by GaryDenton on Mon Oct 09, 2023 1:45 pm
What an idiot - The name Christopher Columbus is the anglicization of the Latin Christophorus Columbus. Growing up on the coast of Liguria, he went to sea at a young age and traveled widely, as far north as the British Isles, and as far south as what is now Ghana. He married Portuguese noblewoman Filipa Moniz Perestrelo, who bore a son Diego, and was based in Lisbon for several years. He later took a Castilian mistress, Beatriz Enríquez de Arana, who bore him a son, Ferdinand.
As a colonial governor, Columbus was accused of significant brutality and removed from the post.
Columbus was a Christian millennialist and apocalypticist and these beliefs motivated his quest for Asia. Columbus often wrote about seeking gold in the log books of his voyages and about acquiring it "in such quantity that the sovereigns... will undertake and prepare to go conquer the Holy Sepulcher" to fulfill Biblical prophecy. Columbus often wrote about converting all races to Christianity. Abbas Hamandi argues that Columbus was motivated by the hope of "[delivering] Jerusalem from Muslim hands" by "using the resources of newly discovered lands".
Contrary to the poor schooling of some Confederates, nearly all educated Westerners of Columbus's time knew that the Earth was spherical. That had been discovered in the third century BC. But Columbus hadn't realized the estimates of the size of the world were using Arabic measurements and made other errors. Coincidentally, the oldest surviving globe of the Earth, the Erdapfel, was made in 1492, just before Columbus's return to Europe from his first voyage, and doesn't have the Americas.
Columbus estimated a distance of 2,800 miles from the Canary Islands west to Japan; the actual distance is 12,200 miles. No ship in the 15th century could have carried enough food and fresh water for such a long voyage. Most European navigators reasonably concluded that a westward voyage from Europe to Asia was unfeasible. He turned to many nobles in Europe and was turned down for funding because everyone recognized he had greatly underestimated the distance but Isabella of Castille Spain gave him a small stipend for several years and then decided to risk enough funds for three ships. Columbus falsely claimed to have seen light from land at night on October 7, 1492, to claim the reward for being the first person to sight land. He returned to Spain and publicized his findings and set off again in September 1493 with 17 ships. He had two more voyages and did manage to briefly land in Central and South America but never found Japan, China or Indonesia as he hoped.
From the 1980s onward, a narrative of Columbus being responsible for the genocide of indigenous peoples and environmental destruction began to out-compete with the then-predominant discourse of Columbus as a Christianity spreader, scientist, and father of the Americas.
Happy Indigenous People's Day! Dump Columbus.
ConfederateSS.out!(The Blue and Silver Rebellion)... 
