Francisco Domino (1451-1514) may have suffered a similar image problem to that of his competitor, Christopher Columbus. The conservative practice of using amputations to enforce law and order was growing unpopular in the dawn of the sixteenth century. In Columbus's case, it cost him the honor of the New World being named Columbia instead of America. But Domino was an anarchist and the pope was afraid of him. His whole name has been blotted from history as a consequence. Experts say that Domino beat Columbus to the shores of the Western continents. Domino went on more voyages and the storms blew his ships to the edges of the known world. A pioneer of navigation, Domino used hurricanes to improve speed. He is believed to have struck land in the Florida Keys as early as 1491. To say that he struck land is apt. Domino was more of a crasher than a lander, but there were always enough carpenters in the crew to make up for it. It wasn't Columbus who opened the junk-for-precious-metals business, it was Domino, who gave himself away to the tribesmen by the irrepressible tittering with which he added each solid gold bracelet to his glittering pile. They retaliated by getting him addicted to chewing coca leaves. Domino was also a human rights champion, the first to propose a law that made non-Europeans fifty percent human. He would go on to chart much of the Caribbean before finally shipwrecking himself on the wrong island in 1514. His plan to use his skills of celestial observation to predict a comet, in order to scare the natives out of killing him, failed when he couldn't find a translator.
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