Celebrating Christopher Columbus Launching an Age of Discovery

Celebrating Christopher Columbus Launching an Age of Discovery

While Monday is celebrated as the day Christopher Columbus discovered America, he actually spotted the coast of the Bahamas on October 12, 1492.

I thought this might be a great day to recall that his fleet launched an age of discovery, as a nice contrast to the woke, Columbus-as-colonialist pseudo-history offered. This is especially fitting, as it appears SpaceX and its CEO Elon Musk appear to be on the forefront of launching a new age of discovery…in space.

While Lief Erickson might have discovered the continent before Columbus’ voyage, it stayed discovered.

Argentine President Javier Milei has released a video honoring Christopher Columbus for discovering the Americas.

Columbus arrived in the new world on October 12th, 1492.

🇪🇸🇮🇹🇦🇷 pic.twitter.com/GhRH0UmS1n

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 12, 2024

Columbus faced many challenges. To begin with, he shopped his proposal around to European courts for years. Finally, Spain’s King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, empowered by their victory over the Muslims, agreed to fund the mission to find shorter and less hazardous trade routes to Asia.

While many people believed the Earth was, indeed, a sphere in 1492, they thought the planet was a bit smaller than it is. Nobody in Europe realized that there were two continents between them and Asia.

Next, the Santa Maria, the Pinta, and the Niña faced storms, becalmed seas, and the crew’s possible unease over sailing off the edge of the world. Furthermore, navigating with the 15th century offered its own challenges, and maps at the time were based on myth and fantasy. Additionally, between the poor hygiene and diet limitations (cruise-ship style buffets were centuries away), the men of those ships deal with scurvy, dysentery, and other illnesses.

Columbus’s discovery of the Americas lifted the entire continent of Europe in terms of quality of life.

The Americas also provided Europe, Asia, and Africa with a rich variety of new foodstuffs. Maize, potatoes, beans, tomatoes, peanuts, tobacco, and cacao (chocolate) were among the plants that journeyed eastward across the Atlantic. By the 1530s, tobacco, smoked and inhaled (in the form of snuff) by Native Americans, became a very valuable cash crop, especially in the British Middle Atlantic colonies. Cacao was used by the Olmec, the Maya civilization, and cultivated in Aztec agriculture. The cacao bean was ground into a powder and infused into water creating a very bitter drink, which was disliked by Europeans.

Hernan Cortés (1485-1547) brought cacao back to Spain in 1528. The Spanish added sugar and honey to alleviate the bitterness, and in the next hundred years, as it spread throughout Europe, vanilla was added to the mixture producing a new luxury item: chocolate.

The potato had the greatest impact on Europe affecting both their diet and lifespan. Potato consists of essential vitamins and nutrients, and it can grow in a wide range of soils capable. Producing high yields, the introduction of potato ended centuries-old cycles of malnourishment and famine, leading to higher population growth in Europe.

Now, let me take a moment to discuss another work of Hernan Cortés: Vanquishing the Aztecs. Social-justice-mythologists usually skip over the magnitude of inhumanity and the sheer scale of horror native Americans imposed upon their fellow human beings.

…In 2015 and 2018, archeologists working at the Templo Mayor excavation site in Mexico City discovered proof of widespread human sacrifice among the Aztecs—none other than the very skull towers and skull racks that conquistadors had described in their accounts.

While it’s true that the Spanish undoubtedly inflated their figures—Spanish historian Fray Diego de Durán reported that 80,400 men, women and children were sacrificed for the inauguration of the Templo Mayor under a previous Aztec emperor—evidence is mounting that the gruesome scenes illustrated in Spanish texts, and preserved in temple murals and stone carvings, are true.

Columbus’ voyages improved navigation techniques and map-making, and pushed the boundaries of what was known about the world. And there were many positive benefits to humanity as well, which go unmentioned in the toxic, revised histories being offered today.

One last thing to note on this Columbus Day: A new genetic study suggests Columbus wasn’t Italian or even originally Catholic but instead a Sephardic Jew.

The findings are based on nearly 22 years’ worth of research that began in 2003, when Lorente, a professor of forensic medicine at Granada University, and historian Marcial Castro exhumed Columbus’ partial remains from the cathedral.

For centuries, countries had argued over his origin, with dozens of conflicting theories that claimed he was born in Poland, Great Britain, Greece, Portugal, Hungary or even Scandinavia.

But those ideas — including the novel thought of a Viking Columbus — appear to have been incorrect.

The DNA-driven results are “almost absolutely reliable,” Lorente said.

The results are consistent with historical records of the era, too, which showed that about 300,000 Jews lived in Spain before Catholic monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand ordered Jews and Muslims to either convert to Catholicism or leave.

Mankind lives to explore, and today is a great day to reflect upon that important trait and to celebrate those who took risks to do so successfully.

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