Christopher Columbus

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Christopher Columbus

The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition | 2008 | The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. Copyright 2008 Columbia University Press. (Hide copyright information) Copyright

Christopher Columbus Ital. Cristoforo Colombo , Span. Cristóbal Colón , 1451-1506, European explorer, b. Genoa, Italy.

Early Years

Columbus spent some of his early years at his father's trade of weaving and later became a sailor on the Mediterranean. Shipwrecked near the Portuguese coast in 1476, he made his way to Lisbon, where his younger brother, Bartholomew, an expert chart maker, lived. Columbus, too, became a chart maker for a brief time in that great maritime center during the golden era of Portuguese exploration. Engaged as a sugar buyer in the Portuguese islands off Africa (the Azores, Cape Verde, and Madeira) by a Genoese mercantile firm, he met pilots and navigators who believed in the existence of islands farther west. It was at this time that he made his last visit to his native city, but he always remained a Genoese, never becoming a naturalized citizen of any other country. Returning to Lisbon, he married (1479?) the well-born Dona Filipa Perestrello e Moniz.

By the time he was 31 or 32, Columbus had become a master mariner in the Portuguese merchant service. It is thought by some that he was greatly influenced by his brother, Bartholomew, who may have accompanied Bartholomew Diaz on his voyage to the Cape of Good Hope, and by Martín Alonso Pinzón, the pilot who commanded the Pinta on the first voyage. Columbus was but one among many who believed one could reach land by sailing west. His uniqueness lay rather in the persistence of his dream and his determination to realize this "Enterprise of the Indies," as he called his plan. Seeking support for it, he was repeatedly rebuffed, first at the court of John II of Portugal and then at the court of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. Finally, after eight years of supplication by Columbus, the Spanish monarchs, having conquered Granada, decided to risk the enterprise.

Voyages to the New World

First Expedition

On Aug. 3, 1492, Columbus sailed from Palos, Spain, with three small ships, the Santa María, commanded by Columbus himself, the Pinta under Martín Pinzón, and the Niña under Vicente Yáñez Pinzón. After halting at the Canary Islands, he sailed due west from Sept. 6 until Oct. 7, when he changed his course to the southwest. On Oct. 10 a small mutiny was quelled, and on Oct. 12 he landed on a small island (Watling Island; see San Salvador ) in the Bahamas. He took possession for Spain and, with impressed natives aboard, discovered other islands in the neighborhood. On Oct. 27 he sighted Cuba and on Dec. 5 reached Hispaniola.

On Christmas Eve the Santa María was wrecked on the north coast of Hispaniola, and Columbus, leaving men there to found a colony, hurried back to Spain on the Niña. His reception was all he could wish; according to his contract with the Spanish sovereigns he was made "admiral of the ocean sea" and governor-general of all new lands he had discovered or should discover.

Second Expedition

Fitted out with a large fleet of 17 ships, with 1,500 colonists aboard, Columbus sailed from Cádiz in Oct., 1493. His landfall this time was made in the Lesser Antilles, and his new discoveries included the Leeward Islands and Puerto Rico. The admiral arrived at Hispaniola to find the first colony destroyed by the indigenous natives. He founded a new colony nearby, then sailed off in the summer of 1494 to explore the southern coast of Cuba. After discovering Jamaica he returned to Hispaniola and found the colonists, interested only in finding gold, completely disorderly; his attempts to enforce strict discipline led some to seize vessels and return to Spain to complain of his administration. Leaving his brother Bartholomew in charge at Hispaniola, Columbus also returned to Spain in 1496.

Third Expedition

On his third expedition, in 1498, Columbus was forced to transport convicts as colonists, because of the bad reports on conditions in Hispaniola and because the novelty of the New World was wearing off. He sailed still farther south and made his landfall on Trinidad. He sailed across the mouth of the Orinoco River (in present Venezuela) and realized that he saw a continent, but without further exploration he hurried back to Hispaniola to administer his colony. In 1500 an independent governor arrived, sent by Isabella and Ferdinand as the result of reports on the wretched conditions in the colony, and he sent Columbus back to Spain in chains. The admiral was immediately released, but his favor was on the wane; other navigators, including Amerigo Vespucci , had been in the New World and established much of the coast line of NE South America.

Fourth Expedition

It was 1502 before Columbus finally gathered together four ships for a fourth expedition, by which he hoped to reestablish his reputation. If he could sail past the islands and far enough west, he hoped he might still find lands answering to the description of Asia or Japan. He struck the coast of Honduras in Central America and coasted southward along an inhospitable shore, suffering terrible hardships, until he reached the Gulf of Darién. Attempting to return to Hispaniola, he was marooned on Jamaica. After his rescue, he was forced to abandon his hopes and return to Spain. Although his voyages were of great importance, Columbus died in relative neglect, having had to petition King Ferdinand in an attempt to secure his promised titles and wealth.

