Christopher Columbus was once lauded as a national hero for supposedly discovering America.
But much of his legend was pure hype.
He didn't land where he planned, he despoiled the soil he landed on, and he soiled his accomplishments
with acts of cruelty.
Plus, he was a total weirdo.
How weird?
Get a load of this stuff you never knew about Christopher Columbus.
Humans have long likened the world to a woman.
Think about it: nobody's heard of Papa Planet, but everyone knows Mother Earth.
But Christopher Columbus may have taken this the most literally, as he believed the world
was actually a gigantic boob.
Yes, it's crazy, but true: according to the Florida Museum, Columbus believed that the
Earth had a round base and an upright bulge shaped, quote, "like a woman's breast."
He also asserted that at the peak of Planet Mammary sat the Garden of Eden or as the NewYorker
called it, quote, "the nipple of the world."
Clearly, this raises some questions, such as: would that make grass the world's chest
hair?
And: are clouds Earth's cotton bra?
But the most pressing question is unquestionably: What the heck?!
Columbus arrived at his idea in 1498 after reaching the coast of Venezuela during his
third voyage.
However, he thought he had reached Asia, though, which led to some major discrepancies between
what he was seeing and what he should have been seeing.
The weather and water seemed wrong, the North Star looked misaligned, and he felt like he
was sailing skyward.
Naturally, though, Columbus never considered that he might be wrong.
Instead, he figured that all previous knowledge of our planet must be mistaken, so he just
altered the makeup of the planet itself to fit his blunder.
Talk about being a boob!
Communication is complicated, especially when the communicators don't speak the same language.
Which explains why, when language failed, Columbus naturally turned to the one universal
language: dance.
See, during that Third voyage where he came up with the whole nipple idea, Columbus ended
up on the coast of South America.
Approaching the island of Trinidad he spotted people in ornate headscarves near canoes people
who he hoped he could trade with, or possibly enslave.
So we waved them over, which you might recognize as the aquatic equivalent of a dude in an
unmarked white van asking you to approach his vehicle.
The Trinidadians also seemed to recognize this and stayed put.
Then Columbus tried to attract them with shiny objects like... pans, which created interest
but no actual interaction, just like most infomercials.
Finally, he had a crewman perform a jig while playing a tambourine, hoping it would essentially
start a giant dance party.
Instead, the locals fired a volley of arrows.
Foiled in his plans, Columbus sailed away, because even he finally realized that the
jig was up.
Christopher Columbus lived in an age when believing in mermaids made sense.
Obviously, he didn't actually see any, but he sure thought he did during his first voyage.
Exciting, right?
You'd think so, but Columbus seemed to consider it a letdown.
Referring to himself in the third-person, because he was a megalomaniac, he wrote in
1493:
"When the Admiral went to the Rio del Oro [in Haiti], he said he quite distinctly saw
three mermaids, which rose well out of the sea; but they are not so beautiful as they
are said to be, for their faces had some masculine traits."
Gee, Columbus was a real prize.
He also apparently couldn't tell a woman from a manatee, because that's almost certainly
what he saw.
Also called sea cows, manatees and similar animals such as dugongs inadvertently fooled
sailors for hundreds of years into thinking that human-fish hybrids exist.
They've been known to perform "tail stands" and have flipper-like forelimbs with finger-like
bones.
They were so good at tricking seamen that they're now scientifically classified as Sirenia,
an allusion to the seductively lethal fish-women of Greek mythology known as sirens.
Add mermaids to the list of things Columbus claimed to have discovered but actually didn't!
Mermaids weren't the ugliest thing about Columbus' first trip to the New World.
That would be the zombies.
Seriously, it's true.
But in order to get to the zombie part of the Columbus story, first you have to go through
the slavery and the genocide parts.
So needless to say, what we're about to tell you isn't pretty.
After stumbling upon the so-called New World in 1492, Columbus called dibs on the island
of Hispaniola, home to the present day nations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
In 1493, he began the first permanent Spanish settlement in the Western Hemisphere there
and he also began a reign of terror and devastation for the native population.
According to Yale University, Hispaniola was home to roughly a half million of the Taino
people when Columbus arrived.
Wihin 20 years, that population had been reduced to less than 32,000 thanks to slavery, disease,
and wholesale murder.
But the Spanish still needed more slaves, so with the decimation of the indigenous population
complete, they began bringing African slaves.
Mortality rates at the sugar plantations were staggeringly high due to grueling, gruesome
conditions.
Slaves began longing for the afterlife, and many resorted in hopes of liberating
their souls.
To cope, they developed Haitian Vodou, a religion that stresses creating concord with the dead.
Vodou priests purportedly possessed the power to shepherd souls into the afterlife or to
trap them on Earth to work as undead slaves, called zombies.
These ideas later gave rise to 1968's Night of the Living Dead, the movie that immortalized
zombies in popular American culture.
According to The Atlantic, director George Romero envisioned the living dead as "undead
Haitian slaves" something that would never have happened without Columbus.
When Columbus finally met his end, it wasn't a happy one.
In 1502, he ventured westward a fourth time.
His goal: to find gold and the Garden of Eden, which as a reminder! he thought was perched
atop Earth's nipple.
Instead of finding paradise, though, Columbus found himself stranded in Jamaica for a year,
which is actually pretty close!
In 1504, his biggest backer, Queen Isabella, died.
Columbus' health declined, and King Ferdinand declined his requests for compensation.
In 1506, Columbus died.
Then his body embarked on a batch of new journeys.
Columbus reportedly wanted to be buried in the New World, but because that wasn't fancy
enough, he was buried in Valladolid, Spain.
Then he was interred near Seville before being relocated to Santo Domingo, Hispaniola, to
be buried with his son Diego.
Depending on who you believe, though, that wasn't his final resting place.
When Spain relinquished Hispaniola to France in 1795, Columbus's remains got shipped to
Cuba, but a century later during the Spanish-American War, Columbus' remains finally returned to
Spain.
Or did they?
In 1877, Dominican workers unearthed the supposedly still-buried bones of Columbus in Santo Domingo's
cathedral, leading the Dominicans to speculate that Spain received the wrong bones.
Currently, the Dominican Republic and Spain both claim to have Columbus' well-traveled
remains.
If Christopher Columbus had an afterlife, he probably spent it attempting to discover
heaven while unwittingly sailing to hell.
But had he achieved his pre-death dream, heaven would have come to him.
Because in addition to wanting to give Earth a purple nurple, Columbus aspired to bring
about biblical oblivion.
History professor Paul Boyer told Frontline that Columbus
"[...] took apocalyptic teachings [and] biblical passages very, very literally."
So while Columbus never believed he would sail off the end of world during his voyages,
he did think they would cause the end of the world.
Toward the end of his life he even created a compendium of apocalyptic texts titled The
Book of Prophecies, whereby he applied end-of-days predictions to himself, because if you haven't
figured it out yet, this guy was a massive narcissist.
In his interpretation, he himself was the key to Christian victory over Islam, which
could only be accomplished by conquering Jerusalem.
For context, Jerusalem had passed between Christian and Muslim hands during the Crusades
before the Muslims once again gained control in 1187.
Columbus claimed that reclaiming the holy city would trigger a, quote, "messianic period."
Starting that period would involve lots of bloodshed, which meant Columbus needed lots
of gold to fund a military campaign.
He even pitched the idea to Ferdinand and Isabella using The Book of Prophecies.
Unfortunately for him, those predictions didn't include the part where he died before fulfilling
them.
Clearly, portraits of him exist.
But according to Scientific American, it's not clear that any were actually painted during
his lifetime.
Most existing images differ from written descriptions, and even museums who claim to have accurate
portraits have acknowledged that they look nothing like the portraits being claimed as
real by other institutions.
Columbus' background is similarly murky.
The accepted narrative holds that he was born in Genoa, Italy.
Somebody named Cristoforo Colombo definitely lived there, but according to The New York
Times, nothing conclusively identifies him as the explorer.
Moreover, according to the Telegraph, Columbus may have simply assumed that name to conceal
his true origins.
Some experts maintain that Columbus actually hailed from Spain.
Linguistics professor Estelle Irizarry told CNN that Columbus wrote in the Spanish equivalent
of Yiddish, suggesting he was actually a Spanish Jew who forsook his faith to escape the Inquisition.
Some who favor this theory also point out that he sometimes used Hebrew letters and
had a hankering for re-capturing Jerusalem.
Then again, one historian has asserted that Columbus was secretly Polish royalty, so it
seems like we'll never know the answer.
Regardless of his beginnings, Christopher Columbus ended up an international man of
mystery.
Appropriately, centuries after his death, Columbus would feature in a series of dramatic
international crimes.
According to Smithsonian Magazine, on three separate occasions, letters the explorer wrote
to Ferdinand and Isabella have gone missing and been replaced with impressive fakes.
And much like the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria, all three documents journeyed to the
New World.
One letter vanished from the Vatican sometime between 1921 and before 2004, when Georgia
resident David Parsons procured it for $875,000 from a New York dealer.
Parsons apparently thought the sale was above-board, so it must have been really irritating to
discover he blew such a ridiculous amount on stolen stationery.
The letter was returned to the Vatican in 2018.
That same year, a different original copy of the letter made its way back to the National
Library of Catalonia in Barcelona after being uncovered by U.S. law enforcement.
And both of these came on the heels of a third letter which was auctioned off in New York
in 2016 for $300,000 before being donated to the Library of Congress.
Authorities don't seem to have a clue who committed the heists or how meaning they are
almost as confused and ignorant as Columbus himself.
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