguese knew about the Americas - but the Spanish didn't. To pull off the trick, Columubus kept two logs. The fake log shortened the distance traveled to fool the Spanish. And he also claimed that he had reached the Spice Islands of the Far East - not the West Indies. To make sure the ruse wasn't discovered, he left the only crew members who understood navigation in the West Indies while he went back to Europe.

The Spanish were thrilled to learn that they could go west to the Spice Islands and soon after Columbus' return in 1494 the Pope decreed the Treaty of Tordesillas which drew a north-south line splitting the Atlantic in half. Spain owned everything to the West of the line and Portugal everything to the East.

This gave the Portuguese the monopoly on going around Cape Horn. They saw the treaty as a diplomatic and economic victory for Portugal won by Columbus' trickery.

What the Portuguese didn't know was that Spain would soon discover gold in South and Central America - on their side of the line - and become fantastically wealthy. Portugal faded into obscurity despite having "won" the treaty.

Who knows if this is all true - but it makes a great story.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...t-1499125.html

I read the same book, makes sense. I also have his bitácoras in old castellano. It is hard to read but you can see how he tricked his crew into believing they were covering a lot less distance they actually did. Of course take into account that most people at that time sailed close to shore and Tierra incógnita meant death. Kind of like going to Mars for us today.

Of course if we bring into light the Chinese voyages before Columbus...we’ll it feels like a fraud what he and Vasco did. I can’t wait till China finally agrees to release all the documents they have on these voyages. Will be soon

[geoleo]

Originally Posted by MicHughV

the biggest fallacy of them all....

CC discovered America....ha ha ha ha...he never set foot on this continent..

Au contraire! On his 4th voyage he cruised the Nonth American Coast from Panama thru Nicagagua and Honduras and landed 4 times. Info from "Admiral of the Ocean Seas" by US Admiral Morrison , Historian of the US Navy.

[geoleo]

Originally Posted by Rubicon King

One of the best responses on how revisionist look at history... this same response approach can be applied to many other famous figures in our history. Well done!

YUP! Abraham Lincoln is now considered a big racist because he was not woke "enough" by the BLM peeps. Will JC be next?

[geoleo]

Originally Posted by carlosproa

I read the same book, makes sense. I also have his bitácoras in old castellano. It is hard to read but you can see how he tricked his crew into believing they were covering a lot less distance they actually did. Of course take into account that most people at that time sailed close to shore and Tierra incógnita meant death. Kind of like going to Mars for us today.

Of course if we bring into light the Chinese voyages before Columbus...we’ll it feels like a fraud what he and Vasco did. I can’t wait till China finally agrees to release all the documents they have on these voyages. Will be soon

Are you going to imply that China "discovered California" because a round rock was found with a hole in it on californias coast?

[geoleo]

Originally Posted by carlosproa

I read the same book, makes sense. I also have his bitácoras in old castellano. It is hard to read but you can see how he tricked his crew into believing they were covering a lot less distance they actually did. Of course take into account that most people at that time sailed close to shore and Tierra incógnita meant death. Kind of like going to Mars for us today.

Of course if we bring into light the Chinese voyages before Columbus...we’ll it feels like a fraud what he and Vasco did. I can’t wait till China finally agrees to release all the documents they have on these voyages. Will be soon

Portugal soon discovered a lot of gold in the Mineais Gerais area of Brazil and was soon very rich from it and hardly "faded" as they had huge trading areas in China, Japan, India E&W Africa, Indonesia and even Iran at Hormuz. They also were involved in trading Spanish silver from then Peru via the headwaters of the Amazon . The Portugese hardly only stayed "close to shore" on their Atlantic voyages " as they went out many hundreds of miles as they explored the Atlantic coast of Africa long before Columbus time.