Christopher Columbus

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It is the 24th of June, 1503.

With waves crashing over his feet to sluice the deck, an Italian by the name of Cristoforo Colombo stands on the forecastle of a ship.

He is the admiral of a fleet of four vessels, two of which have been lost.

His entire remaining crew of 116 men is packed into the surviving caravels.

After extreme weather along the coast of Central America, he is trying to limp back to safe harbor in the Caribbean in the damaged boats.

This whole voyage has been a disaster, his most dangerous and his least profitable.

And at the age of 52, possibly also his last.

Now the ship's mate emerges from a hatch and gestures for him to follow.

There's something he needs to see.

Colombo climbs down the creaking wooden steps and immediately sees the issue.

Below, water is swilling about on the boards.

A rat squeals as it leaps to a dry perch and the mate points to the wooden planks of a hull that is pitted with holes bored out by shipworm.

Even pumps cannot keep water out now.

The caravel is at risk of sinking.

They need to reach the Spanish enclave of Hispaniola Island, far to the northeast, but they're making little progress against strong currents.

Then, there is a shout from the crow's nest.

Colombo hurries up to the deck and sees it.

Land.

And just in time.

But as they get a little closer, he recognizes the island.

It's Jamaica.

He's visited before and knows there is no no Spanish settlement here.

No chance of repairing the ships.

If they land, they will be stranded.

Even so, with the lives of his crew in peril, they have no choice but to go ashore.

They approach the wide bay, and Colombo almost falls to the deck as the caravel grinds to an abrupt halt, its hull rising up on the sand.

With the two vessels beached, leaning against one another like drunken sailors, Colombo jumps down to the shallow water and the men join him, splashing through the waves to the shore an arrow's distance away.

Further along the bay, local fishermen shout in alarm.

Children scream and run into the trees.

But they're of little concern to Colombo, who has bigger things on his mind.

For him, this is no paradise.

It is a prison.

Thirteen months after he left Spain, he has nothing to take home or any idea if he will ever get back there again.

He is marooned, thousands of miles from safety, a castaway.

The explorer, better known as Christopher Columbus, is famous for reaching the Americas and opening up a new world to European pioneers.

His determination and skills were second to none, but he eventually fell out of favor at home and abroad.

His reputation for brutality making him unwelcome even in the colonies he founded.

But Columbus never set foot in what is now the continental United States.

He wasn't even looking for the uncharted continent.

His mission was to discover a new route to Asia.

Contrary to popular misconception, he also wasn't trying to prove that the Earth was round.

This fact had been well understood since ancient Greek times.

So what motivated a young man from Italy to endanger his life on behalf of the Spanish government?

How did his voyages change the world through the exchange of animals, crops, and disease?

And how much responsibility can we put at the feet of one man for the suffering that colonialism brought to the indigenous people of the Americas?

I'm John Hopkins from the Noising Network.

This is a short history of Christopher Columbus.

The origins of Christopher Columbus are disputed, but the widely accepted version is that he is born Cristoforo Colombo in around 1451.

His birthplace of Genoa in what is now northwestern Italy, is a wealthy, independent city-state, a naval port and gateway to the Mediterranean.

In the harbor, boats land from Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East, and sailors visit taverns like the one Cristoforo's father owns at one point.

It is a cultural and linguistic melting pot where the young man picks up several languages, but he is drawn to the sea.

By the age of 14, he is making fishing trips and soon lands a job with the Portuguese Merchant Navy.

He travels widely throughout the Aegean, across to Africa and north as far as Ireland and even Iceland.

He experiences the dangers of the ocean firsthand, nearly dying in a shipwreck in 1476.

But Columbus is ambitious and undeterred.

Douglas Hunter is the author of several books about the history of exploration, including The Race to the New World.

There's a lot of stories, barnacles, that sort of get attached to Columbus, even in his own lifetime.

