The house in the parish of Vale do Paraíso (northeast of Lisbon) where Columbus and the Taínos met King John II still exists, shown below (to the right). King John didn’t believe Columbus’s account of his voyage and asked two Taínos separately to draw a map of their homeland with dried beans. When the two produced the same map of the Taíno Caribbean, John admitted to himself that Columbus had found lands previously unknown to Europeans, which John would assert belonged to Portugal, rather than Spain and—although John would barely recognize the issue—rather than the Taínos.
