Christopher Columbus Bust

Christopher Columbus reached the Caribbean in 1492 while attempting to find a westward route to Asia. Born in Genoa in 1451, he sailed under the sponsorship of the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella. The landfall began sustained contact that would transform societies on both sides of the Atlantic.

The islands were already home to Indigenous peoples, including the Taíno. Columbus's accounts describe encounters through the expectations of a navigator seeking wealth, royal favor, and converts. His voyages also initiated Spanish settlement and systems of coercion in the Caribbean, including the enslavement of Indigenous people.

He made four Atlantic voyages but continued to understand the lands he encountered in relation to Asia. The dispute before his first voyage concerned distances and the feasibility of the route, not a simple battle between a lone believer in a round earth and a world convinced it was flat.

Columbus died in 1506. Italian monuments later honored him as a navigator of Genoese origin. Reading those monuments today requires holding the navigational achievement together with conquest, violence, and the continuing histories of the peoples whose homelands the expeditions entered.