Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Christopher Columbus: Bringer of the Apocalypse

Episode Date: September 8, 2022

Robert is joined again by Michael Swaim to continue to discuss Christopher Columbus.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated

two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, my goodness, it's behind the bastards, the podcast where Michael Swame and I talk about how Christopher Columbus was actually kind of a cool guy. Michael, how do you, you know, a lot of people get angry at him because of the slavery and the genocide? But I hadn't heard that, but have you considered, is it Ohio that has a Columbus or is it Missouri has a Columbus? Both of them have a Columbus, don't they? Maybe both, at least Ohio. At least one American state has a town called Columbus, and I'm going to say they have good pizza. I don't know. Nobody knows. Michael,

you play video games, right? You're a big video games guy. I eat pizza. I play video games. You are a regular guy, Robert. You are. I should introduce you first, not that you need introduction. I don't need to because, as you said, the format is and always has been Robert Evans and Michael Swame talking about Christopher Columbus. That's right. That's right. That's every episode of this show. Michael, you are the only member of the cracked diaspora who has visited me in my new home. I guess I could say that it's probably because of the plague, but I think it's it's it's a direct personal insult. But in any case, when you were here, you brought out a machine which allowed you to play video games on my television,

a gaming console, right? That's right. And that made me think it's this was like a year ago now, but it made I've been thinking ever since, boy, it seems like it'd be nice to sit down on the couch and play a play a video game old fashioned style. So I don't know. I don't have a lot of hobbies anymore, Michael. And I kept thinking about it. And yesterday, I don't know why I was feeling kind of depressed and I was like, I am going to play a video game on the couch. I didn't have it. I don't have a console. I don't have any way to do that. So I go down to the video game store and I'm like, I would like one PlayStation or Xbox. It doesn't matter. And they told me you can't do that. You have to get an invitation to buy one. That's the

way that all gaming consoles work now. And so I just need to ask you as a video game guy, what the fuck is going on with video games? Why can't you just go buy a video game machine? Well, if you collect six Steam decks, then your punch card is full and you can get a PS5. No, it's my understanding is that the well, full disclosure, I used to work at IGN and I would know this shit. I'm lapsed. That was like four, five, six months ago. So I believe, though, that that should be turning a corner soon. Actually, chip shortage and the video card shortage kind of has already broken those 30 80s. I have no idea what I have. I gotta know. I've got a gaming laptop that I bought a year or so ago and another fit of depression.

And so I just I realized eventually why am I trying to buy a PlayStation? All I want to do is play Grand Theft Auto 5. I can just download that on Steam and buy a controller and plug it in, plug it all into my TV. So it's fine now. I figured it out. But I was briefly like back and punch that clerk in the mouth square. No, he was he was like, yeah, I mean, he wasn't being rude. It's just like, I didn't realize we'd gotten to there with video game concepts where you have to get an invitation like dinner with a shake. What is happening here? I remember at work when the PS5s were coming out, they told us all to sign up for X number of lottery tickets because if we didn't get enough consoles to go around for the staff, we wouldn't be able to cover stuff,

which is the entire livelihood of the publication. It's wild. What a weird situation. Yeah, it's it's something else, Michael. Michael, we're talking about Christopher Columbus, Michael Swame, Small Beans Network, formerly of cracked dot com. That's right. Please don't put my name directly next to the film. Kill me now. That's true. Michael, yes. You ready to get back to Columbus? Absolutely. Ohio or otherwise. Yeah. So Michael, as our story comes back, it is 1492. Now Columbus has done sailed his ass right across an ocean blue, and he stumbled into a Caribbean island full of people who he immediately thinks are number one, hot. He repeatedly comments on how good looking they are. And number two, good potential servant slash slaves. Now, according

to his journals, the first thing he focused on trying to do was convert them to Christianity, and most importantly, to make sure that they thought that all white people were chill dudes. Now he did this in a couple of ways, mainly by handing out various trinkets. Here's how he wrote about it in his diary. I, in order that they would be friendly to us because I recognize they were a people who would be better freed from error and converted to our holy faith by love than by force, to some of them I gave red caps and glass beads, which they put on their chests and many other things of small value, which they took so much pleasure in and became so much our friends that it was a marvel. And one of the things that's like really funny here is that he thinks like you get

all these writing from the Spanish at the time about how silly these people are because they'll like trade gold gyms for like useless baubles. But none of them ever considered the fact that like, maybe to these people, they're both useless that like a glass bead and gold are both a rock. A bout is valuable to each other, right? Like neither of them do anything. They just look nice. If you've never gotten high and the thought gold is just a rock though, man. Like it's just a rock. Someone just decided. It's just a rock that sat out in the sun the most according to Play-Doh. And by the way, handing out red caps, I believe this is the official origin of the MAGA cap. So you can play that. He started it. You might actually, you might draw,

I don't know. I don't know enough about fucking Italian history in this period to know how meaningful it is. But like you got to remember, he comes from a place where colored clothing is illegal. So I don't know. That's that's that's interesting. We got the latest hot shit, this contraband. Look at this kids. It's fucking red. The color of passion, my friend. You don't tell the pope and I won't tell the pope. My rods and cones are overwhelmed. And it's also it's worth noting that like, while this is often referred to as gift giving, like him handing out trinkets, it seems based on the descriptions you get that like the natives consider that they are consciously like entering an exchange with him. Like he's giving them stuff that they assume he

values because they're giving him things that they value, right? They're assuming he's not being a huge prick. Yeah, they are assuming he's not being an asshole. They're like, oh, we got to give him some nice stuff. He's giving us all this nice stuff that we've never seen before. Like they're giving him nice cotton thread and like live parrots, which Columbus thinks are delicious. He is you got to give him credit with one thing. I don't know. This is I found this compelling, at least a lot of the Spaniards, especially once they start settling in these islands, refuse to eat the local food. It's actually a massive problem. They have to like keep shipping livestock over from Spain because people decide that like their cuisine is gross.

