John g lenic biography of christopher columbus

Born in the Republic of Genoa , Columbus was a navigator who sailed in search of a westward route to India , China , Japan and the Spice Islands thought to be the East Asian source of spices and other precious oriental goods obtainable only through arduous overland routes. His initial belief that he had reached "the Indies" has resulted in the name " West Indies " being attached to the Bahamas and the islands of the Caribbean.

At the time of Columbus's voyages, the Americas were inhabited by Indigenous Americans , and Columbus later participated in the beginning of the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Columbus died in , and the next year, the New World was named "America" after Amerigo Vespucci , who realized that it was a unique landmass. The search for a westward route to Asia was completed in , when the Magellan expedition sailed across the Pacific Ocean and reached Southeast Asia , before returning to Europe and completing the first circumnavigation of the world.

Many Europeans of Columbus's day assumed that a single, uninterrupted ocean surrounded Europe, Asia and Africa, although Norse explorers had colonized areas of North America beginning with Greenland c. Until the midth century, Europe enjoyed a safe land passage to China and India —sources of valued goods such as silk , spices , and opiates —under the hegemony of the Mongol Empire the Pax Mongolica , or Mongol Peace.

With the Fall of Constantinople to the Turkish Ottoman Empire in , European countries sought to compete with the Silk Road dominated by the gunpowder empires through expanded use of ocean voyages to scope out and establish new trade routes. Portugal was the main European power interested in pursuing trade routes overseas, with the neighboring kingdom of Castile —the predecessor to Spain —having been somewhat slower to begin exploring the Atlantic because of the land area it had to reconquer from the Moors during the Reconquista.

This remained unchanged until the late 15th century, following the dynastic union by marriage of Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon together known as the Catholic Monarchs of Spain in , and the completion of the Reconquista in , when the joint rulers conquered the Moorish kingdom of Granada , which had been providing Castile with African goods through tribute.

The fledgling Spanish Empire decided to fund Columbus's expedition in hopes of finding new trade routes and circumventing the lock Portugal had secured on Africa and the Indian Ocean with the papal bull Aeterni regis. In response to the need for a new route to Asia, by the s, Christopher and his brother Bartholomew had developed a plan to travel to the Indies then construed roughly as all of southern and eastern Asia by sailing directly west across what was believed to be the singular "Ocean Sea," the Atlantic Ocean.

By about , Florentine cosmographer Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli sent Columbus a map depicting such a route, with no intermediary landmass other than the mythical island of Antillia. A popular misconception that Columbus had difficulty obtaining support for his plan because Europeans thought the Earth was flat can be traced back to a 17th-century campaign of Protestants against Catholicism, [ 10 ] and was popularized in works such as Washington Irving 's biography of Columbus.

The primitive maritime navigation of Columbus's time relied on both the stars and the curvature of the Earth. Eratosthenes who assumed three variables he had not proved: the distance of the sun, parallel light rays, and that the earth was spherical had measured the diameter of the Earth with good precision in the 2nd century BC, [ 14 ] and the means of calculating its diameter using an astrolabe was known to both scholars and navigators.

Most scholars accepted Ptolemy 's correct assessment that the terrestrial landmass for Europeans of the time, comprising Eurasia and Africa occupied degrees of the terrestrial sphere, and dismissed Columbus's claim that the Earth was much smaller and that Asia was only a few thousand nautical miles to the west of Europe. Columbus believed the incorrect calculations of Marinus of Tyre , putting the landmass at degrees, leaving only degrees of water.

There was a further element of key importance in the voyages of Columbus, the trade winds. The navigational technique for travel in the Atlantic appears to have been exploited first by the Portuguese, who referred to it as the volta do mar 'turn of the sea'. Columbus's knowledge of the Atlantic wind patterns was, however, imperfect at the time of his first voyage.

By sailing directly due west from the Canary Islands during hurricane season , skirting the so-called horse latitudes of the mid-Atlantic, Columbus risked either being becalmed or running into a tropical cyclone , both of which, by chance, he avoided. Around , King John II of Portugal submitted Columbus's proposal to his experts, who rejected it on the basis that Columbus's estimation of a travel distance of 2, nautical miles was about four times too low which was accurate.

