↗ See also “The Knights of Columbus”
The truth is so much easier to deal with↗ Website dedicated to Roman Catholic Bishop Bartolomé de las Casas, exposer of Columbian genocide
↗ Text of the Papal Bull Inter caetera by Pope Alexander VI (“the Sixth [6th]”)
You can’t make this stuff up or exaggerate it. Is this the most amazing load of ignorance perhaps of all of space and time? We sheepishly recite that Christopher Columbus (in Spanish Cristóbal Colón) discovered America. We sleepily call members of Native American nations, tribes and clans “Indians.” By the way, I do not buy the idea that this is simply bigotry or “ethnocentrism” on our part; it is the product of diligent brainwashing by our filthy, rotten leaders who have named whole territories after the Protojesuitical Arch-Monster (Antichrist?) who is their role model, such as Colombia, British Columbia and most bizarre of all the District of Columbia! What, is it that some outrages are just too thoroughgoing and zany to be called out?

It is also, for any history buff, highly noteworthy that Christopher Columbus was not to be the last genocidal monster to misname a group with an Indic label. The U.S. American “manifest destiny” imperialist westward expansion thugs carried on the term “Injuns” (even though Native Americans seem to have come from Northern China, while the Mormons, who consider the more dark-skinned races diabolical, still call them “Israelites”) and Adolf Hitler pulled this stunt in reverse when he named the Prussian/Bavarian/Austrian peoples “Aryans.”

↗ paraphrased and augmented from the History Channel website
On 12 October 1492, Christopher Columbus, having tread the Atlantic, tread the fine white sands of an island in the Bahamas, unfurled the Spanish royal colors and claimed the territory for Royals Ferdinand and Isabella (whose marriage had merged their respective family territories into what today is called “Spain”). Though Columbus believed himself to be in Asia (namely the “Indias” [which, following Spain and other European principalities, only modernly became thought of as a unified nation “India”]), he had actually landed in a “New World,” i.e. a new land-mass. Let us sing a final dirge to some legends about this exploitation–er, “exploration”–event.

#1. Columbus was not Darwin and did not have scientific pretenses for his historic “con-quest.” I.e. he didn’t set out to prove the earth was round.
Forget those myths perpetuated by communicators from Washington Irving to Bugs Bunny. There was little to no need for Columbus to debunk the flat-earthers: the ancient Greeks had already done so. As early as the Sixth Century B.C., the notorious Greek mathematician Pythagoras surmised the world was round, and two centuries later Aristotle backed him up with his sky-gazing data. So that by 1492 most educated people knew the planet was not shaped like a pancake (though they were pretty sure the Earth was the center of the solar system and of the universe and also believed it to be hollow, neither of which has anyone managed to categorically disprove in the same way the earth’s flatness was made untenable). Columbus’ mission was to find a trade route to the “Indias” to help Isabel and company to fund a Fourth Crusade (of which there were at least eight before the Knights Templar finally kicked the habit).

#2. Not only was Columbus likely not the first European to cross the Atlantic Ocean, he didn’t discover anything close to what is currently thought of as “North America” or the “United States” of the same.
That distinction is generally given to the Norse Viking Leif Eriksson, believed to have landed in now-Newfoundland (apparently not so newly found! [nomenclature another example of Illuminist-Columbian revisionism?!]) around 1000 A.D., almost five hundred years before Columbus embarked. What is more, some historians claim that Ireland’s Saint Brendan and/or other Celts preceded Eriksson in crossing the Atlantic. (Apparently the Spanish believed that India might just lie to the south of Newfoundland.) While the United States commemorate Columbus—who nary tread North America’s main coastline—with parades and a federal holiday, Leif Eriksson Day on 9 October receives little attention if any.

#3. Three monarchs refused to back Columbus’ voyage.
For nearly a decade, Columbus harangued European money princes to fund his “con-quest” to discover a western sea (in lieu of the eastern land) route to Asia. In Portugal, England and France, the response was the same: No. The experts told Columbus his calculations were wrong and that the voyage would take much longer than he thought. Royal advisors in Spain raised similar concerns to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. Obviously the naysayers were right, but the Ferdibella was feeling confident–after all, they had been able to consolidate Spain…woot, woot! Anyway, duh, Columbus dramatically underestimated the earth’s circumference and the oceans’ span. The unanticipated bonus (more for Christopher than for the natives) was that he ran into the uncharted Americas.

