Spain Sails West

By 1492, Spain's monarchs, Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon, had just defeated the last Muslim stronghold on the Iberian Peninsula and were eager to compete with Portugal's growing trade empire. When the Genoese navigator Christopher Columbus proposed reaching Asia by sailing west across the Atlantic rather than around Africa, Isabella and Ferdinand agreed to fund him, motivated by the hope of new wealth and, like the Portuguese, a desire to spread Christianity. On August 3, 1492, Columbus set sail with three ships. Five weeks after leaving the Canary Islands, he reached the Bahamas, believing he had arrived at islands near Asia. He never realized his mistake, even after three additional voyages to the Caribbean and the coast of Venezuela.

Columbus's contact with the people of Hispaniola, whom he called 'Indians,' set a pattern that would repeat across the Americas. Some communities welcomed the newcomers, while others met them with suspicion or resistance. Columbus's own journal described the people he met as gentle and easily converted, and, troublingly, as easily subjugated, writing that fifty men could conquer them all. He returned to Spain with kidnapped members of the Arawak people. Only later did Europeans realize that the lands Columbus had found were entirely new continents, soon named the Americas after the mapmaker Amerigo Vespucci, and not part of Asia at all.

Columbus's legacy remains deeply contested today. For generations, Columbus was celebrated in the United States as the man who discovered America, a story that helped Italian and Catholic immigrant communities feel included in the national narrative. But many historians, along with many Native American communities, point out that Columbus enslaved Indigenous peoples and opened the door to disease, violence, and the destruction of entire societies. Beginning with South Dakota in 1989, some governments have replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples' Day. This debate itself is a lesson in historical perspective: the same set of facts can support very different judgments, depending on whose experience is centered in the story.

Adapted from Studio Aletheia's World Builders Academy curriculum library, drawing on classical world history resources on Columbus's voyages and their contested legacy.