DLS-CSB H20 Colonizers

Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) was an Italian explorer who sailed across the Atlantic Ocean in 1492, hoping to find a route to India (in order to trade for spices). He made a total of four trips to the Caribbean and South America during the years 1492-1504.

In 1492, Columbus sailed from Spain with three ships. Two of the ships, the Niña and the Pinta were small caravels. The third ship, the Santa Maria, was larger, and was captained by Columbus. The ships were from 15 to 36 meters long.

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Timeline

Christopher Columbus (1451 – May 20, 1506) was a navigator, colonizer and one of the first Europeans to explore the Americas after the Vikings. Though not the first to reach the Americas from Europe, Columbus' voyages led to general European awareness of the hemisphere and the successful establishment of European cultures in the New World. It is generally believed that he was born in Genoa, although other theories exist. The name Christopher Columbus is the Anglicization of the Latin Christophorus Columbus. Also well known are his name's rendering in modern Italian as Cristoforo Colombo and in Spanish as Cristóbal Colón.

1488 - Columbus appealed to the court of Portugal once again, and once again John invited him to an audience. It too was to come to nothing, for not long afterwards came the arrival of Portugal's native son Bartholomeu Dias from a successful rounding of the southern tip of Africa. Portugal was no longer interested in trailblazing a western route to the East.

1490 - The "Colombus map" was drawn circa in the workshop of Bartolomeo and Christopher Colombus in Lisbon. Columbus traveled from Portugal once more to both Genoa and Venice, but he received encouragement from neither. Previously he had his brother sound out Henry VII of England, to see if the English monarch might not be more amenable to Columbus' proposal. After much carefully considered hesitation Henry's invitation came, too late. Columbus had already committed himself to Spain.

1492 - Columbus' voyages across the Atlantic Ocean began a European effort at exploration and colonization of the Western Hemisphere. While history places great significance on his first voyage. 1492, Columbus departed from Palos with three ships; one larger carrack, Santa María, nicknamed Gallega (the Gallician), and two smaller caravels, Pinta (the Painted) and Santa Clara, nicknamed Niña (the Girl). (The ships were never officially named).[citation needed] They were property of Juan de la Cosa and the Pinzón brothers (Martin Alonzo and Vicente Yáñez), but the monarchs forced the Palos inhabitants to contribute to the expedition. Columbus first sailed to the Canary Islands, which was owned by Castile, where he restocked the provisions and made repairs, and on September 6, he started what turned out to be a five-week voyage across the ocean.

1493, Columbus sighted a rugged island that he named Dominica (Latin for Sunday); later that day, he landed at Marie-Galante, which he named Santa Maria la Galante. After sailing past Les Saintes (Los Santos, The Saints), he arrived at Guadeloupe (Santa María de Guadalupe de Extremadura, after the image of the Virgin Mary venerated at the Spanish monastery of Villuercas, in Guadalupe, Spain), which he explored between November 4 and November 10, 1493.

He left Hispaniola on 1494, arrived at Cuba (naming it Juana) on April 30. He explored the southern coast of Cuba, which he believed to be a peninsula rather than an island, and several nearby islands, including the Isle of Pines (Isla de las Pinas, later known as La Evangelista, The Evangelist). He reached Jamaica on May 5. He retraced his route to Hispaniola, arriving on August 20, before he finally returned to Spain.

1498 - he did not actually reach the South American mainland until his third voyage. Instead, he made landfall on an island in the Bahamas Archipelago that he named San Salvador while trying to find a sea route to India, hence the indigeneous inhabitants being called "Indians". Likewise, he was not the earliest European explorer to reach the Americas, and there are accounts of European transatlantic contact prior to 1492. Nevertheless, Columbus's voyage came at a critical time of growing national imperialism and economic competition between developing nation states seeking wealth from the establishment of trade routes and colonies. The term Pre-Columbian is sometimes used to refer to the peoples and cultures of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus and further European influence.

Plans
Europe had long enjoyed a safe land passage to China and India— sources of valued goods such as silk, spices, and opiates— under the hegemony of the Mongol Empire (the Pax Mongolica, or Mongol peace). With the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, the land route to Asia became more difficult. The Columbus brothers had a different idea. By the 1480s, they had developed a plan to travel to the Indies, then construed roughly as all of south and east Asia, by sailing directly west across the "Ocean Sea," i.e., the Atlantic.

