Celebrate Columbus Day

Honor The Grand Daring And Achievements of The European Age of Exploration

Today we honor and celebrate one of the great visionaries and explorers in human history, Christopher Columbus. Columbus and the Spanish crown sought a cheaper, safer and less politically encumbered means to trade with the Far East than the traditional land routes. This became essential when the Muslim Ottoman Empire conquered Constantinople.

European peoples are the greatest sea-faring people in the history of the world and so it is logical that we turned to the seas for solutions. Europeans brought to this endeavor the full weight of our significant technological prowess, courage and spirit of adventure. Europeans brought our ability to imagine the world in new ways and then prove or disprove our imaginings through exploration of the physical world to edify our soul.

It is a myth that Europeans thought that the earth was flat. That myth was created and perpetuated by Washington Irving in the 19th century. In 200 BC Eratosthenes had computed the diameter of the earth. The Greeks had long known that the earth was a sphere. Eratosthenes created the world’s first global projection of the world and computed the Earth’s axial tilt. This was known to Renaissance Europeans who had rediscovered the Greek libraries at Alexandria. Logically, this would mean you could sail around the earth. Columbus yearned to see for himself if this was true. He made his own computations of the earth’s diameter which were significantly smaller than Eratosthenes’. This would turn out to aid he and his crew’s daring.

(Bartolomeo and Christopher Columbus’ Map before his voyages)

(First global projection of the world by Eratosthenes 200 BC)

Columbus wanted to be of service to his people and preserve if not expand their peaceful trade with the Orient. He and his crew set sail not knowing how long they would have to sail or if they would ever find a safe port again. Of course, they also wanted the glory that came with succeeding in such an extremely dangerous and bold adventure. They should have. A great and healthy civilization like Renaissance Europe encourages men to seek glory through great achievements and by exploring the unknown through life risking adventures.

Columbus and his crews discovered and explored the Caribbean sea, mapping its geography and also documenting its tides, currents and wind patterns. They sailed and mapped out Central America. Columbus discovered the shortest land crossing that became the Panama Canal. He recognized that you could traverse it by water if you could build a canal. Not having the resources to build it, he and his men traversed it by land. They built a small settlement there where they discovered gold. Their settlement was attacked by Indian tribes and they barely escaped complete slaughter.

They put their boats back in water to escape, and sailed toward San Domingo. They discovered that some of their ships had started leaking due to a wood eating mollusk known as shipworm. He and his crew desperately bailed water until they found some islands to bring their ships to land. All of his ship repairmen were killed by the Indians, so Columbus sent a small party to San Domingo to summons a larger rescue and repair crew. They came and Columbus and his crew used their tenacity and resourceful cunning to escape death yet again.

Leif Ericsson had sailed the Atlantic hundreds of years before, but he kept to the land masses that dot the North Atlantic as an archipelago connecting Europe with North America. Columbus and his crew sailed the open mid-Atlantic - a first in human history. During his four separate voyages he mapped the winds, tides and currents of the mid-Atlantic, and Caribbean Oceans. He discovered, explored and mapped the Caribbean islands. He discovered the Atlantic/Pacific shortest land route and conceived of the Panama Canal. He mapped a large swath of Central and South America from the Yucatan peninsula to a large segment of the northern coast of the South American continent.

(Map of Columbus For Voyages)

None of the people who he encountered who had inhabited this area for thousands of years, had conceived of much less achieved these things.

Columbus and his crew survived massive ocean storms. They survived tough conditions on the open seas with diet and disease. They encountered hostile people who in some cases attacked them and nearly killed them all. They remained resolute and accomplished much on their missions. Had Columbus not set sail or had he failed, another European would have eventually succeeded, as the spirit and thirst for exploration, adventure and the upward development of European civilization was strong across all of Europe.

Christopher Columbus succeeded despite failing to sail unimpeded to the East Indies. The only way to find out if something is possible is to do it. Not only did he do it, but the organization, skill and determination of he, his crew, and the entire European civilization that stood behind him led to untold discovery, development, commerce and technological achievement. The sea-faring exploits of the European Age of Exploration led to massive gains in technological understanding by Europeans without which the space programs, as one example, could not exist. The European exploration of the Earth’s oceans and the earth itself are the direct and necessary ancestor to European man initiating and pushing the boundaries in the exploration of space.

(1892 replica of Columbus ship the Santa Maria)

It is common these days to attack and caricature Christopher Columbus as a one-dimensional embodiment of pure evil. Those attacks on his character are not attacks on Columbus as much as they are attacks on European civilization ands its multi-continental diaspora. They do not aim to establish some new moral order, rather they aim to destroy our European diaspora’s moral legitimacy. It is likely that in a few short years every statue in North America that honors Christopher Columbus will be torn down. As that project has destroyed the legitimacy of the European diaspora and even of Europe peoples and our achievements, the statues honoring the Pioneers and Founding Fathers of America will be torn down too. That is an attack not just on those men, it is an attack on the civilization that they were a part of. Thus, if you are a European, it is an attack on you.

These attacks and the ensuing conquest of our nations have succeeded because we surrendered our moral authority. We lost our confidence and our ability to appreciate the astounding bravery, intelligence, imagination, technological prowess and organizational skills of our people. There is an antidote to this sorry state of affairs. We can reclaim our moral conviction and self confidence very easily. When we do we will reclaim our nations and our people’s destiny to ascend ever upward toward the transcendent; fusing the realms of the spirit and the material through curiosity, daring and action. We can reclaim it by proudly honoring Christopher Columbus, his crew, their supporters and their great collective achievements. We can reclaim that which we most need to reclaim - our healthy and good instinct to better ourselves and our people by sailing for glory. In so doing we honor ourselves and our civilization that produced him.

Today I honor and acknowledge the greatness of Christopher Columbus. I honor the greatness of European man.

(Statue honoring Columbus in Barcelona Spain)