Video: 'How Christopher Columbus Found the New World | Discovery of America'
(Friday, October 12, 1492, about 2:00 a.m. local time) — After a five-week voyage across the Atlantic ocean, Italian explorer Christopher Columbus arrived early this morning with his three-ship expedition in present-day The Bahamas, opening the way for the widespread European exploration and colonization of the Americas.
A lookout on the Pinta, Rodrigo de Triana (also known as Juan Rodríguez Bermeo), spotted land and immediately alerted the rest of the crew with a shout. Thereupon, the captain of the Pinta, Martín Alonso Pinzón, verified the discovery and alerted Columbus on the Santa Maria by firing a lombard.
Columbus later maintained that he had already seen a light on the land a few hours earlier, thereby claiming for himself the lifetime pension promised by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain to the first person to sight land.
Video: 'Christopher Columbus - The Discovery Of America And What Happened After'
The expedition went ashore the same day and claimed the land for Isabella and Ferdinand of Spain, who sponsored his attempt to find a western ocean route to China, India, and the fabled gold and spice islands of Asia.
Columbus called this island (in what is now The Bahamas) San Salvador (meaning “Holy Savior”); the natives called it Guanahani.
Columbus called the inhabitants of the lands that he visited Los Indios (Spanish for “Indians”). He initially encountered the Lucayan, Taíno, and Arawak peoples. Noting their gold ear ornaments, Columbus took some of the Arawaks prisoner and insisted that they guide him to the source of the gold.
Video: 'Who Discovered America First?'
Columbus observed that their primitive weapons and military tactics made the natives susceptible to easy conquest, writing, “the people here are simple in war-like matters … I could conquer the whole of them with fifty men, and govern them as I pleased.”
Though Christopher Columbus came to be considered the European discoverer of America in Western popular culture, his historical legacy is more nuanced.
After settling Iceland, the Norse settled the uninhabited southern part of Greenland beginning in the 10th century. Norsemen are believed to have then set sail from Greenland and Iceland to become the first known Europeans to reach the North American mainland, nearly 500 years before Columbus reached the Caribbean.
The 1960s discovery of a Norse settlement dating to c. 1000 AD at L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, partially corroborates accounts within the Icelandic sagas of Erik the Red’s colonization of Greenland and his son Leif Erikson’s subsequent exploration of a place he called Vinland.