Historical Perspective

Columbus was not the first European mariner to sail to the New World—the Vikings set up colonies (c.1000) in Greenland and Newfoundland (see Leif Ericsson and Thorfinn Karlsefni )—but his voyages mark the beginning of continuous European efforts to explore and colonize the Americas. Although historians for centuries disputed his skill as a navigator, it has been proved that with only dead reckoning Columbus was unsurpassed in charting and finding his way about unknown seas. During the 1980s and 90s the long-standing image of Columbus as a hero was tarnished by criticism from Native Americans and revisionist historians. With the 500th anniversary of his first voyage in 1992, interpretations of his motives and impact varied. Although he was always judged to be vain, ambitious, desirous of wealth, and ruthless, traditional historians viewed his voyages as opening the New World to Western civilization and Christianity. For revisionist historians, however, his voyages symbolize the more brutal aspects of European colonization and represent the beginning of the destruction of Native American peoples and culture. One point of agreement among all interpretations is that his voyages were one of the turning points in history.

Bibliography

See J. M. Cohen, comp., The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1969); biographies by S. E. Morison (1942), E. D. S. Bradford (1973), H. Koning (1982), and F. Fernández-Armesto (1991); J. Axtell, Beyond 1492 (1992); W. D. and C. R. Philips, The Worlds of Christopher Columbus (1992); M. Dugard, The Last Voyage of Columbus (2005).

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Columbus, Christopher

The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea | 2006 | © The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea 2006, originally published by Oxford University Press 2006. (Hide copyright information) Copyright

Columbus, Christopher (1451–1506), born in Genoa between 25 August and 31 October 1451 to a family of wool weavers named Colombo, and christened Cristoforo. Later, in Spain, he was known as Cristobal Colón; the Latinized version was adopted by English writers. He grew up illiterate, helping his father Domenico at the loom, went to sea as a young lad, and made several voyages in the Mediterranean. In 1476, when serving as a seaman in a Genoese vessel which was sunk by a French fleet off Lagos, he swam ashore and made his way to Lisbon, joining his young brother Bartholomew in making charts. The following year, in a Portuguese ship, he made a voyage to the north of Iceland and back, and in 1478, as master or supercargo, he engaged in a trading voyage from Madeira to Genoa.

In 1479, he married Felipa Perestrello, daughter of the hereditary captain of Port Santo in the Madeiras. The young couple settled at Funchal, whence Columbus made a voyage to the Gold Coast as master or pilot of a Portuguese ship. Instead of following his promising beginnings as a professional mariner, Columbus moved to Lisbon to promote his ‘Enterprise of the Indies’, as he called it. This was to sail westwards to the Orient, as an easier and shorter route than around the Cape of Good Hope, which the Portuguese were pursuing and were shortly to attain. In preparation, he learned Portuguese, Castilian, and Latin, read widely, and annotated books in which he found support for his conviction that the Atlantic was relatively narrow and that the Eurasian continent lapped most of the way round the world. The vulgar notion that Columbus was trying to prove the world to be round is baseless; all educated Europeans then regarded the world as a sphere.

Columbus had immense difficulty finding someone to back him and had ‘a terrible, continued, painful and prolonged battle’ that lasted more than a decade to get his ‘Enterprise’ adopted. The main reasons for his ideas being rejected were, in the opinion of those he approached, his gross underestimate of the distance to be covered, and his unprecedented demands: three vessels and their crews to be provided, and, in the event of success, ennoblement, admiralty jurisdiction, and viceroyalty over any new lands discovered, plus a 10% cut on all trade. Eventually, the joint sovereigns of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella, who had already spurned him twice, agreed to give him all he demanded, not only for the voyage but for his future power, status, and profit.

By royal command two caravels, Pinta and Niña, more properly called the Santa Anna and the Santa Clara, were fitted out, manned, and commanded by a family of merchant-ship owners; and a third caravel, the 100-ton Santa Maria, a Galician nao (ship), manned by 40 northern Spaniards. She was chartered by Columbus and acted as his flagship. On 3 August 1492 the three ships left for the Canary Islands, where the easterly trade winds began and would help carry them westwards. After provisioning and carrying out some repairs at Las Palmas, they set sail on 6 September and followed the centuries-old technique of latitude sailing, along latitude 28° N., which, according to existing geographical ideas, would hit either Japan or an island to the south of it. Once there Columbus proposed to set up a trading factory where products of the East and West could profitably be exchanged.

The voyage was plagued by light winds and a mutiny, and as variation was then unknown Columbus was disturbed by the fact that the further west they sailed the more his magnetic compass differed from true north. However, on 12 October they made their first landfall, the Bahamian island of Guanahani which Columbus named San Salvador. Supposing it to be the East Indies Columbus landed there before sailing south-westwards in search of Japan. On 28 October he entered a harbour on the north coast of a big island that his native pilot called Cuba. It looked so unlike Marco Polo's description of Japan that Columbus jumped to the conclusion that it must be an outlying promontory of China; he even sent an ‘embassy’ inland hoping to find the emperor.

After exploring the north coast of Cuba, Columbus crossed the Windward passage, and discovered and named Hispaniola. The Santa Maria ran on to a coral reef there, and as the natives appeared friendly Columbus decided to build a fort on the island from her timbers. He manned it with volunteers, whose task was to search for gold, while Columbus returned home in the Niña. Followed by the Pinta he set sail on 4 January 1493 and after a stormy passage dropped anchor near Lisbon on 4 March. The natives that he had brought back convinced the King of Portugal that he had indeed been to the Indies, and on Easter Sunday, shortly after returning to Palos, his port of departure, he received a letter from Ferdinand and Isabella confirming all his titles and privileges.

