Voyages of Christopher Columbus

Based on Wikipedia: Voyages of Christopher Columbus

The Man Who Got Everything Wrong and Changed Everything

Christopher Columbus was spectacularly, stubbornly, almost comically wrong about the size of the Earth. He underestimated it by about twenty-five percent. He confused Arabic miles with Italian miles. He cherry-picked the most optimistic calculations from ancient geographers and ignored the consensus of his own era's experts. Multiple royal committees examined his proposal and concluded, correctly, that his math was terrible.

And yet.

Between 1492 and 1504, this Genoese navigator led four expeditions across the Atlantic Ocean that would reshape human civilization. Not because he was right about geography—he never was—but because the world turned out to be more interesting than anyone had imagined. Where Columbus expected to find Japan, he found the Caribbean. Where he sought the spice markets of Asia, he stumbled upon continents that Europeans didn't know existed. He died still insisting he'd reached the outskirts of Asia. He hadn't. But the error hardly mattered anymore.

Why Europe Was Looking West in the First Place

To understand Columbus, you have to understand the crisis that created him.

For centuries, European merchants had enjoyed relatively easy access to the luxuries of the East—silk from China, spices from the Indonesian archipelago, opium from various Asian sources. This trade flowed along the famous Silk Road, a network of overland routes that snaked across Central Asia. The system worked because the Mongol Empire, at its height, maintained peace across this vast territory. Historians call this period the Pax Mongolica, Latin for "Mongol Peace."

Then, in 1453, Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks.

This was more than a military defeat. Constantinople had been the eastern gateway of European trade for over a thousand years, first as the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, then as a crucial trading hub. When the Ottomans took control, they didn't shut down trade entirely, but they did make it more expensive and more difficult. European merchants found themselves squeezed out, forced to pay higher prices and accept worse terms.

The established powers of Asia—the Ottoman Empire, the Safavid Empire in Persia, the Mughal Empire in India—collectively controlled the traditional routes. Historians sometimes call these the "gunpowder empires" because they were among the first to effectively integrate firearms into their military systems. They had little incentive to give Europeans favorable treatment.

Europe needed an alternative. The race was on to find a sea route to Asia.

Portugal Gets There First (Sort Of)

Portugal had a head start. While Spain was still fighting the Reconquista—the centuries-long campaign to reclaim the Iberian Peninsula from Moorish rule—Portuguese navigators were methodically exploring the African coast, pushing further south with each expedition.

Their strategy was straightforward: sail around Africa to reach the Indian Ocean. It was slow, dangerous work. The coast of Africa is enormous, and medieval sailing ships were small, fragile things. Crews died of scurvy. Ships wrecked on unfamiliar shores. But by the 1480s, Portuguese explorers were rounding the southern tip of Africa, opening a sea route to the lucrative markets of India and beyond.

Spain, meanwhile, had been busy with other matters. The marriage of Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon in 1469 had united Spain's two most powerful kingdoms, but they still had a war to finish. Only in January 1492 did Spanish forces finally capture Granada, the last Moorish stronghold in Iberia. The Reconquista was complete.

Spain had arrived late to the exploration game. Portugal already dominated the African route. The papal bull of 1481—essentially a decree from the Pope—had given Portugal exclusive rights to discoveries along the African coast. If Spain wanted a piece of the spice trade, it needed to find another way.

Enter Columbus with his improbable proposal: forget going around Africa. Sail west instead.

The Flat Earth Myth and What Columbus Actually Got Wrong

Here's something that might surprise you: educated Europeans in Columbus's time did not think the Earth was flat. That's a myth, traceable to a 17th-century Protestant propaganda campaign against Catholicism, and later popularized by Washington Irving's romantic 1828 biography of Columbus.

The ancient Greeks had figured out the Earth was spherical more than a thousand years before Columbus was born. Eratosthenes, a Greek mathematician working in Alexandria around 240 BCE (Before the Common Era, equivalent to BC), had even calculated the Earth's circumference with remarkable accuracy. His method was elegant: he compared the angles of shadows cast at noon on the summer solstice in two different cities, then used basic geometry to extrapolate the planet's size. His result was off by perhaps ten percent—not bad for someone working without modern instruments.

Medieval scholars knew all this. The idea of a spherical Earth was standard teaching in European universities. Navigators relied on the stars and the curvature of the horizon to plot their courses. Nobody thought Columbus would sail off the edge of the world.

What the experts actually objected to was Columbus's estimate of the distance to Asia.

