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Christopher Columbus

For months, Columbus sailed from island to island in what we now know as the Caribbean, looking for the “pearls, precious stones, gold, silver, spices, and other objects and merchandise whatsoever” that he had promised to his Spanish patrons, but he did not find much. In January 1493, leaving several dozen men behind in a makeshift settlement on Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic), he left for Spain.

Христофор Колумб: биография, открытия

Кто такой Христофор Колумб, знает каждый школьник: тот, кто Америку открыл. Но этого до конца жизни не знал сам Христофор Колумб. Биография его — пример верности мечте о коротком пути к сказочно богатым землям. Это стремление многих мореплавателей привело к открытию неизвестных европейцам материков, островов, торговых путей. В истории человечества этот период составил целую эпоху великих географических открытий (XV–XVII века).

Биография Колумба: интересные факты

Родина Колумба — Италия. Точнее никто не скажет: до сих пор шесть городов спорят, где именно появился на свет великий путешественник. Зато точно известно, когда родился Христофор Колумб. Это произошло 31 октября 1451-го.

Его родители — Доменико Коломбо и Сузанна Фонтанаросса — были людьми небогатыми, но смогли дать хорошее образование детям. По предположению некоторых исследователей, они были крещеными евреями, а богатые итальянцы, собратья по происхождению, помогали им.

Образование и опыт мореплавания

До 14 лет Христофор Колумб учился дома. Приходящие учителя блестяще обучили его основам математики и языкам. Отец иногда устраивал подростка юнгой на торговые шхуны, ходившие по Средиземному морю. Там будущий мореплаватель освоил искусство навигации. Тогда же от моряков он наслушался историй о неслыханных богатствах далеких стран Азии.

Дальше юноша учился в Павийском университете. Здесь он познакомился с астрономом и географом Паоло Тосканелли. Этот ученый увлек молодого человека мечтой о коротком морском пути в Индию.

Его идея основывалась на том, что двигаться туда надо не в восточном направлении, а на запад. А поскольку Земля имеет форму шара, то мысль казалась верной. Но ошибочными оказались представления о размерах планеты.

Колумб искал путь в Азию на западе: YouTube/Храм Гекаты

Из Португалии, где жил Христофор Колумб с 1476 года, мореплаватель ходил в морские торговые экспедиции, побывал в Англии, Исландии, Ирландии. В этих путешествиях он узнал о викингах, еще полтысячи лет назад пересекавших океан в западном направлении и доходивших до каких-то земель.

Проект путешествия в Азию

В этот же период у него окончательно сложилось убеждение, что путь в Азию лежит через Атлантику. Биография Христофора Колумба охватывает почти десятилетие, в течение которого он обивал пороги приемных европейских монархов со своим предложением.

Впервые он обратился к правителю Генуи, но его не приняли. Затем в 1483-м он предложил выгодный проект нового пути в Азию королю Португалии. Но советники сомневались в правильности расчетов, поэтому предложение отклонили. Еще несколько лет ушло на безрезультатную переписку с другими европейскими правителями.

Испанские монархи и Колумб

Переехав в Испанию, Колумб ознакомил с проектом влиятельных лиц, через которых добился встречи с королевской четой — Фердинандом и Изабеллой. Они собрали комиссию из космографов, богословов и других знающих специалистов. Но принять решение мешали обстоятельства:

  • война, к которой готовилась испанская корона;
  • разногласия с церковным учением, которое не признавало шарообразность Земли. А ведь на этой идее строились все предположения Колумба.

Переговоры с испанскими монархами возобновились в 1492 году. Они дали мореплавателю дворянский чин, право стать вице-королем новых земель. Но деньги на оснащение предприятия ему предстояло искать самому. Помог в этом судовладелец и единомышленник Колумба Мартин Алонсо Пинсон: он предоставил один свой корабль, дал деньги на второй, а также ссудил средства для взноса от Колумба.

