Christopher Columbus

Christopher Columbus was a Genoese navigator who, sailing for the Spanish crown, led four voyages across the Atlantic Ocean between 1492 and 1504, making landfall in the Caribbean and becoming the first European known to have reached the Americas since Norse voyages some five centuries earlier. Columbus had set out seeking a westward sea route to Asia, and to his death insisted he had reached the outer edge of that continent rather than a previously unknown landmass, an error other European navigators only gradually corrected in the years that followed. His voyages opened sustained contact between Europe and the Americas, initiating a long period of European exploration, conquest and colonization that historians call the Columbian Exchange, the transfer of plants, animals, diseases and people between the two hemispheres, with catastrophic demographic consequences for the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Columbus is a genuinely contested figure in modern historical memory, honored for generations as a symbol of discovery and increasingly examined, in the same accounts, for the violence, enslavement and disease his voyages brought to the peoples already living in the lands he reached.