Christopher Columbus
Christophorus Columbus,
portrait by Sebastiano del Piombo
Italian explorer
Italian Cristoforo Colombo, Spanish Cristóbal Colón
born between August 26 and October 31?, 1451, Genoa [Italy]
died May 20, 1506, Valladolid, Spain
Overview
Genoese navigator and explorer whose transatlantic voyages opened the
way for European exploration, exploitation, and colonization of the
Americas.
He began his career as a young seaman in the Portuguese merchant
marine. In 1492 he obtained the sponsorship of the Spanish monarchs
Ferdinand II and Isabella I for an attempt to reach Asia by sailing
westward over what was presumed to be open sea. On his first voyage he
set sail in August 1492 with three ships—the Santa María, the Niña, and
the Pinta—and land was sighted in the Bahamas on October 12. He sailed
along the northern coast of Hispaniola and returned to Spain in 1493. He
made a second voyage (1493–96) with at least 17 ships and founded La
Isabela (in what is now the Dominican Republic), the first European town
in the New World. This voyage also began Spain’s effort to promote
Christian evangelization. On his third voyage (1498–1500) he reached
South America and the Orinoco River delta. Allegations of his poor
administration led to his being returned to Spain in chains. On his
fourth voyage (1502–04) he returned to South America and sailed along
the coasts of present-day Honduras and Panama. He was unable to attain
his goals of nobility and great wealth. His character and achievements
have long been debated, but scholars generally agree that he was an
intrepid and brilliant navigator.
Main
master navigator and admiral whose four transatlantic voyages (1492–93,
1493–96, 1498–1500, and 1502–04) opened the way for European
exploration, exploitation, and colonization of the Americas. He has long
been called the “discoverer” of the New World, although Vikings such as
Leif Eriksson had visited North America five centuries earlier. Columbus
made his transatlantic voyages under the sponsorship of Ferdinand II and
Isabella I, the Catholic Monarchs of Aragon, Castile, and Leon in Spain.
He was at first full of hope and ambition, an ambition partly gratified
by his title “Admiral of the Ocean Sea,” awarded to him in April 1492,
and by the grants enrolled in the Book of Privileges (a record of his
titles and claims); however, he died a disappointed man.
The period between the quatercentenary celebrations of Columbus’s
achievements in 1892–93 and the quincentenary ones of 1992 saw great
advances in Columbus scholarship. Numerous books about Columbus appeared
in the 1990s, and the insights of archaeologists and anthropologists
began to complement those of sailors and historians. This effort has
given rise, as might be expected, to considerable debate. There was also
a major shift in approach and interpretation; the older pro-European
understanding has given way to one shaped from the perspective of the
inhabitants of the Americas themselves. According to the older
understanding, the “discovery” of the Americas was a great triumph, one
in which Columbus played the part of hero in accomplishing the four
voyages, in being the means of bringing great material profit to Spain
and to other European countries, and in opening up the Americas to
European settlement. The more recent perspective, however, has
concentrated on the destructive side of the European conquest,
emphasizing, for example, the disastrous impact of the slave trade and
the ravages of imported disease on the indigenous peoples of the
Caribbean region and the American continents. The sense of triumph has
diminished accordingly, and the view of Columbus as hero has now been
replaced, for many, by one of a man deeply flawed. While this second
perception rarely doubts Columbus’s sincerity or abilities as a
navigator, it emphatically removes him from his position of honour.
Political activists of all kinds have intervened in the debate, further
hindering the reconciliation of these disparate views.
Life
Early career and preparation for the first voyage
Little is known of Columbus’s early life. The vast majority of scholars,
citing Columbus’s testament of 1498 and archival documents from Genoa
and Savona, believe that he was born in Genoa to a Christian household;
however, it has been claimed that he was a converted Jew or that he was
born in Spain, Portugal, or elsewhere. Columbus was the eldest son of
Domenico Colombo, a Genoese wool worker and merchant, and Susanna
Fontanarossa, his wife. His career as a seaman began effectively in the
Portuguese merchant marine. After surviving a shipwreck off Cape St.
Vincent at the southwestern point of Portugal in 1476, he based himself
in Lisbon, together with his brother Bartholomew. Both were employed as
chart makers, but Columbus was principally a seagoing entrepreneur. In
1477 he sailed to Iceland and Ireland with the merchant marine, and in
1478 he was buying sugar in Madeira as an agent for the Genoese firm of
Centurioni. In 1479 he met and married Felipa Perestrello e Moniz, a
member of an impoverished noble Portuguese family. Their son, Diego, was
born in 1480. Between 1482 and 1485 Columbus traded along the Guinea and
Gold coasts of tropical West Africa and made at least one voyage to the
Portuguese fortress of São Jorge da Mina there, gaining knowledge of
Portuguese navigation and the Atlantic wind systems along the way.
