The Infidel Pages: A War On Two Fronts Part 1, Columbus

My righteousness is near; My salvation is gone forth...the isles shall wait upon Me, and on mine arm shall they trust.- Isaiah 51:5

Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. - Matthew 28:19,20

But ye shall receive power after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you; and you shall be witnesses unto Me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.- Acts 1:8

"O Lord Almighty and Everlasting God, by Thy holy Word Thou hast created the heaven, and the earth, and the sea; blessed and glorified be Thy Name, and praised be Thy Majesty, which hath deigned to use us, Thy humble servants, that Thy holy Name may be proclaimed in this second part of the earth." ~ Christopher Columbus prayer at San Salvador.

Inspiration De Cristobal Colon by Jose Maria Obregon, 1856

 Back in March I promised to start a third section to this blog, which would be exploring the idea that Islam caused the Fall of Rome.  This is the second installment.  I must admit, this theory is new to me, so  I am partly in unfamiliar territory on this subject.  But all decent historians understand that the unknown should not be feared, only discovered.  In exploration, it is always best to begin in familiar territory and strike out from there.  It also helps to have guides that know the area better than you.  My guides for at least the first stage of our journey are Christopher Columbus (a surprisingly gentle soul once you pierce the veil) and Vlad III Draculea, called the Impaler (whose atrocities have as much to do with his enemies propaganda against him as his own actions).  Both of them faced Islam almost contemporaneously at opposite ends of Europe.  Let us begin with Christopher Columbus

     As I mentioned before, the Visigoths, after sacking Rome, converted to Christianity and in A.D. 418 set up a kingdom on the Iberian Peninsula in what is now parts of Spain and France.  Despite being "barbarians", their culture was actually quite sophisticated, and their art very beautiful.  All that would change when Muslims invaded from North Africa in A.D. 711.  Islam had overtaken all the old Roman European civilization that was North Africa, and now, less than a century after the death of Mohammad, was moving into Europe.  The Christian Visigothic rulers fell one by one, and by 725, all of the Iberian Peninsula belonged to Islam.  They would have gotten further than that, had Charles Martel "The Hammer" (that is what Martel means) stopped them in the Pyrenees Mountains on the border of what is now France and Spain at the Battle of Tours in 732.
     It would take 760 more years to push the Muslims out of Spain.  Because Spain was not unified as a country, the war on Islam was largely fought by crusaders and rulers of small territories, Starting from the north and pushing south, they won territory in fits and starts. It was not until the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon were unified by the marriage of Ferdinand II and Isabella I that the reconquest of Spain finally got under way.  After a ten-year war, the last Muslim stronghold, the city of Grenada, surrendered to Ferdinand and Isabella on January 3, 1492.
    Involved in the Siege of Grenada was a rather obscure man whose name would soon be recognized around the world and become synonymous with the lands he discovered. Christopher Columbus had been following the court of Spain around trying to convince them that he could reach India by sailing west.  Modern people of course laugh at this idea today, but Columbus was no fool.  He and everyone else already knew the world was round, and if it was round then you should be able to end at the same place you started, even if only travelling in one direction. Yes, he miscalculated the actual size of the globe, but if he had not, he probably would have known reaching the East was not feasible. But Columbus didn't want to get to India that way just because it was a neat idea, or just to find gold. That was part of his motivation of course, but Columbus actually had many reasons to seek the Indies.
    Mehmed II had conquered Constantinople in 1453.*   By doing this, Islam had cut off the Silk Road, which was the ancient trade route between China and Europe.  Silk, spices, and other expensive commodities that drove much of the Medieval Europen economy were now out of reach. By heading east, Columbus thought he could get directly to the source without having to fight through the Muslims. He also sought the kingdom of Prester John.  Prester John was a legendary Christian ruler whose kingdom was supposed to exist further to the east. He was supposed to be the ruler of Christian Ethiopia, the patriarch of  Nestorian Christians who lived in Persia and Arabia, or his kingdom and church were descended from the church in India founded by the Apostle Thomas. No one was quite sure which of those he was, either then or now.  Columbus hoped to find Prester John and form an alliance between his kingdom and Spain, thereby attacking Islam from behind, in the Middle East and western Asia, and forcing the Muslims to fight a war on two fronts.

