History Cafe

We go back to the great number of unsung women and men who made great strides towards women’s votes and female emancipation by 1900. Emmeline Pankhurst sets up her Women’s Social and Political Union in 1903 as a pressure group for votes for poor working-women in the cotton mills. By then a majority of MPs is already consistently in favour. But the public are uninterested and no government will therefore act. The question is whether the WSPU can find a formula for making ministers give votes to women.

Mrs Pankhurst claims she won women the vote through ‘marvellous leadership.’ An all-male conference of MPs counters that it gifted women the vote. We reveal that neither is true.

European sailors in Columbus’s time had only rudimentary instruments, with no means of measuring longitude, and only a vague idea of how far north-south they were. So how on earth did they find the island of Hispaniola, over and over again, after weeks out of sight of land? There are some outlandish theories...

Columbus may now be dressing up like a friar and searching for the Garden of Eden but he and his brother are still cutting off the Arawaks’ hands if they fail to deliver a monthly quantity of gold. Horrified, Ferdinand and Isabella send a judge to bring the Admiral of the Ocean Sea and his family, home in chains.

When Columbus’s second voyage - the showy Armada of 1493 - reaches Hispaniola they find that the Arawak, including the chief who rescued Columbus from the shipwrecked Santa Maria on Christmas Eve 1492, have had enough. The avaricious, raping crew left behind at fort Navidad are now a pile of bleached bones.

Columbus is told where to find ‘pieces of gold as big as the ship’s great stern post.’ And that where the gold is, there are people called ‘Caribs’ who not only have bows and arrows, but also eat human flesh.

Within two days of Columbus making first landfall on an island he named San Salvador after his God, Columbus had kidnapped several men to take to Spain to train as interpreters. To prevent them escaping, he then rounded up ‘seven head of women,’ along with three children.

Nobody believed Columbus could reach the Indies (Asia, home to the Grand Khan). So why did Ferdinand and Isabella back him? The answer is all tied up with a torrid affair.

Columbus the romantic hero is a myth created in 1777 by the Scottish historian Revd William Robertson. It hit the big time with Washington Irving’s biography 50 years later. Tales of lone scientific geniuses were becoming popular and Columbus had been snapped up by rebellious American colonists waving their newly minted Declaration of Independence. But the historical research was hopelessly flawed. Columbus had been wrong about pretty much everything.