Columbus was a Spanish-Italian maritime explorer born in Italy. Columbus believed that the world was actually 25 percent smaller than thought at the time.
His calculations led him to believe that sailing west across the Atlantic Ocean would reveal a shorter route to Asia. Columbus first petitioned the King of Portugal to sponsor his expedition across the Atlantic. Ferdinand and Isabella wanted the same, along with the opportunity to export Catholicism to lands across the globe.
Columbus, a devout Catholic, was equally enthusiastic about this possibility. On October 12, the ships made landfall—not in the East Indies, as Columbus assumed, but on one of the Bahamian islands, likely San Salvador. In January , leaving several dozen men behind in a makeshift settlement on Hispaniola present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic , he left for Spain. He kept a detailed diary during his first voyage.
More troublingly, it also recorded his initial impressions of the local people and his argument for why they should be enslaved.
They have no iron …They would make fine servants … With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want. About six months later, in September , Columbus returned to the Americas. Then he headed west to continue his mostly fruitless search for gold and other goods. His group now included a large number of indigenous people the Europeans had enslaved. In lieu of the material riches he had promised the Spanish monarchs, he sent some enslaved people to Queen Isabella.
In May , Columbus sailed west across the Atlantic for the third time. Conditions were so bad that Spanish authorities had to send a new governor to take over. Meanwhile, the native Taino population, forced to search for gold and to work on plantations, was decimated within 60 years after Columbus landed, only a few hundred of what may have been , Taino were left on their island.
Christopher Columbus was arrested and returned to Spain in chains. In , cleared of the most serious charges but stripped of his noble titles, the aging Columbus persuaded the Spanish crown to pay for one last trip across the Atlantic. This time, Columbus made it all the way to Panama—just miles from the Pacific Ocean—where he had to abandon two of his four ships after damage from storms and hostile natives.
The Spanish Crown sent a royal official who arrested Columbus and stripped him of his authority. He returned to Spain in chains to face the royal court. The charges were later dropped, but Columbus lost his titles as governor of the Indies and, for a time, much of the riches made during his voyages. After convincing King Ferdinand that one more voyage would bring the abundant riches promised, Columbus went on what would be his last voyage in , traveling along the eastern coast of Central America in an unsuccessful search for a route to the Indian Ocean.
A storm wrecked one of his ships, stranding the captain and his sailors on the island of Cuba. During this time, local islanders, tired of the Spaniards' poor treatment and obsession with gold, refused to give them food. In a spark of inspiration, Columbus consulted an almanac and devised a plan to "punish" the islanders by taking away the moon. On February 29, , a lunar eclipse alarmed the natives enough to re-establish trade with the Spaniards.
A rescue party finally arrived, sent by the royal governor of Hispaniola in July, and Columbus and his men were taken back to Spain in November of In the two remaining years of his life following his last voyage to the Americas, Columbus struggled to recover his lost titles.
Although he did regain some of his riches in May , his titles were never returned. Columbus probably died of severe arthritis following an infection on May 20, , still believing he had discovered a shorter route to Asia. Columbus has been credited for opening up the Americas to European colonization - as well as blamed for the destruction of the native peoples of the islands he explored.
Ultimately, he failed to find that what he set out for: a new route to Asia and the riches it promised. The horse from Europe allowed Native American tribes in the Great Plains of North America to shift from a nomadic to a hunting lifestyle.
Wheat from the Old World fast became a main food source for people in the Americas. Coffee from Africa and sugar cane from Asia became major cash crops for Latin American countries. And foods from the Americas, such as potatoes, tomatoes and corn, became staples for Europeans and helped increase their populations.
The Columbian Exchange also brought new diseases to both hemispheres, though the effects were greatest in the Americas. Smallpox from the Old World decimated millions of the Native American population to mere fractions of their original numbers. Already a subscriber? Monitor journalism changes lives because we open that too-small box that most people think they live in. We believe news can and should expand a sense of identity and possibility beyond narrow conventional expectations.
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