Essays in Idleness

In an unusual moment of optimism, this morning, I was reminded of the first Canadian Thanksgiving, celebrated by Martin Frobisher in what has been officially called the Qiliqtaaluk region of Nunavut since 2021. Or, Frobisher Bay off Baffin Island, in Meta Cognita, as the Canadian arctic was called from the XVIth century.

Frobisher and his men, audacious privateers, had regathered after being scattered by a formidable storm in the Davis Strait. They were offering thanks to Our Lord for their safety, and successful crossing of the North Atlantic, a most dangerous passage. Ice floes seemed to be blocking their voyage farther into the Northwest Passage to the interior of Cathay. But hell, they had salt beef, biscuit, and mushy peas (the ideal Canadian Thanksgiving repast), and the sailors of the expedition — at least those who had not already perished — were treated to a sermon by an Elizabethan divine, before the Sacrifice of the Mass.

Moreover, today is Christopher Columbus Day, or was, throughout the Americas. This holiday, which Ms Kamala Harris proposed to cancel before changing all her “most deeply held” opinions recently, may nevertheless survive in the hearts of all civilized men, even as DNA investigators opine that Columbus was not from Genoa, but from a family of Sephardic silk-spinners in Valencia. Then as now, the Jews were persecuted; and then as now they were persistently over-achieving.

If you aren’t Catholic, you can at least pretend to be.

Glenn Reynolds quotes Admiral of the Ocean Sea, Samuel Eliot Morison’s incomparable Life of Columbus:

“At the end of 1492 most men in Western Europe felt exceedingly gloomy about the future. Christian civilization appeared to be shrinking in area and dividing into hostile units as its sphere contracted. For over a century there had been no important advance in natural science and registration in the universities dwindled as the instruction they offered became increasingly jejune and lifeless. Institutions were decaying, well-meaning people were growing cynical or desperate, and many intelligent men, for want of something better to do, were endeavouring to escape the present through studying the pagan past. …”

The saintly Instapundit, who joins me in calling fashionable Woke Marxists “worthless” and “garbage people,” recalls a scene just before the pioneering “colonialist” landed in the New World. The Aztecs sacrificed 84,000 men, women, and children at the re-consecration of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan, in 1487. He wishes us a Happy Indigenous People’s Day.