PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN AND A WEEK: CRISTÓBAL “CHRIST-CARRIER” COLÓN “When Christopher Columbus sailed west from Palos across the Atlantic Ocean on his first voyage to the New World, he was in search of gold, silver, precious stones, spices, and silks. Instead, he found parrots.” — Bruce Thomas Boehrer PARROT CULTURE: OUR 2,500-YEAR-LONG FASCINATION WITH THE WORLD’S MOST TALKATIVE BIRD Philadelphia PA: U of Pennsylvania P, 2004, page 50 HDT WHAT? INDEX THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CRISTÓBAL COLÓN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN WALDEN: What does Africa, –what does the West stand for? Is PEOPLE OF not our own interior white on the chart? black though it may prove, like the coast, when discovered. Is it the source of WALDEN the Nile, or the Niger, or the Mississippi, or a North-West Passage around this continent, that we would find? Are these the problems which most concern mankind? Is Franklin the only man who is lost, that his wife should be so earnest to find him? Does Mr. Grinnell know where he himself is? Be rather the Mungo Park, the Lewis and Clarke and Frobisher, of your own streams and oceans; explore your own higher latitudes, –with shiploads of preserved meats to support you, if they be necessary; and pile the empty cans sky-high for a sign. Were preserved meats invented to preserve meat merely? Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice. Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads. What was the meaning of that South-Sea Exploring Expedition, with all its parade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact, that there are continents and seas in the moral world, to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one’s being alone.– “Erret, et extremos alter scrutetur Iberos. Plus habet hic vitæ, plus habet ille viæ.” Let them wander and scrutinize the outlandish Australians. I have more of God, they more of the road. SIR JOHN FRANKLIN DR. ELISHA KENT KANE LEWIS AND CLARK CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS MUNGO PARK HDT WHAT? INDEX THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CRISTÓBAL COLÓN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN A WEEK: The sun-setting presumed all men at leisure, and in a PEOPLE OF contemplative mood; but the farmer’s boy only whistled the more A WEEK thoughtfully as he drove his cows home from pasture, and the teamster refrained from cracking his whip, and guided his team with a subdued voice. The last vestiges of daylight at length disappeared, and as we rowed silently along with our backs toward home through the darkness, only a few stars being visible, we had little to say, but sat absorbed in thought, or in silence listened to the monotonous sound of our oars, a sort of rudimental music, suitable for the ear of Night and the acoustics of her dimly lighted halls; “Pulsae referunt ad sidera valles,” and the valleys echoed the sound to the stars. As we looked up in silence to those distant lights, we were reminded that it was a rare imagination which first taught that the stars are worlds, and had conferred a great benefit on mankind. It is recorded in the Chronicle of Bernaldez, that in Columbus’s first voyage the natives “pointed towards the heavens, making signs that they believed that there was all power and holiness.” We have reason to be grateful for celestial phenomena, for they chiefly answer to the ideal in man. The stars are distant and unobtrusive, but bright and enduring as our fairest and most memorable experiences. “Let the immortal depth of your soul lead you, but earnestly extend your eyes upwards.” ASTRONOMY CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS ANDRES BERNALDEZ “NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project The People of Walden and A Week HDT WHAT? INDEX THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CRISTÓBAL COLÓN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN 1410 Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly’s YMAGO MUNDI presented a world map that would prove useful to Christopher Columbus in the surmise which he felt he needed to make, that it was a reasonable distance from Europe west across the great ocean to the Indies: Cardinal d’Ailly was such a good guy that he had come to be known within the church as “The Eagle of France and the Indefatigable Hammer of Heretics” (Aquila Franciae, et aberrantium a veritate malleus indefessus). He trusted that it was possible, through astrological calculations, to determine the true dates of the major events HDT WHAT? INDEX THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CRISTÓBAL COLÓN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN of human history. The copy of YMAGO MUNDI on display at the Columbine Library at Seville, Spain has notes by Columbus in its margins. Of course, it’s a tossup whether D’Ailly, or Columbus, was crazier. HDT WHAT? INDEX THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CRISTÓBAL COLÓN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN 1451 October 30, Saturday (Old Style): Christopher Columbus, Cristoforo Columbo, Cristobal Colon, was born in Genoa, son of a wool merchant and weaver Domenico Colombo and Susanna Fontanarossa, daughter of a wool merchant?1 He had younger brothers Bartolomeo Colombo, Giovanni Pellegrino Colombo, and Giacomo Colombo. He also had a sister Bianchinetta Colombo. What seems especially noteworthy about all this mystery surrounding the origins and early life of Columbus is that he himself was the most ardent contributor to it, making in later years a round of ambiguous and contradictory statements on his youth that bespeaks nothing so consistently as a desire to be confusing and evasive. — Sanders, Roland. LOST TRIBES AND PROMISED LANDS: THE O RIGINS OF A MERICAN R ACISM. Boston MA: Little, Brown, 1978, page 75. 1. Salvador de Madariaga has hypothesized, entirely on circumstantial evidences at best, that the family of Domenico Colombo and Susanna Fontanarossa were New Christians who had been forcibly converted from a Catalan Jewish community in 1391 who subsequently had migrated to Italy. For sure, at a number of points in his life Columbus does seem to display the character profile we have come to associate with the new convert: great fervor, vast self-righteousness, and an insatiable need to prove oneself again and yet again. Genetic tests of what we take to be his remains, in the West Indies, or the remains of a close relative, do not contain any of the known indicators of an ethnic Jewish ancestry. Such tests are not, however, conclusive. The prevailing theory of this moment is that his family was from Catalunia and was identified as “Colom,” meaning “dove.” This version has come to be of so much favor that it is even being offered repeatedly on TV’s Discovery Channel! HDT WHAT? INDEX THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CRISTÓBAL COLÓN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN Amerigo Vespucci was born, “whose highest rank was boatswain’s mate in an expedition that never sailed, [who] managed in this lying world to supplant Columbus and baptize half the earth with his own dishonest name” (according to that eminent historian, Waldo Emerson).2 Chronological observations of America to the year of Christ 1673. Americus Vesputius a Florentine imployed by the King of Castile and Portingal, to discover the West-Indies, named from him Seven year after Columbus, America. From the year of World BY John Josselyn Gent. The half dishonestly named 2. In fact there is no historical evidence whatever that Vespucci ever asked anyone to name anything after him, and there is surprisingly little evidence that our term “America” actually does as is alleged derive from his given name “Amerigo.” The entire ascription is mostly surmise, surmise by apologists groping among mysteries for a plausible explanation for a historical detail which, seemingly, was considered so minor at the time as not ever to be placed on record. It may be that the claim of Christopher Columbus HDT WHAT? INDEX THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CRISTÓBAL COLÓN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN 1470 Portuguese navigators ventured as far as the “Gold Coast” of west Africa.3 They began to suspect that Africa was circumnavigable rather than being an impassable barrier. The family of Christopher Columbus moved to Savona. He would go to sea as a pirate or privateer, helping to prey on Moorish shipping. The French introduced trunnions that allowed lightweight cannon to be suspended in wheeled carriages, for ready transport about the battlefield. The Japanese began to create large armies of conscript light infantry known as ashigaru, “light feet.” The training of such ashigaru was less thorough than that of provincial samurai, but they needed large quantities of inexpensive weapons and helmets — which would involve the development of techniques of mass 3. For this and other such maps: http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slavery/search.html HDT WHAT? INDEX THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CRISTÓBAL COLÓN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN production. HDT WHAT? INDEX THE PEOPLE OF WALDEN: CRISTÓBAL COLÓN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN 1474 At about this point Sebastian Cabot was born (in Bristol, England or Venice, Italy).