Jared’s Reviews > Christopher Columbus: "A Man Among The Gentiles" > Status Update

"Columbus was shipwrecked......rather than construct a small settlement.....knowing from his previous exsperience....that his people were "by nature disrespectful" and that no command or punishment would be sufficient."...to prevent them from entering villages and huts of people and taking whatever they could...creating thereby fights and quarrels that would have made us enemies...but this did not happen..."

Christopher Columbus had gone through so much, the death of many friends, now hostile Indians (who were once friends), storms, illness, lack of food, worm filled biscuits, not attaining a land of Gold. "Anticipating the armchair analyst......Let those who are...find fault and to censure ask..'Why did you not do this or that?'...I wish they were on this voyage..."

On Christopher Columbus's way home there was a horrible storm. He writes " I have been near death so often.....What made it so unbearable this time was the thought that after our Lord had been pleased to enflame me with faith and trust in his enterprise and crowned it wi victory.....His divine Majesty should now choose to jeopardize everything ....The Lord would not allow such an enterprise To remain unfinished...

Loved the love story of Ferdinand and Isabelle. I bet she upset the royal family.

Henry IV arranged for Isabella to marry the Brother of Louis XI to create an alliance with French Kingdom....she would only marry by her own choice...She preferred Ferdinand over the French prince. In the end Isabell took leave of Henry....Prince Ferdinand entered Castile disguised as a servant, the two were married.

"What could have been a disaster-what was a disaster proved providential in the life of Christopher Columbus. He was twenty four, virtually uneducated, shipwrecked in a foreign country. But the future Admiral of the Ocean Sea could not have been in a better spot at a better time. His fortuitous shipwreck and miraculous survival placed him at a crossroads that shaped history."

With a hand that could be felt, the Lord opened my mind to the fact that it would be possible to sail and he opened my will to desire to accomplish the project......This was the fire that burned within me.....Who can doubt that this fire was not merely mine, but also of the Holy Spirit....urging me to press forward.

This was his Christopher Columbus's words