74 Interesting Facts About Christopher Columbus

12 October 1492 – Christopher Columbus discovers The Americas for Spain, painting by John Vanderlyn.

1. Christopher Columbus (c. 1450-51–May 20, 1506) was born in the Republic of Genoa, Italy, although the exact location of his birth is not known with certainty. His father was a wool weaver who also owned a cheese stand.^b
2. Columbus’ mother was Susanna Fontanarossa, the daughter of a wool merchant. He had three brothers: Bartolomeo, Giovanni Pellegrino, and Giacomo. He also had a sister, Bianchinetta. Columbus was the eldest.^b
3. Christopher Columbus’ family was a member of a very small and lucky group during the Middle Ages: the middle class. Most people were extremely poor (the peasants). A few were very rich (the nobility).^b
4. When Columbus was 14, he left school and his father’s wool workshop to apprentice himself to a merchant on a trading ship.^a
5. When he was only 19, in 1470, Columbus took his first long voyage on one of his employer’s ships to the island of Chios in the Aegean Sea. It was probably on this trip and a second trip to Chios in 1475 that he learned how to navigate and steer a ship on open water on a long voyage.^a





Converting native peoples to Catholicism was a method of control



6. Columbus spoke frequently about his desire to spread Christianity to heathen cultures, and it was a popular cause during the time. However, converting people also meant European governments could control them.^a
7. As a young man, Columbus was tall, well above the 5′ 7″ that was average for men in the Middle Ages. He had pale skin that burned easily in the sun. He had a hooked nose, pale blue eyes, and red-blond hair that turned completely white by the time he was in his 30s.^f


8. Columbus operated a little mapmaking and bookselling shop with his brother Bartolomeo while he lived in Portugal.b
   
   

   

   "Columbus map", drawn ca. 1490 in the Lisbon workshop of Bartolomeo and Christopher Columbus



9. During Columbus’ time, most people believed that the world was formed mainly of one giant landmass consisting of Europe, Asia, and Africa—mainly because these are the only continents mentioned in the Bible. These were surrounded by one enormous body of water they called the Ocean Sea.^a
10. Some scholars speculate that Columbus may have received secret information from a close friend about lands far west across the ocean. This sailor is sometimes called the “Unknown Pilot.” Present historians haven’t found any evidence of him except for what is written by some early Columbus biographers.^a
11. Columbus had two sons by two different women. Diego Columbus (1480–1526) and Fernando (1488–1539).^b
12. Columbus disrupted the entire economy of three continents. Post-Columbian diseases killed 3–5 million people during the subsequent 50 years after his arrival in the New World. Additionally, African slaves became a dominant commodity.^b
13. Columbus first landed near the coast of what is today known as Watling Island in the Bahamas. Although he thought he was near China, Japan, and India, he was actually more than 8,000 miles away.^b
14. Columbus first landed in the Bahamas. All the Caribbean islands—including the Bahamas, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba—were settled by a group of peaceful people called the Tainos.^b





