But Columbus was hardly alone in differing from the conservative view, which, by the late 1400s, was downright unfashionable among the enlightened and educated. Not that Cristoforo Colombo—to use the native Italian form of his name—was well educated. He had been born in Genoa in 1451 to a weaver and would not learn to read and write until he reached adulthood. As a youth, he took to the sea. In 1476, shipwrecked off Portugal, he went to Lisbon, then sailed as far as Ireland and England and even claimed to have sailed from England to Iceland (where, perhaps, he heard stories of an ancient place called Vinland, across the “Ocean Sea”). Columbus returned to Genoa in 1479, then went back to Portugal, where he married. His wife died while giving birth to their child Diego the following year. But, by this time, the seafarer’s thoughts were far from his family.

Having learned to read, he devoured shadowy accounts of westward voyages. He decided that the world was indeed round. And he was right about that. What he was wrong about was believing Marco Polo’s calculations concerning the location of Japan—1,500 miles east of China—and the work of the Greek astronomer Ptolemy (A.D. ca. 100-70), who grossly underestimated the circumference of the earth and overestimated the size of the Eurasian land mass. Further encouraged by the miscalculations of the Florentine cosmographer Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, Columbus concluded that Japan (which Columbus called Cipangu) was a 3,000-mile voyage west of Portugal, over an ocean covering a round earth. Now, that was a long trip, but it was one that (Columbus believed) could be made by the vessels of the day.

In 1484, Columbus secured an audience with King John II of Portugal and tried to persuade him to back a voyage to Japan. Now, there were excellent reasons for going to the East—all of which involved lucrative trading opportunities, chief among which was the commerce in spices. In the time of Columbus, aromatic spices were not just pleasant condiments. They were rare and precious substances essential to the preservation of food in an age long before refrigeration was invented. Spice was as highly valued as gold. But King John 11 turned Columbus down just the same, believing that even a trip of three thousand miles was beyond the capabilities of existing ships.

Undaunted, the seafarer approached Don Enrique de Guzman, Duke of Medina Sidonia, only to be rebuffed. He next asked Don Luis de la Cerda, Count of Medina Celi, who was sufficiently intrigued to arrange an audience, on or about May 1, 1486, with Queen Isabella I of Castile. For the next half-dozen years, Columbus, his son Diego in tow, cooled his heels in the Spanish court of Isabella and her husband, Ferdinand II of Aragon. During this time, he made many influential friends and enemies. Among the most powerful of the former was a courtier named Luis de Santangel, who, after the monarchs apparently turned down Columbus once and for all early in 1492, actually persuaded the pair to sponsor the voyage, which was financed by a combination of royal money and private funds. Commissioned “Admiral of the Ocean Sea,” as well as viceroy and governor of whatever lands he might discover, Columbus set sail from Palos on August 3, 1492. He was in command of three small ships, the Nina (skippered by Vincente Yanez Pinzon), the Pinta (under Vincente’s brother, Martin Alonso Pinzon), and his own flagship, the Santa Maria.

During its first month and a half, the voyage went well, as the three vessels were propealed by highly favorable winds. Then, between the 20th and 30th of September, the winds turned bad and trailed off into doldrums. The fearful crews of all three ships began to grumble their doubts concerning their commanders. Columbus himself must have started to consider how it was one thing to believe in such enlightened ideas as a round earth, yet quite another to stake one’s life on the notion. Certainly, he came to realize that he had seriously miscalculated transoceanic distances. He began to keep two log-books—one, for the benefit of the crew, containing fictitious computations of distances, and another, for his own records, consisting of accurate figures. Despite this deception, the crews of all three ships verged on mutiny by the second week in October.

Then it happened. On October 12, 1492, the Santa Maria’s lookout sighted land. It was a place the natives called Guanahani and Columbus named San Salvador. Most modern historians believe this first landfall was present-day Watling Island, although, in 1986, a group of scholars suggested that the true landfall was another Bahamian island, Samana Cay, 65 miles south of Watling.

The seafarers were greeted by friendly Arawak tribes people. Believing that he had reached Asia—the “Indies”—Columbus logically enough called these people Indians. He then sailed on to Cuba in search of the court of the Mongol emperor of China, with whom he hoped to negotiate a trade in spices and gold. Disappointed in this, Columbus pushed on to Hispaniola (modern Santo Domingo), where, in a Christmas Day storm, the Santa Maria was wrecked near Cap-Haitien. Columbus ushered his crew safely onto the shore. Seeing that the Indians were friendly, he left a garrison of 39 at the place he christened La Navidad and, on January 16, 1493, returned to Spain on the Nina. Pausing at the Canary Islands on February 15 to replenish supplies, he dispatched a letter to his patron Luis de Santangel, who immediately had it printed and, in effect, published worldwide.

In addition to the observations Columbus made in his letter regarding the Indians’ timidity, he recorded in an October 14, 1492, journal entry his opinion that no fortress was required at La Navidad, “for these people are very simple as regards the use of arms.” The garrison Columbus left behind at unfortified La Navidad when he went back to Spain set about pillaging goods and raping women as soon as he departed. The “timid” Indians retaliated. When Columbus returned in November 1493, on his second voyage, no Spaniards were left alive.

Columbus made four voyages to America. His first triggered a dispute between Spain and Portugal, whose king had rebuffed the Great Navigator back in 1484. The failure to back him notwithstanding, the Portuguese crown pressed claims to Columbus’s discoveries, which soon led Pope Alexander VI to issue a pair of papal bulls (Inter Caetera and Inter Caetera II) in 1493 that divided the newly discovered and yet-to-be-discovered world between Spain and Portugal. The two nations formalized this decree with the Treaty of Tordesillas (June 7, 1494), which established a line of demarcation at 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands.