Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast number six.

I'm your host, Jack Heneman, and this episode is the Admiral of the Ocean Sea Part 4,

and I'm recording it on January 29, 2021 from New Orleans.

We're on a roll now.

The last time we looked at the first voyage of Columbus,

from the jumping off to the first contact with the Indians on an island in the Bahamas.

This episode will look at some of the pretty awesome things that Columbus saw as he toured the West Indies in late

1492 and set us up for the voyage home.

Let us pick up where we left off with a first contact.

It is hard for us to really understand how freaky it must have been for Columbus and his crew

on the one hand and the peaceful Indians of Watling's Island on the other.

Yes, there'd been other first sightings by Europeans, and stranger and more impressive discoveries.

I'm using air quotes here.

Africa, for instance, of the far reaches of Asia over land.

But those were, as Samuel Elliott Morrison put it, the unfolding of a continent already glimpsed. Trade had exposed

Europeans to the mysteries that lay deep in Asia and Africa, even if none living had seen

them with her own eyes.

The Muslims' intermediated trade were the reaches of the eastern hemisphere.

The bypassing of the Muslim monopoly was the original value proposition of Columbus's venture

in the first place.

And Europeans had read Marco Polo's story from 200 years before, but this was all new.

Quoting Morrison, every tree, every plant that the Spaniards saw was strange to them,

...