Following Washington Irving's 1828 biography of Columbus, Americans commonly believed Columbus had difficulty obtaining support for his plan because Europeans thought the Earth was flat.[9] In fact, at the time of Columbus’s voyage, since Renaissance started a few decades previously, the news spread between sailors and navigators, [10] that the Earth was a sphere. This had been the general opinion of ancient Greek science, and continued as the second opinion (for example of Bede in The Reckoning of Time). The scholars believed in Isidore of Seville the earth was a disk, inventing the T and O map concept. This view was very influential. Columbus put forth arguments based on the circumference of the sphere. Most scholars accepted Ptolemy's claim the terrestrial landmass (for Europeans of the time, comprising Eurasia and Africa) occupied 180 degrees of the terrestrial sphere, leaving 180 degrees of water.

Columbus, however, believed the calculations of Marinus of Tyre, putting the landmass at 225 degrees, leaving only 135 degrees of water. Moreover, Columbus believed one degree represented a shorter distance on the earth's surface than was commonly held. Finally, he read maps as if the distances were calculated in Italian miles (1,238 meters). Accepting the length of a degree to be 56⅔ miles, from the writings of Alfraganus, he therefore calculated the circumference of the Earth as 25,255 kilometers at most, and the distance from the Canary Islands to Japan as 3,000 Italian miles (3,700 km, or 2,300 statute miles) Columbus did not realize Al-Farghani used the much longer Arabic mile (about 1,830 m).

1498, Columbus left with six ships from Sanlúcar, Spain, for his third trip to the New World. He was accompanied by the young Bartolomé de Las Casas, who would later provide partial transcripts of Columbus' logs.

Columbus led the fleet to the Portuguese island of Porto Santo, his wife's native land. He then sailed to Madeira and spent some time there with the Portuguese captain João Gonçalves da Camara before sailing to the Canary Islands and Cape Verde. Columbus landed on the south coast of the island of Trinidad on July 31. From August 4 through August 12, he explored the Gulf of Paria which separates Trinidad from Venezuela. He explored the mainland of South America, including the Orinoco River. He also sailed to the islands of Chacachacare and Margarita Island and sighted and named Tobago (Bella Forma) and Grenada (Concepcion).

1502 - Columbus made a fourth voyage nominally in search of the Strait of Malacca to the Indian Ocean. Accompanied by his brother Bartolomeo and his 13-year-old son Fernando, he left Cádiz, Spain, on May 11, 1502, with the ships Capitana, Gallega, Vizcaína and Santiago de Palos. He sailed to Arzila on the Moroccan coast to rescue Portuguese soldiers whom he had heard were under siege by the Moors. On June 15, they landed at Carbet on the island of Martinique (Martinica). A hurricane was brewing, so he continued on, hoping to find shelter on Hispaniola. He arrived at Santo Domingo on June 29, but was denied port, and the new governor refused to listen to his storm prediction. Instead, while Columbus' ships sheltered at the mouth of the Rio Jaina, the first Spanish treasure fleet sailed into the hurricane. Columbus' ships survived with only minor damage, while twenty-nine of the thirty ships in the governor's fleet were lost to the July 1st storm. In addition to the ships, 500 lives (including that of the governor, Francisco de Bobadilla) and an immense cargo of gold were surrendered to the sea.

After a brief stop at Jamaica, Columbus sailed to Central America, arriving at Guanaja (Isla de Pinos) in the Bay Islands off the coast of Honduras on July 30. Here Bartolomeo found native merchants and a large canoe, which was described as "long as a galley" and was filled with cargo. On August 14, he landed on the American mainland at Puerto Castilla, near Trujillo, Honduras. He spent two months exploring the coasts of Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, before arriving in Almirante Bay, Panama on October 16.

1503 - In Panama, Columbus learned from the natives of gold and a strait to another ocean. After much exploration, in January 1503 he established a garrison at the mouth of the Rio Belen. On April 6 one of the ships became stranded in the river. At the same time, the garrison was attacked, and the other ships were damaged. Columbus left for Hispaniola on April 16, heading north. On May 10 he sighted the Cayman Islands, naming them "Las Tortugas" after the numerous sea turtles there. His ships next sustained more damage in a storm off the coast of Cuba. Unable to travel farther, on June 25, 1503, the ships were beached in St. Ann's Bay, Jamaica.

