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Only History Buffs Will Know the Fact from Fiction in these Unbelievable Stories

Khalid Elhassan May 11, 2021 37 min

Christopher Columbus and the 1504 lunar eclipse. Eclipse Wise

16. Ungrateful Guests From Hell

As the days turned to months, Christopher Columbus and his men began to wear out their welcome with the Arawaks. Despite the fact that they relied upon the natives for their sustenance, Columbus’ sailors often got grabby with the local women and molested them. They also took to abusing the men and treating them with contempt. So the natives grew less friendly. Finally, after six months of rising tensions and tempers, Columbus’ crews mutinied and attacked their hosts, robbing and murdering some of them.

Understandably, that did not improve the Arawaks’ opinion of the new arrivals. So they stopped bringing food to Columbus and his men. Faced with starvation and the possibility that the enraged Arawak might fall upon the marooned men to massacre them, a desperate Columbus got an idea. It hit him while he was killing time leafing through an almanac that contained astronomical charts covering solar and lunar eclipses from 1475 to 1506. At some point, he noticed that a total lunar eclipse was due shortly, on the night of February 29^th, 1504.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.