14 Jul My Favourite Stories #137
America Was Named After a Lie.
I tell my year 8 History students that when Christopher Columbus left Europe, he didn’t know where he was going, when he got ‘there’ he didn’t know where he was, and when he returned he didn’t know where he had been.
As Columbus, in 1492, waded ashore On San Salvador a soft breeze stirred in the tops of the palm trees. They had spent more than two months on ships, and so the land felt good under their feet.
“Thank you, God,” Columbus prayed as he knelt on the sand. “Thank You for watching over our ships for the last two months, bringing us safely to land.”
“Where are we?” one of the men asked as they stood on the shore.
“I don’t know,” Columbus answered, “but we should be in China or Japan.”
“But sir, look at those people coming out of the jungle,” another sailor observed. “They don’t have the colour skin and the shape of eyes that the Chinese have.”
“They look more like the people of India,” another noted.
“We must have sailed too far south for China and Japan and reached an island off the coast of India, instead.” Columbus agreed. “Yes, these must be the Indies, and the people are Indians.”
Of course, believing that he was in India did not make it so. India was still 20,000kms away. Calling the natives Indians did not make them Indians at all.
Though we may think Columbus foolish, we do the same thing sometimes with people we meet. We misjudge them. Just because some folks go to church, we may say they are Christians, when they may not be at all. Just like sitting in MacDonalds does not make you a hamburger, sitting church does not make you a Chrsitian. Just because some people look and act the way Christians act doesn’t make them Christians.
To be a real Christian means to have Jesus as the ruler of your heart. He never misjudged people or made assumptions. He never gossiped about people and their shortcomings. He ‘argued’ with the Pharisees in a kind way. He didn’t complain about what others were doing wrong. He was kind to everyone. He really loved people – even the unlovely. He tried to make people happy. Are you really a Christian, or do you have a mistaken identity.
Back to the Columbus Story.
A man by the name of Amerigo Vespucci published a book in the early 1500’s where he claimed to have discovered a new world. He claimed to have kept careful records of where he had been and produced charts and maps to prove it. People who read his book were impressed and said that this new world should be named after him. So, this new world was called “America.”
The problem is that little of what Amerigo said was true. He never led any expeditions to the new world. He did go on some voyages with some men who had sailed with Columbus to explore the new world, but only as a pilot, or astronomer, as they were then called. It was his job to check the position of the ship by observing the sun and stars. The maps in his book were actually drawn by Christopher Columbus. From other sailors, he had gathered stories of previous explorations and then told them as if they were his own.
What do you think about what Amerigo did? Do you think it was OK to use Columbus’ maps and charts and call them his own? Was it honest for him to claim to have discovered the new world? Amerigo got away with his fraud because in those days there was no way to copyright any material. Today we would call it plagiarism. It is a big issue in schools and universities today and we have plagiarism checkers and those that get caught get serious penalties. Even the new Artificial Intelligence sector of the internet has checkers that can determine if something has been written by AI.
The Bible says that Lying lips are abominations to the Lord. (Proverbs 12:22)
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