We know he came from Genoa, and I think the real mysteries are how did he get as far up the chain as he did?

His father was a wool carter.

They were pretty modest people, but we know he climbed a pretty steep ladder and a pretty tall ladder.

We just don't know how he did it.

At the age of 25, Columbus moves to Lisbon in Portugal, where he studies navigation, astronomy, mathematics, and cartography.

He discovers the writings of Marco Polo, the Venetian explorer who traveled to Asia in the previous century.

Columbus's younger brother Bartholomew joins him.

and qualifies as a map maker.

The pair are then inspired and look west in the same way that Marco Polo once looked east.

What might be out there beyond the Atlantic?

Classical literature tells stories of mythical islands over the horizon.

But for practical information, we can look to the Viking sagas.

They tell us how Viking sailors like Leif Erikson reached the northern shores of the Americas around the year 1000,

500 years before Columbus.

Some historians believe Columbus could have heard tales about these voyages when he briefly visited Iceland in the winter of 1477,

but we can never know for sure.

What we do know is that in the 1470s, Columbus gets hold of a letter sent by the Italian cartographer Paolo Toscanelli to the King of Portugal.

It offers a detailed account of a possible route to what was then called the Indies, an umbrella umbrella term for the area of Asia that we now know as the Indian subcontinent, China, Southeast Asia, and even Japan.

It also contains a map.

So there was this letter by Paolo Tuscanelli in the 1470s that basically laid out what Columbus wanted to do, which was sail west.

And you were going to get to these semi-mythical places.

The monarchs and the merchants know that there's stuff to be had and money to be made in what they call the Indies.

And everybody knew the world was a sphere.

That wasn't anything controversial.

And if you know what a sphere looks like, you know that if you just sail in one direction, you'll go all the way around inside and you'll come back where you started.

So it wasn't much of a concept to say, well, if we know we want to go to quote the east, but if we just sail west, we're going to run into it sooner or later.

Problem was, how long was it going to take, and could you find people to do it with you?

Goods from the Indies, such as silks and spices, are highly valued.

But the lucrative transport of goods is dominated by Muslim kingdoms, especially the Ottoman Empire, who control the overland routes.

Meanwhile, the Venetians control access to the east via the Levant, or Middle Eastern seaways.

With so much restriction on access to the East, Columbus hopes there could be plenty of potential investors keen on an alternative route.

But the fundraising campaign will prove to be an odyssey of its own.

It will take 10 years to raise the finances necessary for an expedition.

In the meantime, he marries a Portuguese noblewoman, and around 1480, they have a son, Diego.

His wife dies a few years later, and Columbus has a second child, Ferdinand, from a new relationship.

But he spends little time with the family as he travels widely to raise funds for his voyage.

His brother, Bartholomew, the mapmaker, goes to northern Europe to lobby monarchs and rich merchants, but fails to persuade Charles VIII of France or Henry VII of England.

For his part, Columbus seeks sponsors closer to home.

Firstly, he presents a proposal to John II of Portugal.

But when he's turned down, he seeks funding in Venice and Genoa.

And there is also Spain.

As it stands, the Portuguese have a monopoly on exploration along the coast of Africa, which means the Spanish are not allowed to sail any further south than the Canary Islands.

So, given the other limits on passage east, the Spanish are locked out.

An opportunity to head west, therefore, might be just the

The problem is that the two Spanish monarchs, King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile, are caught up in a lengthy and costly war.

The final phase of the so-called Reconquista, the war to reclaim Granada, the last Muslim stronghold in Iberia, has been raging for a decade.

But when the Islamic Emirate of Granada finally surrenders in January 1492, Columbus seizes his moment.

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It is January the 2nd, 1492.

Columbus, now aged 40, stands among a cheering crowd.

They are gathered outside the rose-red walls of a fortress known as the Alambra Palace.

The citadel dominates Granada in southern Spain, a region that has long been ruled by Muslims.

