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 15th and 16th
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 15th and 16th 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.
!5th
and 16th 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 16th 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 14th
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 13th and 14th 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.
