Christopher Columbus

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Christopher Columbus : biography

c. 1451 – 20 May 1506

Columbus also sighted the chain of the Virgin Islands, which he named Islas de Santa Úrsula y las Once Mil Vírgenes, "Islands of Saint Ursula and the 11,000 Virgins" (shortened, both on maps of the time and in common parlance, to Islas Vírgenes). He also named the islands of Virgin Gorda ("Fat Virgin"), Tortola, and Peter Island (San Pedro).

He continued to the Greater Antilles, and landed in Puerto Rico, which he named San Juan Bautista in honor of Saint John the Baptist (a name that was later retained only for the capital city of San Juan). One of the first skirmishes between native Americans and Europeans since the time of the Vikings occurred when Columbus’s men rescued two boys who had just been castrated by their captors.

On 22 November, Columbus returned to Hispaniola, where he intended to visit the fort of La Navidad, built during his first voyage and located on the northern coast of Haiti. Columbus found the fort in ruins, destroyed by the native Taino people. – Latin American Studies – Retrieved 10 July 2011. Among the ruins were the corpses of 11 of the 39 Spaniards who had stayed behind as the first colonists in the New World.

In retaliation for the attack on La Navidad, Columbus demanded that each Taino over 14 years of age deliver a hawk’s bell full of gold powder every three months or, when this was lacking, twenty-five pounds of spun cotton. If this tribute was not delivered, the Taínos had their hands cut off and were left to bleed to death. Columbus then sailed more than 100 kilometers eastwards along the northern coast of Hispaniola, establishing a new settlement, which he called La Isabela, in the present-day Dominican Republic."". ScienceDaily. 20 March 2009. However, La Isabela proved to be poorly located and the settlement was short-lived.

Columbus left Hispaniola on 24 April 1494, arriving at Cuba (which he named Juana) on 30 April. He explored the southern coast of Cuba, which he believed to be part of a peninsula attached to mainland Asia, as well as several nearby islands, including the Isle of Pines (which he named La Evangelista, "The Evangelist"). He reached Jamaica on 5 May. He retraced his route to Hispaniola, arriving on 20 August, before he finally returned to Spain.

Third voyage

On 30 May 1498, Columbus left with six ships from Sanlúcar, Spain, for his third trip to the New World. Three of the ships headed directly for Hispaniola with much-needed supplies, while Columbus took the other three in an exploration of what might lie to the south of the Caribbean islands he had already visited, including a hope-for passage to continental Asia.Christopher Minster,

Columbus led his 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. As he crossed the Atlantic, Columbus discovered that the angle between North as indicated by a magnetic compass and North as measured by the position of the pole star changed with his position (a phenomenon now known as "compass variation"). He would later use his previous measurements of the compass variation to adjust his reckoning.

After being becalmed for several days in the doldrums of the mid-Atlantic, Columbus’s fleet regained its wind and, dangerously low on water, turned north in the direction of Dominica, which Columbus had visited in his previous voyage. The ships landed on the southern coast of the island of Trinidad on 31 July. After resupplying with food and water, from 4 to 12 August Columbus explored the Gulf of Paria, which separates Trinidad from what is now Venezuela, near the delta of the Orinoco River. He then touched the mainland of South America at the Paria Peninsula.

Columbus correctly interpreted the enormous quantity of fresh water that the Orinoco delivered into the Atlantic Ocean as evidence that he had reached a continental landmass. As he sailed the Gulf of Paria, he observed the diurnal rotation of the pole star in the sky, which he erroneously interpreted as evidence that the Earth was not perfectly spherical, but rather bulged out like a pear around the new-found continent. He also speculated that the new continent might be the location of the biblical Garden of Eden. He then sailed to the islands of Chacachacare and Margarita. He sighted Tobago (which he named "Bella Forma") and Grenada (which he named "Concepción").