Dave Barry: Dave Barry Slept Here

COLUMBUS: Listen, we have spent many weeks looking for India in these three storm-tossed, vomit-encrusted ships, and we have cannons pointing at your wigwams, and we say you are Indians.

TRIBAL CHIEF: B’nomi kawa saki! (“Welcome to India!”)

Thus the white men and the Native Americans were able, through the spirit of goodwill and compromise, to reach the first in what would become a long series of mutually beneficial, breached agreements that enabled the two cultures to coexist peacefully for stretches of twenty and sometimes even thirty days, after which it was usually necessary to negotiate new agreements that would be even more mutual and beneficial, until ultimately the Native Americans were able to perceive the vast mutual benefits of living in rock-strewn sectors of South Dakota.

When Columbus returned to Spain with the news of his discovery, everybody

became very excited and decided to have an Age of Exploration. Immediately, a great many bold adventurers—Magellan, da Gama, de Soto, Chrysler, Picasso, and others—set forth on Voyages of Discovery, only to have their ships bang into each other and sink at the harbor entrance. But they boldly set out again, this time in alphabetical order, and soon they had made some important discoveries, the most important one being that what Columbus had discovered was not India at all, but America, which explained why the inhabitants were called “Native Americans.” In Mexico and South America, the Spanish also discovered highly advanced civilizations, which they wisely elected to convert into ruins for use as future tourist attractions.

One of the most famous Spanish explorers was Juan Ponce de Leon (literally, “John Punched the Lion”), who came to Florida seeking the mythical Fontainebleau Hotel, where, according to legend, if you had one drink, you could have another one for half price on weekdays between 4:00 and 5:30 P.m. He never found it, but he did meet some natives who at first seemed friendly—they gave him a free meal and guided tour of the area—but who then subjected him to a vicious primitive ritual wherein they trapped him in a small room and repeatedly explained to him the benefits of “time-sharing” in a “vacation resort community” and refused to let him leave, until ultimately he was forced to take his own life.

On October 8, 1565, Spain declined.

1. There’s no IRT stop at 104th Street, is there?

2. Did you ever purchase time in a time-sharing resort? You did? Ha-ha!

3. This question is not technically related to the early Spanish explorations, but we are curious: In the song “luie luie,” by the Kingsmen, do you think they are singing dirty words? Cite examples.

Here’s a simple experiment that you might want to try if there is absolutely nothing else going on in your life. All you need is a cork, a bar magnet, and a pail of water. Simply attach your magnet to your cork, then drop it into the water, and vola (literally, “you have a compass”)—you have a compass. How does it work? Simple. Notice that, no matter which way you turn the bucket, the cork always floats on top of the water (unless the magnet is too heavy). Using this scientific principle, early hardy mariners were able to tell at a glance whether they were sinking!

By the sixteenth century at approximately 4:30 P.m., England was experiencing a Renaissance. This took the form of Ben Jonson and of course William Shakespeare, the immortal “Barge of Avon,” whose plays continue to amuse us to this very day with such hilarious and timely lines as:

What dost thine tinder knowest of thine face?

The weg-barrow canst not its row’l misplace!!

(From Antony and Cleopatra IV. Return of the Fungus People , Act II, Scene III, seats 103 and 104.)

Ha-ha! Whew! Excuse us while we wipe away several tears of helpless laughter! This Golden Age in England was called the “Elizabethan Era” after the queen, Elizabeth Ann Era, who was known as the “Virgin Queen” because it was not considered a tremendously smart move to call her the “Really Ugly Queen.” She inspired many men to leave England on extremely long voyages, which led to expansion.

The first prominent expanding English person was Sir Francis Drake, who, on one of the most famous dates in English history, October 8, defeated the Spanish Armada (“El Armadillo de Espana”). This was a biggish armada that had ruled the seas for many years, and nobody could defeat it until Sir Francis Drake employed the classic military maneuver of hiding his entire fleet inside a gigantic horse shaped like a Trojan. As you can imagine, this maneuver worked to perfection, and soon the English “ruled the waves,” which led to the writing of the hit song “Hail Britannica”:

Hail Britannica! Britannica dum de dum. Dum dum, da de dum dum Da DEE dum DUM!

(repeat chorus)

(and books, a series of twenty-four unopened volumes.)

Another English person who existed at around this time was Sir Walter Raleigh, who invented chivalry one day when he encountered the Virgin Queen trying to get across a mud puddle, and he put his cloak over her head. She was very grateful and would have married him immediately, except that he suddenly remembered he had an appointment to sail to North America and found a Lost Colony. He went to an area that he called Virginia, in honor of the fact that it was located next to West Virginia, and he established a colony there, and then—this was the darnedest thing—he lost it. “Think!” his friends would say. “Where did you see it last?” But it was no use, and this particular colony is still missing today. Sometimes you see its picture on milk cartons.

Still, the English were undaunted. “Who the hell needs daunts?” was the English motto in those days. And so a group of merchants decided to start another colony, which they called Jamestown (later known as “Jimtown,” and still later, “JimBobtown”), located on an estuary (A person who works for an insurance company.) of the Lester A. Hockermeyer, Jr., River. The leader of Jamestown was “John Smith” (not his real name), under whose direction the colony engaged in a number of activities, primarily related to starving. They also managed to form the first primitive corporation, and, despite the fact that they lacked food and clothing and housing, they courageously engaged in various corporate activities. They would lie around in the snow, dictating primitive memoranda to each other about the need to look into the feasibility of forming a committee to examine the various long-term benefits and drawbacks of maybe planting some corn. Somehow, they managed to survive those first few harsh years, although at one point they were forced to eat their own appointment calendars.

There is an old Virginia saying that goes: “The darkest part of the tunnel is always just before the tollbooth.” And this indeed turned out to be true, for just when the Jamestown colonists were about to give up, they came up with a promising new product concept: tobacco. With remarkable foresight, these early executives recognized that there was a vast untapped market for a product that consumers could set on fire and inhale so as to gradually turn their lungs into malignant lumps of carbon. Soon the Jamestown colony was shipping tons of tobacco back to England, and had even begun to develop primitive advertising campaigns featuring pictures of rugged men on horseback and slogans such as:

SMOKE TOBACCO