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...
Regardng Myths 1 and 7, Columbus wanted to prove you could get to the Far East by sailing west. If I remember correctly he spent some time in Ireland and found debris washed ashore that he felt came from the west and was not found in Europe. This is part of what convinced him to make the trip. Also he probably knew that Portuguese fishermen had been fishing in the Grand Banks off New England for a number of years. So far as his religious nature, Isabella and Ferdinand had just driven the Mores out of Granada and Spain, and as an Italian he certainly knew that they would be encouraged to finance his additional voyages if this would enable them to pursue their goal of restoring Christianity in places where it had been lost. So, good diplomacy and good religion.
PS: Thanks for another fine list of links.
That was certainly true in the US in the 19th Century. In Mexico in the 16th Century there were terrible plagues that killed millions of Indians. On the other hand Europeans learned the “pleasures” of Syphilis.
My daughter-in-law from Puerto Rico is mostly Hispanic heritage but she is also proud of her Taino heritage. Late in our marriage, my mother-in-law finally told my husband she was 1/8th Cree Indian, so my children are 1/32nd Cree, and one of their two sons looks like he got a fair bit of Indian from both parents.
I guess that makes sense.
A New History of the First Peoples in the Americas
A DNA Search for the First Americans Links Amazon Groups to Indigenous Australians
Thanks, I'd not heard the story about C in Ireland. Columbus went to Iceland as part of his research, his visit to Ireland may be why. If memory serves, the King and Queen of Spain had already turned him down, and he was packing to leave, to make his pitch somewhere else, when the Moors were finally expelled (last ruler Abdul Abdullah Boabdil; the anecdote was, he took a long look back at his former capital and wept, and his mother said, "don't weep like a woman for that which you could not defend like a man." There's nothing like a mother's love. ;^)
Anyway, the Reconquest was done, so the monarchs changed their minds and bankrolled Columbus. For his part, Columbus had studied the crap out of the whole thing, and accepted the view going back to ancient Greece that the known landmasses were all that existed, but the reports of the nearby landmasses to the west caused him to reject the estimate (also going back to ancient Greece) of the circumference of the Earth. After he made landfall in what turned out to be the Americas, he really thought he'd shrunk the Earth.
I used to know a guy online who had deep roots in Scandinavia; he claimed ancestors who, during the medieval warming period, had taken advantage of the 24 hour days of Arctic Ocean summer to trade with eastern Asia. That's pretty interesting, though anecdotal.
I was not sure if I remembered Ireland or Iceland, so Googled “Did Columbus travel to Ireland to research his travels.” Sure enough the first article listed was about Columbus taking an Irishman with him who had told of his own travels to land in the West. The second article is about a colony of Irish in the Carolinas that predated Columbus’ voyages. Farley was right!
They are trying to get rid of it.
Discovered from yesterday’s NY Post that most of the animosity against de Blasio at the parade was about the Cabrini statue.
Of course the cops are not exactly in love with him for other reasons.
That kinda rings a bell. I’d be surprised if it hasn’t been two-way traffic for a long, long time.
I Googled disease that killed many after cortez’s conquest of mexico. There were several articles on small pox and other European illnesses. Further down was the article below about the devastating epidemics of “cocoliztli” in 1545 and 1576 which was carefully described by Spanish priests and killed millions. One hundred years after Cortez, it is estimated that a population of 20 million had been reduced to 2 million. Interesting description of research seeking DNA of pathogens in teeth of skeletons in old cemetaries. A salmonella variety showed up repeatedly in teeth of victims buried at the time of a cocoliztli epidemic. Article points out that RNA bugs would not show up. It also mentions the potential for a lot of other historical epidemiological research.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/01/salmonella-cocoliztli-mexico/550310/
When were the Salamanca Catholics doing the intellectual development you describe in your comment? I wonder how that date period compares with the English Magna Carta, 1225 I think?
See here Vitoria Also School of Salamanca with attention to Francisco Suarez, who built on Vitoria.
Of course the history of human thought on justice has many "fathers." Vitoria and Suarez built on Aquinas, Aquinas on Augustine and Aristotle, etc. More modern theorists (Grotius, etc) built on their foundationss, often without acknowledging them.
I post this article from time to time:
Historical Review: Megadrought And Megadeath In 16th Century Mexico (Hemorrhagic Fever)
"The epidemic of cocoliztli from1545 to 1548 killed an estimated 5 million to 15 million people, or up to 80% of the native population of Mexico (Figure 1). In absolute and relative terms the 1545 epidemic was one of the worst demographic catastrophes in human history, approaching even the Black Death of bubonic plague, which killed approximately 25 million in western Europe from 1347 to 1351 or about 50% of the regional population. "
"The cocoliztli epidemic from 1576 to 1578 cocoliztli epidemic killed an additional 2 to 2.5 million people, or about 50% of the remaining native population."
One of the great tragedies of the world was the destruction of the Library at Alexandria.
I have just enjoyed reading your entire link on Mexican megadeath. I wonder if you have read the link I included in my Comment #90. It is quite exciting what can be done by searching for infective organizims in teeth using the bugs’ DNA. I am wondering if the hemorrhagic fevers, Hanta, Ebola, and others are all DNA bugs, or if some are RNA ones which the article I linked say were not studied (could not be studied??).
These HF type infections were in the highlands. The Aztecs were by a lake and it seems Smallpox was a significant killer, whereas the cocoliztli was a highland event associated with drought. Also the symptoms listed did not include pox which are quite definitive for smallpox.
I have had a specific interest in the influence of volcanoes on major climate events, so will do some research on the status of volcanoes in the 1500s. I remember wondering why the Carolingian Empire failed after the death of Charles the Great. Then I read in a book about food that in the century after his death there were about 30 famines some lasting 2 and 3 years. Part of this was caused by changes in agricultural conditions leading to more ergot fungus in northern Europe, and fungus from barberry bushes in southern Europe, those bushes being popular in Muslim cuisine. Later I discovered that there were an unusually large number of big volcanic events in that period.
536 A.D. the worst year in the history of the world
Very interesting.
Yes, that would be the year recorded by Cassiodorus. I have read several sources and the causes argument usually are volcanic air pollution, or meteor strike or air burst. Do you have an opinion or good links? Of course, 1816, the year with no summer in New England was pretty bad and blamed with good reason on the 1815 eruption of Tambora.
When I first read about it (and that was less than a year ago) I thought: If it was such a big event why didn't it make it big in the history books?
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