Captain John P. De Silva

Pirate Captain Kidd's 'treasure' found in Madagascar


The bar is said to be from the wreckage of Capt Kidd's ship, the Adventure Galley

Underwater explorers in Madagascar say they have discovered treasure belonging to the notorious 17th-Century Scottish pirate William Kidd.

A 50kg (7st 9lb) silver bar was brought to shore on Thursday on the island of Sainte Marie, from what is thought to be the wreck of the Adventure Galley.

The bar was presented to Madagascar's president at a special ceremony.

US explorer Barry Clifford says he believes there are many more such bars still in the wreck.

Capt Kidd was first appointed by the British authorities to tackle piracy but later became a ruthless criminal and was executed in 1701.
'Scepticism'

"Captain's Kidd's treasure is the stuff of legends. People have been looking for it for 300 years. To literally have it hit me on the head - I thought what the heck just happened to me. I really didn't expect this," Mr Clifford said.

"There's more down there. I know the whole bottom of the cavity where I found the silver bar is filled with metal. It's too murky down there to see what metal, but my metal detector tells me there is metal on all sides."

The BBC's Martin Vogl tweets that there is much excitement in Madagascar about the discovery and Mr Clifford's team has no doubt that the discovery is genuine.

Barry Clifford at ceremony on Sainte Marie island

Barry Clifford led a team which discovered the suspected treasure

The team believes the bar, marked with what appears to be a letter S and a letter T, has its origins in 17th-Century Bolivia.

It believes the ship it has found was built in England, however there is bound to be scepticism and calls for more proof that the bar was linked to Capt Kidd, our reporter says.

One option would be to take samples of wood from the ship to analyse, he says.

The location of the ship, thought to have sunk in 1698, has been known about for many years but the silver bar was only discovered earlier this week.

Mr Clifford said that while diving in the wreck, his metal detector picked up signals but it was too muddy for him to see anything.

UK ambassador to Madagascar Timothy Smart, who attended the ceremony, said he hoped that Mr Clifford's latest discovery would raise Madagascar's profile as a tourist destination.

The plan is to exhibit the bars in a museum.

Reposted From BBC.com

Francisco de Orellana and the Amazon River

Route of first voyage (1541-1542)

If anything good can be said to have come of the El Dorado myth, it is that it caused the interior of South America to be explored and mapped. The best example is Francisco de Orellana, who was part of a 1542 expedition led by Gonzalo Pizarro. The expedition became divided, and while Pizarro went back to Quito, Orellana eventually discovered the Amazon River and followed it to the Atlantic Ocean.

Exploration of the Amazon River


Shipwrights from Francisco de Orellana's expedition building a small brigantine, the San Pedro

Gonzalo Pizarro set off in 1541 to explore east of Quito into the South American interior in search of El Dorado, the "city of gold" and La Canela, the "valley of cinnamon". He was accompanied by his second-in-command Francisco de Orellana. After 170 km, the Coca River joined the Napo River (at a point now known as Puerto Francisco de Orellana); the party stopped for a few weeks to build a boat just upriver from this confluence. They continued downriver through an uninhabited area, where they could not find food. Orellana offered and was ordered to follow the Napo River, then known as Río de la Canela ("Cinnamon River") and return with food for the party. Based on intelligence received from a captive native chief named Delicola, they expected to find food within a few days downriver by ascending another river to the north.

The Amazon originates from the Apacheta cliff in Arequipa at the Nevado Mismi, marked only by a wooden cross.

Orellana took about 57 men, the boat, and some canoes and left Pizarro's party on December 26, 1541. However, Orellana apparently missed the confluence (probably with the Aguarico) where he was to look for food. By the time he and his men reached another village many of them were sick from hunger and eating "noxious plants", and near death. Seven men died at that village. His men threatened to mutiny if he followed his orders and the expedition turned back to join Pizarro's larger party. He accepted to change the purpose of the expedition to discover new lands in the name of the King of Spain, and the men built a larger boat in which to navigate downstream. After a journey of 600 km down the Napo River they reached a further major confluence, at a point near modern Iquitos, and then followed the upper Amazon, now known as the Solimões, for a further 1,200 km to its confluence with the Rio Negro (near modern Manaus), which they reached on 3 June 1542.

On the Nhamunda River, a tributary of the Amazon downstream from Manaus, Orellana's party had a fierce battle with warriors who, they reported, were led by fierce female warriors who beat the men to death with clubs if they tried to retreat. Orellana's men began referring to the women as Amazons, a reference to the women of Greek Mythology. The river was initially known as the Marañón (the name by which the Peruvian part of the river is still known today) or Rio de Orellana. It later became known as the Rio Amazonas, the name by which it is still known in both Spanish and Portuguese.

The icamiabas Indians dominated the area close to the Amazon river. When Orellana went down the river in search of gold, descending from the Andes (in 1541), the river was still called Rio Grande, Mar Dulce or Rio de Canela (Cinnamon), because cinnamon trees were once thought to be located there. The story of the fierce ambush launched by the icamiabas that nearly destroyed the Spanish expedition was narrated to the king, Charles I, who, inspired by the Greek legend of the Amazons, named the river the Amazon.

In one of the most improbably successful voyages in known history, Orellana managed to sail the length of the Amazon, arriving at the river's mouth on 24 August 1542. He and his party sailed along the Atlantic coast until reaching Cubagua Island, near the coast of Venezuela.

The BBC documentary Unnatural Histories presents evidence that Orellana, rather than exaggerating his claims as previously thought, was correct in his observations that an advanced civilization was flourishing along the Amazon in the 1540s. It is believed that the civilization was later devastated by the spread of diseases from Europe, such as smallpox. The evidence to support this claim comes from the discovery of numerous geoglyphs dating from between 0 and 1250 AD and terra preta. Some 8 million people may have lived in the Amazon region in 1500, divided between dense coastal settlements, such as that at Marajó, and inland dwellers. By 1900 the population had fallen to 1 million and by the early 1980s it was less than 200,000


Geoglyphs on deforested land in the Amazon rainforest.

