Christopher Columbus

Who is Christopher Columbus?

Christopher Columbus was a Genoese navigator and explorer whose four transatlantic voyages, sponsored by the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, opened sustained European contact with the Americas. On his second voyage in 1493, sailing with a large fleet through the Lesser Antilles, Columbus and his crew sighted the small island that would later be named Saint Martin, reportedly on or near November 11, the feast day of Saint Martin of Tours in the Catholic calendar, which is traditionally cited as the reason for the island's name. Columbus never landed to settle the island himself, and it would be French and Dutch colonists who later divided and developed it during the seventeenth century. Nonetheless, his sighting placed Saint Martin on European maps for the first time and set in motion the colonial history that would eventually make it one of the world's smallest territories shared by two sovereign nations. Columbus died in Spain in 1506, his voyages forever altering the course of Caribbean history.

Sources: Christopher Columbus, ship's log accounts, 1493 second voyage (as compiled by later chroniclers) · Bartolomé de las Casas, Historia de las Indias · Samuel Eliot Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus (1942)