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General: FIRST MEN: THE JOURNEYS OF COLUMBUS AND ARMSTRONG COLOMBIA/COLONIA/WISE MEN
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De: BARILOCHENSE6999  (Mensaje original) Enviado: 22/09/2024 02:24

First men: The Journeys of Columbus and Armstrong

 
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As mind-boggling as the first lunar landing was, Columbus’ feat was its equal or better in terms of the magnitude, danger and significance.

On July 20, 2019, much of the world will be commemorating the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing by American astronaut Neil Armstrong.

The event has been celebrated in the movie “First Man,” which opened last year on Oct. 12, the true anniversary of the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus.

Without diminishing Armstrong’s incredible ride and personal courage, Columbus’s feat would equally deserve the title “First Man.” Unlike Armstrong, he did not travel into the void of space, accompanied by fanfare and TV cameras, but made four voyages across the Atlantic to the “New World,” which easily equalled if not exceeded the magnitude, danger and significance of the first moon walk.

In both cases, these adventurers knew well in advance the challenges their respective journeys would entail. Columbus was 41 years old at the time of his first voyage to America and an experienced navigator. Born in the seaport of Genoa, Italy, in 1451, he wound up on the shores of Portugal at age 26 after barely surviving a naval battle with pirates. From there he journeyed as far as Iceland, Greece and Ireland while collecting stories of the riches in the Orient from the second-hand accounts attributed to his fellow countryman Marco Polo.

Armstrong, before piloting Apollo XI for the moon landing, had been trained as an aeronautical engineer, a Navy combat flyer and an “experimental” test pilot. His experience included extensive military aviation flight training leading to five tours of duty and 78 missions during the Korean War. As an experimental test pilot, he made 900 research flights, and on one of those flights he piloted the supersonic X-15 to an altitude of more than 200,000 feet or just under 40 miles!

In his astronaut training he had to experience weightlessness, simulated lunar gravity, celestial navigation and even jungle and desert survival.

In stark contrast to Armstrong, Columbus had a rudimentary education in arithmetic and geography of the time. He was hardly a scholar, though he later of necessity became conversant in Spanish and Portuguese. A saying about the Genoese likely fit him well: “I’m Genoese: I seldom laugh, I grind my teeth and I say what I mean.”

He first took to the sea at age 15 and was considered a “skilled seaman and experienced navigator … and studied carefully all things pertaining to the sea.” His principal talent as a self-taught navigator appeared to be “dead reckoning,” celestial navigation and “an inborn sense of the sea, or wind and weather.”

The crude navigational tools of his era, the quadrant or astrolabe, were almost worthless on a rolling sea and “no one, as far as we know, ever took an accurate reading with a quadrant or astrolabe on the open sea in the 15th century.” The compasses of the time couldn’t account for magnetic variations. An “ampolleta,” or hourglass, depended entirely on the personnel who took the measurements and the movement of the ship.

To measure distance, objects were thrown overboard and the time it took the boat to pass by them was recorded. Needless to say, such methods could not take into account prevailing currents or extreme weather.

To make things even more complicated, Columbus admitted to having two logbooks, an “accurate” one for himself and another that purported to demonstrate a lesser distance so as to not alarm crew members and mask his real route from future mariners.

The genesis of the lunar program was a speech by President John Kennedy in 1962, proclaiming America’s intent to land on the moon. In contrast, Columbus’s journey was his own conception propelled by the twin objectives of “God and gold.” Whereas the American goal took seven years to complete, Columbus spent 10 years just to lobby the English, Portuguese and eventually the Spanish monarchs to subsidize his trip.

At the outset of Columbus’s first voyage, there was little known of the Dark Sea or “Mar Tenebroso” as the Atlantic was called. At that time, very few sailors had ventured more than 7 to 10 days from land. Consider then the difficulty of convincing and then managing a crew to venture 33 days into an unknown world!

Though it is by now virtually undisputed that Columbus and the educated population of his time understood the earth to be round, nevertheless almost everything else they knew about it was “spectacularly wrong.” The best estimates of the earth’s size were off by six times and not only excluded the American continent but the Pacific Ocean as well. As a result, Columbus’ expeditions were roughly 8,000 miles off-target!