Ancient Explorations: The Search for El Dorado

Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro conquering the Aztec and Inca empires

Gonzalo Pizarro

After the conquest of the Incas, Francisco Pizarro named his brother Gonzalo as governor of the entire province of Quito. Gonzalo's assignment was to use Quito as a base to look for El Dorado. Adventurers and conquistadors from all over Europe flocked to the New World, hoping to be part of the next expedition that would find, conquer and plunder a rich American empire. These men followed rumors of gold all across the unexplored interior of South America, many of them dying in the process.

1. There was a grain of truth in the El Dorado myth

The Muisca people of Cundinamarca (present-day Colombia) had a tradition: kings would coat themselves in a sticky sap before covering themselves in gold powder. The king would then take a canoe to the center of Lake Guatavitá and, before the eyes of thousands of his subjects watching from shore, would leap into the lake, emerging clean. Then, a great festival would begin. This tradition had been neglected by the Muisca by the time of their discovery by the Spanish in 1537, but not before word of it had reached the greedy ears of the European intruders in cities all over the continent. "El Dorado," in fact, is Spanish for "the gilded one:" the term at first referred to an individual, the king who covered himself in gold. According to some sources, the man who coined this phrase was conquistador Sebastián de Benalcázar.

The scene depicted in this ancient artwork, on display at the Gold Museum in Bogota, Colombia, shows the origin of the El Dorado myth. Legend tells of a Muisca king who would cover himself in gold dust during festivals, then dive from a raft into Lake Guatavita.

Portraits of rulers of Muisca

2. El Dorado was discovered in 1537

The earliest reference to the name El Dorado was in 1535 or 1536, before Spanish contact with the Muisca people. The Muisca people were discovered in 1537 by Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada: they were swiftly conquered and their cities looted. The Spanish knew the El Dorado legend and dredged Lake Guatavitá: they found some gold, but not very much, and the greedy conquistadors refused to believe that such a disappointing haul could be the "real" El Dorado. They therefore kept searching for it in vain for decades.

3. It Didn’t Exist After 1537

For the next two centuries, thousands of men would scour South America in search of El Dorado, or any other wealthy native empire like the Inca. Somewhere along the line, El Dorado stopped being an individual and began being a fabulous city of gold. Today we know that there were no more great civilizations to be found: the Inca were, by far, the most advanced and wealthy civilization anywhere in South America. The seekers of El Dorado found some gold here and there, but their quest to find the lost city of gold was doomed from the start.

4. Several Germans Searched for El Dorado

Spain claimed most of South America and most of the seekers of El Dorado were Spanish, but there were some exceptions. Spain ceded part of Venezuela to the German Welser banking family in 1528, and some Germans who came to rule this land spent time searching for El Dorado. Notable among them were Ambrosius Ehinger, Georg Hohemut, Nicolaus Federmann and Phillipp von Hutten.

The English adventurer Sir Walter Raleigh leads a raid on the island of Trinidad

5. Sir Walter Raleigh Looked for El Dorado

English courtier Sir Walter Raleigh made two trips to Guiana to search for El Dorado. During his second trip in 1617, he sent his son, Watt Raleigh, with an expedition up the Orinoco River. But Walter Raleigh, then an old man, stayed behind at a base camp on the island of Trinidad. The expedition was a disaster, and Watt Raleigh was killed in a battle with Spaniards. Eric Klingelhofer, an archaeologist at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, says Walter Raleigh was furious at the survivor who informed him of Watt's death and accused the survivor of letting his son be killed. "The man goes into his cabin on the ship and kills himself," says Klingelhofer, who is trying to find the site of Raleigh's base camp on Trinidad.

Raleigh returned to England, where King James ordered him beheaded for, among other things, disobeying orders to avoid conflict with the Spanish.

6. It kept Moving Around

The place where El Dorado was “supposed” to be kept changing, as one expedition after another failed to find it. At first, it was supposed to be in the north, somewhere in the Andean highlands. Then, once that area had been explored, it was believed to be in the foothills of the Andes to the east. Several expeditions failed to find it there. When searches of the Orinoco basin and Venezuelan plains failed to turn it up, the explorers thought it had to be in the mountains of Guyana. It even appeared in Guyana on maps printed in Europe.

7. Lope de Aguirre was the Madman of El Dorado

Lope de Aguirre was unstable: everyone agreed on that. The man had once tracked down a judge that had ordered him whipped for abusing native workers: it took Aguirre three years to find him and kill him. Inexplicably, Pedro de Ursua selected Aguirre to accompany his 1559 expedition to find El Dorado. Once they were deep in the jungle, Aguirre took over the expedition, ordered the murder of dozens of his companions (including Pedro de Ursúa), declared himself and his men independent from Spain and began attacking Spanish settlements. "The Madman of El Dorado" was eventually killed by the Spanish.

8. It led to Much Abuse of the Native Population

Not much good came of the El Dorado myth. The expeditions were full of desperate, ruthless men who only wanted gold: they often attacked native populations, stealing their food, using the men as porters and torturing elders to get them to reveal where their gold was (whether they had any or not). The natives soon learned that the best way to get rid of these monsters was to tell them what they wanted to hear: El Dorado, they said, was just a little bit further away, just keep going that way and you’re sure to find it. The natives in the interior of South America soon hated the Spanish with a passion, enough so that when Sir Walter Raleigh explored the region, all he had to do was announce that he was an enemy of the Spanish and he quickly found the natives willing to help him however they could.

9. It led to Much Exploration

If anything good can be said to have come of the El Dorado myth, it is that it caused the interior of South America to be explored and mapped. The German explorers scoured the area of present-day Venezuela and even the psychotic Aguirre blazed a trail across the continent. The best example is Francisco de Orellana, who was part of a 1542 expedition led by Gonzalo Pizarro. The expedition became divided, and while Pizarro went back to Quito, Orellana eventually discovered the Amazon River and followed it to the Atlantic Ocean.

10. It Lives On

Although no one is still looking for the fabled lost city, El Dorado has left its mark on popular culture. Many songs, books, movies and poems (including one by Edgar Allen Poe) have been produced about the lost city, and someone said to be "looking for El Dorado" is on a hopeless quest.