Columbus believed that he had reached the Indies



15. When Columbus landed in the New World, he believed that he had reached the Indies; thus, he thought, the people he met were Indians. Even though more than 500 years have passed since that voyage, the native people of the Americas are still often referred to as “Indians.”^a
16. Before Columbus was a famous admiral and governor of the New World, he was a pirate, or Privateer, who helped attack Moorish merchant trips.^b
17. Columbus was very religious and believed God had called him to make his voyages. Many of the names Columbus gave to the lands he discovered were religious names.^b
18. Later in his life, for reasons unknown, Columbus wore a plain Franciscan habit everywhere he went.^b
19. Near the end of his life, Columbus wrote a book called Book of Privileges that listed all the promises the Spanish crown had made to him over the years and the ways the crown had not honored these promises.^b
20. Later in his life, Columbus began to write a bizarre book titled Book of Prophecies. In this book, he insisted that all his voyages had been divine missions directed by God. He believed the world was coming to an end and that he, Columbus, was bringing it about.^b
21. During his fourth voyage, Columbus was in intense pain. His eyes bled regularly, which left him blind for long periods of time. He could barely sit or stand due to the pain in his joints. Many historians believe he was suffering from Reiter’s Syndrome, which causes diarrhea and inflammation in the joints, eyes, and bladder.^b
22. Before he died, Columbus began requesting a new sort of voyage: a Christian crusade to Jerusalem to rescue it from the Muslims.^b
23. On May 20, 1506, at the age of 55, Columbus died at the court in Valladolid, Spain. His death went mostly unnoticed. In fact, the official court registry did not even record his passing until 10 days later. However, in the years and decades after his death, much of his fame and glory were returned to him.^b
24. Columbus is often referred to as the “Father of the New World.”^a
Columbus was not the first European to reach the New World
25. Columbus was not the first European to sail across the Atlantic Ocean. Some 500 years earlier, Norse Viking Leif Eriksson is believed to have landed in present-day Newfoundland, around A.D. 1000. Some historians believe that Ireland’s Saint Bernard or other Celtic people crossed the Atlantic even before Eriksson.^d
26. When Columbus saw the Orinoco River empty into the Atlantic off of northern South America during his third voyage, he thought he had found the Garden of Eden.^a
27. Columbus is considered one of the best “dead reckoning” sailors who ever walked the planet.^a
28. Skeletal evidence suggests Columbus and his crew brought back syphilis to the Old World. As one of the first global diseases, it devastated Europe.^b
29. Columbus was inspired by a letter by Italian scholar Paolo Toscanelli to find Asia through a western sea. He believed sailing west would be a faster way of getting to India.^b
30. Columbus was a talented admiral, but he was also a slave trader. While he soon discovered that the new lands did not hold silver, pearls, and other treasures, they did hold people, whom Columbus viewed as valuable resources. He is believed to have instigated the slave trade.^b
31. When Columbus returned to Spain with natives, Queen Isabella believed they were her subjects and, therefore, could not be enslaved unless they refused to be converted. However, during the Colonial era, the Spaniards enslaved them all the time.^b
32. Until the day he died, Columbus did not believe he found a new world. He died believing he had found a new passage to India. To justify his position, he proposed that the Earth was actually shaped like a pear, which made him the laughingstock of Europe.^b
33. Many countries in Europe and in the New World celebrate Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the Americas on October 12, 1492. In the United States, October 12 is called Columbus Day; in Latin America, it is Dia de la Raza (Day of the Race), in the Bahamas, it is Discovery Day; in Argentina, it is Dia del Respeto a la Diversidad Cultural (Day of Respect for Cultural Diversity); and in Belize and Uruguay, it is Dia de las Americas (Day of the Americas).^a
34. Though Columbus Day had been celebrated unofficially since Colonial days, it became an official holiday first in Colorado in 1906 and a federal holiday in 1937. In 1970, the holiday was moved to the second Monday of October.^b
35. Columbus has been viewed as an intrepid explorer, a monster, and a slave trader who unleashed horrors and conquest upon unsuspecting natives. However, scholars note he had both admirable qualities and negative ones: he was brave but a very flawed human being.^a
36. In Berkeley, California, Columbus Day was replaced with Indigenous People’s Day in 1992.^b
37. Activists have sought to abolish Columbus Day since at least the 19th century because of its association with immigrants and with the Knights of Columbus. Additionally, some were afraid it was being used to expand Catholic influence.^a
38. Christopher Columbus did not discover America. Humans had lived in the Americas for at least 20,000 years. By the time Columbus arrived, the Americas were already populated by several empires and hundreds of small nations.^a
Horses were one of the first European exports to the Americas
39. Christopher Columbus introduced horses into the New World. They later spread to the mainland and became essential to the Plains Indians.^a
40. After the destruction of the La Navidad garrison, Columbus created a new colony named Isabella (after the queen) 75 miles away. Over the next three years, it would be the center of the most horrific destruction and bloodshed the land had ever seen.^f
41. Columbus and his men destroyed the island’s natural, delicate ecosystem. His ships brought sugar cane, wheat, olives, oranges, lemons, pomegranates, dates, cucumbers, lettuce, melons, and grapes. These new species grew and spread, overwhelming the native plants that had lived on the continent for hundreds of thousands of years.^a
42. The Europeans and the native Tainos traded two things that would shape cultures for the remainder of history: tobacco and horses. Sailors brought back tobacco to Europe, and the first European nicotine addicts were soon created.^f
43. Columbus was intensely interested in gold, so he imposed a gold tribute system. Every Tainos adult would supply a certain quota of gold dust on a regular schedule. If they did, they were given a token to wear around their necks. If they did not, they had a hand chopped off.^a
44. Because Columbus destroyed the native population of Haiti (the Taino Indians), he began shipping African slaves to the island. This move has had consequences reaching into modern day.^b
45. The Taino population was completely extinct within 50 years of the Europeans’ first landfall. This was due to murder and desperate suicides, as well as a declining birth rate. However, disease was the most devastating factor in their demise. Columbus and the Spaniards unleashed a deadly cargo of dysentery, tuberculosis, and influenza. Settlers wrote home about the unbearable stench of rotting bodies that filled the air.^b
46. During his third voyage, Columbus became the first European to see the coast of South America.^a
47. Columbus died believing that he had found was Asia. However, the closest Columbus ever came to Asia was when he went on a voyage to the island of Khios in modern day Greece when he was a teenager.^b
Columbus sparked the exploration and colonization of the Americas