But today, it is back in Christian hands for the first time in centuries.

The war is at an end after a relentless series of military campaigns finally forced the Sultan to surrender.

Today, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella are arriving to triumphantly take the last piece in their puzzle of a unified Spain.

As Columbus waits to see what will happen next, music starts up.

A procession approaches, and the noise of the crowd only intensifies when they catch a glimpse of the monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, riding through the dusty streets, where only days ago it was too dangerous for Catholics to tread.

They pause at the city gates, which creak and crash open.

There is a carnival atmosphere as the Spanish infantry soldiers, high-stepping cavalry horses, and clergy march into the citadel.

And then, high on the Camaras Tower, the tallest part of the Alambra, a flag bearing the Islamic crescent drops.

It is a poignant moment, and the crowd falls silent.

In its place, a bright white flag appears, jerking and snapping as it is hauled aloft.

It catches the wind and streams into view.

All of Spain is once again under Catholic control.

With the end of the Reconquista, the monarchs are no longer hemorrhaging funds into war, but they do need to restock their coffers.

Just days after the handover at the Alambra Palace, Columbus secures an audience with Isabella to make a fresh appeal.

You need income, he tells her.

Pay for me to sail west, and I'll find you a back door into the Indies.

He was a very persistent salesman.

It's not just like he needs cash and he needs boats, but he wants privileges.

That's a really cure part of his negotiations.

He wants rights that once he finds things on the other side, not only rights for himself, but he wants hereditary rights for his family.

So he got what he wanted, but he really pushed hard to get those things.

So Isabel in the end does grant him the rights.

There's the myth that she pawned her jewels.

It's a nice story, but really what happened is that those funds came from properties of Jews who were kicked out of Spain as of May 1, 1492.

So they either had to leave the country or they had to convert to Christianity by July.

So, you know, that's one of the darker corners of how this thing came together is that it took Jewish property, you know, gave it to the crown.

The crown then used it to put this voyage together for Columbus.

But really, it does come down to this basic Tuscanelli idea.

Go west.

Columbus himself thought maybe a week past the Canaries and you were going to get there.

It took a lot longer than that.

On the morning of the 3rd of August, 1492, Three ships set sail from Palos de la Frontera in Andalufia, in southern Spain.

Leading the way is a carrack called the Santa Maria.

Columbus is commander of the fleet and its navigator.

There are also two caravels called the Pinta and the Niña, captained by the Pinthon brothers, Martin Alonso and Vicente Yanet.

But Columbus's own brother Bartholomew was unable to return from his fundraising efforts in northern Europe.

The fleet passes without fanfare down the Rio Tinto and out into the open sea beyond.

The plan is to sail to the Canary Islands, then pick up trade winds that will carry the ships west into the Atlantic.

And beyond that, are the lands whose names are only known from myth and legend.

There was the Isle of Seven Cities.

There was Antilla.

That's how we got the Lesser Antilles stuck on the maps in the Caribbean eventually.

There was Sipango, which was Japan.

So I don't think there was a question that if you just went west, you were going to get to these places.

The problem was how long was it going to take?

Because it really depended on how big do you think the world is.

There are many medieval texts that claim the Earth is comprised of six parts land to one part water.

And if there's that much more Earth than ocean, surely they'll see some soon.

But as the days pass and there is no sign of land, the crews of three ships start to doubt their commander.

Columbus, either by naivety or deliberately, kind of underplayed the distance, probably made it about 25% shorter than it really was.

And you have to remember, too, that at the time, there was a lot of sailing going on in Europe because of trade, but sailors generally weren't out of sight of land for more than like five days would be a lot.

Spain to the Canaries was about five days.

But everything else was coastal sailing.

So the idea of just heading off off into emptiness and going and going and going and going was a little bit daunting.

Days turn to weeks.

Columbus keeps two sets of logs in his cabin on the Santa Maria.