Compare that to Armstrong’s trip, which was supported by more than 400,000 NASA employees, tens of millions of dollars and state-of-the-art computer and navigational equipment. Furthermore, the route and procedures involved were more than thoroughly known and tested. Armstrong had been involved in all of NASAs space projects, Mercury, Gemini and the earlier Apollo flights. His first actual space flight was at age 38 aboard Gemini VIII, which made 55 orbits of the earth and performed the first docking with another spacecraft, a task essential to a lunar landing.

Much was known about moon flight before Armstrong became commander of Apollo XI. Apollo VIII orbited around the moon, and Apollo X came within 10 miles of the lunar surface and mapped out the territory over which Armstrong was later to fly. As Armstrong explained: “By the time we launched in July, we knew all the principal landmarks on our descent path by heart and, equally importantly, we knew all the landmarks on our way prior to the point at which we would ignite our descent engines”

Needless to say, Columbus did not have any such advantages. After finally getting the support of Ferdinand and (principally) Isabella, he was given the self-conceived title “Grand Admiral of the Ocean Sea and Viceroy and Perpetual Governor.” He was allotted three ships, two of which (the Nina and Pinta) were “provided” by the city of Palos, Spain, to make amends for a transgression they had committed against the Spanish crown. He had a full crew of at least 90 “first-class” sailors including carpenters, ship caulkers, a “barber/surgeon,” waiters, servants, cooks and several gunsmiths. It was only in later voyages, after the news was out of his discovery, that he had to take on an assortment of stowaways, “thieves, gentlemen, ambitious enthusiasts, murderers and mutineers” bent on making a quick fortune in the “Indies.”

Equipped with only anecdotal evidence and virtually no maps, he set sail from Spain on Aug. 3, 1492, bound for the jumping off point in the Canary Islands, a distance of some 700 miles, where he restocked his supplies. He then began his historic 33-day journey of some 3,100 to 3,400 miles, barely avoiding mutiny and eventually landing on a small island he named San Salvador in present day Bahamas.

Little did he know that he had landed on what has been described as the “most intricate mazes of islands and isthmuses on the planet.” Subsequently, Columbus claims to have counted more than 700 islands and cays in the course of his initial voyage. He later commented: “It is important that I forget sleep and labor much at navigation, because it is necessary and which will be a great task.”

It was this constant watch for land, perilous weather and sleep deprivation in his voyages that caused him temporary loss of eyesight, rheumatoid arthritis, malaria, severe gout and possibly a nervous breakdown. At one point, he was so ill that the usually precise navigator was unable to record a single event for a period of almost three months.

In contrast, Neil Armstrong manually “navigated” the final 500 feet of the 50,000-foot descent to the moon surface, a period of 12-1/2 minutes. Though he later described this as akin to an “elevator ride,” it was a terrifying experience by virtue of the fact that his ship (the “Eagle”) went beyond its original target and had only seconds of fuel left. Armstrong later described this feat as a “13” on a scale of “one to 10.”

Throughout their respective voyages, both men were well aware that their lives and those of their crews could have ended in a millisecond. According to Columbus “not a day passes that we do not look death in the face.” He was so convinced that “our Lord wished him to perish” that on the return of his first voyage, he composed a letter of his discoveries to Ferdinand and Isabella and cast it overboard in a sealed barrel fully anticipating he would not return home.

His descriptions of his plight were not exaggerated. His renowned flagship, the Santa Maria, ran aground shortly after his first voyage and he was forced to return home in the smaller caravel, the Nina. During this voyage, he encountered the first of two hurricanes in his journeys, a phenomenon virtually unknown to Europeans. When he finally was forced to land in Portuguese territory, he found it newly hostile to Spain and was arrested and threatened with execution by the authorities.

As a result of numerous run-ins with the cannibalistic Carib tribes, at least three mutinies by his own people, his arrest and confiscation of his property and an event during his third voyage when his ship almost touched the ocean’s bottom, it is no wonder that one chronicler described his life as “one long martyrdom.”

But it was not the perils of the sea that were the greatest threat to Columbus. As in the case of Armstrong, his “secret terror” was that he would be stranded forever on the moon should the Eagle crash land or be unable to lift off the lunar surface. Likewise, on his fourth and last voyage, as a result of another hurricane, 88 days of continuous storms and the complete destruction of his remaining vessels by “shipworms,” Columbus found himself shipwrecked on Jamaica “half-mad, half-blind and hearing voices.”

