Historically High - Christopher Columbus

Episode Date: October 9, 2024

In 1492 this freakin guy Christopher Columbus took his ass across the ocean blue looking for a western sea route to the lands of Asia and India (which he actually thought were the same place and same people). What transpired saw the Nina, the Pinta, the Santa Maria (Boats and Hoes) sail across the Atlantic, which granted hadn't really been attempted too often, and hit landfall in the Caribbean. Now this clown never set foot on the land that would become the United States, yet we have a city in Ohio, and had a recently renamed National Holiday in his honor. The guy had no idea he wasn't in India which is why Indigenous Peoples got saddled with the Indian moniker for so damn long. So he basically stumbles onto landfall and like a good colonizer it didn't take him long to make the locals life hell... Welcome to the Columbus episode. Sponsors: Flintts Mintshttps://www.flintts.com/ Promo code HISTORICALLYHIGH for 15% offAlso if you want to support the show there's a link below, or don't, whatever is cool with us, but it'd be a lot cooler if you did.Support the show Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Chris and I just did a little pre-class 10-minute discussion. That was not 10 minutes, my friend. Okay, a little longer than 10 minutes. That was a half-hour minimum. About time. So, yeah, we're, I don't know if we're lubed up already quite yet to go for such a big topic. Oh, we're ready. We're ready for it.

At the same time, this is kind of an interesting topic to us because growing up, somehow we've just always had this holiday of Columbus Day. Christopher Columbus, vastly interesting person, but at the same time, kind of a throwaway in history as far as could somebody else have done this. Christopher Columbus, just as a person himself,

kind of seems like he was driven out of desperation to make something of himself, but at the same time, he sold himself as someone, who was purely, is the word, altruistic? Yeah, he, people like this still 100% exist. It's like the, you can go to church once a week, and it just absolves you of all the, like, mean shit that you did,

like, for the previous, like, six or seven days. Like, being mean to, like, food service people or just being an asshole. And it's like, but I still go to church, so I'm still, like, a good person, right? So I still got the receipts when it all comes due. But, like, look, every Sunday I went to church. Church. Yeah, well, you're watching your phone. You're watching fucking Red So on your phone the whole time.

Yeah, well, I mean, it's football season. And to lead into football season, that very apt comparison made by that very smart gentleman sitting to my right is the Devante Adams to my Gardner Minchu. He's the Josh Allen to my Keon Coleman. And he's the Justin Jefferson to my Sam Darnold. That's Professor Chris. What's going on, everyone? Yeah, a little pre-Columbus Day episode for you. A little pre-Columbus Day bashing. Yeah. Which I guess we want to call it Indigenous People's Day now, too, which I'm cool with. Oh, 100%. Yeah. It sounds great.

So pre-Indigenous People's Day, Columbus bashing. Which I will just, let's just get this out of the way. Let's address the elephant in the room. This guy should not have had a day. No. He should not have a city in Ohio named after him. He should not have the country in South America, all that good stuff. Shouldn't be called the District of Columbia.

Yes. Here's the deal. this guy didn't even fucking step foot in North America he got to the Bahamas I'm sorry you need

don't you need an passport to go into the Bahamas yeah okay not not the North American continent didn't step foot here has no fucking reason to have a holiday celebrated Indigenous People's Day

100% should have always been Indigenous People's Day just the simple fact that even having one day for them is far too few but to have someone Columbus is one of those people whose legend and myth

after he died somehow completely just pushed aside all of the like the nasty shit that he did and people only remember him as this guy like discovering the new world we're going to find out that like he did not set out trying to discover the new world

he is this guy stumbles ass backwards into finding and not even finding not even discovering to landing in someone else's home just because the European countries didn't know about it

doesn't mean that they fucking discovered something it was always there there were people who lived there they're simply it's technically invading is what it is if we want to just use the terminology. I found this a new place to invade, and that's exactly what it ended up happening.

Before we actually get into it, it's not going to be full. A lot of it is. Not going to beat around the bush. It's a lot of bashing. Yeah. Yeah, we'll point out the good stuff. We're going to try to draw this straight down the middle

and try not to go one way or the other. Unfortunately, the bad stuff glass is a lot more full than good stuff glass. It leads us to the bad stuff glass. shit. This is just, this is a highway to the bad shit. But we're hot. Chris is hot. I'm hot about this subject already if you couldn't tell. Before we set sale, keep rating, keep reviewing, keep subscribing. Five-star rating would be excellent. It makes us so happy. It opens us up to new opportunities to

hit the algorithms on Apple. We've gotten some fantastic reviews lately on Apple. Thank you guys for reaching out. Also emails, they're awesome. too. So thank you. We appreciate it. Let's set sail. Good old Christopher Columbus or Christophersus Colombo. Yeah, he's... I probably should have pronounced it a little bit easier considering that that's... I'm not used to seeing my own name with us on the end of it, so threw me off a bit. Even just Christopher. I mean, I can't... I've never used that name for you ever, and I don't think I ever will, just because it's way too formal. I only heard it when I was in trouble, man.

But there are so many things that are different. And this is going to sound stupid based upon the time. There are so many things that are different about this world and stay different about this world for so long that now it's so hard to understand that Italy did not exist at this time. Christopher Columbus. A unified Italy. Yeah, unified Italy.

It was just the land of Italy. Italy. Christopher Columbus was from the Republic of Genoa, which is, or Genoa, which is delicious salami. Delicious salami, yes. But Italy proper was not altogether. So you kind of had this kingdom system. Like city states. Yeah. This is after the fall, which you think city states, you think Greece, kind of makes sense that this is what happens after the Roman Empire sort of starts to crumble and fall. because we obviously won't get to it. Well, I guess we will in his lifetime. But it's one of those things where this world is so different that Spain isn't even properly Spain when Columbus is born. Everything is just kind of up for grabs.

You're fighting with the Moors, who are the Muslims that are coming up from Africa to take these lands that are going to be disputed. It's Christianity. This is at the time of the Crusades. all that stuff. It's essentially the Muslims against the Christians, which in terms of Christianity, it's the Catholic church that's kind of running everything with the Pope, right? Pretty much. Which is weird because now Christians and Catholics differentiate themselves. I think that has to do with some sort of the divisions that we've had in England and all of that kind of stuff. But as far as all of that goes, that being said, these are some of my favorite times

because it's stuff like Christopher Columbus was born between August and October of 1451. We can't even nail down a date in 1451 that this guy that we have a day after or had a day after was, we just, we don't know. It was sometime. That's what I'm saying. It seems like kind of a bullshit holiday to like recognize someone for, especially again, considering the fact that he never. set foot in North America. Wasn't it North America, yes, because it was Central America

technically, or was he still down in South America? I don't even know if he went into Central America. He did potentially have some run-ins with the minds that we'll talk about. But again, he just got he got as close to missing it as humanly possible

and then just kind of tapped it. So he was born to Dominico and Susanna in the Republic of Genoa, like we were talking, about. Dominico was like a he was a cheese maker and he was a... He got like a government job like a customs official

or something like that. It just doesn't really come from a whole ton. He's got three brothers, Bartholomew, which is a name that just pops up everywhere. It must have been like Brett or not Brett, probably like Steve. I do not think of Bartholomew. Bartholomew I think of like any type of Italian name.

Uh-uh. Giovanni. There you go. Clearly definitely that way. Vincenzo. and Delegino Diego

Geocomo feels a little bit more Spanish He had one sister Brancientia I'm gonna sell that one Quillianeta He had no real schooling Beyond reading, writing and arithmetic

He was what's considered an autodidact He learned how to read And then he kind of taught himself Through books Started sailing at the age of 14 which I'm pretty young, but back then, if you're not going to school, you got to have a job. You were also considered like an adult at 14. He apprenticed on a merchant boat, and at 15, he took part in shipping an armed convoy to northern Europe, which pretty cool.

He traveled a lot of places kind of in that Atlantic corridor along Europe and Africa. And this is at a time when, you know, we kind of lose track of what. travel was like back then because we're able to go so many places. It's so many different times through so many different methods. Jump in your car, hop a train, get on a plane. Here, you were either traveling horseback, wagon, maybe a cart by foot or by boat. And so the opportunity to essentially leave your country, not only travel around like the Mediterranean, but also to go out and see northern Europe, these were lands that were unheard of to you.

You only heard about these through stories in second-hand or third-hand accounts. So, you know, definitely in the smaller percentage, people like Columbus that actually get out to see these places are, I would say, what, 5%? Maybe less of the population, being able to see things like, or even get out of their country.

There's people to see the ocean all the time. There's people that are fishing to make a living and all that, but they're fishing out in vessels that are, you might go a mile off of shore, maybe two miles off of shore to go fishing. Yeah. And even then it's dicey. Yeah, you're not getting into the vast expanse of what the ocean is.

You're also in the Mediterranean too. Yeah. And I don't know if we've ever talked about this. I would imagine that although the Mediterranean being such a huge body of water can still get pretty dicey, but because it can't have room to build up the kind of swells like the ocean can, it must be much less dangerous, right? Probably, but at the same time,

we don't know how, I guess they knew how big it was, but it would have to be a smaller body of water than it is now, right? I'm not sure. Just because we've had more melt? Yeah, two degree, yeah, yeah. So along those lines, yeah, there probably isn't a whole lot of current.

It would just be more like a bigger lake and these seas are massive. They're huge. It's still hundreds of miles that will take time to get across. But yeah, there's no, I don't know if there would really be much of a tide. I'm sure they still had storms, but there wasn't a whole lot of area for the storms

to build over water. Yeah. To go along those lines, he moved himself out of Genoa to Lisbon, which is in Portugal, from 1477 to 1485. He finally became a man, grew up, needed to leave Genoa.

And in that time, he worked on a sugarboat that would go down and visit Madeira. And so he was traveling further south after going further north with the armed convoys. This just came up in the Revolutionary War episode, the Madeira. Did we ever mention the Madeira wine that that was like one of the most popular drinks? Okay. I don't know if we mentioned it was a popular drink, but I think we talked about drinking it. Yeah, so yeah, the island of Madeira, which just was known for its either sugar production or making wine. But you're headed down in that kind of Africa region.

He ends up marrying a woman named Felipe Péristrello and Monez. If you try to say it Italian, it's easier. You go, Philippa Perestrello. It's Portuguese, though. So it's going to be closer to, like, Spanish or Latin. I'm not trying then. Yeah. She was the daughter of a Portuguese nobleman,

and this was huge to Christopher Columbus because he loved titles. He loved having some sort of cachet about his name. To marry into the family of a nobleman, he got definitely a lot more shine. I think he was kind of involved in more circles. His son Diego was born perfect again between 1479 and 1480.

It's just kind of one of those things. where Diego sort of follows his father and because of the deals that his father cuts Diego's life is pretty good but then also because of how Columbus royally screwed everything up

Diego's life is not great. Yeah. Kind of in his earlier years too while he was stationed in Lisbon not stationed where he was living in Lisbon like Adam said he had visited like Bristol in England Galway in Ireland

he was serving as like a business agent for a couple of wealthy families, like families that were essentially like landed families where they had like a region in which they kind of like lorded over and then paid tribute to whoever the main ruler of that area was. So I think during this time he's also kind of, because this is going to play into when he's trying to actually pitch this whole idea of trying to sail west,

I think it was during this time that he kinds of builds up this salesmanship or has to have because that's what he ends up doing. Hell of a salesman. He could pitch an idea, albeit a dumb idea, very well. So during 1482 to 1485, he's sailing and trading along the West Africa coast. Sometime in 1484, while he's kind of going back and forth doing this, his wife ends up dying. As he's sailing up and down the African coast, of course, these areas are pretty much owned by Portugal, correct? Mm-hmm.

So anything to the south of the... Is it the... No, so hold on. The Azores were right out of... Out from Portugal. The Canary Islands were a little bit south, right? I believe they were headed down more towards Africa. And then after you got past a certain latitude...

Cape Verde? Yeah, so it became Portuguese. They had all the rights to all of that by decree, essentially, of the church. And everything went through the church. So also at this time, Portugal and Spain, are kind of like kingdoms of the church. Like they were little kingdoms into themselves,

but in actuality, their king was actually really like the Pope and the church. These were like their strongholds of like Catholicism or Spain and Portugal, but they also butted heads quite a bit, which is why Portugal was awarded this kind of exclusive trade rights, you know, for West Africa. And so he also starts to get into the slave trade.

this is this is huh yeah it's i mean there's a misconception that i heard a lot i don't know if you knew about it before but something along the lines of like he had started the slave trade which Portugal and spain already had slaves like this wasn't something that he started he was down there picking him up and bringing them back i think what they said is he started the transatlantic slave trade so across the atlantic not just up and down in the

Atlantic. Okay, well that's Yeah, I mean I don't know how much the transatlantic slave trade was happening considering that usually everything that he sent from the west back to the east didn't stick around much. It made it. They just didn't last long after they got there, yeah.

But he still was sending them across technically. Yeah, let's get, let's rewind that a little bit because I feel like we hopped over his wife just kind of randomly dying when he's gone in 1884 or in 1484. He has, this weird propensity for just lucky things to happen to him. And I'll kind of point a couple of these out.

This one seems kind of interesting because he's just gone on a ship traveling, comes back to find out that his wife died. Diego didn't, though. Diego wasn't killed in this. Diego was taken in by, I don't know if it was family, friends, what have you until he got back. But he just loses his wife and nobody really knows. what happened to her.

I'm not saying that he snuffed her out. It just kind of seems like an odd footnote that that happened. I don't think he had anything to do with it from like in a very standpoint. Because if anything, she was what was really tying him to the family and that status that he was seeking so badly. Yeah. By severing that if he did that purposely, Diego wouldn't be enough to keep that tied together because then the family could just be like,

no, man, she's not around anymore. you're not, you're not part of this. Yeah, he's our grandson, you're not our son-in-law. So kind of around that time, he moves to a place called Castile, which is another kingdom that is within Spain. He ends up finding himself an old mistress named Beatrice. Don't know how it's a mistress. I guess maybe it's just because it's out of wedlock.

You'd be considered a mistress. I think so. In 1487 and in 1488, Fernando, his second son, his illegitimate son is born. Kind of an interesting thing because he leaves Diego in Beatriz's watch while he continues to go out and sail. Like he never married her. No. But he left her and he raised by her.

Even the kids weren't his priority. No. Like his priority was going out and being, you know, doing what he felt he was good at. Yeah, it was just sailing. And I'm not doubting the guy's sailing abilities besides just not being able. to identify areas that he's hitting. The guy, all props to this guy, he was a hell of a navigator. He could find some place.

He just didn't know where the fuck that, what the fuck that place was. And he wasn't good at a lot of things outside of navigation, aside from salesmanship, I guess. Well, he had a decent brain on him because he was able to learn Latin. He was able to learn Portuguese. He was able to learn Castilian. He read up on a lot of astronomy, a lot of geography. A lot of geography, I'm sure astronomy comes in here. Huge being a sailor just because you have to be able to navigate at night somehow and using the stars.

Huge in history. He loved reading about Marco Polo. Ptolemy, who had created quite a few different maps. He enjoyed studying a guy named Pliny's Natural History, which I'm sure we talked about because it sounds very familiar from the Darwin episode. He just, he loved reading the Bible, too. He was very, very pious. He was, I don't know how he crossed those two with what he does later on in life. That's what I don't get.

I fucking hate that term, like piety, pious. It just feels like you can use that word. And that's supposed to just paint you in this very positive, holy picture. It's like, the man was pious, but he also performed genocide. Yeah. against the indigenous populations of several places. Like it doesn't, but the way that they justify that,

how you can still be pious and perform that kind of stuff, if it falls into certain little boxes, I don't get how you can ever be viewed that way based upon the things that you've done. Again, this is like my whole point about it is that only since, I feel like maybe within the last like 20 or 30 years, there was that push about like actually learning, learning the backstory and the history about Columbus,

and then kind of bringing to light, you know, it's the revisionist history of actually looking back at something and being like, this isn't what we thought it was. I don't know if we should actually be celebrating this. In the same way that we don't celebrate, you know, Hernan Cortez, was it Hernan Cortez? Or like Ponce de Leon or any of the conquistadors who technically landed very close to where he landed,

not in North America, but that would almost be to the same degree as us celebrating a day for the guys that came over and killed like the Inkins and the Mayans and all that kind of stuff. It's akin to that. But somehow this guy gets a pass

just because he happened to be the first one to start doing that shit. Well, not to say that his theory was right, but his theory did allow for that est... that spreading of the empires. And I think that it's a lot of, like you say, revisionist history.

