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Like a surprising number of explorers
of his time, Christopher Columbus
died forgotten by the public and
ignored by those who benefited most from his
voyages of discovery. Luckily, his travels were
documented through his shipboard logs from
his first and third voyages and related docu-
ments, even though many of the original man-
uscripts are lost. Inpreparing a biography
published in Italy in 1571, his son Ferdinand
used the journals in which Columbus
described his first voyage to Ferdinand and
Isabella, the king and queen of Spain. Domini-
can missionary and historian Father Bartolomé
de Las Casas summarized the text of the jour-
nals in his Historia de las Indias(History of the
Indies). Las Casas’s book, however, remained
unpublished until 1875, three centuries after
his death. Despite the flawed reprinting of the
surviving journals, they reflect Columbus’s
travels and his attitudes about the lands he
explored.
SAILOR FROM GENOA
Cristoforo Colombo is the actual birth name
of the navigator the English-speaking world
knows as Christopher Columbus. In Spain,
whose monarchs funded his voyages to the
Americas, he was called Cristóbal Colón. He
was born in 1451 in Genoa, a powerful city-
state that did not formally become part of the
nation of Italy until 1861. In Columbus’s time,
Genoa was one of the most important finan-
cial centers in Europe. Columbus was born
into a family of woolen merchants. By the time
he was a young man, however, he had become
an experienced mariner who had traveled
throughout the Mediterranean, south to West
Africa, and north as far as England, Ireland,
and the waters off Iceland. Some people have
claimed that Columbus learned of the exis-
tence of the New World from Icelanders,
descendants of the Vikings who had voyaged
to Newfoundland about the year 1000, but
most scholars do not accept this theory.24
The Four Voyages of
Columbus
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