Christopher Columbus (1451–1506,) Italian Cristoforo Colombo, Spanish Cristóbal Colón, was an Italian-born Spanish explorer. He is credited as the first European to reach the Americas, thus unleashing globalization and significant changes to human life. In all, Columbus made four transatlantic voyages between 1492 and 1504. Still, he never made contact with North America.
Columbus persuaded Ferdinand II and Isabella I, the Catholic Monarchs of Aragon, Castile, and Leon in Spain, to sponsor an expedition to sail across the Atlantic in search of Asia. In 1492 he set sail with three small ships (the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria.) He made landfall on Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic) in 1492. He launched global European expansion by colonizing the Caribbean.
Returning to Hispaniola in 1493, Columbus settled the island and subjugated the Taino Indians who lived there. In 1496, Columbus shipped nearly 500 captives to Spain, where those who survived the voyage were sold as enslaved people in violation of a royal proclamation. He and his colonists found little gold in the Caribbean, but their efforts led to further New World conquests that brought enormous wealth to Spain and made it the world’s most significant power in the 16th century.
Biographies and historical analyses include Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s Columbus (1991,) W. Phillips and C.R. Phillips’s The Worlds of Christopher Columbus (1992,) and Neiles H. Davidson’s Columbus Then and Now: A Life Reexamined (1997.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Christopher Columbus
Gold is a treasure, and he who possesses it does all he wishes to in this world, and succeeds in helping souls into paradise.
—Christopher Columbus
Topics: Wishes
By prevailing over all obstacles and distractions, one may unfailingly arrive at his chosen goal or destination.
—Christopher Columbus
Topics: Goal
These people have no religion, neither are they idolaters, but are a very gentle race, without the knowledge of any iniquity; they neither kill, nor steal, nor carry weapons… they have a knowledge that there is a God above, and are firmly persuaded that we have come from heaven.
—Christopher Columbus
Topics: People
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