Posted on 10/13/2019 10:16:07 PM PDT by Salvation
Every Columbus Day is the same: Christopher Columbus is attacked. His statues are desecrated. Public monuments in his honor are threatened or removed. Every year, more states and cities change Columbus Day to “Indigenous Peoples’ Day” or “Native Americans’ Day.” And left-wing professors smear the once-revered hero who discovered America in 1492.
Should Columbus be vilified instead of honored? Was he really a villain? Should we believe these attacks on his good name and character?
This post will debunk the most common lies about Columbus.
Everyone in Columbus’s time knew the earth was a sphere. This fact was known since antiquity. Scholars disagreed about its size. Based on the known world, Columbus underestimated it by one fourth.
In the late nineteenth century, enemies of Christianity spread the lie that medieval men believed in a flat earth. They claimed that because people in Columbus’s time were religious, they were therefore crude and ignorant. These enemies wanted to discredit the Church by portraying it as the enemy of science. But Christopher Columbus, a deeply religious man, would be the first to disagree.
History tells us otherwise. War, slavery, cannibalism, and sexual immorality were all common practices among the Indians. As the Spanish would later find out, human sacrifice and infanticide were the norm among other Indians, like the Aztecs. The Aztecs slaughtered upwards of 20,000 in a single day sacrificing many of their enemies by removing their still-beating hearts.
On Columbus’s second voyage, he brought the first of many Catholic missionaries. These men tried to convert the Indians from their barbaric pagan practices. Many missionaries suffered martyrdom to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Slavery was widely practiced by the Indians when Columbus arrived. Reading Columbus’s log, it is clear he insisted on the fair treatment of the people he encountered. Upon his first meeting with the natives on San Salvador, Columbus concludes, “I recognized that they were people who would be better freed [from error] and converted to our Holy Faith by love than by force.”
The mass importation and subjugation of Africans did not begin until long after Columbus’s death.
Genocide is defined as the deliberate systematic and widespread extermination of a national, racial, religious, or ethnic group.
Yes, many Indians died in the initial contact with Europeans. However, any talk of deliberate extermination on the part of Columbus is a lie. Columbus always treated the natives fairly, even when some of his contemporaries did not. Indian conquests among themselves had been going on long before the arrival of the Spanish. Columbus actually helped to establish the foundations for the fair treatment of the conquered.
The real culprit of so many deaths, however, is tied to the next lie.
Wait…weren’t people back then crude and ignorant? If they did not know if the world was round, how did they know how to spread disease? No one knew what a germ was until Louis Pasteur discovered them in 1870, over 350 years later. Columbus and his contemporaries could not have deliberately spread diseases they themselves did not understand.
This allegation was first made 200 years after Columbus’s death, and has been repeated ad nauseum. Columbus had jealous rivals who would have taken advantage of any sign of marital impropriety to defame him. On this point, however, his enemies are silent.
Columbus’s first wife died shortly after the birth of his first son, Diego, in 1477. After he moved to Spain, he married Beatriz de Arana in 1487. His son Fernando was born the following year. All evidence indicates Beatriz de Arana was Columbus’s lawfully wedded wife. Some of her relatives served aboard Columbus’ ships.
Columbus lived out the Catholic Church’s teaching on chastity in one’s state in life. In Columbus’ own language, sins of impurity would consign souls to eternal punishment.
Yes, the Vikings and others before him came and visited these lands. However, to discover means to uncover, or make known. The illiterate Vikings never wrote about or told others of their travels. Knowledge of cartography, navigation, and wind patterns in America did not exist until Columbus came and discovered. The Indians were ignorant of the extent of the lands they occupied and the world at large. Columbus deserves credit for establishing lasting contact between the continents.
On his third and fourth voyages, Columbus wrote about finding something new. He spent his last voyage trying to find a passage between North and South America. Though his name was not given to the continent, it’s a lie to claim he died thinking he had found Asia.
Only after Columbus opened the way did others have the courage to sail to the Americas. What Columbus did was risky. He spent years finding money for the voyage. Despite many obstacles, he never gave up.
