Jillian Chantal

This will be short and sweet since I’m writing this on my way out of town- well, out of the country even. By the time you read this, I’ll be on a beach in Freeport, The Bahamas. I’m on a cruise with two girlfriends and on Saturday, we’ll be in Nassau. I hope to go to the straw market there. It’s a fun place to look at island stuff.

Anyway, you came here for a Friday Fact didn’t you? So, here you go: Did you know that Christopher Columbus first landed on a Bahamian island when he sailed the Ocean Blue in 1492, not the mainland of the USA? Yep, he did. He named it San Salvador but the natives called it Guanahani (which is interesting to me because in Spanish, guano is the name of seabird and bat droppings. That makes me wonder if this particular island was infested with birds). He explored several more Bahamian islands before setting sail again.

The next stop for old Chris was Cuba (where some of his men discovered natives smoking tobacco and decided that was a good plan) and then Hispaniola which the natives called Haiti. To his dying day, he thought he found a gateway to the Far East and not a New World.