Христофор Колумб: YouTube/24 Канал

Одиннадцать лет, с 1492-го до 1503-го, — самые насыщенные годы жизни Колумба: он совершил четыре знаменитые экспедиции, открыл новые земли.

Личная жизнь Колумба

Истории мало известно о личной жизни путешественника:

  • В юности он женился на Фелипе Монис де Палестрелло. У них родился сын Диего.
  • Позже второй сын Фернандо родился от связи с Беатрис Энрикес де Арана. Колумб заботился об обоих наследниках.

Из 4-го мореплавания Колумб возвратился тяжело больным. Средств у него не было — все истратил на оплату долгов. Дарованных ему ранее прав добиться так и не смог. В бедности великий первооткрыватель умер 20 мая 1506 года.

Христофор Колумб: открытия и достижения

В экспедициях мореход вел бортовой журнал. Благодаря его копии, которая частично сохранилась, известны открытия Колумба с точностью до одного дня. Каждая из 4-х экспедиций была знаменательным событием:

Первое путешествие

Экспедиция началась 3 августа 1492 года. В море вышли 3 корабля:

  • флагман «Санта-Мария»;
  • «Пинта» ;
  • «Нинья».

В команде — сотня человек. Больше двух месяцев пересекали Атлантику, потом наткнулись на сушу. Огни острова заметили 12 октября 1492-го, на следующий день достигли берега и составили соответствующий нотариальный акт о вступлении во владение землей.

Команда Колумба на первом открытом острове: YouTube/Храм Гекаты

Это оказался Багамский архипелаг, который составляют около 3 тыс. островов, растянувшихся более чем на тысячу километров. Тот, на котором высадилась команда Колумба, имел местное название Гуанахани. Вновь прибывшие назвали его Сан-Сальвадор.

Продолжив плавание, в конце октября корабли побывали в одной из бухт на Кубе. Но Колумб посчитал, что это часть Китая, и решил направиться на восток, рассчитывая попасть в Японию. Так 6 декабря открыли остров Гаити и назвали его Эспаньолой.

Христофору Колумбу еще были неизвестны истинные размеры Земли, он даже не подозревал, что между Европой и Азией в западном направлении расположен целый материк. Мореплаватель считал, что достиг островов Восточной Азии. Эти территории долго именовали Вест-Индией.

Второе путешествие

Вторая экспедиция Колумба началась 25 сентября 1493-го и продолжалась почти три года. Эскадра состояла уже из 17 кораблей, а на их борту кроме моряков было более двух тысяч будущих поселенцев, которые везли все для основания колоний на новых землях.

В ходе этой экспедиции открыли:

  • Антильские и Виргинские острова;
  • большие территории — Пуэрто-Рико, Ямайку;
  • исследовали южный берег Кубы, который считали оконечностью Индии.

Третье путешествие

В ходе 3-й экспедиции, начавшейся в мае 1498-го, был открыт остров Тринидад, но сам Колумб заболел и вернулся на Эспаньолу.

В том же году другой мореплаватель, Васко да Гама, обогнув Африку, открыл морской путь в Индию. Он привез оттуда драгоценные пряности, а Колумба все стали считать обманщиком. В 1500-м его арестовали и отправили в Испанию. Благодаря заступничеству влиятельных людей обвинения сняли, но обещанные титулы он не получил.

Схема экспедиций и открытий Колумба: YouTube/Sinus

Четвертое путешествие

И все-таки Христофор Колумб был уверен, что до Индии от открытых им островов рукой подать, и убедил в этом короля, который разрешил еще одну экспедицию. Она была снаряжена из 4-х кораблей и началась в мае 1502-го. В ходе ее были открыты:

  • остров Мартиника;
  • обнаружен и захвачен берег Центральной Америки, который был барьером между Атлантикой и Тихим океаном;
  • обнаружен узкий Панамский перешеек, где Колумб искал пролив;
  • открыты Каймановы острова.

