Word: columbus
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...expect dramatic discoveries to appear on cue for 1992 is unrealistic. The Holy Grail of Columbus studies would be the long-lost original log of his first voyage to what he called "the Indies," which exists only in a badly garbled abridgment made after his death by the Spanish priest Bartolome de las Casas. Las Casas, who wrote voluminously on the Spanish colonization of the New World, was not a mariner, and his version is filled with errors that have caused endless dispute over such basic matters as Columbus' course on his historic sail and where his little fleet made...
...number of the apocrypha patched onto the figure of the Discoverer, as the 19th century called him. Some are obviously false, such as the tenacious story that Queen Isabella sold her jewels to pay for his first voyage, or that the Santa Maria was crewed by convicts, or that Columbus was trying to prove the world was round. (No educated person in the late 15th century, and no mariner either, believed otherwise...
...images (the Pilgrim Fathers, Raleigh in Virginia). This can do good, not because it may pump up the "self-esteem" of Hispanic schoolchildren (the purpose of history is not to make people feel better), but because it accords with a large truth shrouded, at present, in omissions and lies. Columbus himself has been presented as Castilian, Catalan, Corsican, Majorcan, Portuguese, French, English, Greek and even Armenian. He was, in fact, Italian: born in Genoa in 1451, the son of a weaver...
...Columbus' sense of his humble origins was crucial. He was determined to transcend them; his means would be navigation. At first he wanted to succeed through trade. Sea trade was the lifeblood of Genova la superba, proud Genoa. As a merchant navigator, Columbus sailed all over the Mediterranean, to the Guinea coast of Africa and as far north as Ireland. He may have gone as far as Iceland too. Sometime between 1478 and 1484, the full plan of self- aggrandizement and discovery took shape in his mind. He would win glory, riches and a title of nobility by opening...
This drive is one of the few attributes of Columbus that all the surviving sources agree on. It was clear to the crew of the Santa Maria as the little fleet was pitching and rolling west in 1492, with no land yet in sight and mutiny brewing. According to Las Casas' account, some of the men argued that "it was great madness and self-inflicted manslaughter to risk their lives to further the mad schemes of a foreigner who was ready to die in the hope of making a great lord of himself." They planned to pitch him overboard...