Christopher Columbus was a monster. He sailed
across the Atlantic in pursuit of his vanity, of wealth and titles. He sailed
across the Atlantic four times and back; he became wealthy, he earned titles, though
his vanity was never satisfied.
He was born in obscurity, an Italian from
Genoa. As a boy he went to sea where he learned the skills and the knowledge
that brought him to a captaincy.
In this he was remarkable, and deserving of
respect.
He became an adventurer in the service of the
monarchs of Spain; Ferdinand and Isabella. He made his first voyage for them in
1492, as I learned by song, when I was a boy, that Columbus Sailed the Ocean Blue.
He set sail on September 6th
sighted land in what we now call the Islands of the Bahamas on October 12th.
He named the island that he landed on San Salvador, which island this was, is
now lost to memory.
He expected to be in Asia, but to his
surprise, and to the surprise of everyone back in the Spanish and European
courts, there were other continents and other oceans they had yet to traverse
in order to get to India.
They still wanted a westward route to India,
but they were more than happy to find what they did.
Columbus opened up these new continents and
all of their peoples, to the incessant appetites and cruelties of the Europeans,
their hunger for gold, and land and war.
Columbus never sailed past the Islands of the
Caribbean. He never set foot in what came to be known as the America’s, and his
life was not without controversy.
He became wealthy and he earned titles, but he
was also arrested, jailed and relieved of his governance, before eventually
being released and to a lesser degree redeemed.
Though wealth and titles came to him his
vanity was never satisfied.
His heirs did not inherit the titles he had
earned, he never entered the true nobility. He died at the age of fifty four, a
sailor from Genoa, Admiral of the Ocean Seas.
His coming to the West, was the beginning of
the end for countless peoples. Tribes whose names history did not record, peaceful
people, who were captured and enslaved, and worked to death which began under the
tyranny of Spanish rule.
Columbus was a harbinger of death.
Given 1st - 2018.10.08
