1/1/2024 0 Comments Mariner write.![]() He appears to have been dishonest with just about everyone he encountered and, most of all, with himself, as he forever tried to rationalize his idiosyncratic preconceptions. In his writings, Columbus reveals that the flip side of his optimism was a casual greed and cruelty. The series goes a long way toward explaining, if inadvertently, why the quincentenary turned into a fiasco. Some forty scholars collaborated on the project, which took fourteen years to complete this fall, a decade behind schedule, the twelfth volume will finally appear. The series, produced by U.C.L.A.’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, features new English translations of the most important documents associated with Columbus’s voyages, including his “Book of Prophecies,” transcripts of his logs, and the earliest accounts of his arrival in the New World. ![]() But by then nearly everything about Columbus, starting with the very notion of discovery, was being reëvaluated.Īmong the few quincentenary projects to reach a satisfactory conclusion is a twelve-volume series called, somewhat portentously, the Repertorium Columbianum. In 1985, Congress established the Christopher Columbus Quincentenary Jubilee Commission, apparently assuming that the five-hundredth anniversary would proceed along similar lines. The four-hundredth anniversary of his discovery of the New World, in 1892, prompted a yearlong national celebration that included, among scores of tributes, the creation of Columbus Circle in Manhattan. (Irving concocted the “fact” to back up his thesis that Columbus’s journeys expressed a bold, proto-American rationalism.) Subsequently, Columbus was taken up by Irish and Italian immigrants, who saw his story, or what passed for it, as proof that Catholicism was no bar to patriotism. ![]() Probably the most famous “fact” about Columbus-his insistence, against overwhelming scholastic opposition, that the world was round-was the work of a fabulist, Washington Irving, who wrote the first modern biography of the explorer. The version of Columbus’s life that most of us grew up on was invented in the early nineteenth century. By this point, he may or may not have been mad. In his later years, he assembled a book of Biblical passages showing that his discoveries were a prelude to the Day of Judgment, and took to signing his name with an elaborate Christological cryptogram. (This manuscript was “found” four centuries later, in a wonderfully clumsy fraud.) But Columbus kept squeaking by and, in keeping with his general view of things, interpreted his good fortune as a sign that he had been singled out by God. Returning from his First Voyage, he ran into a storm so ferocious that he decided his best hope for posterity was to write up an account of his discoveries, seal it in a barrel, and toss the whole thing overboard. Several times, Columbus almost didn’t make it back. To sail west across the Atlantic, a ship needs to find the easterly trade winds to sail east it has to find the less consistent westerlies, and can easily end up becalmed. On all of these points, of course, he was wrong, and should have been fatally so, except that he was also fantastically lucky.Ĭolumbus made four round-trip voyages from Spain to the New World, each of which was a stunning feat of seamanship. Cuba, he was convinced, was part of the Malay Peninsula things of value were more plentiful in the south and the riches of the Orient-or, barring that, the rewards of Paradise-were always just around the corner. When he read in Marco Polo that the palace of the Japanese king had floors of gold “two fingers thick,” he accepted it as fact. What they made of it was not recorded.Ĭolumbus was one of history’s great optimists. He found this theory so compelling that two months later he sent news of it in a long letter to his patrons, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. Had he reached the very tip of the protuberance, he concluded, he would have sailed straight into the Terrestrial Paradise. He felt himself not just crossing the ocean but going up it, his whole ship being lifted gently toward the sky. Putting all this together, Columbus reasoned that the world was shaped like a ball with a breastlike protuberance. Great quantities of fresh water were flowing into the ocean the climate seemed unusually temperate for a region so close to the equator and the North Star was wandering from its course. He had just spent several weeks navigating off what he believed to be an island in the Far East but was actually Venezuela, and during that time he had noticed several curious phenomena. In August, 1498, three months into his Third Voyage, Christopher Columbus found himself sailing toward the nipple of the world. Columbus was one of the few men of his age willing to entertain the notion that the world was not spherical.
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