Chinese explorer Zheng He may have discovered America
before Columbus, according to new book
Eric
Pfeiffer, Yahoo! News 7 hours ago
`Does a 600-year-old Chinese map prove that Christopher
Columbus was not the first explorer to navigate the New World?In his book “Who Discovered America?,” published Tuesday, author Gavin Menzies says the settling of North America by nonnative peoples is more complex than previously thought.
‘The traditional story of Columbus discovering the New World is absolute fantasy, it’s fairy tales,” Menzies, 76, said in an interview with the Daily Mail....
My comment:
There is little doubt that Zheng He's fleet sailed to SE
Asia, and even to East Africa. But, the
Chinese sailing to Europe and even the Mississippi River in America? I doubt it.
In the 1990s someone discovered bones in the western state of
Washington. It appeared to be a murder,
with an arrow in the man’s leg. The
sheriff looked and thought a white man had been killed by an arrow. He sent the skeleton to scientists who judged
it about 9,000 years old, the oldest full skeleton found in N. America (Kenniwick Man). Immediately, the Amerindians demanded the
bones. The hate-science Democratic Party
prefers to appease the religious superstitions of Amerindians than explore
science. An outrageous law signed by
Dem. Pres. Jimmy Carter was used to restrict the time the scientists could
study the bones. Dem. Pres. Clinton
returned the "white" skeleton to the Amerindians for burial. I suspect they buried these bones so no white
man will ever see them again. (Some of
the absurd privileges granted to Amerindians today is bases on white guilt for
killing so many of the savage Indians when Europeans came to North America. If, whites were here before the Amerindians
came, then they were the truly murderous group, and whites have no moral
obligation to allow them to own casinos, a right often denied to whites.) Democratic Pres. Clinton also destroyed the
site where the bones were found. The Democrats
dare not disturb the cult of multi and its hate-whitey views.
Chinese may well
have sailed the Pacific to the west coast of the New World. The Vikings clearly came across the
Atlantic. Some Olmec sculptures appear
quite Negroid, so it is possible Africans also sailed to the New World.
Still, the voyage
of Columbus is the most important one.
The earlier discoverers of America resulted in short-term contact. With Columbus, there would be continuous
contact between Old World and New.
Columbus united the world as never before. Like it or not, he began a new globalism. It is Columbus, and the European sailors who
followed him, who made the modern world.
We may recall Zheng He and Leif Erickson, but it is Columbus whose
discovery created the modern world.
Slavery, disease, death: the dark side of the Christopher Columbus story
Jay Busbee 8 hours ago
And according to The Oatmeal’s Matthew Inman, Columbus Day is a dangerous farce.
Inman contends in his current strip on The Oatmeal, a humor/political commentary website, that the legends we believe about Columbus are not only misleading but grossly unfair. He cites primary sources and journals recounted in Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” and James Lowewen’s “Lies My Teacher Told Me” to dispel the traditional narrative of Columbus as brave traveler who connected the Old World and the New.
Here are a few of The Oatmeal’s conclusions about Christopher Columbus:
• In 1492, no one actually thought the earth was flat. “Pretty much anyone with an education knew the earth was round. The Greeks had proved it 2,000 years before Columbus was born.”
• Columbus didn’t actually “discover” the New World. Not only were there natives living in the Americas for 14,000 years, Leif Ericson found the same territory 500 years before Columbus.
• Columbus wanted gold, and lots of it. His initial ideas for a new trade route to Asia fell by the wayside as he realized how much gold was available in the New World.
• The natives would provide little resistance. According to his own journal, Columbus believed the indigenous Lucayans would not be a significant challenge. “I could conquer the whole of them with fifty men,” he wrote, “and govern them as I pleased.”
• For his second visit, Columbus armed for war. When Columbus returned to the New World, he brought 17 ships and 1,500 men.
• Columbus treated the natives brutally. Columbus demanded treasure, food and sex for his men, and when the Lucayans refused, he ordered their noses and ears cut off to serve as a warning.
• Columbus treated his conquered people harshly. When the Lucayans rebelled, Columbus crushed the rebellion and carted off 500 Lucayans to be sold into slavery in Europe.
• Columbus disrupted the entire economy of three continents. Post-Columbian disease and starvation killed three to five million people over the next fifty years. And the influx of gold disrupted the global economy to the point that African slaves became a dominant commodity.
…MY COMMENT
The hate-the-West
crowd is at it again. Educated men in
Europe may have believed the earth to be round, but they opposed the voyage of
Columbus because they believed it far too large, and the one huge ocean far too
long to reach land (imagine the earth with no New World, and a watery journey
from Spain to Asia). The learned in
Spain opposed Columbus because they thought the sailors would not survive such
a lengthy voyage. It would be like
sending a manned voyage to Mars today - in effect beyond the technology of the
times. Columbus was wrong in that the
earth was much larger than he presumed; however, his mistake resulted in the “discovery”
of the New World.
The most developed of the Amerindians, the
Aztecs practiced mass murder that makes the conquest by Europeans seem
mild. Indeed, it was often only with the
help of the oppressed Amerindians that the vastly outnumbered Europeans were
able to topple the empires of the Aztecs and Incas so quickly.
Others surely
discovered the New World before Columbus.
But there discoveries remained cut off from their lands of origins. Only with Columbus' discovery, would the
world become united, a global economy that would allow all people to
flourish. Only with Western Civilization
would the stone-age Amerindians grow to their numbers of today. Only with Western Civilization would all,
including the descendants of African slaves, multiply and prosper (and have far
more modern lives than those left behind in Africa.) It is Western Civ., with its rejection of
superstition and its embrace of science, that has wiped out and curtailed so
many diseases.
Hooray for Columbus. He made the modern world. Celebrate Columbus Day!
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