Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Christopher Columbus
This nautical chart, lost for five centuries, gives evidence that Portuguese captains had found the New World by 1424
An aged nauti
The discoverer of the New World was first and foremost a sailor says the historian who won the Pulitzer Prize for his brilliant biography of Columbus.
Here are some interesting facts about his epic voyage and its impact.
WAS HE REALLY THE FIRST? IF HE SAILED FOR SPAIN, WHY DO ITALIANS MAKE SUCH A FUSS ABOUT HIS BIRTHDAY? HOW COME AMERICA ISN’T NAMED FOR HIM? WHY IS HE BEING CALLED A VILLAIN NOW?
The Fate of the New World’s First Spanish Settlement
Two ships of Columbus’ fleet of discovery idled languidly in flat water along the treacherous north coast of the island of Haiti, their sails slack in the luminous starlight of a tropical night. It was Christmas Eve, 1492.
Within a century after Columbus and his crew first encountered Cuban natives “with a firebrand in the hand and herbs to drink the smoke thereof,” much of Western civilization had taken to tobacco in all its forms—an addiction brought back to the New World in
Remembering Samuel Eliot Morrison
The great job of the historian is to enable people to understand how things were and why they happened so in a time and at a place that are gone forever. Somehow he has to reach the irrecoverable past.
But didn’t Columbus discover America all by himself? And who were the Pinzóns anyway? Good questions—and not one American in ten thousand probably knows the correct answers.
No event in the history of Western man provided so profound a shock as the discovery of America
Chr
The discoverer of the New World was responsible for the annihilation of the peaceful Arawak Indians
Paul Kane'
Was Columbus motivated by Norse discoveries, concealed over the centuries in misinterpreted maps?
In 1965 widespread interest was excited by the first publication of a fifteenth-century map showing “Vinland” and purporting to be the earliest cartographic representation of any part of the North American continent.
In the Vinland Map we see the only known cartographic delineation of American lands before the discoveries of Columbus and Cabot. So far as the evidence goes, this unique record remained unnoticed by geographical writers, by projectors and explorers, and by cartographers. We may still ask whether, more positively than all the hints of western land accumulated in the fifteenth-century maps and texts, it served in some way to bridge “the gap between two epochs of Atlantic discovery.”
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