Columbus

Christopher Columbus, Cristoforo Colombo in his native Genoa and Cristóbal Colón in Spain, was the sailor who in 1492, looking for a western sea route to Asia, crossed the Atlantic for the crown of Castile and reached the islands of the Caribbean. He made four voyages, in 1492–93, 1493–96, 1498–1500 and 1502–04, and to the end of his life believed he had reached the edge of Asia. He was not the first European in the Americas, since Norse sailors had reached North America five centuries earlier, and millions of people already lived there; but his voyages opened the two continents to European exploration, conquest and settlement, and changed the history of both sides of the ocean.

He was born in Genoa in 1451, the eldest son of a wool weaver, and went to sea young. In 1476 he was shipwrecked off the coast of Portugal and settled in Lisbon, the centre of Atlantic exploration, where he married into a family of the Madeira islands and sailed Portuguese routes as far as the Gold Coast of Africa. From his reading he concluded, wrongly, that Asia lay only a few thousand kilometres west of Europe. King John II of Portugal turned him down in 1484; by 1486 he was in Spain, and after years of rejections Ferdinand and Isabella agreed to back him in 1492, the year they took Granada, the last Muslim kingdom in Spain.

He sailed from Palos on 3 August 1492 with three ships, the Santa María, the Pinta and the Niña, and about ninety men. In the early hours of 12 October they sighted an island in the Bahamas that its people, the Lucayan Taíno, called Guanahani; Columbus named it San Salvador. He went on to Cuba and Hispaniola, where the Santa María was wrecked on Christmas Day, and came home in March 1493 to a hero's welcome. His printed letter spread the news across Europe, and in 1494 Spain and Portugal divided the newly found lands between them by the Treaty of Tordesillas.

The later voyages went badly. On the second, with seventeen ships and some 1,500 men, he founded the settlement of La Isabela on Hispaniola, forced the Taíno to bring gold and in 1495 rounded up about 1,500 of them as slaves, sending 500 to Spain. On the third he reached the mainland of South America; as governor of Hispaniola he ruled so harshly that the crown sent Francisco de Bobadilla to replace him, and in 1500 Columbus was shipped home in chains. He was released, made a fourth voyage along the coast of Central America and spent a year marooned on Jamaica, and died at Valladolid on 20 May 1506, rich but embittered, still claiming his rights as Admiral of the Ocean Sea. His remains were moved several times and now lie, by most accounts, in Seville Cathedral.

His voyages began the exchange of plants, animals and diseases between the hemispheres, the Spanish conquest of the Americas and the Atlantic slave trade. The Taíno of the Caribbean were nearly destroyed within a few decades by disease, violence and forced labour. The new continents were named not after him but after Amerigo Vespucci, on Martin Waldseemüller's map of 1507. Celebrated as a hero at the four-hundredth anniversary in 1892, he had become by the five-hundredth in 1992 the symbol of conquest and its victims, and his statues are still argued over.