The Mental World of Christopher Columbus
Western civilization 1
The Mental World Of Christopher Columbus
Supported by Spain, seeking a water route to the spice islands in 1492 Christopher Columbus left Spain on his first voyage. After more then a month had passed, the crew started to loose all hope and the voyage seemed like a failure. Until on October 12, 1492 land was sighted. The land that was sighted was not what Columbus had originally intended to find. Columbus landed in the Caribbean Sea in the Bahamas, which was thousands of miles away from his original destination. It was there that he met the indigenous people of the islands. These encounters that he had along with the treatment of these native people would eventually help shape his legacy, but at the same time would also surround him with controversy. A lot of people till this day still do not know whether Christopher Columbus Should be valued for his contributions to the western society or should his wrongdoings make him one of histories villain? Before you could answer that question, you would first need to understand what earlier works of geography and travel shaped the mental world of Columbus and how did these works influence the age old democracy as well? Columbus was an individual who was not easily influenced. Meaning he was not an individual who soaked up any and everything that he heard or read about. Columbus was very selectively of who he chose to look up to. While reading the chapter it became very clear to me that scholars from the classical antiquity were very important to Columbus. The book states that one of the sources which is a portion of Ptolemy’s Geography was something that Columbus had a copy of and carried it along with him on his first voyage in his sea chest. The statement say’s “On his first voyage, Columbus had a copy of the Rome 1478 edition of Ptolemy’s Geography in his sea chest.”(Weisner, 275) . Columbus also studied the work of a lot of different Muslim scholars and Geographers either by
The Mental World Of Christopher Columbus
Supported by Spain, seeking a water route to the spice islands in 1492 Christopher Columbus left Spain on his first voyage. After more then a month had passed, the crew started to loose all hope and the voyage seemed like a failure. Until on October 12, 1492 land was sighted. The land that was sighted was not what Columbus had originally intended to find. Columbus landed in the Caribbean Sea in the Bahamas, which was thousands of miles away from his original destination. It was there that he met the indigenous people of the islands. These encounters that he had along with the treatment of these native people would eventually help shape his legacy, but at the same time would also surround him with controversy. A lot of people till this day still do not know whether Christopher Columbus Should be valued for his contributions to the western society or should his wrongdoings make him one of histories villain? Before you could answer that question, you would first need to understand what earlier works of geography and travel shaped the mental world of Columbus and how did these works influence the age old democracy as well? Columbus was an individual who was not easily influenced. Meaning he was not an individual who soaked up any and everything that he heard or read about. Columbus was very selectively of who he chose to look up to. While reading the chapter it became very clear to me that scholars from the classical antiquity were very important to Columbus. The book states that one of the sources which is a portion of Ptolemy’s Geography was something that Columbus had a copy of and carried it along with him on his first voyage in his sea chest. The statement say’s “On his first voyage, Columbus had a copy of the Rome 1478 edition of Ptolemy’s Geography in his sea chest.”(Weisner, 275) . Columbus also studied the work of a lot of different Muslim scholars and Geographers either by