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).