Reposted from Latin American History

Journal of Christopher Columbus: Cuba

Columbus Cuba.—The following is the narrative of the explorer's visit to Cuba during his first voyage (1492) from his Journal. The Journal was forwarded to the King and Queen, but is now lost. In his Life of Columbus, Ferdinand Columbus drew largely from the Journal, and in the subjoined abstract we have parts of the Journal word for word, with many quotations by another chronicler concerning what Columbus did and said:

christopher columbus in cuba

Sunday, Oct. 28—" I went thence in search of the island of Cuba on a south-southwest coast, making for the nearest point of it, and entered a very beautiful river without danger of sunken rocks or other impediments. All the coast was clear of dangers up to the shore. The mouth of the river was 12 brazos across, and it is wide enough for a vessel to beat in. I anchored about a lombard-shot inside." The Admiral says that " he never beheld such a beautiful place, with trees bordering the river, handsome, green, and different from ours, having fruits and flowers each one according to its nature. There are many birds, which sing very sweetly. There are a great number of palm-trees of a different kind from those in Guinea and from ours, of a middling height, the trunks without that covering, and the leaves very large, with which they thatch their houses. The country is very level." The Admiral jumped into his boat and went on shore. He came to two houses, which he believed to belong to fishermen who had fled from fear. In one of them he found a kind of dog that never barks, and in both there were nets of palm-fibre and cordage, as well as horn fish-hooks, bone harpoons, and other apparatus " for fishing, and several hearths. He believed that many people lived together in one house. He gave orders that nothing in the houses should be touched, and so it was done." The herbage was as thick as in Andalusia during April and May. He found much purslane and wild amaranth. He returned to the boat and went up the river for some distance, and he says it was great pleasure to see the bright verdure, and the birds, which he could not leave to go back. He says that this island is the most beautiful that eyes have seen, full of good harbors and deep rivers, and the sea appeared as if it never rose; for the herbage on the beach nearly reached the waves, which does not happen where the sea is rough. He says that the island is full of very beautiful mountains, although they are not very extensive as regards length, but high; and all the country is high like Sicily. It is abundantly supplied with water, as they gathered from the Indians they had taken with them from the island of Guanahani. These said by signs that there are ten great rivers, and that they cannot go round the island in twenty days. When they came near land with the ships, two canoes came out; and, when they saw the sailors get into a boat and row about to find the depth of the river where they could anchor, the canoes fled. The Indians say that in this island there are gold-mines and pearls, and the Admiral saw a likely place for them and mussel-shells, which are signs of them. He understood that large ships of the Gran Can came here, and that from here to the mainland was a voyage of ten days. The Admiral called this river and harbor San Salvador.

Reposted From Son of the South

74 Interesting Facts About Christopher Columbus

12 October 1492 – Christopher Columbus discovers The Americas for Spain, painting by John Vanderlyn.

Christopher Columbus (c. 1450-51–May 20, 1506) was born in the Republic of Genoa, Italy, although the exact location of his birth is not known with certainty. His father was a wool weaver who also owned a cheese stand.^b
Columbus’ mother was Susanna Fontanarossa, the daughter of a wool merchant. He had three brothers: Bartolomeo, Giovanni Pellegrino, and Giacomo. He also had a sister, Bianchinetta. Columbus was the eldest.^b
Christopher Columbus’ family was a member of a very small and lucky group during the Middle Ages: the middle class. Most people were extremely poor (the peasants). A few were very rich (the nobility).^b
When Columbus was 14, he left school and his father’s wool workshop to apprentice himself to a merchant on a trading ship.^a
When he was only 19, in 1470, Columbus took his first long voyage on one of his employer’s ships to the island of Chios in the Aegean Sea. It was probably on this trip and a second trip to Chios in 1475 that he learned how to navigate and steer a ship on open water on a long voyage.^a

Converting native peoples to Catholicism was a method of control

Columbus spoke frequently about his desire to spread Christianity to heathen cultures, and it was a popular cause during the time. However, converting people also meant European governments could control them.^a
As a young man, Columbus was tall, well above the 5′ 7″ that was average for men in the Middle Ages. He had pale skin that burned easily in the sun. He had a hooked nose, pale blue eyes, and red-blond hair that turned completely white by the time he was in his 30s.^f

Columbus operated a little mapmaking and bookselling shop with his brother Bartolomeo while he lived in Portugal.^{b

"Columbus map", drawn ca. 1490 in the Lisbon workshop of Bartolomeo and Christopher Columbus}

During Columbus’ time, most people believed that the world was formed mainly of one giant landmass consisting of Europe, Asia, and Africa—mainly because these are the only continents mentioned in the Bible. These were surrounded by one enormous body of water they called the Ocean Sea.^a
Some scholars speculate that Columbus may have received secret information from a close friend about lands far west across the ocean. This sailor is sometimes called the “Unknown Pilot.” Present historians haven’t found any evidence of him except for what is written by some early Columbus biographers.^a
Columbus had two sons by two different women. Diego Columbus (1480–1526) and Fernando (1488–1539).^b
Columbus disrupted the entire economy of three continents. Post-Columbian diseases killed 3–5 million people during the subsequent 50 years after his arrival in the New World. Additionally, African slaves became a dominant commodity.^b
Columbus first landed near the coast of what is today known as Watling Island in the Bahamas. Although he thought he was near China, Japan, and India, he was actually more than 8,000 miles away.^b
Columbus first landed in the Bahamas. All the Caribbean islands—including the Bahamas, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba—were settled by a group of peaceful people called the Tainos.^b

