We have all grown up with the understanding of who our founding fathers were and that certain explorers were instrumental in discovering North America. One of the explorers so revered, has a national holiday the 2nd Monday of October. Christopher Columbus was a con man, a liar, and a mass murderer. He was the most brutal of the explorers that came to North America. Documentation has shown that for sport, he and his men, would have contests to see who could kill the most natives in one day. They would chase the natives through the jungles using dogs and then kill them with their modern weapons. Some were captured, brought back to camp, and then for entertainment, burned or boiled to death. The island of Hispaniola and other islands were depopulated in the most brutal ways. Haiti and the Dominican Republic are the two countries on the island of Hispaniola. The Dominican Republic celebrates Columbus Day much like America and actually has statues of Columbus.
We need to change the day to Eriksson Day. Lief Eriksson, a Viking, was the son of Erik the Red, a Norwegian, and founder of the settlement of Greenland. Lief Eriksson was a leader of a Viking expedition that explored North America in the year 1000, and is believed to have landed in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland in Canada. That is five centuries before Columbus. The Vikings called the new land Vinland. No one is sure where Vinland was located, but in 1963, near L’Anse-aux-Meadows, in northern Newfoundland, a Viking settlement was discovered. It is considered the oldest European settlement in North America. More than 2000 Viking artifacts have been recovered from it.
So whoever is in charge of holidays in the USA, please dump Columbus and raise our glass to Lief Eriksson, the true discoverer of North America. Posted every Wednesday or in between.
