Guanahani (San Salvador Island), Bahamas

A voyage no one would fund for ten years

For almost a decade before 1492, Christopher Columbus had tried to sell the same idea to every monarch in Western Europe.

The idea was wrong. Columbus believed, from his reading of Imago Mundi by Pierre d'Ailly and Geographia by Ptolemy, that the Earth's circumference was about 30 000 kilometres rather than the actual 40 075 kilometres. He believed that East Asia — Cipangu (Japan) and Cathay (China) — lay about 4 800 kilometres west of the Canary Islands across an open ocean.

It is about 19 000 kilometres.

Had there been no continent in the way, Columbus and his crews would have died at sea, their water and food long exhausted, somewhere in the middle of the Pacific.

The Portuguese court refused him. The English court refused him. The French court refused him. After eight years of petitioning, the Spanish court of Ferdinand and Isabella — having just completed the Reconquista with the surrender of Granada in January 1492 — finally agreed.

The voyage left Palos on 3 August 1492 with three small ships and about 90 men.

Thirty-three days from the Canaries

The route from the Canary Islands to the first landfall in the Caribbean took 33 days at sea. By late September the crews of the Pinta and Santa María were beginning to mutter about mutiny. Columbus, who had been keeping two logbooks — a public one with shorter distances and a private one with the real numbers — was losing the ability to reassure them.

The breaking point came on 9 October. The crews demanded he turn back within three days.

Three days later — at 02:00 on 12 October 1492 — a lookout on the Pinta named Rodrigo de Triana saw moonlight on white surf. He shouted "¡Tierra! ¡Tierra!" and fired the deck cannon. By dawn the fleet was anchored off a small flat coral island, just over the horizon.

Twelve hours of mutual incomprehension

The first encounter on the beach of Guanahani between Columbus's landing party and the indigenous Lucayan Taíno lasted about twelve hours.

Columbus recorded it in detail in his journal:

They are very gentle and without knowledge of evil; nor do they kill or steal... they should be good and intelligent servants. With 50 men they could all be subjugated and made to do what is required of them.

The phrase "with 50 men they could all be subjugated" — con cincuenta hombres los tendría todos sojuzgados — was written within hours of the first peaceful meeting.

The Taíno offered cotton, parrots, and ornaments of guanín (a gold-copper alloy worn as small ear-spools and pendants). Columbus took the guanín as evidence that gold mines were nearby. They were not — the small Taíno gold supply came from limited Cuban deposits.

What followed

Columbus made four voyages to the Caribbean between 1492 and 1504. He never reached the mainland of North America. He died in 1506 in Valladolid, Spain, still believing he had reached the eastern fringes of Asia.

The Lucayan Taíno of the Bahamas were extinct within thirty years. By 1520 the entire indigenous population of the island chain — estimated at 40 000 to 80 000 people in 1492 — had been killed by Spanish slave raids and the encomienda system that exported Lucayan labour to the Hispaniola sugar plantations. The Lucayans were the first indigenous people of the Americas to disappear entirely after European contact. They were not the last.

The conventional 500-year story of "discovery" has been replaced in most modern historiography with a more accurate term: contact. The Atlantic exchange that began on 12 October 1492 reshaped the world in both directions. American crops — maize, potato, tomato, cassava, peppers, tobacco, cacao, peanuts — transformed European agriculture. European livestock — horses, cattle, pigs, sheep — transformed the American landscape. European diseases — smallpox, measles, influenza — killed an estimated 90 per cent of the indigenous population of the Americas in the first century after contact, probably the largest demographic catastrophe in human history.