EDITOR: Yi Xu
The introduction of Christopher Columbus: Christopher Columbus, the son of a wool merchant, was born in Genoa in about 1451. When he was still a teenager, he got a job on a merchant ship. He remained at sea until 1470, when French privateers attacked his ship as it sailed north along the Portuguese coast. The boat sank, but the young Columbus floated to shore on a scrap of wood and made his way to Lisbon, where he studied mathematics, astronomy, cartography and navigation. He also began to hatch the plan that would change the world forever.
His experience: The explorer Christopher Columbus made four trips across the Atlantic Ocean from Spain: in 1492, 1493, 1498 and 1502. He was determined to find a direct water route west from Europe to Asia, but he never did. Instead, he accidentally stumbled upon the Americas. Though he did not really “discover” the New World–millions of people already lived there–his journeys marked the beginning of centuries of trans-Atlantic conquest and colonization.
He didn’t prove that the Earth is round: Kids in school have long been taught that when Columbus set sail in 1492 to find a new route to the East Indies, it was feared he would fall off the edge of the Earth because people then thought the planet was flat. Nope. As early as the sixth century B.C., Pythagoras — later followed by Aristotle and Euclid — wrote about Earth as a sphere, and historians say there is no doubt that the educated in Columbus’s day knew quite well that the Earth was round. Columbus in fact owned a copy of Ptolemy’s Geography, written at the height of the Roman Empire, 1,300 years before Chris Columbus set sail. Several books published in Europe between 1200 and 1500 discussed the Earth’s shape, including “The Sphere,” written in the early 1200s, which was required reading in European universities in the 1300s and beyond. The big question for Columbus, it turns out, was not the shape of the Earth but the size of the ocean he was planning to cross.
Why does Columbus get all the credit for discovering America: It was Columbus’ son, Fernando, who got the legend going with his hagiographic biography. (Creating even more confusion, it is unclear if Fernando wrote this, or if he based his text upon his father’s actual logbook, or if was actually written by Bartolome de las Casas, the Spanish historian and social reformer.)
In 18th-century America, Christian clergy such as Samuel Sewall, Jonathan Edwards and Timothy Dwight began linking the discovery of the Americas to divine prophesy — something still popular in fundamentalist circles. As Washington, D.C., was becoming the capital in 1792, the first “Columbus Day” celebrations began in New York City. In the 19th century, authors such as Washington Irving and Walt Whitman idealized Columbus as an American hero with more glowing, and often slyly misleading, prose and poetry. Catholics embraced Columbus as a way to help dull the sharp sting of the anti-Catholic bigotry rampant in the U.S. In 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt made Columbus Day a national holiday.
Before Columbus: So who were the people who really deserve to be called the first Americans? VOA asked Michael Bawaya, the editor of the magazine American Archaeology. He told VOA that they came here from Asia probably “no later than about 15,000 years ago.” They walked across the Bering land bridge that back in the day connected what is now the U.S. state of Alaska and Siberia. Fifteen-thousand years ago, ocean levels were much lower and the land between the continents was hundreds of kilometers wide.
Columbus Goals: Columbus led his three ships – the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria – out of the Spanish port of Palos on August 3, 1492. His objective was to sail west until he reached Asia (the Indies) where the riches of gold, pearls and spice awaited. His first stop was the Canary Islands where the lack of wind left his expedition becalmed until September 6.