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Christopher Columbus Facts:

• He was born in Genoa, Italy.
• He took his first sea voyage when he was 14 years old.
• He knew the Spanish king and queen.
• He set out by sea with three ships to find China in 1492.

Even though Christopher Columbus didn’t go to school as a child, he knew, like everyone else of his time, that the earth was round. His head was filled with dreams of setting sail and finding mountains of gold on the other side of the world. He was already an adult when he realized that if he was going to make his dreams come true he would have to learn to read and write. He would also need to know math to calculate distance and the speed at which his ships would travel. During his studies he learned of another adventurer, Marco Polo. Two hundred years earlier, Marco Polo had traveled east and discovered India and China. He had returned to Italy not only with the fantastic tales that further fired Columbus’ imagination, but also with exotic spices, silks and riches of all kinds.

Christopher Columbus was convinced, that since the world was round, he could sail west to India and China and find the same treasures that Marco Polo had! While this was a pretty nifty idea, no one knew at the time that there was a big stumbling block in the way, namely two continents, North and South America!

Columbus asked Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain to sponsor his plan and promised to bring back gold, spices and silks. Columbus was granted permission and sailed on August 3, 1492.

Two months later, at dawn on October 12th, he made landfall in what we know today as the Bahamas. Striding confidently ashore, he surveyed the Caribbean beach for signs of Asian natives. He was puzzled because the “easterners” didn’t look the way Marco Polo had described them and there were no pagodas with golden roofs. Columbus still thought he had arrived in Asia and since this didn’t look like the China he had read about, he decided it had to be India!

Because he believed he was in India, Columbus thought the people he met were Indians and referred to them that way in the reports he sent to Queen Isabella. That’s how the inhabitants of what later would be called the Americas, became known as Indians.

Columbus and his three ships then sailed on to Cuba. Still confused, Columbus claimed that he had arrived in Japan! Columbus was off by half a planet! He had landed on the outer edges of a continent that Europeans had no idea existed. There had never been any reports or even rumors of a landmass in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. No wonder Columbus thought he had arrived in India and Japan.

Columbus made 4 voyages to what eventually became known as the “New World” and later the Americas. It wasn’t until his third trip that he discovered the mainland of South America and actually stepped onto a continent. Christopher Columbus never understood that he had discovered the Americas. When he died in 1506, he was convinced he had set foot in Asia rather than in a new world.