Columbus is not one of those guys. He actually gets sick a bunch because he will eat anything these people hand him, which credit where it's due. That's how you're supposed to travel. Yeah. True. So one item he would give them in return are these tiny hawksbells. And these are like, if you're doing falconry, these are like little bells that you tie the tide of birds and use to track them when they're like flying away. I guess it's just a thing that it was easy to get a lot of so that they could have a shitload of these to hand out. But he gives out a lot of hawksbells. And that's going to be noteworthy later. So just keep the hawksbells. Yeah, they're the Livestrong bracelets of the era. If the Livestrong bracelets led directly to a suicide genocide.

Yes. Here we go, Columbus people. Buckle up. The people who lived on the island that Columbus had discovered and then taken possession of for the crown were Tainos, members of the Arawak group. Now, over the coming days, he met with many different like people on this island, many different like kinds of Arawaks, because there's all these different right, like it's pretty broad population, you know? And I think these are kind of like grouping by by languages. And these guys gave him a bunch of gifts of unknown types. You know, we get he writes down some of them. But usually he just writes a tenon is like they gave us trinkets. We don't actually know what that means. They may have been like handing him works of art decorations, clothing, stuff that

like could be because these people believe a lot of them at least believe that he's like a bit like some sort of celestial visitor, right? So it's possible they're giving him like cultural artifacts of significant value to them. And he's just like, yeah, they just gave me some crap because it's not gold, right? Like that's the only thing that he actually ever seems to notice. He calls their gifts tedious. Fishing around his ridiculous panellins. What do I got? What do I got in here? Yeah, yeah. The only things that he like shows any appreciation for are the small pieces of gold jewelry that he sees on some of their bodies. Now, it's worth noting that our friend Carol Delaney absolutely fawns over the descriptions Columbus writes of people and geography.

She glosses over the fact that he like she talks about like what a good like anthropological attention to detail that he does that he has, which is interesting because he's also like dismissing all of these different gifts. They're giving him his trifles, which I would say is bad anthropology, but I'm not an anthropologist here. So in short order, Columbus takes his little fleet away from this first island, which is probably San Salvador, and heads towards Cuba, which he thinks is Japan, right? And he will think that until the day he dies. They were his last words. And yeah, I mean, look, it's you're running to ceviche, you think it's sushi, it's happened to all of us, you know, same food basically.

Yeah. So yeah, he decides that. And part of the reason why he's so like fired up to get to Japan, number one, he's still looking for that great Khan, right? He's still looking for like some evidence of these massive Asian civilizations that he knows are supposed to be here and supposed to be ready for Christianity. And the other thing is that based on his kind of like, these conversations he's having with the locals, and they're not really conversations as well as much as like kind of gesture based discussions. But he kind of puts together that the gold he's found, the little pieces of gold came from that island. So he's like, all right, that's where the gold comes from. And obviously, that's the number one thing. So as he leaves this first

island and heads for Cuba, he captures a bunch of people and takes them with him. He's a random locals that he imprisons on his ship to ask his guides. Now, in her book, because she's terrible, Carol Delaney describes these people as willing and eager guests, friendly natives excited to show the white people around. This is not true. These captives told Columbus that there was an island, like part of the evidence for the fact that these people were not willing guests is that they told Columbus, like as they're sailing to Japan Cuba, they tell Columbus, there's an island on the way. And they're like, Oh, yeah, we've seen people there. And they have like these huge gold bracelets that they wear on their arms and legs. It's the most gold anyone has around here with

them for a while. We'll take you there. We'll introduce you to them, right? And as soon as they get to the island, all of the Teno prisoners he's taken, run the fuck away. They absolutely they fucking escape. So he's annoyed by this and he sends an armed party to the shore to recapture them or to capture somebody else. He also he can't he feels like since he's gotten close to the island, he can't go past it without taking possession of it, right? The exact way he writes this is that it was my wish to bypass no island without taking possession. And this is another thing Carol fails to mention. So I'm going to quote from Lawrence Beargreens book next quote, he dispatched several seamen in hot pursuit of the fugitives chasing them ashore. But as he

ruefully noted, they all fled like chickens. When another dugout canoe innocently approached with a man who came to trade a skein of cotton, some of the sailors jumped into the sea because he wouldn't come aboard and sees the poor fellow as a replacement detainee. Observing from his vantage point on the poop deck, Columbus sent for him and gave him a red cap and some beads of green glass which I placed on his arm and two hawks bells which I placed on his ears. That is the standard issue trinkets of little value and I ordered him back to his dugout. So his plan here was to bait the hook. He wanted the locals to approach him with trust so that he could capture more of them. Right. So he like takes this guy puts him back on his boat with a bunch of trinkets

and sends him off. Hopefully so that he can like question the others about gold and all that stuff. And this tactic is pretty successful. People are generally very friendly for him. And there's a few reasons for this. Some of it is that he is giving people gifts from time to time and so they'll go back and do like there's some dude and he's handing out shit. Let's go meet him. And the other reason is that as Columbus kind of surmised, they saw him as and his men as quote men who came from the heavens. Now, it is hard for us to know precisely what their beliefs were here. Right. We don't have the kind of context that we would like because they are genocided. I mean, he took all their art and shit and they did trinkets and trinkets through

that shit overboard. Yeah. Yeah. It is generally accepted that the people indigenous to a lot of these islands had popular beliefs. And again, you're talking about multiple groups of people, right? They're all into these kind of broad language groups, but that doesn't mean they're like they're often at war. They have different opinions of each other like right there. They're anyway. It is very likely that some of these people had popular beliefs that divine or divinely inspired beings were going to visit them one day. And it was kind of like a prophecy. Some time it may have been kind of like an apocalyptic prophecy, maybe sort of you might even view it as a little bit like kind of Christian rapture like readiness, you know?