Most geographers of the time followed the calculations of Ptolemy, the ancient Greco-Egyptian astronomer, who believed that the combined landmass of Europe, Asia, and Africa covered about 180 degrees of the Earth's surface. This left 180 degrees of ocean—a vast, probably uncrossable expanse of water between Western Europe and Eastern Asia.

Columbus disagreed. He preferred the calculations of Marinus of Tyre, a lesser-known ancient geographer who had estimated the landmass at 225 degrees. This would leave only 135 degrees of ocean—still a lot, but theoretically manageable.

Then Columbus made a second error, this one almost farcical. He was working with the calculations of Alfraganus, a 9th-century Arab astronomer who had measured the length of one degree of latitude as fifty-six and two-thirds Arabic miles. But Columbus apparently read this figure as if Alfraganus had been using Italian miles. The Arabic mile was about 1,830 meters; the Italian mile was only about 1,480 meters. Columbus's misreading shrank the Earth by another significant margin.

Add it all up, and Columbus estimated the distance from the Canary Islands (off the coast of Africa) to Japan at about 2,400 nautical miles. The real distance? Over 10,000 nautical miles. He was off by a factor of four.

When Columbus presented his proposal to the Portuguese court in 1484, the king's experts calculated the error immediately. They rejected his plan not because they thought he'd fall off the edge of the world, but because they knew his ships couldn't carry enough food and water to survive a voyage four times longer than he expected.

They were absolutely right. If the Americas hadn't been there, Columbus and his crew would have died at sea.

The Long Campaign for Funding

Rejection in Portugal didn't stop Columbus. In 1486, he secured an audience with the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella. They referred his proposal to a committee of experts.

The committee's conclusion? Columbus had grossly underestimated the distance to Asia. They recommended against funding the expedition.

But Isabella was intrigued enough to keep Columbus around. She gave him a small allowance—about 14,000 maravedís per year, roughly what a sailor might earn—essentially paying him to stay in Spain and not take his ideas to rival courts.

Columbus tried Portugal again in 1488, but by then the Portuguese had rounded the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa. With an eastern route to Asia now viable, they had no interest in Columbus's risky western alternative.

Years passed. Columbus waited, lobbied, waited some more. In 1489, Isabella sent him another 10,000 maravedís and a letter ordering Spanish cities to provide him food and lodging at no charge. It wasn't funding for an expedition, but it kept him fed and hopeful.

The breakthrough came in January 1492, immediately after the fall of Granada. With the Reconquista finally complete, Spain's monarchs could turn their attention to other matters. Columbus was summoned to court for renewed discussions.

Another committee examined his proposal. Again, the experts concluded it was implausible. Columbus, frustrated, left court and headed toward France to try his luck there.

He had traveled several kilometers down the road when a royal messenger caught up with him. King Ferdinand had intervened, sending his clerk Luis de Santángel to make one final appeal to Isabella. Santángel's argument was pragmatic: if Columbus's wild idea somehow worked, Spain would reap enormous rewards. If he failed, they'd lose only a modest investment. And if Spain turned him away, he'd simply take his proposal to France or England. Better to take a chance.

Isabella agreed. Columbus was summoned back to court.

A Remarkable Contract

The agreement signed in April 1492—the Capitulations of Santa Fe—reveals just how uncertain everyone was about Columbus's prospects.

If he succeeded, Columbus would be named "Admiral of the Ocean Sea" and appointed viceroy and governor of any lands he claimed for Spain. He would receive ten percent of all revenues from these territories, in perpetuity. He could nominate candidates for every official position in the new lands. These were extraordinary terms, almost unprecedented in their generosity.

But generosity is cheap when you don't expect to pay. As Columbus's son later noted, Ferdinand and Isabella offered such favorable terms precisely because they doubted Columbus would ever return to collect.

Three Ships and the Wind

Columbus departed from Palos de la Frontera on the morning of August 3, 1492, with three ships and roughly ninety crew members.

The largest vessel was the Santa María, a carrack—a type of three-masted sailing ship designed for carrying cargo over long distances. It was owned and technically captained by Juan de la Cosa, though Columbus commanded the overall expedition from its deck. The two smaller ships were caravels, lighter and faster than the carrack. One was called the Santa Clara but nicknamed the Niña, possibly after its owner, Juan Niño. The other's real name has been lost to history; we know it only by its nickname, the Pinta.

The Pinta and Niña were piloted by the Pinzón brothers, Martín Alonso and Vicente Yáñez, experienced sailors from the town of Palos. Their expertise would prove essential.

Three days out, disaster nearly struck. The Pinta's rudder broke. Martín Alonso Pinzón suspected sabotage by the ship's owners, who he believed had never wanted to make the voyage. The crew rigged a temporary repair with ropes and limped to the Canary Islands, arriving on August 9. There they replaced the rudder, re-rigged the Niña's sails, and resupplied.