До конца своих дней Христофор Колумб считал, что нашел путь в Азию. Ценность его открытий ощутили уже в середине того же XVI века. Тогда из завоеванных Мексики, Перу европейцы стали вывозить золото и серебро.

Памятник Христофору Колумбу в Италии: Pixabay

Христофор Колумб — великий мореплаватель. Свою жизнь он посвятил поискам короткого пути в Индию, двигаясь в западном направлении. При этом открыл неизвестные европейцам земли и считал, что от них рукой подать до Азии.

Имя Колумба носит страна в Латинской Америке, округ и города в США, а 12 октября уже более 500 лет считается датой открытия Америки.

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Christopher Columbus

Christopher Columbus was an Italian explorer who stumbled upon the Americas and whose journeys marked the beginning of centuries of transatlantic colonization.

Updated: March 28, 2023 | Original: November 9, 2009

Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images

The explorer Christopher Columbus made four trips across the Atlantic Ocean from Spain: in 1492, 1493, 1498 and 1502. He was determined to find a direct water route west from Europe to Asia, but he never did. Instead, he stumbled upon the Americas. Though he did not really “discover” the so-called New World—millions of people already lived there—his journeys marked the beginning of centuries of exploration and colonization of North and South America.

Christopher Columbus and the Age of Discovery

During the 15th and 16th centuries, leaders of several European nations sponsored expeditions abroad in the hope that explorers would find great wealth and vast undiscovered lands. The Portuguese were the earliest participants in this “Age of Discovery,” also known as “Age of Exploration.”

Starting in about 1420, small Portuguese ships known as caravels zipped along the African coast, carrying spices, gold and other goods as well as enslaved people from Asia and Africa to Europe.

Did you know? Christopher Columbus was not the first person to propose that a person could reach Asia by sailing west from Europe. In fact, scholars argue that the idea is almost as old as the idea that the Earth is round. (That is, it dates back to early Rome.)

Other European nations, particularly Spain, were eager to share in the seemingly limitless riches of the “Far East.” By the end of the 15th century, Spain’s “Reconquista”—the expulsion of Jews and Muslims out of the kingdom after centuries of war—was complete, and the nation turned its attention to exploration and conquest in other areas of the world.

Early Life and Nationality

Christopher Columbus, the son of a wool merchant, is believed to have been born in Genoa, Italy, in 1451. When he was still a teenager, he got a job on a merchant ship. He remained at sea until 1476, when pirates attacked his ship as it sailed north along the Portuguese coast.

The boat sank, but the young Columbus floated to shore on a scrap of wood and made his way to Lisbon, where he eventually studied mathematics, astronomy, cartography and navigation. He also began to hatch the plan that would change the world forever.

The First Voyage

At the end of the 15th century, it was nearly impossible to reach Asia from Europe by land. The route was long and arduous, and encounters with hostile armies were difficult to avoid. Portuguese explorers solved this problem by taking to the sea: They sailed south along the West African coast and around the Cape of Good Hope.

But Columbus had a different idea: Why not sail west across the Atlantic instead of around the massive African continent? The young navigator’s logic was sound, but his math was faulty. He argued (incorrectly) that the circumference of the Earth was much smaller than his contemporaries believed it was; accordingly, he believed that the journey by boat from Europe to Asia should be not only possible, but comparatively easy via an as-yet undiscovered Northwest Passage.

He presented his plan to officials in Portugal and England, but it was not until 1492 that he found a sympathetic audience: the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile.

Columbus wanted fame and fortune. Ferdinand and Isabella wanted the same, along with the opportunity to export Catholicism to lands across the globe. (Columbus, a devout Catholic, was equally enthusiastic about this possibility.)

Columbus’ contract with the Spanish rulers promised that he could keep 10 percent of whatever riches he found, along with a noble title and the governorship of any lands he should encounter.