Columbus believed that he had reached the Indies

When Columbus landed in the New World, he believed that he had reached the Indies; thus, he thought, the people he met were Indians. Even though more than 500 years have passed since that voyage, the native people of the Americas are still often referred to as “Indians.”^a
Before Columbus was a famous admiral and governor of the New World, he was a pirate, or Privateer, who helped attack Moorish merchant trips.^b
Columbus was very religious and believed God had called him to make his voyages. Many of the names Columbus gave to the lands he discovered were religious names.^b
Later in his life, for reasons unknown, Columbus wore a plain Franciscan habit everywhere he went.^b
Near the end of his life, Columbus wrote a book called Book of Privileges that listed all the promises the Spanish crown had made to him over the years and the ways the crown had not honored these promises.^b
Later in his life, Columbus began to write a bizarre book titled Book of Prophecies. In this book, he insisted that all his voyages had been divine missions directed by God. He believed the world was coming to an end and that he, Columbus, was bringing it about.^b
During his fourth voyage, Columbus was in intense pain. His eyes bled regularly, which left him blind for long periods of time. He could barely sit or stand due to the pain in his joints. Many historians believe he was suffering from Reiter’s Syndrome, which causes diarrhea and inflammation in the joints, eyes, and bladder.^b
Before he died, Columbus began requesting a new sort of voyage: a Christian crusade to Jerusalem to rescue it from the Muslims.^b
On May 20, 1506, at the age of 55, Columbus died at the court in Valladolid, Spain. His death went mostly unnoticed. In fact, the official court registry did not even record his passing until 10 days later. However, in the years and decades after his death, much of his fame and glory were returned to him.^b
Columbus is often referred to as the “Father of the New World.”^a

Columbus was not the first European to reach the New World

Columbus was not the first European to sail across the Atlantic Ocean. Some 500 years earlier, Norse Viking Leif Eriksson is believed to have landed in present-day Newfoundland, around A.D. 1000. Some historians believe that Ireland’s Saint Bernard or other Celtic people crossed the Atlantic even before Eriksson.^d
When Columbus saw the Orinoco River empty into the Atlantic off of northern South America during his third voyage, he thought he had found the Garden of Eden.^a
Columbus is considered one of the best “dead reckoning” sailors who ever walked the planet.^a
Skeletal evidence suggests Columbus and his crew brought back syphilis to the Old World. As one of the first global diseases, it devastated Europe.^b
Columbus was inspired by a letter by Italian scholar Paolo Toscanelli to find Asia through a western sea. He believed sailing west would be a faster way of getting to India.^b
Columbus was a talented admiral, but he was also a slave trader. While he soon discovered that the new lands did not hold silver, pearls, and other treasures, they did hold people, whom Columbus viewed as valuable resources. He is believed to have instigated the slave trade.^b
When Columbus returned to Spain with natives, Queen Isabella believed they were her subjects and, therefore, could not be enslaved unless they refused to be converted. However, during the Colonial era, the Spaniards enslaved them all the time.^b
Until the day he died, Columbus did not believe he found a new world. He died believing he had found a new passage to India. To justify his position, he proposed that the Earth was actually shaped like a pear, which made him the laughingstock of Europe.^b
Many countries in Europe and in the New World celebrate Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the Americas on October 12, 1492. In the United States, October 12 is called Columbus Day; in Latin America, it is Dia de la Raza (Day of the Race), in the Bahamas, it is Discovery Day; in Argentina, it is Dia del Respeto a la Diversidad Cultural (Day of Respect for Cultural Diversity); and in Belize and Uruguay, it is Dia de las Americas (Day of the Americas).^a
Though Columbus Day had been celebrated unofficially since Colonial days, it became an official holiday first in Colorado in 1906 and a federal holiday in 1937. In 1970, the holiday was moved to the second Monday of October.^b
Columbus has been viewed as an intrepid explorer, a monster, and a slave trader who unleashed horrors and conquest upon unsuspecting natives. However, scholars note he had both admirable qualities and negative ones: he was brave but a very flawed human being.^a
In Berkeley, California, Columbus Day was replaced with Indigenous People’s Day in 1992.^b
Activists have sought to abolish Columbus Day since at least the 19th century because of its association with immigrants and with the Knights of Columbus. Additionally, some were afraid it was being used to expand Catholic influence.^a
Christopher Columbus did not discover America. Humans had lived in the Americas for at least 20,000 years. By the time Columbus arrived, the Americas were already populated by several empires and hundreds of small nations.^a

Horses were one of the first European exports to the Americas

Christopher Columbus introduced horses into the New World. They later spread to the mainland and became essential to the Plains Indians.^a
After the destruction of the La Navidad garrison, Columbus created a new colony named Isabella (after the queen) 75 miles away. Over the next three years, it would be the center of the most horrific destruction and bloodshed the land had ever seen.^f
Columbus and his men destroyed the island’s natural, delicate ecosystem. His ships brought sugar cane, wheat, olives, oranges, lemons, pomegranates, dates, cucumbers, lettuce, melons, and grapes. These new species grew and spread, overwhelming the native plants that had lived on the continent for hundreds of thousands of years.^a
The Europeans and the native Tainos traded two things that would shape cultures for the remainder of history: tobacco and horses. Sailors brought back tobacco to Europe, and the first European nicotine addicts were soon created.^f
Columbus was intensely interested in gold, so he imposed a gold tribute system. Every Tainos adult would supply a certain quota of gold dust on a regular schedule. If they did, they were given a token to wear around their necks. If they did not, they had a hand chopped off.^a
Because Columbus destroyed the native population of Haiti (the Taino Indians), he began shipping African slaves to the island. This move has had consequences reaching into modern day.^b
The Taino population was completely extinct within 50 years of the Europeans’ first landfall. This was due to murder and desperate suicides, as well as a declining birth rate. However, disease was the most devastating factor in their demise. Columbus and the Spaniards unleashed a deadly cargo of dysentery, tuberculosis, and influenza. Settlers wrote home about the unbearable stench of rotting bodies that filled the air.^b
During his third voyage, Columbus became the first European to see the coast of South America.^a
Columbus died believing that he had found was Asia. However, the closest Columbus ever came to Asia was when he went on a voyage to the island of Khios in modern day Greece when he was a teenager.^b

Columbus sparked the exploration and colonization of the Americas

Christopher Columbus made four trips across the Atlantic Ocean from Spain, in the years 1492, 1493, 1498, and 1502. His goal: to find a direct water route west from Europe to Asia. He never found the route. He did find America—specifically, the Caribbean Islands, South America, and Central America.^{e

