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Columbus (1492)Columbus, Christopher (1451?-1506). Christopher Columbus, His Own Book of Privileges, 1502. Photographic facsimile of the manuscript in the archives of the Foreign Office in Paris [...]. London: Benjamin Franklin Stevens, 1893.
One of the most famous navigators of all time was born in Genoa, Italy, probably in 1451, the son of a weaver and, subsequently, wine merchant. Christopher Columbus probably started navigating in the Gulf of Genoa to transport his father's goods. Around 1480, with a solid experience of the sea behind him, Columbus began working on an ambitious plan: to reach Asia by sailing west. The theoreticians of the time deemed such a voyage to be impossible because the crew would have to spend too much time at sea. Columbus devoted years to reading, studying, gathering a considerable number of testimonies and data and, especially, getting his plan approved. Finally, in April 1492 the Spanish Crown endorsed it; under the Santa Fé capitulations Columbus was made viceroy over all the lands he would discover and granted one tenth of all the products of those new lands, including gold and spices. After leaving Spain on August 3,1492, Columbus "discovered America" at dawn on October 12, sailing along the reef of one of the Bahamas, possibly Watling's Island; he then explored Cuba and Haiti before returning to Spain, where he was given a hero's welcome in March 1493. Subsequently, Columbus made three more voyages of exploration (1493-1496; 1498-1500; 1502-1504), all of them to the West Indies, but one of them also to part of the Honduras coast. Convinced that he had reached the outposts of Asia, Columbus died in 1506 without ever realizing the real importance of his discovery: that of a new world. During his first three expeditions, Columbus had kept a precise day-by-day log, which is now lost. Fortunately, one part of it was copied out by Bartolomé de Las Casas for writing his Historia de las Indias between 1550 and 1563.
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