Felipa died in 1485, and Columbus took as his mistress Beatriz Enríquez
de Harana of Córdoba, by whom he had his second son, Ferdinand.
In 1484 Columbus began seeking support for an Atlantic crossing from
King John II of Portugal but was denied aid. (Some conspiracy theorists
have alleged that Columbus made a secret pact with the monarch, but
there is no evidence of this.) By 1486 Columbus was firmly in Spain,
asking for patronage from King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. After at
least two rejections, he at last obtained royal support in January 1492.
This was achieved chiefly through the interventions of the Spanish
treasurer, Luis de Santángel, and of the Franciscan friars of La Rábida,
near Huelva, with whom Columbus had stayed in the summer of 1491. Juan
Pérez of La Rábida had been one of the queen’s confessors and perhaps
procured him the crucial audience.
Christian missionary and anti-Islamic fervour, the power of Castile
and Aragon, the fear of Portugal, the lust for gold, the desire for
adventure, the hope of conquests, and Europe’s genuine need for a
reliable supply of herbs and spices for cooking, preserving, and
medicine all combined to produce an explosion of energy that launched
the first voyage. Columbus had been present at the siege of Granada,
which was the last Moorish stronghold to fall to Spain (January 2,
1492), and he was in fact riding back from Grenada to La Rábida when he
was recalled to the Spanish court and the vital royal audience.
Granada’s fall had produced euphoria among Spanish Christians and
encouraged designs of ultimate triumph over the Islamic world, albeit
chiefly, perhaps, by the back way round the globe. A direct assault
eastward could prove difficult, because the Ottoman Empire and other
Islamic states in the region had been gaining strength at a pace that
was threatening the Christian monarchies themselves. The Islamic powers
had effectively closed the land routes to the East and made the sea
route south from the Red Sea extremely hard to access.
In the letter that prefaces his journal of the first voyage, the
admiral vividly evokes his own hopes and binds them all together with
the conquest of the infidel, the victory of Christianity, and the
westward route to discovery and Christian alliance:
…and I saw the Moorish king come out of the gates of the city and
kiss the royal hands of Your Highnesses…and Your Highnesses, as Catholic
Christians…took thought to send me, Christopher Columbus, to the said
parts of India, to see those princes and peoples and lands…and the
manner which should be used to bring about their conversion to our holy
faith, and ordained that I should not go by land to the eastward, by
which way it was the custom to go, but by way of the west, by which down
to this day we do not know certainly that anyone has passed; therefore,
having driven out all the Jews from your realms and lordships in the
same month of January, Your Highnesses commanded me that, with a
sufficient fleet, I should go to the said parts of India, and for this
accorded me great rewards and ennobled me so that from that time
henceforth I might style myself “Don” and be high admiral of the Ocean
Sea and viceroy and perpetual Governor of the islands and continent
which I should discover…and that my eldest son should succeed to the
same position, and so on from generation to generation forever.
Thus a great number of interests were involved in this adventure,
which was, in essence, the attempt to find a route to the rich land of
Cathay (China), to India, and to the fabled gold and spice islands of
the East by sailing westward over what was presumed to be open sea.
Columbus himself clearly hoped to rise from his humble beginnings in
this way, to accumulate riches for his family, and to join the ranks of
the nobility of Spain. In a similar manner, but at a more exalted level,
the Catholic Monarchs hoped that such an enterprise would gain them
greater status among the monarchies of Europe, especially against their
main rival, Portugal. Then, in alliance with the papacy (in this case,
with the Borgia pope Alexander VI [1492–1503]), they might hope to take
the lead in the Christian war against the infidel.
At a more elevated level still, Franciscan brethren were preparing
for the eventual end of the world, as they believed was prophesied in
the Revelation to John. According to that eschatological vision,
Christendom would recapture Jerusalem and install a Christian emperor in
the Holy Land as a precondition for the coming and defeat of Antichrist,
the Christian conversion of the whole human race, and the Last Judgment.
Franciscans and others hoped that Columbus’s westward project would help
to finance a Crusade to the Holy Land that might even be reinforced by,
or coordinated with, offensives from the legendary ruler Prester John,
who was thought to survive with his descendants in the lands to the east
of the infidel. The emperor of Cathay—whom Europeans referred to as the
Great Khan of the Golden Horde—was himself held to be interested in
Christianity, and Columbus carefully carried a letter of friendship
addressed to him by the Spanish monarchs. Finally, the Portuguese
explorer Bartolomeu Dias was known to have pressed southward along the
coast of West Africa, beyond São Jorge da Mina, in an effort to find an
easterly route to Cathay and India by sea. It would never do to allow
the Portuguese to find the sea route first.