There's kind of some parallels between, shit, what were they? The Knights of Columbus. The ones that kind of started pushing the narrative here in the United States for Columbus that the daughters of the revolution had in getting Confederate statues placed all around the country. Whereas if you push for something enough

and you kind of find a soft spot where it's not a big deal that you can kind of get a foothold. And once you get a foothold, you can kind of spread the myth that you want to spread. That's true. We're doing what you ask is less work than trying to fight against doing what you ask. So a little bit of backstory,

because we're getting ready to, we're getting ready to set sail. In 1453, a little place called Constantinople Falls. If you don't know about Constantinople, Go back and listen to the episode. We did one on it, and it was fantastic. But Constantinople is essentially a Catholic or Christian held city. It was part of the Roman Empire. It was actually the capital of the Byzantine. Yeah, of the Byzantines. So Constantinople is right on the, it's right on the entrance essentially to like the Bosfer Straits, which lead into the Black Sea. Now, this was huge because it was much easier to transport things via water than it was. was over land via the Silk Road. So the Silk Road actually would have a location at the farther, far eastern portion of the Black Sea. All of that stuff coming in from India and China, the

silks, the spices, all that was then coming there, going through the Black Sea, going past Constantinople, into the Aegean, and then essentially dispersed throughout the Mediterranean. now 1453 rolls around and the Ottomans actually take Constantinople. Now the Ottomans are Muslim. So at this point, they're like, all the Christians get the fuck out and you're no longer able to use the Straits of Bosphorus to start shipping your stuff in and out of the Black Sea. Well, you're part of the Silk Road over land, which is how everything got from Asia into Spain was just, gone. Yeah, because I mean, it's not like you would have to travel way north where it's not an established route, Raiders Band, it's all that crazy shit, and then to even get outside of

the area that the, you know, Ottomans controlled at that point. So it just simply completely shut off any type of trade with that area of the world. So now all of a sudden, Spain and Portugal and all those areas that are so used to having access to all of these things through the Silk Road are like, well, shit, what do we do now? So there becomes this huge priority to try to find a ocean-going route to China, India, the spice islands, Japan, all of that, or Chippanyu. Is that what they called it? Chippanya.

Maybe. Yeah, Chippengue, something like that. So that new route is needed, essentially is the lifeblood for all of this trade. Now, in 1475, this guy named Palo del Pozo Toscanelli proposes this Western route to the Portuguese king. He's like, I think if we just actually sail, I know that China and all of that is east of us, but I think because the world,

and it's been acknowledged at this point that the world is round, the world is fucking round. Crazy misconception that there was more of a general agreement among, I guess, less people. But all of the people that were in the real thinking world just believed that the world was round than there is today where there's more people, there's way more proof,

and yet somehow this flatter theory has come home to roost. The world is round. So he's thinking, okay, well, we can just get the other way to China. So there's got to be, if we just set sail directly west, across the ocean in which no one has really sailed out.

that far to see if there's anything over there, we'll eventually reach China. Well, the Portuguese king is like, I don't think we're going to do that. We know where China is. I think we're just going to try to find maybe a way to go around Africa. We don't think Africa can go all the way down, right? So we're going to try to figure that out.

So, again, this was Paolo Tuscanelli. This is in Columbus. But in 1980, Columbus and his brother kind of have the same idea. They're like, there's got to be a Western. route to China and the spice islands and Indian, all of that. Well, they actually get in contact, Columbus gets in contact with this Toscanelli guy and actually even receives like his maps that he kind of like drew out or that he pieced together. And this is at a time in the world where, you know,

there's only a certain section of the world that's been mapped out. So if you're trying to piece together things, you're doing it from records that have been kept in other countries. You're doing it from word of mouth. You're talking to sailors about things that they've seen. You know, most of these people on these ships are trying to map areas that they're sailing through so they know where it's favorable, where there's shoals, reefs, things like that. And working with his brother, I don't think we mentioned it, but when he moved to Lisbon, his brother Bartholomew actually worked in a map store as a cartographer. So I think working around all of this also kind of helps to kind of build up this idea in both Columbus and his brother's head.

So as people are coming in to get maps to go, you know, out wherever they're going to go as far as like down to England or down to Africa, they're also getting information from all these people coming and being like, hey, what's the farthest you've been? They're like, oh, well, this is where I've been. Well, kind of tell us about it. Can we see your maps? And then they would add to their own maps and try to kind of get a larger picture of what the world actually look like.

one thing that kind of throws me through a loop is there was I don't know if it was a generally held belief or something that was kind of more specific to travelers of the day but maybe it was just more philosophers there was a belief that there was a terra balance I forgot the exact term for it

but basically that in order for the earth to stay in one place there had to be an equal amount of land on the other side of the world that was able to balance the scale so the world just didn't like shift So the world was a washing machine?

Pretty much, yeah. You had to keep everything balanced so it wouldn't like go gung, gung, gung, essentially because it was spinning centrifugal force means that equal weight on each side would keep it from like spinning out of its orbit or whatnot. Yeah, so I'm not sure how they thought that they wouldn't

by going west run into different lands that were the balance of the scale. Yeah, because if the next land they hit was the one that they could have already been across to and they know there's not another ocean there, like, that just means it's all on one side with some ocean. Yeah. Yeah, it's not, yeah, that's... So I'm not quite sure how that played into it. I do know that that was a part of it. I think we talked about that a little bit during Australia episode, because that was the same idea with them believing that there was land below Africa in order to keep everything sort of in balance. But with all of that going on,

King John who is King John the second who was the king of Portugal at the time was just not really impressed with the whole idea like Chris said of sailing west they decided to sail south 1488 a guy named Bartholomeo Dias

again Bartholomew again rounds of Cape of Good Hope which is great news for the Portuguese because the Portuguese have now figured out a southern route to get around giant Africa. I think it's Bartolome U. Bartolum? Oh yeah, because there's no age, huh? So there's Bartolomew and Bartholomew?

Wow, that's easy to tell. So yeah, good old Diaz finds out that guess what, Africa doesn't go on forever. Rounds the Cape or Cape Horn, probably sales. We talked about this too. Like, how do you think like this went about? How far do you think he got around the good, had to get around Cape Horn?

Cape Horn. right the same thing no Cape horn is yeah Cape a good hope is what it is Cape horn I think is the one that is the horn shape or is that South America Cape Horn is South America you're right okay always get those two I know so so he had to obviously start sailing north again and then sail north far enough to be like okay this isn't a huge bay I don't feel like if I keep sailing I'm gonna reach land and then it's gonna just keep going so he determined essentially hey you know Africa ends and we can start going up this way. Gets back, tells everybody any thought of expedition West off the table.

Now, not necessary. We found out another way to go about this. And King John had already shot down Columbus's plans. I don't know if Columbus didn't. The math that he did, he believed, and you're going to have to give me the exact numbers on this, he believed that if he were to head west, it would be 20. 2,800 miles that he would get to go to China. Between 25 and 28, I think.

So there's a plan that he has that going west is 2,800 miles. Now, this sort of gets thrown into a lurch again because we have Roman miles and we have some other type of measurement. But are the kilometers technically? I don't know. There were two different measurements. It's four miles. So the area is kind of condested of how much he said. But he really thinks that this is the plan.

He brings it to John this first time before they decide to go south. John runs it through his guys and everybody else that's below him that's running the numbers like this isn't. There's no way. Yeah, the Kings have councils on like trade, sailing all that stuff. So he, King's not like looking over the proposal and be like, hmm, it looks good. He passes it off and he's like, hey, have my guys look at this. They look at this information. look at the mileage, look at the time that he's proposed to be able to do this, and they basically

just laugh at it. Because even as far back as the third century BC, this guy named Arastathines, Aristotthens, Aristotthens, he was a librarian at Alexandria. He computes the correct circumference, and I think we talked about this during the Library of Alexandria episode, he actually computes the circumference of the earth within a matter of like, what was it, a hundred, to 200 miles. It's pretty close. It was something like fucking dead nuts, especially for that time.

So it's been established what the circumference of the earth is. Columbus's estimates for what the circumference of the earth is, even based upon already recognized fact, is like 33% smaller. He underestimates the size of the planet by 33%.

Now, when you're dealing with selling across the ocean to determining how far something is away, to cut out a third of that distance when it's literally months upon months of travel time, it's a pretty big deal to miscalculate it like that. I looked at the difference,

there were Roman miles and English miles. Roman miles are 1480 meters, whereas English miles are 1524 meters. So not a whole ton of difference, but as far as those estimations go, when you start talking about thousands of miles. Yeah, it becomes a much different look. And like you say, to calculate it that short is everybody that saw their proposal

had to laugh him out of the building. Well, not only that, but, you know, with the knowledge we have today, so he's thinking 2,500 miles. He's like, yeah, 25, 2,800 miles. From Spain to China is closer to the 10,000. mile mark. Going west. Yeah, going west.

Closer to the 10. And that's not accounting for having to actually sail around South America because there was no Panama Canaan. There was no way through Panama at this point. Columbus basically tries to shark tank his way through Europe. That's what it is. Yes. So he has, instead of having all the sharks in one room, he basically is sending out feelers

to any and every ruler within Europe to try to have him, have them fund this expedition. Now, again, this guy is technically. technically Italian. He's Genoese, but he's also going to Portugal. He goes to the King of Portugal. He sends his brother to the King of England to try to pitch this idea. And then he actually goes to the, what you would consider the Spanish Royal Court, which at this point, Spain has unified itself through the marriage of, unified itself, kind of mostly, through the marriage, the political marriage of Queen Isabella and, what was the king's name? King Ferdinand. And King Ferdinand. King Ferdinand was the king of Aragon, which was kind of like the biggest region in Spain.

Queen Isabella was the Queen of Castile, so she was another very large portion. Then you have Granada, which at this point in time, the Moors, so the Muslims have a hold of Granada. There's another kingdom that's not coming to mind right now, but they just kind of capitulated with Ferdinand and Isabella. Ferdinand and Isabella needed to wrestle Granada away from the Moors. That was their modus operandi to reestablish the Iberian Peninsula under one kingdom. And Christianity. And Christianity, yes. The kingdom of Christianity.

First and foremost, Christianity, second Iberian Peninsula. Yeah. So as Columbus is going around to these other countries pitching this idea, he ends up going to Spain, pitching the idea to Ferdinand and Isabella. Isabella hands over the information to, she has her own advisors. Ferdinand has his own advisors. It's a political marriage.

They get along as far as ruling goes, but they kind of are doing their own things and have their ability to kind of like fund their own shed and do their own little pet products and everything. So both the Spanish and the Portuguese both knew based on their information that he had his distances way off.

Well, because of this, pitch he's making to Queen Isabella, I think one of her advisors ends up coming in is like, hey, just an idea, this guy's bat shit crazy, and he's wrong, but there is some chance that there might be something to the West, and if we don't lock this down, he's going to keep going to other people, and if someone else takes a chance on him, he finds something, now that country has the rights to that land. So what we should do is let's put him on retainer. We'll put him on the back burner for a little bit, but we'll pay him. Essentially, what they equated it out to is he was paid the yearly wage of what a sailor would actually be paid.

And once this whole thing with Grenada ends up getting cleared up, we can revisit the idea when we have a little bit more free time, a little bit, you know, our attention's not drawn over here. And then we can talk about this Western expedition. So he has to wait on this. And while Spain waits for stuff in Grenada to kind of mellow out and everything, I think eventually Grenada, it's not, it doesn't take too long, but Grenada ends up capitulating and it goes back into Spanish and thus Christianity, Catholicism, pans. Yeah, they bring the kingdom together. The other part of kind of the planning, I think, to give this a little bit more credence and to try it was they get caught in a Portuguese squeeze.

You never want to get caught in a Portuguese squeeze. It's going to ruin your day. It sounds like a sex position. I'm being honest with you. The Portuguese squeeze happens to be that Diaz goes ahead and finds his way around the Cape of Good Hope. So you have the Portuguese who have a historic Navy who travel along the seas everywhere, and that episode is going to be so cool. But they're your neighbors to the south.

They're the other people that are sharing the Iberian Peninsula that you couldn't take over, that they've been so much stronger than you, even though they're so much smaller of a nation. Which is crazy because you should have a stronger land army and you surround them on three sides. Geography, baby. Mountains, they're locked in. Are they really? Yeah. Okay.

Pretty cool. When we talk about that, they had a lot of, this was a deep high dive one night of, I think you and I were talking about it when I told you that I finally figured out that the Portuguese had an empire. But part of it was their natural land barriers around them made it very, very hard.

Like Sparta? Yeah, pretty similar. But I'm just going to keep saying it. I'm just going to keep saying it. The Portuguese squeeze compiled on top of taking Grenada back, you need to make money somehow. You need a win. Yeah, well, you need a win, but at the same time,

you've got to refill the coffers. And if you can... It's not like you can just tax your colonies for it, because they could rise up. Yeah. You can't, excuse me, tax the Grenadians into giving you that kind of money. So if you can make it over into China a different direction, because now you can't go south because the Portuguese are not going to let you use their route to get around.

You got to figure something out. You got to throw a Hail Mary. The Hail Mary ends up being they bring Columbus in for one more pitch. And again, they run the numbers and they go, I don't think so. It's probably not going to happen. As Columbus was leaving Spain and getting ready probably to head back to Portugal, he gets stopped because King Ferdinand had sent his men down there. I believe maybe Queen Isabella was the one that gave him the final go ahead on it. But they catch him right before he leaves before he boards a ship and they bring him back in and they say, okay, what do we need to do for you for you to go on this voyage for us?

And this is, I think, January of 1492. Yeah. So we're in the year when Columbus it comes up. Jesus. Columbus sails his ass across the ocean blue. We're right there. And I found out through doing this research that we're like the only country that knows that rhyme. And there's a lot more beyond just in 1492 Columbus sails the ocean blue like it's a full poem.

That shows you what portion we get about it. Yeah. Where the emphasis is. But Columbus being a man wanting a title and wanting. Some real good stuff out of it. He goes ahead and tells Queen Isabella, I want to be known as the Admiral of the Ocean. I want to be appointed the viceroy and governor

of all new lands that are claimed for Spain in this journey that I take. I want the right to nominate three different people for any office in these new lands. You guys can choose whatever out of the three that I choose, but as long as I get three says that you get to choose from, we're good. I want 10% revenue from all of the

new lands that we conquer in perpetuity. So forever, for the rest of my life, all the way down into my children. I want the crown to be hereditary, so as I die, my son will succeed. The ownership, vice for you, that kind of stuff. The other deal

that they kind of shot back was that they gave him the opportunity to buy into an eighth of the voyage. Yeah, any business ventures that were going to take place, and involved any of these areas that he discovered and that Spain could lay claim to, he would have the opportunity to buy it and have an eighth essentially of the share of it. So they would have to come to him and be like, hey, we're doing a new thing where it's sugar cane or tobacco.

Do you want in on this? And he would have an opportunity. I mean, this wasn't like people could just get in for an eighth of like the revenue for this stuff that the crown would be doing. They're being required by this contract to basically try to have to offer to cut him in, on these deals and an eighth is huge. Yeah, it's a countries full of riches. These places that they're going to, if you find gold and you get an eighth of all the gold extracted,

you're going to be rich beyond your wildest dreams. There's countries, there's city states that are making less money than you would being attached to one-eighth of the Spanish crown. And to make it clear, no knowledge that there's anything between China and Spain right now. That's where he's planning on going, but in case he happens to run into new,

any new territories or islands off of Japan or China that haven't been claimed. That's what's on his mind. Sorry, if he makes it to China, he gets one-eighth of whatever the trade of goods back and forth between China and Spain are, which again is untold riches. Now, because he's also read the biography

and the stuff of Marco Polo, he's aware with both Jengis and then also with Kubla, you know, he has an understanding that there is fucking gold in them hills in China and everything. It's very well known that China has gold. So the thought process is, well, if I can get close to it,

there must be gold over there. And apparently there was this belief about metal back then that as metal aged, or the closer it was, I think, to the equator, the metal would age faster and eventually turn into gold.

