Well, this is it. My last newspaper column. Exit stage left. It’s been a great ride, but I’ve taken the gold watch, and I’m holding the bouquet of roses. Four years. 105 columns. 208,000 words. Adios and sayonara. Vaya con Dios. Aloha and goodbye. I’m hanging up my rock and roll shoes. The last untamed scribbler is going home.
It’s time. I’ve gotten too predictable, and I’ve started repeating myself. Old age has caught up with me. I feel like the last man standing. You must know when to hold them and when to fold them. I’d rather walk out the front door than be thrown out the back. I will always remember those of you who had a kind word for me along the way. Thank you.
I’ll end it with this final story, and it has two parts: about a ship and about Christopher Columbus. That’s consistent with the way I write, I guess. A fellow I thought was my friend who later threw me under the bus once told me that I was “the only writer he ever read who could start out writing about one thing and end up talking about something completely different.” As I told him: “It’s an art.”
Last week, while walking the decks of the sailing ship, Pinta, a replica of Christopher Columbus’ smallest vessel which was berthed at Biloxi’s Schooner Pier, I remembered that I have been to both of his burial sites. Let’s take a deep dive into the Pinta first, and then explore Columbus’ and his meandering corpse.
There’s apparently a fascination with building these types of historic ships. This one was constructed in Brazil in 2005 and has been on tour ever since. It was in Pensacola last week. Who knows how many copies of Columbus’ ships are currently splashing around the world?
The first time I saw a similar replica of the Pinta was when I was a kid. It, along with full-sized reproductions of the Nina and the Santa Maria, was tied up in the harbor at the foot of the Ramblas, the main street of Barcelona, Spain. I didn’t go onboard because, frankly, I couldn’t afford it. My liberty off the ship there in those days consisted of strolling up and down the tree-covered street, taking in the sights, and eating a sweet Valencia orange that I’d bought from an itinerant vendor. I do remember, though, that the ships were quite impressive – all flying their white sails adorned with the red Patee Cross. This was the cross adopted by Prince Henry, the Navigator, of Portugal, who turned Columbus down when he requested financing for his first voyage to the “new world;” and even earlier, this was the familiar cross worn by the Knights Templar when they attempted to retake Jerusalem from the Muslims, but no one knows for sure if it was flown on Columbus’ ships.
The original Pinta, like its sister ship, the Nina, was a caravel, a small, coastal trading vessel redesigned by the Prince Henry cited above, so that the tiller and rudder could be attached to the ship’s transom, allowing it to sail against the wind and to travel the open sea relatively safely. Known as the “Iberian Workhorse,” they were initially used for commerce along the North African coast and were later instrumental in opening the new world to the east. After six years of begging by Columbus, the King of Spain and his Queen, Ferdinand and Isabella, finally loaned the two ships to Columbus, along with the larger flagship, the Santa Maria, because they were cheap and expendable. I’ve been on houseboats larger than the replica Pinta, which closely approximates the original in size: 85 feet long, 24 feet wide (beam), a draft of 7 feet, and weighting 101 tons. Like the original, it is powered by two large, square sails, which means it sails best with a following wind; however, the replica’s sails are augmented with twin Perkins diesel engines rated at 135 horsepower each. In Columbus’ day, it carried a crew of 26 and all slept on deck except for the captain who had the small cabin amidships. The crew members were kept busy tending the sails and ropes and were constantly having to manually pump out water that had washed on board or seeped through the wooden cracks. Since there was no way to preserve food, most of it became spoiled or wormy.
It took Columbus 33 days to sail from the Canary Island to landfall in the Bahamas, because of the favorable prevailing winds, but it took him nine months to return home. Sailors onboard Pinta were the first to sight the new world, because it was the fastest of the three vessels. Spanish ships were generally named after saints; however, there’s disagreement about which one Pinta was named for. “Pinta” in Spanish can mean “The Painted One,” “The Spotted One,” or simply “The Look.”
There’s also no consensus about the actual color of Columbus’ ships, although most believe they were black like the replica I visited. They were probably “painted” with a water and corrosion resistant mixture of pine tar, linseed oil, and turpentine, but no one knows for sure.
This Pinta is homeported in Bayou La Batre, Alabama, home of the Bubba Shrimp Company, co-owned by Forrest Gump, and sails ten months out of the year, educating people about Columbus and our nautical heritage. The non-profit that runs it is currently looking for sea-going volunteers to sign onboard for a minimum of two weeks. Apply at ninapinta.org. The ship will be in Biloxi through 1 April and open for tours every weekend. Admission is $8.00 for adults and $6.00 for children. Its next voyages are “up the rivers through middle America.”
The “woke world” has not been kind to Christopher Columbus. He’s now the poster boy for everything that was wrong with early America: slavery, colonialism, you name it. More and more states no longer celebrate “Columbus Day.” For example, the states of Hawaii, Alaska, Vermont, South Dakota, New Mexico, Maine, and parts of California, including most of Los Angeles County, do not recognize it and have each replaced it with celebrations of indigenous “Peoples Day” (In Hawaii, “Discovers’ Day;” in South Dakota, “Native American Day.”).
