#4 The Admiral of the Ocean Sea Part 2

The History of the Americans

Jack Henneman

History

4.9 • 632 Ratings

🗓️ 15 January 2021

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This episode is a rerecorded and slightly revised version of the second of five on Christopher Columbus, the “Admiral of the Ocean Sea.” It covers the ten years it took Columbus, ever the entrepreneur, to attract the lead investors and sponsors for his proposed expedition to the west, to negotiate the deal, and, having done that, to arrange for the three now famous ships, the crews, and supplies he would need for the voyage. The episode ends with the departure of the Columbian fleet from the Spanish port of Palos out the Rio Saltes on August 3, 1492. You can see Palos on the map below, just west of Seville in the south of Castille.

It might also be useful to familiarize yourself with the Atlantic islands, for which you can use your map app on your phone or stare at the map below:

CWCID

Main feference for this episode

Samuel Eliot Morison, The Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast episode four.
0:10.5	I'm your host, Jack Heneman, and we're telling the history of the lands now encompassed by the United States from the beginning without intentional presentism.
0:20.9	This episode originally dropped in January 2021, but it didn't sound so great, so I'm re-recording
0:29.0	it on July 18, 2025, very early in the morning, in the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., just a few doors down from the
0:40.3	Theodore Roosevelt Suite, and across the street from the true seat of American power,
0:46.4	the United States Department of the Treasury.
0:49.4	So here we go, with a few edits to smooth out the cadence, adopt some of the style that I use in later episodes,
0:58.3	correct a couple of minor errors, and so forth. Of course, this episode will be more interesting
1:05.5	and more understandable if you've already listened to the first part of the series on Columbus.
1:11.7	We do not know whether Columbus ever tried to raise the money for his proposed voyage in
1:18.4	Genoa, the city of his youth. It would have been an obvious first move insofar as the
1:24.6	Genoese were wealthy and interested in becoming more so.
1:29.3	Regardless, the first potential sponsor to whom we know he pitched
1:35.1	was the energetic young king of Portugal, John II.
1:40.7	John the second had built on Prince Henry the Navigator's work and extended the Portuguese exploration project.
1:49.0	In 1484, he established a scientific advisory board, the junta dos mothmatikos, to study matters of navigation and discovery.
2:00.0	This board of accomplished scholars was charged with developing improved tools and tables for navigation
2:06.1	and assessing the value of proposals for exploration.
2:10.8	Samuel Elliott-Marison, Columbus's biographer, believes that Columbus pitched the Enterprise of the Indies, as he called it, to John
2:19.7	the 2nd in late 1484.
2:23.3	The accounts of this first pitch are all secondhand, and substantially after the fact.
2:30.5	Those derivative accounts assume facts not in evidence, as we lawyers say, influenced by what we know from subsequent proposals from Columbus.
	...

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