It is an often overlooked fact that Columbus' voyage was inspired in part by the fall of the Christian city of Constantinople to the Muslim Turks in 1453.
After this disaster, the European powers were in search of new trade routes to the Far East which would by-pass the now dangerous Muslim-controlled land routes through the Middle East and Asia Minor. So they commissioned the likes Columbus to embark on voyages of discovery.
It is one of those ironic twists of history that the age of European exploration and world-dominance was made possible by the Muslim conquest of the crown jewel of Christendom.
But for about a hundred years now, school children have been taught that Columbus discovered America because he was looking for a shorter route to the West Indies. In some text books it is even taught that he “left a legacy of genocide and slavery that endures in some degree to this day.” However, have you been taught that the indigenous people slaughtered the dozens of men he left behind in the New World? Put in liberal progressive terms, in 1493 the natives conducted genocide on every European in the Americas. But you won’t see that in a school text book, I’ll bet!
Upon returning to Spain, Christopher Columbus wrote of his discovery that “Christendom ought to feel delight and make feasts and give solemn thanks to the Holy Trinity.”
What isn’t taught anymore is that Columbus also believed he was led by God to undertake his voyage and that he "felt called to bear the light of Christ to undiscovered lands." In his personal journal Columbus said he was determined, shrewd, and intensely religious. He believed himself to be divinely called to “carry the true faith into the uttermost parts of the earth.” Inspired by this thought, no discouragement could drive him to despair. It was eighteen years from the conception to the accomplishment of his planned voyage.
Isn't it about time for Christianity and other real truths to be restored to public school curriculums and abolish the progressive academic agenda that has poisoned our school system for almost a hundred years? Isn’t it worth celebrating that the pope’s mariner, rather than, say, the henchmen of Muslim sultans or khans, discovered the Americas? How do you think that history would have turned out for the natives?
This is not to whitewash Columbus’s crimes, which have not aged well. The explorer kidnapped natives for show in Spain on his first voyage, enslaved several hundred bellicose Indians on his second visit, and after his third trip faced charges back home of governing as a tyrant. At sea, the admiral and his crew also ate a dolphin—another act that offends 21st-Century tastes.
But shouldn’t he be more plausibly viewed as the catalyst for ensuing greatness?
America first sending men into flight, over the Atlantic, and to the moon; thwarting tuberculosis, yellow fever, and polio; fighting Nazism, Communism, and al Qaeda; serving as a welcome mat to humanity’s “wretched refuse;” inventing the light bulb, the telephone, the computer, and the Internet; and standing as a beacon of freedom, that “shining city on a hill” in an oppressed world all happened in the wake of the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria.
