When Steel Talks - Reboot

‘Columbus Lie’ by the Mighty Shadow

Global - The late great calypsonian “Shadow” shares the true history of Christopher Columbus via a live performance in Canada, 1994.

By Annemarie van de Wouw - 

1. Columbus was not the first person who discovered the Americas, the first explorers came from Siberia and discovered Alaska at about 70,000? B.C. – 12,000? B.C.
2. Columbus’s ships did not sail through bad weather, his own journal shows that the seas were very calm. 
3. The trip didn’t take two months, but one month.
4. The crew aboard of the ships didn’t think the earth was flat, they knew the earth was round.
5. Columbus’s main purpose was not only exploration or trade, but conquest and exploitation. He used religion as a reason to do so.
6. Columbus was not good to ‘the Indians’ (as they were to him in the beginning), he took everything they had, including their women. He killed many of them and enslaved many of them.
   
   During Columbus time in Haiti, he and his men hunted the Taino Indians for sport, beating, raping, torturing, killing, and then using the Indian bodies as food for their hunting dogs.
   
   

7. 12 October 1492 was not the discovery of the Americas, but the meeting of three cultures, because people had lived there for thousands of years. The Americas were only new to the Europeans

8. Columbus wasn’t the first one who saw land on October 12th 1492, that was a sailor named Rodrigo de Triana.

9. It is not sure that Columbus was from Genoa, Italy. He didn’t seem to be able to write in Italian. Some historians think he was Jewish. Probably from Spain. He could also be a Jew from Genoa. It is certain that it is not certain where Columbus was born.

10. No one knows what Columbus really looked like. There are many different portraits of him.

 

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