First voyage
The first voyage (1492 — 1493)
The ships for the first voyage—the Nina, Pinta, and Santa María—were
fitted out at Palos, on the Tinto River in Spain. Consortia put together
by a royal treasury official and composed mainly of Genoese and
Florentine bankers in Sevilla (Seville) provided at least 1,140,000
maravedis to outfit the expedition, and Columbus supplied more than a
third of the sum contributed by the king and queen. Queen Isabella did
not, then, have to pawn her jewels (a myth first put about by Bartolomé
de Las Casas in the 16th century).
The little fleet left on August 3, 1492. The admiral’s navigational
genius showed itself immediately, for they sailed southward to the
Canary Islands, off the northwest African mainland, rather than sailing
due west to the islands of the Azores. The westerlies prevailing in the
Azores had defeated previous attempts to sail to the west, but in the
Canaries the three ships could pick up the northeast trade winds;
supposedly, they could trust to the westerlies for their return. After
nearly a month in the Canaries the ships set out from San Sebastián de
la Gomera on September 6. On several occasions in September and early
October, sailors spotted floating vegetation and various types of
birds—all taken as signs that land was nearby. But by October 10 the
crew had begun to lose patience, complaining that with their failure to
make landfall, contrary winds and a shortage of provisions would keep
them from returning home. Columbus allayed their fears, at least
temporarily, and on October 12 land was sighted from the Pinta (though
Columbus, on the Niña, later claimed the privilege for himself). The
place of the first Caribbean landfall is hotly disputed, but San
Salvador, or Watling, Island is currently preferred to Samana Cay, Rum
Cay, the Plana Cays, or the Turks and Caicos Islands. Beyond planting
the royal banner, however, Columbus spent little time there, being
anxious to press on to Cipango, or Cipangu (Japan). He thought that he
had found it in Cuba, where he landed on October 28, but he convinced
himself by November 1 that Cuba was the Cathay mainland itself, though
he had yet to see evidence of great cities. Thus, on December 5, he
turned back southeastward to search for the fabled city of Zaiton,
missing through this decision his sole chance of setting foot on Florida
soil.
Adverse winds carried the fleet to an island called Ayti (Haiti) by
its Taino inhabitants; on December 6 Columbus renamed it La Isla
Española, or Hispaniola. He seems to have thought that Hispaniola might
be Cipango or, if not Cipango, then perhaps one of the legendarily rich
isles from which King Solomon’s triennial fleet brought back gold, gems,
and spices to Jerusalem (1 Kings 10:11, 22); alternatively, he reasoned
that the island could be related to the biblical kingdom of Sheba
(Sabaʾ). There Columbus found at least enough gold and prosperity to
save him from ridicule on his return to Spain. With the help of a Taino
cacique, or Indian chief, named Guacanagarí, he set up a stockade on the
northern coast of the island, named it La Navidad, and posted 39 men to
guard it until his return. The accidental running aground of the Santa
María provided additional planks and provisions for the garrison.
On January 16, 1493, Columbus left with his remaining two ships for
Spain. The journey back was a nightmare. The westerlies did indeed
direct them homeward, but in mid-February a terrible storm engulfed the
fleet. The Niña was driven to seek harbour at Santa Maria in the Azores,
where Columbus led a pilgrimage of thanksgiving to the shrine of the
Virgin; however, hostile Portuguese authorities temporarily imprisoned
the group. After securing their freedom Columbus sailed on, stormbound,
and the damaged ship limped to port in Lisbon. There he was obliged to
interview with King John II. These events left Columbus under the
suspicion of collaborating with Spain’s enemies and cast a shadow on his
return to Palos on March 15.
On this first voyage many tensions built up that were to remain
through all of Columbus’s succeeding efforts. First and perhaps most
damaging of all, the admiral’s apparently high religious and even
mystical aspirations were incompatible with the realities of trading,
competition, and colonization. Columbus never openly acknowledged this
gulf and so was quite incapable of bridging it. The admiral also adopted
a mode of sanctification and autocratic leadership that made him many
enemies. Moreover, Columbus was determined to take back both material
and human cargo to his sovereigns and for himself, and this could be
accomplished only if his sailors carried on looting, kidnapping, and
other violent acts, especially on Hispaniola. Although he did control
some of his men’s excesses, these developments blunted his ability to
retain the high moral ground and the claim in particular that his
“discoveries” were divinely ordained. Further, the Spanish court revived
its latent doubts about the foreigner Columbus’s loyalty to Spain, and
some of Columbus’s companions set themselves against him. Captain Pinzón
had disputed the route as the fleet reached the Bahamas; he had later
sailed the Pinta away from Cuba, and Columbus, on November 21, failing
to rejoin him until January 6. The Pinta made port at Bayona on its
homeward journey, separately from Columbus and the Niña. Had Pinzón not
died so soon after his return, Columbus’s command of the second voyage
might have been less than assured. As it was, the Pinzón family became
his rivals for reward.
