SCHOLAR ISLAND

COLUMBUS

 

"Columbus saw himself as a ‘divinely inspired fulfiller of prophecy.’ He was firmly convinced that the world would end in about a century and a half, based upon calculations by d’Aily, and that in the meantime all prophecies had to be fulfilled, including the conversion of all peoples and the recovery of Mount Zion." (Jerusalem)

David F. Noble

The Religion of Technology

 

   "Columbus was a fighting man, shaped, as we might expect more in the Portuguese than in the Chinese mold. His destiny, he felt, had been sealed on August 13, 1476, when he floated to shore just up the coast from Prince Henry's institute at Sagres, clutching an oar and leaving behind the burning wreck of the ship in which he had been fighting in the battle of Cape St. Vincent  (on the Portuguese side, against his native Genoa). To be wringing the salt water out of his shirt on the beach near Sagres was just the thing Columbus expected from a life he believed to be directed by the hand of God. he took his first name seriously, thought of himself as Christophoros, the "Christ carrier," whose mission was to discover "a new heaven and a new earth."

-Timothy Ferris

Coming of age in the Milky Way

 

 

"I have not availed myself of reason, or of mathematics, or of maps of the world. What mattered was the accomplishment of what Isaiah prophesied."

Christopher Columbus Book of Prophecies

 

"And your Highnesses, as Catholic Christians and Princes devoted to the Holy Christian Faith and the propagators thereof, and enemies of the sect of Mahomet and of all idolatries and heresies, resolved to  send me Christopher Columbus to the said regions of India, to see the said princes and peoples and lands and (to observe) the disposition of them and of all, and the manner in which may be undertaken their conversion to our Holy Faith, and ordained that I should not go by land (the usual way) to the Orient, but by the route of the Occident, by which no one to this day knows for sure than anyone has gone."

Book of the first Navigation and Discovery of the Indies

 

"Curiously, Columbus embarked on his famous voyage guided by the Bible. He believed his voyage across the Atlantic fulfilled a prophecy from Isaiah (46:11) about God summoning one "from the east, the man who executes My counsel, from a far country."

`1,001 Things you always wanted to know about the Bible

J. Stephen Lang

 

 

 

"God made me the messenger of the new heaven and the new earth of ;which he spoke in the Apocalypse of St. John after having spoken of it through the mouth of Isaiah, and he showed me the spot where to find it."

Christopher Columbus

 

 

Columbus entered in his log that when he arrived at Haiti the natives informed him that 6 European expeditions had arrived before him."

Columbus brought home spear heads and had them analyzed-conclusion: the alloy is of African origins."

 

 

On his 2nd voyage two things impressed him

1. The unquestionable Negro presence.

2. the apparent influence of Christianity….he started looking for Prestor John

 

 

The 3rd voyage he sailed directly to Guinea and discovered that the French, Portuguese, and Germans had gotten to Guinea before him.

Dr. Samuel Marble

Before Columbus

 

 

Vikings arrived 900 A.D.

Africans arrived 1100 A.D.

Celts arrived 800 B.C.

Columbus’s unfinished Book of Prophecies-he was obsessed with the recovery of Mt. Zion.

 

"Columbus brought up the idea of selling slaves. Ferdinand said yes. Isabella; No!

 

   "The men who crossed an ocean to conquer America were the ones that Europe, for all its depravity, could not kill. Weather-beaten and torn by the wind, Columbus arrived off the shore of Santa Marta in 1494 still carrying with him a carefully annotated copy of Marco Polo's journal, still certain that he had reached the lands of Kublai Khan, still anxious to present to the Great Khan his credentials, written in Latin on parchment he could not read. Those who followed him knew better. This land of demons, of birds with teeth and fish that flew, was one vast kingdom of  the devil. To destroy was to serve God, a glorious mission made sweet by the presence of gold. Their Church embraced all their deeds. The rape of children, the violation of the earth, the destruction of all that was beautiful could be condoned by the halo of the faith. Men who had sex as if relieving themselves declared all native women to be whores, and branded the face of children while the Pope debated whether or not they were human beings. Priests who exhaled disease declared pestilence to be the will of God. In their wake they left death. Three million Arawakans died between 1494 and 1508. Within 150 years of Columbus the aboriginal population of 70 million would be reduced to 3.5 million. In the southern Andes of Bolivia, on a mountain of silver once sacred to the Inca, an average of 75 Indians were to die every day for over 300 years."

Wade Davis

One River

 

"I have established warm friendship with the king of that land, so much so that he was proud to call me and treat me as a brother. But even should he change his attitude and attack the men of La Navidad, he and his people know nothing about arms and go naked, as , as I have already said; they are the most timorous people in the world."

-Christopher Columbus, letter written as he returned to Spain (1493)

 

 

"Upon seeing the disaster we had suffered, our misery and distress, the Indians sat down with us and all began to weep out of compassion for our misfortune, and for more than half an hour they wept so loud and so sincerely that it could be heard far away."

-Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca (1555)

 

 

"The Admiral had thirteen noteworthy men beaten in the streets, tied at the neck, their feet leashed together one behind the other, because, in hunger and in need, they had gone to the ships and bartered bits of gold for pieces of lard, bread, and some wine to drink. There was no other reason.

For stealing three or four clemenes of wheat out of hunger, Luquetas was ordered beaten, and his nostrils and ears were cut off. He was shackled, proclaimed a slave, and sent to the bread ovens, where he stayed with his shackles for three years.

