Topical Tens: May 20th: Christopher Columbus

Today is the anniversary of the death of Christopher Columbus, who died in 1506.

We don't know exactly when or where Columbus was born. We know he was born sometime in 1451 and somewhere in the Republic of Genoa, Italy. We do know his name wasn't actually Christopher Columbus at all but Cristoforo Colombo. His name has been altered in other languages, too - in Spanish it is Cristóbal Colón, and in Swedish it is Kristoffer Kolumbus.
His family were wool merchants and quite well off. Christopher was probably expected to take over the family business since he was the eldest son (he had three brothers: Bartolomeo, Giovanni Pellegrino, and Giacomo. He also had a sister, Bianchinetta); but at 14 he left to become the apprentice of a merchant on a trading ship. At 19, he took his first long voyage on one of his employer’s ships to the island of Chios in the Aegean Sea, and learned to navigate. At 25, he was shipwrecked and had to swim six miles to shore clinging to driftwood. This narrow escape convinced him he had been chosen by God for a great purpose.
He was a bit of a religious nut, it has to be said. One of the main reasons for his voyages was to convert heathen races to Christianity (which would also have the effect of making them more controllable). When he discovered islands, he would usually give them religious names; he wanted, in later life, to go on a crusade to rescue Jerusalem from Muslims. He also took to wearing a monk's habit all the time - nobody knows why. At the same time, he started writing a book called Book of Prophecies, in which he claimed all his voyages had been divine missions directed by God, and that he, Columbus, was bringing about the end of the world.
A lot of what he did was motivated by greed, too. For all his religious fervour, he wasn't above using deception in order to hold on to his money! On his 1492 voyage, he promised a bag of Gold to the crew member who spotted land first. However, when a sailor named Rodrigo de Triana spotted a small island, which would later be named San Salvador, Columbus claimed all he'd seen was a trick of the light and never paid up. (Rodrigo eventually got a statue commemorating him in Seville but that would have been little comfort to him at the time.) As a governor in the New World, Columbus demanded tributes of gold dust from the natives, and if he didn't get them, he'd chop their hands off. He even lied to his sailors about just how far they'd travelled from home, by keeping a second log book in which he reduced the number of miles they'd covered while recording the actual distance in a private log just for himself. Later on he let his greed fester - he didn't get everything he'd been promised by the Spanish crown and so he wrote a book listing all the promises they'd made and how they'd not kept them. Manipulating facts saved his life once. In 1504, he was stuck in Jamaica and the angry natives wouldn't give him any food. Columbus happened to know there was about to be a lunar eclipse, so he told the natives God was angry with them and was going to take the moon away. When the eclipse happened, they started feeding him.
He may have made epic discoveries, but my reading about Columbus suggests it was more by luck than judgement! He lost about half the ships he commanded - nine of them. He ran aground at least once, and had to spend a year marooned in Jamaica because another ship had rotted away. In 1492, he had to abandon 40 of his crew on Hispaniola after Santa Maria ran aground. While this was the first European settlement in the Americas, La Navidad, a year later all the men were dead. If navigation includes the art of knowing where you are, Columbus wasn't much good at that, either. When he landed in the Bahamas he thought he was near China but was out by a whopping eight thousand miles. Arriving in the Americas he thought he was in the Indies which is why Natives of the Americas still get called "Indians" to this day.
When Queen Isabella agreed to sponsor the voyage in 1492, Columbus had already been trying for ten years to get various royal families to cough up. Portugal, England, and France all said no, because they thought he was a crackpot, and that his calculations about the size of the earth were wrong, and it was much bigger than he claimed. They were right. Columbus had used Arab maps and had misinterpreted the distance the Arab mapmakers had used for a mile, so Columbus thought the Earth was only three quarters of its actual size. He also used a book by Marco Polo in which the size of China had been vastly over-estimated, making it much nearer than it actually is. Was he misinformed or was he sloppy in not checking his sources? You decide. Isabella was all set to say no as well until a priest told her the voyages would result in heathens being converted.
The ships Columbus and his men sailed in in 1492 were the Santa Maria, the Pinta and the Nina. Or were they? Ships in Spain at that time were nearly always named after saints. "Pinta" is actually Spanish for “the painted one” or “prostitute,” so it's unlikely this was the ship's real name. It was common for sailors to give their vessels less than saintly nicknames - so we don't know what the Pinta was really called. The Nina's official name was Santa Clara, but was nicknamed after its owner, Juan Nino. The Santa Maria's real name is the one that went down in history, but she had a nickname, too. In fact, she had more than one, One was La Gallega, after the province of Galicia in which it was built, and the other was Marigalante, or "Dirty Mary".
Columbus's contribution to history is a mixed bag. Yes, he discovered the Americas (albeit by accident) but he also started the slave trade. When the places he landed in were not found to be rich in precious resources like gold, Columbus traded the people instead. Native populations were decimated within fifty years of his arrival, through murder, suicide and declining birthrates but mostly through the diseases Columbus and his men brought with them, such as dysentery, tuberculosis, and influenza. It was a two way trade - when Columbus and his men returned to Europe, they brought syphilis with them. On the plus side, he introduced Horses to the New World.
What did Columbus look like? We don't know for sure as he never sat for a portrait. There are pictures of him, but they are of what the artists imagined he looked like. Records from the time do tell us that he was well above the average height for the time, with pale skin which burned easily, a hooked nose, pale blue eyes and red-blond hair, although his hair had turned completely white by his thirties.
Columbus died on May 20, 1506, at the age of 55 in Valladolid, Spain. His death wasn't recorded until ten days later. He was initially buried there but his remains have been moved several times since - to Seville, then to Hispaniola, and later to Cuba and then back to Seville. Yet there is still a tomb with his name on it and human remains inside in the Santo Domingo cathedral. Modern DNA tests showed at least some of his remains are in Seville, but the Dominican Republic has refused to allow testing of their remains. So it's possible his remains are scattered on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.