Columbus Lands in Bahamas: Europe Enters the Americas

After five weeks of open-ocean sailing with a crew on the edge of mutiny, a lookout on the Pinta spotted moonlit land at about 2:00 a.m. on October 12, 1492. The cannon shot that signaled the discovery echoed across three small ships and into a future that would reshape every continent on Earth. Christopher Columbus believed he had reached the outer islands of Asia. He had actually stumbled upon a hemisphere that no European mapmaker knew existed. Columbus led the expedition under the Spanish flag, having convinced Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Castile and Aragon to finance his audacious westward route to the Indies. His fleet — the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María — carried about ninety men who had departed from the Canary Islands on September 6. The island where they landed, called Guanahani by the indigenous Lucayan Taíno people, was somewhere in the modern Bahamas, though the exact island remains disputed among historians. The encounter between Columbus and the Taíno people contained the full template of what would follow across the Americas. Columbus noted the islanders' generosity, their lack of iron weapons, and their gold ear ornaments. Within hours of peaceful contact, he was writing in his journal about their potential as servants and the ease with which they could be conquered. He kidnapped several Taíno to serve as guides and interpreters, beginning a pattern of exploitation that would devastate indigenous populations throughout the Western Hemisphere. Columbus's four voyages between 1492 and 1504 triggered the Columbian Exchange — the massive transfer of plants, animals, diseases, and people between the Eastern and Western hemispheres. European diseases, particularly smallpox, would kill an estimated 90 percent of indigenous Americans within a century. The arrival also launched the Atlantic slave trade and the colonial empires that dominated global politics for the next four hundred years. Few single events have so thoroughly altered the trajectory of human civilization.