Christopher Columbus’ Ships: Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria

On August 3, 1492, Columbus and his crew set sail from Spain in three ships: the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa Maria. On October 12, the ships made landfall—not in the East Indies, as Columbus assumed, but on one of the Bahamian islands, likely San Salvador.

For months, Columbus sailed from island to island in what we now know as the Caribbean, looking for the “pearls, precious stones, gold, silver, spices, and other objects and merchandise whatsoever” that he had promised to his Spanish patrons, but he did not find much. In January 1493, leaving several dozen men behind in a makeshift settlement on Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic), he left for Spain.

He kept a detailed diary during his first voyage. Christopher Columbus’s journal was written between August 3, 1492, and November 6, 1492 and mentions everything from the wildlife he encountered, like dolphins and birds, to the weather to the moods of his crew. More troublingly, it also recorded his initial impressions of the local people and his argument for why they should be enslaved.

“They… brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells,” he wrote. “They willingly traded everything they owned… They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features… They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron… They would make fine servants… With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”

Columbus gifted the journal to Isabella upon his return.

Christopher Columbus’s Later Voyages

About six months later, in September 1493, Columbus returned to the Americas. He found the Hispaniola settlement destroyed and left his brothers Bartolomeo and Diego Columbus behind to rebuild, along with part of his ships’ crew and hundreds of enslaved indigenous people.

Then he headed west to continue his mostly fruitless search for gold and other goods. His group now included a large number of indigenous people the Europeans had enslaved. In lieu of the material riches he had promised the Spanish monarchs, he sent some 500 enslaved people to Queen Isabella. The queen was horrified—she believed that any people Columbus “discovered” were Spanish subjects who could not be enslaved—and she promptly and sternly returned the explorer’s gift.

In May 1498, Columbus sailed west across the Atlantic for the third time. He visited Trinidad and the South American mainland before returning to the ill-fated Hispaniola settlement, where the colonists had staged a bloody revolt against the Columbus brothers’ mismanagement and brutality. Conditions were so bad that Spanish authorities had to send a new governor to take over. Meanwhile, the native Taino population, forced to search for gold and to work on plantations, was decimated (within 60 years after Columbus landed, only a few hundred of what may have been 250,000 Taino were left on their island). Christopher Columbus was arrested and returned to Spain in chains.

In 1502, cleared of the most serious charges but stripped of his noble titles, the aging Columbus persuaded the Spanish crown to pay for one last trip across the Atlantic. This time, Columbus made it all the way to Panama—just miles from the Pacific Ocean—where he had to abandon two of his four ships after damage from storms and hostile natives. Empty-handed, the explorer returned to Spain, where he died in 1506.

Legacy of Christopher Columbus

Christopher Columbus did not “discover” the Americas, nor was he even the first European to visit the “New World.” (Viking explorer Leif Erikson had sailed to Greenland and Newfoundland in the 11th century.)

However, his journey kicked off centuries of exploration and exploitation on the American continents. The Columbian Exchange transferred people, animals, food and disease across cultures. Old World wheat became an American food staple. African coffee and Asian sugar cane became cash crops for Latin America, while American foods like corn, tomatoes and potatoes were introduced into European diets.

Today, Columbus has a controversial legacy—he is remembered as a daring and path-breaking explorer who transformed the New World, yet his actions also unleashed changes that would eventually devastate the native populations he and his fellow explorers encountered.

HISTORY Vault: Columbus the Lost Voyage

Ten years after his 1492 voyage, Columbus, awaiting the gallows on criminal charges in a Caribbean prison, plotted a treacherous final voyage to restore his reputation.

