Christopher Columbus

In the last video, we discussed how the Portuguese began to really expand their exploration around Africa with the invention of the caravel, a fast new ship that could sail into the wind, and how Spain, newly united with Ferdinand and Isabella, completed its campaign to expel Muslims from Spain, the Reconquista, in 1492. They began to look outward for an opportunity to compete with Portugal, and it was into that moment that they received an interesting proposal from this man here, Christopher Columbus.

So, who was Christopher Columbus? Well, he was a navigator. He was born around 1451, we think in Genoa, which is today in Italy. He had sailed quite a bit in his life. He was also a voracious reader, thanks to the invention of the printing press back in 1450. One book that he read with great interest was the account of Marco Polo and his travels in China. Columbus dreamt of getting to China and accessing riches, silk, and spices, and maybe even converting people living in Asia to Christianity, teaming up with them in a new crusade to expel Muslims from the Middle East.

Now, there are two common myths about Columbus that I'd like to dispel. One of these is that Columbus was the first European to discover the Americas. In fact, we know that around 1000 CE, the Vikings of Norway had colonized Greenland and had explored around what is today Canada. So, you might be asking, okay, well if the Vikings discovered America, why aren't we talking about the Vikings in this video? The short answer is the Viking settlement in the Americas did not last very long—less than a generation—and it also didn't really get well known outside of Norway. So, it didn't have the worldwide impact on colonization that Columbus's voyage would have.

The other myth about Columbus is that he was the lone visionary who knew that the world was round, and everybody else thought that the world was flat, and Columbus proved them wrong. In fact, most learned people had known that the world was round since the time of the ancient Greeks. What they thought instead was that the world was simply too big; they estimated that it was about 25,000 miles in circumference, which is pretty close to the truth. They believed that even if you could sail out into the ocean, you would run out of supplies and die long before you ever hit land, because they had no idea that the Americas were over here.

Columbus, however, had done some different calculations. He thought that the circumference of the world was only about 16,000 to 18,000 miles, so that the coast of Japan was about 3,000 miles to the west of Europe. Now, he was wrong but he got very lucky because about 3,000 miles to the west of Europe, he encountered landfall. He just didn't know that what he found there wasn't China.

So, Columbus has this dream and he kind of shops it around the courts of Europe, looking for royal patronage. First, he tries the Portuguese because they are the reigning leaders of navigation, and they turn him down, saying his idea is too risky. He also tries France and England with similar results. Finally, he tries Spain, and Ferdinand and Isabella agree that they will stake him. They give him three ships and a crew of 87 men.

In August of 1492, he takes off, makes a brief stop in the Canary Islands, and then turns west into open waters. In October of 1492, he made landfall, and this is what he found. He landed on the small island that he named San Salvador, which is today in the Bahamas. Then, he continued to explore around the coast of Cuba, which he called Juana, and then he ended up in the island that he called Hispaniola, which is today the island of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

We'll talk more about who he met in the New World in the next video.