October 12 is a federal holiday in the United States called Columbus Day, which celebrates the explorer, Christopher Columbus. When asked to describe him, most people say one of two things:
1. Christopher Columbus was a brave explorer, who despite terrible odds, sailed across the Atlantic Ocean and proved the world is round.
2. He was a courageous hero who discovered a new continent, called the New World in his time, which is known today as North America, Central America, and South America.
Both of these “facts” are still taught in many American schools. But, if you agreed with either of those statements, you would be wrong.
In 1491, no one thought the earth was flat.
The notion that everyone thought the earth was flat in pre-Columbian times is a myth that was made up in the 18th century. Misguided historians began repeating what other misguided historians said, which fooled misinformed teachers into believing it was true, and eventually the idea was accepted as fact.
In reality, Columbus knew the earth was round when he set out on his initial voyage, the Queen of Spain knew this fact, and pretty much anyone with an education knew the earth was not flat. In fact, the ancient Greeks had proven this more than 2,000 years before Christopher Columbus was even born.
Columbus did, however, propose a ridiculous theory: that the Earth was shaped like a pear, and that he had not found Asia because of the part of the pear that bulges out towards the stem.
Columbus did not discover the Americas
Leif Ericson found the “New World” over 500 years before Columbus was born and established a settlement in New Foundland, Canada. There is also some evidence that his party may have traveled into the north-eastern United States. Stone boulders in the shape of a Viking ship mark a burial ground in the upper Michigan peninsula, which has been estimated to be 1,000 to 10,000 years old.
Early folklore that circulated in the 1700s, though unproven by archeological evidence, states that a Welsh Prince named Madoc (Madog or Madawg) ap Owain Gwynedd established a colony in Alabama in 1170 A.D. and later migrated up into what is now Tennessee. This colony later integrated with an unknown Indian tribe, producing a race of “White Indians” with many individuals with light skin, blonde hair and blue or gray eyes. Caitlin, the famous Indian painter who lived with the Mandans for eight years, thought they were this mysterious tribe. The Mandans fit this physical description and used a skin covered round boat called a Bull Boat or coracle. Similar boats are still used in Wales today and are called coracles. The Mandan sentence structure is similar to the syntax used in the Welsh language.
Carbon dated Polynesian chicken bones found on the west side of Chile in South America in 2007 indicate Polynesians made the trip at least as early as 1304 to 1424. A study of 8,000 year old Polynesian sweet potato DNA is linked to a variety that originated in South America. This new DNA evidence, taken together with archaeological and linguistic evidence regarding the timeline of Polynesian expansion, suggests that an original contact date between 500 CE and 700 CE between Polynesia and the Americas seems likely.
More and more, scholars are coming to admit that peoples from the Middle East reached the New World long before Columbus or even the Vikings. Ancient Hebrew writings dated to 1,000 B.C have been found in New Mexico. Minoan and Phoenician coins have been found, and inscriptions of ancient Phoenician and Minoan scripts in Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia. The Star of David was even found in an ancient ruin of the Pueblo Indians in New Mexico.
The Yuchi Indians, formerly from Florida and who later migrated to Oklahoma, practiced religious ceremonies that are identical to ancient Hebrew religious traditions, celebrated on the same day of the year, and they prayed to Gods whose names are pronounced the same as the Gods in an ancient Hebrew language.
An archeologist in Mexico has disovered pottery heads of Mongolians, Chinese, Japanese, Tartars, Negroes, and “all kinds of white people, especially Semitic Types with and without beards” that predate Columbus’ travels.
Anthropologists pretty much agree that modern humans colonized North and South America 15,000 to 20,000 years ago during the Late Pleistocene in two separate migrations about 7,000 years apart. These settlers most likely arrived from Mongolia and northeast Asia, traveling across the Beringia land bridge. 97% of modern native American people in the Americas have DNA haplogroups that originated in Mongolia and Asia.
The other 3% of native americans belong to Haplogroup X, and of those, 25% have similarities to the 4% of modern people in Europe that belong to Haplogroup X.
Genetic anthropologists suggest that the presence of X in North America points to an early migration westward from Europe. By looking at the various mutations within haplogroup X, scientists are able to estimate when those early Europeans would have arrived. Depending on how large a group they assume headed west, they come up with two time ranges – either between 36,000 and 23,000 years ago or between 17,000 and 12,000 years ago.
Haplogroup X definitely did not arrive in America with the European explorers of the last 500 years or so. European X and American X are different enough that scientists say they must have diverged thousands of years ago, long before Columbus and his contemporary exporers introduced European genes to the New World. Scientists have also done some testing on pre-Columbian Native American skeletal remains from before 1300 A.D., and found haplogroup X in the same proportion it is present in modern Native American populations.
Native americans were living in the Americas a minimum of 12,000 years before Columbus even learned to sail a boat.
While we are still not sure of who first discovered the Americas, one thing we are sure of is that it wasn’t Columbus.
In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, and discovered a “New World” — in the Bahama Islands, where he first met the Lucayan Indians, (now known as the Taino Indians). In his lifetime, Columbus did not visit Canada, he did not visit Mexico, and he certainly never stepped a foot into the area that is now known as the United States. He visited Cuba and on subsequent voyages, he explored islands along the coast of Central America such as Jamaica and Puerto Rico, but he never made it to ANYWHERE in North America.