It was like a Midas-type situation where regular minerals over time, like coal into diamonds. Yeah. Basically is what it was. They thought that metal, after enough seasoning would actually become gold.

So, I have no knowledge of this. I'm not a geologist. I would love to talk to a geologist about this phenomenon. It does seem like there is more gold around the equator

than in other places. Because in Africa, there were huge gold mines in western and central Africa, probably around where the equator was. We know from the Mayan and Incan episodes there was a lot of gold and silver in that area. And so I don't know why it would be,

but knowing that now and then you're just saying that, it almost makes me think that there's some sort of reason that that happens. There has to be a geological reason and, like, way that gold is for. I don't have no idea what the elemental makeup of gold is or anything like that. But just like in certain places that there is silicon. just like in certain places where there is different types of coal minerals. Lithium, where it's more abundant. There's just something geologically that happens in those areas.

And maybe a warmer climate does tend to go ahead and make that more likely. But it's not a matter of one metal transmutating into another metal. It just happens to be like you said, maybe like an old wives tale based on the fact that that's where they've found the majority of their gold. Yeah, it just, it, it all sounds wrong. Their logic completely does sound wrong. Okay, well, I'm wrong about that because Google just told me that there's not actually more gold around the equator than around the poles.

Okay. So, good to know. I don't know, maybe it's because we've explored around the equator more than the poles that we've just found it. That's the other thing, too, if we're thinking about that, didn't civilization tend to start more equatorally? Yeah. Because it was the more hospitable and.

They didn't deal with the cold and all of that kind of stuff. And then they branched out from there. So there were still more civilization centered around the area closer to the equator. And because those areas were more explored, they just found more gold. Yeah, I could go with that. That actually makes a ton of sense just because we look for it. We explored those areas. So for some reason, Isabella and Ferdinand ended up signing off on this thing.

It was called the Capitulations of Santa Fe, basically promising Columbus, the fucking moon if he were to go ahead and find, you know, both China or any type of, like, new areas. Very important. Remember exactly what Chris just said. If he were to find China. If he were to find China. So Columbus ends up putting together three ships. The crown actually is, I think, like, owed some money from a guy, like a, not a privateer because that's someone that was like a pirate, but hired by government. Basically just a private ship owner. Yeah, they were all private vessels. Yeah, they're all private vessels.

They didn't send any type of like military vessels. These are all merchant vessels. Also meaning that because these are merchant vessels, they're actually going to be quite a bit smaller than I think what you may be picturing your head. These aren't like ships of the line and Spanish galleons and everything like that. These aren't three-tiered-up-the-ass-type ships. The Santa Maria, the Nina and the Pinta are the three ships that he gets. should remember that from the boats and hose.

How does it go, the Nina, the Pinta, the Santa Maria, I'll do you in the boat while I'm drinking sangria. Yeah. Chos and Lemon hats on my dad's boat. So the Santa Maria, which becomes the flagship, was about 115 to 120 feet long, had three masks on it, a deck. So just one deck, it wasn't like multi, you had the deck, and then below deck where they could store all that kind of stuff.

It was a larger heavier cargo ship than the Nina and the Pinta. these ships, the Nien and the Pinta were, I think, a little bit smaller, 50 to 70 feet from bow to stern. These were more maneuverable ships. I'm trying to remember what the term they called these ships. It was Catalones or Carables? Maybe. And some of these ships were, you know, these things, because they're so used to not having to go out into open water, you have these larger ships that have been off the coast further, probably out of side of land. They're naval vessels.

They're patrolling waters, things. like that, but these merchant vessels stick close to the coast. They don't like being at a side of land. So they're not exactly equipped for going out in the open ocean, which makes this even more dangerous. Some of them have like triangular sails still that they're using, which aren't stable as like the regular square rectangular shaped sails. And I believe they said one of them, just to kind of give you scope, was like five meters wide, 15 feet, 15 feet wide. It was either the Nina or the Penta. And then I think one of them was actually six meters wide.

So I can't remember which one it was, the Nina or the Pinta. But yeah, like 15 feet wide, 18 feet wide, and you're heading out into the complete unknown. You got to have some fucking nuts on you to be part of this voyage. Or you have to be crazy or a little bit of both. Or you have to be the owners of the boats because you're not going to let your property out of your site. Juan de la Cosa was the owner and he was the. captain of the Santa Maria. Then you have the Pinsone brothers,

Vincente and Martin, who were running the Nina and the Pinta as captains as well. They were both the owners. I don't remember which one was which, but these guys weren't going to let their boats out of their site. And a big part of this is trying to get everybody on board to just go ahead and agree with whatever Columbus says because you have these guys that are these bone owners

that have been out on the ocean. They've been out on the seas. They know what they're doing. They could potentially be jealous navigators themselves because they believe that they're smarter than Columbus, which by all accounts up to this point, I think they got a pretty good chance at being. Yeah.

And so even though you have these guys captaining these ships, you still have Columbus serving in almost like an admiral type role. That's what, buddy, he was the admiral of the ocean. See, I wasn't sure if he got that title until he actually came back and made good on any of the discovery ship. but he was actually in charge of, he was essentially in charge of this fleet of ships. His job was to determine where they're going to go, which direction, which heading they were going to be heading on, and then it was the captain's jobs to essentially make sure the boat was taken in that direction and followed the orders.

Now, on August 3rd of 1492, they end up leaving Palos de la Fontera, which was in southern Spain, so they're heading out past or through the Straits of Gibraltar and head out into essentially the open ocean. How many people you think they could take across on these three boats? Being that they're not very large vessels, was it 60 or 70? 90. 90, right? 90 people went on this voyage. I don't know why in my head I just thought that there was like a hell of a lot more people.

Maybe I was getting the Mayflower tied in there and thinking that there was a bunch of people on those boats. I think there were a bunch of people on the Mayflower. Yeah, but 90 people doesn't seem like a lot spread across three boats to go far. No, it doesn't, especially considering the size. It had to be like, shit. it wasn't 30, 30 and 30, maybe 20, 20, and 50. Yeah, something along those lines. Yeah. Not a lot of people, considering you're also heading into the complete unknown.

So, first place they stop off at is the Canary Islands, which are off the coast of either Spain or Portrait. Is it off the coast of Africa? I think they're off the coast of Morocco. Maybe. Around that area. So this was Spanish held territory. There was another island chain that was a little bit further to the north called the Azores. That was under the rule of port.

So they find out during this little first stretch of the voyage that the either the Pinta or the Nina, something ends up happening to the rudder to where. Spenta snaps. The rudder snap. Which one was it? The Pinta. The Penta. So the rudder ends up snapping. They're still able to, they kind of like slaps them.

They Magiver it a little bit. They're able to actually keep sailing, but it needs to be fixed before they're taking off across open water. So they roll into the Canary Islands. Take some five weeks to end up getting this thing repaired, which that would be crazy. crazy to see like how do you like dry dock a ship like that and then do all that would have been crazy to see like i understand modernly how they can do that with like modern machinery but like to dry dock or wondering how they repair boats like that that's that's nuts do you think they would have to though because it's just a wood rudder we're not talking about steel or anything like that

no but it's still below the water line you don't have anything that you can you can just carve a piece of wood and drop it in though and bring it up through the hole can't you i mean no these weren't it's going on the fucking ocean, man. It's got to be more complex than that. Well, this brings me to a question that I bet both of us didn't research. Rutter's on a traditional sailing vessel usually have a wheel that it's connected to

to pull one way or the other, right? Oh, it wasn't five weeks, sorry, three weeks in the Canary Islands. Okay. I think the trip was supposed to be five weeks. That's where I got to confuse, yeah. Was there just like a traditional rudder on a small boat now where it just comes up out of the back and there's just a stick that you have two or three guys that are pushing it back and forth.

Like you see on some small, like two or three person little sailboats. Yeah. Just like, yeah, I think so. So I would imagine that it wouldn't, you wouldn't have to dry dock to drop the rudder in because all you'd have to do is drop the rudder in and then put a lateral piece of wood on top to. I think, I think you're simplifying it a little bit too much. From the system for the wheel, so you have the wheel that is in front of you that either spins left or right. the rudder itself has to go left or right but because the wheel is spinning

it spins a gear that goes down through and then that controls the side to side movement there's also like a pulley system where ropes are attached to each side that will help to steer that I believe so I don't think it's a matter of just simply an interchangeable type thing

I think you need to get that up take out the old rudder make sure the like supports and stuff like that are disconnected reattached the lines to the gear and all that. I think it's especially considering if a rudder gets damaged enough to break the rudder, you've got to probably think that it's damaging the internal components of the entire, like, steering system. If it's not just a stick rudder in the back that you have three or four guys run.

If you have a wheel where it's then going down and going through a system of gears to change the direction of the pull, it's got to be much more complex than that. It takes them three weeks to end up getting it fixed. They resupply a little bit, kind of top off their... stores and then it is across the ocean. And this is kind of where Columbus has to get his props as a navigator because while he is sailing out and around kind of Europe, he, you know, both discovers for himself, not discovers, but sees for himself. And then also here's about essentially these trade wins. Now he's able to actually track the easterly winds, which are the ones coming

west to east. This would be very useful and he determines that, hey, if I do happen to say, over to China, this is going to be great for getting me home. What they don't kind of know for sure at this point is exactly what the wind is going to do for them if they're needing to head west. And so as he heads down a little bit further south, we discussed this before the episode. It had to have been because of all of the information that they had gathered at the map store, probably all of the research he had done once he was approved from, you know, Queen Isabella, because at that point then he had government resources, I guess you could say. There had to be some type of word of like a westerly, like trade wind or something like that.

Or, yeah, westerly. So they do head a little bit to the south. Is that right? Or is that the second voyage? No, they head to the south. I think that he already had an idea of the trade winds because he was heading down to Africa picking up on those slave ships. Okay. So I think on the trip down there, he,

may have, you know, felt that there was an extra wind gust to the west, that they had to fight against to stay close to the shore. And that may have been where he had learned that knowledge that if you go down south far enough, you're going to end up picking up those trade winds that'll carry you across. Again, the world is a fascinating place. I don't really understand how jet streams work or anything like that. But once they get into it, they start getting away from land, this kind of panics the crew, because anybody that's sailing on that has never gone out. far enough toward the easterly winds aren't going to ever push them back home. So as they're moving out to the west, everybody's like, well, how are we going to get back, man?

What if we have to turn around? Like, what if something goes wrong and we just have these westerly winds? They're just going to carry us into starvation and death on these ships. This is where sea monsters are. All the tales of sea monsters than ships disappearing that we've heard, these are the exact situations they put themselves in that they don't return from. we're essentially floating out off of the edge of the map. We're now drawing the map as we go along.

And they get about four weeks into the journey, haven't seen land. Columbus, I think, has changed direction, not like drastically, but sometimes we'll be heading a little bit more south, sometimes a little bit more north. He's trying to head west the entire time in one way or another. But the crew at this point is like, dude, it's been four weeks. Like we don't have a idea of what time this should actually take.

And Columbus actually kind of knew that there was probably going to be a little bit of grumbling because he was very talented from a cartography standpoint about gauging how long the distance they had traveled based upon, you know, the astrology, positions of the stars and everything. He was pretty accurate about the distance they were traveling. What he, because he had told essentially the crew

that it was roughly 25 to 20, 800 miles away. Once they had reached that, he knew that they were going to be like, okay, we're at the point you determined where China should be. We're not seeing shit. We need to turn around and head back home.

Because he kind of feared that, from the get-go, he started shorting the mileage that they were traveling each day. So they could travel, and I think they said these ships could sometimes travel. Was it like 120 miles a day?

He would be saying, hey guys, due to the winds, I mean, we're only getting 80 miles today. So he was trying to buy himself time. So he's already being kind of shady going about this of line to the crew and being like, guys, listen up. I said it was going to be 2,800 miles away. We've only gone 2,000 miles. We still got some time to go. There's no way that he's ever going to be able to short to make up for the 8,000 more miles that they would have to go to reach China.

Not only that, but you've got to imagine that maybe. some guys on the other ships that were keeping track and everything like that. We're looking at this. I mean, like, this is bullshit, man. And we're traveling over 100 miles a day. I may not know the exact amount, but I can tell what 100 miles is. Well, also, to give him credit along the way, he does figure out something that, again, just like he's going to figure out a lot of this stuff, he discovers magnetic north over just

following the North Star on his compass. He sees that once they get to a certain point that North is not pointing towards the North star, so there must be some sort of a magnetic pull. I believe the Chinese had figured this out like centuries before, but he had claimed that he was the first guy to find this. Part of the reason that they'd sort of change direction along the way was they were finding these large flocks of birds that they were catching. And just logically, it makes a ton of sense to me that if you see birds out in the

middle of the ocean, there has to be land that they're going to be able to land on. So they started following these flocks of birds kind of deviating from this western path that they're going. Now, had they just gone straight west, I didn't take a look and see kind of where they would have ended up. I'm, excuse me, assuming that they may have just gone more south to follow the birds, because had they gone north, they would have definitely run into continental United States, Americas, that kind of thing. but it veered them enough, of course, that they were headed towards the Caribbean. As Chris said, we get this mutiny that kind of starts to break out. October 10th, the mutiny on the ships was quelled by either the Pinsone brothers or Columbus.

If I was a betting man, which I am, I bet more that the Pinsones were probably quelling the rebellion against Columbus because Columbus believed in himself so much that I don't think he was. he would try to calm the guys down. Wait, so they were, like, trying to calm, the pin zones were trying to calm it down? Yeah, we're trying to calm down the rebellion. Yeah. The, the mutiny.

Well, they were also, you know, captaining these other ships, and if there was a mutiny aboard one ship, how quickly would that travel over to the other ships? They probably didn't want to get sent off their own vessels. So if they would have gone, like, due west, they would end up, like, probably closer to, like, New York or Maine. So.

So, they didn't. definitely went pretty far south. After this rebellion was quelled, I believe there's, this story's been told 10 million different times. There's 10 million different historians that talk about it. I believe it was three days. You agree on three days that he gave them? Was it three or four?

He was about close to like to four and a half week mark. He's like, give me two days, guys. We're close. He's looking at the actual numbers on his map. He's like, oh my God, he's like, it's like, it's three thousand. miles. We need to be close. It's like, give me two more days.

If we don't see anything in two days, we'll turn around, we'll head back to Spain. At any point in time, do you ever think that he was going to be like, shit, we're back in Spain? Like, we miss China completely and now we're back in Spain. Well, man, had he not found anything and gone back, you're not getting another shot at this. No. So he asked for the two days. They agree to give him the two days. The next day, I believe it's actually the next night.

I think you're correct in that I think the day after the mutiny they had run across a branch that was in the water that still had berries on it so they knew they had to be close to land because the berries would have shriveled up and died but the branch still looked fairly new which probably gave him a little bit of hope

and then leading into that night just picks up the ah look at the stick I told you um so yeah that night like two o'clock in the morning look out on the Santa Maria Land Ho I see it, it's right there

Oh no Columbus Hold on That's the story So one of the deals With the king and the queen Was the first person to cite land Would be offered a lifetime pension

Paid for by the Crown So this guy Actually I don't know if he was up in the crow's nest or whatever, he ends up citing land. After this guy cites land, Columbus is like... Robregoryo de Triana was his name. Columbus is like, oh, yeah, yeah. I actually saw that like two hours ago.

I saw a little light out there in the distance. It was just, it was a small light, but I saw it. So, I mean, technically, since I looked out there and saw it and it was land, I'm going to have to claim credit for this, and I'm going to be getting that lifetime pension. So, sorry, buddy. The other thing we have to take into account is by the end of Columbus's life, which we're not terribly far away from at this point in time,

Columbus has very bad eyes because he's been out on the water for so long that the refractory of the sun off of the water has just the glare just melted his eyes. Like snow blindness in a way. Yeah. So he says that he spots this light that looks like it was from a candle on land. brings two guys out there, which this must be the biggest candle ever to be able to be seen that far out. He brings two guys out there. He goes, do you see that?

The first guy goes, yeah, I think I see it. The second guy goes, you're both idiots. There's nothing out there. You don't see anything. The other guy's like, yeah, boss. Yeah, boss, I see it. And he's like, no, you fucking don't. So that was Columbus's story to try to snake.