1504 - Columbus and his men remained stranded on Jamaica for a year. One Spaniard, Diego Mendez, and some native paddlers sailed by canoe to get help from Hispaniola. Hispaniola's governor, Nicolás de Ovando, detested Columbus and obstructed all efforts to rescue Columbus and his men. In the meantime Columbus, in a desperate effort to induce the natives to continue provisioning him and his hungry men, successfully intimidated the natives by correctly predicting a lunar eclipse for February 29, 1504, using the Ephemeris of the German astronomer Regiomontanus.[22] Help finally arrived on June 29, 1504, and Columbus and his men arrived in Sanlúcar, Spain, on November 7.

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Origin of country

North and South America are popularly accepted as having been named after Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller. Vespucci was the first European to suggest that the Americas were not the East Indies, but a new world previously undiscovered by Europeans. Vespucci was the first to discover South America and the Amerique mountains of Central America, which connected his discoveries to those of Christopher Columbus. The etymology is further complicated by the need of cartographers to come up with a name that paralleled the feminine names of the other continents (e.g. Europa, Asia, Africa etc.). The convention is to use the surname for naming discoveries except in the case of royalty and so a derivation from "Amerigo Vespucci" may be problematic.

The second and less generally accepted theory is that the continents are named after an English merchant named Richard Amerike from Bristol, who is believed to have financed John Cabot's voyage of discovery from England to Newfoundland in 1497. A minutely explored belief that has been advanced is that America was named for a Spanish sailor bearing the ancient Visigothic name of 'Amairick'. Another is that the name is rooted in an American Indian language.

Scientists have several theories as to the origins of the early human population of the North America. The indigenous peoples of North America themselves have many creation stories, by which they assert that they have been present on the land since its creation.

Before contact with Europeans the natives of North America were divided into many different polities, from small bands of a few families to large empires. They lived in several "culture areas", which roughly correspond to geographic and biological zones and give a good indication of the main lifeway or occupation of the people who lived there (e.g. the Bison hunters of the Great Plains, or the farmers of Mesoamerica). Native groups can also be classified by their language family (e.g. Athapascan or Uto-Aztecan). It is important to note that peoples with similar languages did not always share the same material culture, nor were they always allies.Scientists believe that the Inuit people of the high Arctic came to North America much later than other native groups, as evidenced by the disappearance of Dorset culture artifacts from the archaeological record, and their replacement by the Thule people.

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Local Foods

In a letter to the King and Queen, Columbus had very specific orders for the food of the expedition. The standard food aboard a Spanish long-distance voyage was wine, olive oil, sea biscuit, and salted meat. Columbus requested from the Crown: good (not stale) sea biscuit, salted flour (for making bread aboard ship), wheat flour, wine, salt meat (usually salted beef), olive oil, vinegar, cheese, dried chickpeas, dried lentils, dried beans, salt fish (usually anchovies and sardines), fishing tackle, (fish for fishing while aboard), honey, rice, almonds, and raisins.

The olive oil was used for cooking things like chickpeas, lentils, beans, and salted meat. The bread they cooked onboard was usually “baked” in the hot coals of the fire pit. One of the sailors cooked a meal in the fire pit, which was the one hot meal served every day at 11 am. The meal would be served in a large wooden trencher and the crew may have had small wooden bowls for their portion. The sailors would use the knives they carried for work (for cutting rope and sail cloth) to cut or pick-up large pieces of food. Otherwise they did not have any forks or spoons. The primary drink was wine and next, water. Both were kept in barrels onboard. The water quickly went stagnate, so wine with alcohol kept better for longer. So the crews drank the wine first and then drank the water as a last resort. There was no coffee or tea to add to the water. At the end of the day, the firebox was extinguished for the night, since fire on a ship is extremely dangerous.

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Way of life

Christopher Columbus sailed from Spain across the Atlantic Ocean in 1492, landing in the "new world" of the Americas and gaining lasting fame. His mission was twofold: open trade routes for exploitation and bring the word of Jesus Christ to the uninitiated. He sailed with three ships (the Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria) and made landfall somewhere in the Bahamas. He returned to Europe to spread the word, and was named "Admiral of the Ocean Seas" by Ferdinand and Isabella. He made three more voyages in the following years, always believing that he had reached Asia, and his success opened the door for Spain to conquer the Americas. Five centuries after his daring voyage, Columbus is still famous but is also the subject of heated discussions about whether he was a good-guy hero who discovered new worlds or a not-so-nice guy who helped grab the Americas from their native inhabitants. Still, he has long been known as the man who "discovered" America, and the second Monday in October is celebrated as Columbus Day in the United States.