In , Columbus was granted an audience with the Catholic Monarchs, and he presented his plans to Isabella. She referred these to a committee, which determined that Columbus had grossly underestimated the distance to Asia. Pronouncing the idea impractical, they advised the monarchs not to support the proposed venture. In Columbus again appealed to the court of Portugal, receiving a new invitation for an audience with John II.

This again proved unsuccessful, in part because not long afterwards Bartolomeu Dias returned to Portugal following a successful rounding of the southern tip of Africa. With an eastern sea route now under its control, Portugal was no longer interested in trailblazing a western trade route to Asia crossing unknown seas. In May , Isabella sent Columbus another 10, maravedis , and the same year the Catholic Monarchs furnished him with a letter ordering all cities and towns under their domain to provide him food and lodging at no cost.

As Queen Isabella's forces neared victory over the Moorish Emirate of Granada for Castile, Columbus was summoned to the Spanish court for renewed discussions. A council led by Isabella's confessor, Hernando de Talavera , found Columbus's proposal to reach the Indies implausible. Columbus had left for France when Ferdinand intervened, [ b ] first sending Talavera and Bishop Diego Deza to appeal to the queen.

In the April " Capitulations of Santa Fe ", Columbus was promised he would be given the title "Admiral of the Ocean Sea" and appointed viceroy and governor of the newly claimed and colonized for the Crown; he would also receive ten percent of all the revenues from the new lands in perpetuity if he was successful. The terms were unusually generous but, as his son later wrote, the monarchs were not confident of his return.

Three days into the journey, on 6 August , the rudder of the Pinta broke. The crew was able to secure the rudder with ropes until they could reach the Canary Islands, where they arrived on 9 August. Las Casas originally interpreted that he reported the shorter distances to his crew so they would not worry about sailing too far from Spain, but Oliver Dunn and James Kelley state that this was a misunderstanding.

On 13 September , Columbus observed that the needle of his compass no longer pointed to the North Star. It was once believed that Columbus had discovered magnetic declination , but it was later shown that the phenomenon was already known, both in Europe and in China. After 29 days out of sight of land, on October 7 , the crew spotted "[i]mmense flocks of birds", some of which his sailors trapped and determined to be "field" birds probably Eskimo curlews and American golden plovers.

Columbus changed course to follow their flight. On October 10, Columbus quelled a mutiny by sailors who wanted to abandon the search and return to Spain. At around pm on 11 October, Columbus thought he saw a light "like a little wax candle rising and falling". They landed on the morning of October Columbus called this island San Salvador; its indigenous name was Guanahani.

Many of the men I have seen have scars on their bodies, and when I made signs to them to find out how this happened, they indicated that people from other nearby islands come to San Salvador to capture them; they defend themselves the best they can. I believe that people from the mainland come here to take them as slaves. They ought to make good and skilled servants, for they repeat very quickly whatever we say to them.

I think they can very easily be made Christians, for they seem to have no religion. If it pleases our Lord, I will take six of them to Your Highnesses when I depart, in order that they may learn our language. Columbus called the indigenous Americans indios Spanish for 'Indians' [ 55 ] [ 56 ] [ 57 ] in the mistaken belief that he had reached the East Indies; [ 58 ] the islands of the Caribbean are termed the West Indies because of this error.

Columbus observed the people and their cultural lifestyle. He also explored the northeast coast of Cuba , landing on 28 October , and the north-western coast of Hispaniola , present day Haiti , by December 5 Columbus was received by the native cacique chieftain Guacanagari , who gave him permission to leave some of his men behind. Columbus left 39 men, including the interpreter Luis de Torres , [ 61 ] [ n ] and founded the settlement of La Navidad.