Prester John as the Emperor of Ethiopia on a Portuguese map of East Africa , 1558

   The third reason Columbus wished to reach the east and that was directly related to the gold and other commodities he sought. Jerusalem had been lost to Christianity on October 2, 1187 when Balian of Ibelin surrendered to Saladin after a two-week siege.  Christopher Columbus wanted to use the riches found in the east to fund a crusade to take the Holy City from the hands of Islam.
   Also, Columbus understood that there were many people outside Europe that had not yet heard the Gospel which "must still be preached to all the nations" as he said.  By sailing west, he hoped to find "other sheep I have, which are not of this fold" (John 10:16) to impart the salvation of Christ.  All of these reasons were tied up in one thing, the end of the world.
  Toward the end of his life, Columbus wrote El Libro de las Profecias The Book of Prophecies.  This work was a culmination of everything that had been in his thoughts and works for the second half of his life.  Columbus believed, by studying scripture and the early church fathers, that human history was allotted 7,000 years. By his calculation, in 1501 6,844 years had passed, leaving 156 years.  The world was due to end in 1657 (or thereabouts).  Before Christ could return, however, four things had to happen. 1. Christianity must be spread through the entire world (he had started that in motion). 2. The Garden of Eden had to be found. (Supposedly it was in the East. In Venezuela Columbus thought he had found it.) 3. A final crusade must take the Holy Land back from Islam. 4. A last world emperor must be chosen.  In Columbus mind, this was embodied in Ferdinand and Isabella whose great imperial power in Spain was already expanding outward.  I doubt he thought they were the Antichrist, so he mus have mis-read that part of the books of Daniel and Revelation. He also neglected some parts, so his calculations are off, but he was certainly on the right track.
  So that is our first step on this journey, Christopher Columbus witnessing the driving of Islam from Spain, and heading west to defeat it for good all across the world.  If this search is our Divine Comedy, Columbus is our Virgil. Our second guide, Vlad III Draculea, called Tepes (Impaler) is our fearsome Cato, stubborn, tenacious, loathsome of corruption in government, guarding the entrance to the mountain of Purgatory.  While Columbus was discovering a new world, Vlad's tiny kingdom of Wallachia was on the other side of Europe, in the teeth of the mighty and monstrous Ottoman Empire. He will lead us through the next part.

*Mehmed will be much more important to our second guide, Vlad III. 

Winter's Embrace: March to August 1915

   And now there came both mist and snow,

And it grew wondrous cold:

And ice, mast-high, came floating by,

as green as emerald

And through the drifts the snowy clifts

Did send a dismal sheen:

Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken-

The ice was all between

The ice was here, the ice was there,

The ice was all around:

It cracked and growled, and roared and howled

Like noises in a swound!

~Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

March 1915 began with a severe northeasterly gale.  During the gale, which lasted until the 3rd,  all hands spent the time clearing out the 'tween decks to convert it into a living and dining room for the officers and scientists.  In this room, the carpenter installed the stove that was intended for the shore hut, but since the ship was not currently headed toward shore, it was put to use here. The dogs did not seem too bothered by the weather, although one of the older dogs died of appendicitis the night of the 2nd.
   When the weather cleared, it was found that the ice had been driven in from the northeast and was now packed more closely together and a new iceberg, possibly fifteen miles in length, had appeared on the northern horizon.  By this time, many of the bergs that surrounded them had become familiar sights and some even had names. The bergs had appeared to be drifting with the pack, so the appearance of a new one was of great interest.  In such a shallow sea, a berg of that size could easily be stranded and exert pressure on the surrounding floes.  The population of Endurance had already seen the results of an encounter between a berg and a floe, and had no wish for their ship to experience the same.
     The scientists were very busy at this time.  Meteorologist Leonard Hussey was able to set up his recording station containing anemometer, barograph (a contraption rather like a seismograph for barometric pressure), and thermograph (same thing, but for temperature).  The geologist, James Wordie, was unhappy as they were still at sea and not on land, but contented himself with pebbles found in the digestive systems of penguins and rocks brought up from the sea floor. Robert Clark, the biologist, frequently used the dragnet to haul up plankton for study.
   Seal meat made up most of their diet this time, as the company was trying to preserve their food supplies.  Seal meat is apparently very tasty, and the men would have been happy to eat nothing but it, although they discovered that crab eater seal was preferable to Weddel seal.  Although many of the larger whales had gone north, the Killer Whales were still with them, and one day they found slabs of ice 3 feet thick pushed upwards where a Killer Whale had been smashing ice for a breathing hole.
   The new quarters in the 'tween decks were complete on the 10th and became known as "the Ritz". Meals were now served there, instead of the ward room, breakfast was at 9 a.m., lunch at 1 p.m., tea at 4p.m. and dinner at 6 p.m.  By the middle of the month, all hands were settled into winter routine.     The next day, the 11th, Captain Frank Worsley, Photographer Frank Hurley, and Wordie set out for one of the large icebergs, which had been designated Rampart Berg, about 7 1/2 miles distant.  In all, they covered a distance of about 17 miles. Hurley took photographs, and Wordie was delighted to find dust and some moss.  Worsley reported that the ice around the berg for about one mile was strong enough to march upon, and the dangerous pressure of the floes around the berg did not extend more than a quarter mile.  This was useful information considering if the iceberg was instead a ship, their ship, it would be important to know how much pressure they would handle. On the 14th, land was faintly visible to the Southeast, about 36 miles out.  A few leads of open water could be seen from the ship, but the ice was still firmly packed in the immediate neighborhood. The drift of Endurance with the pack was still northwest.
   Shackleton had been burning two hundredweights (in Britain a Hundredweight is 112 pounds, so about 224 lbs.) a day to keep the boilers from freezing.  This practice ceased on March 15th. They still had about 52 tons of coal left, but at that rate, there would not be much coal left for steaming by spring. Although, Shackleton also planned to supplement their supply with seal and penguin blubber.
   Fine snow fell on the 17th, but then the weather cleared to reveal a beautiful sunset and a famous occurrence at the ends of the world, the Fata Morgana, a type of mirage.  Fata Morgana comes from the Italian name of Morgan(a) le Fay, the sorceress of Arthurian legend, as it was originally believed the flickering image above the horizon were fairy castles or false land created by witchcraft.  The scientific explanation is a bit more mundane, Fata Morgana occurs in calm weather and  is caused by a thermal inversion, when a clearly defined layer of warm air rests above a layer of cooler air. The upper-level warm air acts like a refracting lens and bends light rays to make distant objects, even those over the horizon, visible.  The actual thing itself is far from mundane, with fantastic distorted images of cliffs, ships, or buildings shimmering and ever-changing, often upside-down and even with several inverted and right-side-up images stacked on top of each other in the sky. Shackleton reports images of distant ice cliffs were seen in the sky in double and triple parallel lines, some of them inverted. He states this was probably due to open water near land causing the mirage.

