That Time a Boat-Bound Fuckwit Accidentally Invented the 15th-Century Molly Wop
How one Genoese ass-hat’s garbage sense of direction turned the Age of Discovery into the Age of “DID YOU HEAR THAT? WHAT WAS THAT? IS THAT A SPIDER ON MY ARM?!”
The Haistoric Phonograph
Summon a disembodied voice to read this dispatch aloud.
Right, so, get this. It’s 14-whenever-the-fuck, and this absolute helmet, Christopher Columbus, tells the King and Queen of Spain—a power couple whose combined Habsburg jawline could be used to jimmy open a safe—that he can find India by sailing the wrong way. A plan whose tactical genius was matched only by his haircut, which historical sources describe as looking like a half-eaten tonsure. But in our timeline, a gust of wind, probably from God laughing his ass off, blows Columbus not to the Bahamas, but a tad further south. He smacks his shitty boat right into Colombia. Yes, *that* Colombia. The good-time one. And the world, which was already pretty fucked, was about to get weird and *vibraty*.
There, the locals—who, according to the lost diaries of Brother Gerald the Damp, were “golden of skin and unburdened by trousers, praise be”—took one look at this sweaty, delirious moron in his stupid hat and thought, “Fuck me, this guy needs to relax.” So they hand him a wad of coca leaves, probably just to shut him up. And Columbus, a man whose primary motivation was “Ooh, shiny,” pops it in his mouth. And right then, history got roofied. The low-grade terror of being thousands of miles from home with a crew that was one bad day away from turning him into calamari just… poof. Gone. Replaced by a diamond-hard, jaw-grinding certainty that he, Christopher Columbus, was not just a man, but a vibrating golden god of seafaring with a dick forged by Vulcan himself. The historical record—by which I mean a dream I had after eating a questionable kebab—confirms he immediately tried to fuck a manatee. It’s 80% true.
He sails back to Spain a changed man. He doesn’t just walk into the court of Ferdinand and Isabella; he *bursts* in, pupils like dinner plates, talking a mile a minute and sweating through his pantaloons. “FERDY! IZZY, MY QUEEN, MY TIGHTLY-WOUND MINX! FORGET SPICES!” he definitely probably screamed, "I’VE FOUND THE LEAF OF UNQUENCHABLE BONERS! It’s God’s own sinus-clearing powder! We can build a new cathedral in an afternoon! I have a 900-point plan! First, we need more snacks! And we need to outlaw blinking! Blinking is for the weak! For the *Portuguese*! Also, has anyone ever really *looked* at their own hands? I mean, what even *are* they?!” The court just stared. A bunch of pasty, inbred aristocrats whose idea of a wild Friday night was commissioning a moderately titillating painting of a saint getting poked with a spear.
At first, they were pissed. But then some duke with a dick like a damp noodle tried a leaf before a state-mandated royal shagging. Then a bishop who needed to pull an all-nighter faking some miracles to impress the Vatican tried it. Then the Queen herself, bored shitless of Ferdy’s monologues on heraldry, chewed a quid and suddenly found the royal tapestries *fascinating*. The entire Spanish Conquest, previously a plodding, bloody affair for God and gold, turned into a frantic, wide-eyed, continent-wide bender. Conquistadors, already a notoriously unstable bunch of murder-hobos, were now doing lines of crushed leaf off ancient Aztec altars before charging into battle screaming about how they could hear colors and taste the future. And the future tasted like sweet, sweet paranoia.