Well, yeah. There are beliefs like that all over the world, right? It's core to almost every religion. Yeah. Yeah. Ultimately. Just that at some point in the distant future, we will meet this magical thing that we always it's human nature to want to eventually meet or connect with or be one with the thing you made up. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, exactly. And it's one of those things. So there there probably were some prophecies that sort of led some subset of the people he's meeting to believe that he and his Spaniards are divine visitors or celestial visitors or some something ethereal in otherworldly. It's also worth noting, though, that whenever we talk about prophecies like this, there's

like a nasty tendency to act as if these beliefs are universal. It gets flattened. So we say the people of these islands believed this or that. And we're talking about large decentralized groups on many islands. Human beings just don't work that way, right? They don't all believe the same thing just because they all live in the Caribbean. And oddly enough, there's a passage from Carol Delaney's book that does a decent job of making this clear. It's one of the little pieces of kind of insight we get into how varied beliefs might actually have been on the ground. Please note, this is the beginning of Robert's turn to pro Carol Delaney. By the end, he's super pro. Well, you know, I just I haven't found this anecdote and the other stuff I've read about

Columbus. And I found it fascinating because it answered this question I always had as a kid when you'd hear like, oh, they believed this or that. And it's like, well, they didn't all, right? Because we don't, you know, like there must have been sex and schisms. And anyway, I find this interesting. At one stop, an old man who had heard of Columbus approached him with a desire to engage in a theological discussion. Perhaps he had heard that Columbus was interested in religious beliefs, or he may have cleverly used this dialogue as a way to protect his people. Columbus, for his part, must have jumped at the chance to have a discussion with a learned native about their beliefs. They talked about the soul and what happens to it after death.

The old man explained that his people believed that any injury to the body also affected the soul and begged Columbus not to injure any of the people. Columbus assured him that he only hurt bad people because that was what his sovereigns had commanded. Unlike others who believe Columbus was some kind of God, this man told Columbus that to his face that he was, quote, mortal like everyone else. Columbus was not offended and wrote that the old man expressed his thinking with excellent judgment and courage. So that's interesting to me. Yeah, you get these little like hints of the variety of beliefs and thoughts that might have existed in this population. Oh, yeah. And just the recurring motif of don't worry, I only hurt bad. I only hurt bad people.

The core of all Western civilization. Yeah, he is. You might, we talk a lot on this show about like whiteness and the fact that whiteness is like an idea with shifting boundaries that changed over time. But you might say Columbus was the first white guy. Like he sounds like one for sure. Yeah. He's got like the talk, right? He's got it all right. You could you could put this guy in like the George Bush White House and he could be delivering fucking press conferences on carpet bombings. It's great. So as much as she tries to paint him as an unbiased, open minded cultural anthropologist, Columbus's own writing makes it clear that his only interest in these people was using to find and mind gold for his Jerusalem goals. He wrote very little

about their actual culture. He brushed over their religion. Again, you have to remember that what he said about their religion is they don't have one, right? Because he didn't he didn't understand it. So he assumed that they were just like a blank slate ready for Christianity. He ignored their social order almost entirely. He didn't really understand the way they were ordered and who was in charge. He showed very little to no interest in their agriculture, except to rave about the quality of that their food. And even that may have been kind of out of desperation as much as anything. Because as the days were on, they keep not finding gold, right? They get these little trinkets. But there's no sign of these gold mines that he had told the king and queen were

going to be here in like huge quantities. So he may have been playing up the only stuff that he thought was of value, right? Because yeah, but yeah, he doesn't care about the people or their culture. So he's like, well, the food's pretty good. Maybe we can take that. Just imagining flying saucers coming. And we're all excited about first contact. And aliens arrive. And they're like, is Arby's open? Yeah, order a bunch of shit. And we're like, do you want to have like cultural interchange? They're like, don't bother us. No, no, you're good. I don't care about that, dude. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then one of them writes home, gets like asked by his boss. So do the humans is like religion a big deal for them? No, I don't think so, man. I don't really think it's a big

deal. Arby's though. They got the meats. Two of these things for $6. It's brilliant. It's like walking around Jerusalem looking for a fucking sandwich being like, wow, these people don't have a religion at all. Meanwhile, you have an abduction quota, and it doesn't matter who doesn't matter. Just take them all. Take them all. Just numbers. Well, we are getting to the abduction quota. So the main thing that he does in his writing here, rather than again, Carol Delaney is like just fucking hard as hell about trying to portray him as like this this like anthropological savant. I think Lawrence Beargreen gets it more correctly when he describes Columbus as writing about the new world that he's found as a quote tabula rasa

in which his sovereigns would leave a lasting imprint of empire. Columbus wrote that quote, your highnesses will command a city and fortress to be built in these parts and these countries converted. And I certify to your highnesses that it seems to me that there could never be under the sun lands superior to them and fertility and mindfulness of cold and heat and abundance of good and pure water. And the rivers are not like those of Guinea, which are all pestilential, which is obviously Portuguese have Guinea, right? So he's trying to he's he's he's not to the fact to the extent that he describes all of this lovingly. He's not doing it out of legitimate interest. He's doing it to try to make it attractive to the king and queen.

It's a sales pitch. Yeah, it's a sales pitch. He's shown no interest in learning these things. No, he's it's gold. It's just gold. Yeah, it's a sales in part because as per the deal he has with them. If this turns into a colony and there's trade, he gets like a quarter of the profits forever, right? Like that's part of why he's trying to sell them on this place. Everything he's writing is like he's like a fucking, I don't know if you yeah, he's he's he's he's a salesman, right? Like that's what he's trying to sell is this land other people live on. And part of the way he's selling that is like, and they're barely even real, like they're not here. They don't care. Like they'll do whatever you want them to do. Yeah, he's playing life like it's Civ 3 before they had

all the like theism and additional mods. It's just I clicked on your shit, dude. It's my color now. It's my stuff now. Yeah. So a write up from American heritage summarizes Columbus's feelings after first contact with the Erawak on San Salvador, quote, two days after the first landing of the expedition on the tiny island of Guanahane in the Outer Bahamas, which Columbus christened San Salvador, when your highnesses so command, they could all be carried off to Castile or be held captive in the island itself, he wrote, because with 50 men, they could all be subjugated and compelled to do anything one wishes. He said the line. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now the Tino did try to introduce Columbus and his men to their food and to various

