Marrow Man
Drunk with Powder
I have no doubt of that. It was well before 1517. 'Twas the only game in town.
Christopher Columbus......what say you?
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I have no doubt of that. It was well before 1517. 'Twas the only game in town.
PhilA
Puritan Board Sophomore
Agreed. 31st October 1517…..that’s a date worth commemorating.
PS I enjoy your blog. Keep up the good work.
Marrow Man
Drunk with Powder
Many thanks!
JBaldwin
Puritan Board Post-Graduate
True.
We tend to have a very narrow view of history based on what we've read in history books which were written by men and women who came along a lot later, and those stories don't a always match.
For example, I laugh when I compare the story of what happened to a certain family ancestor whose name has made it to the Canadian history books vs. what is in the family records vs. what the family says vs. what the public record says. Each version is slightly different, and in some cases, is completely different.
All we can do as observers centuries later is look at the record and make a judgment.
TimV:
This book and others document that the vast majority of population decrease among native americans was due to diseases from exposure to Europeans.
Amazon.com: Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War (9780143111979): Nathaniel Philbrick: Books
In King Philip's War and other early wars, the flintlocks were terribly ineffective and the indians won several large battles and devastated many early english settlements. Had it not been for alliances with other indians, they might have fared much worse. the New England Indians taught the pilgrims how to farm. Later on, the pilgrims adopted indian war tactics due to their superiority over european-style linear tactics in rustic settings.
Disease, coupled with indian inter-tribal fighting and shifting alliances with the British, sealed the fate of the native americans.
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Up until this last century, Columbus is regarded as a visionary hero. The past 50 years or so, he has become a villain. I don't think either caricature is accurate.
In my grade school I was actually taught that Columbus taught that the earth was round whereas most europenas thought the earth was flat; what a crock of baloney. The medieval scholars knew from the ancient greeks that the earth was round. The matter at dispute was just how BIG the world was. And columbus thought it was only about 3,000 miles to Asia whereas the true route would have been about 11,000 miles and have killed his crew had he not bumped into that unknown continent in between.
So, Columbus was a mistaken visionary who still, many years later, never seemed to admit that it was not asia or india that he had landed on.
PhilA
Puritan Board Sophomore
Pergamum
I would agree with the observations you make. I would also add that slavery had an impact on the colonisation of the Americas. Colombo started the exportation of natives to Spain. As the colonies developed(in the context of Colombo this relates to the West Indies and Central America) natives were used as a resource to extract wealth. Once the native resource was exhausted natives were imported leading to the widespread Atlantic slave trade.
On the issue of “the flat earth” I would add that Colombo touted his intended expedition to the English, French and Portuguese courts. Sponsorship of his expedition failed because they disagreed with his estimation of the intended voyage. They correctly estimated the length of the trip and concluded that it could not be completed with the technology available. The intended trip was to directly sail from Europe to Japan/China non-stop. Colombo to his dying day believed that he had in fact reached the coast of Asia.
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