-Columbus first encounter and description of natives
-Looking for gold, native’s king had gold
-Met native cannibals and was deciding whether to stay or leave
– Saw beautiful trees and new beasts and decided to explore more
–“Of all the great men who have played a momentous part in the history of the modern world, there is probably none of whom so much has been written and said, but of whom so little is positively known, as the discoverer of America. We have a considerable collection of the letters and the writings of Christopher Columbus. He was known to many of the statesmen and historians of his day, who put on record some interesting incidents of his life. A whole library of books has been produced by later investigators. And yet we do not know where or when he was born; there is uncertainty…”
–“Native Americans called these shores home for perhaps 15,000 years before Columbus arrived. Norsemen reached North America centuries before Columbus, and even his contemporaries may have reached the new world first according to this intriguing map. In any event, Columbus never even set foot on the North American mainland, as John Cabot did in 1497.”
–“Thus there is no evidence that Columbus’s nationalist rhetoric of the recon- quest was related at this time to his later apocalyptic thinking. The 17 April 1492 Articles of Agreement contain no references to the desire nor to the intention either of the sovereigns or of Columbus to evangelize the foreign peoples he might encounter on his voyage. No religious representative was sent to the New World until Columbus’s second voyage in 1493. Therefore, not only is it improbable that the original purpose of the first voyage was religious in nature, but it is even less probable that it was motivated by apocalyptic beliefs belonging to Columbus or anyone else.10 The rhetoric of the re-conquest used by Columbus should be understood as part of a strategic response to a specific nationalist political context—one without any apocalyptic meaning, either overt or intended.” Serves as insight to why the conquests began and how they evolved into quests with completely different objectives than the original goal of the voyages.