inventions of their culture. And some of these did take the most exciting invention that they found that the Europeans found was the hammock. They had not invented hammock technology yet. We get our word hammock from from the the Erawak language. And this is a big deal, because like among other things, right, think about a boat and the way boats are constructed. People don't have rooms on boats in this day. So you're just all sleeping in a pile around whatever ships boy is like too slow to evade capture by the mob. Right. Yeah. The image is just sailors like on the floor on a shelf sleeping. Yeah. The hammock is going to revolutionize sleeping on boats. Wow. You know, anyway. So, you know, there was a genocide, but at least the world got

the hammock. We got the hammock. It's a great. It is. I just I want to see that packaged as a PSA hammocks worth it. We think so. The United hammock ad pitch. It's just like a devastated land mass graves. The hammock worth it. A Native American in a hammock. Yeah. A single tier. We know the deal. We know the drill. So slowly as the days turned into weeks, Columbus and his crew began to learn bits and pieces of the local language. Now, the most important phrase that they learned was don't be afraid and pro tip. Somebody that's chilling. It's really fucked up, right? If anyone starts a conversation, that's the number one way to know someone means to hurt you. If they start by saying, don't be afraid, then you need to be very frightened. That's a shooting

word, Michael. That is that is a shooting phrase. If an alien comes to my door saying that I am not going to assume that my trinkets. Yeah. What is your word for come with me to a second location? Is that could you condense it to one phrase? How do your people say leave your cell phone behind? So Carol Delaney gives Christopher big ups for realizing that, quote, the natives were not speaking gibberish as later. So many Europeans attributed to primitive peoples and that it was important to learn their language. He figured out that humans speak language. Christopher. Yes. One of his many achievements. But still he and his men were not very good at the task of learning the local language. Six weeks into their journey, he wrote, quote, I do not know

the language and the people of these lands do not understand me nor do I nor anyone else that I have with me them. And many times I understand one thing said by these Indians that I bring for another. It's contrary. Nor do I trust them much because many times they have tried to flee. But now, pleasing our Lord, I will see that the most that I can and little by little I will progress in understanding and acquaintance. And I will have this tongue taught to persons of my household because I see that up to this point it is a single language. Now, first off, it is like a group of languages, but it's probably broadly like, you know, you go to like the the Balkans and there's like the different kind of Serbo Croatian sort of dialects. And they're all different languages.

But like like Ukraine, if you if you speak Ukrainian, you can communicate to someone in Russian with vice, right? It's probably is kind of like that. But these are different islands. So you have to assume they are not, in fact, just one single language. But yeah, anyway, it's interesting to me that he's like, there's a lot that's interesting here to me, including the fact that he's like, I can't trust them very much because they keep running away when I capture them. Weird things I've learned about these people don't like kidnapping, real anti kidnapping vibes on the natives on these islands. It's just weird to imagine the because I know, because I know the way history and human beings

work that there must be areas where I live with a similar level of delusion and I just swallow it. But the idea that he can think that and just be like, that's weird. How does that not hammer home the core value of oh, I see they're like me, they're having the same experience I'm having. But if they were kidnapped, it's just bizarre that people yeah, their brains that much. I don't know that I don't know that I think you do live with that level of delusion. I think we all live with areas in which our level of knowledge is that incomplete. But what he's saying is a delusion and it's a delusion because as both a religious fanatic and an obsessive narcissist, he is incapable of looking at anything that happens to him through any lens other than

how it affects his ambitions. And so his interpretation of reality has to be tortured and twisted in order to make further those ends. No matter what is happening, he has to find a way to translate it in that way. And I don't think you have that Michael having known you for a while. Well, if I'm losing at a video game, I do blame the controller that we all do a degree of this. Yes. Yeah. Yes. In his case, the controller is several hundred thousand people with their own culture in religion. It's weird and bad that they want to not be abducted. It's like because I want to abduct them. What is the problem here? Yeah, I call it their fatal flaw. Lovely people otherwise. The fact that he needs to learn this language so that he can better convert and capture

them is what convinces, according to Delaney, this is what convinces Columbus that he needs to quote, take six Indians back with him when he left for Spain so that they could learn Spanish. Now, she assures us that the experience was meant to be reciprocal so that his family could learn that it's like, you know, it's like a gap year cultural exchange for these people. That's how Carol describes it. It's also the very first iteration of this is America. Speak American. They got to learn Spanish. They're just going to learn Spanish. That's just going to be easier here. I'm going to be honest. It is amazing. There is a type of person and maybe Columbus is the first that when you stumble upon, find yourself in a place surrounded by people who speak and

believe differently than you. Your first thought is like, well, I got to make everybody a little bit more like me. This is going to do. Someone's got to help these people. Yeah. Yeah. What do you call this place? Lisbon? No, that ain't going to work. No, no, no. United Lisbon. So she describes this as like, yeah, these people are excited to learn from him and he's going to learn from them. And it's just this lovely cultural exchange that's going down. Oh, yeah. Bear Green describes this as a much uglier process where there do seem to be some Tino who were excited to see Spain, as you'd expect, because again, they're not all one people. And anytime you get like effectively aliens coming, some people are going to be like, well, shit, yeah, I want to see what I got to see

what's going on there. Right. The whole process was in fact closer to abduction than anything. Quote, on Sunday, November 10th, a dugout canoe arrived with six men and five women to pay their respects. Columbus returned their hospitality by detaining them. That's Columbus's words in expectation of returning to Spain with them. He bolstered their number with seven additional women and three boys. He explained his thinking this way, I did this because the men would behave better in Spain with women of their country than without them. His decision, he said, was based on his experiences detaining the inhabitants of Africa's west coast to Portugal. Many times I happen to take men of Guinea that they might learn the language in Portugal.