On 16 January , the homeward journey was begun. On the morning of 15 February, land was spotted. Columbus believed they were approaching the Portuguese Azores Islands , but others felt that they were considerably north of the islands. Columbus turned out to be right. At this spot, Columbus took aboard several islanders with food.

When told of the vow to Our Lady, the islanders directed the crew to a small shrine nearby. When Columbus defied him, Castanheira said he did not believe or care about Columbus' story, denounced the Spaniards, and went back to the island. After another two days, Castanheira released the prisoners, having been unable to get confessions from them or to capture his real target, Columbus.

Some claimed that Columbus was captured, but this is contradicted by Columbus's logbook. He anchored next to a king's harbor patrol ship on 4 March , where he was told a fleet of caravels had been lost in the storm. After spending more than a week in Portugal, Columbus set sail for Spain. He arrived back in Palos on 15 March and later met with Ferdinand and Isabella in Barcelona to report his findings.

He emphasized the potential riches of the land, exaggerating the abundance of gold, and that the natives seemed ready to convert to Christianity. Hispaniola is a miracle. Mountains and hills, plains and pastures, are both fertile and beautiful There are many spices, and great mines of gold and other metals Upon Columbus's return, most people initially accepted that he had reached the East Indies, including the sovereigns and Pope Alexander VI , [ 58 ] though in a letter to the Vatican dated 1 November , the historian Peter Martyr described Columbus as the discoverer of a Novi Orbis " New Globe ".

Inter caetera , issued 4 May , divided the world outside Europe between Spain and Portugal along a north—south meridian leagues west of either the Azores or Cape Verde Islands in the mid-Atlantic, thus granting Spain all the land discovered by Columbus. The stated purpose of the second voyage was to convert the indigenous Americans to Christianity.

Before Columbus left Spain, he was directed by Ferdinand and Isabella to maintain friendly, even loving, relations with the natives. The fleet for the second voyage was much larger: two naos and 15 caravels. In addition, the expedition saw the construction of the first ship in the Americas, the Santa Cruz or India. On 3 November , Christopher Columbus landed on a rugged shore on an island that he named Dominica.

On Santa Cruz , the Europeans saw a canoe with a few Carib men and two women. They had two male captives, and had recently castrated them. The Europeans pursued them, and were met with arrows from both the men and women, [ 84 ] fatally wounding at least one man, who perished about a week later. The fleet continued to the Greater Antilles , first sighting the eastern coast of the island of Puerto Rico , known to its native Taino people as Borinquen , on the afternoon of 17 November Upon landing, Columbus christened the island San Juan Bautista after Saint John the Baptist , preacher and prophet who baptized Jesus Christ , and remained anchored there for two days, 20 and 21 November The women rescued in Guadeloupe explained that any male captives were eaten, and that their own male offspring were castrated and made to serve the Caribs until they were old enough to be considered good to eat.

The Europeans rescued three of these boys. A canoe party led by a cousin of Guacanagari presented Columbus with two golden masks and told him that Guacanagari had been injured by another chief, Caonabo , and that except for some Spanish casualties resulting from sickness and quarrel, the rest of his men were well. There, they established the settlement of La Isabela.

Finding some, he established a small fort in the interior. Columbus left Hispaniola on 24 April , and arrived at the island of Cuba which he had named Juana during his first voyage on 30 April and Discovery Bay, Jamaica , on 5 May. He explored the south coast of Cuba, which he believed to be a peninsula of China rather than an island, and several nearby islands including La Evangelista the Isle of Youth , before returning to Hispaniola on 20 August.

Columbus had planned for Queen Isabella to set up trading posts with the cities of the Far East made famous by Marco Polo, but whose Silk Road and eastern maritime routes had been blockaded to her crown's trade. In , Columbus sent Alonso de Ojeda whom a contemporary described as "always the first to draw blood wherever there was a war or quarrel" to Cibao where gold was being mined , [ 95 ] which resulted in Ojeda's capturing several natives on an accusation of theft.