The Admiral ordered a woman to be set upon an ass and beaten, entirely naked. They beat her because she had said that she was pregnant.....on and on....

 

 

"Until now I have always taken pity on my fellow man; today, may Heaven have mercy on me, may the earth cry for me, as I wait for death alone, sick and racked with pain. I am so far away from the Holly Sacraments that if my soul should here leave my body, not even God remember it. Those who love charity, truth and justice, let them cry for me now."

Columbus

 

 

"As a result of the suffering and hard labor they endured, the Indians choose and have chosen suicide. Occasionally a hundred have committed mass suicide. The women, exhausted by labor, have shunned conception and childbirth…..Many, when pregnant, have taken something to abort and have aborted. Others after delivery have killed their children with their own hands, so as not to leave them in such oppressive slavery."

Pedro de Cordoba (letter to King Ferdinand 1577)

 

"A hundred Castellanos are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten are now in demand."

( a letter from Columbus to a friend 1500)

 

   "President Ronald Reagan announced, when he signed a proclamation designating October 12 a federal holiday, that Christopher Columbus was a 'dreamer, a man of vision and courage, a man filled with hope for the future" In other words, the adventurer must be the simulation of manifest manners, the countenance of neocolonial racialism. "Put it all together and you might say that Columbus was the inventor of the American Dream."

-Gerald Vizenor

 

 

"The Admiral said that turning the Indians into Christians was against the faith, and that our men were giving the chrism and holy oils to infidels who only converted to Christianity because they were also given clothes. If he wanted to give clothes to the Indians, the entire island would become Christian. The Admiral asked if his men wanted to see just why the Indians became Christians. He then had three Indians summoned and told them that he would give them cassocks and jerkins and shirts and that they would no longer have to dig on the haciendas or do anything else if they became Christian. Even so, they said that they didn't want to.

Goncalo Vizcaino says he himself was impeded by the Admiral from converting an Indian woman he had in his house, and that if she had become Christian, her father, mother, and all the other savages would have. He claims Friar Ramon would have turned half the island Christian if it weren't for the Admiral, who preferred the price they brought as slaves to having noble Christians.

Teresa de Baeca and Ynes de Malaver said the Admiral and his brothers were from a line of weavers. Because of this, their tongues were cut off. When he heard that this had been done, the Admiral wrote a letter to the governor: "That which you have done is good, and whoever speaks ill of us deserves death, for that is the nature of the law."

The Admiral had nails run through the hand of a young lad named Arnalte in the public square because removing a basked of fish from the river, he had taken a fish.

The Admiral ordered Juan de Luxan's throat slit because Luxan was called a traitor and a sodomite."

From testimony taken in 1500 from witnesses of Christopher Columbus's reign in the New World, for an investigation ordered by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, who afterward ordered that Columbus be returned to Spain in chains. The depositions, discovered in 2005 by Isabel Aguiree in the Archivo General de Simancas, were published last August in The fall of Christopher Columbus, by Consuelo Varela, a Spanish historian.

 

Christopher Columbus (a Mission to distract) Barreto had spent 20 years researching the genealogies of the Portuguese royal family. He claimed also to have uncovered documents signed by Columbus implicating himself in  the plot. Under Bareto's theory, Columbus was the son of Prince Fernando nephew of the Portuguese King John II. Having undergone navigation training at the famous school established by Portuguese hero, Henry the Navigator, he was dispatched to Spain in a classic deception operation  to drive q stake at the heart of Portugal's greatest rival.

   Columbus's mission was to divert the Spanish court's attention away from what was surmised to be the only viable sea route to the Indies, around the southern tip of Africa. The Portuguese King had commissioned an expedition to explore the route in 1486 and Bartholomew Diaz duly confirmed it in 1488, just four years before Columbus's famous voyage to the Americas. They were intent on keeping this route, and the fabulous wealth that was known to be at the far end of it, secret as long as possible.

   Added weight was lent to the theory, Barreto claimed, by looking at the dates of the two enterprises. Columbus had his first audience before the Spanish court in may 1486, just a few months before the Diaz mission set off. Countless historians' bafflement about how a supposedly humble and unconnected commoner so readily gained access to a royal  court is now more easily understood. Columbus would have been carefully insinuated into the royal circle with  the help of Portugal's diplomatic representatives..."

See more in Phil Mason

How George Washington fleeced the Nation...and other little secrets airbrushed from History.

************************

Book: "Manifest Manners: The Long Gaze of Christopher Columbus

from "American Indian Persistence and Resurgence" Ed by Karl Kroeber

Book: "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" by Charles C. Mann

Book: "The Genoese Cartographic Tradition and Christopher Columbus" by Gaetano Ferro

Book: "Christopher Columbus: Accounts and Letters of the Second, Third and Fourth Voyages" ed by Paolo Emillio Taviani et al

Book: "History Concerning The Life and Deeds of the Admiral Don Christopher Columbus" by Ferdinand Columbus

Book: "Christopher Columbus, The Last Templar" by Ruggero Marino

Book" Holy War" by Nigel Cliff

Book: "Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem" by Carol Delaney

Book: Columbus: The Four Voyages" by Laurence Bergreen

Book: "Race to the New World" by Douglas Hunter

 

 

 

© 2006

E-MAIL@SCHOLAR

ABOUT SCHOLAR ISLAND

 

Back to Chrestomathy           Next Page