One is the real log, recording the vast distance his calculations tell him they have already traveled.

The other log is the one he shares, a reading based on an alternative set of measurements that suggest they are not as far from home as his men believe.

While the crew is afraid of being lost at sea, Columbus fears that the men will stage a mutiny if they learn the truth.

Columbus was a pretty dodgy guy.

You know, he kept his logs to himself, but he knows they're out there somewhere.

He's not very far and he's going to get there.

And he's kind of monkeying with the geography and his reportage of where he really is, because they had to kind of keep them on side.

Then, Martin Alontho

spots a flock of birds flying south.

Surely, he argues, following them would lead the sailors to whatever foreign shore the birds go to roost.

So the fleet changes course and sails on.

After ten long weeks at sea, they are now desperate for land.

What meat they have left is rotten, and the hard-tack biscuits they rely upon are full of maggots.

Despite the hopeful signs of birds in the sky and floating rafts of palm leaves in the water, the men have had enough.

A mutiny is threatened.

But Columbus manages to negotiate his way out of it.

Two more days, he promises, and will be there.

The fleet heads southwest, and Columbus prays for a sighting.

Then, with the deadline nearly expired, the shout he has been desperate to hear goes up.

The island they approach is low-lying and sandy, with trees tumbling into the water.

In a natural harbor, Columbus goes ashore with a small entourage, carrying weapons and a flag.

On the beach, they plunge into the sand a pole with a white banner adorned with a red and gold crown.

For the first time in history, a European Christian flag flies in the Americas.

Columbus names the island San Salvador, meaning Savior, and makes contact with local inhabitants.

There is no record of the meeting from the perspective of the native native Lucayan people, but it seems they are content to interact with the Europeans and presumably assist the hungry men to find food and fresh water.

But Columbus must be asking, is this the fabled Indies?

The local name for the place is Guanahani, but that means nothing to Europeans who have no maps of this area.

The question of where they actually are has never been definitively answered, although it is now believed that the landing point is one of the smaller isles of what is now the Bahamas.

As the Americas don't feature on his map, it appears to Columbus that they have sailed across the single unbroken sea and arrived on the far side of Asia.

They conclude that San Salvador is one of the tiny dots in the archipelago drawn by Toscanelli.

Columbus declares that he has reached the Indies, and the local people are therefore Indians.

And this is why even today, parts of the Caribbean are known as the West Indies.

In fact, his whole life, he never admitted he didn't make it to the Indies.

That's got to be one of the great achievements of history.

It's like going to the moon and hitting Mars instead, you know, and saying, no, really, I'm on the moon.

Don't mind the red dust.

We're on the moon, folks.

But once you got to somewhere that really wasn't the Indies, you had to figure out what to do with it.

Where's the wealth?

Because, as it turned out, there was going to be eventually massive, massive amounts of silver coming out of the Americas, which was going to bring huge wealth in Spain, but also runaway inflation in Europe.

There were big consequences to doing that.

But initially, it was, well, we've gotten there and like, where are we?

Two days later, Columbus bids farewell to the people of San Salvador and sails on.

His ships spend months exploring the Caribbean.

On December the 6th, they land in a bay that Columbus calls San Nicolas, the northwestern tip of a much bigger island he names Hispaniola.

But the local people, the Taino, have already given their home a name.

It is Land of Mountains, or in their language, Eiti.

It is now better known as Haiti.

Again, there is no record of what the Taino people make of the travelers from across the ocean.

But Columbus meets a chieftain called Guacanagari, from whom he purchases gold jewelry.

But he also tries to force the Taino to take him to the source of their gold, and kidnaps some locals to take back to Europe.

Then, on Christmas Day 1492, the Santa Maria runs aground on a reef.

Though the loss of the flagship is a disaster, Columbus orders the salvage of the timber to build shelters on a spot on the north shore called La Navidad, or Christmas.

They're substantial enough for a settlement.

