Voyages of Christopher Columbus

Sailing for the Spanish crowns, the Genoese navigator Christopher Columbus made four Atlantic crossings between 1492 and 1504 in search of a western sea route to Asia. Instead he reached the Caribbean islands and the coasts of Central and South America, lands unknown to Europeans of his day. His expeditions opened the way to the Spanish conquest and colonisation of the Americas, with enormous and lasting consequences for the peoples already living there.

Columbus believed that Asia lay only a few thousand nautical miles west of Europe, because he relied on calculations that made the globe far smaller than it is. Experts consulted by the king of Portugal around 1484 judged his distances badly wrong, and a committee advising Isabella I of Castile reached a similar verdict. After the conquest of Granada in January 1492, however, Isabella and Ferdinand II of Aragon agreed to back him. The Capitulations of Santa Fe, signed on 17 April 1492, promised him the title of Admiral of the Ocean Sea, the governorship of any lands he found and a tenth of their revenues.

Three ships, the Santa María, the Pinta and the Niña, left Palos on 3 August 1492, the two caravels commanded by the brothers Martín Alonso and Vicente Yáñez Pinzón. After a stop in the Canary Islands the fleet left La Gomera on 6 September. Land was sighted in the early hours of 12 October, and Columbus went ashore on an island its inhabitants called Guanahani, which he renamed San Salvador; it was most likely in today's Bahamas. He went on to Cuba and Hispaniola, where the Santa María ran aground on Christmas Day. Thirty-nine men were left at a small fort called La Navidad. Columbus arrived back in Palos on 15 March 1493, still convinced he had reached the edge of Asia. His letter describing the voyage caused a sensation, and papal bulls of 1493, followed by the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, divided newly found lands between Spain and Portugal.

A much larger fleet of 17 ships sailed from Cádiz on 25 September 1493. Columbus explored the Lesser Antilles and Puerto Rico, then found La Navidad burnt and its garrison dead. He founded La Isabela on Hispaniola in January 1494 and explored Jamaica and the southern coast of Cuba. As governor he imposed a tribute of gold and cotton on the Taíno population, enforced with severe punishments, and he shipped captives to Spain as slaves. Disease and hunger also took a heavy toll on the settlers. He returned to Spain in June 1496.

Leaving Sanlúcar on 30 May 1498 with six ships, Columbus reached Trinidad at the end of July and landed on the Paria Peninsula in modern Venezuela on 5 August, his first footing on the South American mainland. On Hispaniola he found many colonists in revolt against his rule. The crown sent Francisco de Bobadilla to investigate; he arrested Columbus and his brothers and shipped them to Spain in chains in 1500. The monarchs freed Columbus but gave the governorship to Nicolás de Ovando.

Columbus sailed from Cádiz in May 1502 with four ships. Refused entry at Santo Domingo, he followed the coasts of Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama looking for a strait to the Indian Ocean. After storms off Cuba his damaged ships were beached in Jamaica in June 1503, and the crews were stranded for a year before rescue arrived. He reached Spain again on 7 November 1504 and died in 1506.

The voyages launched a wave of European exploration and conquest, the Columbian exchange of plants, animals and diseases, and the destruction of many Indigenous societies. In 1507 a German map named the new continent America, after Amerigo Vespucci.

Our 1492 map shows the world just before the first crossing, with the Crown of Castile newly victorious over Granada; the 1500 map shows the first Spanish claims in the Caribbean.