The Catholic Church is responsible for the modern day misperception of Columbus
Columbus Day was established in the 1930s by an all male Catholic organization known as the Knights of Columbus. They wanted a Catholic male role model their boys could look up to, so they pressured President Roosevelt to make Columbus Day a national holiday. The bill passed and American schools have been teaching the bogus story of Columbus discovering America ever since.
Columbus Day is not a real American tradition. It is a recent tragic mistake.
The real story of Christopher Columbus
Columbus’ first voyage was not particularly fruitful. A sailor on the ship named Pinta was actually the first to spot land. Columbus later claimed he saw it first so he wouldn’t have to pay the sailor the reward he’d promised to the first man to see land.
On that trip, Columbus explored five islands in the modern-day Bahamas before he made it to Cuba. Thinking he had found China, he sent two men to find the Emporer of China. They found a Taino village instead, where the Europeans first observed men smoking tobacco, a habit they quickly picked up.
Next, they stopped on the island of Haiti, which Columbus renamed La Española, and was later changed to Hispaniola.
Of the three ships, Columbus was the captain of the ship named Santa Maria, which sank off the coast of Haiti when he ran it aground. The Lucayan Indians rescued his men and most of his cargo. When the Nina caught up with them, he took it over and proclaimed himself its captain, leaving 39 of his men with the Lucayans. On this first voyage, he noted in his journal that the natives were healthy, generous, hospitable people, and he also noted they wore gold jewelry. On his return voyage, he took 25 Lucayans with him. Seven survived the seven week journey to Spain, where he then asked the Queen to make them slaves. She refused.
Where there was kindness in the natives, Columbus saw weakness.
He concluded his 1492 journal with this statement:
“I could conquer the whole of them with fifty men, and govern them as I please.”
Columbus then sold the queen on the idea of a land saturated in wealth and prosperity beyond her wildest dreams. She then outfitted him with 17 more ships, 1500 men, and an arsenal of crossbows, swords, and cannons. This voyage also included European domesticated animals such as pigs, horses and cattle. Columbus’ orders were to expand the settlement on Hispaniola, convert the natives to Christianity, establish a trading post and continue his explorations in search of China or Japan.
Upon returning to the New World on his second voyage, the atrocities begin
When Columbus returned, he found out the men he’d left behind had raped some local women and they had all been killed. When the chief was confronted, he blamed it on a rival chief. Columbus then took his men and quickly killed most of the rival chief’s village, keeping the remaining 300 or so survivors as slaves.
When he returned, he demanded that the Lucayan people of the remaining villages give his men food and gold, and allow them to have sex with their women. If they refused, he ordered that their ears and noses be cut off so when the disfigured people returned to their villages they would serve as a warning to the others.
Eventually, the natives rebelled, which gave Columbus the excuse he needed to go to war.
With heavily armed troops and advanced weaponry, it was a short war. There are eyewitness accounts of fallen Lucayan warriors being fed alive to dogs, screaming and wailing in agony while the dogs ripped off limbs and pulled out entrails.
Despite quelling the rebellion, Columbus still didn’t have enough wealth and the gold he wanted. So he rounded up 500 Lucayans and ordered them chained below deck and sent to Spain, where he hoped they could be sold as slaves. Of those, 300 survived the journey.
He enslaved another 500 on the islands, who were forced to feed and care for his men. They were even ordered to carry the men around on their backs. This resulted in many Lucayans trying to flee to the mountains to escape enslavement. Columbus then allowed his men to hunt these runaways for sport, and after murdering or maiming them, to feed their bodies to the dogs as dogfood.
Despite all these atrocities, Columbus still didn’t have enough gold, so he set up a tribute system where when a native brought him the required amount of gold, he would receive a token to wear around his neck. This gave them a “get out of jail free” card whereby they wouldn’t be required to bring more gold until the token expired in a few months. Any native caught without a token was severely punished.
The punishment was severe.
When a native was caught without a token, Columbus’ men would cut off their hands, and force them to wear those as a necklace instead of the token. Awful, yes? But it worked. Using this system, Columbus finally acquired enough gold to suit him.
With his greed mildly saited, Columbus began rewarding his lieutenants with sex slaves–particularly very young girls. In a letter he wrote to a friend, he said “A hundred castellanoes 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.”
Smallpox and other diseases and starvation wiped out most of the population of natives.
Not only did smallpox and other European diseases decimate the native population over the next fifty years, the severe work regimen forced onto the Natives upset the ecosystem and brought on mass starvation because they didn’t have enough time to work the land and grow enough food.
It’s estimated that over the next fifty years between three and five million natives died of European illnesses and starvation.
Huge gold exports lead to the proliferation of the worldwide African Slave Trade
Columbus’ huge gold exports resulted in the paralysis of the gold econmy that previously sustained the Gold Coast in Africa. So even though Queen Isabella forbid slavery of the Indians in Spain, this led to the rise of African slavery as the new dominant currency in that region, which inadvertently makes Columbus the father of the transatlantic slave trade.
The point I am trying to drive home is this: Christopher Columbus was no role model, he was awful! If he discovered the New World, it was more like meteor discovering the dinosaurs. It was not a good thing to be celebrated.
And, yet, good ‘ole Christopher Columbus, the mass murderer, sex slaver, and champion of sociopathic imperialism, HAS HIS OWN HOLIDAY!