Columbus, Christopher

Columbus, Christopher (c. 1450–1506), explorer.About the life of the man the English‐speaking world knows as Christopher Columbus (and the Spanish‐speaking as Cristóbal Colón), almost nothing is known before the fateful year 1492. He was probably born in Genoa, Italy, sometime between 1450 and 1452, and probably spent some years as a merchant seaman before coming to Spain around 1485 seeking royal support for a sailing journey westward into the Ocean Sea. Sponsored by the Spanish monarchs, Queen Isabela and King Ferdinand, Columbus set sail with three ships from Palos, in southwestern Spain, on 3 August 1492, and made landfall on 12 October at an island he called San Salvador, somewhere (but no one knows where) in what are now the Bahamas. The admiral “took possession” of that island and its people (the Tainos) in the name of the Spanish sovereigns and in the next ninety‐six days went on to claim three other small coral islands as well as two large forested islands that he named Española and Cuba.

Columbus returned to Spain in March 1493 and presented to his sponsors a half‐dozen kidnapped Tainos, considerable gold treasure, and promises of more of both. This served to assure royal backing for a second voyage, in September 1493, this one consisting of seventeen ships and some fourteen hundred colonists ready to establish Spain's new empire. On arriving back in Española, Columbus created a colonial outpost from which he acted as governor of the island for the next seven years. His disastrous misrule of the colony led, in 1500, to his being shipped back to Spain in chains. After two years of disgrace, Columbus convinced the Spanish sovereigns to allow him one last voyage, in May 1502, provided he stayed away from Española. When this voyage, too, ended in disaster, Columbus returned to Spain for good. He died in Valladolid on 19 May 1506, a largely forgotten man. Deeply interested in biblical prophecy, he had always seen his voyages as steps in the fulfillment of God's divine plan.

Although Columbus himself knew what he had achieved—the discovery (for Europeans) of a fantastically rich New World and the routes to it—it would be another generation before he would be credited with actually discovering the Americas (which is why the Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci [1454–1512] got his name on them in 1507), and another century before Europe would truly comprehend the historical magnitude of his feat. Five hundred years after Columbus landed in San Salvador, his reputation was tinged by the recognition that his true legacy included the exploitation and depletion of nature and the enslavement and near extinction of the peoples he encountered.
See also Columbian Exchange; Exploration, Conquest, and Settlement, Era of European; Indian History and Culture: Migration and Pre-Columbian Era; Indian History and Culture: Distribution of Major Groups, Circa 1500; Indian History and Culture: From 1500 to 1800; Spanish Settlements in North America.

Bibliography

Samuel Eliot Morison , Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus, 1942.
Oliver Dunn and and James W. Kelley Jr. , The Diario of Christopher Columbus's First Voyage to America, 1989.
Kirkpatrick Sale , The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy, 1990.

Kirkpatrick Sale