And after they returned, it was expected to make some use of them in their own country, owing to the good company that they had enjoyed and the gifts they had received. But matters never turned out as hoped. The problem he decided was that without their women, the men would not cooperate. This time, the result would be different. His latest captives, having their women, will find it good business to do what they are told. And these women would teach our people their language, which he assumed is the same in all these islands of India. That is indistinguishable from an MCU supervillain. It is. If we threaten their wives, they'll do what we want. Now, Michael, you didn't mean to do this, but you actually made it a little bit

less fucked up in your head there. So this is an interesting point. In Bear Green's write-up, it just sounds like he has detained these guys with their wives, right? Like he's detained men with the women that they were like in relationships with. Yeah, that's right, buddy. He doesn't. They're interchangeable to him. I'm gonna I'm gonna quote from another write-up from American Heritage that makes a point I did not see noted elsewhere. And this is them quoting from Columbus's journal. Afterwards, I sent to a house which is in the area of the river to the west, Columbus says in his journal. And they brought back seven head of women, small and large, and three children. I did this because the men would comport themselves better

in Spain, having women from their land when without them. So again, he is kidnapping seven head of women to keep the male captives docile. He uses the phrase, the exact way he writes this, is cabezas de mujeres, which is the way you it's the way you'd say he's saying seven head of women. Exactly. The exact same way. So number one, that's pretty bad. And number two, he is he is like. He doesn't understand that people have individual relationships. He's just taking he's like, well, I've got guys, I got to get girls, got to collect the set. He's just grabbing random women to go with these men. Guys, seven girls. And because like they are all traveling, all of the natives in here travel on canoes from island to island. He doesn't I don't think he actually even knows that

like the men and the women come from the same island. Like he may have grabbed people from different villages and just like, no, you got your women with you. Why aren't you happy? And it's interesting. Spanish historian Jose Asincio writes quote, and this is a guy kind of writing around the time. This was a great abuse and bad judgment on the part of the admiral, which was to set a most lamentable precedent and act so apparently trifling, which was to have fatal consequences. And that's interesting, because number one, it does show that like people at the time are recognizing this is an abuse and bad. This is like a bad thing to do to people. But also, it does say a lot that Asincio calls kidnapping a bunch of people, apparently trifling.

Trifling. Trifling. To think that this minor kidnapping of like a dozen people would lead to bad things. Minor kerfuffle, if you will, sticky wicket that. Yeah. So anyway, that's pretty bad. Father Las Casas is even more kind of clear when he writes in his historian quote, one might ask whether it was not a most grievous sin to pillage with violence women who had their own husbands, who was to give an accounting to God for the sins of adultery committed by the Indians whom he took with him, and to whom he gave those wives a sexual partners. And again, that's also you could see where Las Casas is where he's like, well, my God, they've broken the sacred bonds of marriage. Who's going to explain this to God? It's very funny. It's not.

So now again, there are again some people here and there who do show interest in hanging out with Columbus. But Columbus was not always interested in the people who wanted to go with him willingly. There's one point in his diary where a canoe with a man, two women and three kids rose up to his ship and the man begs to join Columbus and like go back to Spain with him. And Columbus is frustrated because the guy is old and can't do hard work. So he's like, well, he's not going to make a very good slave. I don't want this guy. Come on. It's the reason I'm kidnapping the young strapping ones. Just lying in a hammock, judging people's lives. Yeah. Now, Michael, you know who won't kidnap random groups of men and women from a culture and jam them into the hold of a sailing

vessel together to take back to Seville? Our sponsor, Big Hammock. Yeah. Come on down to Big Hammock. Hey, hammocks, we didn't start this situation. Look, all we do is make hammocks now. It's fine. It's just woven thread. Yeah. Hammocks, the genocide was created prior to the start of the corporate charter. That's right. Could it be hammocks that ultimately ended the genocide? Causality? Connection? I don't know. I'm just a hammock. I'm just a, yeah, this is just a company selling hammocks. Okay, here's ads. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. And I'm Alex French.

In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science

you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little

band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Oh, we're back. Michael. So on every island he visits, Columbus sets himself to the task of erecting gigantic crosses. Delaney notes that this is more evidence that he had no intention to enslave the locals, because this is her logic. If he converts them to Christianity, they can't be enslaved, right? So the fact that he keeps building crosses on their land is evidence that he doesn't want them all enslaved, right? He's a good guy. Oh, yeah. When someone puts a cross up in your yard, it's not threatening your aggressive. It is historically always a good thing. Usually. Um, so Beargreen brings up parts of Columbus's notes that Delaney seems to ignore. At one point in November, he did write that the indigenous people were, quote, very gentle and without

knowledge of what is evil, neither murder nor theft, and they are without arms and are so timid that a hundred of them flee before one person of ours. He recommended to the queen, quote, your highness ought to resolve to make them Christians for I believe that if you began in a short time, you would achieve the conversion to our holy faith of a multitude of folk and would acquire great lordships and riches and all their inhabitants for Spain. Now the source of these riches is quite clear in his mind, quote, because without doubt, there is in these countries a tremendous quantity of gold. And in case the extent of his meaning hasn't sunk in yet, gold needs to be mined. The indigenous folks acquired the small amounts of gold that they had, mainly through,

like, searching riverbeds, right, sifting through rocks and riverbeds and stuff to find little bits of gold, but to actually take the quantities necessary to find the gold, and to actually find the quantities necessary to fund his conquest of Jerusalem, proper mines would need to be open. And converted indigenous people couldn't be enslaved because, you know, Christians can't be enslaved, but they could be forced to labor in gold mines as part of their taxes to the new empire there, a part of, exactly. And is there like assaying technology at this time? Like, is he right that there's a bunch of gold? Does he know that? Yes, I mean, they do find gold. Right. Like, he sees, like, when there are, it is like a reasonable conclusion that if you see

a bunch of people with little bits of gold, well, somewhere there has to be a place where that gold's coming from, right? His thinking on that matter is not, like, delusional or anything. He's seeing, like, pieces of gold, and he's like, well, there's got to be a place it's coming from. But as far as reasonable conclusions go, he's not making a lot of them, so I just want to get back to that for a second. They do find this, that is unfortunately where the story's going. They do find gold mines. So on November 11, the Admiral's fleet anchors off the coast of Cuba, which he thinks again is Japan. He and his men quickly put to shore, expecting to find gold. This was where all the people he'd met in islands along the way had told him the gold

came from. But only a few of the folks he meets on the shore are wearing gold jewelry. And again, it tends to be pretty small pieces of gold jewelry. Now, Columbus is seriously starting to worry at this point. He's burning through days. He can't stay out here forever. And he can't just return with some gold trinkets, he feels, because that's not going to be enough to entice the king and queen. So increasingly, he starts to focus on what has he seemed to be like, and what he's come to see is the most readily available source of wealth in this new world, which is its people, right? If I can't find gold, I can at least take and sell the people from a right up in American heritage, quote, on Monday, December 3rd, the Admiral assured the sovereigns that 10 men could cause 10,000 of

