Posted on 06/11/2006 5:35:53 PM PDT by tbird5
No matter how widely he had been hailed as a hero 14 years before, by 1506, when he died (500 years ago today), Christopher Columbus was all washed up.
Crowds from across Spain lined the streets of Seville in 1493 to welcome him home from his first voyage to the Americas, but he already hadnt found what he was looking for, a seaway to Indias spice-trade ports. He never would, though the search consumed the rest of his life. A little genocide here, some slavery there, several mutinies, and multiple executions of crew members later, and Columbus fell out of favor with the Spanish crown and the public. When he died he was surrounded by family and by the trappings of his substantial income. But he went to his grave with the gouging sense of injustice he couldnt forgive and of failure he couldnt explain.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanheritage.com ...
He won! Who can ask for more than that.
I love a happy ending.
I think we've found Clinton's legacy.
If not for Columbus' discovery, the Swiss would not have chocolate, the Italians would not have tomatoes, the Irish would not have potatoes, and the Turks would not have turkeys.
Indeed, famine would've been widespread across Europe if it hadn't been for the potato.
The exchange of new products between the Old World and the New World after 1492 is sometimes called the "Columbian Exchange." The Old World came out ahead--it gained a lot of valuable new commodities (tomatoes, potatoes, corn, chocolate, etc.) which were often more nutritious than the Old World products which entered the New World (although there were some useful ones--horses, cows, chickens, wheat, wine, olives, etc.). New World populations were decimated by Old World diseases. In return they gave the Europeans syphilis and tobacco.
TS
(using weasal words, like "some might argue . . .")
The first European to see an American buffalo was the Spaniard Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, who speaks of them in his Chronicle of the Narvaez Expedition. He was shipwrecked on the coast of Texas in 1528 and spent several years as a captive of local Indians. He says he had eaten the meat (he calls them "cows" but must mean bison). His own name "Cabeza de Vaca" means "cow's head."
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