Christopher Columbus- The Unifier of Mankind

Christopher Columbus was the greatest explorer and discoverer in human history. Her dis-covered and entire hemisphere of the planet unknown to people's East and West (except for some of the Berengia and trans-arctic region of the time). An Italian captain working for hire by the Spanish monarchy, Columbus has been blamed by contemporary leftists for all that followed his discovery including colonization, slavery and even genocide. What people fail to remember is that Columbus was Italian, not Spanish, and that the Italians did not colonize America; they explored it.

It was not the Italian conquistadors that conquered Mexico City or the Inca empire of Peru. Neither did Italians colonize the West Indies and South America. Instead, Italians were busy creating a renaissance, writing poetry, making scientific discoveries or being burned for scientific heresy. Columbus on his third voyage to America was sent back in chains at the order of Spanish authorities. Undoubtedly as a tough captain of the era able to withstand mutiny at sea, he was not averse to taking a profit and enriching himself. One may compare him to the rugged captains of privateers that survived in the era of sea war between England and France and coastal captains such as Martin Frobisher who was so menacing that he could intimidate his scurvy, dangerous sea dogs into compliance aboard ship. Frobisher walked back to England from a diseased African mining colony before eventually reaching the eponymous Frobisher bay in Canada after working for Francis Drake (it was Frobisher who led the attack on the Spanish positions at St. Augustine Florida).

The Spanish Royal authorities that colonized the Americas were not Christopher Columbus. Royalty of the 15^th and 16^th centuries were more like the North Korean Dictator Kim Jong Un with his family as aristocrats. They had nearly absolute power and were at war with other royals of rival nations 1quite regularly. It is unreasonable to expect human history to be a tale of political leadership hell in Eurasia and transform to an Oprah Winfred- led marshmallow configuration upon reaching the western hemisphere- they were just 15^th and 16^th century human beings of a more technologically advanced East meeting outlier fugitives separated by centuries to thousands of years from the rest of humanity in the west.

Pre-Columbian America was sparsely peopled by a variety of DNA tribal groups including some from the Middle Eastern Druze. They were not kinder, gentler bucolic buffalo. They had human sacrifice and slavery comparable to African society of the era perhaps, witho9ut having invented the wheel except for use as a toy. Without the population demographics and inter cultural technology information transfers of the old world they would be slower in technological advance. Though they had human sacrifice and slavery in the Aztec Empire, and slavery in Tlingit land of Alaska that continued until the Alaska purchase and a little beyond, pre-Columbian peoples were largely illiterate as were most people of the world besides elites. Intdiginous people were not averse to practicing tribal genocide.

One might have wished kinder, gentler peoples to have connected the two hemispheres together through the great discovery, unfortunately they did not exist on either shore.

!5^th and 16^th century Europe were full of troubles and conflicts. The masses were yet peasants and held in thrall by elites. Only bloody revolutions and centuries of international conflict directed by ruling elites would sort matters out and let the masses have greater wars in time spanning the globe.

Holland had mass starvation in the 16^th century. He Spanish had finished a half century of war called the reconquista against Muslim invaders in 1492. Muslim turks called the Osmanlis and later Ottoman Empire were attacking Europe and took Constantinople from the Greeks and Eastern Roman Empire's remnant state called Byzantium. Mongols had invaded Europe beginning with Russia in the 14^th century. They continued nearly to the Baltic Sea until the death of Genghis Khan. Europe was recovering from a biological war started by Turkish Muslims when they hurled plague infested rats into Constantinople. Two thirds of the population of Europe had perished by the 13^th and 14^th centuries.

In North America one of the greatest conquests 8in human history had just occurred when Dorsett Eskimos crossed the Bering Strait in an 200 years with a dog-sled Blitzkrieg that would embarrass Hitler's puny conquest of Poland and France, swept away all indigenous resistance before it and arrived in Greenland in a magnificent conquest of the Arctic shoreline of the western hemisphere.

Africa had its cannibals and human sacrifice of course, yet it had great conquerors such as were the Zulu as well as slavery long before Arabs arrived to create the East African institution of slavery and slave exports.

Europe had interminable battles with its own national royal houses, and cannibalism had disappeared last as a tribal act when the Sammi of Finland reportedly quit eating human flesh. The annals of human history on both sides of the pond are not full of peaceful gentle aristocratic and benevolent rulers. It is a history of a world of desperate, unkind and cruel killers organizing themselves under the coercion of violence and greed for commerce, trade and comfort into larger groups of power. I like to think that Columbus and his great discovery represents one of the best and least violent human traditions; discovery, and that the usual tribal, racial, elitist and economic quests for power that bring conflict commonly are less so.