QIYA LIU
English 1110.01 TTh 3:55-5:00
Instructor: Cathy Ryan
Assignment: Christopher Columbus Research
October 5, 2017
1.“Did Columbus really discover America?” Posted by History.com Staff in 2009 http://www.history.com/topics/exploration/christopher-columbus
NOTE: “The explorer Christopher Columbus made four trips across the Atlantic Ocean from Spain: in 1492, 1493, 1498 and 1502. He was determined to find a direct water route west from Europe to Asia, but he never did. Instead, he accidentally stumbled upon the Americas. Though he did not really “discover” the New World–millions of people already lived there–his journeys marked the beginning of centuries of trans-Atlantic conquest and colonization.”
ABSTRACT: I suppose to say that Columbus is the first European who find America. Prior to this, the world is composed of an isolated individual. Columbus discover the new world, which is after the new route opened, the world began to intergrade. So that Columbus connected Europe and America. Columbus led a fleet of three aircraft, to Jamaica, Puerto Rico and the islands of central and South America and other places along the coast of the mainland. When he mistakenly believed that this is Asia, until the time of his death, still did not know this is a “new world” that nobody has been aware of. So, some Caribbean islands are still called the West Indies. A huge America, at that time is unknown. Therefore, people said Columbus had found a “new continent”.
2.“Five myths about Christopher Columbus” By Kris Lane October 8, 2015
NOTE: “1. Columbus proved the “flat Earth” theory wrong. In an early scene in the 1992 Ridley Scott film “1492: Conquest of Paradise,” Columbus, played by Gérard Depardieu, gazes out at the Atlantic Ocean with his son. He tells the boy the world is like the orange he is peeling: round, not flat. In this traditional rendering, Columbus is an enlightened scientific figure, a pre-Galileo surrounded by obscurantists determined to scuttle his plans. We owe this myth to Washington Irving, who Americanized Columbus in a best-selling 1828 biography. Already known for Rip Van Winkle and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Irving was a dedicated Hispanophile who researched Columbus’s life and voyages while living in Spain in the 1820s. Despite careful scholarship, Irving peddled the “all American” idea that Columbus was a hands-on seafaring man willing to challenge immobile academics who couldn’t see past the horizon.”
ABSTRACT: I don’t think it is Columbus to prove the “flat Earth” theory wrong. He just believed the earth is round, but Magellan proved that the earth is round, because he has headed to the West, but finally returned to Spain from the East. In the sixth Century BC, Pythagoras, an ancient Greek mathematician, proposed the concept. About third Century BC, Eratosthenes established the concept of the earth by geometric methods. In second Century ad, Ptolemy, a Greek geographer, also described the earth as a sphere in his book. These are important achievements of human understanding of the earth, but only some mathematical reasoning and theoretical arguments. During the Renaissance, humanists discovered these doctrines of ancient Greece, when many people believed that the earth was round, and explorers who opened new routes shared it including Columbus. During 1519~1522, Magellan completed the first global voyage in human history, it showed irrefutable facts to all mankind and proved that the earth is round.
3.“Columbus’ Confusion About the New World” By Edmund S. Morgan October 2009
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/columbus-confusion-about-the-new-world-140132422/
NOTE: “Columbus himself had made that assumption. His discoveries posed for him, as for others, a problem of identification. It seemed to be a question not so much of giving names to new lands as of finding the proper old names, and the same was true of the things that the new lands contained. Cruising through the Caribbean, enchanted by the beauty and variety of what he saw, Columbus assumed that the strange plants and trees were strange only because he was insufficiently versed in the writings of men who did know them. “I am the saddest man in the world,” he wrote, “because I do not recognize them.””
ABSTRACT: I think people will not deny that the unknown world is far more vast and profound than the known world, and that what we know now is far less than the unknown. The universe is in such order, it may be created by a great and mysterious power, but human were created by it, with intelligent, so maybe we can go beyond it. Our goal of human existence is to find out the mysterious power of their own intelligence. The purpose of our existence in this world is to constantly explore it. All human actions must be measured by this standard. If a behavior helped explore the unknown world, then it is progressive; otherwise if it hindered the ideological shackles, exploring the unknown, such behavior is backward, must be eliminated and condemned.
4.“74 Interesting Facts about Christopher Columbus” By Karin Lehnardt, Published November 11, 2016
https://www.factretriever.com/christopher-columbus-facts
NOTE: “The Taino population was completely extinct within 50 years of the Europeans’ first landfall. This was due to murder and desperate suicides, as well as a declining birth rate. However, disease was the most devastating factor in their demise. Christopher Columbus and the Spaniards unleashed a deadly cargo of dysentery, tuberculosis, and influenza. Settlers wrote home about the unbearable stench of rotting bodies that filled the air.”
ABSTRACT: I would say it is the colonists slaughtered the Tylenol man. When Columbo first arrived in the island in 1492, the Indians living on the island as “Tylenol”, meaning “good people.” Tylenol called the island Haiti, means “mountainous land”. Columbo first discovered America, in December 6, 1492, the island of Hispaniola, and landed on the island. Since then, the colonists began to kill, and imported from Europe a variety of new diseases, and lead to Taino cultural genocide. The number of Tylenol on the island wasn’t exactly recorded before 1492, but according to historical records, about 250 thousand people. By 1550, there were only about 150 people on the island.