The Life and Legacy of Christopher Columbus E-Book

• Herausgeber: Charles River Editors
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Serie: Legendary Explorers
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 106

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

“At two o'clock in the morning the land was discovered…As I saw that they were very friendly to us, and perceived that they could be much more easily converted to our holy faith by gentle means than by force, I presented them with some red caps, and strings of beads to wear upon the neck, and many other trifles of small value, wherewith they were much delighted, and became wonderfully attached to us.” – Christopher Columbus’s diary, October 11-12, 1492

A lot of ink has been spilled covering the lives of history’s most influential figures, but how much of the forest is lost for the trees? The Age of Exploration and the explorers who set out on their history-making expeditions left many legacies and profoundly influenced history around the world. The voyages of men like Columbus and the conquests of men like Cortes escalated tensions between the European nations, initiated imperialistic empires on a global scale, helped birth the United States, and ensured that the wars in the 20th century were truly world wars. In Charles River Editors’ Legendary Explorers series, readers can get caught up to speed on the lives of the most important explorers of history in the time it takes to finish a commute, while learning interesting facts long forgotten or never known.

The most seminal event of the last millennium might also be its most controversial. As schoolchildren have been taught for over 500 years, “In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” In October of that year, the Italian Christopher Columbus immortalized himself by landing in the New World and beginning the process of European settlement in the Americas for Spain, bringing the Age of Exploration to a new hemisphere with him. Ironically, the Italian had led a Spanish expedition, in part because the Portugese rejected his offers in the belief that sailing west to Asia would take too long.

Columbus had better luck with the Spanish royalty, successfully persuading Queen Isabella to commission his expedition. In August 1492, Columbus set west for India at the helm of the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria. Befitting a legendary trip, the journey was star-crossed from the beginning. The Pinta’s rudder broke early on, and just days into the journey Columbus’ compass stopped pointing due north and started pointing to the Earth’s magnetic north pole, something the Europeans knew nothing about. Columbus knew that the uncertainty of the expedition’s destination made his crew nervous, so he hid his compass’ “malfunction” from his crew.  Additionally, after 30 days of sailing, the expedition still had not sighted land, so Columbus started lying to his crew about the distance they sailed each day, telling them they had sailed fewer miles than they actually had so as not to scare them even more. 

On October 7, 1492, the three ships spotted flocks of birds, suggesting land was nearby, so Columbus followed the direction in which the birds flew. On the night of October 11, the expedition sighted land, and when Columbus came ashore the following day in the Bahamas, he thought he was in Japan, but the natives he came into contact with belied the descriptions of the people and lands of Asia as wealthy and resourceful. Instead, the bewildered Columbus would note in his journal that the natives painted their bodies, wore no clothes and had primitive weapons, leading him to the conclusion they would be easily converted to Catholicism. When he set sail for home in January 1493, he brought several imprisoned natives back to Spain with him.

Everyone agrees that Columbus’s discovery of the New World was one of the turning points in history, but agreements over his legacy end there. Although his other three voyages to the New World were far less successful and largely overlooked in the narrative of his life, Columbus became such a towering figure in Western history that the United States’ capital was named after George Washington and him.  

Leseprobe

Legendary Explorers: The Life and Legacy of Christopher Columbus

By Charles River Editors

Columbus Lands in the New World, by L. Prang, 1893

About Charles River Editors

Charles River Editors was founded by Harvard and MIT alumni to provide superior editing and original writing services, with the expertise to create digital content for publishers across a vast range of subject matter. In addition to providing original digital content for third party publishers, Charles River Editors republishes civilization’s greatest literary works, bringing them to a new generation via ebooks.

Introduction

Posthumous portrait of Columbus

Christopher Columbus (1451-1506)

“At two o'clock in the morning the land was discovered…As I saw that they were very friendly to us, and perceived that they could be much more easily converted to our holy faith by gentle means than by force, I presented them with some red caps, and strings of beads to wear upon the neck, and many other trifles of small value, wherewith they were much delighted, and became wonderfully attached to us.” – Christopher Columbus’s diary, October 11-12, 1492

A lot of ink has been spilled covering the lives of history’s most influential figures, but how much of the forest is lost for the trees? The Age of Exploration and the explorers who set out on their history-making expeditions left many legacies and profoundly influenced history around the world. The voyages of men like Columbus and the conquests of men like Cortes escalated tensions between the European nations, initiated imperialistic empires on a global scale, helped birth the United States, and ensured that the wars in the 20th century were truly world wars. In Charles River Editors’ Legendary Explorers series, readers can get caught up to speed on the lives of the most important explorers of history in the time it takes to finish a commute, while learning interesting facts long forgotten or never known.

