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Columbus's first voyage reaches the Americas

12 October 1492·Exploration & colonisation·Caribbean (Bahamas); Crown of Castile·
12 October 1492Date
Exploration & colonisationCategory
29Empires active
Date
12 October 1492
Category
Exploration & colonisation
Region
Caribbean (Bahamas); Crown of Castile
Era
Post-Classical / Medieval
Significance

On 12 October 1492 an expedition led by the Genoese navigator Christopher Columbus, financed by the Crown of Castile, made landfall on an island in the Bahamas that its Lucayan inhabitants called Guanahani and that Columbus renamed San Salvador.

Seeking a westward sea route to Asia, Columbus instead initiated sustained contact between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres. Although Norse sailors had reached North America centuries earlier, Columbus's landing opened a permanent, continuous link across the Atlantic. The voyage triggered the European colonisation of the Americas, the vast biological transfer later termed the Columbian Exchange, and trans-Atlantic trade in commodities and enslaved people. For Indigenous peoples it inaugurated conquest, dispossession and catastrophic epidemic mortality. Few single events have so thoroughly reshaped world history, joining previously separate human, biological and economic systems into a single interconnected world.

See the world map in 12 October 1492 →More exploration & colonisationThe Post-Classical / Medieval era

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Further reading

If you read one book

Columbus: The Four Voyages

Laurence Bergreen

Warts-and-all narrative of Columbus's voyages.

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