Columbus Returns: The Dawn of European Colonization

Christopher Columbus sailed into the port of Palos de la Frontera, Spain, on March 15, 1493, ending a seven-month voyage that had taken him to the Bahamas, Cuba, and Hispaniola, though he went to his grave believing he had reached the outer islands of Asia. He carried parrots, gold samples, several kidnapped Taino people, and a letter to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella describing territories ripe for colonization. Columbus had departed Palos on August 3, 1492, with three ships and roughly 90 men, funded by the Spanish crown after years of lobbying courts across Europe. He made landfall on October 12, 1492, in the Bahamas, likely on the island the Taino called Guanahani. He spent the following months exploring Cuba and Hispaniola, establishing a small settlement called La Navidad on the northern coast of present-day Haiti after the Santa Maria ran aground on a reef on Christmas Day. The return voyage nearly killed him. Columbus departed Hispaniola in January 1493 aboard the Nina, accompanied by the Pinta. A violent storm in the mid-Atlantic separated the two ships and nearly sank the Nina. Columbus stopped in the Azores, where Portuguese authorities briefly detained his crew, and then in Lisbon, where he met with King John II of Portugal before continuing to Palos. Ferdinand and Isabella received Columbus at court in Barcelona with extraordinary ceremony. He presented the gold, the Taino captives, and his account of the territories he had claimed for Spain. The monarchs immediately began planning a second, much larger expedition. The papal bull Inter caetera, issued in May 1493, divided the newly discovered lands between Spain and Portugal. Columbus would make three more voyages to the Caribbean, but never found the Asian mainland he was seeking. His voyages initiated sustained European contact with the Americas, triggering the Columbian Exchange that transferred crops, diseases, animals, and human populations between hemispheres. The encounter he initiated killed an estimated 90 percent of the indigenous population of the Americas within a century.