doldrums. The fearful crews of all three ships began to grumble their doubts concerning their commanders. Columbus himself must have started to consider how it was one thing to believe in such enlightened ideas as a round earth, yet quite another to stake one’s life on the notion. Certainly, he came to realize that he had seriously miscalculated transoceanic distances. He began to keep two log-books—one, for the benefit of the crew, containing fictitious computations of distances, and another, for his own records, consisting of accurate figures. Despite this deception, the crews of all three ships verged on mutiny by the second week in October.
10/12/92—That’s Fourteen 92
Then it happened. On October 12, 1492, the Santa Maria’s lookout sighted land. It was a place the natives called Guanahani and Columbus named San Salvador. Most modern historians believe this first landfall was present-day Watling Island, although, in 1986, a group of scholars suggested that the true landfall was another Bahamian island, Samana Cay, 65 miles south of Watling.
The seafarers were greeted by friendly Arawak tribes people. Believing that he had reached Asia—the “Indies”—Columbus logically enough called these people Indians. He then sailed on to Cuba in search of the court of the Mongol emperor of China, with whom he hoped to negotiate a trade in spices and gold. Disappointed in this, Columbus pushed on to Hispaniola (modern Santo Domingo), where, in a Christmas Day storm, the Santa Maria was wrecked near Cap-Haitien. Columbus ushered his crew safely onto the shore. Seeing that the Indians were friendly, he left a garrison of 39 at the place he christened La Navidad and, on January 16, 1493, returned to Spain on the Nina. Pausing at the Canary Islands on February 15 to replenish supplies, he dispatched a letter to his patron Luis de Santangel, who immediately had it printed and, in effect, published worldwide.
First Blood
In addition to the observations Columbus made in his letter regarding the Indians’ timidity, he recorded in an October 14, 1492, journal entry his opinion that no fortress was required at La Navidad, “for these people are very simple as regards the use of arms.” The garrison Columbus left behind at unfortified La Navidad when he went back to Spain set about pillaging goods and raping women as soon as he departed. The “timid” Indians retaliated. When Columbus returned in November 1493, on his second voyage, no Spaniards were left alive.
Carving Up a New World
Columbus made four voyages to America. His first triggered a dispute between Spain and Portugal, whose king had rebuffed the Great Navigator back in 1484. The failure to back him notwithstanding, the Portuguese crown pressed claims to Columbus’s discoveries, which soon led Pope Alexander VI to issue a pair of papal bulls (Inter Caetera and Inter Caetera II) in 1493 that divided the newly discovered and yet-to-be-discovered world between Spain and Portugal. The two nations formalized this decree with the Treaty of Tordesillas (June 7, 1494), which established a line of demarcation at 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands.
Three More Voyages
In the meantime, Ferdinand and Isabella sent Columbus on his second voyage (from Cadiz, on September 25, 1493), this time grandly outfitted with a fleet of 17 ships and nearly 1,500 men. After discovering the grim fate of La Navidad, Columbus set up a new colony, named Isabella, about 70 miles east of that bloody site. Columbus explored the Caribbean for some five months, then tried to govern the fledgling colony he had planted, but instantly proved to be a disastrously inept administrator. He returned to Spain in 1496, leaving his brother Bartolome in charge with instructions to move the settlement to the south coast of Hispaniola. Renamed Santo Domingo, this became the first permanent European settlement in the New World.
In June 1496, when Columbus landed at Cadiz, it was not to a hero’s welcome. Although he continued to protest that he had found a shortcut to gold-and spice-rich Asia, he had clearly failed to find the mainland (where, presumably, the treasure was stashed), and discouraged colonists trickled back to Spain with complaints about the Great Navigator’s abusiveness and ineptitude. Nevertheless, growing competition from Portugal, which sent Vasco da Gama to India in 1497, prompted Isabella and Ferdinand to fund a third voyage. With difficulty—on account of his tarnished reputation—Columbus gathered a crew to man six ships, which departed Spain in May 1498, reaching Trinidad on July 31, 1498. On August 1, they landed on the mainland, and Columbus thereby became the discoverer of South America.
He also discovered pearls at islands near the coast. This must have been a great relief, for his royal sponsors were continually fuming about Columbus’s failure to harvest the treasure trove they had anticipated. But then came the bad news. Sailing across the Caribbean to Santo Domingo, Columbus found the colonists in revolt. In the meantime, the disgruntled Spanish sovereigns had dispatched a royal commissioner, Francisco de Bobadilla, who arrived from Spain in 1500 to straighten matters out. He summarily stripped the Columbus brothers of governing authority and sent them back to Spain in chains.
The captain of the returning vessel thought Columbus had gotten a raw deal and removed the shackles, but Columbus dramatically insisted that he appear before Isabella and Ferdinand in chains. The conscience-stricken pair immediately ordered him freed. In May 1502, they even sent him on a fourth and final voyage. Landing briefly at Martinique, Columbus sailed on to Santo Domingo, only to be refused permission to land. He explored the Central American coast and was marooned for a year in Jamaica because his wooden vessels had been thoroughly rotted by shipworm. Subsequently rescued, he reached Spain in November 1504 and died two years later (on May 20, 1506) at Valladolid, still claiming that he had reached Asia and arguing fruitlessly for his family’s right to a share of whatever wealth and power his discoveries might yet yield.
Why We’re Not Called Columbia
In the end, Columbus was cheated even of the honor of having his major discovery named for him. The Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci (1454-1512) claimed to have made four Atlantic voyages between 1497 and 1504, although only two have been absolutely confirmed: one in 1499, commissioned by Spain and resulting in the discovery, of Brazil and Venezuela, and another in 1501, to Brazil on behalf of Portugal. Following the 1501 voyage, Vespucci coined the phrase Mundus Novus—New World-to describe the region. The name stuck. Then, in 1507, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemuller published an account of Vespucci’s voyages, along with a map and Cosmographiae introductio (Introduction to Cosmography), a treatise on mapmaking. It was Waldseemuller who used a Latinized form of Vespucci’s first name to label the region Amerigo Vespucci had explored.
The Least You Need to Know
Columbus was hardly unique in believing the earth to be round. However, he did set sail and persuade a crew that they would not fall off the edge of a flat world.
