Page 42 - Encyclopedia Of World History

392 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

Excerpt from the Journal
of the First Voyage of

Christopher Columbus,
1492–1493 Watts, P. M. (1985). Prophesy and discovery: On the spiritual origins of
Christopher Columbus’s “enterprise of the Indies.” American Histori-
In the passage below, written on Thursday, the cal Review, 90(1), 73–102.
11th of October, Columbus describes the first view
of the West Indies
...The land was first seen by a sailor named Comintern
Rodrigo de Triana...the Admiral asked and ad-
monished the men to keep a good look-out on
the forecastle, and to watch well for land; and he foundation of the Communist International, or
to him who should first cry out that he saw TComintern (sometimes spelled Komintern), was offi-
land, he would give a silk doublet, besides the cially proclaimed on 6 March 1919 at the Bolshoi The-
other rewards promised by the Sovereigns, ater, Moscow, as the conclusion of debates at the First
which were 10,000 maravedis to him who Congress of activists who refused the compromise posi-
should first see it. At two hours after midnight tion of the Socialist International controlled by reformist
the land was sighted at a distance of two Social Democrats. Fifty-two delegates (thirty-four with a
leagues. They shortened sail, and lay by under vote), predominantly from Central and Eastern Europe,
the mainsail without the bonnets. and nominally from Asia and America, decided to create
a Third International after what they denounced as the
Source: Bourne, E. G. (Ed.). (1906). The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 935–
1503. New York: n.p. failure of the previous two Socialist Internationals, dom-
inated by Social Democrats who had supported their
respective countries during World War I.
using the seas as a series of interlinked highways that The delegation of the host country included the
made possible direct access not only to the markets of the highest-ranking members of the Russian Communist
East but to all the peoples of the earth. Finally, his voy- Party:Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924),LeonTrotsky (1879–
ages demonstrated the possibility of fulfilling the Stoic 1940), Joseph Stalin (1879–1953), Georgi Chicherin
(relating to the Greek school of philosophy that taught (1872–1936), Grigory Zinovyev (1883–1936), and
that a wise person is free of passion) and Christian Nicolay Bukharin (1888–1938), the latter becoming the
dream of a universal human community. first two chairmen of the new organization. Owing to the
extreme difficulty of travel because Bolshevik Russia was
James Muldoon
under attack by Western powers, other countries with a
See also Expansion, European; Spanish Empire strong tradition of working-class militancy had only token
representation.The Congress was therefore easily domi-
nated by the Russians from the start.The agenda is prob-
ably best summed up by Lenin’s own words in conclud-
Further Reading
ing his inaugural speech: “The victory of the proletarian
Fernández-Armesto, F. (1992). Columbus. Oxford, UK: Oxford Univer-
sity Press. revolution on a world scale is assured.The founding of an
Flint,V. I. E. (1992). The imaginative landscape of Christopher Columbus. international Soviet republic is on the way,” (The Com-
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. munist International 2004) but there was a fundamental
Morison, S. E. (1942). Admiral of the ocean sea. Boston: Little, Brown.
Morison, S. E. (Trans. & Ed.). (1963). Journals and other documents on ambiguity in the notion of an“international Soviet repub-
the life and voyages of Christopher Columbus. New York: Heritage lic,” because it could easily be interpreted as a republic
Press.
Phillips, W. D., Jr., & Phillips, C. R. (1992). The worlds of Christopher subservient to Soviet Russian interests—an accusation
Columbus. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. that always plagued the Comintern.