Word: columbus
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Columbus was in fact a very rigid man, and his inflexibility combined with piety and opportunism to produce behavior not far from paranoid. His growing ambition encouraged the belief, typical of obsessed loners, that everyone except God was against him. He was so certain that his enterprise of the Indies was a fulfillment of God's designs that he even greeted the wreck of the Santa Maria as a sign of divine approbation. He had an apocalyptic turn of mind...
...Columbus could be extremely petty, as when he claimed for himself the prize money he had promised to the first crewman to sight westward land. His reports to the crown were absurdly self-serving, especially those composed after the first voyage, which are a tissue of hustling lies about "incredible amounts" of gold and spices -- which, however, got him 17 ships for the second voyage. His fixations often skewed his charting, so that Columbus mistook islands for continental coasts and thus claimed to have found what...
...lies and self-delusion, inflated claims, greed and chart errors were the common currency of exploration. Columbus' mistakes, for instance, were no worse than those of the 16th century navigators who blundered out into the Pacific in search of gold and terra australis, the antipodal continent. And unlike others, Columbus got across the Atlantic and found something -- not Asia, but something -- in the West...
...current prejudice against the word discovery, in the context of Columbus' efforts, is interesting. There has never been a shortage of claims and hypotheses about alternative "discoveries" of America. It seems quite certain that the first Europeans to reach the mainland of North America (which Columbus never did: the closest he got to it was Venezuela) were the Vikings, who created a short-lived settlement in Newfoundland around the year...
...fleeing Roman persecution in the 2nd century. Others hold out for Japanese fishermen blown off across the Pacific in 3000 B.C., and (most recently) an unknown Spanish mariner who supposedly reached the Bahamas in the 15th century, struggled back across the Atlantic and entrusted his map and logs to Columbus, who concealed his knowledge of them to reap the glory of discovery for himself. But then, why leave out the extraterrestrial beings who landed in Peru to create the vast Nazca earth drawings...