Christopher Columbus

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Christopher Columbus : biography

c. 1451 – 20 May 1506
In space
  • Asteroid 327 Columbia is named in his honour.

Legacy

Though Christopher Columbus was long considered to be the "discoverer of America" in popular culture, his true historical legacy is more nuanced. America was first discovered by its indigenous population, and Columbus was not even the first European to reach its shores as he was preceded by the Vikings at L’Anse aux Meadows. But the lasting significance of Columbus’ voyages outshone that of his Viking predecessors because he managed to bring word of the continent back to Europe. By bringing the continent to the forefront of Western attention, Columbus initiated the enduring relationship between the Earth’s two major landmasses and their inhabitants. "Columbus’s claim to fame isn’t that he got there first," explains historian Martin Dugard, "it’s that he stayed."Dugard, Martin. The Last Voyage of Columbus. Little, Brown and Company: New York, 2005.

The popular idea that he was the first person to envision a rounded earth is popular misconception. The rounded shape of the earth had been known since antiquity.

The scholar Amerigo Vespucci, who sailed to America in the years following Columbus’ first voyage, was the first to speculate that the land was not part of Asia but in fact constituted some wholly new continent previously unknown to Eurasians. His travel journals, published 1502-4, convinced Martin Waldseemüller to reach the same conclusion, and in 1507—a year after Columbus’s death—Waldseemüller published a world map calling the new continent America from Vespucci’s Latinized name "Americus". According to Paul Lunde, "The preoccupation of European courts with the rise of the Ottoman Turks in the East partly explains their relative lack of interest in Columbus’s discoveries in the West.""". Paul Lunde. Saudi Aramco World. May/June 1992.

Historically, the British had downplayed Columbus and emphasized the role of the Venetian John Cabot as a pioneer explorer, but for the emerging United States, Cabot made for a poor national hero. Veneration of Columbus in America dates back to colonial times. The name Columbia for "America" first appeared in a 1738 weekly publication of the debates of the British Parliament.. The use of Columbus as a founding figure of New World nations and the use of the word "Columbia", or simply the name "Columbus", spread rapidly after the American Revolution. Columbus’s name was given to the federal capital of the United States (District of Columbia), the capital cities of two U.S. states (Ohio and South Carolina), and the Columbia River. Outside the United States the name was used in 1819 for the Gran Colombia, a precursor of the modern Republic of Colombia. Numerous cities, towns, counties, streets, and plazas (called Plaza Colón or Plaza de Colón throughout Latin America and Spain) have been named after him. A candidate for sainthood in the Catholic Church in 1866, celebration of Columbus’s legacy perhaps reached a zenith in 1892 with the 400th anniversary of his first arrival in the Americas. Monuments to Columbus like the Columbian Exposition in Chicago and Columbus Circle in New York City were erected throughout the United States and Latin America extolling him.

In 1909, descendants of Columbus undertook to dismantle the Columbus family chapel in Spain and move it to Boalsburg near State College, Pennsylvania, where it may now be visited by the public. At the museum associated with the chapel, there are a number of Columbus relics worthy of note, including the armchair that the "Admiral of the Ocean Sea" used at his chart table.

More recent views of Columbus, particularly those of Native Americans, have tended to be much more critical. This is because the native Taino of Hispaniola, where Columbus began a rudimentary tribute system for gold and cotton, disappeared so rapidly after contact with the Spanish, because of overwork and especially, after 1519, when the first pandemic struck Hispaniola,Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange, Westport, 1972, pp. 39, 47. because of European diseases. Some estimates indicate case fatality rates of 80–90% in Native American populations during smallpox epidemics."". Arthur C. Aufderheide, Conrado Rodríguez-Martín, Odin Langsjoen (1998). Cambridge University Press. p. 205. ISBN 0-521-55203-6. The native Taino people of the island were systematically enslaved via the encomienda system,"" (PDF). Latin American Studies. which resembled a feudal system in Medieval Europe.Lyle N. McAlister (1984). "". University of Minnesota Press. p.164. ISBN 0-8166-1218-8. The pre-Columbian population is estimated to have been perhaps 250,000–300,000. According to the historian Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes by 1548, 56 years after Columbus landed, fewer than five hundred Taino were left on the island.Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange (Westport, 1972) p. 45. In another hundred years, perhaps only a handful remained. However, some analyses of the question of Columbus’s legacy for Native Americans do not clearly distinguish between the actions of Columbus himself, who died well before the first pandemic to hit Hispaniola or the height of the encomienda system, and those of later European governors and colonists on Hispaniola.