And I think probably successful this pension away from. um, Trayana. Motherfucker, you're already going to be the Admiral of the Ocean,

vice-roy governor, you're getting all this revenue. You need to fucking steal that, like, that's exactly how you ingratiate yourself

with the crew when they see you pull that shit. That makes you look like a, like a real man of the people. Well, and this next move

defies all logic in what Columbus, I think, believed? Because they end up landing in the Bahamas the next morning on October 12th. And the first thing that Columbus does is he runs off the boat and he plants a Spanish flag. Mm-hmm.

Now, if you are going to China to trade, it's probably going to hurt trade relations if you jump off the boat and claim the land you just landed on in Asia for Spain, right? Yeah. This guy doesn't have a lot of like forethought, I think, or foresight. He seems like a very, it's like that a joker analogy. Like I'm like a dog trying to chase a car. I wouldn't know what to do with it. Once he actually succeeds in what he believe, or what I'm doing succeeds in quotes with what he's trying to do, he's just so fucking excited that like all rationale like goes out the window.

He forgot the plan. So also to preface this. So Columbus actually believed that India and China were kind of just all the same people. So everyone was just going to look Indian or Chinese. I don't think he didn't differentiate between the two. And so where we actually get the term Indians, why we have Indians in North America, when India is on the opposite side of the globe, is that Columbus thought, that he had reached the east coast of Asia or India, so he just assumed the indigenous people

that he's going to meet here naturally just have to be people from Asia or India, so they're Indians. They landed on an island that he considered to be in the Indies. So the island that they land at, he ends up calling it San Salvador in the Bahamas. And a lot of the names of these islands that still exist in the Bahamas are actually the original names that Columbus had named them. You get places like Hispaniola, which is the area that is Dominican Republic and Haiti. It's still called Hispaniola. You get places like St. Barts. You get places like the Virgin Islands. These places are named by Columbus, not necessarily

on this first voyage, but he's going to be back quite a few more times, exploring different areas. And he's thinking that these areas are all just these little islands in the land masses off like the Asian coast. There is a San Salvador in the Bahamas today. They don't know if it was the one that he landed on. They say probably not. They don't know exactly which island in the Bahamas that he landed on. And there are certain kind of, like names have obviously changed over time.

Plus, we're talking about an area that was so in dispute that almost each one of these places had to have their own war of independence to become independent nations. So things do get changed. But wherever he landed over there in the Bahamas, he called San Salvador, not the actual San Salvador today. Claimed it for Spain. Yeah. Already occupied a note, buddy.

Yeah. You claimed what you thought was a Chinese island for Spain. Yeah, it's just the level of ridiculousness. How many flags do you think he made them pack on board? Well, they also packed crosses because remember they would erect a cross on all these places. so it was also claimed for Spain, but also for Christianity. Surprisingly enough, I'm not sure how accurate it is, but they had never sent a man of the cloth on this first voyage.

They did not, right? There were no clergyman on the first voyage. I think it was also because it was such a risk that they were going to be like, and we're not going to waste one of our guys. None of the Padres stepped up and volunteered for this mission. All right. So up to this point, Columbus has, again, I'm doing quotes here, discovered the new world.

What he actually thinks is Asia. And before we get into meeting the locals, we're going to take a quick bathroom break. All right, listen up, people. Nothing can derail a podcast faster than dry mouth. It's real, and honestly, it's dangerous. Thankfully, our friends over at Flint's mints have got us covered, and they will get you covered too.

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hike to the falls. And like the preparer that I am, I forgot a water bottle. Didn't forget the pen, though. On the way to the falls, I realized that my mouth was just dry as could be. Luckily, in my pocket, I had this sweet tin of flintz mints, and after I popped one, gave it a couple minutes. My mouth is wetter than those falls. Now, enough about us, where can you get this? You got to go to flints.com. That's f-l-l-I-N-T-S dot com. Use code historically high for 15% off for November 30th on any mince at flints. Again, that's flints.com flints with two T's. Use code historically high. Get yourself 15% off. Cotton mouth kills. Flint saves. All right, and we're back. My mouth is dry. Yeah, I think round two, I will be going with the Flint's Mint's snowy

pine, which has a F strength of 275. We're going real high because I have a real dry mouth. I'm going sour tangerine. 175. Mine's dry, but not that dry. You know

what wasn't dry? Old Chris Columbus, after he waited out of that boat and onto that beach, discovering the new world, claiming it for Spain. Everything's going, it's all going aces for old Chris. Well, the island does have

occupants and they are weird how you say that he just discovered it and then you mentioned that there's occupants on it yeah i i'm using discovered very loosely yeah oh yeah yeah any just anything any term when it has to do with discovery during this podcast or anything to do with christopher columbus in discovery it's very loosely termed as discovery even the whole idea of it because when you say that columbus discovered the americas well guess what we did an episode on the vikings and found out that good old Lee Ferrickson traveled up a little further north. Yeah, why don't we have Leaf Day? Leaf Erickson Day. Isn't that like a SpongeBob thing or some shit like that?

It should be, but it's following the same, you know, I'm sure Leaf did probably kill some people. Oh yeah. Didn't kill nearly as many people when he came in. But at the same time, he actually discovered North America where we have or had Columbus Day. It makes no fucking sense. It makes no fucking sense. On to the people. One of the people.

So what was the name of the people as a whole? Because I have the two different tribes that were on this island, but it started with an A. Well, there's the Arawak. Yes, the Arawak people. And then they were broken up into a couple different tribes like the Tano. Taino. The Taino. And then the Caribs were the caribs part of the Arawak or were they their own thing?

The Caribbs were more of their own thing. They were what were considered cannibals. And I think this is where we get the name cannibal. Is it? I thought it was where we got the name Caribbean. I kind of did too. because Carib sounds very familiar, but maybe when you say that,

it was they believe that cannibals lived in the Caribbean. Yeah. But there was also a tribe called Lucan. The first people that he runs into are the tyanos. And tyanos are very friendly. They're very nice. They're very naked. Yeah.

I mean, not to talk about melanin or anything like that, but skin color-wise, these tyanos have been living so much closer to the equator. not wearing clothes, as Chris just pointed out. As one would do, living in that type of free society, man, if we could just go around naked all day and there wasn't any taboo about it. Sand in my ass feels like it would be an issue. I think that I'd need a loin cloth.

Nah, you get used to it. Probably. You're living in fucking paradise. If the worst thing is sand in your ass, then I think it's a good trade-off. You would grow calloused pretty quickly. But I think that there's a big, like, kind of fascinating measure to see people with a very different skin tone because you just, that wouldn't be something that they'd ever come across before. This is their first meeting with somebody that's outside of these tribes

that are just local. And it's not only how these people look, it's how they show up. These people have canoes. They're still kind of like, not a sea-going people, but they're able to go out and fish on the ocean. They can travel the waterways, you know, rivers and stuff like that on the island. they've never seen a ship of this size with sails and these men in strange metal suits cannons guns swords yeah swords yeah and in you know full Spanish regalia and everything

rowing in these weird boats so everything about this is insanely foreign to them and props on well what's not going to be actually good for them, but they actually kind of approach these new people in a very friendly way. And throughout the time that not only on its first voyage, but on the subsequent voyages that it goes on, the Tyanos are going to be almost like the friendly version, you know, the only Indians that he's really on good terms with or stays on good terms with, and then eventually

does end up fucking them over as well. Yeah. And Columbus has a very interesting kind of first entry into his journal about the Tainos that he meets. He says, Many of the men I have seen have scars on their bodies. And when I made signs to them to find out how this happened, they indicated that people from other nearby islands come to San Salvador to capture them.

Come to San Salvador. The place that I just named. We're just going to call it San Salvador, not their island, my island. They defend themselves the best they can. I believe that people from the mainland come here to take them as slaves. Hmm. Weird how the S word just sort of comes up in the first journal entry. So your people make good slaves is what I'm hearing.

Well, next line. They ought to make good and skilled servants, for they repeat very quickly whatever we say to them. I think they can very easily be made Christians, for they seem to have no religion, because I've been here for less than 24 hours, so I know they don't have religion. Okay, so here's a religious kicker here.

If they had this rule in Spain that the only people that you could take as slaves were people that were non-Christians. If someone was a Christian, it was essentially against the law to take that person as a slave. If you were to convert to Christianity, you would then gain that immunity from being a slave. So the whole point with Queen Isabella, one of the things that she, told them and that Columbus was kind of set to do is, hey, any people you find over there, also this mission being from God, you're to convert everyone to the Christian faith. So in Isabelle's mind, she's like, everyone's going to get converted to the Christian faith, so no one will be slaves. Because she was actually pretty against slavery, wasn't she?

Yeah. She was ahead of her time when it came to slavery. I don't know if completely against is the right word, because to some degree at that point, it was just part of the culture. But I think she was progressive for the time against slavery. She was against slavery if they could be converted. If they had no belief... Oh, that was the other thing that I forgot to mention. After they went ahead and cleared out Grenada and made it a part of Spain,

they went ahead and... Can't believe that this comes up in yet another episode. Went ahead and decided to expel the Jews out of Spain. That's right. So you're losing a lot of merchants. That was the choice. Was either they were going to expel. spell all the Jews out or they can

repent and take up Christianity. Real common theme throughout history. Pretty much everywhere. A lot of history. And along with that piety, and to your point, as far as Queen Isabella goes and how she viewed slavery, his last line was, if it pleases our Lord, I will take six

of them to your highness when I depart in order that they may learn our language. So, while not taking slaves, you are abducting people from their homeland and taking them back. You're essentially kidnapping them instead of putting them into slavery. Well, you know, he was going to bring them back.

They were going to learn the language. And then when he came back, he was going to bring them with him to introduce back into the people so they could not only serve as translators, but they could also sing of the wonderment of Catholicism and Christianity and how Europe was run. And then all would be well. So I mean, he's trying to actually send them to like vocational school.

And this is where the thing. sort of take a turn. Because some of these Tyanos and these airwarks that he's running into, he notices that they have things like gold earrings on, they have gold rings. I don't know as far as rings go, but they have bracelets. Not a lot. But I mean, a couple of them that he's meeting probably people higher up in the tribes, but these are not like huge, gaudy pieces.

It's like, you know, they're finding gold in small amounts and fashioning them into just like little nugget earrings, things like that. but it's fucking gold. And so he's looking at this and he's saying there are already signs of gold here. Jackpot. I'm fucking rich.

So is anybody looking for gold would do? And is anybody who just saw a bunch of foreigners and watched them give a demo of their cannons would do? He says, hey, where'd you guys get that gold? And maybe thinking that these Spanish people had overstayed, they're welcome, the Aerox are like,

South, go south. They're that way, which hilarious that pretty much every time any explorer runs into that, they're always like, God, we got to get them out of here. What do we do? South, South, go that way. So, instead of just going south to look for it. I'm not trying to play the blame game here

because they would have discovered South America eventually with all of the voyages and exploration. But do you ever think after learning the history, any of those South American indigenous groups are just like

he had to keep fucking pointing them south man I mean yeah we had a shit ton of gold but fucking tell it on us the guys down at the Cape of Good Hope when they meet him they're like hey where'd you guys get the gold and they look over to the ocean like fuck there's nowhere south

where do we send them north north oh no you guys just came there is south it's just gonna fucking bundle up it's a ways so Columbus goes ahead and takes a few airwarks as prisoners to guide him to the gold. And voluntary guides. Yeah, voluntary prisoners.

He ends up landing on the northeast coast of Cuba, October 28th, and they travel around ending up landing on the northwest coast of Hispaniola on December 5th. And again, Hispaniola is modern-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic. They're just kind of, you know, because travel essentially isn't the fastest thing at this point, even traveling around to these islands, you have to wait for the winds to be favorable. It's not like you can just pack the fucking boat up real quick and just get going in a day. You're bringing supplies onto the beach, off the boat, you're back and forth and everything. So it does take time to do this.

So there are sometimes like three weeks between recorded events here and where he's just kind of exploring. And he's just kind of puttering around the Caribbean. kind of pinballing around just trying to find. He doesn't know what's not mainland and he's, you know, and what's an island. For like Cuba, he thought Cuba, I think, was Japan when he first saw it. And he only sailed around that first time, he only sailed around and explored the northeast coast of it. He thought it was a peninsula of Japan. Yeah.

So he didn't know that, you know, it wasn't attached to land. So he's going to all these different places. As he ends up on his pinola on December 6th, they're still kind of out exploring. And on Christmas Day, December 25th, his flagship, the Santa Maria runs aground. So one of the captains or whoever was supposed to be watching the ship, as it was just anchored into whatever port that they had pulled on. Which would be like, when we say port, we basically mean like a cove, because these aren't established places.

It's basically just like a natural harbor where it's supposed to be safe from the weather. Exactly, yeah. The guy that was supposed to be watching the boat, making sure that it doesn't run ashore, ends up wanting to go maybe start in on some Christmas celebration and leaves it to a lower ranking member. That lower ranking member isn't paying enough attention. And the winds and the waters actually end up pushing the Santa Maria so far onto land that it is just shipwrecked, essentially. part of the thing that they fight this whole entire trip and for the accompanying next three voyages and I'm sure every voyage

something called shipworms shipworms were it's like a crustacean that feeds off of wood that's in salt water they're the termites of the sea yes and then actual termites that they would get on land but also be an issue kind of topside of the water you get termites above the water you get termites below the water so

as the Santa Maria is pretty much out of commission. There was some earlier issue with the Pinta and one of the goddamn Pizones. Yeah. One of the Pizones that was on it.

They just went ahead and for lack of a better term, they just fucked off. They just left. They just pulled out of harbor with a bunch of people on the boat and took off. I don't know if they had had a disagreement with Columbus. I don't know if they were just tired of a shit. I don't know if they thought that there was a better way.

All the above. Yeah, they just went ahead and took off. I don't know how I missed that. Yeah, November 26th, so like almost a month before the Santa Maria runs a ground. Old Marty Pinzon, he takes the penton of treasure hunt. I think he heard that there was gold a little bit further south. So he's just like, fuck this. I'm going on my own.

I'm going to find this gold. And it ends up leaving. And this isn't like he just shows back up like a few days later. No, no, it's a ways. You know, Santa Maria running aground and everything like that. It's, he's not around. He's off exploring. And which brings me to another.

point. They eventually do find each other back together. How does that even happen? It's a great question. It's a truly great question. Like, are you just saying we're heading on, like, do you leave word at the last place you're at? Because that's where they left from. And it just says, we left here on this heading to go to this. And how do you know there's going to be how the fuck? Do you just sail around looking within the crow's nest being like, we're just making zigzags trying to get out to the distance, trying to find a ship? I think they found each other at sea, which is even more just incredible that this has. happened. Well, this whole thing with the Santa Maria causes a couple issues. One, they're down

their biggest shit. So the best hope they have for getting back home is now having to be abandoned. Not only abandoned, but they wanted to show off for the locals some more. So after they had the locals helped them offload all of this equipment and load it back on two, I think the Nina at that point, they fired the cannons from the Nina at the boat as like a display of power to show the locals what they could do. They also did it because they needed smaller chunks of wood. Yes. The reason they needed those smaller chunks of wood was because now you have, and let's just say it was like 40 or 45 guys that were on the largest vessel, you are now not only missing a boat that you just abandoned, you're missing technically another boat because Martin is off cruising the waves. You got

45 extra guys that aren't going to fit on this little boat. heading back to Spain, let alone all the supplies that they have to load, stuff that they're going to bring back with them. So you've got to look for a solution here because not everybody's making it home this trip. You're drawing straws. So luckily, the native chief, they're from the Taino, gives them permission to actually leave some men. And so Columbus is like, um, all right, you, you, you, you, and just counts out 35 guys.

35 or 39? I just put some men. My number was 39. 39 men, it is. And he's like, okay, guys, we're going to go ahead and construct a little defensive or fortification here. We're going to call it La Navidad. And you guys are going to hang tight here. I'm going to go back to Spain.

Press tour, you know, adulations, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm definitely going to get a second voyage. It's going to be much bigger. We'll come and relieve you guys. While you're here, what I'd like you to do, find out from these locals where all this gold is. Have them bring you the gold and have all of it here waiting at the fort when I get back. So it's easy for me to access.

All right. Good plan. All right. Go team. Oh, wait. One more rule. Don't mess with the women. Yeah.