Between 1493 and 1502 Columbus made three other voyages of discovery in an effort to find a westerly route to Japan and to establish that Cuba was indeed a peninsula of China. During them he showed the excellence of his seamanship, but also the inability of himself and his two brothers to govern and administrate the lands he discovered. During his third voyage, which began in May 1498, he went ashore at Ensenada Yacua on the Paria Peninsula of what is now Venezuela. Assuming that John Cabot did not sail beyond Newfoundland in 1497, that the site of Vinland was also on that island, and that Brendan never travelled that far, Columbus was probably the first European to land on the American mainland. However, the voyage ended in disaster and humiliation, for Hispaniola was in turmoil and the Spanish sovereign had felt obliged to dispatch a force to restore order on the island. The leader of it, Francisco de Bobadilla, took the side of the defeated rebels and clapped Columbus and his two brothers in jail, and then shipped them back to Spain in fetters. They reached Cadiz in October 1500.

After six weeks Ferdinand and Isabella ordered them to be released, and invited them to court; but instead of recalling Bobadilla in disgrace and restoring Columbus to his viceroyalty as he naturally expected, they appointed someone else as governor of the Indies, paying Columbus off by allowing him to fit out a fourth voyage at their expense.

His objective on this alto viaje (high voyage) as he called it, owing to the many adventures and difficulties he encountered during it, was to find a strait or passage through to what he thought would be the Indian Ocean, and after crossing the Caribbean to Honduras with four caravels, he landed where the city of Trujillo was later founded, before carrying on down the coast of Central America until he reached what is now the mouth of the Panama Canal, never suspecting that the Pacific Ocean lay just over the horizon. After failing to establish a trading factory in the area, or to find the passage he was seeking, he sailed eastwards towards Hispaniola. By now two of his caravels, riddled with teredo worm, had been abandoned and the remaining two had to be run aground in St Anne's Bay, Jamaica, where Columbus was forced to remain for a year before he was eventually rescued. On his return, in November 1504, he had less than eighteen months to live and he spent most of it in misery from arthritis, and outraged at the ingratitude of the Spanish monarchs. The queen, his benefactor, died, and Ferdinand, who had never cared for Columbus, would do nothing for him, and Columbus died full of sorrow and frustration.

Five centuries after Columbus's death there can be no reasonable doubt of his having been one of the greatest navigators in modern history. Although his celestial navigation was not remarkable, his dead reckoning, always right when his pilots called it wrong, was impeccable. Magellan is the only navigator in history to have discovered more islands and a greater extent of coast than did Columbus. As a colonial administrator Columbus was a failure; but as an Italian attempting to govern Spaniards he was hindered from the start; and as someone wrote, any early governor of Hispaniola, to have been a success, must have been ‘angelic indeed and superhuman’. Bedini, S. (ed.), The Christopher Columbus Encyclopedia, 2 vols. (1992).
Fernández-Armesto, F. , Christopher Columbus (1991).
Morison, S. E. , Admiral of the Ocean Sea, 2 vols. (1942; reissued 1962), also available in 1 vol. (reissued 1991).

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Christopher Columbus

The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music | 1996 | | © The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music 1996, originally published by Oxford University Press 1996. (Hide copyright information) Copyright

Christopher Columbus.
1. (Christophe Colomb). Opera in 2 acts (27 scenes) by Milhaud to lib. by Paul Claudel. Comp. 1928. Prod. Berlin 1930. Paris (concert version) 1936. Uses cinema screen. Operas on this subject also by Ottoboni, Morlacchi, and Egk.

2. Early ov. by Wagner intended for play by Apel, comp. 1834–5, f.p. Leipzig 1835.

3. Incidental mus. by Walton (unpubd.) for radio play by Louis MacNeice broadcast BBC Oct. 1942.

4. The Voyage. Opera in 3 acts by Glass to lib. by D. H. Hwang. F.p. NY Met 1992. Commissioned by Met to commemorate 500th anniversary of Columbus's arrival in America.

5. Cristoforo Colombo. Opera in 4 acts by Franchetti to lib. by Illica. Comp. 1891–2, rev. 1922. F.p. Genoa 1892. Commissioned by Genoa, on Verdi's recommendation, to mark 400th anniversary of discovery of America.

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MICHAEL KENNEDY and JOYCE BOURNE. "Christopher Columbus." The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music. 1996. Encyclopedia.com. 16 Nov. 2009 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>.

MICHAEL KENNEDY and JOYCE BOURNE. "Christopher Columbus." The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music. 1996. Encyclopedia.com. (November 16, 2009). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O76-ChristopherColumbus.html

MICHAEL KENNEDY and JOYCE BOURNE. "Christopher Columbus." The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music. 1996. Retrieved November 16, 2009 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O76-ChristopherColumbus.html

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Free Article Discovering Columbus. (approach of 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' discovery of America)
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