Newsmax's Top 10 Facts About Christopher Columbus

Christopher Columbus (Cristoforo Colombo in his native Italian) was a remarkable explorer and navigator, whose life and experiences are celebrated each year on the second Monday of every October — October 14 this year.

The left wants to replace Columbus Day with "Indigenous People’s Day," claiming Columbus should not be honored because of alleged acts of cruelty, including slavery, that he inflicted upon the native populations he came across.

But the cruelty was a two-way street — committed also by natives. This was, after all, more than 500 years ago, and the acts of men in the late 15th century can’t be judged by 21st century standards.

Despite those claims, Columbus was a very religious man, who named many of the places he visited after saints, and the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal service organization, was named after him.

Here are Newsmax’s top 10 facts about Columbus, many of which you may not have known.

1. Columbus Nearly Didn’t Make His Historic Voyage:

For the decade before Spain’s King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella agreed to finance his journey to the New World, Columbus approached three other countries — Portugal, England and France. They all turned him down.

Educated men had known for centuries that the Earth was round, and upon that basis, Columbus reasoned that he could reach Asia by sailing west.

What he reached instead, of course, was the Americas — the New World.

The agreement he signed with Spain’s monarchs included a provision that he could retain 10% of the "pearls, precious stones, gold, silver, spices . . . which may be bought, bartered, discovered, acquired, or obtained.”

2. Columbus Was Likely Not the First:

Although Columbus is generally credited as being the first European to discover the Americas, the Norse Viking Leif Erikson more-than-likely made the first trans-Atlantic voyage 500 years earlier, landing in present-day Newfoundland.

Columbus, moreover, never set foot on the North American continent, although he’s honored each year throughout most of the Americas.

However, Columbus made multiple voyages to the Americas and ushered in European colonization — first by Spain, followed by England.

3. About the Names of Those Ships . . .  :

Every elementary school student knows that Columbus made his first voyage in the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. Although Columbus’ flag ship was officially named the Santa Maria, the Nina and Pinta were slang names given by the ships' bawdy sailors, according to The History Channel.

Spanish ships of the era were generally named after saints.

For example, the official name of the Nina was the Santa Clara.

But the sailors called it the Nina in order to honor its owner, Juan Nino.

The Pinta, moreover, is Spanish for "the painted one" or "prostitute."

While we don’t know what its actual name was, we’re reasonably certain it wasn’t "Prostitute."

4. Columbus Never Believed He Found the Americas:

As everyone believes, Columbus landed in the Americas on each of his four official voyages . . .  everyone, that is, except for Columbus.

The great explorer went to his grave believing he’d found exactly what he set out to find — a western passage to Asia.

Although Columbus knew he hadn’t yet reached China or Japan, he believed he was close.

5. Columbus Made Four Voyages to the New World:

Every grade-schooler knows of Columbus' initial voyage, "In fourteen hundred ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue."

But did you know that within the following decade he made three additional voyages to explore the Caribbean, South America, and Central America?

Also, he believed half of his four voyages were unsuccessful.

Despite the fame of his first voyage, he failed to return to Spain on ships laden with spices and precious metals, and his flagship, the Santa Maria, ran aground and sank, forcing him to leave 39 men behind in a settlement he called La Navidad.

Similarly, on his fourth voyage his ship rotted out from under him in Jamaica, leaving him and his men marooned for a year.

6. Columbus Returned to Spain in Chains in 1500:

Despite his fame and success as an adventurer, Columbus was a terrible governor.

He was appointed governor of Hispaniola and colonists there complained that he was a tyrant. Governing a country is not the same as running a ship.

Complaints to the Spanish monarchy became so intense that they sent a ship there to arrest Columbus and bring him back in chains. Although he was stripped of his title as governor, he was sent back on his fourth and final voyage.

7. He Was the First European to Connect With a Major New World Civilization:

Columbus' fourth voyage, consisting of four ships, took him to Central America, where he and his crew came upon an advanced culture believed to be either Mayan or Mayan-related. They wore textile garments, possessed tools made of copper, and they brewed a fermented concoction remarkably similar to beer.

From there he proceeded south along the Central American Coast, but ended up in Jamaica, where he was eventually stranded.

8. How Columbus Saved Himself by Looking to the Heavens:

After Columbus was left marooned on Jamaica by half his crew, the islanders captured him and denied him food. But what he lacked in people skills he more than made up for with navigational expertise.

With his knowledge of celestial navigation, Columbus was aware that a lunar eclipse was coming in a matter of days. He told the natives that if he wasn’t given nourishment, his god would show his displeasure by making the moon "rise inflamed with wrath."

Sure enough, on the evening of February 29, 1504, the Earth came between the sun and the moon, turning the moon red. The frightened islanders offered him food and implored Columbus to ask his god to show mercy.

9. Columbus Made One Final, 5th Voyage, to the Americas, After His Death:

Columbus was buried in Spain — first in Valladolid, then in Seville — following his death in 1506. His body remained in Seville until 1537, when his daughter-in-law requested that his remains, and those of his son, her late husband Diego, be laid to rest in Hispaniola, at a Santo Domingo cathedral.

10. No One Knows Where Columbus’ Final Resting place Is:

After being interred in Santo Domingo for more than 200 years, Columbus’ remains were sent to Havana, Cuba in 1795. Then 103 years after that, a box supposedly containing his remains was shipped to Spain.

However, in 1877, a box containing bones and inscribed with Columbus’ name was discovered in Santo Domingo. Since then two cities — Seville, Spain and Santo Domingo, Hispaniola (the capitol of the Dominican Republic) — lay claim to possessing Columbus’ remains.

Which are his? No one knows for sure.

Michael Dorstewitz is a retired lawyer and has been a frequent contributor to Newsmax. He is also a former U.S. Merchant Marine officer and a Second Amendment supporter. Read Michael Dorstewitz's Reports — More Here.