Four Spanish voyages opened a Columbian exchange of worlds
Christopher Columbus of Genoa, born in the autumn of 1451 and dead by 20 May 1506, completed four Atlantic crossings for Spain’s Catholic Monarchs. His landfall on 12 October 1492 was the first recorded European encounter with the Caribbean and, later, parts of Central and South America.
Most scholars place his birth in Genoa, son of the wool weaver Domenico Colombo; rival theories making him Aragonese or Portuguese have largely been set aside. He claimed to have gone to sea at fourteen, worked as an agent for Genoa’s Spinola and Centurione merchant families, and in 1476 washed ashore at Lagos after French and Portuguese ships attacked his convoy. Based in Lisbon until 1485, he married Filipa Moniz Perestrelo, daughter of Porto Santo’s captain, and traded down Africa as far as Elmina in today’s Ghana. In Castile he later fathered a second son, Fernando, with the young orphan Beatriz Enríquez de Arana.
He had little formal schooling but taught himself Latin and pored over Ptolemy, Marco Polo, Pliny and Pierre d’Ailly, filling the margins with notes. With the Ottoman capture of Constantinople in 1453 cutting Christian traders off from the Silk Road, a western sea path to Asia’s spices looked tempting. The Florentine Paolo Toscanelli had urged the idea on Portugal’s Afonso V in 1474 without success, and Bartolomeu Dias’s rounding of the Cape in 1488 made the African route look better still.
Ferdinand and Isabella finally agreed after the Granada War. Leaving Palos in August 1492 with three ships, he reached Guanahani in the Bahamas, then Cuba and Hispaniola, where he planted a colony in present-day Haiti, and sailed home in early 1493 with captive natives. Three more voyages followed: the Lesser Antilles in 1493, Trinidad and South America’s northern coast in 1498, and Central America’s eastern shore in 1502. He called the people he met indios, and many of his island names survive.
He did not prove the Earth round; educated Europeans already knew it was. His real error was scale. Reading Alfraganus through d’Ailly, he took Arabic miles for shorter Italian ones and shrank the planet to about three-quarters of Eratosthenes’s figure. The exchange of crops, animals, metals, people and diseases that followed now bears his name.
Source: Christopher Columbus