Don't do anything. It was basically one of those things like, hey, anything that would piss off the locals, don't do that. because you don't have any backup or support or more ammunition that's going to be showing up or anything like that. No help. Keeping them friendly is your only hope of survival. So probably keep your dicks in your pants

and don't shoot anyone. Cool? Fuck each other. Yeah. Take care of that. We'll leave you the cabin boy. Yep. Which cabin boy.

I mean... I'm unfamiliar with this. What's the cabin boy? Well, first of all, it's an excellent movie starring Chris Elliott. Second, cabin boys were young boys that were brought aboard ships to serve as like the... Not Stuart. Maybe Stuart is the right word. No, no, not a steward.

Almost the butler or servant or gopher for like the captain or the first mate. Okay. He would be the one to like clean up and stuff and like bring the captain his food, that kind of stuff. It was basically a way for like... young guys to get like young boys to get like into sailing and learn like command and usually it was kind of I think maybe not super prominent families but some would like have their sons become boys because they had aspirations or the family business was to have them captain a ship and they wanted them to get an experience but didn't want them fucking handling the ropes and all that other shit that was

menial shit I'm gonna go ahead and tell myself that that cabin boy left the ship as untouched as he was when he got onto the ship that's what I'm trying to get out of here. That had to have happened, right? Yeah. Okay. Hey, we're creating mermaids out in the ocean that we're just seeing. You don't think that that may be happening to? Okay. Not only that, but

you have been at sea for, you're at sea for five weeks. You've been hopping around these islands for the last, well, they got there October 12th. You're now getting to, what was it, the 26th that they wrecked the ship. So you're already two and a half months in. Your boss is leaving now.

and some of those beautiful women in the world Caribbean women just walking around naked all the time listen okay that came off really they were asking 40 not even saying that what I'm saying that is what you're doing is you're putting untrustworthy people in a situation where you're very stupid

if you think that they're not going to do the things that you're telling them not to do especially in the accompanying third and fourth voyages when he can't get anybody to come with him except for criminals and prisoners you're probably not going to be bringing the best of the best they're not bringing monks on these trips these guys all have urges and they're all kind of savages

but I would like to say Fort Navidad the nativity Christmas what a beautiful name for what is probably going to be a beautiful flourishing fort where they're going to be able to be nice to the locals and all these locals are just going to bring them the gold that then they're going to trade for the shitty beads and wine probably

that they brought them? Oh, it was like, oh, I don't think wine. They don't think they were keeping that. No, they were definitely keeping wine if they had it for themselves. I think they said it was, oh, what was the shitty thing that they kept giving them? So it was glass beads, like green glass beads. Yeah. And then falcon bells, bird bells.

It was these little bells that you would put because falconry was a big thing. Yeah. See that? And so you would put these bells on like the hawks or the falcons. But they were just like little trinkets. You know, you could rattle it and it would make sound and everything. So you could hear the bird when it was flying around, I think. So just giving them a little useless shit for the stuff that they wanted, any gold that they could find plus, you know, food and everything like that. well it's time for Columbus to go so he ends up grabbing up all the guys he's actually taken back with him

left 39 men 39 guys good luck fellas so how so i don't i know we got a lot to cover but what are you what's the win if you're one of the 39 guys that gets left on the island i mean you can't communicate with yeah what's the ratio to volunteers to volunteer there because you got to understand there were probably a couple guys that were like bad guys that were seeing that they were going to be left alone here were like, perfect. I got no prospects. I got nothing waiting for me back in Spain. I got nothing to lose.

I'm staying. Then you had guys that were told they were standing. They're like, fuck that. Like, no. No way. And he's like, not really asking yet. You're staying here. So you probably had ones on each extreme.

They did leave one doctor. That was pretty cool of him. Yeah, I guess, to treat the fucking inevitable syphilis. Also, what was the venereal disease? They introduced that wasn't a thing? the new world? Cephalus. It was syphilis?

That they introduced to the old world. They... From the new world. Yeah. What was it they brought back? Cephalus. It was syphilis?

Excellent. Ah, syphilis. The indigenous people's revenge. So Columbus ends up grabbing some more prisoners. I don't think he grabbed any of the Tiana because he was on good terms, but I think at this point, was it the Cribes?

He had grabbed a couple Cribes. We kind of come to... Because there were people that hadn't converted to Christianity. And I don't think the Tejano had agreed or done that yet, but because he knew he had to have a friendly ally there on the island, I think he wasn't too concerned with that at the time.

He ends up grabbing some more prisoners and ends up running into Martin Penzone on January 6th. So what was the day they actually left? I think before we get to leave we run into kind of their first violence like you were talking about

as far as the people that they took they ran into a it was a canoe that had the caribs on it now who also knew if the carib story was true I think it was from everything that I researched

it seems like it was fairly true just because they learned about the caribs as like a cannibalistic society. Well, that's what I'm saying is it was it just that they heard that, like had they landed on an island with the Cribs, would they be here in the Tehrano were the same way? Or did they just get lucky to kind of land in a friendlier territory? Well, this crazy story that, again, I can't stress this enough. They don't even speak anywhere close to the same language.

There's no way that they could have gotten these stories until later once they had figured out how to speak each other's languages. But these carabs were supposed to be a cannibalistic society that would raid villages. They would kill all the men and eat all the men. They would impregnate the women. Then they would castrate the boys until they were the right size to eat. So they didn't want veal. They wanted the whole cow. All I was thinking was how to try to mime to somebody that they eat people.

And he's just like trying to hand signal. And he's like pointing to the other island. Then he takes like a spear and he like acts like he's poking. and then he pulls back and tries like bite his arm and he's like bad he grabs columbus's arm he bites it close yeah yeah exactly what are you doing so they'd run across a canoe of these supposed caribs um they opened fire on them that sounds like a unit of measurement a canoe of caribs maybe that's what a grouping of them is called uh they end up fighting uh the other big advantage that they have is none of these people know about metals. So you have fire-hardened tips spears and arrows that

are coming from these natives while they're firing actual cannons and pistols and rifles at them. They end up killing and wounding most of them. They go ahead and they take captive four of the Caribs and then on January 6th like you said meeting up with Marty January 13th they run into the Sigallo's sigayo's um and they put up kind of like the only violent relit or resistance on land and it was just a little short skirmish they fired at the Spanish the Spanish ended up firing back I believe they hit like one guy with a bullet or with a ball and then had slashed another one's leg. Either way, they end up taking some of them captive as well. And January 16th, they set sail all the way back to Spain because there's nowhere else that they could land beside Spain because of the expert navigation, right?

Yeah. And I was actually just kind of thinking about that timeline. So, yeah, you got to imagine when they're kind of. coming back out that Columbus, not technically, I mean, he's got to definitely suspect that he's getting a second voyage, but not knowing if it's a certainty, he's got to be trying to do as much work on the way back as possible with discovering, you know, New Island selling in a little bit of a different direction, which would explain why it takes them so long just to get from La Nabi Dau, which is on Hispaniola, out of the Caribbean, because that's not a huge, a huge trek

just to get out to the open ocean. So, yeah, even between the time of them leaving, him meeting up with Pins-on, then another 10 days in which this altercation takes place, then they're finally out on the open ocean, sailing in the two smallest ships that they have. And basically... Less people. What? Less people. Yeah, it's still, they're less sea-worthy. Yeah, and I guess they do have captives now, too. Yeah. So, I mean, they're loaded down a little bit more. But as they end up setting sail, they're taking off to try to get... Were they trying to go directly to Spain, or did they have to go to the Canary Islands first?

I think they were trying to just go straight back to Spain. Okay, they get caught in a storm. Yep. So there's a storm that ends up damaging. It separates the boats and ends up damaging one of them to where they have no choice to stop, but to stop in the Azores. And it's Columbus that's on the Nina, and he's the one that actually has to stop in the Azores. Well, bad news about the Azores is that despite... Spain and Portugal having to kind of still be on friendly terms,

they still get into little skirmishes. They'll still kind of like try to make shit hard for each other where they can when it comes to like customs or like them being in their territory. So when they get into the Azores, they need, you know, some time to repair the damages. I think Columbus said they sent in some of the men like 50 men into town and they end up getting arrested by like the local authorities. They believe they were pirates.

Yes, they thought that they were pirates, which at that point, with how they probably looked after that amount of time out on the open ocean and then in the jungle and all that kind of shit, they probably didn't look good. No. No. Lest we forget to mention that not everybody that started off on the journey home ended up making it even to the Azores. Because as the captives grew sicker being around the Spanish, they would end up catching the diseases that would ultimately kill them. And then you don't really need to take a dead rotting body back to Spain. So you just hucked them off the side of the ships. They ended up bringing back a few of them, but they were so sick by the time that they were there.

They kind of had to be nursed back to health. And the whole idea, like Chris was talking about earlier, if you can teach them the language, if you can teach them in the religion, then you can bring them back to translate the religion into their language. But we're not there yet because they are arrested in the Azores as pirates. And I don't know how you talk yourself out of that one. He ends up Columbus, he's not one of the 50 that are arrested, but then they come down to the boat, I think. And Columbus is showing them all the documentation from the king and queen of Spain.

As a not really saying ally or anything like that, but as countries that aren't in open conflict with each other, they were expected to provide him passage or assistance if he needed. They end up holding him for like a week, but then they're like, okay, well, you're free to go. go ahead and head back to Spain. Well, during that week, I want to say that the Nina, or sorry,

the Pinta actually was making its way closer to Spain because it actually arrived before he got there. I thought they arrived, I thought it arrived like within a day of each other. Wasn't it not? One of the voyages they did arrive within, but I can't remember exactly where that was. I think it had to be this one because part of the issue was

he needed to beat back the other boat because the other boat had actually come up with a few different things that they wanted to bring back and present the king and queen. And again, like we were talking about earlier, these Pinsone brothers probably harbor a little bit of a grudge. Like maybe they want to show up Columbus as like, hey, we did more than he did on this trip. And Columbus can't let that happen.

Yeah, you're getting the first account from these people. Anything that comes after that, not only is it two against one, but you've already heard that story first, so changing your mind about it, it's a little bit tougher. Yeah. Well, as they head back to Spain, they run into another storm and are forced to actually stop in Lisbon.

Bad storm lock. Bad storm lock. Lisbon, also capital city, largest city in Portugal. As they are detained in Lisbon, because it's not like the Azores sent word back to Lisbon. It's like, hey, if you guys run into this, ship, you know, it's cool.

It was just another Spanish ship full of a bunch of people and people they'd never seen before showing up. So... Columbus, I think, wants to rub it in a little bit, though. Columbus is taken before the king. He asked to go before the king. He wrote a letter trying to request

his presence. Well, he was trying to be able to basically show him the documentation of the papers from the king and queen, I think. I think and maybe take a little victory lap. To let him know that you could have had this. Like you get ahead all this. Yeah, wouldn't it take any of as long to go around this?

As he shows the dead natives that... Yeah. Well, they brought a few other things back, but we'll get to that. Well, he was also interrogated for a lot of this information because, yeah, Spain may have gone over there and actually claim that. But unless that other ship gets back to Spain and they keep Columbus there, Spain really doesn't know what's happening. So if they can get the information out of Columbus and be like, hey, tell us what you know about that. over there. How did you get there? Spain or Portugal is like we can start sending shit over there and start claiming land. We know something's over there. We can get over there. Part of that too was they had

formed this treaty in 1479 called the treaties of Alcovis. And it was that line delineation that we had talked about where the Portuguese had anything to the south and the Spanish had anything to the north. So King John believed that he went too far down south into Portuguese territory. and that's where he found the dead natives. He's like, it goes all the way around. Whatever the known world is, anything south, we get that. Luckily, they end up landing back March 15th, and they go to report the findings to the king and queen.

Now, you remember earlier when I was talking about how some things just kind of seem to break for Columbus? Well, the break that Columbus got here, was the Pinsone brother that was supposed to go report the findings ends up dying before he can go report his findings. So his death

stops that first account from getting to the king and queen before Columbus can get to the king and queen. That's lucky. Yeah, they say, which I just would like to believe, because it's funny, that the venereal disease

is what killed him in truth I think they said that it takes like more than a year for it to actually set in to a deadly point in time unless you get a lot of it yeah unless you get a lot of it um just cramming it in there

I don't know if there's a multiplier effect there but either way Columbus gets to be the first accounting to the king and queen um he brings back to the court untold riches of very little gold a few pearls the captives that had survived,

he brought back flowers, and a very underrated bringback that I think ends up being something that's way more valuable than the gold that they would eventually find. It was shown to be more, yeah. Tobacco. Tobacco that was being smoked on these islands in 1492

that I don't know how much the European continent knew about, which blows me away to think that tobacco, was like a relatively new find around the time that they found the Americas. I mean, in the same way, if you're thinking of, like, the Americas never knew what coffee was. It's just if you don't have, like, the Americas never knew what cocaine was. Like, it has to be that thing that maybe just might be specific. There were some, like, how many different vegetables were introduced into different areas? Like, tomatoes aren't even, like, native to Italy.

South America. They were brought back. Yeah. There's so many things that they get that comes maize, potatoes, tomatoes, um, not garlic. Garlick's shockingly grown on like every continent except for Antarctica. But it's

certain things that they just had no idea about. Not this journey. We're just, we're, we're yeah, extrapolating. But pineapples, that would blow the brain of any Spanish person to taste a pineapple for the first time.

Just to think of that flavor profile that they have no idea or roasted tomato or roasted pepper. Yeah. But Columbus actually did bring back pineapples for them to eat. Luckily, I think pineapples can survive that voyage because it wasn't as long. But also something that interested me, the turkey. I would have thought the turkey would have been something in Europe that then came over to the

Americas. But the other way. Hmm. No, I guess I could see that. Yeah. But I never think of turkey when I think of like the Caribbean. No, but a little... You'd have some form of turkey.

It doesn't have to look like a turkey that we're accustomed to. It could fall within the turkey family. Yeah, and a turkey, now a flightless bird may have been able to fly back then. We're focusing way too much on this turkey thing. A little too much on turkey. A little too much turkey talk. So anyway, he ends up getting back. accolades galore, everyone, you know, he's the talk of the town, he's discovered, you know, the new world.

Probably not a lot of discussion or details on what he actually brought back, because I'm sure that the crown didn't really want to look like they had made a bad investment by being like, oh, well, he didn't bring back that much gold or anything like that. He'd basically, they just hyped it up that Spain had gained new territory. There was this new land. So word gets back to Rome. The Catholic Church is like, oh my God, we have an entirely new area to convert to Christianity. When in actuality, didn't he still think it was somewhere in Asia?

Yeah. At this point, yes, he has no knowledge. Again, Columbus has no knowledge that there is an entire ocean on the other side that's between him and Asia. So he's like, I found the Asian continent, but I found these places that Spain can, I don't. That is so weird to me that they would think for some reason that there was area in Asia that was so close to Asia that people from Asia had not already claimed. And I'm going to go down a rabbit hole here. You're in Spain. Everywhere around Spain to some degree has some type of like civilization society to it, even like the law.

even like the lower class and all that kind of stuff. Everyone's within the same scope of society. All this stuff that you've heard about, the Silk Road, all of these things coming out of China, you somehow think that there are people in China that are on these islands close to China or Asia that are living in, you know, huts and all this kind of stuff.

I'm trying to think of like what Columbus's like thinking was, like, oh my goodness, I've discovered new area in Asia that hasn't been claimed by the Asians because these people aren't Christian. I'm just trying to like piece together what the leaps are for him to get to that point.

It's delusion. He was so focused on one thing and then I think that he just kept up the facade because he pivoted so fast from trying to figure out mainland to like slavery.

Well, gold. But the thing is, too, is it's not just him doing that. It's also now the crown of Spain is like, oh, yeah, like there wasn't even, there had to have been some questions as to like, are you sure this was Asia? Or are you sure that like this wasn't land that the Indian or Chinese people already had? Like, I'm not getting this. There were people there, right? Yeah. Okay, so they had found it already?

But I guess this falls back into the thing. And I can't remember what episode we talked about it. is that unless countries were Christian, they weren't recognized as sovereign. Yeah, yep. I can't remember what episode we talked about that, but that had to have been the understanding or the thought at the time.

Well, it gives back to Rome, and there are three papal bowls, which papal bowls are like, I just think, Bull Bulletin. They're basically things that are sent out, like, decrees. Oh, that makes sense. I actually just thought that up. Huh.

