Christopher Columbus

He was born in the Republic of Genoa in or around 1451, a wool weaver's son, in a city where the sea was the obvious way out of a small workshop. Cristoforo Colombo — Cristóbal Colón to the Spanish, Christopher Columbus to the English-speaking world — went to sea young, and by his twenties had settled in Portugal, then the sharpest navigational culture in Europe. By the traditional account he arrived there after a sea fight off the coast, swimming ashore from a burning ship. In Lisbon and on Madeira he sailed with Portuguese crews, traded down the African coast, and taught himself Latin so that he could read the geographers. His surviving books are heavily marked in the margins. It is a myth that he was an uneducated dreamer with nothing but a hunch: he was a capable, self-taught seaman who read everything he could find. The truth is stranger. The more he read, the more confidently he built an argument that was, in almost every measurable respect, wrong — and the more certain he became that God had chosen him to carry it out.

Here is the myth that has to go first. It is not true that Columbus set out to prove the earth was round, and it is not true that learned Europeans thought it was flat. Educated opinion had accepted a spherical earth since Greek antiquity; Eratosthenes had measured it with impressive accuracy, and every navigator who had watched a ship's hull vanish before its mast knew what shape the sea lay on. What was genuinely disputed was not the shape but the size. Columbus took the smallest estimate of the earth's circumference he could find, combined it with the most generous estimate of how far Asia stretched eastwards, and squeezed the numbers further still. On his map, Japan sat a few thousand miles west of the Canaries — a hard voyage, but a possible one. In reality that ocean was vastly wider, and no ship of the period could have carried enough water and food to cross it to Asia. He did not slightly underestimate the distance. He underestimated it by roughly a factor of three.

This is why he was refused, again and again, and why the refusals were the sensible decisions. In the mid-1480s he put his scheme to King John II of Portugal, whose expert committee examined the arithmetic and rejected it. He crossed into Spain and began to petition Ferdinand and Isabella, who passed the plan to a commission of scholars at Salamanca; they too concluded that his figures were unsound, and they too were right. For years he waited, argued, and sent his brother to sound out England and France. The old picture of a lone visionary shouted down by superstitious churchmen belongs to romantic fiction, not to the record. What actually happened was a competent technical review reaching a correct technical conclusion. The experts told him the world was too big. It was, and it took an unsuspected landmass in the way to save him. What he needed was not a better argument but a patron with a reason to gamble — and in 1492 the Spanish crown suddenly had one.

1492 was the year Spain finished one long project and began another. In January, Granada fell and the centuries-long Reconquista was complete; in March the same monarchs signed the decree expelling Spain's Jews, and tens of thousands left that spring. A crown flushed with victory, in debt and hungry for a route to the spice trade was suddenly willing to fund a cheap gamble, and the terms Columbus extracted were extraordinary: the title of Admiral of the Ocean Sea, the governorship of whatever he found, and a tenth of the wealth. Three ships left Palos in August — the Niña, the Pinta and the flagship Santa María — refitted in the Canaries, then sailed west into an empty Atlantic for five weeks. The crews grew frightened as the days ran past every distance he had promised. Land was sighted in the small hours of 12 October 1492. Landfall was made on an island in the Bahamas whose indigenous Taíno inhabitants called it Guanahani; Columbus renamed it San Salvador. Which island it actually was, historians still cannot agree.

He believed he was in the outer islands of Asia, and he never stopped believing it. Sailing on to Cuba and then to the island he named Hispaniola, he lost the Santa María on a reef on Christmas Day, used her timbers to build a small fort called La Navidad, and left around forty men there for want of room. He returned to Spain a celebrity. The second voyage, in 1493, was a different thing altogether: seventeen ships and well over a thousand settlers, sent to occupy rather than to explore. At La Navidad he found the fort burnt and every man he had left dead. What followed on Hispaniola was subjugation in the plainest sense. Gold had been promised to the crown, so a tribute system was imposed on the Taíno: adults had to deliver a fixed quantity of gold at fixed intervals, and those who failed were mutilated or killed. It became notorious even in its own time. Captives were shipped to Spain to be sold, and the island's indigenous population began to collapse.

It was not Spanish outrage over the Taíno that brought him down, and that is worth saying plainly — it was the complaints of the Spanish colonists themselves. Columbus proved a disastrous governor: autocratic, secretive, unable to control his men, and free with the gallows when they rebelled. Settlers promised gold who had found fever and hunger sent furious reports home. In 1500 the crown despatched an investigator, Francisco de Bobadilla, who arrested Columbus and his brothers and sent them home in chains — a humiliation the Admiral pointedly refused to have removed until he stood before the king. He was released and his wealth largely restored, but the governorship was gone for good. A fourth voyage in 1502 took him along the coast of Central America and left him marooned on Jamaica for a year. He died in Valladolid in 1506, wealthy, aggrieved, and still insisting to anyone who would listen that he had reached the outskirts of Asia. On that last point, the geographers who had turned him down were entirely vindicated.

The voyages mattered far beyond anything Columbus intended or understood, and historians group the consequences under a single phrase: the Columbian Exchange. After 1492 two biological worlds that had been separate for thousands of years were joined. Eastwards travelled maize, potatoes, tomatoes, cassava, beans, chillies, cacao and tobacco — crops that would feed and reshape Europe, Africa and Asia, and without which Italian, Irish, Indian and West African cooking would be unrecognisable. Westwards came wheat, sugar cane, coffee, cattle, pigs and horses, which transformed the landscapes and the economies of two continents. And westwards, invisibly, came smallpox, measles, typhus and influenza, against which indigenous American populations had no acquired immunity. The result was catastrophic on a scale that is genuinely difficult to hold in the mind. Epidemics ran ahead of the Europeans themselves, emptying villages before any soldier arrived. Scholars dispute the pre-contact population figures fiercely and estimates vary enormously, but none seriously doubt that the loss ran into many millions, approaching total collapse in some regions within a century.

Two more myths are worth clearing away. First, he was not the first European to reach the Americas. Around the year 1000, Norse sailors from Greenland and Iceland built a small settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland — excavated in the 1960s, and now firmly established archaeology. That is roughly five centuries before Columbus. What was different about 1492 was not priority but permanence: the Norse contact faded, while the Spanish crossing was followed by ships, settlers, colonies and an unbroken link that has never closed. Second, the flat-earth story. It owes an enormous amount to Washington Irving, whose romantic and partly invented biography of 1828 gave the world the unforgettable scene of a lone genius facing down flat-earth clerics — a scene in schoolbooks ever since. Even the naming went elsewhere: the two continents took their name not from Columbus but from Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine navigator who grasped, as Columbus never did, that this was a new landmass altogether, and whose name a German mapmaker printed across it in 1507.

Which leaves the argument, and it is a real one. For centuries Columbus was a hero of nerve and navigation; in the United States he became more, a patron figure for Italian and Catholic immigrants who were themselves despised, and Columbus Day was made a federal holiday in the 1930s partly for that reason. Against this stands the record of what began in 1492: enslavement, subjugation and demographic catastrophe, and the fact that the man himself was arrested for misrule by his own side. From the late 1980s, American states and cities began replacing or twinning the holiday with Indigenous Peoples' Day, and in 2020 statues of Columbus were pulled down, beheaded or quietly removed in a dozen cities. Defenders answer that judging a fifteenth-century sailor by twenty-first-century standards is a category error, and that erasing him flattens history rather than teaching it. Critics reply that no one is obliged to keep celebrating, and that a statue is an honour, not a lesson. Both sides are arguing about the same legacy: the moment the world's halves were locked together, for everyone who came after.