Christopher Columbus Famous Italian Explorer Important Facts

(Last Updated On: April 16, 2021)

Christopher Columbus was an important Italian explorer and navigator. At 12, he sailed from Spain to the Santa Maria Atlantic Ocean, hoping to find a new route to India along with Pinta and Nina. This article will give an overview of Christopher Columbus Important Facts.

Christopher Columbus Important Facts

Between 1492 and 1504, he made a total of four trips to the Caribbean and South America, and has been convicted – and convicted – of exposing America to a European colony.

The early years

Columbus was born in 1451 in the Republic of Genoa, now a part of Italy. In the 20’s he moved to Lisbon, Portugal, and later resettled in Spain, which was his residence for the duration of his life.

Columbus first traveled to the ocean as a teenager, taking part in several trade voyages to the Mediterranean and the Aegean Sea. Such a trip to the island of Chios in modern Greece brought him the closest to Asia.

In 1976, his first voyage to the Atlantic Ocean nearly cost him his life as the French vessels he was carrying were attacked by French privateers along the coast of Portugal. His ship was burned and Columbus had to swim on the Portuguese shore.

He moved to Lisbon, Portugal, where he eventually settled down and married Felipe Perrestello. One of the couple’s sons, Diego, moved to Spain around Columbus shortly after the death of his wife, about 6 p.m. His second son was Fernando, who was born in a marriage to Belize Enriquez de Arana in the 5th.

After participating in several other expeditions to Africa, Columbus acquired knowledge of the Atlantic currents flowing east and west from the Canary Islands.

Route to Columbus

The nearby Asian islands of China and India were handicapped for their spices and gold, which made them an attractive destination for Europeans – but made it difficult for Muslims to travel east through the Middle East.

Columbus made a way west of the Atlantic to reach Asia, believing it would be faster and safer. He considered the earth to be a sphere and was about 2,7 miles between the Canary Islands and Japan.

Many of Columbus’s contemporary nautical experts disagreed. They date from the second century B.C. (Now known as correct) C follows estimates of the circumference of 25,000 miles of earth, which made the actual distance of about 12,200 statutory miles between the Canary Islands and Japan.

Despite their disagreements with Columbus about distance, they agreed that a westward journey from Europe would be a continuous waterway.

Columbus proposed a three-ship voyage across the Atlantic, first to the Portuguese king, then to Genoa, and finally to Venice. He was rejected every time.

In 1486, he visited the Spanish monarchy of Queen Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon. Their focus was on the war with the Muslims, and their nautical specialists were skeptical, so they initially rejected Columbus.

This idea, of course, reigned as the Kings held Columbus. Columbus continued his administration, and soon the Spanish army occupied the last Muslim fort in Granada on January 12. Shortly afterward, the royalists agreed to finance his campaign.

The ship

In late August 1492, Columbus left Spain and left the port of Palos de la Frontera.

He sailed on three ships: Columbus sailed along with the Greater Santa Maria (a type of ship known as a Caracas) as well as Pinta and Nina (both Portuguese-style carvings).

When did Columbus discover America?

On October 12, 1492, after a 36-day voyage westward across the Atlantic, Columbus and several crew set foot on an island in the present Bahamas, claiming Spain.

There his crew encountered a dramatic but friendly countryman who was open for business with sailors, exchanging glass beads, cotton balls, parrots, and spears. Europeans also noticed bits of gold that the natives wore for ornaments.

Columbus and his men continued their journey, visiting the islands of Cuba (which he considered to be mainland China) and Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which Columbus thought could be Japan) and meeting with the leaders of the local people.

At this time, Santa Maria was crushed to a peak off the coast of Hispaniola. With the help of some of the islands, the people of Columbus recovered everything they could and set up Villa de la Navidad (“Christmas Town”) with the help of ship timber.

The ninety-nine men went behind to capture the settlement. Confirmed that his search had reached Asia, he left home with the remaining two ships.

Returning to Spain in 1493, Columbus made a shocking, somewhat exaggerated report, and the royal court accepted him warmly.