48. Christopher Columbus made four trips across the Atlantic Ocean from Spain, in the years 1492, 1493, 1498, and 1502. His goal: to find a direct water route west from Europe to Asia. He never found the route. He did find America—specifically, the Caribbean Islands, South America, and Central America.e
    
    

    

    Voyages of Christopher Columbus



49. In 1500, a royal commissioner was dispatched to Hispaniola to arrest Christopher Columbus and his brothers. They were brought back to Spain in chains under accusations of mismanagement of the colony. Although Columbus was stripped of his governorship, King Ferdinand granted him his freedom and subsidized a fourth trip.^e
50. In 1504, Columbus was stuck in Jamaica with angry islanders who would not give him food. Knowing that a lunar eclipse was going to happen, Columbus told the islanders that his gods were angry for refusing him food. After the eclipse, the scared islanders gave Columbus plenty of food and begged for mercy.^e
51. Christopher Columbus’ remains have been transported between the Old and New Worlds so many times that many historians believe that his remains are scattered in both worlds.^e
52. Columbus’ heirs were engaged in a legal battle with the Spanish monarchy until 1790 (nearly 300 years after his death). They argued that the monarchy did not give them the money or profits due the explorer.^e
53. Christopher Columbus lived during the Age of Discovery, a time between the 15th and 16th centuries when several European nations went exploring to search for wealth and lands.^c
54. Columbus’ first voyage into the Atlantic Ocean in 1476 almost cost him his life. French privateers off the coast of Portugal attacked the commercial fleet he was on. His shipped was burned and he had to swim to the Portuguese shore with the aid of a piece of driftwood.^c
55. While in Portugal, Columbus married Felipa Perestrelo and had one son, Diego, in about 1480. After his wife died (some scholars say he simply left her), Columbus moved to Spain. He had a second son out of wedlock, Fernando, in 1488 with a 20-year-old orphan named Beatriz Enriíquez de Arana.^a
56. After his wife died, Columbus never married his mistress Beatriz Enríquez de Arana, most likely because she was not of noble blood. For someone as status conscious as Columbus, a wife who could not appear in royal court was unthinkable.^a
Diego Columbus was the eldest son of Christopher Columbus
57. Both of Christopher Columbus’ sons served as pages to Prince Juan, the son of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella.^f
58. While the Santa Maria was the official flagship, Columbus frequently complained about its clumsiness and slowness. His favorite ship was the Nina, which was swifter and smaller.^b
59. The crew of the first voyage consisted of 24 men for the Nina, 26 for the Pinta, and 40 for the Santa Maria. Most were common sailors, and no women were allowed. There was also a secretary and an interpreter who spoke Arabic so that they could communicate with Ghengis Kahn and his people when they reached the East. There were also barrel makers, caulkers, and carpenters to fix the ships, as well as a surgeon.^b
60. During the voyage, every person—including Columbus—had lice. Fleas and rats were everywhere. There was no plumbing and the ships were filthy. The first voyage took about 43 days.^b
61. The sailor’s clothes on Columbus’ ships were extremely filthy. Everyone wore the same set of clothes they had when they left Europe until they returned to Europe. All crewmembers wore leggings, a woolen smock with a hood to protect salt spray, and a red cap called a gorro. And everyone went barefoot.^a
62. On his first voyage, Columbus kept two log books to avoid mutiny. In one log book, he recorded the actual distance the ships traveled each day. This book was only for him. In the second book, he recorded fake numbers, reducing the daily distance by many miles.^a
