Interesting stuff, Plingsby. I'd never heard of Amerike. Right or wrong they make a case for him. Surprising to find it on a website about The West. (Maybe I should have just asked Rooster.)
1) Columbus never claimed to have found a new land mass. Vespucci explored and detailed the continents as new land masses and mapmakers credited his name to the naming of the new land masses.
2) Spain had turned on Columbus for what they perceived as mismanagement of new areas because he treated the Natives too well. Spain looked at it as an act of treason and started an anti-Colombus sentiment.
This may help explain the history of the New World post 1492.
This post was edited by Benedict Arnold at February 6, 2017 2:46 PM MST
Both those comments are fascinating and completely new to me. Thanks for posting. (Certainly the Spanish conquest of Central and South America was merciless.)
That's something I didn't know. Lots of gaps in my Australian education. (If he'd discovered England they'd probably have made us learn it all by rote.) Is that sort of thing regularly taught in American schools or do you have to learn it from further study?
(Our history lessons, in the 1940s, were very much slanted in Britain's favour.)
What Columbus "discovered" was the Bahamas archipelago and then the island later named Hispaniola, now split into Haiti and the Dominican Republic. On his subsequent voyages he went farther south, to Central and South America. He never got close to what is now called the United States.
I only know what I learned from pop songs in the 1950s:
"Columbus say to the Spanish king, I think this world is a very fine thing, And just to prove that the world is round, United States has never been found."
This is part of the page I linked earlier .... Columbus set out to prove the World was round. If he did, he was about 2,000 years too late. Ancient Greek mathematicians had already proven that the Earth was round, not flat.
That was Eratosthenes about 240 BCE. He also calculated it's circumference and, depending on which of two measurements he used for the old "stadia" he was remarkably accurate.
Plingsby 