October 11, 2007 Issue                                       

©2007 The Chestnut Hill Local

Did you know Columbus had 30 lawyers on his ship?
by JIM HARRIS

“In 1493, Columbus sailed the bright blue sea.” Every school child knows this simple rhyme, but who was Christopher Columbus really? In this scholarly paper, I have humbly attempted to separate man from myth.

The son of a simple wood weaver, Chris was a born explorer. Even as a young child, he was always wandering into the neighbors’ yards and “discovering” things. His folks thought he might grow up to be a tax collector, but fate had bigger plans. One day while he was out exploring, he noticed a faint line in the dirt. It was the 39th parallel, and from that lone strand he wove a theory that the world was not a cube, as most believed, but rather donut-shaped. 

He theorized that by sailing through the hole in the donut he could reach India from the East and thus avoid the long lines for take-out occurring on the Western border. He took his bold plan to Queen Isabella of Spain and her brother, King Ferdinand, and they gave him some boats and money just to get rid of him. They were quite sure that he would sail off one of the corners of the cube and into the area called “Nowhere,” never to be seen again.

So off he went in his three tiny ships — only 10 feet long by 14 inches wide  — the Nano, the Piñata and the Mongo Santamaria. On board were 30 lawyers, two hundred barrels of cheap wine, and a five-piece dance band in the lounge. Three days later they spotted what they believed to be India, but after rigorous inspection, determined it to be seaweed. Eight weeks after that, on October 12, while hanging over the railing after another night of partying, Chris noticed that his ship had run aground, and a crowd of curious natives had gathered. 

He quickly communicated to them, using a patented system of grunts, bird calls and oil paintings, that they were “Indians,” and that they would soon be civilized like he was. They then held the first Thanksgiving dinner, rang the Liberty Bell and finished off the last barrel of wine.

Sadly, after Columbus’ third voyage, it was discovered that he had been systematically dismantling the new continent and smuggling the pieces back to Italy in a fake wooden leg. He was arrested and brought to Spain in chains, but managed to wriggle free and escape to Guadalajara, where he hid in a chicken coop until his death in 1506.

His body was buried in Mexico, but he began harassing the other dead people, and was moved to the Abbey at Madrid. When the abbey went condo, he was shipped off to Cuba. Then in 1898, after a bitter custody battle in which neither side wanted him, his remains were schlepped back to Spain. DNA results announced in May, 2006, showed that some of his remains remain in at least 17 different locations. In death as in life, truly a man of the world.

In recent times, historians have determined that Columbus was in fact not the first outsider to reach North America. He was apparently preceded by Eric the Red, Eric the Greenish-Blue, Girl Scout troop 184 from Oxford, England, who rowed over and back in one sitting, and “Ajax,” an escaped  one-armed circus monkey who swam the entire 4,000 miles from France in just over a week. Only Columbus, however, stuck around long enough to become the New World’s first illegal alien.

In writing this piece, I have discovered that being a learned historian is hard. It involves many long minutes of research, but what’s even harder is deciding whom I can make fun of without being sued, killed or beaten up. I figure anyone dead over 500 years is probably a safe target, but I’m screening my calls just in case.

Jim Harris, of Germantown, is a musician and animal activist who insists that the worst time to have a heart attack is in the middle of a game of charades.