He firmly believed it was his God-given mission to explore new lands and bring the light of the Gospel. His first prayer on reaching land was:
“O Lord, eternal and omnipotent God, Thou hast, by Thy holy word, created the heavens, the earth, and the sea; blessed and glorified be Thy name; praised be Thy majesty, who hast deigned that, by means of Thy unworthy servant, Thy sacred name should be acknowledged and made known in this new quarter of the world.”
Yes, Columbus sought gold and other valuables, but not for personal gain. After he founded La Navidad on the island of Hispaniola on December 25, 1492, he writes:
“I hope to God that when I come back here from Castile, I will find a barrel of gold, for which these people have traded, and that they will have found the gold mine, and the spices, and in such quantities that within three years the Sovereigns will prepare for and undertake the reconquest of the Holy Land. I have already petitioned Your Highnesses to see that all the profits of my enterprise should be spent on the conquest of Jerusalem, and Your Highnesses smiled and said that even without the expedition they had the inclination to do it.”
The Muslims were finally pushed out of Spain in 1492.
Columbus sailed for a much higher goal than wealth. His greatest unfulfilled desire was to reclaim Jerusalem and the Holy Land where Christ shed His most precious blood.
Historian George Grant concludes: “Christopher Columbus wasn’t sailing to find a New World, but to find a way to rescue the old.”
Columbus had considerable wealth as he approached death. On May 20, 1506, the Vigil of the Ascension, Columbus, a third-order Franciscan, lay on his deathbed in his apartment at Valladolid, surrounded by his fellow Franciscans and his sons. As the friars chanted Compline, his last words echoed those of Christ on the cross: In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum. Into Thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit.
Christopher Columbus is treated as a scapegoat. The real target is Christianity, which formed Western civilization. Christians and all men of good will should have no qualms about celebrating Columbus Day. We need to fight back, giving due honor to this great man who spread the Gospel and civilized a hemisphere.
In a letter after Columbus’ first voyage, he gives us the best reason to continue celebrating:
“Let Christ rejoice upon earth as he does in heaven, to witness the coming salvation of so many people, heretofore given over to perdition. Let us rejoice for the exaltation of our faith, as well as for the augmentation of our temporal prosperity, in which not only Spain but all Christendom shall participate.”
Bibliography:
Jeffrey Burton Russell: Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus And Modern Historians, Praeger Publishers, 1997.
José Maria Iraburu: Hechos de los Apóstoles de América. Gratis Date, 2003. https://docplayer.es/13211342-...
Lawrence Keeley: War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage. Oxford University Press, 1996.
Ann Ramenofsky: Death by Disease. Archaeology, Mar/Apr 1992. https://web.archive.org/web/20...
Fr. John Hardon, SJ Christopher Columbus, The Catholic. 1992. http://www.therealpresence.org...
Clark Hinckley: Christopher Columbus: A Man Among the Gentiles. Deseret Book, 2014.
Pope Leo XIII: Quatuor Abeunte Saeculo (On Christopher Columbus). https://www.papalencyclicals.n...
Xavier Donald Macleod: History of the Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary in North America. p. 1-3. Virtue & Yorston, 1866.
Carol Delaney: Columbus’s Ultimate Goal: Jerusalem. https://www.amherst.edu/system...
George Grant: The Last Crusader: The Untold Story of Christopher Columbus, Crossway Books, 1992.
Roselly de Lorgues: The Life of Christopher Columbus: From Authentic Spanish and Italian Documents p. 541-543. Catholic Publication Society, 1870. https://archive.org/details/li...
Thank you, great article done by someone who cared to do the research. It’s funny how the lies are so easily available and still taught in schools.
The people Columbus argued with about the size of the earth were all clergy. At the time, the most educated people were routinely priests.
Also, there was a claim that the Tainos (who inhabited the Caribbean) were extinct but genetic studies showed that wasn’t true. The Spanish made people “extinct” by calling them Spanish (the same thing happened in Mexico).
And, the disease that caused the huge die off shortly after contact was a native hemorrhagic fever that had caused earlier die offs. I would guess Chicken Pox and measles did cause many deaths.
