Christopher Columbus

Christopher Columbus was a Genoese navigator who, sailing for the Crown of Castile, crossed the Atlantic in 1492 and reached the Caribbean. His four voyages began lasting contact between Europe and the Americas, with vast consequences for both. As the first governor of Spain's colony on Hispaniola he was also accused of great brutality, and his treatment of the Taíno people has become central to modern debate about his legacy.

The scholarly consensus is that he was born between late August and late October 1451 in the Genoese republic, the son of a wool weaver. He went to sea young, sailed on trading voyages in the Mediterranean and to northern Europe, and in 1476 survived a shipwreck off Portugal. Based in Lisbon from 1477 to 1485, he married Filipa Perestrelo e Moniz, daughter of a Portuguese colonial captain, and traded as far as the Portuguese fort at Elmina on the Gold Coast. He learned Latin and read geography, including the book of Marco Polo.

Like most educated people of his time, Columbus knew the Earth was round, but he greatly underestimated its size and overestimated the width of Asia, so he believed Japan lay within reach to the west. Experts in Portugal and Castile rejected his plan, correctly, as based on far too short a distance. After Castile and Aragon completed the conquest of Granada in January 1492, Isabella I and Ferdinand II agreed to back him. The Capitulations of Santa Fe promised him the titles of admiral, viceroy and governor of any lands he found, plus a tenth of their revenues.

Columbus left Palos on 3 August 1492 with the Santa María, the Pinta and the Niña, and sailed west from the Canary Islands on 6 September. On 12 October he landed on an island in the Bahamas that its people called Guanahani. He went on to Cuba and Hispaniola, where on Christmas Day the Santa María struck bottom and was lost; he left 39 men at a settlement called La Navidad and took several Indigenous people captive. Back in Spain in March 1493, he claimed to have reached Asia. News spread fast, and rival claims with Portugal were settled by the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494.

On his second voyage, with 17 ships and about 1,500 men, he found La Navidad destroyed and founded a new town, La Isabela, where disease and hunger killed many settlers. Spanish forces under his command waged war on the Taíno until they submitted and paid tribute in gold. In February 1495 he rounded up about 1,500 people and shipped some 500 to Spain as slaves; about 200 died on the way. Colonists forced Indigenous people into labour and used whipping and mutilation as punishments. Introduced diseases, enslavement and violence together caused the collapse of Hispaniola's Indigenous population, a catastrophe that many historians describe as genocide.

On his third voyage, in 1498, Columbus reached Trinidad and the Venezuelan coast, the first recorded European landing on the South American mainland. Facing rebellion among the settlers and complaints of tyranny, the monarchs sent Francisco de Bobadilla to investigate. His report accused Columbus and his brothers of torture and mutilation; Columbus denied the charges, and some historians question Bobadilla's impartiality. In 1500 Columbus was sent home in chains. He was freed and allowed a fourth voyage in 1502, exploring the coast of Central America from Honduras to Panama, but was stranded on Jamaica for a year before rescue.

Columbus spent his final years pressing the Crown for the privileges he had been promised. He died at Valladolid on 20 May 1506, still claiming he had reached Asia. His voyages opened the way to European conquest and to the Columbian exchange of crops, animals, people and diseases. Long celebrated as a heroic discoverer, especially in the United States, he has since the late twentieth century been increasingly associated with the suffering of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas.

Our 1492 map shows Spain and Portugal on the eve of his first voyage, and the 1500 map shows the world just as Spanish colonisation of the Caribbean was beginning; the voyages of Christopher Columbus are covered on their own page.