← Back to the front page

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

Khalid Elhassan May 11, 2021 37 min

15. Historic Support for Christopher Columbus’ Eclipse Story Being Fact Rather than Fiction

Armed with foreknowledge of an upcoming lunar eclipse, Christopher Columbus arranged a meeting with the Arawaks’ chieftain, and told him that the Christian God was angry with the natives for not feeding the new arrivals. He informed the Arawaks that his furious God would demonstrate His wrath three nights hence by turning the moon blood red – “inflamed with wrath“, as Columbus put it. He would then blot it out as a harbinger of the calamities He was about to unleash upon the natives.

The Arawaks did not believe him and laughed off the dire warnings. They stopped laughing when what they had dismissed as fiction turned into fact. On the night of February 29, 1504, just as Columbus’ had told them, the moon turned red and started disappearing. According to Columbus’ son, the terrified Arawak: “with great howling and lamentation came running from every direction to the ships laden with provisions and beseeching the admiral to intercede with his god on their behalf“. They promised to cooperate if Columbus restored the moon back the way it was.

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.