Happy Columbus Day!
LOL. Being Italian, and sailing for the Spanish crown, I don't think he was overly concerned with English rhyming. :-)
This is a keeper... Thanks
The first verified documents about giving infected blankets to the Indians came from a fort that was in the middle of its own smallpox outbreak so they would have had people who could handle the blankets.
But if you use the same logic as the Columbus article it was still 100 years before Pasteur so they wouldn’t have known how to spread that type of infection.
They actually understood the concept of inoculation at that time. Maybe they didn’t quite know why it worked, but they were practicing it. :)
most likely ... unless you believe Howard Zinn ...
Did you read the original post?
Nothing about what you mentioned at all.
Did you read the original article? I think you are mistaken.
Zinn is an America-hating embicile.
**********
And according to Far Left Watch, a watchdog organization, Antifa and other left-wing groups plan to deface and attack Columbus statues across the country on Columbus Day.
It is unfortunate to see what was once a uniting figure—who represented American courage, optimism, and even immigrants—is suddenly in the crosshairs for destruction. We owe it to Columbus and ourselves to be more respectful of the man who made the existence of our country possible.
Once Revered, Now Maligned
A few historians and activists began to attack Columbus’ legacy in the late 20th century. They concocted a new narrative of Columbus as a rapacious pillager and a genocidal maniac.
Far-left historian Howard Zinn, in particular, had a huge impact on changing the minds of a generation of Americans about the Columbus legacy. Zinn not only maligned Columbus, but attacked the larger migration from the Old World to the new that he ushered in.
It wasn’t just Columbus who was a monster, according to Zinn, it was the driving ethos of the civilization that ultimately developed in the wake of his discovery: the United States.
“Behind the English invasion of North America,” Zinn wrote, “behind their massacre of Indians, their deception, their brutality, was that special powerful drive born in civilizations based on private profit.”
The truth is that Columbus set out for the New World thinking he would spread Christianity to regions where it didn’t exist. While Columbus, and certainly his Spanish benefactors, had an interest in the goods and gold he could return from what they thought would be Asia, the explorer’s primary motivation was religious.
“This conviction that God destined him to be an instrument for spreading the faith was far more potent than the desire to win glory, wealth, and worldly honors,” wrote historian Samuel Eliot Morison over a half-century ago.
Honestly... I ended up here in the Religion category by accident and commented before I realized it. I would have never commented had I realized this, I try to stay away from the blind ideology. I am an objective open minded unbiased historian, last place I belong is in this category of bias selective historical narrative.
Please disregard. And I will try harder to not end up here.
Thanks for posting this excellent article.
7
What an ignorant thing for the author to say.
To say the general population of the "Vikings" population where illiterate in their own language(s) to any greater degree than the rest of general population of Europe was illiterate in their own languages, is absurd. [1]
Were the people of Greenland or Iceland illiterate in English or French or Latin? The vast majority, no doubt. Were the Italians, Spaniards, or English illiterate in Norwegian, Swedish or Dutch? The vast majority, no doubt.
If one is to suggest that the "Vikings" where illiterate, one must also suggest that the rest of Europe was illiterate as well. Which means there is no purpose to state the Vikings were illiterate other than in an attempt to subvert history.
Furthermore, to state that the "Vikings" "never wrote about or told others of their travels." is yet another absurdity.
Did they have scripts widely published in Rome about their travels around the 1000's? No, of course not. But Rome, or Paris, or Madrid, or London were not the entirety of the world.
But they never told others? Of course they told others, because others made their own voyages to North America over the ensuing decades. Bjarni Herjólfsson (voyaged from Norway)(is said to not have made landfall) in 986 AD -> Leif Eriksson (from Greenland) in 1000 was the first to make landfall and set up a settlement -> followed by Thorvald Eiriksson (from Greenland) in 1004 and then Thorfinn Karlsefni (from Greenland) in 1009 [2][3][4].
Beginning with Herjólfsson in 986...each group of explorers TOLD their stories to others...who subsequently revisited North America.
