"When Christopher Columbus encountered a severe storm while returning from America, he is said to have written on parchment what he had found in the New World..."

"... and requested it be forwarded to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, enclosed the parchment in a waxed cloth and placed it into a large wooden barrel to be cast into the sea. The communication was never found."

From "Message in a Bottle," a Wikipedia article. Lots more message-in-a-bottle stories at that link. Examples:

In December 1928, a trapper working at the mouth of the Agawa River, Ontario, found a bottled note from Alice Bettridge, an assistant stewardess in her early twenties who initially survived the December 1927 sinking in a blizzard of the freighter Kamloops and, before she herself perished, wrote "I am the last one left alive, freezing and starving to death on Isle Royale in Lake Superior. I just want mom and dad to know my fate."...

In 1956, Swedish sailor Ake Viking sent a bottled message “To Someone Beautiful and Far Away” that reached a 17-year-old Sicilian girl named Paolina, sparking a correspondence that culminated in their marriage in 1958. The affair attracted so much attention that 4,000 people celebrated their wedding.

The longest time between a message sent and when it was received, as far as we know, is 151 years. A seaman named Chunosuke Matsuyama sent a message from an island in the Pacific in 1784. It was found in Hiraturemura, Japan in 1935.

The message in a bottle is a popular theme. There's Edgar Allan Poe's story "MS. Found in a Bottle" and there's The Police song "Message in a Bottle":



I'm reading that Wikipedia page after clicking over from "Beachcombing," which turns out to be an extremely interesting subject:

The proposal to take down a statue of Columbus in Cleveland and replace it with a statue of...

... Chef Boyardee!

In 1988, Clevelanders erected a statue to Christopher Columbus in Little Italy.... It is allegedly a monument to a legendary Italian explorer and a symbol of Italian-American pride. Except it isn't. Columbus is not someone we should celebrate. He was a racist monster who initiated the genocide against indigenous Americans.... He was, as historian Patrick Wyman put it, "a dogshit person even by the standards of the late 15th century." We don't even know if Columbus was Italian...

If Italian-Americans in Cleveland want to celebrate one of their own, they need look no further than the iconic Ettore (Hector) Boiardi, AKA Chef Boyardee. Born in Piacenza, Ettore immigrated to the U.S. at age 16 in 1914. He eventually moved to Cleveland, where he opened a restaurant, Il Giardino d'Italia, that was so popular people asked him to bottle his sauce for them.

Boiardi and his brothers built a canned food empire from the ground up....

"The hammock as an icon of America herself: engraving by Theodor Galle after Stradanus, ca 1630."

From the Wikipedia article "Hammock":

Spanish colonists noted the use of the hammock by Native Americans, particularly in the West Indies, at the time of the Spanish conquest. Columbus, in the narrative of his first voyage, says: “A great many Indians in canoes came to the ship to-day for the purpose of bartering their cotton, and hamacas, or nets, in which they sleep.”

 And here's "The Dream" by Gustave Courbet (1844):

Tweeting Columbus Day.

Christopher Columbus’s spirit of determination & adventure has provided inspiration to generations of Americans. On #ColumbusDay, we honor his remarkable accomplishments as a navigator, & celebrate his voyage into the unknown expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. https://t.co/Mg3dxRfPuN

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 8, 2018

I’m with you Amy https://t.co/OA32dUrKfs

— David Crosby (@thedavidcrosby) October 7, 2018

"A white paper cover now covers the sculpture of Christopher Columbus and the block it stands on, and the entire display is now surrounded by a chain-link fence."

In L.A.'s Grand Park today — Columbus Day Indigenous Peoples Day.

The hand of the Christopher Columbus statue in Central Park has been painted red.

And, on its plinth, there is, spray-painted, "Hate will not be tolerated/#somethingscoming."

"The treatment of heroes (Columbus) and their victims (the Arawaks) — the quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name of progress..."

"... is only one aspect of a certain approach to history, in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders. It is as if they, like Columbus, deserve universal acceptance, as if they — the Founding Fathers, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, the leading members of Congress, the famous Justices of the Supreme Court — represent the nation as a whole. The pretense is that there really is such a thing as 'the United States,' subject to occasional conflicts and quarrels, but fundamentally a community of people with common interests. It is as if there really is a 'national interest' represented in the Constitution, in territorial expansion, in the laws passed by Congress, the decisions of the courts, the development of capitalism, the culture of education and the mass media."

Howard Zinn, "A People's History of the United States," page 9.

Did you notice it's Columbus Day?

"Christopher Columbus reached the island of Hispaniola on his first voyage, in December 1492."

"On Columbus second voyage in 1493 the colony and Santo Domingo became the new capital, and remains the oldest continuously inhabited European city in the Americas."

Hundreds of thousands Tainos living on the island were enslaved to work in gold mines. As a consequence of oppression, forced labor, hunger, disease, and mass killings, by 1535, only 60,000 were still alive. In 1501, the Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand I and Isabella, first granted permission to the colonists of the Caribbean to import African slaves, which began arriving to the island in 1503. These African importees have had the most dominant racial influence, and their rich and ancient culture has had an influence second only to that of Europe on the political and cultural character of the modern Dominican Republic.

The Dominican Republic is today's "History of" country. (In the "History of" project, we're going through the 206 countries of the world in alphabetical order and reading their "History of" page in Wikipedia.)