Voyages of Christopher Columbus}

In 1500, a royal commissioner was dispatched to Hispaniola to arrest Christopher Columbus and his brothers. They were brought back to Spain in chains under accusations of mismanagement of the colony. Although Columbus was stripped of his governorship, King Ferdinand granted him his freedom and subsidized a fourth trip.^e
In 1504, Columbus was stuck in Jamaica with angry islanders who would not give him food. Knowing that a lunar eclipse was going to happen, Columbus told the islanders that his gods were angry for refusing him food. After the eclipse, the scared islanders gave Columbus plenty of food and begged for mercy.^e
Christopher Columbus’ remains have been transported between the Old and New Worlds so many times that many historians believe that his remains are scattered in both worlds.^e
Columbus’ heirs were engaged in a legal battle with the Spanish monarchy until 1790 (nearly 300 years after his death). They argued that the monarchy did not give them the money or profits due the explorer.^e
Christopher Columbus lived during the Age of Discovery, a time between the 15th and 16th centuries when several European nations went exploring to search for wealth and lands.^c
Columbus’ first voyage into the Atlantic Ocean in 1476 almost cost him his life. French privateers off the coast of Portugal attacked the commercial fleet he was on. His shipped was burned and he had to swim to the Portuguese shore with the aid of a piece of driftwood.^c
While in Portugal, Columbus married Felipa Perestrelo and had one son, Diego, in about 1480. After his wife died (some scholars say he simply left her), Columbus moved to Spain. He had a second son out of wedlock, Fernando, in 1488 with a 20-year-old orphan named Beatriz Enriíquez de Arana.^a
After his wife died, Columbus never married his mistress Beatriz Enríquez de Arana, most likely because she was not of noble blood. For someone as status conscious as Columbus, a wife who could not appear in royal court was unthinkable.^a

Diego Columbus was the eldest son of Christopher Columbus

Both of Christopher Columbus’ sons served as pages to Prince Juan, the son of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella.^f
While the Santa Maria was the official flagship, Columbus frequently complained about its clumsiness and slowness. His favorite ship was the Nina, which was swifter and smaller.^b
The crew of the first voyage consisted of 24 men for the Nina, 26 for the Pinta, and 40 for the Santa Maria. Most were common sailors, and no women were allowed. There was also a secretary and an interpreter who spoke Arabic so that they could communicate with Ghengis Kahn and his people when they reached the East. There were also barrel makers, caulkers, and carpenters to fix the ships, as well as a surgeon.^b
During the voyage, every person—including Columbus—had lice. Fleas and rats were everywhere. There was no plumbing and the ships were filthy. The first voyage took about 43 days.^b
The sailor’s clothes on Columbus’ ships were extremely filthy. Everyone wore the same set of clothes they had when they left Europe until they returned to Europe. All crewmembers wore leggings, a woolen smock with a hood to protect salt spray, and a red cap called a gorro. And everyone went barefoot.^a
On his first voyage, Columbus kept two log books to avoid mutiny. In one log book, he recorded the actual distance the ships traveled each day. This book was only for him. In the second book, he recorded fake numbers, reducing the daily distance by many miles.^a
Christopher Columbus isn’t the explorer’s birth name; rather, it is Anglicization of his real name Cristoforo Colombo. His name has been changed in other countries as well: in Spanish it is Cristóbal Colón, and in Swedish it is Kristoffer Kolumbus.^b

Father Perez was a friend and supporter of Columbus

When King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella initially hesitated to fund Columbus’ exploration, a priest named Father Perez interceded and said that if Columbus succeeded, he would be able to convert heathen races to Christianity. In 1492, they finally give Columbus the funds and the ships.^f
Columbus was not interested in proving the Earth was round. By Columbus’ time, most people knew this fact thanks to the ancient Greeks—specifically the Greek mathematician Pythagoras, who lived in the 6th century B.C., and later Aristotle, who backed him up with astronomical observations.^a
Three countries refused to fund Columbus’ voyage: Portugal, England, and France. They refused because they thought he was a crackpot. They told him the Earth was much larger than he had calculated. They were actually right.^a
The first sailor in Columbus’ crew to see land (on October 12, 1492) was named Rodrigo de Triana. It was a small island in the present-day Bahamas named San Salvador.^a
Some historians believe that Muslims came to the Americas in the 700s, several hundred years before Christopher Columbus. In fact, Columbus used maps created by Muslim explorers.^d
Not all of Columbus’ voyages were successful; in fact, half of them ended in disaster. On his first voyage (1492), his fully outfitted flagship ran aground and sank. On his fourth trip, his ship rotted away and he spent a year with his men marooned on Jamaica.^f
A section from Columbus’ logbook notes that the natives “would make fine servants. With 50 men we could subjugate them and make them do whatever we want.” He later wrote, “Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.”^a
While Columbus was not the first to “discover” America or the first European to visit the New World (Viking explorers had sailed to Greenland and Newfoundland in the 11th century), he did kick off centuries of exploration and exploitation of the American continents.^b

Columbus believed the earth was far smaller than its true size

One reason Columbus estimated the distance around the Earth shorter than other navigators is that he had read Arab maps. As he read the maps, he used a shorter distance for a mile than the Arab map makers had used, causing him to estimate the circumference as being one-fourth less than the actual number of miles. Additionally, Marco Polo’s book, which Columbus relied on, estimated China as much larger than it really was, which also shrank the distance from Europe to Asia.^a
The Pinta is Spanish for “the painted one” or “prostitute.”^a
Columbus never set foot on the mainland of North America.^a

References
a Berne, Emma Carlson. 2008. Christopher Columbus: The Voyage That Changed the World. New York, NY: Sterling. b Chrisp, Peter. 2001. Christopher Columbus: Explorer of the New World. NY, New York: Dorling Kindersley. c “Christopher Columbus.” History.com. 2014. Accessed: January 27, 2014. d Fachner, Rebecca. “Did Muslims Visit America before Columbus?” History News Network. 2014. Accessed: January 27, 2014. e Klein, Christopher. “10 Things You May Not Know about Christopher Columbus.” October 5, 2012. Accessed: January 27, 2014. f Molzahn, Arlene Bourgeois. 2003. Christopher Columbus: Famous Explorer. Berkeley Heights: NJ: Enslow Publishers, Inc.