Basically, these three papal bulletins come out from Alexander the 6th, Pope Alexander the 6, which basically gave overseas lands and it didn't want to pick its favorite kid. It was going to make sure it was fair. They were basically like, oh, hey, by the way, we are just telling you that any of these overseas lands will be the property of Portugal or Spain. So they didn't just annex out Portugal, even though Portugal kind of had the monopoly on West Africa. They knew that because Portugal and Spain, they had to keep both of them under that Catholic umbrella. to keep getting that money and money

and all the fucking gold that was going to be coming from these areas, I just thought of that. So that makes complete and total sense because if Spain and Portugal are both the deepest ones in the pocket of the Catholic Church, it would make the most sense

that any area that was even possible to have money made from it, whether it be gold or something else that we're going to get into, all of that money at some point part of it would find itself funneled back into the Catholic Church. Well, money that is

competed for is never going to be as much money as money that's just discovered. So part of that was... That's true. Because if Spain and Portugal both know that they can now get territory, Portugal's going to be on its ass. Like, we got to get the fuck over there quickly and start snatching this up. Spain is thinking

the same thing. We got to get over there before Portugal does so they don't take all of our shit. So it drives the, like, demand for it, basically. He splits it. into what's called the Interkatera, which replaced the old treaty that John had thought they had broken. The Interkatera divided the world outside of Europe from north to south instead of east to west,

and the dividing line was 100 leagues west of the Azores, which I think eventually gets spanned out into like 300 leagues. And since it's north to south, this is why Portugal takes Brazil. So that's why the Brazilians speak Portuguese because it was where the Portuguese had landed. So thinking about a globe and how far away everything looks on a map, 300 leagues west of European islands goes through Brazil. Also, like, I, how often do you actually, when we're doing these episodes,

do you notice something new about a map maybe that you haven't noticed before? Constantly, all the time. So I was looking at this, looking at Columbus' sailing routes. And when I'm so used to seeing stuff from World War II that all of my eye line goes from the east coast of United States over toward England, which is like the widest point of the Atlantic. But if you actually travel down and you're going down the coast and you go down coast of Africa and west Africa, right when you get to the point of Africa that's closest to South America before it cuts back like hard west and then goes closer into the interior of Africa, that distance right there is like a quarter of the distance between Africa and South America than it is between North America and like Europe itself. It's so weird that it gets that close in.

It makes sense too because that's the area that Portugal had been so familiar with. So all they had to do was all their areas in Africa. They just had to head west at that point. And it wasn't very long until they hit Brazil. And it was like, oh shit, this was a lot closer. yeah i always forget the positioning of south america so much i just always draw like a straight line down to think that if you went straight south from florida you would just end up in brazil but there's like a whole lateral shelf of south america that i just don't even ever take into

account in my mind for some reason the gulf of mexico and i think it's because that's the only place that it's called that is just literally like florida south america and then Central America in there. And there's a lot of area in between those two places. And everything's just, it shifted to the right. It shifted closer to Africa. That's why it looks like Pangia is legit. Yeah.

Because those two places fit in really well. All right. So getting to the second voyage, of course this thing gets approved. Why wouldn't it? There's so much stuff to be gained from it. And plus, now that this papal bulls, those papal bolins have been signed, guess what? We got us get on this and start discovering these new areas.

areas. So September 24th, 1493, so less than a year after the first voyage set out, correct? Mm-hmm. And then easily less than a year since they, like, what, like six months since they got back? Yeah, that sounds about right. I thought they had left in April of 1492, so a little more than a year. That's when it got approved, was April, is when they signed that. And then they started putting together the expedition at that point. Columbus actually... Oh, yeah, you're right. It was August 3rd that they left, and then October 12th is when they landed in San Salvador.

Okay, so a little more than a year. We're going to bump you up from three ships to 17 ships. We're going to bump you up from 90 dudes to 1,200 men in priests this time. Men, no women, and these people were going to establish colonies. They were going to establish the bones of colonies, and then it was basically going to be the same situation that we've talked about, establish ports, Constantly, it was just going to be a train of supplies going back and forth, pulling shit out of the new world and bringing in more people in supplies so they could expand their reach.

Well, this time, Columbus was beating dudes off with a stick, just trying to keep them off of his ships because so many people wanted to go explore the new world. Yeah, they heard about the naked islanders. That too. One of the people that was actually on the second voyage, big name, Juan Ponce de Leon, who ends up becoming the... the first governor of Puerto Rico and Florida. He was the dude that was famous for actually going in search of the Fountain of Youth. That's right. And then we get our names from...

Amerigo Bespucci. That's right. So he wasn't on that voyage. I don't believe so. But that's where America's come from. Hilarious that we don't have that guy's day. Yeah. The guy that actually went along the East Coast of the United States and the Americas.

I wonder what kind of shit he had to have done to not pick him. Yeah. So different culture. He was Portuguese. He wasn't Genoan or Genovese like Columbus was, so he wasn't Italian. Yeah. So they came in a little more southern this time, not quite as southern as the Portuguese did when they found Brazil, but basically just a little bit more south in the Caribbean.

And at this point, they came through the Virgin Islands, so they discovered a little bit more. And kind of went in and out of the Caribbean, kind of trying to map out additional area, Discover Islands and everything. They're planting crosses in the greater and lower Antilles, like they're going out of style. Yes. November 22nd, they, you know, they don't get back to, they don't go straight back to La Navidot. Which is so funny. I know.

They're like, we're going to get here and we're going to, we're going to take the scenic route. We're basically going to, you know, our guys have already been alone. We have no idea what's happened to him. So instead of getting back as quickly as possible, we'll get to it when we get to it. There's no thought of trying to resupply that. fort faster than just like, yeah, when we get there, we get there. I mean, this voyage was put together pretty quick. From the time they got back, I think it was like five or six months.

Yeah, still, 14 or 17 ships that go over there. It's probably pretty planned out. This was their biggest thing that was probably going on in Spain. I would assume you would send, like, some of the ships there. Yeah. Like take half with Columbus and send the other half to La Navid. Well, nobody else knows how to get there. You could, if, yeah, well, here's the thing.

You have to know kind of because you get separated in the, storms, but you still have to find your way. Columbus had to have been telling them, hey, once we get to this point, you head at this heading for this, you know, amount of time or whatnot, they had to have some general idea. I mean, these guys were like skilled sailors to be captaining these ships.

Yeah, it just depends on the directions given. Well, here's the thing, too. It took a lot to find that place and to get there. Once you knew how to get there, though, I think it was just a matter of like, most people didn't try

that because they didn't know anything was out there. It was almost like a death sentence. You were risking everything to go out that direction. But once you knew that the travel time was five weeks, this was the way to get there. It just became another voyage. People had been sailing for five, six, seven months at a time. They'd just been doing it along the coast or going somewhere else. You're just taking the coast out of it and selling out in the open ocean, but you're still directionally pointing yourself somewhere and you're still. You're still selling through water. Yeah.

So I think the trip would become, the big deal that's made of it is that he found it. It wasn't exactly like he had to fight through, you know, the worst squalls and like he survived all odds and he fought sea monsters and shit. He just pointed it in a direction and happened to run

into something. He took the chance and he got something out of it. Which is why I think the second voyage they missed. I think they were trying to go to Navidad first. They got little off course. They ended up in lower antena. finding Antigua. Then they move up to the greater Antilles.

They get to St. Croix. And then they're like, ah, shit, St. Croix, St. Croix. What do we do? Greater Antilles till November 17th. And then from the 23rd, they go from Puerto Rico, which they had found, to Española. They finally made it back to Española. Yeah, so November 22nd, 1493, that's when they went. back to La Navaedad.

But that's what I'm saying. It was they missed and then he kind of followed his way around to where the stars were pointing him to like, okay, no, this is where all the constellations were. Because if you figure September 24th, so let's just say the third week in September, or fourth week in September, should take you five weeks. And he did that the first time. I think the second time the trip was a little bit shorter. Four weeks, I think.

Yeah. So you say September, October. So you're at toward the end of October. You're literally in the Caribbean at that point. and you're just fucking around for a month or trying to find your way back, which makes sense because stuff in the Caribbean when there's all these little islands,

especially undiscovered ones, you're probably like, that kind of looks familiar. Go look on the beach and see there's a big fucking cross. Any footprints? Yeah, anything like that. And yeah, so that makes sense. But when they do get back to La Navidod,

they find the fort fucking destroyed. Men are all dead. Some of them not even there, but assume dead. And they're just like, oh shit, like what? happened here and the chiefton like what's

the name of the tribe again? These were the tyanos. Yeah, the tyanos. They end up showing back up and the chieftain is like... Canobo. Yeah, Canobo is basically like you'll never believe what fucking happened. Or no, no, no. Canobo was the chief

that had made his way into the Navidad and he was the one that went ahead and butchered the whole lot of the Spaniards that were there. Well, what did the Spaniards do? Pretty much everything that Columbus told them not to do where they were going to end up getting killed. Yep, they went ahead and went into villages.

They didn't just sit around the fort waiting for all the Tainos to bring them gold. They went out into the villages. They started molesting the women, getting them pregnant, catching their own balance of syphilis. Don't say molesting because that doesn't, they went fucking rape crazy. Yes, they did. Not the best guys to have around, not giving them any excuses. How long do you think they kept their dicks in their pants? Not long. Not long because they were on the ship for so long.

And like I said, this isn't a justification for what happened. It was disgusting. These dudes hadn't seen a woman that wasn't naked in a very, very long time. They hadn't seen a woman. Well, period. They met the women, villagers and natives. And they just all happened to be not wearing clothes. Oh, got it. Yep, I mixed up there.

The temptation just got too much for them. And they just did despicable, terrible things. And Canobo went ahead and paid them back by massacring a lot of them. It just, he blew through every Spaniard that was left until there was just none left to kill. They had discovered some of the bodies because they were like skeletonized, but there was still beards on them. And none of the natives could grow facial hair so they knew that they were Spanish. And it wasn't like there wasn't a ton of people on this island. I think they estimate there was something in the neighborhood of maybe like up to 300,000.

Tons, lots. On the island of Hispaniola. So, although they were broken up into different groups or tribes, I mean, the Tejano's might have had several different tribes like all up and down the coast or in certain sections of the island. So there were quite a few of them, but this, you know, it wasn't like they just attacked them. I think they ended up getting like 200 men together. Tons. To end up attacking these guys. And they could only hold out so long.

This was a fort basically made of, like, wooden fencing and everything. and you're also fighting what probably was a night raid against people who fucking live there. But again, eventually, lead and cannons are always going to win the day against fire-hardened wooden arrows. When it comes to having more than 39 guys, and those are the ones that were alive at the point and hadn't died of some other type of stuff.

Yeah. So you've got to be sad that you just lost Lanavidod. But you can't forget why you're there. January 2nd, 1494, they established a settlement, La Isabella, on the northern coast of Hispaniola. Yeah, so they moved this one. The first one would have been in Haiti. So La Donavida was in Haiti. They found a different location in the Dominican Republic, what would be the Dominican Republic now, to establish La Isabella.

So just if you're keeping score at home, that is 0 for 1 for Columbus trying to build. forts, I guess you would say, or what would you call that? Established colony. Colonies, yes, colonies. And it doesn't take long for him to almost be 0 and 2 because by the end of 19, or sorry, 1494, disease will have killed two thirds of the settlers at La Isabella. So in just barely over a year, two thirds of the settlers are already dead. Well, things just go so wrong because after they erect La Isabella, on the North

Northern coasts, they start to go into the interior to search for all of this gold that they're being told about. As they go in there, they establish an interior fort that is just constantly under warfare. But this is where Columbus really shows his Columbusness, because he's supposed to be governing these areas. But instead of governing these areas, they go ahead and leave Hispaniola on April 24th. They make it to Cuba in six days. Columbus was believing that the that Cuba was the peninsula of China I think I said Japan earlier was China

He just went out exploring again He just set up these colonies These forts of these people And then it was just like okay you guys are cool I know I'm your governor I'm gonna go find some more shit He was delegating because Prior to going off to explore Cuba

He ordered the subjugation of the People of Hispaniola While he was out looking at around Cuba. Pretty quick. So he's like, hey, gonna go try to explore China a little bit more.

When I get back, I would like all of the native people to be under control. Cool? All right. See you later. And spoiler alert. It did not go well.

And he basically comes back to an island at war. The natives are in open revolt, as they fucking should be in their homeland. and it's not helping because the Spanish are getting ready to go right back at them. So Columbus goes ahead and releases a secret weapon. Alonso de Ojeda loose on Hispaniola.

O'Heda was really rough on the natives. If he found anybody that was stealing, he would be cutting their hands off. Also cutting the ears and nose off of captives before then re-enslaving them. Just a real bad guy to have in charge. of rule of law. Well, they established this thing called incommenda. I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that correctly,

but it was basically a labor system that rewarded conquerors with the conquered. So basically these guys going out and subjugating these hostile natives or whatever they were considering them because they weren't being brought to heal. Those guys that were going out there

and conquering them would then be rewarded with those people like as slaves. to do labor. And the fact that there's a name for that type of fucking labor system is fucking horrible. But we've got to get on to more horrible things because in February 1495, he went ahead and took 1,500 airwarks captive and sent 500 them back to Spain. The 500 strongest ones that he thought could survive the best. And the strongest ended up being 40% of them dying en route and then being hucked off the side of the ships.

The other half that ended up making it were sick upon arrival and did not last very long back in Spain. October, Spain received slaves that were considered to be cannibals and prisoners. So now, instead of sending back the best and brightest like you were talking about with the 500, he's sending back all the problem children on the island. Well, here's the thing. They aren't sending back a lot of gold at this point. No. The thing that they're supposed to be going over there and getting and sending back as the thing of value, they're not sending back a lot of that. Instead, it's almost like the focus has been taken off that, like, hey, yeah, we'll still be looking around for gold.

But in the meantime, look at all these slaves. Like, this could be a real, you know, real fucking cash machine. It's human capital. Yeah. You're still sending back something that you believe has monetary value. Isabella, not very happy about this. No. Isabella is saying, you are subjugating my subjects.

Well, and here's the thing, too. Think about it from, like, how we would look at, like, day traders or stockbrokers and all that shit today. Yeah. What you're basically doing is you're inflating your own stock. What he's doing is he's not waiting to try to, you know, wait till they have a reliable, you know, huge source of gold from mines they had discovered. He's not waiting to make that 10% off of that. What he's doing is he's basically subjugating and taking these people into. slavery and when they get sent back to Spain, it's not exactly like they're like sent back and been

like, no, put these people, they're just actually being sold into slavery. And it's not like we're sending back just like men either. They're sending back a ton of women as well to serve as basically like concubines and basically sex slaves. Not going to fucking like mince words about it. That's what's what's happening. So Columbus is fucking making money off of this. He's getting his 10% because this is technically revenue that's coming

out of the new world. Yeah, he's, the cash cow is still going on. He's pulled a bait and switch move to this point because like Chris said, they aren't finding gold. They don't know how valuable tobacco is yet. There's no other real cash crop. There's some cotton that's being

grown, but besides that, there just wasn't a whole lot. he could provide, so he starts providing slavery. Along with that, there's this place called Ceabo. It was a gold mine in Hispaniola. It would become crucial to Columbus's new tribute system. This tribute system was very, very special, and it was very, very rewarding. Because this whole thing ends up tearing apart the island.

The tribute system was that you had to bring back whatever the shit, a hawk's bell of gold dust is. That's what I was telling you. That's what he turned it into because he knew people knew what that amount was. Okay. So that was one of the trinkets that he gave out, so it was these little bells.

And because he knew they knew what the size of that was, that's why he would say you would bring back a hawks bell. Or a hawk bell full. Whenever I heard it on a dock or a podcast, I thought they were saying hawksbill. No, like the bill of a hawk bird. Yeah, like the bill. Yes.

Yeah. That's what I thought. Um, if you weren't able to provide that in one month, you had to provide 25 pounds of cotton. Um, you were rewarded though. This is the big part. You were rewarded if you were able to do that. Oh boy, what did they get? You got a sexy copper necklace.

Fuck, yes. Uh, if you were found without your copper necklace, your hands would be chopped off. Oh, fuck. So it was a way of ID people that had essentially paid their taxes. Yeah. Uh, as you can imagine. imagine this would pretty much just wreak havoc on...