the natives to flee. So cowardly and faint hearted are they, and they carry no arms except some rods at the end of which are pointed sticks, which are fire hardened. And again, Delaney is like portraying him as in love with these people and building these deep relationships. And everything he's writing is like, we could fuck these guys up. No problem. They can't stop us. We're gods here. It's wild that he's like, I don't know. You want to make them our religion? You want to use them as slaves? You want some rocks? Like whatever. What's important is they're here and we can fuck them up. I mean, he literally is willing to denude the landscape that he's discovering of whatever. As long as he gets what he, you know, something valuable. Now,

by December 16th, his ideas in this respect have taken definite form, quote, and here's Columbus again. They have no weapons and are all naked without any skill and arms and are very cowardly so that a thousand would not challenge three. Thus they are useful to be commanded and to be made to labor and so and do everything else of which there is need and build towns and be taught to wear clothes and learn our customs. I call them thinky gold. They can be taught to walk and speak as a man. It is also like you come across these people and you recognize, wow, everyone here looks very healthy and very happy and their food is delicious and it's like a paradise. You know, it would be great is teaching them how to labor and forcing them to build towns and wear

pants. Yeah. Well, you hate to see it. It's the seesaw. I don't think his interest is improving their lives. Yeah, it is. It is not. Now, I want to contrast these things, which Columbus writes himself during his travels with how Carol Delaney describes the exploration of Cuba slash Japan by Columbus. Quote, he sent some men ashore, giving instructions as usual, that if the natives fled at their approach, the men must not touch or take anything from their houses. From the very beginning, Columbus notes how generously the natives shared whatever they had, and he did not want his crew to take advantage of them. He demanded that there must be an exchange, for example, beads and bells for needed food supplies. It was unequal to be sure, but trade,

nonetheless, he continually recounts having to restrain his crew from looting villages when the residents fled at their approach. Throughout the diary, he repeats, I did not allow anything to be taken, not even the value of a pin. Now, it's interesting because she's not wrong in that he does repeatedly tell his men not to loot. He writes regularly back to his sovereigns that I said not to loot. But when you just include that part of the story, you get this vision of like a guy who's really just trying to meet people and explore and he's constantly dealing with the fact that his men are unethical and want to just rob things. I would already question why you have a corporate culture where everyone under you is like champing at the bit table. Exactly, exactly. But because

what Carol has done here is cut out every time he's written like, boy, literally three of us could beat all of these people in a war and then we could own them and make them work for us. I'm not going to kill you, but like that, dude, like that. It would be so easy. Right? Yeah. So again, when you're leaving all that out, perhaps you are doing a disingenuous job of writing about a guy's backstory. I'm not an anthropologist like Carol Delaney, but I see that as perhaps missing a key part of the story. Now, one thing we're not going to be getting into a lot in these episodes is the story of the Pinzon brothers. Delaney leaves them out mostly too. All she kind of notes is that in late November, Martin Alonso Pinzon, who's the captain

and owner of the pinta, right? All of these ships had other guys who own them. They were just kind of in service to the Spanish crown. He abandons the fleet out of greed, right? Like not that long after they arrive. He takes the pinta and he just goes separately and does his own thing for a while. And she makes Pinzon out to be basically the villain of the Columbus story, this dangerous incompetent buffoon who tries to like ruin. He's trying to like steal gold while he's away and he he's not listening to Columbus. And it is true that Pinzon takes the pinta and kind of leaves the fleet and returns Spain eventually like separately. It is inaccurate to portray him as some buffoonish foil. Pinzon and his brothers basically handled all of the expedition's logistics. Martin Pinzon

was the only reason Columbus was able to find a crew. He was a very respected sailor in Palos, and he basically convinced others to join the journey. Interviews we have with crew members and their families from a later court case between the two suggests that he basically ran all of the day to day business of the expedition because Columbus wasn't good at it and no one trusted him. Evidence that maybe people were right not to trust Columbus as an expedition leader comes right around Christmas when the Santa Maria sinks like a motherfucker off the coast of what is today Haiti. Now, the precise cause of the accident is unclear, and it is partly unclear because Columbus wrote and revised his own account of the disaster repeatedly in order to like blame

different people. At first he blames the ship's boy who he says is at the tiller at the wrong time and screws up, but as time goes on he starts to claim that the ship hit an invisible reef while he slept, and then finally as Bear Green writes, quote, now he insisted it was caused by the treachery of the master and the people, he's talking about Pinzon here, in refusing to run out the anchor from Stim to Kedge that is Hall off the ship as the admiral ordered. There was no more mention of the hapless boy at the tiller or Columbus's fatigue or the holiday celebrations treachery had taken their place. So basically he's having issues with this crew. A lot of them trust these pinzones and like one of the pinzone brothers fucking leaves with his guys and Columbus

initially is like this thing sank because we were celebrating for the holiday and like I was tired, we didn't like pay enough attention. Then he's like, no, it was this boy. And then he's like, no, it was treachery from the men of Palos who wanted to ruin the expedition and like didn't do what I told them to. I don't know. I think Columbus maybe literally fell asleep at the wheel like it is entirely possible that he just kind of like passes out and the Santa Maria crashes. Just yeah. But yeah, anyway, it's very funny. And what's interesting here is that kind of by that last revision of the story. And what we're seeing is an increasingly paranoid Christopher Columbus because he's under a lot of stress. He has to justify this expedition. And he also has

come to increasingly believe that like, God is directing him, right? God brought him here and he is like achieving a sacred end for the Lord. And so finally a good turn in the story because God's good. God's going to know what to do. This is going to be great. Well, God is telling him that all of the crewmen he has are conspiring against him to stop him from achieving his goals. So the good news is that Columbus, his men and most of their possessions get rescued by a local leader, a casique, which is kind of, I don't know, vaguely speaking, it's like a chief, right? A casique is like kind of a local kind of villager town level leader. Some they seem to have pretty widely differing kind of like numbers of people following. Sure, middle management. No, I mean,

definitely. Yeah, it doesn't look like there's like a long chain. But yeah, one of these guys is named Guacanagari. And Guacanagari is either depending on kind of how you interpret things, either one of these guys who sees the Spaniards as maybe some semi divine, or he's just a very savvy local politician who sees them as powerful military allies against his enemies, right? He recognizes, well, these guys have good weapons. And if I get in their good books, they will help protect me from my enemies, right? So after he rescues Columbus and his men from this sinking, he offers to build houses for the admiral and his men and like let them live there. And he presents them with several gold gifts like he gives them kind of some of the biggest pieces of gold Columbus has found.

