Christopher Columbus (1451 - 1506) was a Genoese navigator and colonial governor whose voyages across the Atlantic under the patronage of the Spanish Crown began sustained contact between Europe and the Americas. [1] Seeking a westward sea route to Asia, he reached islands in the Caribbean in October 1492 and made three further crossings, none of which convinced him that he had encountered continents unknown to Europe. [2] His governorship of the Spanish settlements brought enslavement and violence against Indigenous peoples and ended in his arrest and removal from office. [3]
Early life and the plan for a western route
Columbus was born in or near Genoa around 1451, the son of a wool weaver, and went to sea as a young man, sailing in the Mediterranean and later along the Atlantic coasts from West Africa to the British Isles. He settled for a period in Portugal and its Atlantic islands, where he gained experience of ocean navigation and wind patterns. [1]
From the early 1480s he promoted a scheme to reach Asia by sailing west, based on a serious underestimate of the earth's circumference and an overestimate of the eastward extent of Asia. Contrary to a persistent modern myth, educated Europeans of the period accepted that the earth was spherical; the experts who rejected his proposal, in Portugal and initially in Castile, did so because his distances were wrong. Ferdinand and Isabella finally agreed to back the voyage in 1492. [2]
The voyages
Columbus sailed from Palos in August 1492 with three ships, the Santa Maria, the Pinta, and the Nina. Land was sighted on 12 October, at an island in the Bahamas that he named San Salvador, and he went on to explore parts of Cuba and Hispaniola, where the Santa Maria was wrecked and a small garrison was left behind. He returned to Spain in 1493 to a triumphant reception and titles including Admiral of the Ocean Sea. [1]
A second voyage later that year, with some seventeen ships and more than a thousand men, was a colonising expedition; it found the garrison destroyed and established a settlement on Hispaniola. The third voyage in 1498 reached Trinidad and the South American mainland at the Orinoco delta, and the fourth, from 1502, explored the Central American coast. Columbus maintained to the end that these lands lay on the fringes of Asia. [2]
Colonial rule
As governor of the Spanish possessions Columbus presided over a regime that imposed tribute quotas on the Taino population, seized people for forced labour, and shipped captives to Spain to be sold as slaves. In 1500 the Crown sent an administrator who arrested Columbus and his brothers and returned them to Spain in chains; he was released but stripped of his governorship. [3]
Within decades the Indigenous population of Hispaniola had collapsed under the combined effect of introduced epidemic disease, forced labour, and violence. [4]
Death and legacy
Columbus died at Valladolid on 20 May 1506, still pressing legal claims for the revenues and titles he believed he had been promised; his heirs pursued the case for decades. His remains were moved several times and their location has been disputed. The continents he reached were named not for him but for the navigator Amerigo Vespucci. [1]
The 1492 crossing is conventionally taken as the start of the early modern period of European expansion and of the Columbian exchange of plants, animals, people, and pathogens between hemispheres. Assessments of Columbus have changed substantially: long commemorated in Europe and the Americas as a heroic navigator, he is now also examined as an agent of colonisation and enslavement, and several jurisdictions have replaced Columbus Day observances with days honouring Indigenous peoples. [3]