63. Christopher Columbus isn’t the explorer’s birth name; rather, it is Anglicization of his real name Cristoforo Colombo. His name has been changed in other countries as well: in Spanish it is Cristóbal Colón, and in Swedish it is Kristoffer Kolumbus.^b
Father Perez was a friend and supporter of Columbus
64. When King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella initially hesitated to fund Columbus’ exploration, a priest named Father Perez interceded and said that if Columbus succeeded, he would be able to convert heathen races to Christianity. In 1492, they finally give Columbus the funds and the ships.^f
65. Columbus was not interested in proving the Earth was round. By Columbus’ time, most people knew this fact thanks to the ancient Greeks—specifically the Greek mathematician Pythagoras, who lived in the 6th century B.C., and later Aristotle, who backed him up with astronomical observations.^a
66. Three countries refused to fund Columbus’ voyage: Portugal, England, and France. They refused because they thought he was a crackpot. They told him the Earth was much larger than he had calculated. They were actually right.^a
67. The first sailor in Columbus’ crew to see land (on October 12, 1492) was named Rodrigo de Triana. It was a small island in the present-day Bahamas named San Salvador.^a
68. Some historians believe that Muslims came to the Americas in the 700s, several hundred years before Christopher Columbus. In fact, Columbus used maps created by Muslim explorers.^d
69. Not all of Columbus’ voyages were successful; in fact, half of them ended in disaster. On his first voyage (1492), his fully outfitted flagship ran aground and sank. On his fourth trip, his ship rotted away and he spent a year with his men marooned on Jamaica.^f
70. A section from Columbus’ logbook notes that the natives “would make fine servants. With 50 men we could subjugate them and make them do whatever we want.” He later wrote, “Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.”^a
71. While Columbus was not the first to “discover” America or the first European to visit the New World (Viking explorers had sailed to Greenland and Newfoundland in the 11th century), he did kick off centuries of exploration and exploitation of the American continents.^b
Columbus believed the earth was far smaller than its true size
72. One reason Columbus estimated the distance around the Earth shorter than other navigators is that he had read Arab maps. As he read the maps, he used a shorter distance for a mile than the Arab map makers had used, causing him to estimate the circumference as being one-fourth less than the actual number of miles. Additionally, Marco Polo’s book, which Columbus relied on, estimated China as much larger than it really was, which also shrank the distance from Europe to Asia.^a
73. The Pinta is Spanish for “the painted one” or “prostitute.”^a
74. Columbus never set foot on the mainland of North America.^a

References 
 a Berne, Emma Carlson. 2008. Christopher Columbus: The Voyage That Changed the World. New York, NY: Sterling. b Chrisp, Peter. 2001. Christopher Columbus: Explorer of the New World. NY, New York: Dorling Kindersley. c “Christopher Columbus.” History.com. 2014. Accessed: January 27, 2014. d Fachner, Rebecca. “Did Muslims Visit America before Columbus?” History News Network. 2014. Accessed: January 27, 2014. e Klein, Christopher. “10 Things You May Not Know about Christopher Columbus.” October 5, 2012. Accessed: January 27, 2014. f Molzahn, Arlene Bourgeois. 2003. Christopher Columbus: Famous Explorer. Berkeley Heights: NJ: Enslow Publishers, Inc.

Reposted from Random History.com

Tomb of Christopher Columbus

The final resting place of the great navigator, or maybe his son    

Just inside the Cathedral door of Seville’s massive cathedral stands a monument to Christopher Columbus. His tomb is held aloft by four allegorical figures representing the four kingdoms of Spain during Columbus’ life, Castille, Aragon, Navara and Leon.

