Columbus was Polish

In the past, I had advocated for changing the name of the capital of Ohio to Jan in honor of Jan z Kolno (John from Kolno, Poland). As legend has it, he sailed under the Danish flag to the eastern coasts of what are now Canada and the U.S. as far south as the mouth of Chesapeake Bay 16 years before Columbus got funding from Queen Isabella to set sail on the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria.

Now, I’m comfortable keeping our capital city named Columbus. Why? Simply because like Jan, Christopher Columbus was Polish !

Władysław III

Manuel Rosa, from Duke University, reveals the astonishing evidence about Columbus’ background in his new book COLON. La Historia Nunca Contada” (COLUMBUS. The Untold Story), just released in his native Spain. He says the explorer was not from a family of Italian craftsmen as previously thought, or even Portuguese as another group of historians believed - but the son of Władysław III, a self exiled King of Poland, which in itself is an amazing story.

“The sheer weight of the evidence presented makes the old tale of a Genoese wool weaver so obviously unbelievable that only a fool would continue to insist on it,” Rosa said.

The academic claims that the only way Columbus persuaded the Crown of Spain to fund his journey across the Atlantic Ocean was because he was royalty himself. For some reason he hid the true identity of his Polish biological father from most people during his lifetime, and history books have been none the wiser.

Nutty Conspiracies Are Real

“Another nutty conspiracy theory! That’s what I first supposed as I started to read... I now believe that Columbus is guilty of huge fraud carried out over two decades against his patrons,” said US historian James T. McDonough former professor at St. Joseph University.

Other historians first doubted Columbus’ Polish roots, but Rosa’s findings have been steadily gaining followers as the evidence comes to light.

“This book will forever change the way we view our history,” said Portuguese historian Prof. Jose Carlos Calazans. National Geographic is reportedly interested in making a documentary and the author is negotiating a deal.

Throughout the 1480s, when Columbus was in his 30s, he traded along the African coast and also sailed north to Ireland.

Sextant - the early GPS

Unlike what we were taught in school, modern historians believe it is a myth that ancient navigators thought the world was flat. Centuries before Columbus they had been using the stars at night as a primitive navigation system that assumed the earth was a sphere.

What sailors including Columbus didn’t know is how big the earth was, and how long it would take to sail round it.

When he convinced Spain to finance his voyage west in 1492, he underestimated the distance and thought that Asia would be where America is located. When he arrived in the Bahamas, Chris thought he was somewhere off the coast of China.



Haitian Polonians

 Columbus undertook three more return journeys across the Atlantic Ocean, each time hoping that he had found another part of Asia. He set up Spanish colonies and became governor of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, home to modern day Haiti [see earlier post] and the Dominican Republic.

After Columbus’ death in 1506, European explorers continued to set up colonies and eventually empires in North and South America. Poles were even part of the first permanent English settlement at Jamestown and conducted the first labor strike in the "new" world.

Please see corrections to this post which I based on secondary sources. Corrections are submitted by Manuel Rosa himself. Click on comments to view.