Second voyage
The second voyage (1493 — 1496)
The gold, parrots, spices, and human captives Columbus displayed for his
sovereigns at Barcelona convinced all of the need for a rapid second
voyage. Columbus was now at the height of his popularity, and he led at
least 17 ships out from Cádiz on September 25, 1493. Colonization and
Christian evangelization were openly included this time in the plans,
and a group of friars shipped with him. The presence of some 1,300
salaried men with perhaps 200 private investors and a small troop of
cavalry are testimony to the anticipations for the expedition.
Sailing again via Gomera in the Canary Islands, the fleet took a more
southerly course than on the first voyage and reached Dominica in the
Lesser Antilles on November 3. After sighting the Virgin Islands, it
entered Samaná Bay in Hispaniola on November 23. Michele de Cuneo,
deeply impressed by this unerring return, remarked that “since Genoa was
Genoa there was never born a man so well equipped and expert in
navigation as the said lord Admiral.”
An expedition to Navidad four days later was shocked to find the
stockade destroyed and the men dead. Here was a clear sign that Taino
resistance had gathered strength. More fortified places were rapidly
built, including a city, founded on January 2 and named La Isabela for
the queen. On February 2 Antonio de Torres left La Isabela with 12
ships, some gold, spices, parrots, and captives (most of whom died en
route), as well as the bad news about Navidad and some complaints about
Columbus’s methods of government. While Torres headed for Spain, two of
Columbus’s subordinates, Alonso de Ojeda and Pedro Margarit, took
revenge for the massacre at Navidad and captured slaves. In March
Columbus explored the Cibao Valley (thought to be the gold-bearing
region of the island) and established the fortress of St. Thomas there.
Then, late in April, Columbus led the Niña and two other ships to
explore the Cuban coastline and search for gold in Jamaica, only to
conclude that Hispaniola promised the richest spoils for the settlers.
The admiral decided that Hispaniola was indeed the biblical land of
Sheba and that Cuba was the mainland of Cathay. On June 12, 1494,
Columbus insisted that his men swear a declaration to that effect—an
indication that he intended to convince his sovereign he had reached
Cathay, though not all of Columbus’s company agreed with him. The
following year he began a determined conquest of Hispaniola, spreading
devastation among the Taino. There is evidence, especially in the
objections of a friar, Bernardo Buil, that Columbus’s methods remained
harsh.
The admiral departed La Isabela for Spain on March 10, 1496, leaving
his brothers, Bartholomew and Diego, in charge of the settlement. He
reached Cádiz on June 11 and immediately pressed his plans for a third
voyage upon his sovereigns, who were at Burgos. Spain was then at war
with France and needed to buy and keep its alliances; moreover, the
yield from the second voyage had fallen well short of the investment.
Portugal was still a threat, though the two nations had divided the
Atlantic conveniently between themselves in the Treaty of Tordesillas
(June 7, 1494). According to the treaty Spain might take all land west
of a line drawn from pole to pole 370 leagues—i.e., about 1,185 miles
(1,910 km)—west of the Cape Verde Islands, whereas Portugal could claim
land to the east of the line; but what about the other side of the
world, where West met East? Also, there might be a previously
undiscovered antipodean continent; who, then, should be trusted to draw
the line there? Ferdinand and Isabella therefore made a cautious third
investment.
Third voyage
The third voyages (1498 — 1500)
Six ships left Sanlúcar de Barrameda on May 30, 1498, three
filled with explorers and three with provisions for the settlement on
Hispaniola. It was clear now that Columbus was expected both to find
great prizes and to establish the flag of Spain firmly in the East.
Certainly he found prizes, but not quite of the kind his sponsors
required. His aim was to explore to the south of the existing
discoveries, in the hope of finding both a strait from Cuba (his
“Cathay”) to India and, perhaps, the unknown antipodean continent. On
June 21 the provision ships left Gomera for Hispaniola, while the
explorers headed south for the Cape Verde Islands. Columbus began the
Atlantic crossing on July 4 from Sao Tiago Island in Cape Verde. He
discovered the principle of compass variation (the variation at any
point on the Earth’s surface between the direction to magnetic and
geographic north), for which he made brilliant allowance on the journey
from Margarita Island to Hispaniola on the later leg of this voyage, and
he also observed, though misunderstood, the diurnal rotation of the
northern polestar (Polaris). After stopping at Trinidad (named for the
Holy Trinity, whose protection he had invoked for the voyage), Columbus
entered the Gulf of Paria and planted the Spanish flag on the Paria
Peninsula in Venezuela. He sent the caravel El Corréo southward to
investigate the mouth of the Grande River (a northern branch of the
Orinoco River delta), and by August 15 he knew by the great torrents of
fresh water flowing into the Gulf of Paria that he had discovered
another continent—“another world.” But he did not find the strait to
India, nor did he find King Solomon’s gold mines, which his reading had
led him and his sovereigns to expect in these latitudes; and he made
only disastrous discoveries when he returned to Hispaniola.
