Columbus

Christopher Columbus

Born: 1451 Genoa
Died: 1506 Valladolid, Castile, age 54
Travels: as far north as the British Isles, as far south as Ghana
Voyage: appointed by Isabella I of Castile
Offspring: one son by his wife and one son by a mistress

He landed in the Bahamas, visited Cuba and Hispaniola, now Haiti, and made three more voyages to the Americas: Lesser Antilles, Trinidad, and the northern coast of South America and east coast of Central America.

Wikipedia –
“Columbus learned Latin, Portuguese, and Castilian. He read widely about astronomy, geography, and history, including the works of Ptolemy, Pierre d'Ailly's Imago Mundi, the travels of Marco Polo and Sir John Mandeville, Pliny's Natural History, and Pope Pius II's Historia rerum ubique gestarum.

“According to historian Edmund Morgan, ‘Columbus was not a scholarly man. Yet he studied these books, made hundreds of marginal notations in them, and came out with ideas about the world that were characteristically simple and strong and sometimes wrong….’”

movie clip
Vangelis Papathanasiou, composer of “Conquest of Paradise”, from the soundtrack, 1492 Conquest of Paradise, directed by Ridley Scott, starring Gérard Depardieu as Christopher Columbus, released 1992.

The song is pseudo-Latin. See the entry of 11/25/2021 for the lyrics.

Columbus is an inspiration to young people for his daring.

crew of ninety men
Niña, Pinta, Santa Maria
little girl, painted lady, Saint Mary