3.5—Christopher Columbus, Part 2 (9 min video)

Transcript

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– All right, where we left off yesterday with Columbus, he had essentially hit his all-time low. Columbus had lost his wife. The new woman that had been put into his life that actually was gonna prove to be a great mother for his son, he by law was not allowed to marry her for various inheritance reasons.

Not only that, but everyone that he tried to speak to, particularly those who actually had known Henry the Navigator or were descended from him about this expedition west to retake Jerusalem, no one would listen to him.

Everyone essentially thought that Columbus was crazy to do this. Now, one of the things about this we need to talk about right now is one of the old myths of history. And one of the common myths that you may have heard is that in the days of Columbus, most people thought the world was flat.

And that Columbus, who thought the world was round, was kind of seen as a radical. Nobody believed that that was actually true. They actually thought he was crazy for believing the world was round and not flat. The problem with that story is it’s not really true. That’s one of those we can’t just say, oh, that’s a legend or a myth. That’s one we actually pretty well know never was actually true. In fact, that myth was probably invented by Washington Irving, the same guy who wrote “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” to help sell his biography on Columbus. What we do know about Columbus’s day is that most people actually believe the world was round. So the debate was not whether or not when you sail west are you going to fall off some edge. The debate was if you sail west, how many miles of ocean do you have to cross before you hit land? Because after all, the ship can only travel so fast, and the ship can only carry so much food and so much fresh water for its crew.

And so the common thought was is that if you sailed west with a fully laden ship, because land was so, so far away that eventually you would run out of water and all food and your sailors would die a horrific death of thirst and starvation on the open sea.

And of course, nobody wanted to do that, let alone think about it. But Columbus calculated based upon things like the driftwood we mentioned yesterday, that land actually wasn’t that far away. And that if you had a well fitted and well supplied ship, you could actually make it in just a couple of weeks. Of course, the problem was, could he convince anyone that he was true? And he couldn’t. It’s around this time when Columbus has hit his all-time low that he meets a Franciscan monk, someone who had devoted themselves to living a life of simplicity, someone who devoted themselves to living a life without all the pleasures that we often go for.

His name was Pastor Antonio. And Pastor Antonio was able to encourage Columbus, was able to bring him into the monastery, not as a monk, but just as a student, and able to show him, search the scriptures, read the prophecies, and see what they have to say about the venture you’re about to partake of. He also encouraged Columbus to redesign things, to rethink all the things that we know about navigation, or about shipbuilding, or about equipping ships up to this time.

Columbus does this. He actually invents a new ship design. He actually invents new navigational instruments. He prays and especially he reads the scriptures. By the year 1492, Columbus, who has been rejected and has gotten used to rejection, is no longer completely depressed. He continues to pursue the monarchs of Europe, hoping that one of them will say yes. Now we remember the year 1492 because that is when Columbus sailed the ocean blue and came over to the New World, but there was another important thing that happened at the beginning of that year.

At the beginning of that year, the king of Aragon, his name was Ferdinand, and his wife, who was the Queen of Castile, her name was Isabella, they finished conquering all the Spanish kingdoms when they retook Granada.

Now, this was a war that had been going on between the Spanish Christians and the Spanish Muslims for 700 years. And so when it ended in 1492, everyone kind of went, (exhaling) and was ready to kind of just sit down and enjoy life again.

So when Columbus comes along and he asks for financing and for ships to go on this daring voyage, again, many people thought he was insane or many people thought that he just was an overachiever.

But Isabella listened to him. Now that the conquest of all of Spain, or the Reconquesta as it’s called, had been completed, she decided she would give him some money. And along with Columbus’s money and the money of a few others, he was able to buy three very tiny, very rickety old ships known to history as the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria.

These ships were so rickety that when Columbus and his crew first left, they had to immediately return because the ships were leaking, and had other various problems.

They had to come back and spend a month in repairs in the dock. They then set sail once again, this time to cross the ocean blue and to find the New World. Only the problem was they didn’t have enough rope, so they had to go yet back again, get new rope, and the third time they set sail, they didn’t go back. Of course, the journey wasn’t easy. They were Bacalm. That means that they were without any wind, right in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. It’s during this time that Columbus has a near-mutiny on his hands, because the men think we’re all going to die of thirst and starvation in the middle of this ocean wilderness. So Columbus takes a gold coin and he nails it to the mass and he says the first man who sights the land will actually win this gold coin.

And it was indeed on October the 12th that a man sighted land and Columbus and his small crew landed on this beach of an island which they called San Salvador, which means “Our Savior.” Indeed, the land was. as the land was, in many ways something that Columbus was so desperately seeking. Now, this made Columbus a hero. This made Columbus famous. When he returned to Europe, everyone looked to him as the one who had found the new world. Of course, in the coming years, all the kingdoms of Europe, all the other ambitious explorers, they all quickly set sail, quickly laid claim to lands, quickly discovered new things.

I mean, it was an Italian explorer named Amerigo Vespucci who first found the continents of South and North America. That’s why America is named after him and not Columbus. Columbus would have later voyages. It would actually take him many years before he admitted that this was not India. But he was always looking for the people of the great Khan who wanted these missionaries, and he was always eager to see missionaries come to the natives he had discovered.

What’s interesting about Columbus is that even though Columbus, after this great venture and this great discovery, doesn’t have a lot of later successes, He does leave us with a very important record of why he did what he did. It’s called the Book of Prophecies. And he wrote this Book of Prophecies at the end of his life to explain his whole vision, his whole motivation for why he did what he did.

Let me read to you something from this Book of Prophecies. This is what Columbus wrote, again writing to the king and the queen. “I’ve already petitioned your highnesses to see “that all the profits of this my enterprise “should be spent on the conquest of Jerusalem.” And your highnesses smiled and said that the idea pleased them. And then even without the expedition, they had an inclination to do it. The argument I have for the restitution of the Temple Mount to the Holy Church is simple. I only hold fast to the Holy Scriptures and to the prophetic citations attributed to certain holy men who were carried along by divine wisdom.

I am motivated by the Scriptures to go on to discover the Indies. I must repeat, for the expedition to the Indies, neither reason nor mathematics nor cartography were of profit to me in the manner that the prophecies were of the Scriptures.

This is what I have to report concerning the liberation of Jerusalem.” So we have to keep this in mind as we look at these explorers, particularly men like Columbus. They did these things for the sake of what the Scriptures commanded them and encouraged them to do. They did these things for things like adventure, for things like evangelism, and for things like the reconquest of Jerusalem. Remember that as you finish this lesson.