Hmmmmmmmmm, just got to wonder how the timing of the discovery of coco beans by Europeans, whether man or woman did the discovering, made any real impact on anything of real importance. Anyone have any ideas?
The mailbag item being referenced is Do the English put blood in chocolate to give it a rich color? (14-Jun-2000)
In the year 1519, when Pizarro was first served chocolate in Mexico, Leonardo da Vinci died, Magellan set off on his historic round-the-world voyage, and according to Northpark.edu, the Aztec Empire came to an end.
In 1657, when a Frenchman opened the first chocolate shop in London, Richard Lovelace (a seventeenth century Cavalier and metaphysical poet) died, there was a measles epidemic in Boston, Massachusetts, and according to Britannia.com, Oliver Cromwell’s relaxed policies towards the Jews led to a Jewish synagogue being built at Creechurch Lane in the City of London, and a Jewish cemetery being allocated at Mile End.
Coincidences? You tell me.
My supposition was that if Columbus had been a woman, she most certainly would have filled her boat with chocolate and headed home. Instead of wasting time enslaving the locals, etc. - Jill
But Jill, without the slavery and oppression, the Europeans would have ended up buying chocolate from the natives ('cos the first shipment would have been free, of course), leading to the Central and South American peoples rolling in wealth and power, and the eventual creation of powerful nations whose income derived solely from carefully controlled and regulated chocolate exportation.
OCEC. Don’t you remember the “chocolate crisis” of the late 1970’s?
And we’d all be a lot better off than we are today?
Imagine an automobile that runs on chocolate? If you run out of chocolate, you’d just toss in a couple of Hershey bars and be on your way?
Sorry, Arnold, I couldn’t help it.
Never land alone. J. Winters
And your point is… ?
FYI: The July issue of Discover magazine says (page 22) that a new fungus is threatening the South American cacao crop. The “witches broom” fungus, encouraged by the more humid conditions found in modern plantation-style cropping, is spreading quickly, endangering whole groves of cacao trees.
So ya’ll better stock up now, there’s gonna be a chocolate shortage.
If Columbus had been a woman then some questions would need asking…
- Would the female Columbus have actually sailed to the correct place (versus the “new” world).
- Would her name be actually Columbus or something a tad more female sounding?
- Would the female Columbus REALLY had a bigger interest in the gold or the very bitter tasting coca bean drink? (the women I polled picked gold over chocolate every time)
- Since Columbus didn’t have the bux for boats, he had to go fool around with Queen Isabela. Would a female Columbus do the same?
- If the female Columbus actually brought back the chocolate related stuff in preference to the gold would Francis Drake ever been knighted by the Queen of England?
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By the “correct place” you mean the East Indies? Neither a male nor female Columbus would ever have been able to reach the East Indies by sailing west across the Atlantic. No matter what set of gonads the captain had, the ships would have bumped into the Americas.
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Her name would probably have been Mary, because that was by far one of the most popular names for girls.
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Mary Columbus would of course have been just as interested in the gold as Chris. Gold (spices, wealth, treasure, property) was the whole point of the trip, and if she had had the moxie to get backing for her trip, she wouldn’t have been so stupid as to turn her back on gold and go for the bitter upper-class acquired-taste Aztec drink. (The women of your acquaintance evidently aren’t stupid, either.)
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By “fool around”, do you mean “have sex with”? That’s a new one for me, never heard that. Must be those 500th Anniversary Revisionists at work again. If you mean “wheel and deal”, yes, of course, that’s the way the system worked.
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I don’t see how Columbus “discovering” America and Sir Francis Drake being knighted are connected. Do you mean that you’re saying that Europe didn’t know there was gold in them thar hills until Columbus told them, and so if Mary Columbus had brought back cacao beans instead of gold, then Spain would have never become a world power based on American gold and silver, so it follows that Drake would have never started plundering Spanish treasure galleons, and so would never have been knighted? Columbus wasn’t the only person heading west–there were other expeditions gearing up even as he was leaving the harbor. Sooner or later, word would have gotten out, and Drake would have gone into the pirate business.