Reposted from Random History.com

Tomb of Christopher Columbus

The final resting place of the great navigator, or maybe his son

Just inside the Cathedral door of Seville’s massive cathedral stands a monument to Christopher Columbus. His tomb is held aloft by four allegorical figures representing the four kingdoms of Spain during Columbus’ life, Castille, Aragon, Navara and Leon.

The tomb was one of the last additions to the cathedral, installed in 1899. It was designed by the sculptor Arturo Melida, and was originally installed in Havana before being moved to Seville after Spain lost control of Cuba.

Columbus’ body began its final rest in Valladolid, Spain where he died in 1506, and was moved shortly thereafter to Seville, by orders of his son, Diego. In 1542, the remains were again moved, this time to Colonial Santo Domingo, in what is now the Dominican Republic, where they were installed in the newly completed Cathedral of Santa Maria. There they remained for a couple of centuries.

Then, in 1795 when Spain lost control of the Dominican Republic, they were moved again to Havana, Cuba. 100 years later, they made their final voyage back home to Seville, and placed in the cathedral where you can visit him today.

Unfortunately, after all that effort, in 1877 a very suspicious box was discovered back in Santo Domingo inscribed with the words "The illustrious and excellent man, Don Colon, Admiral of the Ocean Sea.”

That box is now contained in the massive “Faro a Colon” Lighthouse in Santo Domingo. Despite examinations and a recent DNA test of the remains in Seville, the question remains somewhat unsolved, or completely resolved, depending on whom you ask.

Seville Cathedral was designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1987.

Admiral Zheng He - China's Treasure Fleet

Over a period of almost three decades in the early fifteenth century, Ming China sent out a fleet the likes of which the world had never seen. These enormous treasure junks were commanded by the great admiral, Zheng He. Zheng He and his armada made seven epic voyages from the port at Nanjing to India, Arabia, and even East Africa.

Zheng He's most important role in his master's service, and the reason he is remembered today, was as the commander in chief of the new treasure fleet, and as the emperor's principal envoy to the peoples of the Indian Ocean basin. The Yongle Emperor appointed him to head the massive fleet of 317 junks, crewed by over 27,000 men, that set out from Nanjing in the fall of 1405. At the age of 35, Zheng He had achieved the highest rank ever for a eunuch in Chinese history.

The so-called "Zheng He map", probably produced in 1763.

During his career as a naval commander, Zheng He negotiated trade pacts, fought pirates, installed puppet kings, and brought back tribute for the Yongle Emperor in the form of jewels, medicines and exotic animals, among other things. He and his crew travelled and traded with not only with the city-states of what is now Indonesia and Malaysia, with Siam and India, but even with the Arabian ports of modern-day Yemen and Saudi Arabia, and as far as Somalia and Kenya.

Replica of Zheng He Treasure Ship

The first expedition of this mighty armada (1405-07) was composed of 317 ships, including perhaps as many as sixty huge Treasure Ships, and nearly 28,000 men. In addition to thousands of sailors, builders and repairmen for the trip, there were soldiers, diplomatic specialists, medical personnel, astronomers, and scholars of foreign ways, especially Islam. The fleet stopped in Champa (central Vietnam) and Siam (today's Thailand) and then on to island Java, to points along the Straits of Malacca, and then proceeded to its main destination of Cochin and the kingdom of Calicut on the southwestern coast of India. On his return, Zheng He put down a pirate uprising in Sumatra, bringing the pirate chief, an overseas Chinese, back to Nanjing for punishment.

The route of the voyages of Zheng He's fleet.

The seventh and final voyage (1431-33) was sent out by the Yongle emperor's successor, his grandson the Xuande emperor. This expedition had more than one hundred large ships and over 27,000 men, and it visited all the important ports in the South China Sea and Indian Ocean as well as Aden and Hormuz. One auxiliary voyage traveled up the Red Sea to Jidda, only a few hundred miles from the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. It was on the return trip in 1433 that Zheng He died and was buried at sea, although his official grave still stands in Nanjing, China. Nearly forgotten in China until recently, he was immortalized among Chinese communities abroad, particularly in Southeast Asia where to this day he is celebrated and revered as a god.

Zheng He’s naval adventures were not universally popular. The Confucian bureaucrats opposed them for a number of reasons. At a basic political level, Confucian bureaucrats despised eunuchs in the government, and Zheng He and the other supporters of overseas expansion were eunuchs. At a practical level, the Confucian bureaucrats considered the great fleets tremendously expensive, producing little benefit to China, and they opposed such egregious wastes of the nation’s resources. As traditionalists, they also opposed the expansionism policy on principle; it was militaristic, and they were anti-militarists. The expeditions promoted commercial expansion, while they desired economic self-sufficiency for China, and they increased China’s foreign contacts, while the Confucians advocated isolationism.

The Confucian bureaucrats won the struggle by winning over succeeding emperors to their point of view. China withdrew from the rest of the world, and a little over 60 years later, Vasco da Gama reached India by sea from Europe. In one of history’s ironic twists of fate, it was da Gama’s tattered little fleet of a few vessels and his small, dirty crew that truly changed the course of history, not Zheng He’s magnificent armada with its crew in the tens of thousands. Ming China did not become a nation of world travelers; the Western world came to them.

One has to wonder how different the world would be today if China’s emperors had continued on the path of expansionism, world exploration and expanding trade. Recently, there has been serious exploration of the idea that on one of Zheng He’s expeditions he visited the Americas years before Columbus. Stranger still is that Zheng He may have been using maps created by Kublai Khan’s fleet (Kublai Khan’s maps were recently discovered at the U.S. Library of Congress and may date back to the late 13th century).

Sources: Net Central, Wikipeida

Ancient Navigators: Zheng He the Christopher Columbus of China

Zheng He was an ethnically Muslim Chinese figure of the Ming Dynasty, which ruled China for 276 years between the 1368 and 1644. Zheng He might be called the “Christopher Columbus” of China because of his spectacular journeys to far-off lands, such as East Africa, the Middle East, and Sri Lanka. But he was also much more. He was a great military and naval commander, diplomat, adviser, emissary and political insider.
Rediscovering Zheng He

Zheng He was all but forgotten to Chinese history until his story was rediscovered and documented in a popular 1909 book by the Chinese scholar, Liang Qihao. Shortly after this incredible biography became widespread knowledge, a monument to the explorer placed in Sri Lanka was also rediscovered. It is known as the Trilingual Stele because written on the stone are homages to the Buddhist, Islamic, and Hindu religions in three different languages.

