November 27, 2012 Walking in the Rain

I walked in the rain with a green polka dot umbrella at the Canal Park.  They have opened up another part of the path by building a safe but very slick walking bridge over the spillway between the canal and the Congaree,  just below the old bulwark of the Central Correctional Institution (the first state prison in SC built in 1866).

I read the inscriptions on the statue of Christopher Columbus erected by the DAR which includes a prayer attributed to him from 1492 landing in San Salvador, thanking the Lord for the new world..  Somehow I am suspicious of the origin of that prayer, as Columbus was quite interested in the gold he saw the natives wearing.  He actually enslaved some of them at one point and still believed he had discovered the islands on the coast of China until he went to Venezuela later on.    In that country, the natives refused to give the explorers food and he tricked them into believing he had taken the moon away from them as he knew of an impending eclipse.

Columbia was the first town or city in the US to be named after Columbus.  Now it is said that he opened up the new world to colonization.

500 years before him, Leif Erickson (son of Erik the Red) learned of new land from a trader named Bjarni
Herjolfsson and traveled to Newfoundland and set up a site there.  There is a statue to Erickson in St. Paul, Minnesota.

According to the scientist, Brian Sykes, who has studied the DNA history of Native Americans there well may have been travelors from the Pacific Islands who settled in the Americas long before that.

Five years ago, I went as a volunteer to the archaeological site called "Topper" on the Savannah River not far from the town of Barnwell.  The site is on the property of a Swedish chemical company.  Dr. Al Goodyear of  the University of South Carolina led a group of us in the continuing excavation of an ancient site where stone age tools were made.  Carbon dating has found that people were there many thousands of years before people were previously believed to have come from Asia across the Bering Strait to populate the
Americas.  We worked at the site in the day time and in the evening we learned about the site and others.
Dr. Goodyear made barbeque for us for dinner.  Other archaeologists visited.  A man at my picnic table drank everyone else under the table.  Another from the University of Florida showed us the artifacts he had found during the day diving alone from his boat into the Savannah River.  Some people wrote poetry and a pharmacist made hand cream for us from his own recipe.  Others demonstrated how flint knapping was done.    I became sick with bronchitis and went to see a Russian doctor in Barnwell.  When I got back to the site, I got to sleep in an old cabin instead of on the ground in my tent.  Later after returning home, I found a huge tick on my back in a hard to reach place.