To say he was “stranded” would be the ultimate understatement. His chances of being found were “nil.” The last rowboat from his ship had been lost in a storm and his repair crew had been killed by natives. And to add to his deadly peril, half of his crew took to the hills in mutiny and began to turn the natives against him. Once again “lost with no hope of life,” the admiral convinced the natives that he was a great god by foretelling a lunar eclipse. Just as he predicted, the moon appeared as a “faint red disk suspended in the night sky” after which he received full support from the amazed natives!

But this did not end his peril. His only realistic hope of salvation was to arrange a rescue ship to be sent from Hispaniola, a distance of more than 100 miles over the treacherous Caribbean. Now reduced to two native dugout canoes, several of his men along with a dozen natives somehow made the crossing, an accomplishment that in and of itself has been considered “one of the bravest deeds in the history of the sea.” After trekking in the wilderness and fighting off natives and disease, the men finally arranged a rescue ship, which arrived nearly a year after Columbus had been stranded.

NASA made a purposeful decision not to send Armstrong on any further space missions thereafter, believing they could not afford to lose or jeopardize such an incredible icon and good will ambassador. Once a $23,000 per year experimental test pilot, Armstrong went on to achieve enormous financial success as spokesperson for various American corporations and eventually accumulated “well over two million dollars.”

As is well known from history, Columbus, and later his son Fernando, had to petition and fight to restore his name, entitlements and fortune. However, contrary to history, he ultimately became neither “isolated nor impoverished.” In one of the greatest ironies of all time, a fleet of two dozen Spanish ships laden with gold from Hispaniola perished in a hurricane that Columbus had predicted and warned about. Only one ship survived to reach Spain and that was the vessel containing Columbus’ personal possessions and his share of the gold.

Though he could have lived as a wealthy, conquering hero, he chose to reside in “humble lodgings” once back in Spain, dressed in humble monks’ garb. He continued to petition Ferdinand (Isabella was now dead) to sponsor yet a fifth voyage but, suffering from numerous afflictions, and feeling “that it would be like banging my head against a brick wall for a simple countryman like myself to continue the battle,” he finally succumbed to death on May 20, 1506, at age 54. Rather than an instant success, his achievement as America’s discoverer was not truly recognized until more than 300 years later.

To compare the journeys of these men is a true exercise in “apples and oranges.” As acknowledged by Armstrong, he was not a true “explorer”: “What I attended to was the progressive development of flight machinery. … I flew to the Moon not so much to go there, but as part of developing the system that would allow it to happen.”

This was exactly the opposite in Columbus’s case. His bold explorations did not come from a governmental directive, an international competition or a technological breakthrough. He had no real charts, no true advance planning, barely sufficient resources, and only the crude technology of his time as a guide to his whereabouts. Without question, it was the creation of one man, a “hot headed Genoese mystic” and “wild-eyed dreamer,” a truly singular experience not likely to be repeated in any manner ever again.

Most of this essay is based upon two recent and comprehensive biographies of these pioneers: “Columbus: The Four Voyages” by Laurence Bergreen (Viking Penguin, 2011) and “First Man” by James R. Hansen (Simon and Schuster, 2005). Other sources include the Chicago Sun-Times, “The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus” by His Son Ferdinand, “History of the Indies” by De Las Casas, “Columbus on Himself” by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, “Columbus, For Gold, God and Glory” by John Dyson, “The Grand Design” by Paolo Emilio Taviani, “Admiral of the Ocean Sea” by Samuel Eliot Morison, “Christopher Columbus: The Four Voyages” by J.M.Cohen, “Christopher Columbus” by Salvador De Madariaga and “America Discovers Columbus” by Claudia L. Bushman.