On the way

In 1493, Columbus embarked on its second expedition to the sea and explored further islands in the Caribbean.

Arriving at Hispaniola, Columbus and his crew discovered that the Navidad settlement had been destroyed by the slaughter of all sailors.

In keeping with the local Queen’s wishes that slavery was offensive, Columbus established a compulsory labor policy to rebuild the settlement and search for gold, believing it would prove profitable. His efforts created small amounts of gold and malice among the local people.

Before returning to Spain, Columbus left his brothers Bartholomew and Diego to conduct the settlement of Hispaniola, briefly traveling around the Greater Caribbean Islands and discovering the islands of China as he identified himself.

Columbus reached the mainland until his third voyage and explored the present-day Venezuelan River Orinoco.

Unfortunately, the situation in the Hispaniola settlement deteriorated to near-insurrection levels, with settlers claiming they were distracted by Columbus’ demand for wealth and accusing his brothers of poor management.

The Spanish Crown arrested Columbus and sent a prince who had taken him away. He returned to Spain with chains, facing the royal court.

The charges were later dismissed, but Columbus lost his title as governor of the Indies and, for a time, acquired much of his wealth during his voyage.

Final Voyage

After convincing King Ferdinand that a further voyage would bring rich promises, Columbus made his last voyage in 1502, traveling along the east coast of Central America in a failed quest on the Indian Ocean.

The tornado destroyed one of his ships, capturing the captain and his sailor on the island of Cuba. At this time, the local islanders refused to give their food, tired of the Spaniards’ abuse and their passion for gold.

In a spur of inspiration, Columbus consulted with a pan make and planned to “punish” the islands by taking the moon.

On February 29, 1504, a lunar eclipse caused enough fear to the locals to re-establish trade with the Spaniards.

Finally, a rescue team sent by the governor of Hispaniola arrived in July, and Columbus and his men were taken back to Spain on November 5th.

For the rest of his life, two years after his last trip to America, Columbus struggled to recover his lost titles. Although he regained some of his wealth in May 1505, his title never returned.

Christopher Columbus Fact Card

To die

Columbus probably died of severe arthritis after an infection on May 20, 1506, still believing he had discovered a short route to Asia.

The Columbian Exchange: A Critical Inheritance

Columbus was credited with opening the United States to European colonization – as well as discovering that the islands were responsible for the destruction of Native peoples.

In the end, he fails to find what he set out for: the new path to Asia and the promise it made.

Called the Columbian Exchange, Columbus’s expeditions triggered a massive transfer of people, plants, animals, diseases, and cultures that greatly affected almost every society on the planet.

Horses from Europe allowed Native American tribes to migrate from hunting to hunting in the Great Plains of North America.

Wheat has become the main food source for the United States of America from the Old World. Coffee from Africa and sugarcane from Asia have become major financial crops for Latin American countries.

Food in the United States of America, such as potatoes, tomatoes, and maize, has become the staple of Europeans and helped their population grow.

The Columbian Exchange introduced new diseases in both hemispheres, though its impact was most pronounced in the United States.

Smallpox in the Old World decimated millions of Native American population’s infraction of their original numbers.

This is more than any other reason allowed for European domination in the United States of America.

The overwhelming benefits of the Colombian exchange went to Europeans in the beginning and eventually to other places in the world.

Americans changed forever, and Native American civilization lost its once vivacious culture and denied any complete understanding of the world to their existence.

Claims to discover Santa Maria

On May 27, Columbus headlined that a group of archaeologists had probably found Santa Maria on the northern coast of Haiti.

The leader of the expedition, Barry Clifford, told the Independent newspaper that “all geographical, subterranean, and archaeological evidence strongly suggests that the ruin is the famous Santa Maria of Columbus.”

After a thorough investigation by the US agency UNESCO, it determined the dates of the devastation from a later period and were located far away from the coast of Santa Maria.