#4. Niña and Pinta were (according to the History Channel though Wikipedia disclaims this) not the names of two of Columbus’ three ships.
In 15th-century Spain, ships were traditionally named after saints. Salty sailors, however, bestowed less-than-sacred nicknames upon their vessels. Mariners dubbed one of the three ships on Columbus’ 1492 voyage the Pinta, Spanish for “the painted/spotted/done-up one” (i.e. “the prostitute”). The Santa Clara, meanwhile, was nicknamed the Niña in honor of its owner, Juan Niño. (Niña means girl.) Although the Santa María is called by its official name (meaning Saint [or Holy] Mary), its nickname was La Gallega, after the province of Galicia where it was built.

#5. The Santa Maria wrecked on Columbus’ 1492 voyage; tragedy ensued.
On Christmas Eve of 1492, a cabin boy ran Admiral Columbus’s flagship into a coral reef on the northern coast of Hispaniola, near present-day Cap Haitien (French for Hatian Cape), Haiti. Its crew spent a very un-merry Christmas salvaging the Santa Maria’s cargo, but their woes had just begun. Columbus returned to Spain aboard the Niña, but he had to leave nearly forty crewmen behind to start the first European settlement in the Americas—”La Navidad” (meaning Christmas). When Columbus returned to the settlement in the fall of the following year, none of the crew were found alive. This tragic (and tragically forgotten) incident indicates, of course, that survivalism was not among Columbus’ crew’s points of preparation because they did not expect to visit uncharted/uncivilized lands.

#6. Columbus made four voyages to the New World.
Although best known for his historic 1492 expedition, Columbus returned to the Americas three more times in the following decade. His voyages took him to Caribbean islands, South America and Central America.

#7. Columbus returned to Spain in chains in 1500.
Columbus’ governance of the settlement Hispaniola could be described as brutal and tyrannical. Native islanders who didn’t collect enough gold could have their hands cut off (theft being presumed), and a Spanish colonist who rebelled could expect to be lynched. Colonists complained to their crown-heads about the cruel, incompetent mismanagement, and a royal commissioner dispatched to Hispaniola arrested Columbus in August 1500 and returned him to Spain in chains. Although Columbus was stripped of his governorship, King Ferdinand not only granted the explorer his liberty but subsidized a fourth voyage.

#8. A lunar eclipse may have saved Columbus.
Now fast forward four years and think Jack Sparrow. In February 1504, a desperate Columbus was stranded in Jamaica, abandoned by half his crew and denied food by the islanders. The heavens he relied on for navigation, however, would guide him safely once again with a new twist. Knowing from his almanac that a lunar eclipse was coming on 29 February 1504, Columbus warned the islanders that his god was upset with their refusal of food and that the moon would “rise inflamed with wrath” as an expression of divine displeasure. On the predicted night, the eclipse darkened the moon and turned it red, and the terrified islanders offered provisions and besought Columbus to ask his god for mercy.

#9. Even in death, Columbus continued to cross the Atlantic.
Following his 1506 voyage to a New Dimension, Columbus’ corpse was buried in Valladolid, Spain, then moved to Seville. At the request of his daughter-in-law, the bodies of Columbus and his son Diego were shipped across the Atlantic to Hispaniola and interred in a cathedral in Santo Domingo (namely, la Catedral de Santa María la Menor). When the French took the island in 1795, the Spanish excavated remains thought to be those of the exploiter–er, explorer–and moved them to Cuba before returning them to Seville following the Spanish-American War in 1898. However, the weird thing was, a box bearing human remains and the explorer’s name was discovered inside the Santo Domingo cathedral as late as 1877! Did the Spaniards exhume the wrong body? DNA testing in 2006 found evidence that at least some of the remains in Seville are those of Columbus. The Dominican Republic has refused to let the other remains be tested. It’s just possible that pieces of Columbus are both in New Country and Old Country.

#10. Columbus’ heirs and the Spanish monarchy were in litigation until 1790.
Following Columbus’ entrance into everlasting slumber, his inheritors waged legal war with the Spanish crown, claiming that the royals short-changed them on money and profits due the explorer. Most of the Columbian lawsuits were settled by 1536, yet legal proceedings dragged on, nearly until the 300th anniversary (ca. 1790) of Columbus’ famed and spooky expidition.

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