"Columbus and the World Wide Web"
                            by
                     Thomas C. Tirado
 
     It would be very difficult to over-exaggerate the
historical significance of Columbus' first voyage of
discovery to the New World. It could be argued, in fact,
that the ultimate expression of the Columbian Legacy is the
rapid exchange of information from one corner of the globe
to another, something totally beyond the wildest imagination
of the 15th century European.
     Columbus and his fellow travelers knew not where they
were on the face of the Earth; in hopes of finding a way to
circumvent the Moslem monopoly on the riches of the Far
East, these Medieval adventurers sailed away from a world
that still believed that Earth was the center of the
Universe. This geocentric theory of the Universe left no
room for compromise, since the scriptures revealed all
truths--even those of Nature and of the Cosmos. The idea
that humankind inhabited a third rate planet hurling itself
at astronomical speeds through space around a fixed Sun was
totally unacceptable.
     Now contrast this picture with that of today; even the
image of the Universe that school children have is more
accurate than that of the most learned scholars of the
Ancient or Medieval Worlds. Contrasting also is the manner
in which new information is handled. Today, almost as soon
as new information is revealed it becomes part of a global
knowledge base; within minutes of its revelation, it enters
the information super highway of the Internet and public
broadcasting; and it appears almost instantly in the home,
the dorm, the office and every other place that there is a
computer monitor or TV set. Reflect for a moment upon the
recent spectacular show from space. Almost simultaneously
with the scientific community, millions of people in a
world-wide audience were able to view NASA-enhanced images
of Comet P/Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashing onto the surface of
Jupiter. This once-in-a-lifetime experience was, in itself,
remarkable; but what made it even more amazing was that the
new information entered the global knowledge base instantly,
at the same moment it was being revealed to the scientific
world. Enhanced and colored by NASA, these images arrived
uncensored to a global community in seconds or minutes.
     Contrast the above phenomenon with the Middle Ages, a
time during which there was no mechanism at all for
disseminating new, uncensored and raw information. In a
segmented Europe with no public school system, no newspapers
or news magazines, or TV satellite coverage (e.g., "give us
15 minutes and we will give you the world"), there was no
means by which new information could enter the knowledge
base and be absorbed by the people. Conspicuous in Medieval
world was the Roman Catholic Church, a bastion of privileges
and a powerful voice that one hundred years later condemned
Galileo for advancing the heliocentric theory. The Church
was suspicious of novelty, it resisted new ideas that
threatened its primacy, and it feared the bourgeoisie, of
which most of the navigators were its agents. Considering
that the Church controlled nearly all of the centers of
learning as well as all publication, the late Middle Ages
was not a time during which new information was hailed,
appreciated, or even sought.
     Yet, sailors and navigators along with the scholarly
community, were beginning to question the traditional view
of the Universe. Illiterate seamen as much as the scholar
were beginning to question ancient authorities. As ships
returned to the parts of Europe from the newly found lands,
a new picture of the Universe began to emerge, one that
challenged the ancient authorities and one that based its
new conclusions on hardcore empirical evidence--not theory,
scriptures, or tradition. Hitherto, "fact" had not been
considered a necessary ingredient in a successful argument
or defense.
     What made the fifteenth century Age of Discovery so
profoundly different from other periods in history was that
barely 50 years earlier the moveable type printing press had
come into use throughout Europe. Though this new invention
did allow greater and speedier dissemination of information,
the lack of a popular system of education, or of an
information system that was anything other than the most
rudimentary, kept Christian Europe from experiencing full
exposure to new information. As late as the middle of the
16th century it was still difficult for the Medieval mind to
absorb all of the new and exciting information that arrived
from around the world. With such alacrity did the new
information arrive that the knowledge base could not
assimilate it all; or, what was also observed, earlier first
impressions during this exciting age were so deeply engraved
in the minds of the Europeans that subsequent images of the
contact could not obliterate earlier ones. In modern
terminology, the system became over-loaded. That the first
impression was so deeply engraved in their minds was due
largely to the fact that the discovery of new land in the
Western Hemisphere was more an accident that the result of a
pre-set goal. Looking for a new world was clearly not one of
the motivations for the Age of Discovery. Not only did
Europeans run into a hitherto unknown world but they found
PEOPLE, too. By chance the first natives they encountered
were among some of the most primitive societies in the
Western Hemisphere. The Europeans equated the natives with
beasts, barbarians, savages, cannibals, in other words,
subhumans. (Even the Church took 40 years to reach the
conclusion that the natives were rational beings). More than
a generation after the initial contact, when the Spaniards
encountered the more sophisticated natives of terra firma,
the earlier image of "barbarian" persisted in the minds of
the Europeans and prevented them from seeing the true native
societies. This older image (that is, the first impression)
was so deeply engraved that it could not be obliterated by
the new ones of the Mayas, Aztecs, and Incas. Besides, the
Europeans could not see any other native other than the one
they wanted to see; they saw the natives of the New World as
a labor force and not a cultural entity worth preserving.
Columbus, Cortez, Pizarro and countless other adventurers
were about as far from being cultural anthropologists and
ethnographers as you can get. Their actions speak louder
than any of their words; they cared little for the
indigenous culture. Thus, the native cultures--as well as
the native population--began to disappear. In what can only
be described as the greatest holocaust of all time, disease
and other conquest- and invasion-related activities lead to
the destruction of tens of million of natives. Only today
are we realizing the enormity of the loss of people and the
inestimable loss of culture.
     Contemporary investigations, studies, and presentations
relating to the ideas above can be found in much more detail
in a electronic database called CIRS (The Computerized
Information Retrieval System on Columbus and the Age of
Discovery). Created and installed by Millersville University
as its contribution to the national commemoration of the
Columbian Quincentenary, the information service is
accessible to anyone who has a WEB browser and an Internet
connection.
     Simply point your browser to:
http://marauder.millersv.edu/~columbus/. You will find among
the over 1000 text files, articles covering the 500th
anniversary of Columbus' historic first voyage. There are
articles relating to both Columbus and the impact of the Age
of Discovery; some articles are scholarly research papers
and speeches taken from respected professional journals and
conferences while others are newspaper articles relating
more popular themes. Endorsed as an "Official Project" by
the U.S. Christopher Columbus Commission, this university
research project will continue for as long as there is a
demand for information.