Columbus Sails West: Discovery of the Americas Begins

Three small ships slipped out of the harbor at Palos de la Frontera before dawn, carrying ninety men toward the edge of the known world. Christopher Columbus had spent nearly a decade begging European monarchs to fund a westward voyage to Asia, enduring rejection after rejection before Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain finally agreed. On August 3, 1492, the Santa María, Pinta, and Niña set sail on a journey that would accidentally reshape the entire planet. Columbus was not trying to prove the Earth was round — educated Europeans already knew that. His radical claim was that the ocean between Europe and Asia was narrow enough to cross by ship. He was spectacularly wrong about the distance, underestimating the circumference of the Earth by roughly 25 percent. Had the Americas not existed, his crew would have starved long before reaching Japan. The fleet stopped first at the Canary Islands for repairs and supplies, departing again on September 6 for the open Atlantic. Five weeks of sailing with no sight of land tested the crew's nerves to the breaking point. Columbus faced near-mutiny before a lookout on the Pinta spotted land on October 12, probably the island of Guanahani in the modern Bahamas. Columbus called the inhabitants "Indians," convinced he had reached the outer islands of Asia, a belief he maintained until his death in 1506. What Columbus actually initiated was the Columbian Exchange: a permanent transfer of plants, animals, diseases, and people between the Eastern and Western hemispheres that killed as many as 90 percent of Indigenous Americans through epidemic disease while transforming diets, economies, and ecosystems on every continent. Potatoes and tomatoes went east; horses and smallpox went west. The three ships that left Palos carried fewer than a hundred men, but they set in motion the largest demographic and ecological upheaval in human history.