1492

“The Nina, the Beana, and the Pina Colada”, or however the song goes…

Since returning from my trip to Maui last week, I’ve been going hard on completing the travel sections, really diversifying them and making them “guides” as they should be. It’s crazy how much you don’t realize you’ve done on a vaca until you’re pouring back over the photos and agenda and trying to piece it back together for someone who has never been to the place before. And while I should be jumping feet first into all the wild sh*t I did in Hawaii, I find myself forever coming back and revising the Spain section, time and again. To me it’s never complete. No matter how many times I revise it, no amount of revision is enough. And it has to be because the history is so rich. Not that all history isn’t rich, but these are the tales we were told as little children in history class about Christopher Columbus and the Nina, Beana, and the Pina Colada, or however it went.

I don’t have children, as you all know, which is why I can pour my time and money into traveling, partying, and telling you all about it on here, but my understanding is that these stories are either no longer told in school or are very much abridged because, as we always find out later, our heroes of old usually turn out to be defrauders, liars, savages, and more of the same. Today Columbus would’ve been tried and hung as a war criminal, or so we’d expect. He and his merry marauders went from place to place, stealing everything they could get their hands on, including entire tribes, forcing the indigenous into slavery, and setting up newfangled government posts at every landing, then abandoning those ill-equipped men to an unknown land without even establishing a common dialogue. From post to post, he created chaos and returned to ashes, all in the name of greed.

What strikes me about it is how much I don’t remember about the teaching expect for “CC sailed the ocean blue in 1492". I’m, again, working on the travel guides for Granada, which gets so much of my attention because the Reconquista, which was a 700 year war, ended with the final blow being the defeat of the Moors by the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, in 1492. And I think economically how thin that monarchy must have been stretched. You’re leading your entire court and thousands of men across a country for what you hope is the final battle of a centuries old beef, while you’re also funding these wild expeditions across unknown seas on the back of a man who convinced you of his nautical guile on the resume of word of mouth, in a time with basically no means of communication save a fire pit on the mountaintop? And that all came together, fell into place, at the exact same time for one of the most epic wins of all time?! I can’t even have copies made at Kinko’s without being dinged for insufficient funds.

Well played, Spain. Well played.