And he tearfully expresses his intense desire for friendship. Now, Carol Delaney writes about this at length and presents it as a beautiful example of platonic cross cultural love between these two men. It was made into a Charlie Brown special. Exactly. Yeah, he had Guacanagari are like just the best of buds. Beargreens writing makes it clear that the casique was motivated as much by Realpolitik as anything else. Quote, Striding past groves of trees next to the houses, the Spaniards found themselves escorted to their guest quarters by a good 1000 people all naked, except for Guacanagari who out of respect for his guests now wore a shirt and gloves that the admiral had given him and over the gloves he made more rejoicing than anything. They talked

of strategic matters of the Indians fierce rivals, the Carribs, who carried bows and arrows reminiscent of the Spaniards exotic weapons, but made without any iron and of the way the Carribs captured the Indians at will. At once the admiral said by signs that the sovereigns of Castile would order the Carribs to be destroyed and would order them all brought with their hands bound to reinforce his show of strength. Columbus ordered a lombard and musket to be fired. The two shots powered by gun powder technology unknown to the Indians shattered the Caribbean calm and the Indians fell to the earth. So this guy is like, you can stay here. We can be friends. You know, by the way, would you help us out with these local enemies of ours who are like raiding us and taking some of our people

captive? And Columbus is like, oh, once I tell the queen this, you know, she's going to approve a genocide. We'll wipe them out. Don't worry. Look at look at our guns. And this is going to be noteworthy later because now that the Carribs are kind of in the picture, we've established basically everyone he's met before is like peaceful and friendly. The Carribs are not peaceful or at least it is he has agendas. They're doing things. They can at least be portrayed that way. And if there is a group of people here who are aggressive, well, then suddenly a whole world of military options opens up, right? I guess that's like me. That's like me sticking my fist into a wasp's nest and going, well, this is war. You see that I had no choice. That is basically what happens

here. Now, the show of modern arms has two purposes for Columbus. For one thing, obviously, it does establish his value as an ally to this guy. But it also acts as a show of force to Guacanagari and his people. Because with the Santa Maria Sunk, Columbus doesn't have space on his boats to take all of his people back to Spain. But when the casique offers him a home on the island, the Admiral is like, well, wait a second, I can make a fortress here. Like I can leave some guys behind, we can fortify it. And I'll have built the first strong point for Spanish power in the region. It'll be like the start of our trading system and stuff throughout the islands. And Columbus now, because he's kind of taken with this vision, he starts to see the loss of his

flagship, the sinking of the Santa Maria, as divinely inspired. He was, he decided, quote, preordained to run aground and to meet Guacanagari. And while his initial mission had been simple exploration, he was obligated now by Holy Fiat to actually start colonizing this new land. Quote, now I have given orders to erect a tower and a fortress, all very well done and a great moat. Not that I believe it to be necessary for these people, for I take it for granted that with this people, I could conquer all this island, which I believe to be bigger than Portugal and double the number of inhabitants. So he's like, I'm building a fortress, even though I don't really need one, right? Like I could conquer it without one, but I'm going to make one. Now, of the people

who are already there, Columbus showed now no real pretense of kindness. He described them as cowardly and beyond hope of cure. It is right that this tower should be built, he insisted. And it is as it should be being so far from your highnesses that they may recognize the skill of your highnesses subjects and what they can do so that they may serve them with love and fear. So he's like part of what he's saying here is that the reason we should build a fortress here is to show these people is to have is to provide a physical like a physical example of the power of the Spanish crown, right? Right. We don't need this fortress because to defend ourselves from them because they're harmless. What we need it for is that they never forget that now they're

subjects of the king. Yeah, exactly. We are Pennywise. We live off their fear. Yeah. Yeah, we're going to build us a little death star in the middle of their nice little Caribbean island. So they never forget that the empire is on their fucking neck. Absolutely is. Yeah. Again, construction on the dome, the death dome. That is that is his brilliant idea. So he said he leaves about 40 of his guys there to create a new settlement and they're meant to build up infrastructure using native labor to help and collect gold for Spain that's going to be there upon their return. Carol Delaney writes that the men he left behind were just super jazzed for the opportunity. Quote, while once his men had desperately feared they would not be able to return to Spain,

they now began to haggle who over who would be fortunate enough to stay on the island, while Columbus and the rest of the crew would attempt to return to Spain on the tiny Nina. So that's good. Now, Michael, let's let's let's let's think here. Let's war game this out, right? You've got these people who Columbus has already said every single time they come upon a village with people. He has to stop them from stealing, right? Right. And now he's like, I'm going to leave some of you here alone with weapons. And they're all suddenly very excited to be in that crew. Do you think they have plans? Meanwhile, I'm going to put this fox in this grain and this duck in my boat all together. And I'm going to go over there. Do you think maybe something bad

might be about to happen with these guys? But you know, who would never rob an island of people blind? Because I don't think physically possible, if you're going to say what I think you're going to say. Yeah, that's right. The products and services that support this podcast. When sets up the island that you can hunt children on, which by the way, Michael, you and I should hang out on one of these days. It's a great, great place for a vacation. Any excuse. They're not, they're not robbing their island off the coast of Indonesia. They're creating value. You know, that island was just uninhabited by anything other than people when they came here. And now they've turned it into a hunting preserve. You know, that's value, right?

