Episode Details

Christopher Columbus was born in Genoa around 1451, the son of a wool weaver who also ran a cheese stand, and he taught himself Latin, Portuguese, and Castilian. After surviving a shipwreck off Portugal in 1476 he reached Lisbon, the center of maritime exploration, married into a Portuguese noble family with access to his late father in law's charts, and worked in a cartography shop with his brother Bartholomew. He read Marco Polo and Ptolemy selectively, then built his pitch on three errors: he read the astronomer al Farghani's figures in short Roman miles instead of Arabic miles, shrinking the globe by about 25 percent; he stretched Eurasia too far east; and he put Japan about 2,400 nautical miles west of the Canary Islands when the real distance is roughly 10,600.

Educated Europeans knew the Earth was round, and the experts who rejected him in Portugal and Spain were arguing about its size, correctly. Spain kept him on a small retainer until the Granada War ended in January 1492, and the clerk Luis de Santangel persuaded Queen Isabella with a risk and reward case. He landed on Guanahani in the Bahamas in October 1492, insisted he had reached Asia, and as governor of Hispaniola imposed forced labor that, with disease, the source describes as genocide. In 1500 the royal investigator Bobadilla sent him home in chains, and he died in 1506 still demanding the wealth his contracts promised.

• He planned to ride the trade winds using the volta do mar, a technique learned from Portuguese sailors.
• Portugal lost interest after Bartolomeu Dias rounded the southern tip of Africa.
• He captured several Arawaks and demanded they lead him to the source of their gold ornaments.
• His heirs fought the Spanish crown for decades in the lawsuits known as the pleitos colombinos.
• His remains moved from Spain to Santo Domingo, Havana, and Seville, and DNA testing has been used to sort out where he lies.