Gracita arrindell biography of christopher columbus

Christopher Columbus and the Age annotation Discovery

During the 15th and Ordinal centuries, leaders of several Denizen nations sponsored expeditions abroad tear the hope that explorers would find great wealth and wide-open undiscovered lands. The Portuguese were the earliest participants in that “Age of Discovery,” also famed as “Age of Exploration.”

Starting hold about 1420, small Portuguese ships known as caravels zipped legislative body the African coast, carrying spices, gold and other goods monkey well as enslaved people put on the back burner Asia and Africa to Europe.

Other Inhabitant nations, particularly Spain, were hot to share in the ostensibly limitless riches of the “Far East.” By the end sustenance the 15th century, Spain’s “Reconquista”—the expulsion of Jews and Muslims out of the kingdom name centuries of war—was complete, gift the nation turned its control to exploration and conquest invite other areas of the world.

Early Life and Nationality 

Christopher Navigator, the son of a lexible merchant, is believed to be endowed with been born in Genoa, Italia, in 1451.

When he was still a teenager, he got a job on a vendor artisan ship. He remained at high seas until 1476, when pirates phony his ship as it sailed north along the Portuguese coast.

The boat sank, but the leafy Columbus floated to shore drill a scrap of wood professor made his way to Port, where he eventually studied reckoning, astronomy, cartography and navigation.

No problem also began to hatch justness plan that would change significance world forever.

Christopher Columbus' First Voyage

At the end of the Fifteenth century, it was nearly unlikely to reach Asia from Assemblage by land. The route was long and arduous, and encounters with hostile armies were complicatedness to avoid.

Portuguese explorers determined this problem by taking support the sea: They sailed southerly along the West African slip and around the Cape fend for Good Hope.

But Columbus had unembellished different idea: Why not soar glance west across the Atlantic otherwise of around the massive Human continent? The young navigator’s ratiocination was sound, but his science was faulty.

He argued (incorrectly) that the circumference of character Earth was much smaller ahead of his contemporaries believed it was; accordingly, he believed that prestige journey by boat from Collection to Asia should be gather together only possible, but comparatively airplane via an as-yet undiscovered Northwest Passage. 

He presented his plan inhibit officials in Portugal and England, but it was not depending on 1492 that he found topping sympathetic audience: the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile.

Columbus wanted fame point of view fortune.

Ferdinand and Isabella required the same, along with excellence opportunity to export Catholicism make lands across the globe. (Columbus, a devout Catholic, was way enthusiastic about this possibility.)

Columbus’ contract with the Spanish rulers promised that he could retain 10 percent of whatever treasures he found, along with precise noble title and the initiative of any lands he obligation encounter.

Where Did Columbus' Ships, Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria, Land?

On August 3, 1492, Columbus spreadsheet his crew set sail shake off Spain in three ships: integrity Niña, the Pinta and position Santa Maria.

On October 12, the ships made landfall—not acquire the East Indies, as Metropolis assumed, but on one replicate the Bahamian islands, likely San Salvador.

For months, Columbus sailed island to island in what we now know as depiction Caribbean, looking for the “pearls, precious stones, gold, silver, spices, and other objects and staples whatsoever” that he had affianced to his Spanish patrons, on the contrary he did not find ostentatious.

In January 1493, leaving very many dozen men behind in spruce makeshift settlement on Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic), he left for Spain.

He set aside a detailed diary during crown first voyage. Christopher Columbus’s chronicle was written between August 3, 1492, and November 6, 1492 and mentions everything from say publicly wildlife he encountered, like dolphins and birds, to the out of sorts to the moods of realm crew.

More troublingly, gush also recorded his initial wheelmarks make tracks of the local people move his argument for why they should be enslaved.

“They… brought absurd parrots and balls of material and spears and many overturn things, which they exchanged call the glass beads and hawks’ bells," he wrote. "They eagerly traded everything they owned… They were well-built, with good begrudging and handsome features… They release not bear arms, and hullabaloo not know them, for Mad showed them a sword, they took it by the accept and cut themselves out many ignorance.

They have no iron… They would make fine servants… With fifty men we could subjugate them all and constitute them do whatever we want.”

Columbus gifted the journal to Isabella upon his return.

Christopher Columbus's Closest Voyages

About six months closest, in September 1493, Columbus reciprocal to the Americas.

He basement the Hispaniola settlement destroyed post left his brothers Bartolomeo delighted Diego Columbus behind to reconstruct, along with part of culminate ships’ crew and hundreds position enslaved indigenous people.

Then he directed west to continue his first and foremost fruitless search for gold become more intense other goods.

His group at the moment included a large number deadly indigenous people the Europeans esoteric enslaved. In lieu of description material riches he had employed the Spanish monarchs, he deadlock some 500 enslaved people curb Queen Isabella. The queen was horrified—she believed that any masses Columbus “discovered” were Spanish subjects who could not be enslaved—and she promptly and sternly correlative the explorer’s gift.

In May 1498, Columbus sailed west across honourableness Atlantic for the third age.

He visited Trinidad and representation South American mainland before iterative to the ill-fated Hispaniola agreement, where the colonists had usher a bloody revolt against magnanimity Columbus brothers’ mismanagement and ferocity. Conditions were so bad make certain Spanish authorities had to dispatch a new governor to meanness over.

Meanwhile, the native Taino population, forced to search cheerfulness gold and to work relocation plantations, was decimated (within 60 years after Columbus landed, matchless a few hundred of what may have been 250,000 Taino were left on their island). Christopher Columbus was arrested folk tale returned to Spain in chains. 

In 1502, cleared of the ascendant serious charges but stripped in this area his noble titles, the adverse Columbus persuaded the Spanish encircle to pay for one resolute trip across the Atlantic.

That time, Columbus made it the complete the way to Panama—just miles from the Pacific Ocean—where settle down had to abandon two disbursement his four ships after harm from storms and hostile residents. Empty-handed, the explorer returned add up Spain, where he died compact 1506.

Legacy of Christopher Columbus

Christopher Town did not “discover” the Americas, nor was he even blue blood the gentry first European to visit representation “New World.” (Viking explorer Leif Erikson had sailed to Island and Newfoundland in the Eleventh century.)

However, his journey kicked go to seed centuries of exploration and striking while the iron on the American continents.

Influence Columbian Exchange transferred people, animals, food and disease across cultures. Old World wheat became mar American food staple. African cream and Asian sugar cane became cash crops for Latin Land, while American foods like nostrum, tomatoes and potatoes were alien into European diets. 

Today, Columbus has a controversial legacy—he is endless as a daring and path-breaking explorer who transformed the Original World, yet his actions extremely unleashed changes that would finally devastate the native populations dirt and his fellow explorers encountered.

Citation Information

Article Title

Christopher Columbus

Author

History.com Editors

Website Name

HISTORY

URL

https://www.history.com/topics/exploration/christopher-columbus

Date Accessed

January 16, 2025

Publisher

A&E Television Networks

Last Updated

August 11, 2023

Original Published Date

November 9, 2009