The most seminal event of the last millennium might also be its most controversial. As schoolchildren have been taught for over 500 years, “In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” In October of that year, the Italian Christopher Columbus immortalized himself by landing in the New World and beginning the process of European settlement in the Americas for Spain, bringing the Age of Exploration to a new hemisphere with him. Ironically, the Italian had led a Spanish expedition, in part because the Portugese rejected his offers in the belief that sailing west to Asia would take too long.

Columbus had better luck with the Spanish royalty, successfully persuading Queen Isabella to commission his expedition. In August 1492, Columbus set west for India at the helm of the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria. Befitting a legendary trip, the journey was star-crossed from the beginning. The Pinta’s rudder broke early on, and just days into the journey Columbus’ compass stopped pointing due north and started pointing to the Earth’s magnetic north pole, something the Europeans knew nothing about. Columbus knew that the uncertainty of the expedition’s destination made his crew nervous, so he hid his compass’ “malfunction” from his crew. Additionally, after 30 days of sailing, the expedition still had not sighted land, so Columbus started lying to his crew about the distance they sailed each day, telling them they had sailed fewer miles than they actually had so as not to scare them even more.

On October 7, 1492, the three ships spotted flocks of birds, suggesting land was nearby, so Columbus followed the direction in which the birds flew. On the night of October 11, the expedition sighted land, and when Columbus came ashore the following day in the Bahamas, he thought he was in Japan, but the natives he came into contact with belied the descriptions of the people and lands of Asia as wealthy and resourceful. Instead, the bewildered Columbus would note in his journal that the natives painted their bodies, wore no clothes and had primitive weapons, leading him to the conclusion they would be easily converted to Catholicism. When he set sail for home in January 1493, he brought several imprisoned natives back to Spain with him.

Everyone agrees that Columbus’s discovery of the New World was one of the turning points in history, but agreements over his legacy end there. Although his other three voyages to the New World were far less successful and largely overlooked in the narrative of his life, Columbus became such a towering figure in Western history that the United States’ capital was named after George Washington and him. Conversely, among the Native Americans and indigenous tribes who suffered epidemics and enslavement at the hands of the European settlers, Columbus is widely portrayed as an archvillain.

Legendary Explorers: The Life and Legacy of Christopher Columbus chronicles Columbus’s life and his historic voyages, but it also examines the aftermath of his expeditions and analyzes the controversy surrounding his legacy. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events in his life, you will learn about Columbus like you never have before, in no time at all.

Columbus and Queen Isabella. Detail of the Columbus monument in Madrid (1885)

Legendary Explorers: The Life and Legacy of Christopher Columbus

About Charles River Editors

Introduction

Chapter 1: Origins and Early Years

Chapter 2: Columbus in Lisbon

Chapter 3: The Search for a Royal Sponsor

Chapter 4: The First Voyage and its Impact

Chapter 5: The Second Voyage and the Beginnings of Colonization

Chapter 6: The Third and Fourth Voyages - Disaster and Disgrace

Chapter 7: Columbus’s Final Years and Legacy

Extracts from Columbus’s Journal of His First Voyage

Chapter 1: Origins and Early Years

Christopher Columbus is one of the most famous and controversial figures in history, so it is fittingly paradoxical that very little can actually be established about his life with certainty. As an initial indication of how little history truly knows of the man, even his name is a subject of disagreement, partly as a result of his itinerant life and partly as a result of the array of reputations that have come to surround him in different parts of the world. Christopher Columbus is an adaptation of the Latinized version of his name, “Christophorus Columbus,” which has become prevalent in the English-speaking world, but the name Christopher Columbus would go unrecognized in Spain and Spanish America, where he is known by the Hispanized version of his name: “Cristóbal Colón.” While these two versions are the most widely used today, both are adaptations of his actual given name, which was probably Christoffa Corombo, as it would be pronounced in the local Genoese dialect presumably spoken in his family; a closer version to the original is the standard Italian Cristoforo Colombo.

