Tag: The Birth of the New World

Columbus Day

Richard Barnes

On 12 October 1492, when the little fleet of Christopher Columbus raised a Bahamian island that he named San Salvador, neither he nor anyone else guessed that this would be an historic date. Even Columbus, who regarded himself as a child of destiny, thought he had merely found an outlying island to “the Indies.” 

Had his entire fleet been wrecked, nobody would have been the wiser, and in all probability America would not have been discovered until 1500 when Pedro Alvares Cabral, on his way to the real India, sighted a mountain near the coast of Brazil. 

Thus the entire history of Europeans in America stems from Columbus’s First Voyage. The Northmen’s discovery of Newfoundland almost five centuries earlier proved to be dead-end. Pre-Columbian Portuguese, Welsh, Irish, English, and Venetian voyages to America are modern-made myths, phantoms which left not one footprint on the sands of time.

But Columbus’s First Voyage proved to be the avant-garde for thousands of hidalgos who, weary of sustaining their haughty pride in poverty, were ready to hurl themselves on the New World in search of gold and glory.

Columbus’s discovery led within a year to the first permanent European colony in America, in Hispaniola; and he himself made three more voyages of discovery, as well as sparking off those of Ojeda, Juan de La Cosa, the younger Pinzón, Vespucci, both Cabots, Magellan, and countless others. 

Not only the northern voyages, starting with John Cabot’s of 1497, but the southern voyages of discovery and Spain’s vast empire stretching from Florida to Patagonia and out to the Philippines stem from the First Voyage of that intrepid mariner and practical dreamer Christopher Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea….”

        Samuel Eliot Morrison (1887-1976), distinguished naval historian, Harvard

So the surname of Colon [Italian form of Columbus] which he revived was a fitting one, because in Greek it means “member”, and by his proper name Christopher, men might know that he was a member of Christ, by Whom he was sent for the salvation of those people …. [Christopher Columbus] carried [the Name of] Christ over deep waters with great danger to himself …. [Christopher Columbus asking Christ’s aid and protection in that perilous pass, crossed over with his company that the Indian nations might become dwellers in the triumphant Church of Heaven. There is reason to believe that many souls that Satan expected to catch because they had not passed through the waters of baptism were by the Admiral made dwellers in the eternal glory of Paradise….”

        Ferdinand Columbus (son of Christopher Columbus; 1488-1539)

In the Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ

Because, most Christian and very Exalted, Excellent, and mighty Princes, King and Queen of the Spains and of the Islands of the Sea, our Lord and Lady, in this present year, 1492, after Your Highnesses had made an end to the war with the Moors who ruled in Europe, and had concluded the war in the very great city of Granada, where in the present year, on the second day of the month of January, I saw the Royal Standards of Your Highnesses placed by force of arms on the towers of the Alhambra ….

[He goes on to recap the insistent petitions of a prince of India for instructors from Rome to teach them the holy faith but such had not been provided] thus so many people were lost through lapsing into idolatries and receiving doctrines of perdition….

[And therefore] Your Highnesses … devoted to the Christian Faith … resolved to send me….

[Throughout, Christopher Columbus repeatedly emphasized the goal of converting people to Christ]

        Christopher Columbus, extracted from Journal of the First Voyage, 1492

Today, October 12, is what used to be universally and uncontroversially known as Columbus Day. 

In 1892 planning for the great Columbian Exposition, also known as the Chicago World’s Fair, began in Chicago and culminated the following year. It was a phenomenal and confident celebration of Columbus’s discovery and the progress of American, Christian civilization. A mere century later, in 1992, the 500th anniversary was, to put it mildly, a major downer, with high school and college students instructing us that it would have been better had Columbus just stayed home. 

Presumably these young scholars would prefer to have been appetizers gracing the tables of the cannibalistic Aztecs, Incas, Caribes, and others.

The Russian, Zurab Tsereteli, dedicated a gargantuan bronze statue, The Birth of The New World to Columbus, Ohio, to celebrate; however, that city turned it down as did others. Puerto Rico distinguished herself by eventually accepting it. 

To our cynical age, men such as Columbus who took their faith with all seriousness; who genuinely feared God and sought to do their best to please Him are seen anachronistically as hypocrites and materialistic frauds. 

But nothing could be further from the truth. 

By remaining silent over much of the 20th Century and well into the 21st, we have allowed the Zinnistic charlatans and their ahistorical narratives to dominate our schools and universities which in turn have bequeathed us with countless generations of robotic, atheistic know-nothing, violently angry clones.

Although I would rather we as a country placed more emphasis on the church calendar — sans the countless saints days — it is notable that the three Christian themed holidays on the civic calendar — Christmas, Columbus Day, and Thanksgiving — have been under virulent attack for generations. Is it too much to ask for us to know how to defend the history behind these? 

Once again, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s warning is apropos: to destroy a country you must first cut off its roots.

May you enjoy your Columbus Day with gratitude to the Lord for having raised up such a man.

Christopher Columbus (1451-1506)

Columbian Exposition, Chicago (1892-1893)

The Birth of The New World, Zurab Tsereteli, Arecibo, Puerto Rico

Arrogance and Ingratitude

Richard Barnes

The Enlightenment temperament, anti-Christian and schizophrenic (see Humboldt), impelled the growth of “indigenismo” in the late nineteenth century and continuing onto the present day. This is a cult that emphasizes Indian America over the Spanish heritage, with bitter and unhistorical disparagement of the latter (see Tree of Hate, p. 116). 

