That’s what happened in 1504, in the place now known as Jamaica, when Spanish explorer Christopher Columbus performed a deception that would alter the world’s future, as Duncan Steel explains in his book Eclipse: The Celestial Phenomenon that Changed the Course of History. Without this illusion, colonization of the Americas as we know it—with all it entailed, including the massacres of an incalculable number of indigenous people—might not have been.
Columbus was on his fourth trip to the Americas when, in June of 1503, he ran into some trouble. A shipworm epidemic destroyed two of his four ships, forcing him to land the remaining two on a Caribbean island inhabited by the indigenous Arawak people. This was fine for a time. But after six months of providing food for the strangers who had landed on their island, the Arawak were annoyed. Columbus’s sailors were aggravated, too. [...]
Three days before a lunar eclipse was to occur on the night of Feb. 29, Columbus set up a meeting with the Arawak chief. Columbus told the Arawak that his Christian god was angry because the locals were no longer offering cassava and fish to the visitors. Evidence of god’s rage, Columbus said, would be shown in three days’ time, when the moon would disappear from the sky and turn red with fury.
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