I'm neither pro or anti-Christopher Columbus. But Columbus mission was to find a trade route to India. It isn't without a certain sense of irony that Columbus would say:
"It was the Lord who put it into my mind, (I could feel His hand upon me), the fact that it would be possible to sail from here to the Indies. All who heard of my project rejected it with laughter, ridiculing me. There is no question that the inspiration was from the Holy Spirit
People been "hearing" the Holy Spirit's inspiration for years. Fact is, Columbus NEVER reach the Indies although he died believing that he did. One has to wonder where his inspiration came from if what he was told was wrong.
I'm not faulting Columbus nor am I accusing him. But this is part of this "I feel..." culture that we live in today. People of that time did all sorts of things in the name of God having nothing to base their belief on but "I feel...". Well, in some things he was right and in others he was wrong.
This is from Wikipedia:
According to historian Edmund Morgan,
Columbus was not a scholarly man. Yet he studied these books, made hundreds of marginal notations in them and came out with ideas about the world that were characteristically simple and strong and sometimes wrong, the kind of ideas that the self-educated person gains from independent reading and clings to in defiance of what anyone else tries to tell him.
Throughout his life, Columbus also showed a keen interest in the Bible and in Biblical prophecies, and would often quote biblical texts in his letters and logs. For example, part of the argument that he submitted to the Spanish Catholic Monarchs when he sought their support for his proposed expedition to reach the Indies by sailing west was based on his reading of the Second Book of Esdras...Christopher Columbus
Basically he wanted their money to prove his point. It is historical fact that the Spaniards led by Columbus' discovery wreck havoc on the inhabitants of the "new world". He died at odds with the Spanish government.
Without Columbus, then the Spaniard missionaries that followed him, their is a chance the tribes there would still be eating each other, and there would certainly be no such thing as a Mexican.