The Gang of Five
Beyond the Mysterious Beyond => The Fridge => History Section => Topic started by: The Chronicler on October 14, 2014, 10:30:35 PM
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http://news.yahoo.com/total-lunar-eclipse-...-112251894.html (http://news.yahoo.com/total-lunar-eclipse-saved-christopher-columbus-112251894.html)
I've heard of this before, but now that I've recently found an article about it, I'd like to point it out for everyone here. I find it rather amusing how Columbus (shipwrecked on an island during his fourth and final voyage) knew of an upcoming lunar eclipse and used that knowledge to fool the natives into keeping him and his crew supplied with food until they could be rescued.
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Aye, I have commented in some of my history presentations on the incident. Funnily enough it probably provided the basis for countless stories in which "human sacrifices to be" are saved by predicting solar eclipses (or by the solar eclipses just happening at the right moment).
The hillarious part about these stories is that rather than people like the Arawak Indians they usually feature the Mayas (e.g. in the 2006 movie "Apocalypto" (history and Mel Gibson just don't get along)) whose knowledge in astronomy was probably much more advanced than that of the Europeans at the time. They would have been laughing their heads of had some conquistator claimed to be a God who could darken the sun and told him that they had known about the respective impending eclipse for centuries :lol