Christopher Columbus: The Man Who Sought India
He crossed an ocean looking for spices and silk — and stumbled onto a hemisphere he never admitted he'd found.
Christopher Columbus was born in the Republic of Genoa sometime between 25 August and 31 October 1451, the son of Domenico Colombo, a wool weaver who also kept a cheese stand where young Christopher helped out. His mother, Susanna Fontanarossa, raised him alongside three brothers — Bartholomew, Giovanni Pellegrino, and Giacomo — and a sister, Bianchinetta. In one of his writings, Columbus says he went to sea at age 14, and by 1473 he had begun an apprenticeship as a business agent for the wealthy Spinola, Centurione, and Di Negro families of Genoa.
His travels carried him far beyond Genoese waters. He sailed to Chios in the Aegean, joined an armed convoy to northern Europe in 1476, and likely visited Bristol in England and Galway in Ireland, where he may have called at St. Nicholas' Collegiate Church. That same year, disaster struck: the Genoese trading ship he was aboard was attacked and he was shipwrecked on the coast of Lagos, Portugal. He made his way to Lisbon, where he settled for years, working trade routes for the Centurione family and reuniting with his brother Bartholomew, who ran a cartography workshop there.
In Lisbon, Columbus married the Portuguese noblewoman Filipa Moniz Perestrelo, daughter of the governor of Porto Santo. Their son, Diego, was born around 1479 or 1480. Between 1482 and 1485, Columbus traded along the West African coast, reaching the Portuguese trading post of Elmina in present-day Ghana. Filipa died sometime between 1478 and 1485, and Columbus, taking Diego and his possessions, left Portugal for Spain, settling there in 1485. Two years later he met Beatriz Enríquez de Arana, a young orphan, likely in Córdoba; their son Ferdinand was born out of wedlock in August 1488.
By then, self-taught in geography, astronomy, and history, Columbus had developed his central idea: a western sea route to the East Indies that could open the lucrative spice trade to whoever reached it first. He lobbied tirelessly across multiple kingdoms before Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II, fresh from victory in the Granada War, agreed to sponsor the voyage.
In August 1492, Columbus left the Port of Palos with three ships. On 12 October, he made landfall on an island in the Bahamas that its native inhabitants called Guanahani — ending what is now called the pre-Columbian era in the Americas. He went on to visit Cuba and Hispaniola, founding a colony in what is now Haiti, before returning to Castile early in 1493 with captured natives in tow. News of the voyage swept across Europe.
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