Columbus Day is coming – on Monday, October 14th.

At a time when most people still believed the Earth was flat, when the first scientists since the decline of ancient Greece, like Francis Bacon, Galileo, and Isaac Newton were still more than a hundred years into the future, and Christianity preached “Do not love this world or anything in the world,” Christopher Columbus convinced the Spanish King and Queen to fund three ships for exploration – to search for a shorter route to India and China, in hopes of the riches to be gained through trade with people on those distant shores.

Marco Polo, a merchant from Venice, Italy, had journeyed to China about 1274, traveling through China, Burma, India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and Persia, before passing through Constantinople and returning back to Venice.  His experiences and writing were Europe’s first introduction to the potential value of trade with the Asians.

Spain, however was still fighting to wrest the Spanish peninsula from the Moslems who had invaded in 711.  Spain’s reunification was finally achieved in January of 1492.  Spain needed trade to build its economy.  Later that year, Spain’s King and Queen gave Columbus the ships and crews he needed.

Columbus, of course, ran into a slight problem.  Between Spain and the Orient is what came to be known as the Americas – North America and South America.  

But Spain conquered the major Indian civilizations – the Aztecs in Central America and the Incas in South America.  All the wealth they could load onto their ships for the trip home to Spain, including ships loaded with tons of gold, became key to Spain’s economy.  Spain also colonized the New World, from Colorado down to the southern tip of South America.  

While Spain claimed all of the North American continent, England and France made their own discoveries in eastern, northern, and even on the western coasts.  

Christopher Columbus never reached the Orient.  But the subsequent colonization of the New World radically changed the future of the whole world.  And three hundred years later, in 1776, was created the world’s first country based on individual rights, with government subservient to that end.  

Such a government was impossible in the kingdoms of Europe and Asia.  A New World was needed – a prerequisite to the founding of a country of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  

Thank-you, Christopher Columbus, for making possible the life we all enjoy!

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