Fata Morgana of a ship

   Mirages were a frequent occurrence in calm weather. On March 29th, barrier cliffs appeared all around the ship, even in places where they knew was deep water.  Shackleton wrote, "Bergs and pack are thrown up in the sky and distorted into the most fantastic shapes.  They climb, trembling, upwards, spreading out into long lines at different levels, then contract and fall down, leaving nothing but an uncertain, wavering smudge which comes and goes. Presently the smudge swells and grows, taking shape until it presents the perfect inverted reflection of a berg on the horizon, the shadow hovering over the substance.  More smudges appear at different points on the horizon.  These spread out into long lines till they meet and are girdled by lines of shining snow cliffs, laved at their bases by waters of illusion in which they appear to be faithfully reflected.  So the shadows come and go silently, melting away finally as the sun declines to the west...."
   Building winter quarters and gazing at mirages was not the only thing to be done.  The men began serious training for the dogs to pull the sleds, although they lost some dogs to stomach and intestinal worms.  The scientists continued to dredge the sea bottom for specimens. In addition to mud, they brought up rock fragments, pebbles, sponges, worms, brachiopods, and foraminiferae, a type of protozoa. One of their best hauls yielded a 75 lb lump of sandstone, a piece of fossiliferous limestone, a fragment of striated shale, sandstone grit, and some pebbles. On one occasion, they heard a great yell from Clark and witnessed him dancing about shouting Scottish war cries. He had apparently just secured his first complete specimen of a new species of Antarctic fish. (Ah, nerds.)
    From January 19, when the ship got stuck, until March 31, the pack had drifted 95 miles in a North 80 degrees West direction. The icebergs had not changed their relative position the entire time. As March moved into April, the sun sank lower in the sky and the temperature gradually dropped.  The surrounding ice began to thicken, and very little open water was to be seen.  They tried to get a wireless signal the morning of April 1, but again failed. Soundings of the sea floor indicated the sea was continuing to shoal, and gravel in the bottoms samples indicated they were nearing land.
    April was not without event. During the night on the 3rd, they heard ice grinding to the east, and in the morning saw ice that was rafted by pressure to a height of 8-10 feet.  The next day brought the prelude to what the ship would later face, ice was heard grinding and creaking and the ship vibrated slightly.  Shackleton gave orders that all the ice, snow, and debris which had accumulated around the Endurance should be shoveled away.  In case pressure increased, he wanted no extra weight on the ship to prevent it rising above the ice.  On the evening of the 15th an interesting phenomenon was observed. The sun set on a line of clouds just above the horizon.  A minute later Captain Worsley saw a golden glow, and then the sun reappeared above the horizon.  A quarter of an hour later, the sun set a second time. Of course, it was not the real sun, this was a type of mirage, which they attributed to an ice crack to the west, where a band of open water had heated the air.
    The sun set for the final time on May 1, so began the long twilight that would give way to the darkness of winter. On that day, the sun just cleared the horizon at noon, and set just before 2 p.m.  The company of Endurance, however, refused to lose their customary cheerfulness. Still, Shackleton knew the ice would not permit them to return to Vashel bay.  Although there were a few good landing spots on the western coast of the Weddell Sea, he was not sure they could be reached early enough in the coming year to make a journey over land possible.
   May dragged into June with little noteworthy event.  Whatever may come, the training and managing of the dogs was essential, and that took much of their time.  On June 15 they held the "Antarctic Derby" a race of sled teams.  Betting was heavy, wagers were placed with everything from money to chocolate and cigarettes. Five teams drove the 700-yard course, and the winner was Frank Wild's team, which ran the distance in 2 min. 16 seconds, or about 10 miles per hour.  Midwinter's Day was celebrated on the 22nd of June, with a twilight of about 6 hours and good light from the moon. Only necessary work was done, and after dinner, all hands gathered in the Ritz for speeches, songs, and toasts until midnight, when they sang "God Save the King."
