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Christopher Columbus was born in Genoa, Italy, about 1436. He latinised his name of Christoforo Colombo into Columbus, and when he went to Spain adopted the Spanish form of it, Cristobal Colon. He was the eldest son of Domenico Colombo, a wool-comber and small-scale merchant, and his wife, Susanna Fontanarossa. They had two other sons, Bartolomeo and Giacomo, the latter called in Spain Diego. Columbus received little formal education and was a largely self-taught man, later learning to read Latin and write Castilian.
Columbus began working at sea early on, and made his first considerable voyage, to the Aegean island of Chios, in 1475. A year later, he survived a shipwreck off Cape St. Vincent and swam ashore, after which he moved to Lisbon, Portugal, where his brother Bartholomew was living. Both brothers worked as chartmakers, but Columbus already nurtured dreams of making his fortune at sea. In 1477, he sailed to England and Ireland, and possibly Iceland, with the Portuguese marine, and he also bought sugar in Madeira for a Genoese firm.
In 1479, Columbus married Felipa Perestello e Moniz, from an impoverished noble Portuguese family. Their son, Diego, was born in 1480. Felipa died in 1485, and Columbus later began a relationship with Beatriz Enríquez de Harana of Cordoba, with whom he had a second son, Ferdinand. (Columbus and Beatriz never married, but he provided for her in his will and legitimatized Ferdinand, in accordance with Castilian law.)
By the mid-1480s, Columbus had become focused on his plans of discovery, chief among them the desire to discover a westward route to Asia. In 1484, he had asked King John II of Portugal to back his voyage west, but had been refused. The next year, he went to Spain with his young son, Diego, to seek the aid of Queen Isabella of Castile and her husband, King Ferdinand of Aragon. Though the Spanish monarchs at first rejected Columbus, they gave him a small annuity to live on, and he remained hopeful of convincing them. In January of 1492, after being twice rebuffed, Columbus obtained the support of Ferdinand and Isabella.
On August 3, 1492, the fleet of three ships—the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María—set forth from Palos, on the Tinto River in southern Spain. After spending nearly a month in the Canary Islands, off the mainland of northwest Africa, the ships continued west, following the parallel of Gomera. According to records of the voyage, weather remained fair throughout. The first sighting of land came at dawn on October 12. (Though Columbus claimed that he himself, on the Niña, was the first to see land, later evidence showed that the sighting was made from the Pinta.) The place of the first Caribbean landfall was most likely modern San Salvador, or Watling Island, in the Bahamas. Thinking he had reached the East Indies, Columbus referred to the native inhabitants of the island as “Indians,” a term that was ultimately applied to all indigenous peoples of the New World. The three ships sailed among other Bahama islands and landed at Cuba, which Columbus convinced himself was the mainland of great Cathay (China). There was little gold there, and his exploration continued by sea to Ayti (Haiti) on December 6, which Columbus renamed La Isla Española, or Hispaniola. He seems to have thought Hispaniola was Cipango (Japan); in any case, the land was rich with gold and other natural resources, and allowed Columbus to return to Spain in the spring of 1493 with riches enough to convince his sovereigns of his success.
On March 10, 1496, Columbus set sail for Spain, leaving his two brothers, Bartholomew and Diego, in charge of Hispaniola. When he reached Cádiz, he found Spain at war with France and his benefactors even more eager to acquire gold and other riches from the New World. In command of six ships, three with explorers and three with provisions for settlement on Hispaniola, Columbus set sail for a third westward crossing on May 30, 1498. The first land sighting was at Trinidad, which Columbus named in honor of the Holy Trinity.
When the expedition arrived back at Hispaniola, he found it in disarray, with a revolt mounting against his brothers led by the alcalde (mayor) of La Isabela, Francisco Roldán. The chiefs of the indigenous tribes in Hispaniola, as well as a number of Spaniards, were incensed by Bartholomew Columbus’ reorganization of the gold production process, which favored certain Spaniards over others and exploited the native labor force. As Columbus tried to restore order, sometimes resorting to hangings, Roldán and his fellow opposition leaders sent so many letters of complaint against Columbus and his brothers back to Castile that the rulers sent the Spanish chief justice, Francisco de Bobadilla, to Hispaniola. Bobadilla took Columbus and his brothers into his custody and sent all three men back to Spain in shackles.
Ferdinand and Isabella later ordered Columbus’ release, and he appeared before them at Granada in December 1500. The monarchs allowed that Columbus was a superior mariner and navigator, but questioned his abilities to govern. Another man was appointed governor of Hispaniola, and Columbus was given support and permission to begin a fourth expedition. As he prepared for the voyage, which would be his last, Columbus revealed in his writings an even stronger mystical vision of himself as the bearer of Christianity into worlds unknown, a vision that had contrasted sharply with the realities of conquest and colonization in Hispaniola.
He set sail from Cádiz on May 9, 1502, with four ships, arriving at Santo Domingo on Hispaniola on June 29. Continuing on down past Jamaica, the southern shore of Cuba, Honduras, and the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua, Columbus showed navigation skill in a voyage as difficult as his first crossing of the Atlantic. He was searching for the strait to India, but obviously did not find it, and was eventually forced to turn back. En route to Hispaniola, however, his ships were unable to make the distance and had to be beached on the coast of Jamaica in June of 1503. Columbus and his crew spent a year in Jamaica before returning to Spain on a ship sent from Hispaniola on November 7, 1504. Upon arriving there, Columbus learned that Queen Isabella, long his most sympathetic supporter, was on her deathbed. She died on November 26, 1504.
By the end of his final voyage, Columbus’ health had deteriorated; he was suffering from arthritis as well as the after effects of a bout with malaria. With a small portion of the gold brought from Hispaniola, Columbus was able to live relatively comfortably in Seville for the last year of his life. He was emotionally diminished, however, and felt that the Spanish monarchs had failed to live up to their side of the agreement and provide him with New World property and gold, especially after Isabella’s death. Columbus followed the court of King Ferdinand from Segovia to Salamanca to Vallodid seeking redress, but was rejected. He died in Vallodid on May 20, 1506, in poverty, at age 55. His remains were later moved to the Cathedral of Santo Domingo in Hispaniola, where they were laid with those of his son Diego. They were returned to Spain in 1899 and interred in Seville Cathedral.
