![]() The sailors use modern navigational instruments, and the ships include diesel engines. The ships are taller, with more headroom. Without power winches, the replica ships require several people to lift the sails.īut the replicas offer more comfort for the 52 Spanish crew members than the originals would have. In October 1990, the newly christened replicas embarked on a 10-month tour of Europe, visiting ports in Spain, France, Italy and Portugal.ĭouglas Peck, 74, a historian and navigator who has retraced Columbus’ voyage three times, sailed beside the replica ships last year when they departed Huelva, Spain.Įxcept for the difficult task of handling the square-rigged sails, which are identical to those on Columbus’ ships, sailing the replicas is “a piece of cake,” Peck said. The caravels’ arrival in Miami, after stops in Santo Domingo, capital of the Dominican Republic and at the island of San Salvador, thought to be the site of Columbus’ landing in 1492 will mark 15,000 miles at sea. “This was a holocaust of unimaginable proportions.” “This was not the stuff of heroes,” Harjo said. ![]() In addition, the Europeans transported Africans under the most inhumane conditions to work as slaves in the sugar colonies. The Indians resisted slavery, and untold numbers were murdered and their communities pillaged for gold. In the years after Columbus, Indian communities suffered an unprecedented mortality rate, the Smithsonian exhibit shows.ĭisease introduced by white European settlers was the biggest killer, decimating Indian populations and weakening their resistance to soldiers. This was an active civilization until we were inflicted … by barbarism.” “This wasn’t a lost-and-found hemisphere. “It’s a celebration of ignorance and arrogance,” said Suzan Shown Harjo, national coordinator of the 1992 Alliance, a coalition of Indian groups. Showcased by the Smithsonian Institution’s traveling exhibit, “Seeds of Change,” the quincentennial is prompting Americans of all backgrounds to reconsider the European impact and the destruction of American Indian civilizations that were thousands of years old. The ships are evoking both pride and pain as they sail into the Americas under an international spotlight. Schoolchildren from Broward, Dade and Palm Beach counties will tour the ships during the two-week stay.īut not everyone is celebrating. Vazquez estimates that 250,000 people will watch the ships sail into the Port of Miami from water and land vantages. Billed as the 1992 American Tour of the Discovery Ships, the sailing vessels promise to draw tens of thousands of South Floridians with the lure of navigation lore and of Cristoforo Colombo, the Italian explorer known to Americans as Christopher Columbus.
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