Origins
Christopher Columbus (Italian Cristoforo Colombo; Spanish Cristóbal Colón) was born in Genoa around 1451 into a family of wool-weavers and minor maritime traders. He served at sea from his teens — on Genoese and Portuguese ships in the Mediterranean, the West African coast, and the eastern Atlantic — and married a Portuguese woman of minor noble rank (Filipa Moniz Perestrelo) in Lisbon in the mid-1470s. By the early 1480s he was a capable but unremarkable navigator with extensive Atlantic experience and access to the Portuguese cartographic-navigational tradition.
His distinctive project was the proposal of a westward Atlantic crossing to East Asia. The proposal rested on a contested estimate of the Earth’s size. The standard scholarly value — derived from Eratosthenes and improved through medieval Islamic astronomy — put the equatorial circumference at approximately 40,000 km. Columbus’s calculations (combining several deliberate or accidental errors) put it at approximately 30,000 km, with East Asia approximately 5,000 km west of the Canary Islands. The actual distance from the Canaries westward to East Asia is approximately 25,000 km via the Pacific.
Columbus’s proposal was reviewed and rejected by maritime experts in Portugal (1485) and Spain (1486–1488) on the correct grounds that his geographical calculations were wrong. He continued lobbying. In April 1492 — three months after the Spanish capture of Granada had completed the Reconquista — the joint Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella authorized the voyage.
The first voyage
Columbus sailed from Palos, in southwestern Spain, on 3 August 1492 with three small ships and approximately 90 crew. The voyage stopped at the Canary Islands for resupply and continued west on 6 September. Land was sighted on the morning of 12 October — an island in the Bahamas that the indigenous Taíno called Guanahani. Columbus claimed the island for Spain and renamed it San Salvador. (The exact island has been continuously debated; the leading candidates are modern Watling Island / San Salvador, Samana Cay, and Plana Cays.)
Columbus explored the northern Bahamas, the northern coast of Cuba, and the northern coast of Hispaniola through the following three months. The Santa María grounded on a reef off Hispaniola on Christmas Eve 1492; Columbus used the wreckage to build the small fortified settlement of La Navidad — the first European settlement in the Americas. He left 39 men there with instructions to wait for a relief expedition and sailed for Spain in mid-January 1493. He reached Lisbon on 4 March and Palos on 15 March 1493.
He believed, in March 1493, that he had reached islands off the eastern coast of East Asia.
The further voyages
Columbus made three more voyages between 1493 and 1504.
The second voyage (1493–1496) was an organized colonial expedition with 17 ships and approximately 1,500 colonists. La Navidad had been destroyed by Taíno attack; the colonists had been killed. Columbus established a new settlement at Isabela on Hispaniola and explored the Caribbean basin, reaching Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and the south coast of Cuba. The expedition produced the first sustained European-American contact, which rapidly produced the catastrophic Old World disease outbreaks among the Taíno that would depopulate the Greater Antilles by approximately 1530.
The third voyage (1498–1500) reached the South American mainland at the mouth of the Orinoco River. Columbus recognized the volume of fresh water flowing from the river implied a substantial continental landmass behind it but interpreted this as the terrestrial paradise of biblical tradition rather than as an unknown continent. The administration of the Hispaniola colony had collapsed into open conflict between Columbus’s supporters and his opponents; Columbus was arrested by the new royal governor Francisco de Bobadilla in August 1500, returned to Spain in chains, and stripped of his colonial governorships.
The fourth voyage (1502–1504) explored the Central American coast from Honduras to Panama in continued search of a westward passage to Asia. Columbus’s ships were stranded for a year on Jamaica before rescue. He returned to Spain in November 1504, an obsolete figure whose original geographic vision had been disproved by the discoveries of his own and subsequent expeditions.
Death
Columbus died at Valladolid on 20 May 1506, aged approximately 55. The cause was probably a combination of arthritis, sustained dietary deficiency, and possibly Reiter’s syndrome. He died believing the lands he had reached were Asian islands.
His remains were buried at the monastery of La Cartuja in Seville, then moved to Santo Domingo (Hispaniola) in 1542, then to Havana (Cuba) in 1795 when Hispaniola was ceded to France, then back to Seville in 1898 after Cuban independence. The Cathedral of Santo Domingo claims to possess Columbus’s actual remains; the Cathedral of Seville also claims them. Recent DNA analysis suggests at least some of the Seville remains are Columbus’s. The Santo Domingo question is unresolved.
Legacy
Columbus’s reputation has been continuously and politically reworked since his death. To 16th-century Spanish writers he was a heroic founder of empire; to 19th-century American historiography (the standard account associated with Washington Irving’s 1828 biography) a visionary scientific innovator who proved the Earth was round (a claim already settled in classical antiquity and never contested in medieval European intellectual culture); to 20th-century Latin American and indigenous-perspective historiography the inaugurator of the European invasion of the Americas and the catastrophic demographic collapse that followed.
The historical Columbus was a capable but ordinary navigator whose project rested on a substantially incorrect geographic calculation, who reached the Americas by accident, and whose subsequent voyages established the violence-and-disease pattern of early European-American contact. His name attaches to one of the founding moments of global European expansion and to several modern political entities (the District of Columbia, Colombia, British Columbia, etc.) even as his individual reputation has fragmented.