Ojeda cut the ears off of one native, and sent the others to La Isabela in chains, where Columbus ordered them to be decapitated. They could not get up to search for food, and everyone else was too sick to care for them, so they starved to death in their beds. By , Columbus had shared his viceroyship with one of his military officers named Margarit, ordering him to prioritize Christianizing the natives, but that part of their noses and ears should be cut off for stealing.

Margarit's men exploited the natives by beating, raping and enslaving them, with none on Hispaniola being baptized for another two years. Columbus's brother Diego warned Margarit to follow the admiral's orders, which provoked him to take three caravels back to Spain. Fray Buil, who was supposed to perform baptisms, accompanied Margarit.

After arriving in Spain in late , Buil complained to the Spanish court of the Columbus brothers and that there was no gold. Groups of Margarit's soldiers who remained in the west continued brutalizing the natives. In June of that year, the Spanish crown sent ships and supplies to the colony on Hispaniola, which Florentine merchant Gianotto Berardi had helped procure.

John g lenic biography of christopher columbus

Retrieved 26 January The First Americans. Berkeley: University of California Press. Westminster John Knox Press. The American Historical Review. University of Maryland School of Medicine. Archived from the original on 23 January Archives of Internal Medicine. PMID September The American Journal of the Medical Sciences. Micheal; Slape, Emily Tarver, H.

Micheal; Slape, Emily eds. El Universal in Spanish. Retrieved 2 February Inflammatory Arthritis in Clinical Practice. Elsevier Health Sciences. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. Archived from the original on 27 August Retrieved 20 March Retrieved 3 February Associated Press. Archived from the original on 31 October Retrieved 15 August Retrieved 26 October June Cuadernos de Medicina Forense in Spanish.

AP News. Archived from the original on 19 May Retrieved 21 May New York: G. Putnam's Sons. Evening Star. Archived from the original on 2 January Retrieved 15 August — via Newspapers. In Search of a Kingdom. Boston: Mariner Books. Christopher Columbus did not discover a new world, nor did he ever set foot on the North American continent.

Rather, he established continuous contact between two continents, each with major populations. But he became a national hero for the United States, and, as such, he has frequently been placed on the same level with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln by Americans who prefer mythology to facts. Early in our history, he became a unifying symbol to the struggling English colonies when Puritan preachers began to use his life as an exemplum of the developing American spirit.

On the eve of the American Revolution, poems, songs, sermons, and polemic essays in which Columbus was idealized as the discoverer of a new land for a new people flowed from New England. Such veneration culminated in a movement to name the nation "Columbia. Thinking back in spring to "the antiquities of New England," Cotton Mather came upon a crucial connection, as he saw it, between the voyage of Columbus two centuries before and the Puritans' Great Migration.

Considered together, the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the landing at San Salvador held the key to a great design. To begin with, Columbus's voyage was one of three shaping events of the modern age, all of which occurred in rapid succession at the turn of the sixteenth century: 1 " the Resurrection of Literature ", University Press of New England.

The Legacy of Christopher Columbus in the Americas. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. The Nation. NYU Press. Richard; Gregory, Stanley V. In Benke, Arthur C. Rivers of North America. Anuario Colombiano de Historia Social y de la Cultura. World Digital Library. Retrieved 17 July University of Illinois Press. In Provenzo, Eugene F. World Archaeology.

In King, John ed. The Wilson Quarterly. November — via Google Books. Cornell University Press. Italian Americana. History Today. The History Teacher. Alfred Crosby, a scholar with the mind of a scientist and the heart of a humanist. He writes that "the major initial effect of the Columbian voyages was the transformation of America into a charnel house.

In Jayasuriya, Shihan de S. The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean. Africa World Press. Testimonies from the Columbian Lawsuits. When we speak today of the "legacy" of Christopher Columbus, we usually refer to the broadly historic consequences of his famous voyages, meaning the subsequent European conquest and colonization of the Americas.

Norse Greenland: Viking Peasants in the Arctic. National Geographic. Archived from the original on 7 August Wisconsin Historical Society. Archived from the original on 26 February Retrieved 22 March Vintage Books. When referring to the conquest, Venezuelans tend to side with the original "Indians" inhabiting the territory, even though "we" are generally careful to distinguish ourselves from them, and above all from their contemporary descendants.

