Posted on 10/11/2004 4:44:09 PM PDT by Coleus
you’re right about that and if they were the same as the indians in mexico, they probably did blood sacrifices of infants and young virgins.
i just saw on 20/20 last friday a show about the muslims and in it they mentioned that muslims rode on columbus’ 3 ships, this is the first i have heard of this.. I wonder where this info. can be verified. I understand that it was a Catholic-sanctioned trip and fr. juan perez may have voyaged with them.
I did not have the impression the Columbus was totally vilified for the quincentenial, but rather that his discovery was not something to be celebrated since the outcome for native Americans was so disasterous.
Regarding the Aztecs, their governance was particularly brutal. If I remember correctly they were a Chichimec tribal group that moved south into the lake country of central Mexico. Their homeland was particularly dry and brutal, and they carried that mentality with them. The “flowery war” tradition had been started within the previous hundred years by a “prime minister” who said “let the neighboring tribes be our bread”. There were no large animals in Mexico suitable for food, so the population was protein short, and canibalism made up the shortfall and kept the Aztecs stronger than their neighbors.
When I studied in Mexico City I read both Bernal Diaz and Cortez’s Five Letters to King Carlos of Spain. Both accounts are pretty consistent in the horrors they describe. Another interesting book is “Heart of Jade” a novel by Salvador Madariaga.
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I saw replicas of all three of his "ships" one year in Corpus Christi, TX. Dang, those things were small!!! I'd never set sail across an entire ocean in search for something that might not have even been there in one of those things. And they had how many on board?!
Happy Columbus Day, October 12, 1492
I spent a few hours with Christopher Columbus XIV (i think the 14th) on 7-4-76 ... I rode with him out to the replica of Santa Maria, which was in the Hudson off the west side of Manhattan. Dropped him off.
If you want your children to remember it better:
“Fourteen hundred and ninety-two
Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”
BTTT
Still vilified in the Public Schools..
Happy Columbus Day!!!
I didn't get the details of whether they had to take him back to the Caribbean or what. We all know, from Las Casas' later writings, how horribly the Spanish devastated the native people of the Caribbean.
But it appears the Spanish Royal policies--- or so I read --- were, in themselves, the most enlightened of all the European powers. As early as 1512, the Laws of Burgos regulated the behavior of Europeans in the New World forbidding the ill-treatment of indigenous people and limiting the power of encomenderos or landowners. In 1542 the New Laws expanded and corrected this human rights legislation.
Although these laws were not always followed across all American territories, they reflected the will of the Spanish colonial government of the time to protect the rights of the native population. They failed mostly from gross insubordination by colonial governors: lack of enforcement.
But I am just a beginner in reading this history.
What's the scoop on Queen Isabella? Slaver or anti-slaver?
Actually, the various Indian tribes enslaved one another, and the dominant tribes on the mainland indulged in human sacrifice and slaughter on a massive scale. The Indians on the island where Columbus first landed were threatened with invasion and enslavement, and Columbus and his followers pretty much freed them from that threat.
Some of the Conquistadores practiced slavery, but the Pope decreed that slavery should not be permitted. For the most part the Spaniards obeyed, especially after many of the Indians converted to Christianity.
It was standard propaganda for English speaking Protestants to accuse the Spaniards of being cruel, inhuman, and horrible to the natives. Then how come most of the South American Indians survived the conquest, and intermarried with the Spaniards, whereas most of the Indians in North America were either killed off or transferred to reservations? We refer to the inhabitants of Latin America as Hispanics, but most of the common people there are more Indian than Hispanic.
I will always remember the little poem my WW II sailor dad taught me as a child.
“Fourteen hundred and ninety-two
Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue”
Happy Columbus Day!
Agreed. I once saw replicas of all three of his “ships” in Corpus Christi, TX. Tiny little things. I wouldn’t dare try to cross an ocean on one of those things.
The human rights tradition was, ironically, founded by the supposedly vicious Spaniards. In a way, the discrediting of Columbus is just a new version of the Black Legend, originated by English pirates subsidized by the Government of Queen Elizabeth, as an excuse for breaking the generations long commercial treaty between England and Spain, sealed by the marriage between Arthur, Prince of Wales and Princess Mary, who after the death of Arthur was to become the bride of his younger brother, Henry. Now all the European powers have been tarred by the charge of a special avarice, based on another myth, that of the noble savage. But it is Rousseaus version of that myth, a vile man but brilliant writer, who persuaded so many of his readers of the essential evil of Christendom.
How many college graduates today, how many professors in the liberal arts have any idea of how great was the power of Turkey under the Sultan Sullieman, and how close he came to conquering all Europe?
Happy Columbus Day, BTTT!!!
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