As far as relatively recent Europeans go, Leaf Erickson "discovered" North America, Christopher Columbus popularized it.
And for the record...no, I don't think Christopher Columbus Day should be renamed indigenous people's day (see below).
I do, however, think our nation should also celebrate Leif Erickson Day. [5]
Presidential Proclamation on Leif Erikson Day, 2019
======================================================================
Now, if we want our history to be even more complete, we must look further back...much further to the people from the area of what is today France and Spain.
It's a growing theory (though one clearly going against the PC winds), that "Europeans" migrated to the America's thousands of years before the "East Asians" did...and were either killed off by the larger migrating groups from east asia, or were "integrated" into their groups from east asia, occurring either in the America's and/or in far eastern Siberia.
European style stone tools suggest Stone Age people actually discovered America
By Bob Yirka | February 29, 2012
"...Stone tools found recently in Delaware, Maryland and Virginia in the eastern United States, all appear to bear a striking resemblance to tools used by Stone Age peoples in early Europe, and have been dated to a time between 19,000 and 26,000 years ago, a period during which Stone Age people were making such tools, and long before the early Asians arrived.
...The evidence is further bolstered by the recent discovery that an ancient knife found in Virginia in 1971 was made of flint that originated from France.
...Stanford and Bradley also point out the lack of evidence of any human activity in the north-east part of Siberia or in Alaska any earlier than 15,500 years ago. And the reason early Asians won out, evolving into the people now called Native Americans, was because their window of opportunity was much wider, 15,000 years versus just 4500 for the early Europeans. Thus the original Native Americans were either assimilated or killed by the large numbers of migrating Asians. Evidence that it was likely the former has been found in the DNA of skeletons of North American Native American people. Also, the language of several Native American tribes doesn’t seem to have originated from Asia."
https://phys.org/news/2012-02-european-style-stone-tools-age.html
Stone-age Europeans 'were the first to set foot on North America'
By Matthew Day | 4:12PM GMT 28 Feb 2012
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/9110838/Stone-age-Europeans-were-the-first-to-set-foot-on-North-America.html
Scientists have unearthed ancient artifacts that are upending the history of mankind
By Dan Conover | June 13, 2012
https://www.charlestoncitypaper.com/charleston/scientists-have-unearthed-ancient-artifacts-that-are-upending-the-history-of-mankind/Content?oid=4092912
Out of Europe
By Dan McLerran | Jun 1, 2013
"...New excavations in the southeastern U.S. and the mid-Atlantic were yielding artifacts dated to pre-Clovis times. Sites like Meadowcroft Rock Shelter in Pennsylvania, Cactus Hill in Virginia, Miles Point and Oyster Cove on the Chesapeake Bay, as well as the offshore Cinmar site, to name but a few, all revealed lithic artifacts arguably dated thousands of years before the oldest Clovis points found across North America. And like the Cinmar point and other points uncovered throughout the eastern U.S. and at underwater locations off the eastern seaboard, the Solutrean assemblages found in Europe, and more specifically southwestern France and northeastern Spain, shared remarkably similar characteristics.
“The majority of the oldest dated sites in the Americas with undisputed artifacts are in the Chesapeake Bay region,” maintains Stanford. “The artifacts from these LGM (the Last Glacial Maximum, between 26,000 and 20,000 years ago) sites are technological and functional equivalents of artifacts from the same period found in southwestern Europe and are not technologically or morphologically related to any east Asian technology."
"Projectile points and their corresponding ages, found at sites in eastern North America. The first artifact on the far left represents a typical point of the Solutrean type, found in Europe. Courtesy Dennis Stanford"
"The LGM ice cover in the North Atlantic at the time when Solutrean peoples are hypothesized to have crossed over from Europe to the Americas. Courtesy Dennis Stanford"
"Map showing the exposed continental shelf along southwestern France and northwestern Spain, with known Solutrean sites. Also shown are concave based points from Spain, representing the types of artifacts of the period that show similarities to the Clovis and pre-Clovis artifacts found in eastern North America. Courtesy Dennis Stanford"
"Distribution of known Solutrean-style laurel leaf biface artifacts in the mid atlantic coastal and continental shelf areas, showing extent of dry land during the LGM. Courtesy Dennis Stanford"
https://popular-archaeology.com/article/out-of-europe/
Ancient DNA Links Native Americans With Europe
Michael Balter | 25 Oct 2013
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/342/6157/409
Interesting!