The roots of this of course lie in “our own house” with the blatant propaganda of Las Casas, eagerly seized by Spain’s European enemies and by the intellectual elite of the day and of this day also.

This in turn propelled a publishing industry promoting the Discovery as a Spanish invasion of the Americas which was purposefully destructive of Indian cultures which were superior to what the invaders brought from Europe’s Christian civilization.

Such instruction, affirmed with the certainty that proceeds from ignorance, culminated in a neat inversion of reality: a land of noble savages and quiet, peaceful aborigines minding their own business, building enlightened cultures and civilizations, suddenly set upon by blood-thirsty, superstitious, Christian Neanderthal monsters who tortured, destroyed, and murdered with genocidal fury. 

And, of course, it did not take long for calumny of Spain and Columbus to bleed into contempt towards anything having to do with the Americas, especially the United States.

Perhaps the culminating event of this ahistorical propaganda was the 1980 publication of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, whose more honest description would be “A Marxist Prescription For Teaching United States History To Our Children”. 

It is no surprise that Zinn’s work dedicates many pages to that great genocidal maniac, Christopher Columbus.

So from Samuel Eliot Morison paying homage in 1955 “to Christopher Columbus the stout-hearted son of Genoa who carried Christian civilization across the Ocean Sea” we have come to the National Council of Churches in 1990, pontificating, “What some historians have termed a ‘discovery’ in reality was an invasion and colonization with legalized occupation, genocide …. “

Thanks to such tendentious “teaching”, few today know that on January 2, 1492, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella led a triumphant procession to the Granada city square where both knelt in gratitude to God for the liberation of Spain from almost eight centuries of Moorish rule. The event followed the surrender of the city by the Moors, having accepted the terms of either leaving Spain or staying in allegiance to her with the promise of religious liberty to worship according to their conscience. These terms were accepted and were honored by the royal house.

Among the multitude who accompanied the king and queen was a man committed to bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the Indian continent by a route that would avoid having the need to go through enemy Muslim lands. Later in that very same year, 1492, with the financial support and fervent prayers of the king and queen, he launched his three vessels to reach India by sailing west from Spain. He would have reached India, except that his calculations were off: the earth was quite a bit larger than he estimated. And the Americas stood in the way.

The man was Christopher Columbus.

For centuries the Americas recognized the greatness of the man: there are more places and sites named after him than after any other man. The capital of Ohio is named after him, as is the site of the capital of the nation, District of Columbia.

However, after the French Revolution, the attacks and slanders and half truths were relentless and eventually took their toll, culminating with the publication of Zinn’s fake history. Zinn, usually known as a Socialist, but actually a radical Marxist, despised our history and was determined to destroy its roots. In this, he has been wildly successful but by the time his work became known, thanks to its promotion by actor Matt Damon in the 1997 movie Good Will Hunting, much uprooting had already taken place.

If you would like to know more about Christopher Columbus and also the truth behind Zinn’s polemics, you might want to find and read John Eidsmoe’s Columbus and Cortez, Conquerors for Christ and Mary Grabers’ Debunking Howard Zinn. 

The above thoughts come to mind because of my chance “sighting” of a monumental bronze sculpture which began appearing on my horizon as I drove on the northwest coast of Puerto Rico. It was a stunning sight which became larger as I approached. 

However, when I came parallel to it, I saw that the area on which it stood was fenced in and locked and the surrounding terrain was overgrown and unkempt. I drove on to my destination and asked about the statue only to learn that folks knew very little about it and did not seem to care to learn more.

Some time later, I returned with several of my children. A gentle rain fell, which added to the grandeur of this phenomenon. A police cruiser happened by and stopped as I signaled him to ask what he knew about the statue and whether it would soon be open to the public. He knew hardly anything about it, other than it was “grande”. 

What I later learned was that the statue is the work of Russian artist and architect, Zurab Tsereteli, who built it as The Birth of The New World, intending to dedicate it to Ohio’s capital, Columbus. As I understand it, the work was completed in 1991 in time for the 1992 quincentenary of the world changing voyage. 

However, Columbus rejected it. As did New York, Boston, Cleveland, Fort Lauderdale, and Miami. The city of Cataño, Puerto Rico, near the San Juan metropolitan area, offered to accept it but that intent was foiled when the FAA opposed such a tall structure five miles from the airport. Finally, a private citizen near the town of Arecibo accepted it and private funds enabled its assembly and installation.

And so it sits near the coast. A 300-plus foot tall representation of Christopher Columbus, twice as tall as the Statue of Liberty and every bit as impressive, in my layman’s opinion. And if you look into it, as I did, you will encounter vitriol and angst and disgust and ignorance, such as this:

“I am sorry for the artist, but this statue is the same as if the Jews had made a statue to Hitler!”

Or this:

“Columbus is a symbol of Genocide, not a hero to be celebrated.” 

Such statements and sentiments are so far from reality and historical truth as to be embarrassing. But shame is no longer something to be shunned or avoided. Ignorance is a point of pride to many today. 

We are reminded by Arnold Toynbee, “Civilizations die from suicide, not murder.” 

If we cannot understand and appreciate the massive gates that were opened by men such as Columbus, we are a truly ungrateful and arrogant people who need to be re-awakened to the earth shattering — in a very positive sense — impact of the voyage that took place in 1492.