This tactical identification suggests that the force of this rejoinder comes not just from the hold of the familiar—Columbus already discovered America, so what's new—but from the appeal of a more exclusive familiarity evoked by a shift of location — he only "discovered" it for Europe, not for "us". It is as if we viewed Columbus's arrival from two perspectives, his own, and that of the natives.

When we want to privilege "our" special viewpoint, we claim as ours the standpoint of the original Americans, the view not from the foreign ship but from our "native" land. An Introduction to Latin American Philosophy. American Literary History. Retrieved 8 February The encounter between two worlds is a fact that cannot be denied The word discovery gives prominence to the heroes of the enterprise; the word encounter gives more emphasis to the peoples who actually "encountered" each other and gave substance to a New World.

Whereas discovery marks a happening, an event, encounter conveys better the idea of the political journey that has brought us to the reality of today, spanning the five hundred years since These historical and political milestones are valuable because they relate the present to both the past and the future. It was inevitable that history written from a Eurocentric standpoint should speak in terms of discovery and it is equally inevitable that, as history has now come to be seen in universal terms, we should have adopted so evocative a term as encounter.

New York: Plume. Not So! New York: Oxford University Press. Retrieved 5 September Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and modern historians. New York: Praeger. European Images of the Americas and the Classical Tradition. Liverpool University Press. New York: W. Science , , — Geodesy for the Layman Report 4th ed. United States Air Force. This cycle of violence, intentionally created to maximize the extraction of wealth from the islands, in combination with the epidemic diseases that were running rampant through the Taino population, together promoted the genocide of the Taino people Therefore, at best, the theory that disease did the business of killing and not the invaders can only be seen as a gratuitous colonizer apologetic designed to absolve the guilt of the continued occupation and exploitation of the indigenous people of this continent.

However, the truth of the matter is much worse and should be called by its appropriate name: American holocaust denial. The Washington Post. Retrieved 4 August Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 26 September Social Justice. Retrieved 29 July The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus. NY: Penguin. Monthly Review Press. Retrieved 1 May In McCrank, Lawrence J.

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Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 21 June Quaternary Science Reviews. Bibcode : QSRv.. Public Opinion Quarterly. Christopher Columbus, Mariner. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Smallpox and its eradication. History of International Public Health. Geneva: World Health Organization. Retrieved 29 April Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

Retrieved 25 December The Cambridge encyclopedia of human paleopathology. Western Journal of Medicine. London, England: BMJ : 65— Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Wollongong, New South Wales: Elsevier : 13— While most of the other epidemics in history however were confined to a single pathogen and typically lasted for less than a decade, the Americas differed in that multiple pathogens caused multiple waves of virgin soil epidemics over more than a century.

Those who survived influenza, may later have succumbed to smallpox, while those who survived both, may then have caught a later wave of measles. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. The Journal of Navigation. Bibcode : JNav Archived from the original PDF on 5 July Retrieved 4 July Mexico City, , book 1, chapter 2, Of Columbus, too, none of the familiarly reproduced portraits is thought to have been made in his lifetime.

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On October 12 land was sighted. He gave the first island he landed on the name San Salvador, although the native population called it Guanahani. He even proposed that the island of Cuba was a part of China. It is hard to determine specifically which islands Columbus visited on this voyage. His descriptions of the native peoples, geography, and plant life do give us some clues though.

One place we do know he stopped was in present-day Haiti. He named the island Hispaniola. Hispaniola today includes both Haiti and the Dominican Republic. In January of , Columbus sailed back to Europe to report what he found. Due to rough seas, he was forced to land in Portugal, an unfortunate event for Columbus. With relations between Spain and Portugal strained during this time, Ferdinand and Isabella suspected that Columbus was taking valuable information or maybe goods to Portugal, the country he had lived in for several years.

Those who stood against Columbus would later use this as an argument against him.