ACTIVITY 1 TRUE OR FALSE?
- He proved the Earth was round.
- He wasn’t the first European to cross the Atlantic.
- Christopher Columbus was not his real name. The name he was actually given when he was born in Genoa was Cristoforo Colombo.
- Christopher Columbus began a career as a seafarer at the age of fourteen and later supported himself by selling maps and charts.
- Christopher Columbus and his crew were actually seeing the island of San Salvador, 375 miles off of the coast of Florida.
- Even though he made three return trips west, Christopher Columbus never actually stepped foot on the mainland of North America.
ACTIVITY 2 Story Retelling: the fun facts story
First, read the English description of the story and try to understand the main idea of the story. If you have any questions, please ask. Try to retell the story in your own words. Please use any kind of performing (e.g. singing, dancing, acting, mimicking), blackboard, your body language and so on to tell the story.
Story 1. Even in death, Columbus continued to cross the Atlantic. (4 - 5 people)
Following his death in 1506, Columbus was buried in Valladolid, Spain, and then moved to Seville. At the request of his daughter-in-law, the bodies of Columbus and his son Diego were shipped across the Atlantic to Hispaniola and interred in a Santo Domingo cathedral. When the French captured the island in 1795, the Spanish dug up remains thought to be those of the explorer and moved them to Cuba before returning them to Seville after the Spanish-American War in 1898. However, a box with human remains and the explorer’s name was discovered inside the Santo Domingo cathedral in 1877. Did the Spaniards exhume the wrong body? DNA testing in 2006 found evidence that at least some of the remains in Seville are those of Columbus. The Dominican Republic has refused to let the other remains be tested. It could be possible that, aptly, pieces of Columbus are both in the New World and the Old World.
Story 2. A lunar eclipse may have saved Columbus. (4 - 5 people)
In February 1504, a desperate Columbus was stranded in Jamaica, abandoned by half his crew and denied food by the islanders. The heavens that he relied on for navigation, however, would guide him safely once again. Knowing from his almanack that a lunar eclipse was coming on February 29, 1504, Columbus warned the islanders that his god was upset with their refusal of food and that the moon would “rise inflamed with wrath” as an expression of divine displeasure. On the appointed night, the eclipse darkened the moon and turned it red, and the terrified islanders offered provisions and beseeched Columbus to ask his god for mercy.
Story 3. He died at home in Spain. (3 - 4 people)
Though many of Christopher Columbus’ voyages were harrowing (he traversed the Atlantic in vessels not intended for such journeys and several of them sank in the process) he died after returning from his final trip. Upon his return, he waited at home for a call from King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella that never came. There were rumours at the time that the king and queen had questions about Columbus’ mental state and felt he had already caused them enough problems with his heavy-handed ruling of the colonies. The official cause of his death at age 55 was heart-failure although there is some modern evidence that it was caused by a secondary illness known as Reiter’s Syndrome after he became sick from a food-borne illness while at sea. He appears to have been chronically ill from age 41 and was often bedridden for months at a time due to fevers, prolonged attacks of gout, and even bleeding from the eyes.
Story 4. The Santa Maria wrecked on Columbus’ historic voyage. (4 - 5 people)
On Christmas Eve of 1492, a cabin boy ran Columbus’s flagship into a coral reef on the northern coast of Hispaniola, near present-day Cap Haitien, Haiti. Its crew spent a very un-merry Christmas salvaging the Santa Maria’s cargo. Columbus returned to Spain aboard the Nina, but he had to leave nearly 40 crew members behind to start the first European settlement in the Americas—La Navidad. When Columbus returned to the settlement in the fall of 1493, none of the crew were found alive.
Story 5. Columbus returned to Spain in chains in 1500. (3 - 4 people)
Columbus’s governance of Hispaniola could be brutal and tyrannical. Colonists complained to the monarchy about mismanagement, and a royal commissioner dispatched to Hispaniola arrested Columbus in August 1500 and brought him back to Spain in chains. Although Columbus was stripped of his governorship, King Ferdinand not only granted the explorer his freedom but subsidised a fourth voyage.
Story 6. He maybe was not great at maths. (2 - 3 people)
At the time Columbus made his famous journey, a lot of overseas travel was guesswork. The exact size of the planet Earth was unknown, and there were two main ways of measuring degrees of latitude—the method developed by the Greek philosopher Poseidonius and the method developed by the mediaeval Arabs. In making his own calculations, Columbus argued that the circumference yielded by both methods was the same…ignoring, or forgetting, that Arab miles were longer than Roman miles. Using that data, which ultimately rendered the planet about 25 percent smaller, Columbus assured his backers that his small wooden ships could make it from Spain to Japan in 30 days. Some scholars think Columbus willfully misrepresented the distance, but the jury is still out.
