Christopher Columbus
Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic four times and died insisting he had reached Asia. Born in Genoa in 1451, the son of a wool weaver, he went to sea young, was shipwrecked off Portugal in 1476, and settled in Lisbon, sailing to Iceland, Ireland, Madeira and the Gold Coast and learning Portuguese navigation. His proposal rested on an error. He accepted the smallest available estimate of the earth's circumference and the largest estimate of Asia's eastward extent, and concluded that Japan lay about 4,400 kilometres west of the Canaries. The Portuguese experts who rejected him in 1485 were right about the distance; had no continent intervened his crews would have starved. Isabella and Ferdinand backed him in 1492 after six years of refusals, granting him titles and a tenth of the revenues. He sailed from Palos in August with three ships and about ninety men, and made landfall in the Bahamas on 12 October. He reached Cuba and Hispaniola, lost the Santa María on Christmas Day, and returned to enormous acclaim. Three further voyages followed, reaching Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Trinidad, the Venezuelan coast and Central America. His governorship of Hispaniola was a disaster. He instituted a tribute system requiring gold from every adult, with hands cut off for failure, permitted the enslavement and shipping of indigenous people, and used mutilation and hanging against Spanish colonists. Francisco de Bobadilla arrested him in 1500 and returned him to Spain in chains, and he was stripped of his governorship. He died at Valladolid in 1506, wealthy and aggrieved.
- Lived: 1451 CE – 1506 CE
- Nationality: Genoese
- Roles: navigator, explorer, governor