The tomb was one of the last additions to the cathedral, installed in 1899. It was designed by the sculptor Arturo Melida, and was originally installed in Havana before being moved to Seville after Spain lost control of Cuba.

Columbus’ body began its final rest in Valladolid, Spain where he died in 1506, and was moved shortly thereafter to Seville, by orders of his son, Diego. In 1542, the remains were again moved, this time to Colonial Santo Domingo, in what is now the Dominican Republic, where they were installed in the newly completed Cathedral of Santa Maria. There they remained for a couple of centuries.

Then, in 1795 when Spain lost control of the Dominican Republic, they were moved again to Havana, Cuba. 100 years later, they made their final voyage back home to Seville, and placed in the cathedral where you can visit him today.

Unfortunately, after all that effort, in 1877 a very suspicious box was discovered back in Santo Domingo inscribed with the words "The illustrious and excellent man, Don Colon, Admiral of the Ocean Sea.”

That box is now contained in the massive “Faro a Colon” Lighthouse in Santo Domingo. Despite examinations and a recent DNA test of the remains in Seville, the question remains somewhat unsolved, or completely resolved, depending on whom you ask.

Seville Cathedral was designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1987.

Uncovering Hidden Text on a 500-Year-Old Map That Guided Columbus

The 1491 Martellus map  Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

Christopher Columbus probably used the map above as he planned his first voyage across the Atlantic in 1492. It represents much of what Europeans knew about geography on the verge discovering the New World, and it’s packed with text historians would love to read—if only the faded paint and five centuries of wear and tear hadn’t rendered most of it illegible.

But that’s about to change. A team of researchers is using a technique called multispectral imaging to uncover the hidden text. They scanned the map last month at Yale University and expect to start extracting readable text in the next few months, says Chet Van Duzer, an independent map scholar who’s leading the project, which was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The map was made in or around 1491 by Henricus Martellus, a German cartographer working in Florence. It’s not known how many were made, but Yale owns the only surviving copy. It’s a big map, especially for its time: about 4 by 6.5 feet. “It’s a substantial map, meant to be hung on a wall,” Van Duzer said.

The Martellus map during preparations for multispectral imaging. Chet Van Duzer

The Martellus map is interesting for several historic reasons, Van Duzer says. One is it’s relevance to Columbus. “It’s extremely likely, just about unquestionable that Christopher Columbus saw this map or a very similar one made by the same cartographer, and that the map influenced his thinking about the world’s geography,” Van Duzer said.

There are several lines of evidence for this, Van Duzer says. Columbus sailed west from the Canary Islands hoping to find a new trade route to Asia. Writings by Columbus and his son suggest that he began searching for Japan in the region where it appears on the Martellus map, and that he expected to find the island running north to south, as it does on the Martellus map, but not on any other surviving map made before his voyage. (You can see Japan floating too far off the coast of Asia in the top right corner of Martellus’s map above).

Of course, what Columbus found instead was something Martellus hadn’t known about—the New World.

Martin Waldseemüller's 1507 map was influenced by Martellus's earlier map.

A photo of the Martellus map taken in 1960 with ultraviolet light (right) reveals text in places where it’s not normally visible. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

Martellus’s map was also a big influence on Martin Waldseemüller, another German cartographer whose 1507 map is the first to apply the name “America” to the New World. The Library of Congress purchased the only surviving copy of Waldseemüller’s map in 2003 for $10 million. “There are many places where the same information was in the same place on the two maps,” Van Duzer said. “The layout is very similar, a lot of the decorative elements are very similar.”

What isn’t known, because of the condition of the Martellus map, is how similar the text on the two maps is. “One of the most exciting images I’ve ever seen of a map is an ultraviolet image of the Martellus map taken in the early ’60s,” Van Duzer said. “If you look at eastern Asia with natural light, if you look closely, you get a hint that there’s text there, but if you look in ultraviolet light suddenly you see that there’s text everywhere.”

