Chris has always fascinated me. Wrong on so many points and yet courageous in so many ways. I’ve seen replicas of his ships and they were awesome small and afforded the crew with little protection from the elements. One of the interesting things I’ve learned is that while we’re taught that the generally accepted world view was the the planet was flat, the truth be told, most of the educated people of the time knew the earth resembled a big blue marble, as in round. Another source of wonder to me has been that as we know, Chris thought he’d arrived in India so of course he called the native inhabitants he encountered, Indians. I suspect that an anthropolical study would show that our native Cheyene and Cree, Shawnee, Pawnee and Cherokee are anything BUT Indian. So my wonder is, knowing they aren’t “Indian” what or who are they? The vast variation from the Aztec to the Apache doesn’t seem to offer much in the way of an answer. Maybe we’ll never really know.
Happy Columbus day.