The Galle Trilingual Inscription is a stone tablet inscription in three languages, Chinese, Tamil and Persian, that was erected in 1409 in Galle, Sri Lanka to commemorate the second visit to the island by the Chinese admiral Zheng He. The text concerns offerings made by him and others to the Buddhist temple on Adams Peak, a Mountain in Sri Lanka, Allah (the Muslim term for God) and the god of the Tamil people, Tenavarai Nayanar. The admiral invoked the blessings of Hindu deities here for a peaceful world built on trade. The stele was discovered in Galle in 1911 and is now preserved in the Colombo National Museum.

Zheng He’s Background

Zheng He belonged to a Muslim subgroup of Chinese culture known as the Hui people. He was born in 1371, the second son in a large family. His birth name was Ma He, and his father was Ma Hajji. Even though he was born into a Muslim family, his own religious convictions are uncertain.

It is likely that Zheng was a broad-minded intellectual whose contact with many cultures and belief systems gave him and expanded worldly view and perspective. He was honored and admired by Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu alike.

Zheng He was born in a time of turmoil. When he was 10 years old, Ming forces had invaded Yunnan, the land of Zheng’s birth and family. Yunnan was controlled by the Mongols at the time. His father was killed fighting against the Ming army, although historical records differ on the actual circumstances and allegiance of Ma Hajji. He may have simply been killed in the complicated, chaotic violence of war between opposing forces.

Captured and Castrated

At this time, young Zheng He was captured by Muslim forces allied with the Ming. He was subsequently castrated so that he could be placed in servitude to the Prince of Yan, who would become the future emperor, the Yongle Emperor. He eventually became a soldier in the Ming wars against the Mongols.

He distinguished himself as a soldier and rose steadily through the ranks of the military hierarchy. This path led him to gain the personal confidence of the Prince of Yan. When the Prince rose to the supreme position of Emperor, Zheng also gained a position of considerable power.

In 1404, the Emperor appointed Zheng “Grand Director” of Palace Servants. It was a reward for his considerable achievements as a military leader in battles fought not only against enemies of the Ming Dynasty, but against the many internal feuding factions which characterized those complicated times.

Zheng He’s Sea Campaigns

Zheng He’s role in the Ming Dynasty evolved from that of soldier to a commander of ships. In 1424, he sailed to Palembang to confer an official seal upon and appoint an important official as a commissioner. Shortly after, the Yongle Emperor died and was succeeded by his son, the Hongxi Emperor. His new master wanted Zheng to serve as commander of the important city of Nanjing, and so his naval career was suspended for a time.

In 1430, the next ruler, the Xuande Emperor, ordered Zheng to lead an expedition to the “Western Ocean.” This was a time when China was moving aggressively to expand its trade and imperial power throughout the southeastern nations of Asia. The Ming Dynasty was also interested in expanding trade to distant locations in the West, which meant far-reaching efforts to establish links, trade, and power in Africa and the Middle East.

A relief wall telling the story of Chinese navy explorer Zheng He in front of the Sam Poo Kong Temple, in Semarang, Central Java, Indonesia

Legacy and Death of Zheng He

Similar to the way Europe began looking westward after the discovery of the New World by Columbus in 1492, the years of 1404 through the 1430s were a major age of seafaring expansion for China. The gigantic role Zheng He played in these expeditions cannot be overestimated.

His mind, skills, bravery, military instincts and superior diplomatic talents made Zheng He a natural to make significant gains for his country and to earn his place as one of the greatest explorers of all time. His accomplishments at sea included considerable military actions that expanded Chinese interests throughout Southeast Asia and among nations of the Indian Ocean.

Zheng He died at sea in 1433. His tomb remains today in the city of Nanjing. Numerous monuments to his memory can be found throughout the Asian world today.

Reposed from Totally History

Ancient Chinese Explorers

An Oriental armada

In the 15th century, Zheng He, seen here with one of his massive ships in a painting at a temple shrine in Malaysia, led seven enormous seafaring expeditions. Photo credit: © Chris Hellier/Corbis

Six centuries ago, a mighty armada of Chinese ships crossed the China Sea, then ventured west to Ceylon, Arabia, and East Africa. The fleet consisted of giant nine-masted junks, escorted by dozens of supply ships, water tankers, transports for cavalry horses, and patrol boats. The armada's crew totaled more than 27,000 sailors and soldiers. The largest of the junks were said to be over 400 feet long and 150 feet wide. (The Santa Maria, Columbus's largest ship, was a mere 90 by 30 feet and his crew numbered only 90.)

Loaded with Chinese silk, porcelain, and lacquerware, the junks visited ports around the Indian Ocean. Here, Arab and African merchants exchanged the spices, ivory, medicines, rare woods, and pearls so eagerly sought by the Chinese imperial court.

Seven times, from 1405 to 1433, the treasure fleets set off for the unknown. These seven great expeditions brought a vast web of trading links—from Taiwan to the Persian Gulf—under Chinese imperial control. This took place half a century before the first Europeans, rounding the tip of Africa in frail Portuguese caravels, "discovered" the Indian Ocean.

With unrivaled nautical technology and countless other inventions to their credit, the Chinese were now poised to expand their influence beyond India and Africa. Here was one of history's great turning points. Had the Chinese emperors continued their huge investments in the treasure fleets, there is little reason why they, rather than the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and British, should not have colonized the world. Yet less than a century later, all overseas trade was banned, and it became a capital offense to set sail from China in a multi-masted ship.

Read More

The Bizarre Mirage of the Fata Morganan

The mysterious fata morgana: making people question their sanity since the beginning of time. Louise Murray/Visuals Unlimited/Getty Images

Jesuit priests aren’t especially known for their heavy drug use, but it would seem that Father Domenico Giardina was tripping pretty hard on August 14, 1643. Looking out over the sea from Messina, Sicily, Giardina saw “a city all floating in the air, and so measureless and so splendid, so adorned with magnificent buildings, all of which was found on a base of a luminous crystal.” The metropolis suddenly transformed into a garden, and next a forest. And then in a flash it all descended into chaos. Huge armies sprang forth, as did the towns they had laid waste to, before the whole mess disappeared.

