Herman Ould's play
The Discovery dramatizes the events on the last night of Christopher Columbus' sailing expedition to search for a sea-route to India.The story is sometimes anachronistic and credits to Columbus far greater knowledge than he had on the expedition that led to the 'chance' discovery of America.
The crew is restless at the outset and becomes eager for a fight as the play unfolds. The high-handed attitude of Columbus and absence of sympathy for the justified complaints of the crew leade to a situation close to mutiny. Destiny, however, has decided to bring laurels to Columbus and crown his efforts with the discovery of a land that is still not colonized.
Columbus is quite authoritative and stern disciplinarian. Yet he seeks adventure; he is a risk-taker by nature.
The play conveys both the strengths and flaws in the character of this great explorer.
Christopher Columbus (c. 1451 – 20 May 1506) was a
Genoese navigator,
colonizer and
explorer whose voyages across the
Atlantic Ocean led to general European awarenes.In 1492,
Christopher Columbus landed on the island of San Salvador in
The Bahamas.Columbus
made four voyages to the Americas, with his first in 1492, which
resulted in what is considered by European Americans as the
Discovery of America[1] or
Discovery of the Americas.
[2]
Columbus had sought an audience from the monarchs
King Ferdinand II of
Aragon and
Queen Isabella I of
Castile,
who had informally united the largest kingdoms of Spain through
marriage, and while ruling their kingdoms independently, their internal
and foreign policies were coordinated as one. On May 1, 1489, permission
having been granted, Columbus presented his plans to Queen Isabella,
who, in turn, referred it to a committee. After the passing of much
time, these savants of Castile, like their counterparts in Portugal,
reported back that Columbus had judged the distance to Asia much too
short. They pronounced the idea impractical.In 1492 the joint rulers of the nation conquered the
Moorish kingdom of Granada,
which had been providing Castile (Spain)with African goods through tribute,
and they decided to fund Christopher Columbus' expedition that they
hoped would bypass Portugal's lock on Africa and the Indian Ocean
reaching Asia by travelling west.
[5]
Europe had long enjoyed a safe land passage to China and India—sources of valued goods such as
silk,
spices, and
opiates—under the
hegemony of the
Mongol Empire (the
Pax Mongolica, or
Mongol peace). With the
Fall of Constantinople to the Turkish
Ottoman Empire
in 1453, the land route to Asia became more difficult. In response to
this the Columbus brothers had, by the 1480s, developed a plan to travel
to the Indies, then construed roughly as all of southern and eastern
Asia, by sailing directly west across the "
Ocean Sea," the Atlantic Ocean.
Columbus's calculations underestimated the circumference of the Earth
A spherical Earth had been the general opinion of Ancient Greek science,
and this view continued through the Middle Ages (for example,
Bede mentions it in
The Reckoning of Time). In fact
Eratosthenes had measured the diameter of the Earth with good precision in the 2nd century BC.
[12]
Where Columbus did differ from the generally accepted view of his time
is his (very incorrect) arguments that assumed a significantly smaller
diameter for the Earth, claiming that Asia could be easily reached by
sailing west across the Atlantic. Most scholars accepted
Ptolemy's correct assessment that the terrestrial landmass (for Europeans of the time, comprising Eurasia and Africa) occupied 180
degrees
of the terrestrial sphere, and dismissed Columbus' claim that the Earth
was much smaller, and that Asia was only a few thousand nautical miles
to the west of Europe. Columbus' error was attributed to his
insufficient experience in navigation at sea.
[6]
While Columbus was not the first European to voyage to the New World and did not actually reach the mainland until his third voyage in 1498 (when he reached
South America, and the fourth voyage, when he reached
Central America), his discoveries led to the major European sea powers sending expeditions to the
New World to
build trade networks and
colonies and to convert the native people to Christianity.
Transatlantic travel played a major role in the expansion of Western civilization into the Americas. It is the Atlantic that separates the "
Old World" from the "
New World". In
modern times, some
idioms refer to the ocean in a humorously diminutive way as
the Pond,
describing both the geographical and cultural divide between North
America and Europe, in particular between the English-speaking nations
of both continents. Many British people refer to the United States and
Canada as "across the pond", and vice versa.
[4]
With his four voyages of discovery and several attempts at establishing a settlement on the island of
Hispaniola, all funded by
Isabella I of Castile, he initiated the process of
Spanish colonization which foreshadowed general
European colonization of the "
New World." (The term "
pre-Columbian" is usually used to refer to the peoples and cultures of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus and his European successors.)
His initial 1492 voyage came at a critical time of growing national
imperialism and
economic competition between developing nation states seeking wealth from the establishment of
trade routes and
colonies.