Both the Taino and the European immigrants had resented the rule of
Bartholomew and Diego Columbus. A rebellion by the mayor of La Isabela,
Francisco Roldán, had led to appeals to the Spanish court, and, even as
Columbus attempted to restore order (partly by hangings), the Spanish
chief justice, Francisco de Bobadilla, was on his way to the colony with
a royal commission to investigate the complaints. It is hard to explain
exactly what the trouble was. Columbus’s report to his sovereigns from
the second voyage, taken back by Torres and so known as the Torres
Memorandum, speaks of sickness, poor provisioning, recalcitrant natives,
and undisciplined hidalgos (gentry). It may be that these problems had
intensified. But the Columbus family must be held at least partly
responsible, intent as it was on enslaving the Taino and shipping them
to Europe or forcing them to mine gold on Hispaniola. Under Columbus’s
original system of gold production, local chiefs had been in charge of
delivering gold on a loose per capita basis; the adelantado (governor)
Bartholomew Columbus had replaced that policy with a system of direct
exploitation led by favoured Spaniards, causing widespread dissent among
unfavoured Spaniards and indigenous chiefs. Bobadilla ruled against the
Columbus family when he arrived in Hispaniola. He clapped Columbus and
his two brothers in irons and sent them promptly back on the ship La
Gorda, and they arrived at Cádiz in late October 1500.
During that return journey Columbus composed a long letter to his
sovereigns that is one of the most extraordinary he wrote, and one of
the most informative. One part of its exalted, almost mystical, quality
may be attributed to the humiliations the admiral had endured
(humiliations he compounded by refusing to allow the captain of the La
Gorda to remove his chains during the voyage) and another to the fact
that he was now suffering severely from sleeplessness, eyestrain, and a
form of rheumatoid arthritis, which may have hastened his death. Much of
what he said in the letter, however, seems genuinely to have expressed
his beliefs. It shows that Columbus had absolute faith in his
navigational abilities, his seaman’s sense of the weather, his eyes, and
his reading. He asserted that he had reached the outer region of the
Earthly Paradise, in that, during his earlier approach to Trinidad and
the Paria Peninsula, the polestar’s rotation had given him the
impression that the fleet was climbing. The weather had become extremely
mild, and the flow of fresh water into the Gulf of Paria was, as he saw,
enormous. All this could have one explanation only—they had mounted
toward the temperate heights of the Earthly Paradise, heights from which
the rivers of Paradise ran into the sea. Columbus had found all such
signs of the outer regions of the Earthly Paradise in his reading, and
indeed they were widely known. On this estimate, he was therefore close
to the realms of gold that lay near Paradise. He had not found the gold
yet, to be sure, but he knew where it was. Columbus’s expectations thus
allowed him to interpret his discoveries in terms of biblical and
classical sources and to do so in a manner that would be comprehensible
to his sponsors and favourable to himself.
This letter, desperate though it was, convinced the sovereigns that,
even if he had not yet found the prize, he had been close to it after
all. They ordered his release and gave him audience at Granada in late
December 1500. They accepted that Columbus’s capacities as navigator and
explorer were unexcelled, although he was an unsatisfactory governor,
and on September 3, 1501, they appointed Nicolás de Ovando to succeed
Bobadilla to the governorship. Columbus, though ill and importunate, was
a better investment than the many adventurers and profiteers who had
meantime been licensed to compete with him, and there was always the
danger (revealed in some of the letters of this period) that he would
offer his services to his native Genoa. In October 1501 Columbus went to
Sevilla to make ready his fourth and final expedition.
Fourth voyage
The fourth voyage and final years (1502 — 1504)
The winter and spring of 1501–02 were exceedingly busy. The four chosen
ships were bought, fitted, and crewed, and some 20 of Columbus’s extant
letters and memoranda were written then, many in exculpation of
Bobadilla’s charges, others pressing even harder the nearness of the
Earthly Paradise and the need to reconquer Jerusalem. Columbus took to
calling himself “Christbearer” in his letters and to using a strange and
mystical signature, never satisfactorily explained. He began also, with
all these thoughts and pressures in mind, to compile his Book of
Privileges, which defends the titles and financial claims of the
Columbus family, and his apocalyptic Book of Prophecies, which includes
several biblical passages. The first compilation seems an odd companion
to the second, yet both were closely linked in the admiral’s own mind.