Unfortunately, he’s still hard to ignore. Many of the large Italian American populations in this country still consider him a heroic, iconic figure, and there’s no less than 54 cities across America named in his honor, including the capitals of Ohio and South Carolina, not to mention our neighbor down Highway 98.
Christopher Columbus was born into a family of wool carders and weavers in 1451 in Genoa, Italy. Although his family had no nautical background, Genoa was a seafaring nation state that had long rivaled neighboring Venice for dominance of trade in the Mediterranean Sea. In the 21st century, it’s obvious that Genoa came out on top because today, Venice is just a tourist trap that is slowly sinking into the sea, while Genoa is a center for major ship construction and the homeport of many Italian cruise lines.
As a young sailor, Columbus was greatly influenced by the Venetian explorer, Marco Polo, and his stories about the Far East. He had read Polo’s book, “Travels in the Land of Kublai Khan” (1295) many times, and he became convinced that he could find a shorter and a less dangerous route to the Spice Indies by sailing west. This was not such a fantastic idea at the time, for it was generally accepted at this time in history (1492) that the world was round. Columbus also corresponded with the leading geographers who had long advocated the possibility of a western route to Asia. What was not suspected by anyone was the intervening continents and oceans between Europe and Asia.
Regarding Marco Polo, there’s an anecdote about his impending death that I’ve always respected. Supposedly back in Venice and on his death bed, his confessor told him that he had best “recant” or take back all the wonderous stories he had told in his books about his travels in the Far East. To his credit, he replied to the priest: “Recant? How can I possibly recant when I only told half of what I saw?”
Among academic circles, Columbus is perhaps most infamous for something known as the “Columbine Exchange.” The innocuous term refers to and minimizes the draconian impact the arrival that Europeans and their culture and their pathogens had on the indigenous peoples of the new world. Simply explained, the “exchange” goes like this: the inhabitants of the new world gave Europeans maize (corn), potatoes, sweet potatoes, beans, peanuts, squashes, pumpkins, tomatoes, chili peppers, pineapples, cocoa, tobacco, and quinine (a medicine). In return, they received wheat, sugar, bananas, rice, grapes (wine), dandelions, horses, pigs, cattle, goats, sheep, chickens, SMALLPOX, MEASLES, TYPHUS, and the PLAGUE. A fair exchange?
Two other men of note who sailed with Columbus were Ponce de Leon who was looking for the Fountain of Youth and who discovered Florida in 1513. The other was the little known but very important Antonio de Alaminos who was a discoverer of the Gulf Stream, the great “river” in the ocean that aids ships going from the United States to Europe. A contemporary and rival who did not sail with him was Amerigo Vespucci who, through the work of an obscure German map maker, managed to get the newly discovered continent named after himself. Vespucci was also the first person to figure out that the two Americas were separate continents.
To his credit, Columbus was a great navigator. Having only such primitive instruments as the astrolabe (from the Greek word, “to take a star”) to determine latitude (north and south of the equator), the magnetic compass, and the sand hourglass to measure time, it’s a wonder he ever found land. It wasn’t until the English horologist, John Harrison, invented the first practical marine chronometer (1761) that mariners were able to accurately compute their longitude at sea (east and west of the equator). Before this, lookouts spent a lot of their time looking for driftwood and small land birds. In assessing Columbus’ character, as a driven and determined man, he reminds me of the old saying: “When your only tool is a hammer, every problem is a nail.”
I happen to repair clocks, a trade I picked up during long nights at sea, and I can tell you that swingling pendulums hate rocking ships. I also taught myself origami, the Japanese art of paper folding. It’s amazing how much time an idle mind can waste. Origami is good for meditation and beats cross word puzzles, in my opinion, for challenging your brain. If you are interested and a member, I’m scheduled to conduct a two-hour origami workshop at USM’s Ochsner Lifelong Learning Institute in September. I will teach you how to make a sailboat, swan, cat, butterfly, star, jumping frog, flapping bird, tulip, crane, and a box to put them in. If the karma in the room is right, we will also make a dragon and mandala.
As to Columbus’s burial site, I have been to two different locations: in Spain and in the Dominican Republic on the Island of Hispaniola, next to Haiti. Of the two, I believe that Spain has the stronger case, because DNA testing that was conducted on his supposed bones in 2009 confirmed that he still rests (He died in 1509.) in the Cathedral of Seville, Spain. On the other hand, knowing that he had expressed a desire to be buried in the new world that he had “found,” his daughter-in-law supposedly had his remains removed in 1537 to the Cathedral in Santo Domingo, the capital city of the Dominican Republic. Dominican authorities, incidentally, refuse to allow DNA testing on their remains, one of their largest tourist attractions. So, who knows? In parting, I do know this:
We’ve been long together,
Through pleasant and through cloudy
weather;
‘Tis hard to part when friendly and dear,
Perhaps will cost a sigh, a tear;
Then steal away, give little warning
Choose thine own time;
Say not ‘Good Night,’ but in some
Brighter clime,
Bid me ‘Good Morning.’
Adieu, adieu, and adieu. Old sailors never die; they just float away. The tide is going out, and I need to catch it.
Light a candle for me.
Benny Hornsby of Oak Grove is a retired U.S. Navy captain. Visit his website, bennyhornsby.com, or email him: villefranche60@yahoo.com.