The Canary Islands weren't a random waypoint. Columbus had chosen them deliberately because of the trade winds.

Here's something landlubbers often don't appreciate: you can't just point a sailing ship in the direction you want to go and expect to get there. You're at the mercy of the wind. In the Atlantic, the prevailing winds blow in enormous circular patterns. Near the equator, the trade winds blow steadily from northeast to southwest. Further north, the westerlies blow from west to east.

The Portuguese had figured out how to exploit these patterns in a technique they called the volta do mar, "turn of the sea." To reach destinations in the south Atlantic, you first sailed southwest with the trade winds, then caught the westerlies to return. Columbus planned to use the same principle: sail west from the Canaries on the trade winds, then loop north to catch the westerlies home.

It was a sound plan, but Columbus's knowledge of Atlantic weather patterns was imperfect. By sailing due west during hurricane season, skirting the becalmed "horse latitudes" of the mid-Atlantic, he was taking serious risks. Pure luck kept his fleet from running into a tropical cyclone or getting stranded in windless water.

What Columbus Found (And What He Thought He Found)

On October 12, 1492, after thirty-three days at sea from the Canaries, Columbus's lookout spotted land. They had reached an island in what we now call the Bahamas. Columbus named it San Salvador.

He was convinced he had reached the outer islands of Asia—the Indies, as Europeans called the region. The people he encountered, he called "Indians." He spent weeks exploring the Caribbean, convinced that the mainland of China or Japan must be nearby. He found Cuba and Hispaniola (the island now divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic). He found gold ornaments worn by indigenous people, tantalizing hints of the wealth he'd promised his patrons.

He never found the spice markets of Asia. They were still 10,000 miles away.

Columbus would make three more voyages to the Americas—in 1493, 1498, and 1502. He explored the Caribbean islands, the coast of Central America, and the northern coast of South America. He established the first permanent European settlements in the New World. He also oversaw the beginning of the brutal colonization of indigenous peoples, whose populations would collapse under the combined assault of European diseases, violence, and forced labor.

He died in 1506, still insisting he had reached Asia. He never accepted that he had found something entirely different—continents unknown to European geography, separated from Asia by the largest ocean on Earth.

The following year, 1507, a German cartographer named Martin Waldseemüller published a map labeling these new lands "America," after the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci. Vespucci had sailed to the New World after Columbus and recognized what Columbus could not: this was not Asia. It was something new.

The name stuck. Columbus, for all his voyages, would not have continents named after him.

The Larger Pattern

There's an uncomfortable irony in Columbus's story. He succeeded because he was wrong. If he had accepted the scientific consensus of his time—if he had correctly calculated the distance to Asia—he would never have attempted the voyage. No ship of his era could have survived a journey of 10,000 nautical miles. The experts who rejected his proposal were right about the geography and right about the impossibility of his stated goal.

But the world contained something no one had accounted for: two continents, blocking the path to Asia, rich in resources, and already home to millions of people whose lives would be transformed—and often ended—by the arrival of Europeans.

Columbus didn't discover America. People had been living there for at least 15,000 years. The Norse had established settlements in Greenland around 986 CE (Common Era, equivalent to AD) and reached North America, though their presence there faded by the early 15th century. But Columbus's voyages created something new: a permanent connection between the Eastern and Western hemispheres that has shaped everything since.

Historians call this the Columbian Exchange—the massive transfer of plants, animals, diseases, people, and ideas between the Old World and the New. Potatoes and tomatoes went from America to Europe. Horses and cattle went from Europe to America. Smallpox and measles devastated indigenous populations who had no immunity. Millions of Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas as slaves. Sugar plantations, silver mines, and cotton fields would reshape global economics.

The world before 1492 and the world after are almost different planets.

The Final Voyage to Asia

The route Columbus sought—a westward passage to the Spice Islands—was finally completed in 1521, fifteen years after his death. Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese navigator sailing for Spain, led an expedition that rounded the southern tip of South America, crossed the Pacific Ocean, and reached Southeast Asia.

Magellan himself died in the Philippines, killed in a battle with local warriors. But one of his ships, the Victoria, continued westward across the Indian Ocean, around Africa, and back to Spain—completing the first circumnavigation of the Earth.

The crew of the Victoria proved what Columbus had believed but couldn't demonstrate: you could reach Asia by sailing west from Europe. It was just much, much farther than anyone had imagined, and required crossing not one ocean but two, separated by continents that Columbus never knew existed and never accepted were there.

He was wrong about almost everything. But he changed everything anyway.