September 6 – Sails and Salem

nPostednon September 6, 2016

nFornany given day in the year, we can find many and varied events thatnhappened on that day in years (even centuries) past.

nHerenare a few that fit together nicely:

Onnthis date in 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed away from the CanarynIslands. This was the last of the known ports of his famous voyage –nit was the beginning of the Great Unknown.

nOnnthis date in 1522, the only surviving ship of Ferdinand Magellan’snround-the-world journey returned to a port in Spain. On that day thenVictoria became the first ship to circumnavigate the world!

nOnnthis date in 1620, the Pilgrims sailed away from Plymouth, England,non the Mayflower. The goal of this so-famous voyage was tonsettle in North America. Eventually, they settled in what they namednPlymouth, Massachusetts. n

Andnon this date in 1628, the Puritans settled Salem, Massachusetts.

nAllnof these have in common the courage to face the unknown. The couragento sail off, discover and explore, or the courage to start new livesnin new places.

nUnfortunately,nthey also have in common a ruthless disregard for peoples of thosennewly discovered, explored, and settled lands. n

nInalways enjoy exploring the surprising, confusing, or memorablenaspects of familiar historical tales. Here are a few:

nTheren is a myth that Christopher Columbus went up against the people ofn his day, claiming that the world was round when “everybody knew”n that the world was flat. The myth goes on that Columbus was provedn right – the underdog wins the day!

There is another mythn that Christopher Columbus was incredibly stupid and wrong-headedn about the world. According to this myth, everyone knew that then world was round like an orange, and learned people agreed that itn was really, really huge. According to this story, everybody knewn that sailing across the Atlantic Ocean to China and “the Indies”n was impossible, at least at that time – the distance was too far.n According to this myth, Columbus stubbornly argued that the worldn was way smaller than it is – and he was just plain lucky to runn into islands and continents conveniently located a sail-ablen distance from Europe.

The reality was that experts, scholars,n and navigators in the late 1400s all agreed that the world wasn roundish (if you want to see how even ancient scholars knew that,n check out this article),n but they disagreed about its size and shape, and they of coursen didn’t know how much of the Earth was covered by land and how muchn by oceans. Columbus thought it likely that the Earth was smallern than it is, and that it was shaped more like a pear than an orange.n But he was hardly alone in these thoughts – he wasn’t someone whon held onto a stubborn disbelief of well-established knowledge. An mathematician named Paolo Toscanelli, from Florence (now Italy),n thought that Asia could be reached by sailing west – and Columbusn corresponded with him. A globe made by Martin Behaim showed Asian extending much farther east than it really does, and the Atlanticn islands including the Canary Islands extending much farther westn than they really do; even the great (and ancient) thinker Ptolemyn thought that Eurasia is much larger than it is.

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nSo,nthe more correct view of Columbus is more nuanced. He certainlynwasn’t a great intellectual hero whose minority views were provedncorrect! But neither was he a know-nothing fool who ignored all thenexperts of his day.

nYoun may have read that, even though Magellan is often given credit forn being the first person to circumnavigate the globe, he didn’t do it.n He was killed in what we now call the Philippines, before hisn mission even reached “Spice Islands” (today called Indonesia).

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nMagellan deserves some partial credit, since he organizedn the voyage, navigated the dangerous, stormy straits that bear hisn name around the tip of South America, and also navigated a 98-dayn journey across the Pacific before reaching habitable land…but twon others also deserve credit:

nThe Basque mariner Juan Sebastiann Elcano commanded the return voyage of Victoria,n which was the only surviving ship out of the five that started.

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A statue of Enrique, aka
Henrique

nAndnEnrique, a personal slave of Magellan’s who acted as an interpreternduring the expedition, had lived in the Philippines, and historiansnpoint out that he may be the first human to have circled the globe –nwhen the expedition reached the Philippines, his homeland! n

nIt’sninteresting to note that, although most of the sailors of thenMagellan expedition were Spaniards and Portuguese, the crew includednmen from Greece, Sicily, England, France, Germany, and North Africa.nI don’t know if Enrique was the only slave, or the only Asian-bornnperson on the ship – but it’s clear that the expedition was morenmulti-cultural than we generally picture it!

nWhatn is the difference between the Pilgrims of Plymouth, MA, and then Puritans of Salem, MA?

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nBoth groups werenreligious Christians who believed in Calvinism (which is one of sonvery many Christian branch-offs). n

nBut the Pilgrims were anseparatist group who felt that they needed to separate from thenChurch of England. They fled from England and settled in Holland, innthe Netherlands, but they feared that they might lose their Englishncultural identity there, so they fled even farther…all the way tonthe New World.

nMany Puritans, on thenother hand, remained within the Church of England and sought tonreform it (purify it) from within. Some of these “non-separatingnPuritans” founded Salem and, later, created the Massachusetts BaynColony.

n(By the way, some sourcesnmake it sound as if Puritans and Pilgrims were two different groups,nand other sources clearly state that Pilgrims WERE Puritans; they saynthat Pilgrims were a minority group of separating Puritans.)

nAlsonon this date: