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From the grave of Columbus |
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Written by DeadGirl
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Tuesday, 28 September 2004 |
Experts recently attempted to answer questions about the 15th-century explorer Christopher Columbus by going to his grave to dig into his past via modern technology. MELODY L. GOH hops on board for a look at the Discovery Channel special that documents the mission.
SOME of us may have learnt in school about how Christopher Columbus the explorer sailed across the Atlantic Ocean and discovered America in 1492. We also learnt about his other explorations, as well as a brief history of his background.
However, for decades now Columbus has been a target of controversies that stem from the accuracy of his voyages as well as the origins of his background.
America was already populated when Columbus arrived, ruling him out as the first person to “discover†the Americas. In fact, he wasn’t even the first European to discover the continent. It is widely acknowledged today that the Vikings from Northern Europe came to North America in the 11th century and began a short-lived colony there. Theories abound as to who really discovered the Americas, but you’d have to spend long hours on the Internet to read up on that.
As for Columbus’s background, the question of where or even who he really was remains unanswered. Was he really Italian, or was he the illegitimate son of a Spanish aristocrat? His name in Italian is Cristoforo Colombo, in Spanish Cristóbal Colón, and in Portuguese Cristóvão Colombo. Columbus is the Latinate form of his surname.
All original records of the explorer’s birth and childhood have been destroyed, so there’s no way of finding out everything about his history. Even his descendants aren’t sure. However, through modern technology and forensic science, Discovery Channel tries to bring us closer to the truth in a special documentary entitled Columbus: Secrets from the Grave.
In this programme, historian Prof Charles Merrill who has examined the question of Columbus’s origins for 25 years, and genetics scientist Prof Jose Lorente join a team of other scientists and historians on a mission to provide valid evidence of Columbus’s past by employing several different methods.
The popular observation of Columbus’s background is that he was from Genoa, Italy, and came from a family of woollen merchants. He was born in 1451 to Domenico Colombo and Suzanna Fontanarossa. He had three younger brothers – Bartolomeo, Giovanni Pellegrino and Giacomo (also known as Diego) – and a sister named Bianchinetta.
Columbus later worked for his father in wool processing. It was during this time that Columbus studied cartography with Bartolomeo. Still, Columbus received almost no formal education, and was mainly self-taught. Somewhere between 1474 and 1476, Columbus spent some time on a ship bound for the island of Khios, Greece, and stayed there for a year. Some say it was from there that he got many of his sailors.
By 1477, Columbus was living in Lisbon, Portugal, where Bartolomeo worked as a mapmaker. Columbus married Felipa Perestello e Moniz, a daughter of a noble Portuguese family of Italian ancestry in 1479. They had a son, Diego Colon, in 1480. Five years after that, Felipa passed away. Columbus found another partner in Spain, an orphan named Beatriz Enriquez, but the two never got married. They had a son together, Ferdinand, better known as Fernando Colon.
The debate over Columbus’s real origins begins with his manuscripts. Many of his preserved documents – be it personal or official – were written almost exclusively in Castilian. Merrill suggests that Columbus’s phonetic mistakes as analysed in his handwriting were most likely those of a Catalan. Plus, the fact that he married a noblewoman shows that he himself might have come from a noble family, because it was unheard of during that time for someone of nobility to marry outside of their class.
Another theory is that Columbus was a Spanish Jew fleeing from the Spanish Inquisition. In Spain at the time, Jews who converted to Christianity were mistrusted as some thought that they were still practising Judaism in secret. So, perhaps Columbus was trying to hide his true identity, in fear of being tortured or killed.
In Columbus: Secrets from the Grave, the team went to the Cathedral of Santa Maria in Seville, Spain, to exhume Columbus’s remains as well as those of his brother Diego and son Fernando. The remains were subject to a series of complex DNA tests, which have been taking place for more than a year now.
“The first thing we did,†revealed Prof Jose Lorente during a phone interview from Spain recently, “was to figure out which bones belonged to whom. Then we had to find out if the remains really did belong to Christopher Columbus, so we’re comparing them to the DNA of his descendants. The problem is that none of the bones are complete. There isn’t one bone that is big or complete enough to be instantly identifiable like the femur bone; what we had were short and small fragments. It was very difficult. But we did get some basic information like the fact that the bones did belong to a man of about 60 years old.â€
At the time of this interview, the scientists were still analysing the remains and had yet to come up with solid findings. However, Lorente said that everything will hopefully be unveiled by the time the show goes on air.
“It’s taking a long time because the fragments of bones are in really bad shape and are contaminated,†explained Lorente. He added that for DNA studies to be carried out, the quality of bones is as important as the quantity of bones. If the bones have been contaminated, then that’s going to be a problem too.
“The bones have been moved many times. Through the moving process, the bones have been manipulated and touched by many people. Some bones may have been left out and some may have had reaction to chemicals. The bones from Columbus and Diego’s tombs are in really bad condition, it really was a challenge to find the real remains,†he said.
Columbus died in Valladolid in Spain in 1506. He was initially buried in a small cemetery in Valladolid, but was moved to Seville shortly after that. Diego died in 1526, and he was buried beside his father. However, Diego’s widow ordered for the bodies to be moved to a cathedral in Santa Domingo, Hispaniola (now Dominican Republic). They remained there for two centuries.
In 1795, France took over the island from Spain. As the remains were considered a national treasure, the Spaniards took the remains with them and placed them in Havana, Cuba. When Cuba won independence from Spain a century later, the remains were moved back to Seville, where the tomb of Christopher Columbus is located today. (The epitaph on his tomb reads Non confundar in aeternam in Latin, or Let me never be confounded in English, suggesting that his identity was not what he publicly stated in his life.)
“Apart from the condition of the bones, we also had problems getting the remains in the first place. It took us several months before we could secure the few remains that were left in the Dominican Republic, which at the time was having their presidential election,†said Lorente.
A total of five laboratories (located in the United States, Spain, Italy and Germany) were involved in the checking of the DNA. Lorente said that he didn’t want to be the only one dealing with the remains.
“When we sent the samples to the different labs, the scientists there were working in a blind way, meaning they didn’t know whose remains they belonged to.
“The conclusions from the analyses are a big thing for several countries and many people. If one person makes one conclusion, someone might say that it’s unfair, that the testing was biased. We didn’t want that kind of problem, we wanted an international team, and teams from both Italy and Spain,†Lorente noted.
Whatever the outcome is, one thing will always remain true: Christopher Columbus was a great explorer of his time, no matter where he originated from.
The hour-long ‘Columbus: Secrets from the Grave’ premieres on the Discovery Channel (Astro Channel 50) today at 9pm, and will be repeated tomorrow at 1pm.
http://www.star-ecentral.com/news/story.asp?file=/2004/9/26/tvnradio/8960586&sec=tvnradio
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Taphophilia?
taphophilia (taf′ō-fil′ē-ă)
ORIGIN:
From the Greek words taphos, meaning "tomb" or "sepulcher" and philia, meaning "attraction or affinity to something, in particular the love or obsession with something"
DEFINITION: 1. An excessive interest in graves and cemeteries. 2. A love or fondness for funerals, graves, and cemeteries. 3. In psychiatry, a morbid attraction to graves and cemeteries
Quote Repository
“Fear no more the heat o' the sun Nor the furious winters' rages; Thou thy worldly task hast done, Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages The sceptre, learning, physic, must All follow this and come to dust.” William Shakespeare - Cymbelin
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