He seems to have been certain that his mission was divinely guided.
Thus, the loftiness of his spiritual aspirations increased as the
threats to his personal ones mounted. In the midst of all these efforts
and hazards, Columbus sailed from Cádiz on his fourth voyage on May 9,
1502.
Columbus’s sovereigns had lost much of their confidence in him, and
there is much to suggest that pity mingled with hope in their support.
His four ships contrasted sharply with the 30 granted to the governor
Ovando. His illnesses were worsening, and the hostility to his rule in
Hispaniola was unabated. Thus, Ferdinand and Isabella forbade him to
return there. He was to resume, instead, his interrupted exploration of
the “other world” to the south that he had found on his third voyage and
to look particularly for gold and the strait to India. Columbus expected
to meet the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama in the East, and the
sovereigns instructed him on the appropriate courteous behaviour for
such a meeting—another sign, perhaps, that they did not wholly trust
him. They were right. He departed from Gran Canaria on the night of May
25, made landfall at Martinique on June 15 (after the fastest crossing
to date), and was, by June 29, demanding entrance to Santo Domingo on
Hispaniola. Only on being refused entry by Ovando did he sail away to
the west and south. From July to September 1502 he explored the coast of
Jamaica, the southern shore of Cuba, Honduras, and the Mosquito Coast of
Nicaragua. His feat of Caribbean transnavigation, which took him to
Bonacca Island off Cape Honduras on July 30, deserves to be reckoned on
a par, as to difficulty, with that of crossing the Atlantic, and the
admiral was justly proud of it. The fleet continued southward along
Costa Rica. Constantly probing for the strait, Columbus sailed round the
Chiriquí Lagoon (in Panama) in October; then, searching for gold, he
explored the Panamanian region of Veragua (Veraguas) in the foulest of
weather. In order to exploit the promising gold yield he was beginning
to find there, the admiral in February 1503 attempted to establish a
trading post at Santa María de Belén on the bank of the Belén
(Bethlehem) River under the command of Bartholomew Columbus. However,
Indian resistance and the poor condition of his ships (of which only two
remained, fearfully holed by shipworm) caused him to turn back to
Hispaniola. On this voyage disaster again struck. Against Columbus’s
better judgment, his pilots turned the fleet north too soon. The ships
could not make the distance and had to be beached on the coast of
Jamaica. By June 1503 Columbus and his crews were castaways.
Columbus had hoped, as he said to his sovereigns, that “my hard and
troublesome voyage may yet turn out to be my noblest”; it was in fact
the most disappointing of all and the most unlucky. In its explorations
the fleet had missed discovering the Pacific (across the isthmus of
Panama) and failed to make contact with the Maya of Yucatán by the
narrowest of margins. Two of the men—Diego Méndez and Bartolomeo Fieschi,
captains of the wrecked ships La Capitana and Vizcaíno,
respectively—left about July 17 by canoe to get help for the castaways;
although they managed to traverse the 450 miles (720 km) of open sea to
Hispaniola, Ovando made no great haste to deliver that help. In the
meantime, the admiral displayed his acumen once again by correctly
predicting an eclipse of the Moon from his astronomical tables, thus
frightening the local peoples into providing food; but rescuers did not
arrive until June 1504, and Columbus and his men did not reach
Hispaniola until August 13 of that year. On November 7 he sailed back to
Sanlúcar and found that Queen Isabella, his main supporter, had made her
will and was dying.
Columbus always maintained that he had found the true Indies and
Cathay in the face of mounting evidence that he had not. Perhaps he
genuinely believed that he had been there; in any event, his
disallowances of the “New World” hindered his goals of nobility and
wealth and dented his later reputation. Columbus had been remote from
his companions and intending colonists, and he had been a poor judge of
the ambitions, and perhaps the failings, of those who sailed with him.
This combination proved damaging to almost all of his hopes.
