QUARANTINE BLOG # 327

February 20, 2021

Today we begin a multi-part look at one of the most important episodes from “The Golden Age of Sail.”

When Christopher Columbus landed in the Bahamas in 1492, he thought he had arrived in India, and so the exotic islands were referred to as the ‘Indias’ — the Indies. 

The Spanish Main included all of the land shown on this map: Florida, around the Gulf of Mexico, Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America, and South America.

Two years later, the Treaty of Tordesillas imposed legislation on the world of exploration. Pope Alexander VI divided the new lands between Spain and Portugal. Basically it gave Brazil to Portugal and everything else to Spain.

On October 12, 1492, Columbus reached San Salvador, in what is now the Bahamas.  In early December, Columbus was sailing along the northern coast of a land he named Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic). After some exploration that featured the discovery of some gold and the accidental wreck of the “Santa Maria”, his largest vessel, on Christmas Eve, he decided to return to Spain.

Columbus also ordered the construction of a fort. As its construction started just after Christmas, it was named La Navidad in honor of the birth of Christ. It was the first European fortification to be built in what would become known as the Spanish Main. 

When Columbus reappeared with 17 ships and 1,200 men in November 1493, he discovered that the fort had been burned and the 39 occupants he left behind were never seen again.

In every age gold has presented one of the strongest means of enticing men from their homes to remote lands.

Portuguese seamen as early as the middle of the fifteenth century brought gold from the west coast of Africa In order to find a sea-route to the gold lands of India, Vasco da Gama sailed around the Cape of Good Hope, and in order to obtain a shorter route from Spain to India Christopher Columbus ventured out upon the Atlantic Ocean and there reached the new gold-land, America. 

Columbus wrote in his journal: “I was anxious to learn whether they had gold. I saw also that some of them wore little pieces of gold in their perforated noses. I learned by signs that there was a king in the south who owned many vessels filled with gold.”

Columbus pioneered that pleasant institution, the Caribbean cruise.  

Asking everywhere for news, he sailed from island to island. Columbus first glimpsed the mainland of South America on his third voyage, in 1498. On his last expedition in 1502, Columbus called first at Santo Domingo, Hispaniola, where he met a fleet of 30 ships about to depart for Spain laden with West Indian gold.  The veteran explorer warned of storms but the Spaniards would not heed him, and hurricanes sent 20 ships to the bottom, one of them carrying a nugget of gold said to weigh 36 pounds.  

Columbus himself waited out the storm and then moved along the eastern coast of Central America, collecting a considerable quantity of gold. The Indians told him of a wealthy and civilized nation lying nine days’ march overland to the west. Not finding it, he returned to Jamaica, and a year of sickness and hunger.  

By 1504 he was back in Spain just as his patron, Queen Isabella, was dying.  Columbus, gouty and deprived of the benefits of his discovery survived her by 18 months.  After his first great voyage, his life had been a sequence of misadventures, and other men reaped the harvest of the Indies.

The Conquistadors

The term conquistador comes from the Spanish word meaning “to conquer.” Until fairly recently, the consequences of their actions was not appreciated by most of the Western world. Their actions constituted one of the most violent upheavals in history, and overthrew three advanced civilizations.

Europe called it the “New World.” Priests and scholars in the Old World debated whether the First Americans were fully human and had souls. Spanish theologian Juan Gines de Sepulveda placed the Indians somewhere “between apes and men.” According to Sepulveda: The Spanish have a perfect right to rule these barbarians of the New World ... who are as inferior to the Spanish as children to adults, or women to men. Although some of them show a certain ingenuity for various works of craftsmanship, this is no proof of human cleverness, for we can observe animals, birds, and spiders making certain structures which no human accomplishment can competently imitate.

One who disagreed with Sepulveda’s was a Dominican friar named Bartolome de Las Casas. He had personally witnessed the horrendous brutalities perpetrated on the natives by the Spanish. 

Las Casas argued that the American natives were human beings. He predicted that God would demolish the great empire Spain was building atop the mangled bodies and crushed souls of an unfairly oppressed people.

Needless to say, few agreed with Las Casas, and the colonization of the Americas proceeded at an unrelenting pace. 

In dealing with the natives, the Spanish established a pattern that would be repeated in other parts of the Americas. By 1515 Hispaniola’s new masters worked to death or outright murdered 80 percent of the original 250,000 residents. Only 500 of Hispaniola’s Indians were left by 1550. By 1650 all had been exterminated.

Next Saturday we will follow the Conquistadors as they search for gold, and find something more valuable.

👉  “Be careful that you don’t practice your religion in front of people to draw their attention. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 6:1 – CEB).

In today’s Lenten text, Jesus is warning people who try to gain God’s favor by what they do, that the applause of the people who see them perform will be all the reward they will receive.  In other words, if you don’t seek God’s mercy and you rely only on yourself, you will have nothing eternal.

An article in National Geographic, says, “The Giza Pyramids, built to endure an eternity, have done just that.”  But the author of that article evidently did not look at the photograph which accompanied his prose:

Pharaoh Khufu’s tomb, which is in the center of this picture, was once covered in a smooth limestone surface.  All that remains is the small portion at the top of the pyramid, the tomb has been raided, and all the things he would need to guide and sustain himself in the next world have been pillaged.  The pharaoh’s body isn’t even in his tomb, but in a museum where people come to gawk.  So much for enduring for eternity. 

Jesus said when you give to the poor, don’t blow your trumpet attracting the attention of the crowds as the hypocrites do so that they may receive praise from people.  Don’t make big prayers in public to attract attention.  Don’t disfigure your face and put on sad make-up when you fast so people will be attracted to your piety (read Matthew 6:2-18).  

“Your Father who sees in secret will Himself reward you openly” (Matthew 6:4, 6, 18).  If you are praying for the applause of people you can admit no mistake.  And when people say, “What a wonderful prayer!” that is all the reward you will receive. 

But when you pray in secret you can admit to being just who you are – a sinner who needs the grace and mercy of Almighty God.  I can think of only one street corner prayer in the Bible that was blessed by God, and the one who prayed was a despised tax collector.  With his eyes cast down, not even looking toward heaven, he prayed “God, show mercy to me, a sinner.” (Luke 18:13).  And that man, Jesus said, went away justified.

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