Christopher Columbus is famous and known for his discovery of the Americas in the late 15th century. As reiterated in the popular children’s song “in fourteen hundred ninety two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” Common myth is that he was the first to believe that the world was round, but that was believed since antiquity. He completed four voyages across the Atlantic Ocean that led to general European awareness of the American continents. Those voyages, and his efforts to establish permanent settlements on the island of Hispaniola, initiated the Spanish colonization of the New World. He also coined the term “Indians”, which he named the Native Americans due to the fact that he thought he was in the West Indies.
Columbus, or his real Spanish name Cristobal colon, was born in October of 1451 in Italy. In some of his writings he claims to have gone to the sea at the age of 10, but there is no legitimate proof to this. Columbus eventually learned Latin, as well as Portuguese and Castilian, and read widely about astronomy, geography, and history. He was not a scholarly man however. Throughout his life and writings Cristobal Colon was a big supporter of the Bible and biblical teachings. He even went on to produce a book of prophecies towards the end of his life. Christopher Columbus refused to accept that the land he visited and claimed for Spain were not part of Asia. Even with mounting evidence that this wasn’t the case. It was believed in part why the Americas were named after the Amerigo Vespucci, the Florentine explorer. On 20 May 1506, aged probably 54, Columbus died in Valladolid, Spain.
Christopher Columbus set sail on his first voyage on August 3, 1492 with three ships, the Pinta, the Nina, and the Santa Maria. Columbus first sailed to the Canary Islands, which belonged to Castile, where he restocked the provisions and made repairs. After stopping over in Gran Canaria, he departed from San Sebastián de La Gomera on 6 September, for