Father Giardina, you see, was high on life. The “great and marvelous theater” he had witnessed was the mysterious fata morgana, an incredibly complex mirage that has historically both fascinated and scared the hell out of sailors and landlubbers alike. Whether it be the work of necromancers or fairies or a god, few phenomena have captivated humankind quite so thoroughly as fata morgana.

It was Jesuits like Father Giardina, argues Marina Warner in her brilliant book Phantasmagoria, who made the first “careful” observations of fata morgana, that is, not freaking out about them and instead beginning to apply a dash of science to the matter. The good Father claimed, writes Warner, that the minerals and salts in the region “rise up in hot weather in vapours from the sea to form clouds, which then condense in the cooler upper air to become a mobile specchio, a moving, polyhedrical mirror.” It was wrong, but it actually wasn’t that far off.

Light being refracted downward as it passes from air into a denser material, plexiglass. (Some light is also reflected upward) Zátonyi Sándor/Wikimedia Commons

At work here is some basic physics. When the sun heats up the atmosphere above the ocean, it creates a gradient of temperatures: Near the surface, it’s still relatively cool because the water is chilling that air, but sitting above that is a layer of warmer air. Now, light doesn’t always travel in a straight line. When it hits a boundary between two layers of the atmosphere that are different temperatures (and therefore different densities), it bends and travels through the new layer at a different angle. This is known as refraction. The change in the light’s angle of travel depends on the difference in density between the two layers.

How does bending light create a mirage? The rest of the effect is caused by how your brain works. When light hits your eyes, your brain assumes it arrived there in a straight path between you and the object reflecting the light. So if light is bent on its way toward you, your brain will think the object is where it would be if the light’s path was straight. This is why when you are looking down on a surface of water, objects under the surface will appear to be in a different spot than they actually are—just ask a spear fisherman…if you happen to know a spear fisherman. The human brain doesn’t automatically account for the refraction. (Interestingly, the brains of some birds like ospreys do correct for the effect so that when they dive headlong into the water after a fish, they are right on target.)

In the case of a fata morgana mirage, light reflecting from a distant object such as a ship is bent downward as it passes through the colder, denser air near the surface of the ocean (or sometimes cold land, particularly ice). But your brain places the object where it would be if the light came to you in a straight path—higher than it actually is. This bending effect can even work with the curvature of the Earth if conditions are just right, which is why some fata morgana images can actually be refracted cities and ships from beyond the horizon.

A superior mirage or fata morgana, left, and an inferior mirage, what you’d see on a hot day on asphalt, right. Ludovica Lorenzelli, DensityDesign Research Lab/Wikimedia

The opposite situation is what produces mirages like an oasis of water in the desert. In this case, a hot layer of air just above the surface bends light rays up toward your eyes, causing your brain to perceive things as much lower than they actually are. The desert oasis is actually the sky. This kind of mirage is known as inferior, while the fata morgana, which places objects higher than they actually are, is superior.

But before the Scientific Revolution and all its wonderful advances in physics, mirages were firmly in the realm of mysticism (thank a Frenchman named Pierre de Fermat, by the way, for his pioneering work in decoding inferior mirages right around the same time Father Giardina was making his own observations). Indeed, fata morgana takes its name from Morgan le Fay, the treacherous fairy, enchantress, and half-sister of King Arthur.

Morgan le Fay: fairy

According to Warner, the Normans brought stories of Morgan’s magic to Italy, particularly her penchant for luring sailors to an undersea palace with visions of castles in the air—fata morgana is particularly prevalent in southern Italy’s Strait of Messina, where Father Giardina experienced his own vision. Another Italian version of the legend has Morgan falling in love with a regular fella, granting him immortality, and keeping him in captivity, then putting on shows in the sky when he gets bored with the whole never dying thing.

And long before Arthurian legend, it could have been that sightings of these phenomena gave rise to any number of the “whoa something is appearing in the sky” scenes in antiquity, Warner argues. The Second Book of Maccabees, for example, tells of sky-people coming to the aid of the Jews in their skirmishes with the Romans: “When the battle became fierce, there appeared to the enemy from heaven five resplendent men on horses with golden bridles, and they were leading the Jews.” The ghostly warriors fired arrows and thunderbolts at the rascally Romans, “so that, confused and blinded, they were thrown into disorder and cut to pieces.”

Fata morgana’s most famous offspring, though, is the legend of the Flying Dutchman, a ghost ship said to sail aimlessly around the high seas. The tale was first popularized in a story called “Vanderdecken’s Message Home” from 1821, which told of a boat from Amsterdam that haunts the Cape of Good Hope, trying to hand off letters from its dead crew to the vessels of the living (uh, no thanks, the sailors would say, you can deliver your own damn mail). Warner connects this to fata morgana showing a ship from beyond the horizon: The mirage vessel could suddenly disappear with no explanation, and there you have your legend.

The tale of the Flying Dutchman ghost ship likely came from sailors seeing ships caught up in fata morgana

In the decades following “Vanderdecken’s Message Home,” few other than the most superstitious (or most intoxicated) of sailors actually feared the Flying Dutchman, but real fata morganas made their way into the blossoming mass media of America. In 1871, the Sentinel of Santa Cruz, California reported a fata morgana that made a steamer appear “four or five stories high,” while other schooners played about beautifully in the mirage. Some 20 years later in Buffalo, New York, 20,000 people gathered to witness a fata morgana on Lake Ontario. Though Toronto was over 50 miles away, “its church spires could be counted with the greatest ease” through the mirage, reported Scientific American.

Gone was the mythologizing of fata morganas, yet the wonderment remained. And that right there is the beauty of science: The ghost ships full of angry dead dudes waving letters may be passé, but we get to keep 100 percent of the awe and zero percent of the scurvy. And I’d say that’s pretty good progress.

Reference:
Warner, M. (2008) Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media Into the Twenty-First Century. Oxford University Press

Reposted from Wired

Pages