By Tim Sanders

A September 15 article in the Springfield (Missouri) News-Leader by reporter Sony Hocklander tells of a recent meeting between officials of the Springfield Health Department and the Southwest Center for Independent Living. The meeting was to determine if a Springfield woman, Debby Rose, had the right to take her monkey into restaurants with her. According to the article, "Richard, [Ms. Rose’s] bonnet macaque monkey, is a service animal that assists her with an anxiety disorder."

I’d planned on reporting the results of that meeting, and examining the topic of anxiety disorder "assistance monkeys" at length. After all, who among us hasn’t said to himself while dining out, "Hey, my prime rib is undercooked and that weird guy at the next table is staring at me. Geez, if I only had a monkey here for emotional support."

But not wanting to annoy supersensitive PETA folks, I decided against that column.
Instead, since today is Columbus Day, we’ll discuss that great navigator. And if alleged indigenous Americans like Ward Churchill, who find Columbus Day politically incorrect, get their panties all in a wad, what can I say? I’m trying not to offend the monkey lobby this week. I’ll worry about those guys next week.

Christopher Columbus was born in 1451. In the 1470s while living in Genoa, he worked aboard ships as a cook, messenger boy, hatch-batten-downer and timber shiverer.

In 1477 Columbus settled in Lisbon, Portugal, and spent a lot of time gazing at maps. Columbus became convinced he could reach the Orient by sailing west. In 1484 he met with Portugal’s King John II and three subcommittees, in hopes of raising money for a voyage to China. John told him no. He blamed budget cuts.

Never one to give up, in 1485 Columbus moved to Spain, where he changed his drab, dreary old Italian name to the more attractive, romantic Spanish name, Cristobal Colon.

In 1487 "Senor Colon" presented his plan to sail west to get to the East to King Ferdinand (V) and Queen Isabella (W). Their committee turned him down because their research indicated that a) the earth was flat, b) the ocean was way too wet, and c) he would be eaten by huge sea serpents. In 1491 Columbus was turned down again, due mainly to his excessive demands to keep one-tenth of all the riches he accumulated, and be given the titles of Governor, Admiral, Commander, Viceroy and Marlboro Man. Finally in 1492, when funds from Spain’s new Windfall Profits Tax became available, the deal was struck.

Columbus went to the port of Palos in southern Spain and leased three ships: the Atcheson, Topeka, and the Santa Fe. Ships' provisions included water, dried fish, salted meat, chickens, hogs, dairy cattle, goats, cream cheese, rice, broccoli, brussels sprouts, figs, and graham crackers. At Columbus’s orders, no beans, high fiber foodstuffs, or stimulant laxatives were allowed. They took such essential equipment as nautical almanacs, charts, compasses, refrigerator magnets, hourglasses, astrolabes, hernia trusses, and tongue depressors. In hopes of trading with the Chinese, they also took attractive rhinestone costume jewelry, Queen Isabella foldout posters, beanies with wooden propellers, simulated gold and silver ingots, really authentic-looking fake pearls, Tabasco sauce and fourteen large boxes of ping-pong paddles.

Sadly, in those primitive times navigation was often a rather imprecise science. Columbus, due to missing several geography classes in grade school, had underestimated the circumference of the Earth by about twenty thousand miles. Granted, this made his map files much smaller, but they were also a bit misleading. And sailors often calculated their speed by dropping an expired comrade (mate) off the bow of the ship (hood), and timing how long it took him to pass the stern (rear bumper). This was called "dead reckoning." Sometimes, depending on what the late mate had in his pockets, the body would sink immediately, convincing the simple sailors that they were moving upward rather than forward, and making dead reckoning a kind of hit or miss proposition.

On August 3 they set sail from Palos de la Frontera, Spain. 41-year-old Christopher Columbus, Admiral of the Oceans, said goodbye to dry land and the safety of home, and hello to adventures and unknown perils which lay ahead. He sailed into history. Okay, what he sailed into was San Sebastian in the Canary Islands. Fortunately, no one was injured. Columbus and his crew remained there from August 12 until September 6, when the islanders could no longer afford to feed them, and insisted they go on.

Early in the morning of the second Monday in October, 1492, which Queen Isabella herself had already set aside as a paid federal holiday, a lookout on the Topeka was heard shouting "Tiara! Tiara!" Immediately the other sailors slapped him in irons and set about looking for a diamond headpiece. After a few hours, when the ship bumped into something that felt suspiciously like a large island, they realized he was saying "Tierra! Tierra!" which meant "Land! Land!" in Spanish.

So on the second Monday of October, 1492, after 36 days of braving the elements, fighting heat and fungal infection, and hurling large quantities of dried fish and fig chunks into the ocean blue, Columbus and a few hardy crew members set foot, or feet, on the island of San Salvador in the Bahamas, and proudly declared it to be ... Okinawa. They then planted Spanish flags, which they hoped would grow well in such a temperate climate, uncorked a couple bottles of wine, and practiced the new dance steps they’d learned on the cruise. Soon a group of natives approached, and Columbus pronounced them "Indians." When they objected, Columbus said he was an admiral, a commodore, a 33rd degree Mason, a commander, a viceroy and a Marlboro man, and he knew exactly where he was. He was in the East Indies, only a few nautical miles from the continent of Asia, and therefore the natives would be Indians and like it. During this first voyage, Columbus also discovered Cuba, which he believed was South Korea, and Jamaica, which he proudly dubbed "Japan."

Columbus returned to Spain and gave lots of fascinating misinformation to Ferdinand and Isabella about what the Orient was really like, and how it was a lot hotter than he’d expected over there, and how much those crazy Asians enjoyed calypso music. During his second voyage, he managed to annoy both the indigenous West Indian islanders and his own sailors, who were more interested in searching for gold and naked island women than building actual settlements.

On his third voyage, in 1498, Columbus found himself in the doldrums for over a week, and would have remained there had his crew not snapped him back to reality by secretly putting hot chili peppers into his underclothing at laundry time. Shortly thereafter the Admiral, or Commodore, or whatever he was calling himself, discovered the South American continent, which he believed to be either China or the Soviet Union. He then revisited the Spanish settlement in Hispaniola, which he insisted on calling Taiwan. He found that even though his settlers had all the mosquitoes, malaria, and free slave labor anybody could possibly want, they were disgruntled. Unable to gruntle them, he sailed home to Spain.

On May 9, 1502, Columbus set sail on his fourth and last voyage. It was disastrous; there were riots and mutinies and protest marches, and Columbus dropped precipitously in the polls. Other navigators had already sailed into both North and South America by then, without ever once wrecking their ships, or more importantly, suspecting they’d hit mainland China.

Columbus decided against further travel. He died on May 20, 1506, in Valladolid, Spain. His grandson later shipped his remains to Santo Domingo in the Caribbean to be buried. But due to another famous Columbus miscalculation, historians now agree that he is probably buried somewhere near that bustling Midwestern city which proudly bears his name, the home of the Buckeyes ... Colon, Ohio.