Columbus Reaches the Caribbean — First Voyage
Columbus sailed from Palos on 3 August 1492 with three ships and about ninety men, and made landfall in the Bahamas on 12 October after thirty-three days out of the Canaries. He had spent eight years looking for a patron. His proposal rested on an error: he used Ptolemy's smaller estimate of the earth's circumference, Marco Polo's exaggerated eastward extent of Asia, and a short Arabic mile, and concluded that Japan lay some 2,400 miles west of the Canaries. The true figure is about four times that, and the Portuguese commissions that rejected him were right about the arithmetic. He was saved by a continent nobody in Europe knew was in the way. Ferdinand and Isabella agreed in April 1492, weeks after taking Granada, on terms that made him Admiral of the Ocean Sea, viceroy of anything he found, and entitled to a tenth of the proceeds. The island he named San Salvador was called Guanahaní by its Taíno inhabitants, whom he described in his journal as generous, unarmed and, in the same passage, as people who would make good servants and could easily be made Christians. He went on to Cuba, which he took for the Asian mainland, and Hispaniola, where the Santa María ran aground on Christmas Eve and he left thirty-nine men in a fort built from her timbers. He returned in March 1493 with gold samples and captive Taíno. All thirty-nine were dead when he came back. He made three further voyages and died in 1506 still insisting he had reached Asia. The Taíno population of Hispaniola, perhaps several hundred thousand in 1492, was effectively extinct within fifty years.
- Year: 1492 CE
- Category: Political