Most of the text still isn’t legible in those older UV images, but some of the parts that are appear to be drawn from the travels of Marco Polo through east Asia. There are also indications of where sailors could expect to find sea monsters or pearls. “In northern Asia, Martellus talks about this race of wild people who don’t have any wine or grain but live off the flesh of deer and ride deer-like horses,” Van Duzer said. Waldseemüller copied much of this.
A photo of the Martellus map taken in 1960 with ultraviolet light (right) reveals text in places where it's not normally visible.

A photo of the Martellus map taken in 1960 with ultraviolet light (right) reveals text in places where it’s not normally visible. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

There are also interesting differences between the two maps. Waldseemüller gets the shape of Africa more or less right, but on the Martellus map, southern Africa juts out way too far to the east (Africa is on the left side of both maps). In addition, Martellus’s depiction of rivers and mountains in the interior of southern Africa, along with place names there, appear to be based on African sources. It’s likely that this information came from an African delegation that visited the Council of Florence in 1441 and interacted with European geographers. Three other surviving maps contain some of this same information, but the Martellus map covers more territory than any of them, making it the most complete surviving representation of Africans’ geographic knowledge of their continent in the 15th century. “In my mind, that’s absolutely amazing,” Van Duzer said.

Van Duzer hopes to learn more about Martellus’s sources from the new images the team is creating. Scanning the map only took a day, after two and a half days of set up, he says. The team used an automated camera system developed by a digital imaging company called Megavision. The system uses LEDs to deliver light within a narrow band of wavelengths and minimize the amount of heat and light the map was exposed to. The camera has a quartz lens, which transmits ultraviolet light better than glass. The team photographed 55 overlapping tiles of the map, using 12 different types of illumination, ranging from ultraviolet to infrared.

Conceptually, the process isn’t very complicated, says team member Roger Easton, an expert on imaging historical manuscripts at the Rochester Institute of Technology. “We’re really just looking at the object under different colors of light and trying to find the combination of images that best enhance whatever it is that we’re trying to see.”

But extracting legible text from all those images will take a lot of imaging processing and analysis, and a lot of trial and error, Easton says. A combination that works on one part of the map might be useless for another part. “It depends on the details of how the map has eroded or how the color of the pigments has changed,” Easton said. “Different pigments reflect different wavelengths of light, and they deteriorate differently too.”

When the project is complete, probably sometime next year, the images will be available for scholars and the general public to examine on the website of the Beinecke Digital Library at Yale.




Original Post: By Greg Miller  Permalink

Christopher Columbus' remains in Spain?

Cristina Quicler  /  AP file

In 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue; after he died in 1509, his remains remained on the move. He was originally buried in the Spanish city of Valladolid, but his remains were shipped to the Caribbean island of Hispanola (modern-day Dominican Republic and Haiti) in 1537, in accordance with his will. When the Spanish lost the territory to France in 1795, they shipped Columbus's remains to Cuba, where they stayed until the Spanish-American War prompted their return to Seville in 1898. The tomb is shown here.

The Dominican Republic, however, says Columbus' remains never left Hispanola. In 1877, a box was uncovered in a Santo Domingo cathedral with an inscription identifying the remains as belonging to the "illustrious and distinguished male Cristobal Colon (Spanish for Christopher Columbus)."

DNA analysis of bone fragments from the Seville remains and those of Columbus' brother Diego, also buried in the city, are a perfect match. When researchers announced those findings in 2006, they declared that the century-old dispute was resolved. But DNA from the Dominican remains has yet to be studied, leaving the case not quite fully shut.

Notable Globe Trotters in History: Christopher Columbus. 1451 -1506.

Few could dispute Christopher Columbus’s status as a notable historical figure, but as a navigator he was a disaster. His discovery of the New World on his 1492 voyage is all the more remarkable given that he had only the vaguest notion of where he was or where he was going.

Using a collection of fanciful charts and his own wildly inaccurate calculations, Columbus was convinced just 3,666 kilometers separated Asia from Western World – a quarter of the actual distance – and that he could open up a lucrative route to Asia.

His certainty that he’d found Asia and his insistence on calling the region West Indies created a misnomer that survives until today.

Still, Columbus deserves credit for his innovative thinking and for embracing emerging technologies