It's the worst audit ever. You get your fucking hands chopped off. On the native population. So much so that 50,000 Tyanos ended up committing suicide so they didn't have to live in this shit system that Columbus had come up with. He drove these people to kill themselves.

They saw that this wasn't something that was going to be going away. Essentially, you see this guy show up. Things are kind of fishy, but you're okay dealing with that he leaves some of his guys. They don't last long. Honestly, you guys probably killed them,

and I'm not blaming you, because they probably tried to fucking or did rape your women, so good on you guys. But now they come back with even more people, and they're setting up even more permanent settlement. They're establishing these fucking horrible rules already, and where are you going to go? you don't have anywhere to go.

They're changing your entire way of life and you're just looking at this as like, nah, rather not be around for this because I know this isn't changed and this isn't going anywhere, so I'm out. And along with that, they realize that their life on the island could never be the same again

because this tribute system that he put into place ends up becoming such an issue because these people eventually, once they don't have a whole lot left to find in the gold mine, they have to go in search of gold. So they're basically leaving all of their daily tasks that keep their tribes and their lands running as far as farming, going out, hunting, anything like that. They're solely dependent on trying to keep their hands by collecting either A enough cotton,

which I don't know how fast 25 pounds of cotton grows. Codd's pretty fucking light. If all you were trying to stay alive, if all of you were trying to stay alive, you're probably going to be farming the shit out of that. you're not farming as many crops you lose your food sources because you're too busy trying to again keep your hands

can eat cotton nope and it just completely throws off kind of like the whole ecosystem of the island not probably the literal ecosystem too but just how the ecosystem of living on the island worked well and at the same time

this gold that you had beforehand it's not like you have a fucking mint or Fort Knox or anything like that where you're hoarding all this gold and you're just keeping it secret, you're finding this in riverbeds. You're like, oh, that's pretty, and the chief takes it and he makes a ring out of it

once he collects enough of it. Or you're finding it, you know, along the path. Or when you discover, like, a mine and everything, these people, they don't know how to mine. They don't know where to dig for this stuff. So it's not like they found this stuff all the time to begin with, and now they're actively having to go out or mine for this. Every single, was it every day that they had to have the hawksbill or once a month?

Once a month. Still, to find that much. even if it's a small bell for all of these people to have to find this, it's fucking ridiculous. Well, the word that you used to describe that was gold dust. It's not coming in nugs. You're not getting big, leafy, beautiful, sticky, sweet. Wrong one. Gold, hard, yellow, shiny gold.

And so you have to just collect little micro amounts of this at a time. and it got to the point on the island where even the Spanish that were there were skimming gold off the top and then trading it for goods with the natives. And this is where Columbus really made his mistake because once he started finding that out, he started ordering those guys to get their ears

and their nose and their hands cut off as well. So you start to have Spanish people that are like, whoa, whoa, whoa, he's going a bit too far. The conjugating the natives and killing them's okay, but now he's turning on us. He's turned this into his kingdom. Yeah. He's turned this area into his little playland. And again, Columbus, because of the capitulation of Santa Fe, he's the governor and the vice

story of this area. It takes a long time for news to get back to Spain about this fuckery that he's doing. So he's feeling pretty untouchable right now. Well, he knows eventually that after this, you know, voyage, he does have to head back because he needs to go get the adulation of all the stuff he's saying it's about. or has sent back, he's got to talk to Queen Isabella and be like, how'd you like them slaves I sent you? Pretty nice, right? You want to re-up?

You want to send me back? And, yep, he has to get funding and he has to get all new equipment, you know, new crews. He needs more ships. He's got to go back for a third voyage, right? There's more shit to find. Yeah. And he also gets sick while he's over there, too. Not sick enough.

No, not sick enough. He contracts malaria at some point that kind of, follows him for a long, long time because, obviously, being European, you don't have the natural immunity to malaria. We've talked about it a million times when you're over in the Caribbean. There's places that they just named Mosquito Island because there were just so many mosquitoes over there, ravaging them. The fleet ends up leaving March 10th, 1496. It lands back in Spain, June 11th. They did a little bit of dilly-dallying, I think, because that's a long period of time. It was the total voyage for the second voyage was 30 months.

And that was at the time they departed, La Isabella. They'd been there for 30 months. Can you imagine you left 39 guys there? Yep. They fucked up so badly by trying to fuck the populace that they were all killed. How many you guys, you're leaving so many people this time in these established little colonies that you made? Like, what do you think is going to happen? but you don't care at that point

because now you've gone full-blown, I'm just dealing in people now. Yeah, and he gets back and the Royal Court, wow, Royal Court starts to hear some of these stories

about what's going on. There's rumors being spread. There's accusations being lobbed against Columbus about his treatment of not only the locals, because there were some sympathizers, I'm sure sympathizers

to a point of like, hey, you know, I only had two slaves and not six slaves, and I didn't think it would be right to take any more than two, but he's also being lobbied these accusations of favoritism, of nepotism, that he's the one that's sitting down at these tables, eating these grand meals while everybody else is getting by just on nothing. Well, and you, looking at it from the perspective of, like, the news coming back,

he's constantly, he's got 17 ships. So every so often, he's sending a pretty steady stream back. I mean, he's got to send all of these slaves back. He's also sending back any of the gold he does find or animals and plants and all that kind of stuff. So as people are coming back, you know, they're being met with the royal court to, you know, take stock of how stuff is going and yada, yada, yada. Drop stuff off a port. Yeah. Like, oh, by the way, like that Columbus guy, he's kind of, you know, he's kind of fucking crazy.

Like, you should hear what he's doing over here to these locals to try to get them to pay up all this gold. And so they start finding out this stuff And so when he gets back There's kind of a reckoning where he has to answer for a lot of this Also he's slowly descending into crazy Uncle Madness And he's starting to change his look and appearance a little bit He's starting to dress like a Franciscan Which I guess was like a religious

Like a Franciscan monk? Yeah, probably something along those lines So he rolls in and to the court and what I assume would probably be like cotton pants, Birkenstocks. He literally showed up to court. You know how you wear a suit? If you have to go to court, you dress up, try to make yourself look presentable.

That's what he did. He tried to make himself look like a pious holy man from the get-go. Yeah, like he's running some sort of a wonderlust comment. He was literally going to court, going to court. Yeah. And somehow, this smooth-talking son of a bitch goes ahead and satisfies the king and queen. Enough that the king and queen are like, okay, June 11th, that's okay. Let's get a little bit of time behind us here. May 30th, 1498, we're going to go ahead and send you back. Here's the deal, though. We're going to go ahead and send you back. We're going to give you three ships. We're going to load three ships with all sorts of supplies that can go back, excuse me, to Isabella.

and it can go ahead and restock Isabella, which I'm sure hasn't turned into some sort of a post-apocalyptic war zone. Do you think that after seeing what happened and what he was able to do with the 17 ships and sending them back repeatedly with slaves, that they were like, we're not going to, yeah, I'm not allowing this to happen again. So you're going to take three ships

because I already know you have guys over there. We just need to send over, you know, we don't even have to send a lot of guys. We can just send the sailors and just load these things up with supplies, and you'll be good. So it's kind of like, hey, we don't like what you're doing there. So what we're going to do is we're going to put you on a leash.

We're going to muzzle you. You're still going to get to do your thing where you get to go around and map out stuff and discover parts of Asia. I'm doing Asian quotes here. But we're basically going to make – we're going to neuter you. We're going to cut your balls off and make sure that you can't keep sending these slaves back here. So there will be no reason for you to subjugate them any further. We don't like what you're doing. don't get us wrong. We don't hate what you're doing, but we don't like what you're doing.

We're getting enough out of what you're doing, and there's enough potential there that we're going to tolerate what you're doing and let you keep doing it. We just want to sleep a little bit better at night, so we're going to try to cut out some of the nasty shit. Well, and eventually we're just going to go ahead and you're going to die one day, and we're just going to be running this whole thing. So it's that big of a deal. Unfortunately for him, in his three ships that he's taking back, it becomes really, really, really hard to find guys that want to go back. with him because they've heard stories about what's going on over there. Yeah, how many like, so he's trying to recruit

guys who are probably sailors. Not only sailors, but people that are going to be calling us over there too. But people that are going to be in those positions probably are just like around town in pubs, taverns, bars, whatever. They're hearing from these guys that are coming back on these

voyages and be like, don't fucking go. Like are you it's, no, it's not fucking worth it. No, it's not fun. It burns when I fucking piss all the time now. Granted, that's my fucking fault. Start to hear voices. So, he gets 150 men that you could say were men of ill repute.

This is where I got the story wrong to in my head this whole entire time was, I think it swung the other direction, and I caught some negative Columbus propaganda that said that he was actually a prisoner that was sent over to the Caribbean in that area. to find the Americas to pay off his penance. That wasn't actually it. He was, like we've said, he got the go-ahead and all that. But these 150 men that he brought back were mostly criminals.

They were bad people. They weren't going to add to the vibes that were going on in Hispaniola. Yeah, they weren't a solution to any problem. No. So he goes ahead and takes over. They say, okay, we're going to send these three ships back over to Hispaniola to resupply them. Columbus, you're going to go ahead and explore the South Caribbean. They loaded, they landed.

He was just busy work. They were like, okay, this thing can't run any more poorly with you at the helm because of how bad it's been run at this point. So maybe if we take you kind of out of the equation, we still have to do that governorship and everything because of the capitulation, the Santa Fe one that we signed. But I think if we can keep you distracted long enough, like, hey, you want to explore the South? You want to go down and explore the South Caribbean? Yeah, you do? Okay, do that. And then just try to put someone in there as a second or someone that'll be overseeing the colonies

that actually know what the fuck they're doing. Yeah. So they end up taking off. They land at the Portuguese island of Porto Santo. They sail off to Madeira. On July 13th, they get caught in this place that I had no idea about since a little bit like the Bermuda Triangle called the doldrums.

Yeah. The doldrums were an area where they just got no wind. and it was hotter than hell in the doldrums. And when you're not moving and you're just sitting on open water and it's getting hotter and hotter, all of your supplies are spoiling. Any meat that you have that hasn't been turned into jerky, which you can't do on a wooden boat

because you can't start a fire on a wooden boat because that's only bad news. So you can't dry out any beef. Everything ends up rotting. You're running low on any sort of drinking water while being surrounded by salt water. Oh, yeah, man. Like you're getting dehydrated.

There's no wind to cool you, so you're just constantly. sweating even more. I want to say that, and I'm probably wrong in this, the doldrums are like sandwiched between two of like the trade winds or something like that, but it's this area that just like the eye of a storm basically where there's just no movement.

They're down by Trinidad, I believe. Okay. So they end up finally getting out July 31st. They just cooked in the sun for that whole entire time. they run into this thing called the Ornika River, which is in current day Venezuela. It is this beautiful, lush landscape because they finally found a continent.

And Columbus believed that he finally found a continent that he thought was China because there was so much land mass and there was so much water that was flowing out of this river that it had to be a massive amount of land that was collecting this water to form this river during the rains. So they end up finding that area. He claims that he found Eden because this was the most spiritual, celestial-looking place that he's ever seen.

August 4th, they end up getting hit by a tsunami that almost sinks a ship. They are forced on August 15th to land on the Peria Peninsula on the mainland of South America. So the guy that discovered the Americas, I guess, is fitting because he lands in South America finally. He finally hits land on his third voyage in 1498, six years. later he ends up finding land. I guess finding mainland. Mainland. Not the right mainland, but a mainland, a currently

occupied mainland. He has this wild thought that he starts to kind of really lose his mind. He ends up miscalculating something called the polar radius of the North Star and it starts to lead him into the thought

process of maybe the earth isn't round. Maybe it's more breast shaped. Maybe it's more breast shaped with a nipple that is closest to heaven and the area that we're in right now is the tip of the nipple because this is where Eden is. I just heard pear shaped but I'd like your description. Keep going. Let me just close my eyes here. Finally, August 19th, a very, very sick Columbus ends up making it back to Hispaniola and he walks into a full-blown rebellion against his brothers

that he had left there. He ends up making just the most embarrassing concessions to this guy named Francisco Roblon. Is that how he say his last name? There's another Francisco coming up, so

Rublon, Robloin? He was the one that was leading the rebellion against the brothers. Okay, yep. He basically has to capitulate enough to be like, look, we got these ships that are coming over here soon. If you guys want to leave the island,

we'll go ahead and forget that this whole rebellion thing happened. I won't bring any charges against you guys as far as I'm concerned, the slate's clean. Which is his way of saying, hey, if this happens, don't go back and tell them that there's been a rebellion, because then it's going to sound like I don't know what I'm doing. Yeah, don't go tattle, please.

The other thing was that he gave them, like, vast sprawling estates on Hispani. that they kind of got used to being, kind of got used to living in and decided that a lot of them didn't really want to go back. But enough of them had gone back that News had made it back to Spain in 1500, and the King and Queen of Spain

now decide that they are going to investigate Columbus. They send over this gentleman, I don't remember his first name, his last name is... Francisco. Oh, Francisco Bobadilla. Bobadilla. He goes over there.

He kind of starts an inquiry, trying to figure out what's going on. He sees the poor condition that the natives are in. He also sees the very poor condition that the Spanish are in. He's basically just going over to confirm all the shit

that they've been hearing. Yeah. And when he gets there, he's like, ah, this makes sense. So Bobadilla ends up removing him as governor. And hilariously enough, the only person that they could find

on the island that was willing to arrest Christopher Columbus was the, ships cook. So one of the cooks on the ship was like, I'll get, I'll arrest him, give me the arm irons. I'll get this guy. They put him in chains. Yeah. I think they put him in one of his kids in chains.

And they bring them back across. Not before he ends up establishing the only colony that actually stuck around Santo Domingo, which I believe is the capital of the Dominican Republic today.

So still around today. Did he name that after his father? Dominican, Dominican, Dominican Republic. I could see that. St. San Domingo, maybe there already was a St. Domingo in the Catholic area. But he is removed as governor, and that becomes a major problem. Because being removed as governor, he ends up coming back over to Spain, again, in shackles and leg irons and arm irons.

He's held in prison for a little while. Eventually, the king and queen decide that it's okay to release him. upon releasing him, he did not get any of his shit back. Everything that was still over on the island of Hispaniola was still over there. It was seized by Bobadilla. And they said,

well, that's not right. You need to get your stuff back. And he's also like, well, yeah, you guys, we made the deal.

I'm governor. You can't just remove me as governor. This was a deal that we made. They're like, hold on a second. This deal works both ways. There were certain things that like, a code of condo.

in which you were supposed to, what do they call that now that you sign it? It's like a pledge of something. I can't remember, like an ethics or something like that. But there was some type of ethics clause in there. It's like, no, no, no. Like you were going to get all that stuff if you would fulfill your end of the deal,

which you have not at this point. Because guess what? We haven't found China yet. There's no trade route to China that you have found. You keep telling us about China and Japan over there. We're not seeing anything Chinese or Japanese that's making it back of crap. cross. So they do end up letting him out. He starts to plead his case. He's trying to kind of do some

damage control on some of the stuff that went on over there. And somehow, we kind of talked about this earlier, I think that they were just trying to get him out of their hair because he was over there demanding his governorship back, demanding all the pay that he needed to receive. He wasn't getting his portion of what was coming back, which was pennies at this point. Like, you're not going to pay him the slaves that he sent over to you. Like, there's just, there's no way that all this is going to happen. So, like, you know what, man, you want to go back. We want you out of our hair.

We're going to sign off on a fourth voyage. We're going to send you with 147 men. I believe they had four boats. You have one rule. And this is the one hard, fast rule that you have. Just like those guys that you told them Navidad, don't go out and touch the women. You are not to go anywhere near Hispaniola. That is the one thing that you cannot do.

this is your do not pass go, do not collect $200, don't put your ass back in that position. And he goes, sure, that sounds fine. We can make that happen. So March 14th, 1502, this one's kind of fun because Diego finally gets to sail with his pops. Yay. Diego gets to go out and learn the family business,

although a very murky family business at this time. Blew me away. They crossed the Atlantic in 20 days. That's really fast. Yeah, I got to imagine there had been enough trips over there both, you know, the initial 17 before that and then the ones after that. But you'd probably also had maybe some other non-Columbus journeys going that direction. Oh, tons, yeah, I'm sure. Also, the Portuguese had in that direction.