Nonetheless, it would be wrong to suppose that Columbus spent his final
two years wholly in illness, poverty, and oblivion. His son Diego was
well established at court, and the admiral himself lived in Sevilla in
some style. His “tenth” of the gold diggings in Hispaniola, guaranteed
in 1493, provided a substantial revenue (against which his Genoese
bankers allowed him to draw), and one of the few ships to escape a
hurricane off Hispaniola in 1502 (in which Bobadilla himself went down)
was that carrying Columbus’s gold. He felt himself ill-used and
shortchanged nonetheless, and these years were marred, for both him and
King Ferdinand, by his constant pressing for redress. Columbus followed
the court from Segovia to Salamanca and Valladolid, attempting to gain
an audience. He knew that his life was nearing its end, and in August
1505 he began to amend his will. He died on May 20, 1506. First he was
laid in the Franciscan friary in Valladolid, then taken to the family
mausoleum established at the Carthusian monastery of Las Cuevas in
Sevilla. In 1542, by the will of his son Diego, Columbus’s bones were
laid with his own in the Cathedral of Santo Domingo, Hispaniola (now in
the Dominican Republic). After Spain ceded Hispaniola to France, the
remains were moved to Havana, Cuba, in 1795 and returned to Sevilla in
1898. In 1877, however, workers at the cathedral in Santo Domingo
claimed to have found another set of bones that were marked as those of
Columbus. Since 1992 these bones have been interred in the Columbus
Lighthouse (Faro a Colón).
Principal evidence of travels
Remains
There are few material remains of Columbus’s travels. Efforts to find
the Spaniards’ first settlement on Hispaniola have so far failed, but
the present-day fishing village of Bord de Mer de Limonade (near
Cap-Haïtien, Haiti) may be close to the original site, and a Taino
chieftain’s settlement has been identified nearby. Concepción de la
Vega, which Columbus founded on the second voyage, may be the present La
Vega Vieja, in the Dominican Republic. Remains at the site of La Isabela
are still to be fully excavated, as are those at Sevilla la Nueva,
Jamaica, where Columbus’s two caravels were beached on the fourth
voyage. The techniques of skeletal paleopathology and paleodemography
are being applied with some success to determine the fates of the native
populations.
Written sources
The majority of the surviving primary sources about Columbus are not
private diaries or missives; instead, they were intended to be read by
other people. There is, then, an element of manipulation about them—a
fact that must be borne fully in mind for their proper understanding.
Foremost among these sources are the journals written by Columbus
himself for his sovereigns—one for the first voyage, now lost though
partly reconstructed; one for the second, almost wholly gone; and one
for the third, which, like the first, is accessible through
reconstructions made by using later quotations. Each of the journals may
be supplemented by letters and reports to and from the sovereigns and
their trusted officials and friends, provisioning decrees from the
sovereigns, and, in the case of the second voyage, letters and reports
of letters from fellow voyagers (especially Michele da Cuneo, Diego
Alvarez Chanca, and Guillermo Coma). There is no journal and only one
letter from the fourth voyage, but a complete roster and payroll survive
from this, alone of all the voyages; in addition, an eyewitness account
survives that has been plausibly attributed to Columbus’s younger son,
Ferdinand (born c. 1488), who traveled with the admiral. Further light
is thrown upon the explorations by the so-called Pleitos de Colón,
judicial documents concerning Columbus’s disputed legacy. A more recent
discovery is a copybook that purportedly contains five narrative letters
and two personal ones from Columbus, all previously unknown, as well as
additional copies of two known letters—all claimed as authentic.
Supplemental narratives include The Life of the Admiral Christopher
Columbus, which has been attributed to Ferdinand Columbus, the Historia
de los Reyes Católicos (c. 1500) of Andrés Bernáldez (a friend of
Columbus and chaplain to the archbishop of Sevilla), and the Historia de
las Indias, which was compiled about 1550–63 by Bartolomé de Las Casas
(former bishop of Chiapas and a champion of the indigenous people of the
Americas).
Columbus’s intentions and presuppositions may be better understood by
examining the few books still extant from his own library. Some of these
were extensively annotated, often by the admiral and sometimes by his
brother Bartholomew, including copies of the Imago mundi by the
15th-century French theologian Pierre d’Ailly (a compendium containing a
great number of cosmological and theological texts), the Historia rerum
ubique gestarum of Pope Pius II, published in 1477, the version of The
Travels of Marco Polo known as the De consuetudinibus et condicionibus
orientalium regionum of Francesco Pipino (1483–85), Alfonso de
Palencia’s late 15th-century Castilian translation of Plutarch’s
Parallel Lives, and the humanist Cristoforo Landino’s Italian
translation of the Natural History of Pliny the Elder. Other books known
to have been in Columbus’s possession are the Guide to Geography of the
ancient astronomer and geographer Ptolemy, the Catholicon of the
15th-century encyclopaedist John of Genoa, and a popular handbook to
confession, the Confessionale produced by the Dominican St. Antoninus of
Florence. The whole shows that the admiral was adept in Latin,
Castilian, and Italian, if not expert in all three. He annotated
primarily in Latin and Spanish, very rarely in Italian. He had probably
already read and annotated at least the first three named texts before
he set out on his first voyage to the “Indies.” Columbus was a deeply
religious and reflective man as well as a distinguished seaman, and,
being largely self-taught, he had a reverence for learning, perhaps
especially the learning of his most influential Spanish supporters. A
striking manifestation of his sensibilities is the Book of Prophecies, a
collection of pronouncements largely taken from the Bible and seeming to
bear directly on his role in the western voyages; the book was probably
compiled by Columbus and his friend the Carthusian friar Gaspar Gorricio
between September 1501 and March 1502, with additions until circa 1505.