© Michael A. Benedetto 2019

https://franoi.com/columbus/first-men-the-journeys-of-columbus-and-armstrong/


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De: BARILOCHENSE6999 Enviado: 20/02/2025 16:33

St. Mark's Masonic Temple No. 7 of the Prince Hall Free & Accepted Masons

 
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
St. Mark's Masonic Temple No. 7 of the Prince Hall Free & Accepted Masons
Map
Location 988 E. Long Street, Columbus, Ohio
Coordinates 39.968210°N 82.974960°W
Built 1927
 
Columbus Register of Historic Properties
Designated March 31, 2009
Reference no. CR-60

St. Mark's Masonic Temple No. 7 of the Prince Hall Free & Accepted Masons is a Masonic temple in the King-Lincoln Bronzeville neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio, associated with the Prince Hall Freemasons. It was added to the Columbus Register of Historic Properties in 2009.[1][2] It was listed under the register's Criterion B, for being closely and publicly identified with people who contributed to the cultural, architectural, or historical development of the city, state, or nation. Founding members of the lodge were part of the Underground Railroad network in Central Ohio and the Midwest.[2]

The lodge is the oldest Prince Hall Masonic Lodge in Columbus and the fourth-oldest in Ohio.[2]

Attributes

[edit]

The masonic temple is a brick structure facing East Long Street. It has a grand entrance flanked by pilasters made of blonde brick, a brick foundation above-grade, and wood-framed windows with stone lintels and sills. The structure incorporates an earlier building, dating to 1891 or earlier.[2]

History

[edit]

The lodge became active in the mid-18th century, and its founders were identified as instrumental to the Underground Railroad efforts in Central Ohio and the Midwest region during the Proceedings of the State Convention of Colored Men held in 1856. In early 1919, the current site of the temple was selected; it was purchased on July 28, 1920. The temple was constructed in 1927 after membership pledges and loans were secured; the lodge room was dedicated on January 15, 1927.[2]

The building was added to the Columbus Register of Historic Properties in 2009.[1][2]

References

[edit]
  1. Jump up to:a b "City of Columbus Legislation, File #0542-2009"City of Columbus. April 15, 2009. Retrieved February 28, 2023.

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De: BARILOCHENSE6999 Enviado: 04/03/2025 17:40
Colonia Dignidad
Entidad subnacional

Hito que marca la entrada a Colonia Dignidad también llamada Villa Baviera.
Colonia Dignidad ubicada en Chile
Colonia Dignidad
Colonia Dignidad
 
Localización de Colonia Dignidad en Chile
Coordenadas 36°23′15″S 71°35′15″O
Entidad AsentamientoComunidad intencionalCentro clandestino de detención y tortura, Comunidad religiosa y Culto
 • País Chile
 • Región Bandera de la Región del Maule Maule
 • Provincia Linares
 • Comuna Parral
Superficie  
 • Total 137 km² Ver y modificar los datos en Wikidata

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De: BARILOCHENSE6999 Enviado: 13/03/2025 14:45
1892-1893 World's Columbian Exposition Isabella Quarter| Commemorative  Coins - American Numismatic Association : American Numismatic Association

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De: BARILOCHENSE6999 Enviado: 13/03/2025 01:14
https://victor-li.com/isabellaquarter/
 

Vindicated by History: The 1893 Queen Isabella Commemorative Quarter

October 4, 2019

A few things I’ve picked up from researching early commemorative coins:

  • The people behind them always hope they can raise a ton of money for a pet project or monument or expo. They rarely do.
  • The designs usually get denigrated by the numismatic press – oftentimes with a venom critics reserve for Limp Bizkit albums or Michael Bay movies.
  • The mint melts down the excess/unsold coins. As a result, the ones that did sell end up becoming valuable decades later – screwing over collectors on a budget like yours truly.

Those issues were all in play for the 1893 Isabella Quarter.

The Queen Isabella commemorative quarter traces its beginnings to the World’s Fair: Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago in 1893. Congress had already authorized the minting of a commemorative half dollar featuring Christopher Columbus, but a group of women, led by Bertha Palmer, whose husband, Potter, owned the famed Palmer House hotel in Chicago, thought they could do better.

Spearheaded by renowned women’s rights activist, and future $1 coin subject, Susan B. Anthony, the Board of Lady Managers had been awarded $10,000 in federal funds to help manage the Columbian Expo. In early 1893, the Board went before the House Appropriations Committee to ask that the $10,000 could be paid to them in the form of 40,000 specially designed commemorative quarters, which they could then sell at a profit. Congress obliged and the Board set about becoming “the authors of the first really beautiful and artistic coin that has ever been issued by the government of the United States.”

