Christopher Columbus - Polish?

Hmmmm, I am automatically suspicious.  The person who wrote the book is an academic.  Okay, they "publish or perish" - for academic journals, that's a well known fact of life for an academic.  So why is this book being touted to the popular press, and why a book instead of a scholastic treatise?  Something seems not right.  But here's the article, anyway.

From the Daily Mail.co.uk
Christopher Colombowicz: America's discoverer Polish not Portuguese, claim historians
Last updated at 9:43 AM on 29th November 2010

He is celebrated as the humble Italian weaver who ended up discovering the Americas.

But the conventional wisdom relating to Christopher Columbus is under threat after academics concluded the explorer was actually a Polish immigrant.

An international team of distinguished professors [who?] have completed 20 years of painstaking research into his beginnings.

The fresh evidence about Columbus’ background is revealed in a new book by Manuel Rosa, an academic at Duke University in the United States. He says the voyager was not from a family of humble Italian craftsmen as previously thought - but the son of Vladislav III, an exiled King of Poland. (Conventionally, Vladislav III is reported to have died in 1444, so either conventional history is wrong or Christopher was fathered by his father's holy spirit, ahem).

‘The sheer weight of the evidence presented makes the old tale of a Genoese wool-weaver so obviously unbelievable that only a fool would continue to insist on it,’ Rosa said.

The academic argues that the only way Columbus persuaded the King of Spain to fund his journey across the Atlantic Ocean was because he was royalty himself. For some reason he hid the true identity of his Polish biological father from most people during his lifetime, and history books have been none the wiser.

‘Another nutty conspiracy theory! That’s what I first supposed as I started to read... I now believe that Columbus is guilty of huge fraud carried out over two decades against his patrons,’ said US historian Prof. James T. McDonough.

Other historians first doubted Columbus’ Polish roots, but Rosa’s findings have been steadily gaining followers as the evidence comes to light.

‘This book will forever change the way we view our history,’ said Portuguese historian Prof. Jose Carlos Calazans. National Geographic is reportedly interested in making a documentary.

Until now, it was believed that Columbus, who was born in the Italian city of Genoa in 1451, was the son of Domenico Columbo, who was a weaver and had a cheese stall in a market in the city. At the age of 22 Columbus started working for Genoese merchants trading throughout the Mediterranean, and three years later took part in a special trading expedition to northern Europe, docking at Bristol before continuing to Ireland and Iceland. Throughout the 1480s, when Columbus was in his 30s, he traded along the African coast.

Historians say it is a myth that navigators thought the world was flat before Columbus sailed west – they had been using the stars at night as a primitive navigation system that assumed the earth was a sphere.
What sailors including Columbus didn’t know is how big the earth was, and how long it would take to sail round it.

When he persuaded financiers to back his voyage west in 1492, he had completely miscalculated the distances and thought that Asia would be where America is: he arrived in the Bahamas, thinking he was somewhere off the coast of China.

Columbus undertook three more return journeys across the Atlantic Ocean, each time hoping that he had found another part of Asia.

He set up Spanish colonies and became governor of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, but was later put on trial in Spain for alleged abuse of power.
After Columbus’ death in 1506, European explorers continued to set up colonies and eventually empires in north and south America.

Gee - Ya Think?

Too tired to carry on tonight - daylight savings time has thrown my poor system for a loop. I HATE losing that hour of daylight in the morning during this time of year. It was DARK when the alarm went off at 6 a.m. this morning, yech! I found this rather amusing: Sail Like An Egyptian It turns out the oldest seafaring ships ever found actually work By Jeremy Hsu Posted 03.09.2009 at 2:10 pm Well gee - ya think? DOH I found this rather disgusting: Medieval Vampire Skull Found The remains of a woman's skull with a rock thrust into its jaws is evidence of the mediaeval fear of vampires, Italian anthropologists have claimed. By Nick Squires in Rome Last Updated: 11:16PM GMT 08 Mar 2009 Oh please. I found this rather intriguing: Christopher Columbus was actually Pedro Scotto, a blonde, freckle-faced fella of Scottish ancestry Last Updated: 10:42PM GMT 08 Mar 2009 I found this rather uplifting: Whoa! Must be some kind of record - a 10 year old squirrel not in captivity!?! FYI, average life of a squirrel out there is 4-6 years. So this is truly a story of a mini-miracle in the world of nature, and a story of hope for the future for post-Katrina traumatized lands: March 9, 2009 (KATC TV) Songbirds, critters making post-hurricane comeback Information from: The Times-Picayune, http://www.timespicayune.com Tired and dragging as I've been all day, I was heartened on my trek to the bus stop this morning to hear my first robin song of the season - it sounded like a young male just trying it out for the first time :) And tonight on the even longer and tireder - ur, that's not a word, but it's how I feel (more tired than before) - trek from the bus stop back home, I heard the trills of both male and female red-winged blackbirds. And just about half a block from home, in one of my neighbor's large blue spruces, I spied a flash of purplish-red on the breast of a tiny bird - a male house finch! They are back! So, even if the weather is crappy and tomorrow night my entire house may be crushed by the giant tree in the back yard that finally succumbs to forecast gale-force winds out of the northwest, the birds know - spring is here! There is hope -

Christopher Columbus - Man of Mystery

A fascinating article today at The New York Times. What will the DNA tests eventually reveal? And - I thought there was some controversy about this - are they sure those bones from which they extracted a smidgeon of DNA are Columbus' bones? Seeking Columbus’s Origins, With a Swab By AMY HARMON Published: October 8, 2007 BARCELONA, Spain — When schoolchildren turn to the chapter on Christopher Columbus’s humble origins as the son of a weaver in Genoa, they are not generally told that he might instead have been born out of wedlock to a Portuguese prince. Or that he might have been a Jew whose parents converted to escape the Spanish Inquisition. Or a rebel in the medieval kingdom of Catalonia. Yet with little evidence to support them, multiple theories of Columbus’s early years have long found devoted proponents among those who would claim alternative bragging rights to the explorer. And now, five centuries after he opened the door to the New World, Columbus’s revisionist biographers have found a new hope for vindication. The Age of Discovery has discovered DNA. In 2004, a Spanish geneticist, Dr. Jose A. Lorente, extracted genetic material from a cache of Columbus’s bones in Seville to settle a dispute about where he was buried. Ever since, he has been beset by amateur historians, government officials and self-styled Columbus relatives of multiple nationalities clamoring for a genetic retelling of the standard textbook tale. Even adherents of the Italian orthodoxy concede that little is known about the provenance of the Great Navigator, who seems to have purposely obscured his past. But contenders for his legacy have no compunction about prospecting for his secrets in the cells he took to his grave. And the arrival on Oct. 8 of another anniversary of Columbus’s first landfall in the Bahamas has only sharpened their appetite for a genetic verdict, preferably in their own favor. A Genoese Cristoforo Colombo almost certainly did exist. Archives record his birth and early life. But there is little to tie that man to the one who crossed the Atlantic in 1492. Snippets from Columbus’s life point all around the southern European coast. He kept books in Catalan and his handwriting has, according to some, a Catalonian flair. He married a Portuguese noblewoman. He wrote in Castilian. He decorated his letters with a Hebrew cartouche. Rest of article here.