Map of Juan de la Cosa, 1500
Calculations
Contrary to common lore, Columbus never thought that the world was flat.
Educated Europeans had known that the Earth was spherical in shape since
at least the early 7th century, when the popular Etymologies of St.
Isidore of Sevilla were produced in Spain. Columbus’s miscalculations,
such as they were, lay in other areas. First, his estimate of the sea
distance to be crossed to Cathay was wildly inaccurate. Columbus
rejected Ptolemy’s estimate of the journey from West to East overland,
substituting a far longer one based on a chart (now lost) supplied by
the Florentine mathematician and geographer Paolo Toscanelli, and on
Columbus’s preference for the calculations of the classical geographer
Marinus of Tyre. Additionally, Columbus’s reading primarily of the
13th–14th-century Venetian Marco Polo’s Travels gave him the idea that
the lands of the East stretched out far around the back of the globe,
with the island of Cipango—itself surrounded by islands—located a
further 1,500 miles (2,400 km) from the mainland of Cathay. He seems to
have argued that this archipelago might be near the Azores. Columbus
also read the seer Salathiel-Ezra in the books of Esdras, from the
Apocrypha (especially 2 Esdras 6:42, in which the prophet states that
the Earth is six parts land to one of water), thus reinforcing these
ideas of the proportion of land- to sea-crossing. The mistake was
further compounded by his idiosyncratic view of the length of a degree
of geographic latitude. The degree, according to Arabic calculators,
consisted of 562/3 Arab miles, and an Arab mile measured 6,481 feet
(1,975.5 metres). Given that a nautical mile measures 6,076 feet (1,852
metres), this degree amounts to approximately 60.45 nautical miles (112
km). Columbus, however, used the Italian mile of 4,847 feet (1,477.5
metres) for his computations and thus arrived at approximately 45
nautical miles (83 km) to a degree. This shortened the supposed distance
across the sea westward to such an extent that Zaiton, Marco Polo’s
great port of Cathay, would have lain a little to the east of
present-day San Diego, California, U.S.; also, the islands of Cipango
would have been about as far north of the Equator as the Virgin
Islands—close to where Columbus actually made his landfalls. (See also
Sidebar: Measuring the Earth, Classical and Arabic.)
The miscalculation of distance may have been willful on Columbus’s
part and made with an eye to his sponsors. The first journal suggests
that Columbus may have been aware of his inaccuracy, for he consistently
concealed from his sailors the great number of miles they had covered,
lest they become fearful for the journey back. Such manipulations may be
interpreted as evidence of bravery and the need to inspire confidence
rather than of simple dishonesty or error.
Assessment
The debate about Columbus’s character and achievements began at least as
early as the first rebellion of the Taino Indians and continued with
Roldán, Bobadilla, and Ovando. It has been revived periodically (notably
by Las Casas and Jean-Jacques Rousseau) ever since. The Columbus
quincentenary of 1992 rekindled the intensity of this early questioning
and redirected its aims, often with insightful results. The word
“encounter” is now preferred to “discovery” when describing the contacts
between Europe and the Americas, and more attention has been paid to the
fate of indigenous Americans and to the perspectives of non-Christians.
Enlightening discoveries have been made about the diseases that reached
the New World through Columbus’s agency as well as those his sailors
took back with them to the Old. The pendulum may, however, have swung
too far. Columbus has been blamed for events far beyond his own reach or
knowledge, and too little attention has been paid to the historical
circumstances that conditioned him. His obsessions with lineage and
imperialism, his zealous religious beliefs, his enslaving of indigenous
peoples, and his execution of colonial subjects come from a world remote
from that of modern democratic ideas, but it was the world to which he
belonged. The forces of European expansion, with their slaving and
search for gold, had been unleashed before him and were quite beyond his
control; he simply decided to be in their vanguard. He succeeded.
Columbus’s towering stature as a seaman and navigator, the sheer power
of his religious convictions (self-delusory as they sometimes were), his
personal magnetism, his courage, his endurance, his determination, and,
above all, his achievements as an explorer should continue to be
recognized.
Valerie I.J. Flint
Encyclopaedia Britannica
