Blogs

 

I found Christopher Columbus's log of his journey very interesting. Since I had never learned about his voyage in high school, this is the first time I had a more detailed description of him an his life. I did need to look up terms throughout the reading, specifically referring to distance as leagues. In the beginning, every passage mentioned how many leagues they had travelled, and how many leagues he told his crew they had travelled, which was a considerable amount less. He said later that his crew was complaining about how far they thought they had travelled without even reaching land, but I thought that was strange because I personally feel it would be an accomplishment to travel so far. Once they finally began to find land, which was done so by many ways including being given clues by the types of birds they found themselves surrounded by, I found the responses of the people to these new strangers interesting. On some islands, the people would gather at the beach and welcome them, making trades of anything they could to learn about these sailors. However, at other islands, Columbus and his men would never even see the people, they would only find abandoned homes  that had obviously only recently been fled from. Some people on islands had no idea about the usage of weapons, some even grabbed a sword blade with bare hands, wile others and made their own weapons, an were always ready for an attack. The main thing about this reading that interested me was all of the details of the journey, such as the fact that they could not continue the journey for so many days because the weather was to poor and the wind was not going in the desired direction. Gold was important in both of these passages, as it was more abundant than it is in Europe. Some places Columbus travelled every person was wearing some type of gold or silver, and on other islands the people said that only the kind had the luxury, and was surrounded by  it.