3.4—Christopher Columbus, Part 1 (10 min video)

Transcript

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– Well today we have the privilege of taking a look at Christopher Columbus, at looking at his early life and going all the way until he really began to question what he was doing.

Christopher Columbus, whose name actually means something like Christ-bearer and holy dove, has these very distinct references to what he believed. He was born in 1451. That’s a date that you should know. It’s helpful to know when he actually lived. But he was born, from what we can tell, in the city of Genoa, which is in Italy. And there, his parents were involved in a weaving business and also involved in various family businesses that caused him, by the age of 10, to be able to sail and run errands for his father on a small skiff that he operated up and down the coast of Italy.

So he was very capable as a boy. But what’s interesting about Columbus is his earliest memory. He tells a story that his earliest memory came before he was even three years old. He was about two and a half. The year was 1453. And he remembers walking through the streets of Genoa with his parents, and he remembers all of the bells beginning to ring, only it wasn’t a call to worship, it wasn’t a sign that a specific person had died. It was all the bells at once, and he noticed that people, as they heard why the bells were ringing, began to weep openly in the streets, including his own parents.

And so Columbus asked, “Why are so many people crying? “What is wrong? “What has actually happened here?” And that’s when his parents told him that the capital of Constantinople, far away in the east in what used to be known as Byzantium, had fallen to the Muslim Turks, and that therefore the Eastern Empire that had once been a light over there was completely gone.

Constantinople was the last city. And people cared so much about the people in Constantinople and cared so much about that light in the East that when it was finally extinguished, they didn’t just say, “Oh, well.” They didn’t just say, “Tough luck for those people.” They actually weeped openly in the streets. But Columbus began to think, “How can I solve this? How can I remedy this? How can I actually find a solution to this? And we’ll see what he came up with, but that really is an important part of his boyhood story. Now, as I already mentioned to you, he very early on learned the art of sailing. Very early on learned how to get around on a boat using nothing but his own wits, his own knowledge of navigation and the wind as power.

And so therefore, by the year 1472, Columbus actually became a captain on a ship of trade. In other words, he was so well trusted as a young man that he was given some incredible responsibility. It’s during this time that he first sailed to the east. It’s during this time that he first went to the eastern Mediterranean and he saw all of the wealth and all of the riches of that land, but he also began to think Jerusalem is just over there, but Jerusalem is a closed city.

It’s a city that we really cannot go to. and there are people there who are actually suffering, and we need to do something to actually alleviate or remedy their suffering. And so Columbus begins to tuck all of these things away, begins to think about these things in connection with his earliest memory as a young boy.

And as he continues to sail and continues to see much of the world, it’s in the year 1476, after being a captain for four years, that his ship is wrecked off of the coast of Portugal. And actually, Columbus should have died in the shipwreck. He was found half dead or half drowned, however you want to put it, on a piece of the shipwreck by a fisherman who actually dragged his body back into Portugal and eventually took him to the city of Lisbon, where Columbus was able to come back to full health.

While he was there, Columbus began to search once again, not so much for what he should do next, but really what he should actually do with his life.

Now, he continued to be a captain. He actually became the head of a whole commercial fleet, but he used these voyages to expand his knowledge of what was out there. He traveled to places like England and Scotland and Iceland and Greenland. He traveled to places such as the Scandinavian countries or much of Western Europe. And as he began to travel to these places, He began to encounter all the stories of places like Ultima Thule, all the stories of what might actually be out there to the West.

He also began to read heavily, specifically in the scriptures. He also began to collect whatever maps he could find that claimed to show what might actually be out there to the West. The maps at this point still weren’t very reliable, and they certainly weren’t accurate, but they at least showed that there was something out there. Sometime around this era of Columbus’s life, he also encounters the school of Sagre, which you’ll see here on the screen, because this is a word that you won’t be easily able to spell unless you’re familiar with the Portuguese language. And at Sagre, Columbus encountered a group of fellow navigators, a group of men who were interested in exploration, interested in proper shipbuilding and so forth, and he began to find men who were like him.

And this school was founded by an incredible man himself, was founded by a prince known as Henry the Navigator, who also wanted to retake Jerusalem.

And Henry the Navigator was famous because he was the first modern ruler, or the first modern anyone, to actually get someone to travel all the way around Africa.

It was a strange thing, there was this cape about half the way down Africa called Cape Bojador, and everyone was too afraid to cross it.

They feared that if you crossed it, you would be beached, or you would be swallowed alive by some kind of kraken or sea monster, or that you would be suddenly attacked by, I don’t know, some pygmy tribe from the jungle. It was all ridiculous. It was just based upon fear. And so people began to imagine all kinds of things that might be down there. And here, the navigator sent 19 different explorers. The 19th one finally crossed it. And once they managed to get past that one cape, everyone was able to get past it. It was all mental. It was all in their mind that kept them from going that far. But what Henry the Navigator also did was he founded this school for explorers in Portugal. It was the school of Sagre. It was on the westernmost point of Portugal, which is also one of the west-westernmost points of Europe. And the idea was, “Let’s travel west and let’s see what’s out there.” Well, Columbus was trained at this school. He was trained by men who had similar passions to him. And he began to understand navigation. He began to understand astronomy. He began to understand maps. He began to understand things like, how do you best build a ship? How do you best use navigational instruments? How do you understand things like currents in the water? How do you understand wind currents and things like that? As a result, Columbus was given so much knowledge and so much skill in how to calculate these things that a story is told about Columbus that one day as he walked along the beaches of Portugal, a piece of driftwood appeared on the shore.

And he noticed some interesting things about this driftwood. He noticed, first of all, that it came from a tree, because it had a bark pattern, that was like no other tree that he knew of in the known world.

And Columbus was pretty well versed in the various plants of the known world. He also noticed that it had been hewed. It actually had marks from some kind of ax or some kind of knife. And so he realized that some person had most likely been working on this. But however he was able to do it, Columbus evaluated how long this piece of driftwood had been in the water, and he also evaluated how long this piece of driftwood had actually taken or how many miles it had traveled to get to where he was.

And so he determined that land was only as far away as that. So he used a piece of driftwood to figure out how far away it was. Now after this time, Columbus, everything seemed to be going well for him. He married, he had a son named Diego, and he began to appeal to people for his mission to retake Jerusalem by sailing west. This was the idea now. Let’s not travel over land by the eastern route. Let’s sail west. We’ll be able to retake Jerusalem because we’ll invade from essentially the back door. But the following year, by the time Columbus was 34 years old, in the year 1485 we are now, his wife suddenly died. And all of the people who he’d been talking to about sailing west suddenly denied him. Columbus, the following year, Columbus moved to the city of Castile, which is in one of the Spanish kingdoms. His son accompanied him. He needed somebody badly to help him with his son and badly to help with the house. He actually met a beautiful young woman named Beatrice who helped him with these things. She was a great mother to Diego. And somebody that Columbus fell in love with, only the laws of the time prevented him from marrying her. And so Columbus, feeling that he was a broken man and feeling that his life was over, began to hit rock bottom. And had Columbus given up, had he actually decided to call it quits here and nobody had been sent into his life to rescue him, it’s quite possible that we wouldn’t be having this conversation because no one would have ever heard of Columbus. But we’ll talk about why people know about Columbus in the last video.