Christopher Columbus Important misconceptions

Let’s take a look back at some of the biggest misconceptions on, which is one of Christopher Columbus Important facts.

1. Columbus proved the “flat earth” theory wrong.

In the opening scene of the 1992 Ridley Scott movie, “1492: Paradise of Paradise,” played by Gerard Depardieu, Columbus stares with his son in the Atlantic Ocean, which is one of Christopher Columbus Important facts.

He tells the boy that the earth is spinning like an orange: spherical, not flat. In this traditional satirical presentation, Columbus is an enlightened scientific figure, surrounded by a pre-Galileo determined to thwart his plan.

We know this myth from Washington Irving, who Americanized Columbus as the best-selling 1828 biography. Already known for Rip Van Winkle and “Legend of Sleepy Hollow,”

Irving was a dedicated Hispanophile who studied Columbus’s life and travels while living in Spain in the 1820s.

Despite being a careful scholar, Irving brought to the “All American” the idea that Columbus was a maritime voyage, willing to challenge immovable academics who couldn’t see past the horizon.

In fact, the world is less or less spherical which was not reported in Columbus’ day. The question was the size, shape and how much of it was covered by the ocean was Columbus would eventually choose a smaller, pear-shaped globe vs. round orange.

Florentine mathematician Paulo Toccasnelli was credited with inspiring Columbus’ sailing, but neither Toscanelli nor Columbus could convince a Portugal court about its potential.

When Columbus met them in 1886, the Spanish cosmographers expressed similar concerns, but the Catholic kings, Isabella and Ferdinand were interested.

They eclipse Columbus and hold him. Portugal was pushing Africa into East Asia with a goal. Will Spain be eliminated?

The Emperors granted Columbus another audience in early 1492. An agreement was signed in the shadow of Alhambra in April. Columbus was now the “Admiral of the Seaside.”

2. Columbus was Italian.

The National Italian American Foundation has called New York’s Columbus Day Parade “the most visible and accessible manifestation of our Italian American pride,” and Italian Americans nationwide have been opposed to changing the focus of the holiday, which is one of Christopher Columbus Important facts.

But when Columbus lived, there was nothing Italian; Italy did not exist until 1861. The best evidence suggests that this researcher was born in a village near Genoa, which today in part of Italy, proudly claimed Genoa as his home.

During Columbus’s lifetime, Genoa was a fiercely independent republic with its own language, currency, and foreign colonies.

Its commercial relations with Castile and Aragon in modern Spain were close. The Genos Trading Colonies of Seville, Barcelona, and Lisbon were huge. Some Xenonians who were married locally turned to Castilian, Catalan, or Portuguese affairs.

These comfortable relationships helped give birth to the “berthurs” crop in Columbus. The claims of Catalan, Majorcan, Abidjan, Portuguese, Greek, Sephardic Jews, Sardinian, Polish and even Scottish have been made by a mix of serious scholars and crackpot theorists.

Most historians believe that Columbus was Genos, but they hesitated to call him “Italian” for some of the reasons mentioned above, and partly because Columbus left home early and traveled a lot.

3. Columbus was a successful businessman and model leader.

An early American archaeologist, Columbus has long worked as a model entrepreneur. By all accounts, Columbus is a confident risk-taker, he knows hot products, which is one of Christopher Columbus Important facts

He traveled to the West African coast in the early sixties in search of gold, then moved on to the sugar of the Madeiras, where he married the Portuguese nobleman Philippa de Perestrello.

Columbus knew cod fisheries in the North Atlantic, but there was no romance in the fishes. He wants spice in Asia, described fondly by Marco Polo.

If Columbus had reached Asia, he would probably prove to be a keen entrepreneur. As it happened, he reached the Caribbean coast, in a populated area that was economically vulnerable to any Old World businessman. Some gold is available, but it has not been used as currency.

Prisoners may have, but they were not sold on the open market. Columbus speculated that he would be able to make friends and trade for gold and slaves following the Portuguese custom in West Africa, but with a few exceptions, there was no market economy in the United States that matched the Old World.