Well, before that, we, we weren't aware that cloth could be cut in the shape, that shape, that apron shape. It wasn't worth it for the apron. The apron alone has made their island worthwhile. Michael, here's some ads. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, Hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic

historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to do the ads? From I Heart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly

convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine,

I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, we're back. So, you know, Columbus is it's interesting here because like he is he's leaving these guys behind and a lot of them are very excited to get to stay on the

island and get up to the shit they're going to get up to. But it's also worth noting that like Columbus is potentially dooming them all based on his own vanity and desire for advancement, because he's very good at navigating, right? He has navigated his way to and through the Caribbean with extreme facility, but the notes that he's written on how to get there and back are totally nonsense from a nautical point of view. Purposefully, he has written the wrong way to get there and back in his notes because he doesn't want to risk getting intercepted by a foreign power and giving them directions to the new world, right? Now, that's reasonable in a way, right? Because this is a valuable secret. Wouldn't you do it in code or in some way that you could

still understand where you're going? Well, he can. He knows how to get there. Okay, great, great. But no one else. He's so here's the thing, though. He's leaving all these dudes behind and no one else is going to be able to find that. Right? That's where he to have died on the voyage and people died for no fucking reason back then. All of those guys would have just been doomed. It's also the screenwriter and me just can't get over what a huge turn in like dooming so many lives that that moment is where he decides in his sick little brain, oh, I was supposed to stay here. Why? Because I'm supposed to take dominion of this land, all of it. You're like, done, done, done. Yes.

But it is funny that he is essentially gambling the lives of his men on the hope that he, a middle-aged guy in the 1400s, isn't going to like die and leave them stranded forever. I find that also funny. Obviously, that's not a particularly great crime in the Columbus canon, but it does say a lot about him as a dude that he just doesn't even think about it, not for a second. It's there is an ounce of concern. What if we need to get back? We're, you know, left at the big rock or whatever. Yeah, man, you just say like, come on, figure it out. So Columbus begins his journey home on January 2nd, 1493. But despite days of begging from the casique, that he stayed to provide protection from the caribs. Before he left,

he christened his new settlement on Hispaniola, Navidad, and wrote in a letter to his sovereigns that when he returned to the island, he was sure that he would, quote, find a barrel of gold that those who were left behind would have acquired by exchange and that they would have found the goldmine and the spysary. And those things in such quantity that the sovereigns before three years are over will undertake to go and conquer the Holy Sepulchre. For this, I urged your Highnesses to spend all the profits of this my enterprise on the conquest of Jerusalem. Well, all right, next to him. Yeah, he's like, it's going to be great. It's going to change the world guaranteed. Well, because what he's saying here is that what I'm leaving them on the island to to collect gold

and find a mine and find spices, which number one, Carol Delaney is like, he just wanted them there to watch his friend and to set up a settlement so people could live essentially set up a human Bitcoin mine. Yeah, that's actually what he's doing. And he wants he's doing it all for Jerusalem, baby. So one of the last things Columbus did was he delivered a letter to the man he was leaving in charge of Navidad. It contained instructions and was signed. Instead of with Columbus's usual signature, it was signed with something new. This is the first time he starts using what instead of like his signature is this bizarre glyph that he invents for himself during the voyage. Sexy. And he creates this like glyph to sign things with because he's now grown convinced

that he's being guided by God to some holy end. And here's how Carol Delaney describes this. The sigil resembles a ship in full sail and consists of three rows of letters in the shape of a triangle. The meaning of the last line is clear. Expo Farins is a combination of Greek and Latin words, meaning Christ bearer. Columbus must have believed that he had made good on his identification with his namesake, Saint Christopher. Though during the voyage, Columbus must have given much thought to the letters in their arrangement. To this day, they remain undeciphered despite the efforts of many people through the ages. What interpretation is that the initial stand for service at the top and then some Altissimi Salvadoris on the second

line and Christe Maria Jesu on the third, all of which translates as I am the servant of the most high savior, Oh Christ, Mary Joseph. Another interpretation is Servidor Sus Alstecas Sacras Christo Maria Isabel, that is the humble servant of their most sacred majesties, Christ, Mary and Isabella. So he's he's he's kind of gone full extremist here. He's he's he's like built himself a logo that doesn't that number one. He's like primarily identify yourself. Yeah, he is. By the way, he is he is signing himself now as like the agent of God, right? Yeah, like the person who is going to like bring about the apocalypse and but it's designing of Jerusalem. Yeah, like put it in a little cool triangle. He's spending a lot

of time in his room writing it out. Yeah, he's got a laser. We never got his notes, his little trapper keeper as he figured out how to do all the fail the alternate ones and takes and little shitty was going to doodle. Anyway, that's that we're now at like full Christ bearer Columbus, who is number one convinced that he and by like he and the sovereigns now own this place, right? Because again, he part of his deal with them is that if they take it, he gets to be the governor and he gets a cut of all the profits. And he's also convinced that he is being directly guided by God to take possession of this in order to fund a holy war. So that's it is striking how often people who have acquired or on the verge of acquiring completely like, you know, unevenly

levered like advantage over something or to suck a huge amount of resource up, yeah, suddenly decide that it's good. This is happening. And God wants this to happen. And it's great. And that's why it's fine. I love it. I love being on the show, Robert. I'm glad this is all we ever do together episode after episode. Yes. Yes. Next, we will be talking about Christopher Columbus's feet. Now, this is largely going to be based on, you know, my personal theories slash erotic dreams. But right, I think people will still get a lot out of it, Michael. I hope you do. I am turgid. So let's go. You have any plugs you want to plug before we roll out? God, not after that. Thanks for the opportunity, Robert. Always have a blast here. Yeah, my name is Michael Swame.

You can find me on Twitter mostly at Swame underscore corp. And if you want to hear me on a whole variety of podcasts, search up small beans, which is the name of my imprint, or head over to patreon.com slash small beans. I've also got another show that's not on that network called One Upsmanship, a brand new video games podcast on the I heart network. Check it out if you're interested in video games as an art form, because that's what we think it is. By we, I mean myself and my cohost Adam Danzer. Again, that's the number one. And then Upsmanship. Check it out. Excellent. All right. The episode's over. Go home, everybody. Behind the bastards is a production of cool zone media. For more from cool zone media,

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