So when he departs for Europe, 39 men from his crew remain behind to maintain the first Spanish outpost in the Americas.

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In January 1493, Columbus sets off for home in the two caravels belonging to the Pinthon Pinthon brothers.

He hasn't found mountains of gold and instant riches, but he has some novelties to take home and a promise of plentiful profits to come.

Explorers are not out there to fill in the geography for the sake of the science of geography, rather to seize the main chance.

When Columbus first sees people in the Bahamas, it's very telling that his first comments are, they look intelligent and they'd make good slaves.

We can grow sugar here.

We need slaves.

We can enslave the people here.

We're in the middle of conquering.

They're busy finishing the conquest of the Canary Islands.

And he's tied to the people in the conquest of the Canary Islands.

In fact, Berardi, a slaver, is the guy he borrows the money from to charter the Santa Maria for himself.

And that's another consequence of the fact that it was someone from Portugal or Spain that came to the world first because it was a slaving world in the Mediterranean.

This was a slaving society and they had no compunction about enslaving people and using slave labor.

On this return leg, the ships encounter the worst storm of the entire voyage.

But eventually, two months after leaving the Caribbean, Columbus reaches Spain and rushes to Barcelona to present himself to the king and queen.

In letters that he sends ahead, he tells of how he reached the Indies and describes Hispaniola as a magnificent island off the coast of China.

In the centuries that follow, Columbus's name will become synonymous with the voyage that forever connects Europe and the Americas.

But in 1493, it is not immediately clear who will take the glory for the so-called discovery.

Columbus had the rights, so there's no question he's the guy whose name is signed to the papers, So he has the blessings of the Spanish crown.

The most interesting rival he has of that time really is Martin Villonzo Pinzon.

He is with his brother, the guys that bring in the Nina and the Pinto.

But you also get a lot of people saying Pinzon actually is the one that made them go all the way, that Columbus wanted to turn back.

And Pinzon said, no, no, no, we're going to keep going.

It's Pinzon.

I don't think it's Contested who sees this flock of birds and says, let's go that away.

For a few days, Pinzon has the chart that they're using and Columbus has to take it back from them on the crossing and then they get separated in a storm on the way back and then you're aware that there's this race home because whoever gets there first is going to tell the story of what really happened.

Martin Alonzo Penzo dies a few days after getting home.

And if Penzon had lived, we would have had a whole different perspective on the voyage.

Martin Alonzo Pinthon probably dies of syphilis.

a disease believed to have originated in the Americas and introduced to Europe as a result of the voyages of Columbus.

Pinthon has no immunity to the new strain of bacteria and quickly succumbs, just as millions of indigenous Americans will do in the years to come from the many diseases that spread in the other direction.

With Pinthon out of the way, Columbus is warmly welcomed home.

He is named governor of the Indies, and in return he presents Queen Isabella with a sample of gold and the Taino people that he kidnapped.

He shows off the other souvenirs too, things never seen before in Europe.

A pineapple, tobacco, a turkey.

But contrary to popular belief, Columbus doesn't bring back the first potatoes.

These aren't discovered by Europeans until 1532.

But his best gift is the news that there is an abundance of gold, fertile land, and a local population ready to convert to Catholicism.

By deeming the so-called New World terra nullis, or empty land, the Europeans justify its seizure without recognizing the sovereignty of indigenous people.

I know discover is something we put in quotation marks, but I think discover is still a valid concept within a culture itself.

In Europe, they didn't know this place existed.

So because people live there doesn't mean it's empty.

That's valid.

Terra Nolis is offensive.

But nobody had a concept of this place.

So there is a process of discovery, naturally.

And they discover a lot of resources.

They were completely alien to Europe.

He's impressed them enough with whatever he has to say, we've got to get him back there right away.

We've got to get a trading center built.

And that's serious.

It's 17 vessels and over a thousand people go to set up the center.

They really believe they're right on the edge of something big.

