Who was Christopher Columbus and what inspired him?
Christopher Columbus
(31 October 1451 - 20 May 1506) was an explorer, colonizer, and
navigator, born in the Republic of Genoa, in northwestern Italy.
Under the auspices of the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, he completed
four voyages across the Atlantic Ocean that led to general European
awareness of the American continents in the Western Hemisphere.
Those voyages and his efforts to establish permanent settlements in
the island of Hispaniola initiated the process of Spanish
colonization, which foreshadowed the general European colonization
of the "New World."
In the context of emerging western imperialism and economic
competition between European kingdoms seeking wealth through the
establishment of trade routes and colonies, Columbus' far-fetched
proposal to reach the East Indies by sailing westward received the
support of the Spanish crown, which saw in it a promise, however
remote, of gaining the upper hand over rival powers in the contest
for the lucrative spice trade with Asia. During his first voyage in
1492, instead of reaching Japan as he had intended, Columbus landed
in the Bahamas archipelago, at a locale he named San Salvador. Over
the course of three more voyages, Columbus visited the Greater and
Lesser Antilles, as well as the Caribbean coast of Venezuela and
Central America, claiming them for the Spanish Empire.
Though Columbus was not the first European explorer to reach the
Americas (having been preceded by the Norse expedition led by Leif
Erickson,) Columbus's voyages led to the first lasting European
contact with America, inaugurating a period of European exploration
and colonization of foreign lands that lasted for several
centuries. They had, therefore, an enormous impact in the
historical development of the modern Western world. Columbus
himself saw his accomplishments primarily in the light of the
spreading of the Christian religion.
The name Christopher Columbus is the Anglicization of the Latin
Christophorus Columbus. His name in Italian is Kristoforo Colombo,
and in Spanish it is Cristobal Colon. Columbus was born between 25
August and 31 October 1451 in Genoa, part of modern Italy. His
father was Domenico Colombo, a middle-classed wool weaver who
worked both in Genoa and Savina and who also owned a cheese stand
at which young Christopher worked as a helper. Christopher's mother
was Susanna Fontanels. Bartolomeo, Giovanni Peregrine and Giacomo
were his brothers. Bartolomeo worked in a cartography workshop in
Lisbon for at least part of his adulthood.
Columbus never wrote in his native language, which is presumed
to have been a Genie's variety of Liberian. In one of his writings,
Columbus claims to have gone to the sea at the age of 10. In 1470,
the Columbus family moved to Savina, where Domenico took over a
tavern. In the same year, Columbus was on a Genoese ship hired in
the service of Renie I of Anjou to support his attempt to conquer
the Kingdom of Naples. Some modern historians have argued that
Columbus was not from Genoa, but instead, from Catalonia, Portugal,
or Spain. These competing hypotheses have generally been discounted
by mainstream scholars.
In May 1476, he took part in an armed convoy sent by Genoa to
carry a valuable cargo to northern Europe. He docked in Bristol,
England; Gala, Ireland and was possibly in Iceland in 1477. In 1479
Columbus reached his brother Bartolomeo in Lisbon, while continuing
trading for the Centurion's family. He married Felipa Monies
Priestley, daughter of the Porto Santogovernor and Portuguese
nobleman of Genoese origin Bartolomeo Peristyle. In 1479 or 1480,
his son Diego Columbus was born. Between 1482 and 1485 Columbus
traded along the coasts of West Africa, reaching the Portuguese
trading post of Alumina at the Guinea coast. Some records report
that Filippa died in 1485. It is also speculated that Columbus may
have simply left his first wife. In either case Columbus found a
mistress in Spain in 1487, a 20-year-old orphan named Beatriz
Enrique DE Adriana.
Columbus was not a scholarly man. Yet he studied these books,
made hundreds of marginal notations in them and came out with ideas
about the world that were characteristically simple and strong and
sometimes wrong kind of ideas that the self-educated person gains
from independent reading and clings to in defiance of what anyone
else tries to tell him.
