American Minute-Notable Events of American Significance Remembered on the Date They Occurred
As a young man, Columbus began sailing on a trip to a Genoese colony in the Aegean Sea named Chios.
In
1476, he sailed on an armed convoy from Genoa to northern Europe,
docking in Bristol, England, and Galway, Ireland, and even possibly
Iceland in 1477.
When Muslim Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453 and hindered land trade routes from Europe to India and China, Portugal, which had been freed from Muslim domination for two centuries, began to search for alternative sea routes.
Portugal, under Prince Henry the Navigator, led the world in the science of navigation and cartography (map-making), and developed a light ship that could travel fast and far, the "caravel."
During
Portugal's Golden Age of Discovery under King John II, Columbus sailed
along the west coast of Africa between 1482-1485, reaching the
Portuguese trading port of Elmina on the coast of Guinea.
In 1498, Portuguese sailor Vasco de Gama did make it around South Africa to India.
But six year before that, in 1492, the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella finished driving the Muslims out of Spain and wanted to join the quest for a sea trade route to the India.
They backed Columbus' plan.
Though Columbus was wrong about the miles and degrees of longitude, he did understand trade winds across the Atlantic.
On August 3, 1492, Columbus set sail on the longest voyage to that date out of the sight of land.
Trade winds called "easterlies" pushed Columbus' ships for five weeks to the Bahamas.
On OCTOBER 12, 1492, Columbus sighted what he thought was India.
He imagined Haiti was Japan and Cuba was the tip of China.
Naming the first island "San Salvador" for the Holy Savior, Columbus wrote of the inhabitants:
"So
that they might be well-disposed towards us, for I knew that they were
a people to be converted to our Holy Faith rather by love than by
force, I gave to some red caps and to others glass beads...
They became so entirely our friends that...I believe that they would easily be made Christians."
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