and the caravels Pinta and Niña, each
probably less than 70 feet long.
Columbus himself commanded the Santa
Maria, while two Spanish brothers com-
manded the other ships: Martín Alonzo
Pinzón on the Pinta and Vicente Yáñez
Pinzón on the Niña. After stopping for
provisions at the Canary Islands, on
September 6 they sailed due west for
regions unknown.
By late September, the expedition’s
progress was dramatically slowed by dol-
drums and weak winds, causing crew
members to threaten mutiny. A month
after setting sail, the expedition had cov-
ered 2,700 miles, surpassing Columbus’s
estimate of 2,400 miles for the entire
journey. Rather than disclose his miscal-
culation to his rebellious crew, he began
keeping two logbooks: one with fake cac-
ulations, and a second accurate but secret
account. At 2:00 a.m. on October 12,
Rodrigo de Triana, the Spanish lookout
on the Pinta, spotted land. After sunrise
the explorers anchored their ships and
stepped ashore on an island in the
Bahamas that the Native peoples called
Guanahaní. Columbus, a deeply religious
Catholic, knelt and thanked God; then,
claiming the island for Spain, he chris-
tened it San Salvador, or “Holy Savior.”
The people who lived on San
Salvador, the Arawak or Taino, soon cameout to meet the newcomers. The Arawak
bore gifts of parrots, cotton, and wooden
spears, which they readily exchanged for
the trinkets the Spanish offered, such as
glass beads and hawks’ bells. A hand-
some people who went naked or nearly
naked, they impressed Columbus with
their hospitality and guilelessness. “Of
anything they have,” wrote Columbus, “if
you ask them for it, they never say no;
rather they invite the person to share it,
and show as much love as if they were
giving their hearts.” Columbus wrote at
first that he had high hopes of converting
them to Christianity, using not force but
love. Despite these good intentions, they
were soon to be exterminated, with
Columbus’s help.
Columbus called them Indians, since
he believed he had already reached the
Indies, or East Asia. He was convinced that
the advanced civilizations of Japan and
China lay nearby, and with them the treas-
ures he was seeking, especially gold. Some
of the Arawak wore gold ornaments in
their noses, a sign to Columbus that vast
gold reserves were close at hand.
Following hints from the Arawak, he sailed
from island to island, landing on Cuba and
Hispaniola (from española, “Spanish
lady”), the latter now divided into the
Dominican Republic and Haiti. But the
great gold fields did not materialize, nor22 ATLAS OF HISPANIC-AMERICAN HISTORY
DID
COLUMBUS
DISCOVER
AMERICA?
Although Christopher Columbus is
credited with the European discovery
of America, he was not the first
European to reach the New World.
About A.D. 1000, an Icelandic explorer
named Leif Ericson (975–1020)
reached a land he called Vinland, in
what is probably Newfoundland. He
may have been preceded there some-
what earlier by another Norseman,
Biarni Heriulfson. In any case, the
Norse established at least one settle-
ment in the New World, identified in
the early 1960s in the ruins at L’Anse-
aux-Meadows in northern Newfound-
land. But the settlement did not
survive long, and aside from being
recorded in Icelandic sagas, the dis-
covery was forgotten.
To Columbus belongs the more
enduring claim to the title of discover-
er: once he set foot there, Europe
never forgot what he had found, and
the two halves of the world were
never again separated. Of course,
from the Native American point of
view, the Americas were discovered
when their prehistoric ancestors first
colonized them.
To avoid asserting the European
point of view over the Native
American one, some historians prefer
the neutral term contact over discov-
ery. But even in terms of contact,
Columbus has a claim to distinction.
The first contact between Europeans
and Native Americans that led to last-
ing interaction was the work of
Columbus. Whatever that is good or ill
that may be said about him, he
deserves the credit (or blame) for that.A Currier and Ives lithograph depicting the landing of Columbus at San Salvador, in the
West Indies (Library of Congress)