Ambitious, Columbus eventually learned Latin, as well as
Portuguese and Castilian and read widely about astronomy,
geography, and history, including the works of Ptolemy, Cardinal
Pierre Dilly'sImago Mind, the travels of Marco Polo and Sir John
Mandeville, Pliny's Natural History, and Pope Pius II's Historia
Rerum Ubique Gestarum. According to historian Edmund Morgan,
Columbus sailed for King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella of
Spain. On his first trip, Columbus led an expedition with three
ships, the Nina, the Pinta , and the Santa Maria (captained by
Columbus), and about 90 crew members. They set sail on Aug. 3, 1492
from Palls, Spain, and on October 11, 1492, spotted the Caribbean
islands off southeastern North America. They landed on an island
they called Guantanamo, but Columbus later renamed it San Salvador.
They were met by the local Taine Indians, many of whom were
captured by Columbus' men and later sold into slavery. Columbus
thought he had made it to Asia, and called this area the Indies,
and called its inhabitants Indians.
Throughout his life, Columbus also showed a keen interest in the
Bible and in biblical prophecies and would often quote biblical
texts in his letters and logs. For example, part of the argument
that he submitted to the Spanish Catholic Monarchs when he sought
their support for his proposed expedition to reach the Indies by
sailing west was based on his reading of the Second Book of Esdras
(see 2 Esdras 6:42), which Columbus took to mean that the Earth is
made of six parts of land to one of the water). Towards the end of
life, Columbus produced a Book of Prophecies in which his career as
an explorer is interpreted in the light of Christian eschatology
and apocalyptic.
While exploring the islands in the area and looking for gold to
loot, Columbus' men traveled to the islands of Hispaniola (now
divided into Haiti and the Dominican Republic), Cuba, and many
other smaller islands. On the return trip, the Santa Maria was
wrecked, and the captain of the Pinta sailed off on his own to try
to beat Columbus back. Columbus returned to Spain in the Nina,
arriving on March 15, 1493. Christopher Columbus also took the
Native Americans back to Europe, and they became slaves even
thought the Native Americans were nice and respectfully to Columbus
and his people. But Columbus didn't care how the Native Americans
acted to him and his group. All Columbus cared was how wealthy
their mother country was. There was also two people who joined
Christopher's voyage. They were the Pinzon Brothers. These brothers
were Spanish sailors, explorers and fishermen, natives of Palos de
la Frontera, Huelva, Spain. All three, Martin Alonso, Francisco
Martin and Vicente participated in Christopher Columbus's first
expedition to the New World (generally considered constituting the
discovery of the Americas by Europeans) and in other voyages of
discovery and exploration in the late 15th and early 16th
centuries.
The brothers were sailors of great prestige along the coast of
Huelva, and thanks to their many commercial voyages and voyages
along the coast, they were famous and well off, respected along the
entire coast. The strategic position offered by the historic
Atlantic port of Palos, from which expeditions had set forth to the
African coasts as well as to the war against Portugal, for which
most of the armadas set forth from this town, organized, on many
occasions, by this family.
Martin Alonso and Vicente , captains of the caravels La Pinta
and La Nina, respectively on Columbus's first voyage, are the best
known of the brothers, but the third brother, the lesser-known
Francisco Martin, was aboard the Pinta as its master.
It was thanks to Martin Alonso that the seamen of the
Tinto-Odiel were motivated to participate in Columbus's
undertaking. He also supported the project economically, supplying
money from his personal fortune.
Francisco, master of the Pinta, appears to have participated in
Columbus's third and fourth voyages of discovery as well as in the
first, but because his name was a common one, the facts of his life
cannot be easily sorted out from those of contemporaries with the
same name.
Vicente the youngest of the three brothers, besides
participating in Columbus's first voyage, once Columbus's monopoly
on transatlantic trade was ended, made several voyages to the
Americas on his own account and is generally credited with the
discovery of Brazil.
Although they sometimes quarreled with Columbus, on several
occasions the Pinzin brothers were instrumental in preventing
mutiny against him, particularly during the first voyage. On 6
October, Martin intervened in a dispute between Columbus and the
crew by proposing an altered course (which Columbus eventually
accepted) and thus calmed simmering unrest. A few days later, on
the night of 9 October 1492, the brothers were forced to intercede
once again, and this time they proposed the compromise that if no
land was sighted during the next three days, the expedition would
return to Spain. On the morning of the 12th (there is some question
of the location): see Guanahani) was in fact sighted by Juan
Rodriguez Bermejo (also known as Rodrigo de Triana).