Obviously, the Board wanted a female on the obverse and decided on Queen Isabella I of Castile, who had provided vital financial support for Columbus’s voyages. Putting a foreign monarch on U.S. currency was unprecedented (indeed, there had a been a revolution over it), but according to Coin Week, the main source of conflict was over design.

Caroline Peddle, a former student of famed artist and coin designer Augustus Saint-Gaudens, was hired by the Board to design the coin. However, her sketches, which included a seated Isabella on the obverse and the inscription “Commemorative coin issued for the Board of Lady Managers of the World’s Columbian Exposition by Act of Congress, 1492–1892” on the reverse, were deemed to look too token-like and rejected. Rather than be allowed to redesign the coin, the Mint took away the reverse side and gave it to one of their in-house artists, Charles Barber, to design.

After some more back-and-forth and additional restrictions imposed by the Mint, Peddle resigned. The Mint then cobbled together some portraits of Isabella and ultimately produced an image of a young Isabella wearing a crown on her head for the obverse. On the reverse, the Mint went with an image of a woman kneeling while holding a distaff and spindle- symbolizing her industry. The Board had suggested an image of the Woman’s Building at the Expo, and Palmer later stated that the Board disliked the Mint’s reverse image because “we did not consider [it] typical of the woman of the present day.” However, the Mint made the final decision and approved the coin design.

To say that the reception for the commemorative quarter was not warm is a bit like saying that the American public didn’t embrace Apple’s Newton. The American Journal of Numsimatics was particularly brutal:

[W]e do not know who designed it, but in this instance, as in the half dollar, the contrast between examples of the numismatic art of the nation, as displayed on the Columbian coins, on the one hand, and the spirited and admirable work of the architects of the buildings, for instance, on the other, is painful. If these coins really represent the highest achievements of our medalist and our mints, under the inspiration of an opportunity without restrictions, the like of which has never been presented hitherto in the history of our national coinage, we might as well despair of its future…

The American Journal of Numismatics in October 1893, quoted by PCGS.

The Journal also drew a “mournful” comparison between the reverse design of the kneeling woman holding the distaff and spindle and the well-known “Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?” anti-slavery Hard Times Token. Surely, the Board felt vindicated by that line – although there’s no evidence Palmer or anyone else affiliated with them ever wrote to the Mint to say: “See? I told you we should gone with the building on the reverse.”

1838 HT-81 “Am I Not A Woman & A Sister?” (Image via me)

Sales figures, meanwhile, were disappointing. Of the 40,000 coins minted, a little more than half (21,180) ended up selling. According to NGC, the quarter’s sales were cannibalized by the Columbian Expo half dollar, which sold for the same price and was more widely available at the fair (5 million Columbian Expo half dollars were minted – 125 times as many compared to the Isabella quarter). While it didn’t come close to selling out, Coin Week points out that the quarters, which sold for $1 each, ended up being profitable for the Board. A $20,000-plus stream of revenue may not have been much, but it was double the original federal appropriation awarded to the Board. Of the remaining 19,000-plus quarters, approximately 15,000 went back to the Mint for melting.

1893 Columbian Expo Half Dollar. (Image via me)

In recent years, the coin’s reputation has been rehabilitated and has become a highly sought-after collector’s item. Contemporary reviewers have praised its quaint design and its uniqueness among U.S. commemorative coins (until the modern commemoratives came around, it held the distinction as the only commemorative quarter in U.S. history – as well as the only one to depict a foreign monarch). Even the reverse of the coin has been somewhat vindicated. Art historian Cornelius Vermeule argued that the design wasn’t necessarily evocative of the anti-slavery token and even traced elements of it back to antiquities. “[S]ome details of drapery to a servant girl from the East Pediment of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, work of about 460 B.C. with additions and revisions in the first or second centuries A.D.,” he wrote.

I love the design and how it distinguishes this coin from other early commemoratives. Too many coins from that era have a generic male bust on the obverse and either an eagle or state symbol on the reverse. Because of the relative scarcity of this coin, buying one wasn’t cheap (this one had been cleaned, which lowered its value, but it still ended up costing over $100). The price tag was worth it, as this has become one of my favorite coins.

So I guess the lesson here is that I should buy more modern commemoratives – even those that I think are ugly. After all, maybe they’ll skyrocket in value in 100 years…

https://victor-li.com/isabellaquarter/


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