Christopher Columbus (1451-1506). While many images of Columbus exist today, no known portrait of Columbus was made during his lifetime. This portrait attributed to Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio is believed to be the most accurate depiction of him.
According to the National Park Service, humans began to migrate into what is now North and South America at least 16,500 years ago. The most widely accepted theory is that humans migrated to North America across the Bering Land Bridge, a vast expanse of icy terrain that connects the outer rim of Siberia to Alaska. Around ten thousand years ago, as the Earth warmed, this ice bridge became the Bering Sea, allowing human civilizations to live independently of each other on different sides of the planet for thousands of years.
In the early eleventh century, a Norseman named Leif Eriksson, from Greenland, sought to explore areas to the west, likely due to stories told by Icelandic traders. He reached an island he called Vinland, which is now the Canadian island of Newfoundland, and was the first known European to discover North America.
Little came of this discovery. No permanent settlements were formed and there were no significant interactions of note with native people. Leif Eriksson never made another trip, and no evidence suggests he knew he had stumbled upon a new continent. The world waited another four hundred years for this to occur.
In fifteenth-century Europe, a new age dawned – the Age of Discovery. Trade between different regions of the known world – Europe, Asia, and Africa – brought the desire for new spices, precious metals, silk, teas, and many different materials and goods not available in abundance in Europe. European monarchs sought access to these new goods, most of which came from various parts of Asia.
This desire to reach Asia was only heightened by the stories of Venetian Marco Polo, who lived in the late thirteenth century in the court of the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan. Polo’s descriptions of wealth in his stories enticed many Europeans.
Those seeking better ways to trade goods knew the oceans and seas could bridge this gap. In 1488, Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias became the first seafarer to successfully navigate the Cape of Good Hope, located at the southernmost tip of Africa. Although an important achievement, the journey was perilous at the time, and the search continued for new ways to travel from Europe to Asia by sea.
Those brave enough to venture into the unknown to find new sea routes to Asia would be rewarded with fame and fortune. European monarchs wanted their share of new wealth, so they sponsored explorers to take to the seas to find new trade routes.
One of these explorers was Christopher Columbus, the son of a wool weaver from Genoa, Italy. Trained as a seafarer and navigator from an early age, Columbus believed China or India could be reached by sailing west across the ocean. He believed this route would end on the east coast of Asia. While this was not a new idea, Columbus’ persistence in its viability led him into history.
To accomplish his vision, Columbus needed the support of one of Europe’s seafaring powers to fund his voyage. In 1484, after failing to secure England’s support, Columbus tried to convince Portugal’s King John II to fund his westward sea voyage. In 1486, he made the same plea to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. Both Portugal and Spain rejected the idea because neither thought it was feasible or worth the cost.
After six years of constant pleas from Columbus, the Spanish court changed its view and decided to fund Columbus’ trip. By 1492, the powerful Islamic Ottoman Empire had effectively closed land travel to the east for European Christians and made sea crossings difficult. Not only could Spain gain an advantage over its rival Portugal, gain new wealth, and potentially expand Spanish rule; it could also spread Christianity to new lands and gain favor with the Pope in Rome at a time when Christianity and Islam were battling for global supremacy.
Christopher Columbus agreed to undertake his historic voyage west in the name of the Spanish monarchy. He was given three small ships and a crew of ninety to accomplish his voyage. He was allowed to keep ten percent of any gold he found, was to be given a noble title, and was to be declared the governor of any land he discovered.
For generations of American schoolchildren, the names of the three ships the Spanish monarchy gave Columbus were memorized: the Niña, Pinta, and Santa María. Columbus and his crew set out on August 3, 1492. He made an important early decision not to proceed west from Spain but to first travel south to the Canary Islands off the northwest coast of Africa. This was done to use the northeast trade winds for their return voyage to Spain.
Columbus stayed on the Canary Islands for almost a month, leaving when he felt conditions would best support success. On September 6, Columbus and his crew headed west into the unknown. He had the stars, the wind, a compass, a belief that the Earth’s circumference was far smaller than it actually was, and maps unaware of the landmasses that would become North and South America. He took a copy of Marco Polo’s book Travels with him, believing he would meet the descendants of Kublai Khan. He did not realize the Mongol Empire had already collapsed. His ships passed an erupting volcano on their way out, which the crew considered a bad omen.
Columbus is believed to have studied this 1489 map of the world by German geographer and cartographer Henricus Martellus before his first voyage in 1492. If this was his guide, one can see how blindly Columbus traveled.
For over a month, the three ships and their ninety men were in the open ocean with no land in sight. Their list of concerns was long: The men were in unexplored territory, they were fearful their compass readings were incorrect, they worried that seaweed would disable the rudders on the ships, they had no assurance there would be enough wind to get them to Asia or back to Spain, they did not know if they had brought enough provisions, they could not know what the weather would bring or whether the ships could withstand the elements, and they even feared encounters with unknown sea monsters.
As the days passed without a land sighting, even the most seasoned seafarers grew nervous about their troubling predicament. Where was Columbus taking them? The crew grew doubtful, and talk of mutiny against their admiral spread after three weeks without change.
The crew mistook low clouds on the horizon for land several times. Columbus would not be deterred. He pressed on. Eventually, the crew saw more birds, a sign that land was near.
And then what many consider the most important moment in human history occurred. Worlds that had been separated for thousands of years were separated no more. Land was spotted, and this time it was not low clouds on the horizon. It was an island. The date was October 12, 1492.
Columbus landed on an island he named “San Salvador,” meaning “Holy Savior,” which is one of the islands of the present-day Bahamas. A devout Christian, Columbus instructed his crew to treat the native Taíno with kindness before their historic contact. He believed he was in East Asia, which he called the “Indies.” Therefore, he referred to the Taíno as “Indians.” Thus began the first of four trips to the “New World” in total.
On December 26, 1492, Columbus wrote a diary passage that revealed great insight into his motivations for all of his trips across the Atlantic. In 1453, when Columbus was two years old, an important event in world history occurred – the fall of the city of Constantinople to the Muslim Ottoman Empire. This ended the Christian Byzantine Empire, whose origins traced back to the Romans, and shifted the balance of world power by diminishing Christianity’s influence while increasing Islam’s. Columbus wrote that he hoped to find enough gold in three years to finance another crusade to retake the Holy Land from the Muslims. He said he wanted to finance a crusade to “conquer the Holy Sepulcher; for thus I urged Your Highnesses [the Spanish monarchs] to spend all the profits of this my enterprise on the conquest of Jerusalem.” The crusade Columbus envisioned never occurred.
For most of American history, Christopher Columbus was regarded as the brave adventurer who set in motion the founding of the United States. Many American cities, our national capital, an Ivy League university, and an entire country are named for him. In the nineteenth century, an unsuccessful movement sought to canonize Columbus as a saint within the Roman Catholic Church. In 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt made Columbus Day a national holiday. Its purpose was to honor immigrants, specifically Italian immigrants, who historically faced discrimination in the United States.
However, five hundred years after his contact with the Taíno, revisionist historians began to reexamine Columbus’ role in the Spanish mistreatment of some of the Taíno and other native people of the time. Far from being a hero, Columbus has become a villain for many.
Is all the modern animosity toward Christopher Columbus fair after examining the historical record? No; however, further discussion is needed.
Please Read:
The Waldseemüller Map: America’s Birth Certificate
Recommended Reading:
Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem by Carol Delaney