Tthere is little agreement on a common name for the famous sailor and explorer, but the question of his family’s origins has also inspired a great deal of debate over the years. While his birth and early upbringing in Genoa is well-documented in contemporary materials, scholars have repeatedly claimed that his ancestors came from elsewhere. In part, this would seem to be a consequence of his status as a national hero and an object of patriotic pride in subsequent centuries. Thus, scholars have variously claimed that his family bloodline traced back to Catalonia, Portugal, and Spain, the latter two both being places where he spent formative periods of his career and which had a vested interest in claiming him more fully as a true son. None of these theories have gained ascendancy among mainstream scholars, nor has an intriguing claim that Columbus’s origins were among the Sephardic Jews of the Iberian peninsula. A large part of the evidence for this claim is that Columbus was reticent in later life about his family backgrounds – and why, some scholars have contended, would he have been so reticent unless he were hiding something? And what would he be hiding if not Jewish origins, a major liability in the vigorously Catholic Spain of the late 15th century, which was in the process of expelling all of its Jewish inhabitants? Regardless, the absence of evidence surely does not itself constitute evidence, and the desire to tie Columbus more fully to one or another national or ethnic background mainly provides an index of the way his figure and voyages have been used to serve many purposes.

Those questions aside, there is little doubt that his birthplace was Genoa, and most scholarship has put his year of birth around the latter half of 1451. Genoa was an independent republic at the time, a sea port whose economy revolved around trade routes stretching in various directions across the Mediterranean Sea. In this milieu, it is not surprising that Columbus chose the life that he did. While in other parts of Europe (including Spain), a young man seeking adventure might have opted for a military career, seafaring and trade were an obvious choice in Genoa, which even had its own small colonies in the Greek islands. Columbus later claimed to have first gone to sea at the age of 10, but his first known voyages were on merchant ships to the island of Chios, a Genoese colony in the Aegean Sea which was a port of entry to the Eastern Mediterranean, which in turn was the nearest point of arrival of exotic products from Asia.

Columbus was also born around the time of the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks, whose newly powerful empire threatened trade routes to Asia. In the environment in which he grew up, there were immediate reasons, both economic and religious, to be concerned about the new balance of power. On the economic front, for several centuries, Italian merchants had been able to travel safely to the East and bring back valuable trade goods (the most famous of these was Marco Polo, whose accounts of various Asian kingdoms Columbus read). Now, having conquered Constantinople, the Muslim Turks were dangerously positioned to dominate the highly lucrative trade with the East. Meanwhile, on the religious front, the Ottomans were now not only in control of the holy city of Jerusalem but threatening the Southeastern quadrant of Christendom via their new foothold on the European continent. Both commercial and religious leaders were beginning to call for a new crusade to reestablish Christian control in the East. For some, the rising Muslim power was a sign of the coming apocalypse, anticipating the final struggle between Christ and the Antichrist.

In any case, the economic goal of extending trade routes and the religious goal of expanding Christendom would remain intertwined in Columbus’s later activities. A further effect of the fall of Constantinople was the arrival to Italy of thousands of Christian refugees from the former Byzantium, including Greek-speaking scholars carrying with them classical Greek manuscripts. By most accounts, their arrival was one of the major catalysts for the Italian Renaissance, and the new availability of scholarship would exercise an influence on Columbus, a man of extensive scholarly curiosities.

In his early expeditions, Columbus sailed as far north as the ports of Bristol, England and Galway, Ireland, and possibly even all the way to Iceland. These trips would crucially shift his orientation from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, a sphere of travel and trade that had been unfamiliar to him when growing up. His realignment toward the Atlantic, and thus toward the West, was completed when he settled in Portugal around 1476, ironic given that Columbus started looking west as the Portugese were fixated on looking east. His arrival in Portugal was initially accidental, according to most reports. Although Genoa was at peace with Portugal, his ship, bound to England, was attacked and destroyed just beyond the straits of Gibraltar, and Columbus was reportedly forced to come to shore clinging to an oar. The castaway was treated well by the Portuguese villagers he met on shore, and he proceeded to Lisbon, Portugal’s capital, where he fell in with the city’s small community of Genoese merchants and sailors. He remained based in Lisbon for the next decade, marrying a Portuguese woman and having a son, Diego.

Painting depicting Columbus and his son Diego

Chapter 2: Columbus in Lisbon

Columbus’s enterprise of sailing to the Indies emerged directly out of the cultural and economic environment he discovered in Lisbon. As John Noble Wilford has observed, “Ideas do not emerge in a vacuum. Even a man of his intuition, zeal, and self-assurance could not have conceived of such a scheme in a time much earlier or a place much different from Portugal in the late fifteenth century”. Columbus’s previous world had been that of the richly diverse but limited and fully charted Mediterranean; his world now was that of a country deeply engaged in exploration and expansion.