What Animals Did Christopher Columbus Find In America
In 1492, when Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic Ocean in search of a fast route to Eastern asia and the southwest Pacific, he landed in a place that was unknown to him. There he constitute treasures – extraordinary trees, birds and gold.
Only in that location was one thing that Columbus expected to find that he didn't.
Upon his return, in his official written report, Columbus noted that he had "discovered a bully many islands inhabited past people without number." He praised the natural wonders of the islands.
But, he added, "I take not found whatever monstrous men in these islands, equally many had idea."
Why, ane might ask, had he expected to find monsters?
My research and that of other historians reveal that Columbus' views were far from abnormal. For centuries, European intellectuals had imagined a globe across their borders populated by "monstrous races."
Of course the 'monstrous races' exist
Ane of the earliest accounts of these non-human beings was written by the Roman natural historian Pliny the Elder in 77 A.D. In a massive treatise, he told his readers nearly domestic dog-headed people, known equally cynocephalus, and astoni, creatures with no mouth and no need to eat.
Across medieval Europe, tales of marvelous and inhuman creatures – of cyclops, blemmyes, creatures with heads in their chests, and sciapods, who had a single leg with a giant foot – circulated in manuscripts hand-copied by scribes who often embellished their treatises with illustrations of these fantastic creatures.
Though at that place were always some skeptics, most Europeans believed that distant lands would be populated by these monsters, and stories of monsters traveled far across the rarefied libraries of elite readers.
For example, churchgoers in Fréjus, an ancient market town in the southward of France, could wander into the cloister of the Cathédrale Saint-Léonce and report monsters on the more than ane,200 painted wooden ceiling panels. Some panels portrayed scenes of daily life – local monks, a human being riding a pig and contorted acrobats. Many others depicted monstrous hybrids, dog-headed people, blemmyes and other fearsome wretches.
Maybe no one did more to spread news of monsters' existence than a 14th-century English knight named John Mandeville, who, in his account of his travels to faraway lands, claimed to have seen people with the ears of an elephant, i grouping of creatures who had flat faces with two holes, and another that had the head of a man and the body of a caprine animal.
Scholars contend whether Mandeville could have ventured far enough to run across the places that he described, and whether he was even a existent person. Just his book was copied time and again, and likely translated into every known European linguistic communication.
Leonardo da Vinci had a re-create. So did Columbus.
Onetime beliefs die hard
Even though Columbus didn't see monsters, his report wasn't enough to dislodge prevailing ideas about the creatures Europeans expected to find in parts unknown.
In 1493 – effectually the fourth dimension Columbus' outset report began to circulate – printers of the "Nuremberg Chronicle," a massive volume of history, included images and descriptions of monsters. And soon later the explorer'southward return, an Italian poet offered a poesy translation describing Columbus' journeying, which its printer illustrated with monsters, including a sciapod and a blemmye.
Indeed, the belief that monsters lived at the World's edge remained for generations.
In the 1590s, the English language explorer Sir Walter Raleigh told readers nigh the American monsters he heard about in his travels to Guiana, some of which had "their eyes in their shoulders, and their mouths in the middle of their breasts, & that a long train of haire groweth backward betwixt their shoulders."
Before long after, the English natural historian Edward Topsell translated a mid-16th-century treatise of the various animals of the world, a book that appeared in London in 1607, the same year that colonists established a pocket-sized community at Jamestown, Virginia. Topsell was eager to integrate descriptions of American animals in his volume. Only alongside chapters on Old World horses, pigs and beavers, readers learned about the "Norwegian monster" and a "very plain-featured creature" that Americans called an "haut." Another, known as a "su," had "a very deformed shape, and monstrous presence" and was "cruell, untamable, impatient, trigger-happy, [and] ravening."
Of form, in the New World, the gains for Europeans came at a terrifying cost for Native Americans: The newcomers stole their country and treasures, enslaved them, introduced Old World diseases and spurred long-term environmental alter.
In the end, possibly these ethnic Americans saw the invaders of their homelands as a 'monstrous race' of its ain – creatures who destabilized their communities, took their possessions and threatened their lives.
Source: https://theconversation.com/columbus-believed-he-would-find-blemmyes-and-sciapods-not-people-in-the-new-world-104306
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