Christopher Columbus died a magnificent failure! Four times he tried to find a route to Asia. When he reached another continent, he insisted that Cuba was a part of China.
Colombus set sail in August 1492. His sailors rebelled. ‘Tierra, Tierra’ (land, land) shouts on October 12, ended the rebellion. An island ‘Guanahani’, renamed as San Salvador by Columbus was the first land fall. He thought the native people were good, simple and easy to conquer. It was not the case. They resisted.
Columbus became the governor of Hispaniola (Haiti). Greed for gold, enslavement and slaughter of natives Columbus resulted in Columbus’s arrest for mismanagement in Dec 1500. He was sent back home in chains.
Columbus’s discovery of new world was accidental, but his adventurous spirit. Created a new global civilization. Ideas, goods, deadly microbes, colonizers and African slaves followed Columbus to America. The ‘new world’ of Columbus gave avocados, cod, corn, peanuts, pineapples, potatoes and tobacco. Europe sent apples, Christianity, guns, horses, hogs, rice, wheat, oranges and smallpox to the new world.
Columbus was born in 1451, died on 20th May 1506 due to heart failure believing that he has discovered sea route to China & Japan.
His last words before dying: “Into your hands, O Lord, I commend by spirit”.
About the Author
Dr. K. Raja Gopal Reddy is a seasoned internationally qualified Insurance professional. What you are reading here, may not answer all the questions we have, but has the absolute power of asking unsettling questions which increase the interest in the strange world, and show the contradictory wonders lying just below the surface of the commonest things of life. Look at this disturbing but beautiful thought of Friedrich Nietzsche “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him”. Dr. Reddy can be reached at: raja66gopal@gmail.com
