Many people strongly dislike (read: hate) history. I admit I am also one of those people who sleep in History class because it is just so boring. However, history can also have a fun side to it. This book is all about the mistakes, blunders, and sca...
Many of you already know that Christopher Columbus "discovered" America, etc, etc. I won't bore you too much. If you want to skip over this chapter, whatever bakes your blueberry cookies. However, Columbus is crucial to American history. After all, if Columbus hadn't made a mistake in his math (like all the rest of us at some point in our lives unless you are a really freaky math genius), those of us who are currently living in the Americas won't be here today. We would all be squished up against each other in Europe, Asia, and Africa unless some other person also made a mistake in their math and wanted to sail to Asia the long way because they thought the Earth was "small".
Back in the 15th century, all sorts of countries in Europe wanted to travel to Africa and Asia to bring back all sorts of stuff like gold, spices, and silk. Gold and silk are pretty much self-explanatory. The spices are there because the food back then don't last very long. If you were living in the 15th century, most likely you were eating meat and other stuff that is in the early stages of spoiling. People try to cover up this fact by adding a lot of spices to it. Personally, I wonder if anyone back then would connect heavily spiced foods their hosts serve with diarrhea, but I'm pretty sure they didn't because people kept eating it. Or they just didn't have a choice. I'm pretty sure it's the latter.
Anyway, countries in Europe wanted to get a lot of valuable stuff from the Eastern countries. Their wish is all fine and dandy, but there is just one small problem. The locations of minor obstacles like the Sahara Desert and the Himalaya Mountains made traveling there by land almost impossible. Add in thieves and bandits to the equation and the math tells you to forget about it. No, you are not going to get there by land because it is virtually impossible. Fortunately, Europeans are a persistent bunch, and they soon figured out an alternative. Why make all the effort to go by land when you can go by sea?
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At the end of the 15th century, the Portuguese figured out how to sail to Asia by sailing around the Cape of Good Hope. However, the journey was long and many impatient people didn't like how much time one journey took.
This is where Columbus steps in.
He proposed a way to get to Asia by sailing directly west. According to his calculations, sailing west would be easier and more efficient than sailing all the way down and around the Cape of Good Hope. There was just one tiny problem.
Apparently, he got his math wrong and he thought the earth was a lot smaller than the people at the time believes. It's a small world after all! Now, all he had to do to test this false theory is to just do it.
He found a sponsor in the form of the monarchs of Spain and sailed away into the ocean blue on the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria.
It was in the middle of his trip that he realized how wrong his math was. He ended up keeping two separate logbooks. One holds the real measurements of how much they had traveled in a day, and the other held fake measurements of how much they had traveled in a day. Yes, Columbus is a liar. He showed the fake measurements to the crew to prevent mutiny, and it worked somewhat. Eventually, though, even the most mentally strong person on Earth would get tired of seeing nothing but water around them for weeks. The crew almost mutinied and sailed home, but Columbus made a deal with them. If land isn't seen within the next two days, they could sail home. Sure enough, "land ho!" was yelled within the next day.
Columbus thought he had sailed to India. He called the natives "Indians", and everything. In reality, though, he had only sailed to an island in the Bahamas. He'd probably never went to India because most people would have noticed the differences between the two lands if they had gone to both.
But even though he didn't go to India and he didn't even know he went to a new world, that day in history is now widely known as the day when the new world was discovered. Personally, I believe Columbus shouldn't get all of the attention. I mean, there was a Viking dude named Leif Erikson who went to the new world a few centuries before Columbus was even born! How come we get a break on Columbus Day but not on Leif Erikson Day (October 9)?
On this day in history (May 13th):
1568: Mary, Queen of Scots, is defeated for daring to take of her sister's (Elizabeth I of England) throne just because Elizabeth was Protestant
1898: Edison sues over new motion-picture technology.
1968: Vice President Nixon is attacked by angry Venezuelans