Failing to understand this, Columbus made a quick managerial mistake, some fatal. He planted a colony on the north bank of Haiti and was named La Navidad.

When he returned on his second trip, everyone in “Christmas Town” died. Columbus started another settlement called La Isabella for its royal patronage, which coincided with the same outcome.

Archaeologists have found that La Isabella was built as a sort of Genos-Portuguese trade post in the Mediterranean and Atlantic Africa.

The objective was to survive by trade rather than self-reliance, to engage in suicide attacks in the neighboring tribal villages of the inhabitants.

Columbus’s misunderstanding of the local economy and its failure to adapt to local conditions cost not only Spanish life but countless indigenous peoples.

4. Columbus committed genocide.

On Columbus Day in the 8th, the late Native American activist Russell Means led a protest of the American Indian movement, a bucket of fake blood was etched on a statue of Columbus in a suburb of Denver, and Italian Americans took to the streets, which is one of Christopher Columbus Important facts. (Columbus Day was opened in Denver in ’97.)

The city’s parade was canceled for a decade. AIM activists are not alone in accusing Columbus of genocide, and in recent years several cities and states have begun celebrating “Indigenous Peoples Day” or “Native American Day” instead.

But if we judge Columbus from what we know from the historical record, is this the right charge? He must have seen the slavery and sale of the abducted locals from the Caribbean coast.

Once he formed an alliance with the words “good Indians”, the Columbus men thought that the indigenous parties were in favor of fighting and enslaving.

During the 1500s, he and his brothers dispatched about 1,500 slave labor to the European market for sale. Even the “friendly” indigenous peoples were forced to make gold mines at a fast pace of nutrition, extra work, and morbidity.

Columbus was apparently not a friend of the aborigines, but a document discovered 10 years ago in Simancas, Spain, proves that he was a co-op oppressor.

Witnesses testified that his Hispaniola brief government was characterized by regular cruelty not only to indigenous Tanos but also to the Spaniards, to ridicule or ridicule him.

A woman who reminded Columbus that she was the son of a weaver, had her tongue cut off. Others were executed for minor offenses.

Colonialism was never beautiful and in its dealings with indigenous peoples, Columbus was following the practice of Spanish and Portuguese trade and slavery.

If we can accuse him of neglect (if anything), it is more difficult to prove intent. Columbus wanted to increase the number of people living and managing taxes and management. He was not interested in transferring newly acquired territories.

Was Columbus an active protector of Native Americans? No, does he want to eliminate them? No Did the massacre result directly from his decree and his family’s commercial goals? Yes.

5. Columbus believed that he had discovered America.

For decades, US schoolchildren learned that “Columbus sailed the Blue at the age of fourteen” on his way to the New World.

By the fifth year of 12, new academic scholarships began to enter primary and secondary history lessons, which is one of Christopher Columbus Important facts.

Today, very few people claim that Columbus first traveled to European America. The evidence for medieval Norse travel and colonization is overwhelming.

Columbus himself wondered what he was doing? He never believed he reached somewhere that the Europeans were otherwise unaware of, and thus named America for another navigator, Florentine Amerigo Vespucci, who recognized the “newness” of South America.

Columbus thought he was exploring parts of Asia that were not described by Marco Polo or other western authorities.

He believed he had found a new maritime path for the East Indies that would block Muslim-controlled land routes and waterways.

If Columbus had invented something, it would have been the real dimension of the North Atlantic Trade Wind Circuit.

The Portuguese Mariners have already observed this air and the current system, but Columbus proved his four trips were far more certain than the one who imagined transatlantic sea travel in the ship’s age.

To discover the truth, we must return to Columbus at least 13,000 to 14,000 years ago.

Recent research confirms that the first people to reach the United States fled from North-East Asia to North America via temporary isthmus or through the islands of the Bering Strait and along the Alaskan and British Columbia coasts.

In a number of waves, these Native Americans began their journey south and east, changing the two continents and the numerous islands.