History of Christopher Columbus

The man who sailed from Spain to discover America was neither Spanish nor did he actually discover America. But it was true that:

In fourteen hundred and ninety-two
Columbus sailed the ocean blue

Origin

He was actually Italian, born in 1451 to a wool merchant in Genoa and first went to sea in his youth. He sailed to Iceland and Guinea for business, and later spent some time as a privateer. It was in 1484, the year after Martin Luther was born in Germany, that Christopher Columbus presented to King John of Portugal the idea of an “Enterprise of the Indies” (no relation to Star Trek‘s starship) where he would sail west to the East Indies, thinking it shorter than the eastern spice trade route. After unsuccessful appeals to the kings of Portugal, England, and France he eventually moved to Spain whereupon his fourth request, he secured the patronage of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. You know them as the parents of Queen Katherine of Aragon, first wife of Henry VIII of England, and grandparents of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor who presided over the trial of Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms.

Voyages

Columbus sailed from Palos, Spain with three ships on August 3 and arrived not in the East Indies, but in the Bahamas on October 12 of 1492, where he named the locals “Indians.” He sailed on to the islands of Cuba and Haiti thinking he’d reached the islands of the East Indies. Contrary to popular belief, Columbus was not alone among 15th century Europeans in thinking that the world was round, but he did vastly underestimate the circumference of the Earth.

Fame

He returned with captives and gold to a hero’s welcome in Spain, which subsequently enjoyed its Golden Age of exploration. Columbus made three more voyages to the New World including the Caribbean and South America, but never saw the North American continent.

So did he discover America? Perhaps, if you neglect the indigenous people already living there or the Vikings who had visited pre-Columbian America 500 years earlier. But his journeys did result in the first European colonies in the New World of a permanent nature. And in the United States of America, Columbus Day is one of only four federal holidays that honored individuals, including Jesus, President Washington (and Lincoln), and Martin Luther King, Jr. It is also celebrated across Latin America under many names as Dia de la Raza, Dia de la Hispanidad, Dia de las Americas, and Dia del Respeto a la Diversidad Cultural.

Columbia

Other European explorers, within decades following Columbus, landed in North America including Juan Ponce de Leon (Florida), Alonso Alvarez de Pineda (Texas), and Giovanni da Verrazanno (New York). It was Colombus, who never got closer than Bermuda, whose name was used for the newly independent United States in the late 1700s. Other examples include the Columbia River, Columbia University, and the District of Columbia.

The Holiday

How did Columbus Day become a holiday? While he was not widely known in America until the mid-18th century, but this began to change after the US gained its independence from Britain. Italian immigrants began to arrive in American in 1820, but the large wave of immigration was between 1880 and the start of WWI in 1914. As with the Irish who had settled in the US before them, they experienced religious and ethnic discrimination, including mass lynchings in 1891.

The next year, President Benjamin Harrison became the first president to call for a national observance of Columbus Day, on the 400th anniversary of the Italian’s arrival. The first state to observe Columbus Day was Colorado in 1906. Angelo Noce, an Italian immigrant and the founder of Colorado’s first Italian newspaper, La Stella (the Star), was instrumental in creating the holiday. Fourteen other states followed suit within the next five years.

It was the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal service organization, who were instrumental in making it a federal holiday during the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt in 1934. It was set on October 12, but now is fixed to the second Monday in October, by coincidence, the same day as Canadian Thanksgiving since 1957.

Redaction

Though it remains a federal holiday and in some cases, but not all, a state holiday, over the last 25 years about a dozen cities have voted to observe the day locally as Indigenous Peoples Day. Some cities declare it an official city holiday, others do not. In California, Native American Day is observed on the fourth Friday in September. California’s Burbank recently voted for this new name, joining Berkeley, San Fernando and, most recently, Los Angeles as the only cities in the state that have replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day.

Some of the allegations in support of this change assert that the hagiography of Columbus was based on a best-selling book that popularized his story, though inaccurately. In 1828 Washington Irving published A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus which has since served as a myth-making glorification of the voyager. In the book, Columbus is depicted as a benevolent man of adventure, known for his generosity to the indigenous native Americans. This book also promoted the incorrect belief at the time that most thought the Earth was flat.

Is Columbus Day a day off school or work for you?

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