In this
sociopolitical climate, Columbus's far-fetched scheme won the attention of
Isabella I of Castile. Severely underestimating the
circumference of the
Earth, he estimated that a westward route from
Iberia to
the Indies would be shorter and more direct than the overland
trade route through
Arabia. If true, this would allow
Crown of Castile entry into the lucrative
spice trade — heretofore commanded by the
Arabs and
Italians. Following his plotted course, he instead landed within the
Bahamas Archipelago at a locale he named
San Salvador. Mistaking the
North-American island for the
East-Asian mainland, he referred to its inhabitants as "Indios".
Europe had long enjoyed a safe land passage to China and India— sources of valued
goods such as
silk,
spices, and
opiates— under the
hegemony of the
Mongol Empire (the
Pax Mongolica, or
Mongol peace). With the
Fall of Constantinople to the
Ottoman Turks in 1453, the land route to Asia
became more difficult. In response to this the Columbus brothers had,
by the 1480s, developed a plan to travel to the Indies, then construed
roughly as all of south and east Asia, by sailing directly west across
the "
Ocean Sea,"
i.e., the Atlantic.
The knowledge that the Earth was spherical was widespread, and the means of calculating its diameter using an
astrolabe was known to both scholars and navigators.
[9] Where Columbus
did differ from the generally accepted view of his time is his
(incorrect) arguments that assumed a significantly smaller diameter for
the Earth, claiming that Asia could be easily reached by sailing west across the Atlantic. Most scholars accepted
Ptolemy's correct assessment that the terrestrial landmass (for Europeans of the time, comprising Eurasia and Africa) occupied 180
degrees
of the terrestrial sphere, and dismissed Columbus's claim that the
Earth was much smaller, and that Asia was only a few thousand nautical
miles to the west of Europe. Columbus's error was put down to his lack of experience in navigation at sea.
[11]
Columbus believed the (incorrect) calculations of
Marinus of Tyre, putting the landmass at 225 degrees, leaving only 135 degrees of water. Moreover, Columbus
believed that one degree represented a shorter distance on the Earth's
surface than was actually the case. Finally, he read maps as if the
distances were calculated in
Italian miles (1,238 meters). Accepting the length of a degree to be 56⅔ miles, from the writings of
Alfraganus, he therefore calculated the circumference of the Earth as 25,255 kilometers at most, and the distance from the
Canary Islands to Japan as 3,000 Italian miles (3,700 km, or 2,300 statute miles). Columbus did not realize Alfraganus used the much longer Arabic mile (about 1,830 m).
The true circumference of the Earth is about 40,000 km (25,000 mi), a figure established by
Eratosthenes in the second century BC,
[10] and the distance from the Canary Islands to Japan
19,600 km (12,200 mi). No ship that was readily available in the 15th
century could carry enough food and fresh water for such a journey. Most
European sailors and navigators concluded, probably correctly, that
sailors undertaking a westward voyage from Europe to Asia non-stop would die of thirst or starvation long before reaching their destination.
Catholic Monarchs, however, having completed
an expensive war in the
Iberian Peninsula, were desperate for a competitive edge over other European countries in trade with the East Indies. Columbus promised such an advantage.
Easterly,ever Easterly Don Pedro....
There was a further element of key importance in the plans of Columbus, a
closely held fact discovered by or otherwise learned by Columbus: the
Trade Winds. A brisk westward wind from the east, commonly called an "
easterly", propelled
Santa María,
La Niña, and
La Pinta
for five weeks from the Canary Islands off Africa. To return to Spain
eastward against this prevailing wind would have required several months
of an arduous sailing technique upwind, called
beating,
during which food and drinkable water would have been utterly
exhausted. Columbus returned home by following prevailing winds
northeastward from the southern zone of the North Atlantic to the middle
latitudes of the North Atlantic, where prevailing winds are eastward
(westerly) to the coastlines of
Western Europe, where the winds curve southward towards the
Iberian Peninsula. So he used the North Atlantic's great circular wind pattern, clockwise in direction, in both legs of his voyage.
Light, light........
In his first journey, Columbus visited San Salvador in the Bahamas
(which he was convinced was Japan), Cuba (which he thought was China)
and Hispaniola (where he found gold).
After 29 days out of sight of land, on October 7, 1492, the crew
spotted "[i]mmense flocks of birds", some of which his sailors trapped
and determined to be "field" birds (probably
Eskimo curlews and
American golden plovers). Columbus changed course to follow their flight.
[26]
Land was sighted at 2
a.m. on October 12, by a sailor named
Rodrigo de Triana (also known as Juan Rodriguez Bermejo) aboard
La Pinta.
[27] Columbus would later assert that he had first seen the land and, thus, earned the reward of 10,000
maravedís.
[28][29] Columbus called the island San Salvador, in present day the
Bahamas or the
Turks and Caicos, although the indigenous residents had already named it
Guanahani.
For your gains
In the first voyage he observed that inhabitants were peaceful, in the second he attacked them and enslaved them.
Columbus enslaved five hundred and sixty people. The slaves were shipped
to Spain; 200 died during the route back to Spain, and half of the
remainder were ill when they arrived.
