Timothy Birdnow

Happy Columbus Day!  He was a great Italian, even if a bit thick.

He WAS thick; the man argued the world was half the size that everyone else knew it to be. None of the crowned heads of Europe would finance his trip because they knew he was wrong, not because they thought he would fall of the edge of the world as the Left wing now claims (people knew the world was round since the ancient Greeks and there are statues of Jesus standing on a globe dating back to well into the Middle Ages.) Columbus was lucky; I suspect Queen Isabella was more interested in Columbus' Latin passions than his geographical ideas. Still, they gave him three crumby ships that were not suited for long-range travel just to get rid of him. He got monumentally lucky, finding a new continent - and no realizing he had done so. He went to his grave believing he was in the East Indies.

But God bless him! His voyages and later governing of the lands he found ended the tyrannical scourges of the Aztecs, the human sacrifice of the Mayans, and brought civilization with all its attendant benefits - to a number of savage and warlike peoples. Cannibalism, human sacrifice, torture were not at all uncommon in the pre-Columbian days.

God bless him! $

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 05:50 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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