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happy Indigenous Peoples' Day!
(beehaw.org)
[alt text: a photo of graffiti writing on a brick wall, which says, "Bitchstopher Colombitch".]
My favorite Christopher Columbus fact:
In his time, the world was widely regarded as round. You might have heard some myth about him proving that it is, but this had been surmised by the ancient Greeks.
The story that I had heard was that Christopher Columbus couldn't get funding for his expedition because nobody believed him that the world was round. The real reason he couldn't get funding was because he wanted to go to India by sailing west from Europe. No land was known to be between Europe and India, so this would have been an unfathomably long journey doomed to failure.
He only 'discovered' the new world by dumb luck - and for the people living there, I'd say it was very bad luck indeed. And after he did, he maintained that he had found the east coast of Asia.
The man was delusional but somehow kept failing upward into colonialism
From what I gathered (years ago, so take it with a grain of salt), he couldn't get funding because he hugely miscalculated the distance to India if you'd travel west, like more than half the the distance. Most sailors and scolars knew better, but somehow he got the funding from the Spanish queen.