In September 1493, Columbus set sail west again, this time with his brothers beside him.

His fleet now comprises 17 vessels with a crew including soldiers, priests, craftsmen, and farmers.

The mission this time is not to explore, but to colonize.

It takes only 20 days to cross the Atlantic.

But when Columbus returns to the settlement at La Navidad, he finds that it has been burned to the ground and the Spaniards are missing or dead.

Confronting a local chieftain, Columbus learns that the Spanish had forcibly kidnapped Taino women and made them serve at La Navidad.

So the Taino massacred the foreigners to free them.

Cutting his losses, Columbus abandons La Navidad and sails to Cuba, which he believes is a peninsula of Cathay or China.

Hispaniola, he concludes, must be Sipango or Japan.

There, Spanish explorers find gold and force local people to work in the mines.

Naturally, they fight back, and the Spanish resort to brutal punishments, including mutilation and execution.

Columbus uses the same methods, ordering violent retribution against both locals and any Spanish who get out of hand.

He also starts to ship captured indigenous people back to Europe to labor in Spain.

It's on that second voyage that things really start to get sideways.

They ship back 400 people as slaves.

Half of them probably die on the way home.

There are just horrifying eyewitness letters of women dropping their babies in panic and just running into the forest to get away from the Spanish who are coming after them.

Plus, he's indebted to slavers.

He borrowed the money for the Santa Maria from Berardi, who's a slaver.

So he's lost a ship the first time out.

And he probably brought these people home to try to, you know, settle some debts.

You just get this sense on this second voyage that just becomes this free-for-all of expeditions into the hinterlands, looking for gold, shaking down people, terrorizing people.

And, you know, Columbus trying to build a trading station for which there's no need.

All All the while, Columbus is trying to keep alive this idea that, yeah, we really are just around the corner from where all the money is.

But just because you have a geographic idea that you can sail that way and get somewhere, are you the right guy to run this show?

Are you the right guy once you get there to oversee, you know, the colonization, oversee the trading center, do all those things?

And, you know, the Columbus record, frankly, isn't very good.

March 1496, Columbus once again heads home, leaving his brother Bartholomew to stay and run the colony with a third Columbus sibling, Diego.

When Christopher arrives back in Europe, his star is on the wane.

He has failed to produce the promised riches, and Isabella is not impressed by reports of brutality and enslavement.

She declares that the people of these newly colonized lands will not be treated as slaves because they are her subjects.

This is at a time when Africans are being enslaved too, but the difference for the Queen is that Spain hasn't colonized their African homelands, so they are not her citizens.

Columbus is ordered to take the captives home.

There is now a long wait of four years before Columbus's third voyage.

In that time, another explorer called John Cabot sets off from Bristol in England to cross the northern wastes of the Atlantic.

When he makes landfall in what he calls Newfoundland in North America, he claims the land on behalf of the English king Henry VII.

A year after that historic moment, Columbus sets sail again to the south of the continent in a much depleted fleet of six ships.

This time he also reaches the mainland, landing on the coast of what is now Venezuela, but doesn't find treasure or a strait leading to Asia.

Back in the Spanish enclave of Hispaniola, he is increasingly unpopular.

Both Columbus and his brothers antagonize the settlers as well as the locals.

Soon, tensions come to a head.

It is August of the year 1500.

A caravel docks at Santo Domingo on Hispaniola and a harbor bell rings to call Stevedors to unload it.

Now a man with a neat, pointed beard comes down the gangplank and makes his way along the quay, sweating in his formal Spanish jacket and ruff.

This is Francisco de Bobadilla, a court official who has been sent across the Atlantic by the King and Queen to investigate worrying reports about the state of governance in their colonies and, if necessary, to arrest the governor, Christopher Columbus.

His attention is drawn to a gibbet that stands on the waterside, from which swing the bodies of five men.

Judging by their attire, they are Spaniards.

