Christopher Columbus
Ahoy, mateys! I can’t begin to tell you how fast this year has been moving for me. Every day seems to have gone by at a blinding pace since the start of the New Year. It seems like only yesterday that I was finding the cutest sandals for the beach, preparing my wardrobe for the summer season. Summer is now behind us (where did it go?!) and there’s only a few months left to go in 2009. Goodness gracious! But before we get to the party streamers and midnight kisses of New Year’s Eve, we’ve got to batten down the hatches and swab the decks on October 12 to observe Columbus Day.
In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Talk about time passing by in a blur; Columbus was charting maps and getting seasick over 517 years ago on his trip to “The New World.” Here’s the quick skinny on our pal, Chris: he was an Italian sailor and also believed to be the first European to sail the Atlantic and land on the American continent. I think that information should be fairly elementary to us by now, especially as we all learned it in elementary school! 
While we all know the 1492 ocean blue part, some of the history behind Columbus that you might not remember is that he was a career sailor, tradesman, and explorer. He sailed to many places for the Portuguese (because he relocated to Portugal from Italy in his mid-20’s). He’d traveled to England, Ireland, and the Azores, Cape Verde, and Madeira islands off the coast of Africa. Through his travels he met sailors who believed islands existed to the west of areas already charted. In 1484, he had asked King John II of Portugal to back his voyage west, but had no luck and the King told him to take a flying leap. And that wasn’t the only time that those in power told Columbus to take a long walk off a short plank. They thought he was crazy and didn’t want to financially back his trips. Finally, In January of 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain supported Columbus. And the rest is, dare I say… history.
Here we are now, 517 years after Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue, and we hear his name every year. Well, not all 517 years. The first recorded celebration that commemorated Columbus’s discovery of America took place on October 12, 1792, in New York City. It was the 300th anniversary of Columbus’ landing in the New World. So for those first 300 years, the name Christopher Columbus was probably one of those obscure types of names that you only heard if you were a scholar of the day, a big shot in the sailing community, or something like that. Another 100 years would go by before, in 1892, President Benjamin Harrison asked people to participate in the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ voyage. Now, here’s a tidbit that even I didn’t remember… It was during this 400th anniversary event that the Pledge of Allegiance was recited publicly for the first time. In closing with the history of our observances, in 1937 President Roosevelt proclaimed October 12 as “Columbus Day,” and, in 1971, President Nixon declared the second Monday of October a national holiday.
While observing Columbus Day and studying his travels is a way that all of us can learn about the Age of Exploration, the story of Columbus himself does not exist without increasing amounts of controversy and conjecture. This is something for a whole other blog that would go on for days but, in short, there’s the whole issue of “discovery” that some would argue (rather successfully) that The New World was already inhabited. It’s a fact that the once sunny-skies-way in which we learned about Columbus is now party cloudy with a chance of skepticism.
I can’t say too much about it, but really, history is continually being amended. We learn new things about past events almost daily and history needs to be retold to include the new facts. While the real Columbus may have not been the image of a dashing hero that some of us learned about once upon a time in school, there is something to be said for having your name remembered 517 years after you did something. I can only hope that, 517 years from now, that my name could become synonymous with something grand. Perhaps even something, Presidential?
Till we meet again,
Lexi
