1492: a voyage west, and what followed

In 1492, the Italian sailor Christopher Columbus convinced Spain's King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella to fund a voyage sailing west across the Atlantic Ocean, hoping to reach Asia faster than the route around Africa. On October 12, 1492, his three ships -- the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria -- reached an island in the Bahamas. Columbus believed he had reached the "Indies," near Asia, so he called the people he met there "Indians," a name based on his mistake that has stuck for over 500 years, even though he had actually reached islands near a continent Europeans did not yet know existed. The people he encountered were the Taino, who had their own villages, farms, and ways of life on these Caribbean islands long before his arrival.

Columbus made four voyages across the Atlantic in total, and his own writings and actions show a harsh side to this history: he and his men demanded gold and labor from the Taino, punished those who could not deliver enough, and took some Taino captive to be sold. Within just a few decades, warfare, forced labor, and diseases introduced by the Europeans (which you will study more closely next week) killed the vast majority of the Taino population. Columbus's voyages are a real turning point in world history -- they opened the door to sustained contact and colonization between Europe and the Americas -- and an honest look at 1492 holds both his navigational achievement and its devastating cost to the Taino at the same time.