Why has Columbus hanged his own men?

The sight confirms what Bobadilla feared: evidence of chaos and brutality.

The official is taken straight to the home of Columbus, one of the only stone buildings in the town.

He is shown inside by an armed guard, but finds that both the governor and his brother, Bartholomew, are elsewhere on the island.

It's of no matter to Bobadilla, though, who takes the opportunity to settle himself behind the desk in Columbus's office.

He is leafing through papers when the third Columbus brother, Diego, arrives.

Rising to his feet, Bobadilla orders Diego to release any other Spaniards who might be imprisoned in the fortified tower that serves as the town's jail.

When Diego refuses, Bobadilla whistles for a guard, and Diego himself is dragged away to the prison.

The visitor returns to Columbus's correspondence.

But word of his arrival has spread around the small settlement, and a stream of fellow Spaniards now arrive at the residence, keen to give evidence about Columbus.

Some are friends, some are enemies.

Babadilla hears that Columbus has taken slaves, stolen goods, kept for himself valuables that should have been sent home to his monarchs.

He is said to have given the best rolls and land to his own brothers.

cut off the ears and noses of people who worked too slowly, and made women parade naked through the town.

Bobadilla notes all the accusations, but it's not long before he comes to a decision.

Columbus has got to go.

There is a loud knock and a guard announces that the governor has been spotted on his way back to town.

Bobadilla rushes to his horse.

They gallop to the outskirts of the port where they intercept Columbus.

He is manhandled by the guards from his horse, then clapped in chains and marched to the quayside.

There are jeers and shouts as he reaches the water's edge and is unceremoniously loaded onto a ship.

Columbus's last impression of the town he founded is the rejoicing of its people as he is removed from power.

Back in Spain, he is put on trial for mismanagement and cruelty.

Columbus argues that Bobadilla trumped up the charges because he himself wanted to become governor of the Indies.

Indeed, Bobadilla is appointed to the position as soon as Columbus is out of the way.

In the end, Columbus is cleared of the accusations, but his reputation is damaged and he loses his honorary titles.

The profusion of conflicting accounts mean it's hard to create a clear picture of the man himself.

We don't get to interrogate the people around him.

We don't get to interrogate the indigenous allies he has or their enemies.

Even Columbus, we don't have his journals.

We have an abstract of the journals.

We have letters from people who were on the voyages.

So you kind of have to sifter those and it's never easy in this historical vein to find that middle ground.

What can we be definitive about?

Remarkably, given Columbus's fall from grace, Queen Isabella grants funding for another voyage.

But he is under strict instructions not to return to Hispaniola, where his presence is divisive.

The focus is exploration.

His goal now is to circumnavigate the world.

Columbus sets sail from the Spanish port of Cadiz in May 1502.

accompanied by his grown-up son, Diego, and Ferdinand, who is only 13.

They reach the coast of Central America again, meeting a group of people who are probably Mayans sailing in a long canoe.

The Americans introduce Columbus to his first taste of cocoa or chocolate.

Further along the coast he reaches Panama.

Though locals tell him that he is only a few days walk from another sea, he does not travel inland.

If he had, he might have traversed the narrow isthmus to discover the Pacific Ocean.

Perhaps this sight would have finally proved that he was not in the Indies, but had put a new continent on the map.

Instead, his fleet is hit by the worst storm he has ever encountered.

He describes the sea as seething like a pot on a hot fire.

They survive, but the boats are damaged and found to be riddled with shipworm.

The foundering vessels limp on towards the safety of Hispaniola, but end up wrecked in Jamaica.

Here, Columbus is a castaway for a year.

He's only saved when one of his crew bravely paddles for four days in a canoe to raise the alarm in Hispaniola.

Columbus sails back to Spain with his youngest son in 1504, and his extraordinary career comes to an ignominious close.

But for the connection between Europe and the Americas, it is only the end of the beginning.