And I thought the Solutrean Hypothesis was now a dead end.
Pretty good list. Thanks, Salavation!
Incorrect. Columbus DID NOT believe the earth was spherical.
He believed it was pear-shaped. Not slightly pear-shaped (in the Neil DeGrasse Tyson fashion) but prominently pear shaped. Like a Bartlett.
Entry from Columbus' log of his third journey to the New World in 1498:
I found it (the world) was not round . . . but pear shaped, round where it has a nipple, for there it is taller, or as if one had a round ball and, on one side, it should be like a woman’s breast, and this nipple part is the highest and closest to Heaven.Columbus greatest error (in terms of sailing miles required) was not in underestimating the size of the earth but in trusting in the accounts of Marco Polo. Polo exaggerated the breadth of Asia by about 5000 miles to make the scale of his journeys seem all the more daunting and heroic. Had indeed Asia extended 5000 miles further to the east, it would indeed have been within the sailing range of a late 15th Century Spanish caravel.
I read somewhere that Columbus in his career had traveled to Iceland where he probably encountered stories maybe even former residents of Vinland. Also he had encounters with Basque cod fishermen who very likely had already been along the Canadian Atlantic coast following the cod run.
It is interesting that Catholic thinkers (whom you accuse of blind ideology) created the Magna Carta, the ur-document of Constitional Law. Its principal author and negotiator was Stephen Langton, Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury between 1207 and 1228.
The movable type printing press was invented by Catholic Johannes Gutenberg was the first book printed on it was the Catholic Bible.
Patent law and the development of the Sciences (both theoretical and practical) progressed in the High Middle Ages, which gave us the first Universities in the world.
The first Universities in the world:
University of Bologna,est. 1088, Catholic.
University ff Oxford, est. 1096, Catholic.
University of Salamanca, est. 1134, Catholic.
University of Paris, est. 1166, Catholic.
University of Cambridge, est. 1239, Catholic.
University of Padua, esp. 122, Catholic.
University of Naples, est. 1224,Catholic.
University of Siena, xt. 1240, Catholic.
University of Coimbra, est. 1290, Catholic.
OK, many more in Europe, every one of them Catholic (Universities of Perugia; Sapienzia in Rome; Complutense in Madrid, Macertta, Valladolid, etc.etc. all before the 14th century). Let's note the first Unversities on other continents as well. For instance, Asia:
University of Santo Tomas est. 1611 (in the Philippines), Catholic.
Interesting also to see that the Catholics had established eight Universities in Central and South America (Lima; Mexico City; La Plata o Charcas; Santo Tomas; Santiago de la Paz, Cordoba; Quito; and Quito) ... all before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock.
And what did they teach and study in the Universities? Unlike madrassas, yeshivas, lamaseries and confucian imperial mandarin schools, which concentrated heavily on memorization, recitation, and writing in a style which imitated sacred texts, the Catholic univsities were organized around a core curriculum of the seven liberal arts: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music theory, grammar, logic, and rhetoric.
Meanwhile, the Spanish Catholics at Salamanca were developing the concepts of procedural and substantive due process, and international law. They originated the basic definition of what a human being, or "person," is -- an entity of any race, color, culture or appearance possessing or capable of possessing intellect and free will--- in contrast to an irrational beast.
In consequence, they developed the theory of Universal Natural Rights, including the rights to simply go on living, to make their own choices inasmuch as they did not interfere with others' basic rights, and to securely possess and use property and the products of their labor for their own purposes and satisfaction. Put briefly, the Natural Rights comprised Life, Liberty, and Property (or pursuit of happiness)--- embraced centuries later in Jefferson's world as Natural Law.
So: with regard to "blind ideology"?
When you turn on the lights, a little rearrangement of your mental furniture may be in order.
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