Christopher Columbus

Christopher Columbus was born in the Republic of Genoa, most likely in the city itself, some time before 31 October 1451. He went to sea young, worked the Mediterranean and Atlantic trade routes, and by the 1480s was living in Portugal, then the leading European centre of oceanic navigation.

There he developed the plan that would occupy the rest of his life: reaching Asia by sailing west rather than around Africa. The idea rested on two serious errors. Columbus underestimated the circumference of the Earth and overestimated how far Asia extended eastward, which together put Japan roughly where the Caribbean actually is.

The popular story that Columbus had to convince a flat-Earth establishment is not true. That the Earth is a sphere had been standard knowledge among educated Europeans since antiquity, and Eratosthenes had estimated its circumference with reasonable accuracy in the third century BC.

The experts who rejected Columbus's proposal — first in Portugal under John II, then in Castile — did so because they thought his numbers were wrong. They were right. An unbroken ocean of the size Columbus imagined would have been survivable; the real distance to Asia would have killed his crews. What saved the expedition was an unknown landmass in the way.

After years of lobbying, Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon agreed terms in April 1492, shortly after the fall of Granada. Columbus sailed from Palos de la Frontera on 3 August with three ships and around 90 men, stopped in the Canary Islands, and struck west. Land was sighted in the early hours of 12 October. He went on to explore the coasts of Cuba and Hispaniola; the Santa María ran aground on Christmas Day and its timbers were used to build a small settlement, La Navidad.

The second voyage in 1493 was a very different undertaking — seventeen ships and around 1,200 men, sent to colonise. La Navidad was found destroyed and its garrison dead. On the third voyage in 1498 Columbus reached the Paria Peninsula on the South American mainland, in modern Venezuela, and recognised that the volume of fresh water pouring out of the Orinoco meant a continent lay behind it.

The fourth voyage of 1502–04 explored the Central American coast in search of a strait through to the Indian Ocean. It ended badly: worm-eaten ships, a mutiny, and a year marooned on Jamaica before rescue arrived.

Columbus's contract had made him governor of the lands he found, and he proved a disastrous administrator. Complaints about brutality and mismanagement on Hispaniola reached the Crown, and in 1500 the royal commissioner Francisco de Bobadilla arrested Columbus and his brothers and sent them back to Spain in chains. They were released, but he never recovered the governorship.

He died in Valladolid on 20 May 1506, wealthy but embittered, still maintaining that the lands he had reached were part of Asia. The continents were named instead after Amerigo Vespucci, who argued they were a new world.

His legacy is genuinely contested rather than fashionably so. The voyages triggered the Columbian Exchange — the transfer of crops, animals, people and diseases between hemispheres that reshaped diets and populations worldwide. They also began the conquest, forced labour and epidemic disease that destroyed the Taíno population of the Caribbean within a few decades. Any honest account of Columbus has to hold both.