It took kind of a roguish, scheming guy to hold this group together and achieve something he had no intention of achieving.

It was huge for the Americas because you have disease, you have cultural influences, you're going to have Catholicism and Christianity come in.

Columbus getting there in 1422 is monumental as to what's going to happen in the economy of the world and, the politics and the consequences for millions and millions and millions of people.

His explorations are the first chapter in a long story of unprecedented change that impacts both sides of the Atlantic.

Trade, culture, animals, plants, germs.

It becomes known as the Columbian Exchange, an explosive transfer of biology and ideas that is unprecedented in the history of the planet.

But though the voyages will result in enormous wealth for Europe, the indigenous people of the Americas, they signal the commencement of waves of hardship, devastating epidemics, forced labor, and cultural disruption.

There's a lot of disease.

Smallpox came to North America and it did.

It killed crazy numbers of people in indigenous communities.

I mean, the numbers are anywhere up to 90% because of disease alone.

It's just a complete physical cultural shock of these people coming in in this, you know, the dark side of the exchange in the new world that their bodies had never, you know, encountered before and they were incapable of withstanding.

It becomes this unstoppable force.

It's inevitably going to take over these places and rule them on their terms.

Columbus returns from his travels a sick man.

In 1506, he succumbs to heart failure in the Spanish city of Valla Dolid.

His remains prove to be as restless as the man himself.

Almost 40 years after his death, Columbus's own wishes are carried out when his coffin is taken to Hispaniola, the island that today is divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

But while his life has long been commemorated with books, statues, and occasions like the North American national holiday, Columbus Day, the more brutal aspects of his story have led many to shun the celebrations.

Some prefer to mark Indigenous Peoples Day, focused on the history, resilience, and achievements of Native Americans.

Others argue that one individual cannot be either celebrated or condemned.

Columbus was simply a cog in an imperial machine that meant exploration inevitably led to exploitation.

It was going to happen.

How it unfolded had huge consequences.

So on the one hand, you say, well, you can't expect Columbus to be any different than the world he came from.

And I think that's true.

Everything came down to cash.

I mean, as ruthlessly as we can put it.

I mean, everybody was trying to make money out of something.

That was entirely the mentality of the time.

But we do value stepping back from it and saying, what were the indigenous consequences?

What were the indigenous perspectives on these things?

And we've listened a lot more and thought a lot harder about what the consequences were for people because we live with them today.

You know, they're not just some little historical artifact.

Because this happened, we're dealing with these things now because the way we let things unfold.

There is no doubt that Columbus was a daring explorer who rose from lowly origins to hold sway over kings and queens, an adventurer who brought about irreversible change on both both sides of the ocean.

But his pursuit of his vision was ruthless.

And though his success triggered an era of conquest and prosperity in Europe, it signaled the beginning of oppression and deprivation for millions.

His legacy remains a subject of debate, one of ambition, consequence, and controversy.

Columbus was a guy who succeeded through failure, but also succeeded through persistence where others didn't.

I think one of the remarkable things about the time is why weren't other people pushing this?

Why were the courts of Portugal and Spain in particular, why weren't people hammering the doors down?

You know, all wanting the rights to go west, because obviously, if we did, we're going to make a killing.

It's Columbus that has to fight his way through this and, you know, wait for the Grenada occupation.

You know, it is in hindsight pretty amazing that it was this, or harsh we know, it was this one guy who was just really determined to take this letter from Toscanelli in the 1470s and say, this could work.

You know, we should try this.

Next time on Short History, we'll bring you part one of a two-part special on the Tudors.

Their claim to the throne actually descended from an illegitimate line.

Ultimately, they traced their descent from the sons of Edward III, and in particular, John of Gaunt, but from John of Gaunt's affair with Catherine Swimford.

So that's where the Tudor line came from, or the Tudor claim to the throne came from.

So, yeah, it didn't bear close scrutiny.

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