According to the Harvard University history professor, Hubert Howe Bancroft, who was writing in the 1880?s, Columbus had resided in Portugal from 1470, and he had made several trips in Portuguese ships down the African west coast, during the course of which he conceived the idea of sailing west to reach the Indies, which is where everybody in Europe wanted to reach. In the minds of Europeans in the fifteenth century, the Indies to the east represented something like a Garden of Eden, where there were beautiful silks, exotic spices and wonderful jewels ? a world of great sensual pleasure and wealth unknown in Europe.

Howe Bancroft wrote that Christopher Columbus proposed in 1484 to the king of Portugal his scheme of reaching India by sailing west. Behind Columbus? back, the king of Portugal sent a ship out to test Columbus? theory. After searching unsuccessfully for land westward, the Portuguese ship returned to the Cape Verde Islands. When Christopher found out what the Portuguese king had done, he angrily packed his bags and left for Spain.

A few years later the Portuguese sailed south around the southernmost tip of Africa ? the Cape of Good Hope, and reached the Indies sailing northeast from the Cape.

There were two major problems with the Pope?s line of May 2, 1493. The first was that it made no allowance for the English, the French, the Dutch or anybody else except the Spanish and the Portuguese. The second problem was that those going west and those going east, were bound to meet on the other side of the round world, and there was no allowance for that.

The Portuguese feared that the opposite meridian threw into Spain?s papal portion, a part or the whole of India. They therefore began to quarrel with Spain about the May 2, 1493, papal line, and the matter was decided with the treaty of Tordesillas in June of 1494. That treaty moved the line 270 leagues further west. At the time of the treaty of Tordesillas, the existence of the giant Brazil was not even suspected by Spain.

Writing, to repeat, in the 1880?s, Howe Bancroft said, ?? it is impossible to conceive why Portugal decided to change the partition line from 100 leagues to 370 leagues west of the Azores; for the change could only diminish the possessions of Portugal in India by 270 leagues, as in truth it did, including the Moluccas in the loss, and gaining in return 270 leagues of open Atlantic sea!? Howe Bancroft conceded an ?accidental gain of a part of Brazil,? but insisted the matter was ?an unexplained mystery.?

Elsewhere in this issue of our newspaper, we have included Howe Bancroft?s details of Columbus? first three voyages to the New World. (Christopher made four voyages in all.) In Howe Bancroft?s time in the nineteenth century, all the research and publication had not been done on the rape and genocide Christopher Columbus inflicted upon the indigenous people he found in the New World. Van Sertima, who was writing 90 years after Howe Bancroft, said, ?Even those historians who would canonize Christopher Columbus, have all agreed he was inordinately greedy.?

And so Van Sertima advanced a thesis which explains the strange behaviour of the Portuguese (?an unexplained mystery?), when they seemed to be arguing for open sea but ended up with Brazil! According to Van Sertima, Columbus went to the Portuguese capital, Lisbon, before he returned to Spain after his first voyage, and entered an intrigue with Don Juan, the king of Portugal. He blamed a storm for driving him into Lisbon, but it appeared later in charges brought against Columbus in Spain that he exaggerated or fabricated the storm. Remember, things ended up reaching a point where king Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain grew suspicious and allowed Bobadilla to arrest and chain Columbus and his brother and drag them back, naked and in disgrace, to Spain.

In Lisbon, Don Juan explained to Columbus in early March of 1493 that Africans sailing west from the Guinea coast of Africa, had reached lands south and southeast (South America) of where Columbus had sailed on his first voyage (the Caribbean). According to Van Sertima, Columbus and Don Juan cut a deal whereby Columbus went to Spain and pushed for the line we referred to in the first paragraph of this column, the line drawn by the Pope on May 2, 1493. Columbus argued to Ferdinand and Isabella that Spain would lose little or nothing, and Portugal would gain little or nothing, by the demarcation line.

Columbus was hustling. He was eating from both Spain and Portugal. Remember, he was an Italian. He owed allegiance to no one on the Iberian Peninsula. On his second voyage, the Indians in Hispaniola (present day Haiti and the Dominican Republic) told Columbus that black people had come to Hispaniola from the south who traded in a gold which Columbus later tested in Spain to be of 32 parts – 18 of gold; 6 of silver; and 8 of copper. This gold alloy contained exactly the same ratio of alloy as the gold in African Guinea! The king of Portugal died in 1495, but his ?stats? were right on time.

On his third voyage Columbus went south, to Trinidad and South America. On that voyage, Columbus found more evidence of the contact between Guinea and the New World. From a settlement along the South American coast, natives on Tuesday, August 7, 1498, brought ?handkerchiefs of cotton very symmetrically woven and worked in colors like those brought from Guinea, from the rivers of Sierra Leone and of no difference.? (Pg. 392, John Boyd Thacher, CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS, HIS LIFE, HIS WORK, HIS REMAINS, New York, G. P. Putnam?s Sons, 1903, Vol. I)

Subsequent Spanish explorers found African settlements and artifacts in the New World. When these sightings were not reported as quaint asides, they were ignored or suppressed.

But the truth has now come out. Columbus was a hustler and a rat. Real.