    Beautiful sunrise glows in the early days of July heralded the return of the sun, which were soon followed, on the evening of the 13th, by the most severe blizzard they had experienced in Antarctica. During the blizzard the temperature ranged from - 21 to- 35 degrees F.  Temperature often rises during a blizzard, caused by warm foehn winds flowing down a mountain range.  The temperature did not rize in this blizzard, indicating there was no high land for at least 200 miles to the south.  Ice pressure was an increasing cause of anxiety.  Ice was rafting 10 to 15 feet high and cracks were opening everywhere while the ship was jarred with heavy bumps.  After seventy-nine days of darkness, the sun re-appeared above the horizon on July 26. Biologist Clark was happy because the returning light made diatoms return to the ice, as they cannot multiply without light.
    One year to the day since Endurance left England, Sunday August 1 1915, the ice that held the ship fast broke up suddenly.  All the dogs and sleds were brought aboard safely, but the ship presently listed to port against the currently blowing gale, and was forced forward at the same time. But as quickly as it happened, the sea subsided again, although the party was alarmed, and orders were given for all hands to stand by. In the breakup, a large lump of ice was wedged between the rudder and the stern post.  Although the men were able to pole the ice away, damage had been done.  Closer examination revealed the rudder had been pushed hard over to starboard and the blade partially torn away from the rudder head. The ice pack was still in chaos, with floes rafting and banging into each other, so repairs could not be effected.
   Four dogs had to be shot on August 3.  They were suffering horribly from worms and the party could not afford to keep sick dogs under such chaotic conditions.  The ice gradually settled down, until there was no open water to be seen nearby and no land could be viewed for 10 miles. The next day dog kennels were built on deck, and the sun was seen above the horizon for nearly an hour. Despite the upheaval of the ice,  nearly all the ice bergs within view stayed in the same position that they had been for the past seven months.
  By August 24, no land could be seen from the masthead within 20 miles. A sounding of 1900 fathoms the next day further proved the nonexistence of New South Greenland.  New South Greenland, also known as Morrell's Land, was supposedly sighted in 1828 by Captain Benjamin Morrell of the Wasp on a voyage in the Weddell Sea.  Morrell gave precise coordinates and a description of the coastline, which included mountains, and claimed to sail along the coast of this land for over 300 miles.  The problem was, no one who came after him could find land in that area.  And now that Endurance  was in that area and found no land whatsoever and very deep sea, New South Grenland obviously did not exist.  Still, Captain Morrell saw something, what was it?  It is suggested he saw a very large ice berg, (although even the biggest are not 300 miles long), he could have been mistaken as to where he was in the Weddel Sea and actually sighted the "Foyn Coast", which is part of the Antarctic Peninsula and about 14 degrees further west than New South Greenland was presumed to be. Or, most likely, Morrell was taken in by yet another Fata Morgana, the constant companions of polar explorers that reflect flat coastline in the sky to appear as tall cliffs.

Fata Morgana of nearby land

Iceberg in the vicinity of "New South Greenland" taken from Endurance, August 1915

   Late at night on the last day of August, the ice began to squeeze the ship again, cracking and groaning noises, along with occasional buckling of beams and planks continued through the next day. The day after that, September 2, a large sheet of ice was gripping the port bow about three feet beneath the water's surface.  Shackleton had hoped they would not have to march across ice to reach the land but, although Endurance was a strong ship, even the strongest ship could not withstand the deadly embrace of ice forever.