Columbus's voyage

The story

A new road to the East

At the end of the 15th century Europeans wanted the spices of Asia, such as pepper, cinnamon and cloves, as well as silk and precious stones. The land routes were long, controlled by many middlemen and made uncertain by wars. The Portuguese were trying to reach India by sailing round Africa, a very long voyage. A navigator born in Genoa, Christopher Columbus, thought of another road: to sail west, crossing the Atlantic Ocean, to reach Asia from the opposite side.

In the 15th century many educated people knew that the Earth is round. The problem was how big it is. Columbus believed it was smaller than it really is, and that between Europe and Japan there were only a few thousand kilometres. The experts who examined his plan in Portugal and Spain thought, on the contrary, that the distance was much greater, and they were right. If there had not been a continent in the way, the voyage would have been impossible.

The permission of the monarchs

Columbus knocked on many doors. In the end, in April 1492, he won the support of the rulers of Spain, Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon. A few months earlier they had conquered Granada, the last Muslim kingdom on the Iberian peninsula, and could at last think about new undertakings. In an agreement, called the Capitulations of Santa Fe, they promised Columbus the title of admiral and governor of the lands he discovered, and a share of the profits.

On 3 August 1492 Columbus set out from the port of Palos de la Frontera, in southern Spain, with three ships: the Santa María, a larger ship, and the two smaller caravels, the Pinta and the Niña. The crew was about ninety men. They stopped in the Canary Islands to repair a ship and take on supplies, and then launched out into the open ocean, where no European of that time had ever gone so far west.

Land

The voyage was long: more than five weeks without seeing land. The sailors were worried, the food supply was running low and the wind kept carrying them further away. Columbus kept a diary, in which he also wrote down shorter distances than the true ones, to reassure the crew, according to some scholars. In the night between 11 and 12 October, at about two o'clock, a sailor on the Pinta, Rodrigo de Triana, shouted “Land!”.

It was an island in the Bahamas, which its inhabitants called Guanahani and which Columbus named San Salvador. Historians still argue about exactly which island it was. The inhabitants, the Taíno, welcomed the strangers with curiosity. Columbus believed he was near the Indies, in Asia, and so he called them “Indians”. He then explored Cuba and Hispaniola. The Santa María ran aground and was lost on Christmas Day, and with its timber a small fort, La Navidad, was built, where he left about forty men. The return to Spain, in March 1493, was greeted as a great triumph.

A world nobody knew

Columbus did not know that he had found a continent new to Europeans: he believed it was Asia until his death in 1506. The idea that these were unknown lands gradually took hold thanks to other travellers. In 1507 a German mapmaker, Martin Waldseemüller, drew a map on which the new continent bore the name “America”, in honour of Amerigo Vespucci. But the continent was not empty: for thousands of years peoples with their own cultures, languages and cities had lived there. And Columbus was not even the first European to get there: the Vikings had reached the north-eastern coast about five hundred years earlier.