They probably knew, well, if we go down here a little bit further south, we can catch the trade winds or the Westerlies all the way there. Yeah, they're regularly resupplying Hispaniola and now, yeah, well, Hispaniola, because Santo Domingo's on there. but they're sending more people over there to kind of poke and prod in the areas and see kind of what all Columbus found and how they can take advantage of it. They end up landing in a place called Martinique, June 15th, and Columbus anticipated a hurricane, which this guy, again, can't see still probably suffering the effects of malaria. His knees probably start hurting. It could be it, yeah.

He's like, ah, my knee, he's like, there's a hurricane on the horizon. The old salt that he was anticipates his heart. hurricane. And he decides that he has a ship that's infested with waterworms. These things aren't going to be seaworthy very soon. Also, they're probably not going to survive a hurricane if they're being infested this much. Where am I going to go? Let's head back so we can buy a boat from Hispaniola. So he does the one thing that they told him not to do. Of course, when he gets to Santo Domingo, he's denied port on June 29th. Um, but, But they have to be able to hunker down because this hurricanes are coming.

And this is where we run into the same thing that I talked about with the Pazone boy that died of potentially the venereal disease. That's not what they're called. That doesn't sound right. STI. Yeah. Yeah. Chris, he gets another break. So 30 ships end up heading back to Spain and on board some of those.

those ships were all of Columbus's possessions that were being sent back to Spain for Columbus. Not only that, but also on that ship was the guy who had, like, denied him entering the port and everything, basically the guy that was took over his spot as the governor and vice-froy of that area. Bobadilla. Yep. So he's heading back, and basically it's kind of a treasure fleet. Like all that stuff that they've been able to gather in the meantime, they're sending it all back. so that storm that he was feeling that right knee that started aching it ends up being right because out of the ships

out of the 30 ships 20 of these ships sank in the storm one of these ships total then out of those 10 that were left made it back to Spain and wouldn't you fucking know it which one made it back to Spain the one that had all of Columbus's show the fucking one that had all of Columbus's shit So he's now down there And even though the guy that is

You know, Bombadie is gone He still doesn't have permission to get in He doesn't have a large enough crew Or the fucking balls to try to take the four Or do anything like that So he ends up hitting Jamaica and Cuba Before sailing to Central America And there's some debate on

You know, did he, didn't he? But he may have been introduced to the minds at that point Oh yeah This kind of blows me away Just how he kind of starts work in the rim He regrouped He ends up hitting Jamaica Then he hits Columbia

Then he sails to Central America You mean Cuba Oh shit yeah Sales to Jamaica Hits Cuba And then they start sailing towards Central America He didn't know what he's sailing yet He just knows that he's headed west

They have maybe a chance encounter that they believe could have been Mayans. Of course, this is a pretty run-down Mayan society. If you haven't listened to it, go back and listen to the Mayan episodes. Endlessly interesting. October or August 14th, he spends two months exploring the Honduran, the Nicaraguan, and the Costa Rican coast before he arrives in Panama. And if you haven't listened to our Panama Canal episode, go pick up on that one too. August 16th is when they land in Panama

This becomes a pretty bad deal for the Panamanians Because as they get in there They start speaking to some of the locals And the locals start saying Yeah there's a bunch of land you have to cross There's kind of a river that'll take you into the heart If you get into the river That's where all the gold is at the end of the river

I'm sure that was another hey keep going south There's going to be gold down there but on the other side of that little strip of land there's a whole another big sea on the other side he's like so what you're doing is like sea here that you're on he's like yes he's like land here it's like I understand big sea on the other side

it's like another ocean he's like yes fuck well shit is that the Atlantic too did we miss China did we miss India? No there's no way so they end up sitting at the mouth of this river flood season ends up happening. They're able to travel down the river further in search of this gold.

The Panamanians end up getting pretty tired of them messing around in their area. So we come to another war that happens along this fourth that they had posted up on the river. So you got to leave. Once you leave, December 5th happens and Columbus's fleet gets hit by a storm that lasted for nine days. They said that he wrote in his journal that it was the worst storm that he'd ever experienced. on the ocean. This guy spent a lot of time on the ocean for this to be the worst storm that's ever hit him. Doesn't seem like the kind of storm that would hit a good Christian man. No, no. But it all

kind of makes sense that he ends up running into just all of these bad storms because again, the trade winds are the things that carry all of the tropical storms into the Gulf of Mexico. So right now, I think there are, there's a hurricane that's supposed to be coming towards Florida right now. supposed to be pretty bad. But if you're there during hurricane season, which is kind of around the time that he was there, you're going to be getting these tropical storms that are just coming in and just battering the hell out of the area. So they end up surviving this nine days storm. They have a run in with some more locals.

He decides to head back for Hispaniola because they need to get back to, I guess, replace ships? They still needed to replace the ship at that point. They were still left with that one. And these aren't like, when they're being sent on these ships, it's not like, hey, we just built this brand new ship. Here you go. These are ships that have been on the sea for a long time. So there's already rot and all that kind of stuff, you know, already set in on them.

Yeah. And especially if you're on your fourth voyage and they're just trying to get you the fuck out of Spain, you're probably not getting even B tier C tier ships. No. So just along his way back to Hispaniola, they end up finding the, Cayman Islands, which he named Los Tortugas on May 10th. Unfortunately, they end up running into a storm on June 25th and get marooned on Jamaica. There was something about how they were pulled up into port and they were concerned that it was going to destroy the ship.

So instead of destroying the ships, they just ran them a ground as hard as they could to the point to where they could never come back out. They also probably did that for shelter. Again, this is another one of those things where it's just Columbus shouldn't have survived this. Nobody should have survived this. They were stranded in Jamaica for a year. A year. A man named Diego Mendez

goes ahead and saves his bacon. He jumps into a couple of canoes with some natives. They wouldn't have survived had it not been for the natives. No. And the natives hadn't met them before at this point. They were able to establish decent relations, probably because Columbus didn't have a boat to enslave and send them back on. So that's probably why he was able to actually ingrati himself with it.

And after that time period of them helping them to survive because they definitely didn't have a year of supplies available to them, they are like, okay, we got to do something. No one's found us. It's been a year. We got to take a leap. So Diego Mendez, some natives, they actually canoe put, you know, I think they kind of rigged some rudimentary sales on the canoe because they know it's roughly about 120. 25 miles to Hispaniola. So I think they actually sent out two canoes. Yeah.

So Diego Mendes, some other guys, and then some natives actually head back to Hispaniol for help. It got so bad at certain points that one of the natives died of dehydration. They said that there was a point where they started to take on water or something like that. They were in a storm and there was too much weight. They actually just started pitching some of the natives over the side. And as they were like fucking trying to grab onto the. boat to float. They were just slashing out of with their swords. So yeah, way to think the people that are going out to try to help you. They end up making it. Like a hundred miles. Yeah.

Well, what do you mean? That was the journey that they had taken by canoe. It was like a 125. Yeah, dude. So they end up making it to Hispanic, which, crazily enough, like, you're not in a ship where you can really steer that much. You're just in these canoes. But to actually navigate and make your way back to Hispanola or Hispaniola is pretty crazy on its own. This guy named Governor

Nicholas. Nicholas Obando. And he was like, nah. He's like, I don't think we're going to go out there and, you know what? Why don't you guys just chill?

You guys had a hard journey. Aren't you guys worried about you? Don't worry about Columbus. He'll be fine. You guys rest, recover. Hey, did you hear it's hurricane season? We don't go out during hurricane season.

I thought hurricane season was over. That's right. You get your ship running around hurricane season and get yourself stranded. Just like what happened here. So you guys just chill out and we'll see what happens. Well, that doesn't really go over well

because word ends up getting out that he's been denying to rescue Columbus who is still the former governor. He probably made some of the people there either wealthy or granted of land so he's not making anybody happy or he's not making everybody happy by not rescuing Columbus. So through some public pressure, he ends up having to avoid a mutiny, basically, go and rescue the crew.

Which, shockingly enough, was in full mutiny on the island. Yeah. There were half of the guys. Mutant is glore. Half of the guys that were marooned in Jamaica with him just decide that they've had enough of it. They end up leaving. They run into conflicts with some of the natives on the land because, again, not the best. guys that are on this trip.

They start trying to take themselves some women, start trying to overrun the villages. So Columbus ends up going to the villages like, hey, my guys are cool, I'm cool, we're not trying to attack you. Friend? Friend. Changa, Rick Marshall. Friend. Friend.

So they end up getting the revolters back under control. And there was a first ship that comes over to just kind of like scope out what was going on. They landed, they kicked out some meat and some wine. And clubs, like, okay, let's get on the ship. And they're like, nah, we're sending another one for you. We just wanted to make sure you guys were all still alive. Everything's cool.

We're just the meat and wine, guys. We don't have room. We don't have the capacity for this. Just meat and wine. Sorry, guys. So they end up sending another ship later on. They end up scooping everybody off of Jamaica. Do you think they did that just to like, they sent them out there probably a smaller boat a little bit faster?

And they're like, just see if they're still alive. Yeah. If you don't see any science. of them will act like we didn't see them. As they're sailing by the beach, there's like a boat fucking up on the bank with like a shantytown built around. He's like, fuck! It's been a year.

How did these people survive a year? I know. God damn it. All right. Drop anchor. So, they bring them back to Hispaniola, I guess. Ovando and Or Obando and Columbus, who didn't like each other kind of exchanged from pleasantries.

Columbus, Est is D a little bit. And all and told for that good desucking that he gave him. Obondo's like, okay, here's a deal. You're not supposed to be here. You're not the governor anymore. I am the governor. You and your son are going to go ahead and purchase tickets.

Look here. I'm the captain now. You and your son are going to purchase tickets on what's basically like a civilian ship that will send you back to Spain. And I'm sure at that point, Columbus is like, we're not on Jamaica anymore. I don't even like the islands anymore. Just send me back home.

We're cool with this. He's also been, like, fighting illness this entire time his eyesight's been going. Honestly, he definitely has syphilis. Oh, yeah. So that's starting to eat at his brain as well. So this guy needs to be put in home. September 11th, another day that will live in Infany. Columbus and Diego bordered a ship that was headed back home, arriving in Spain, November 7th.

And he will never return. No. Alive. No, his final years are very interesting to me because he gets back November 7th. Queen in Isabella ends up dying November 26. So very shortly after he gets home to, I'm sure, try to spin a narrative that what he did wasn't so bad. This was the person that would consistently give him chances and kind of swallow the bullshit. This was his patron, his main patron.

So after he lost her, what was the king's name? Sorry? Ferdinand. King Ferdinand was just like, we don't need you anymore, clown. He's like, go, go take a break, go take a walk, go sit by a pond, go feed some ducks. You sweet, just racist old man. The issue with that, though, is this sweet racist old man decided that he wanted his penance. He wanted his money.

He wanted his end fulfilled and just kept tying the court up, left and right with all of these different things, trying to get his money, trying to get his ownership of all these companies. Which, I mean, good on Spain for having a justice system that allows him to take that type of stuff to court and actually be heard about it. Yeah. Like, in some situations, it would just be like, dude, I'm the fucking king. We'll kill you. No.

How about we just cut your head off? Off with his head? Is that no. But the fact that, you know, it shows how progressive Spain was at the time. They still led to the genocide of basically everybody on the South American and Central American continent. So horrible fucking people, but ahead of their time for the justice system, it seems. Not justice, justice for them, not justice for the rest of the people.

There's a reason why there's a lot of Spanish dialects being spoken down in South America and Central America today along with Portuguese. And some German too. Yeah. He follows King Ferdinand around basically. He settles in Seville in April of 1505. He ends up following Ferdinand around. even to Ferdinand's second marriage to his new queen, just trying to petition the king to get his stuff.

He ends up dying on May 20th, 1506, in a place called Valid, or Baladlid, something like that at the age of 54. This was a city that Ferdinand had actually married his second wife in. So he was still like up to his last dying day, still fighting to get what he needed. And for as interesting as his whole story was alive, oh buddy, did you hear about after he died? Yeah.

So after he dies, his remains were first buried in this Baladid town, whatever it's called. Diadid or whatever. Yeah. Then it gets moved to a monastery in Seville based on his son's orders. 1513, it's moved inside to, or inside of a cathedral that it's entombed in in Seville. He's a hero to the Catholic Church. Yeah.

And has remained a hero throughout this time and everything. So this is why he's able to essentially have his remains put into, you know, a monastery and then a cathedral. 1536. Along with Diego's remains, he's sent to Santo Domingo to be buried as per, excuse me, as per his will. Boo. Not great. But 1793, France, who is just taken over Santo Domingo ends up sending his remains to Cuba. and in 18.

I just see it is like someone walking into somebody else's house and there's still stuff left and he's like trash or what do we do with it and he's holding up just like an urn? He's like what is it? It says Columbus's ashes on it.

He's like, uh, is there any, do we have their forwarding address? It's like, yeah, their forerting address is Cuba. Do we have a ship leaving for Cuba? Just like already, yeah, just fucking put it on the ship. Throw the bones in a bag. Label the bag for Cuba. We'll just go drop it on their doorstep.

If they ask questions, just say that it's Columbus. So 1898, Cuba fights for its independence and wins, and Cuba goes ahead and sends some of the remains back to Seville. So there's, like, multiple places. There's bones that are still claimed to be his in Santo Domingo. There's bones that are still claimed to be his in Cuba. You know that Castro had some of Columbus's bones. He probably used a skull as an ashtray.

Probably. Because why wouldn't you? That would be... That would be cool. that'd be pretty poetic but supposedly there's a set of bones

that is credited to Christopher Columbus that is now back in Seville and our whole belief system of having Columbus Day is kind of odd

because well and I guess we don't have it anymore but the reason that we did have it's kind of odd because in Spain where he sailed for he's not a hero he's not somebody

that they're they looked to as like the guiding light. He's given his due for accidentally finding the Americas, not China. But beyond that, he caused them a lot of problems. But also he cashed a bunch of checks for them because they went into South America and Central America. Like we talked about and swooped in and just took over. Yeah. So he still gets a little credit for that.

The countries in Central America kind of acknowledged that he was a guy that showed up. But as far as like celebrating him, they had a Columbus Day 2. they've changed those over to indigenous people's days. So this whole belief that like Western wokeism trying to change Columbus Day into... I don't even see what the argument on that is. That's a non-argument because the point is, the only argument is we've always had a Columbus Day. It's part of our, it's part of our, you know, our national heritage that we've always had a Columbus Day. Always since the 70s.

Yeah. So, but wait, part of our national heritage is a day about a guy. who's famous in Spain, but was born in Italy, that never set foot on the North American continent. And we have a day for that guy. Okay. Not Amerigo Vespucci. Yeah. A day for the guy that didn't even set foot in Orlando.

So, I mean, it's all kind of a mixed story. Not really a great guy. Not really the villain, I think, that he's portrayed to be. Just kind of a guy that saw a situation that he's. could take advantage of. I think he gets, I think it's kind of twofold. I think he gets credited with the accomplishments of others. I don't mean specifically, but what I think happens is when people talk about the discovery of the new world, they tend to see what became of that. And so he somehow, the credit funnels down to him as the progenitor of that. At the same time, from the

other standpoint, when you look at it from an outsider's perspective, he was the one that actually introduced all of the horrible shit as well. So if he, you know, that's what people are seeing now. Once all of that stuff has more of a focused point than just all of the like glossy, like happy, like, he discovered the new world. That's why we're all here. Yay. It's like, no, like what did he have to do in discovering this place that had already been populated. So I think that's when, you know, the argument for people to say

that he should have a day like that is just, if your only argument is because it's always been part of America since the 70s, you still get the fucking day off work. Yeah, don't hate it. Yeah. And honestly, if we're being honest,

that's the only reason any of us ever liked Columbus Day growing up, going to school, work, you got the fucking day off. It could have been crazy, fun, sodomy day. And if you got the fucking day off, it would just include more butt sex. But what I'm saying is, if it's, you know, had it been a day that we work, no one would give a fuck. No, nobody would give a shit. So there you go.

That's my two cents on it. And that's Columbus. And that is Columbus. Well, we're not going to keep you guys any longer. Thanks for joining us on this one. Remember, rate, review, subscribe. And we'll see you on the next one. Thanks. All right, ladies and gentlemen, thanks for joining us for another episode.

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