Of Columbus

"Because, O most Christian and very high, very excellent and puissant Princes, King and Queen of the Spains and of the islands of the Sea, our Lords, in this present year of 1492 ... Your Highnesses resolved to send me, Cristobal, to India ... and ordered that I should not go by land to the eastward, as had been customary, but that I should go by way of the west, whither up to this day we do not know for certain that any has gone." -- The Journal.

On October 12 at two hours after midnight, the land was sighted at a distance of two leagues. The vessels were hove to, waiting for daylight and on Friday, they arrived at a small island [believed today to be Watling Island.]

If Columbus had not discovered America for Europe, eventually someone else would have. Would the indigenous inhabitants have suffered less if it had been Russia, crossing over from Siberia, not Spaniards? Or Turks, pouring in with the banners of Mohammed? Or if two more centuries had passed and Englishmen had been the first of the European race to plant their flag in the New World?

It is not reasonable to hate Columbus, as some do. He was a man of great courage, certainly. He was a man of many flaws, too, a man of his flawed era. But from Ottawa to Buenos Aires, for better or for worse, the world is a bigger place because of him.

We rightly honor him today.

Above is a church in the Canary Islands where he stopped to pray along his journey.

Columbus slept here

Having finished with "canals" in my encyclopedia, I have now reached the Canary Islands.

There's a whole lot that I found interesting about these Spanish-owned islets off the African coast.

They were Christopher Columbus' last stop in the Old World before he sailed for America. A church stands on one of the islands in which he supposedly prayed before he left. (Though my web searching found info only about the Iglesia de Nuestra Senora de la Concepcion, which dates to 1516 and thus 24 years after Capt. Columbus first passed through. That's the photo that I have included, sadly, not of my own taking. Maybe someday.)

How about this from Wikipedia: The Gomerans (natives of one of the islands) have a unique way of communicating across the barrancos (valleys) by an amazing kind of whistled speech called Silbo. Silbo Gomero language, a whistled language, is an indigenous language, whose existence was known since Roman times. Invented by the original inhabitants of the island, the Guanches, Silbo was adopted by the Spanish settlers in the 16th century and survived after the extinction of the Guanches. When this unique medium of communication was about to die out early in the 21st century, the local government required all children to learn it in school.

And this:
Columbus stopped at Gomera for wine and water, intending to stay only four days. He became romantically involved with Beatrice de Bobadilla, Governor of Gomera, and he stayed a month. When he finally sailed she gave him cuttings of sugarcane, which became the first to reach the New World. The house in San Sebastián in which he stayed is now a tourist attraction.

This was going to be a blogpost about the "Columbian exchange." I'll get to that in a later post.