Sailing under the Spanish crown, Christopher Columbus and his crew of roughly 90 men aboard the Niña, Pinta, and Santa María sighted land after weeks of open ocean, convincing many aboard who had doubted the voyage. The moment set in motion centuries of European colonization, trade, and catastrophic upheaval for the Americas' Indigenous peoples.
By early October 1492, Columbus's crew was mutinous. Weeks past when they expected to find land, sailors muttered about turning back and, according to later accounts, some even discussed throwing their captain overboard. Columbus had been quietly falsifying the ships' logs, understating the distance traveled each day to keep morale from collapsing entirely.
On the night of October 11–12, a sailor aboard the Pinta named Rodrigo de Triana spotted a white cliff glinting in the moonlight and cried out. Columbus later claimed he himself had seen a light hours earlier, a claim that let him keep the reward promised to whoever first sighted land — a small, telling act of self-interest before one of history's most consequential mornings.
The ships anchored off an island in the Bahamas, which Columbus named San Salvador. He believed he had reached Asia's outer islands. Instead he had opened a hemisphere to European conquest, setting off exchanges of crops, diseases, and peoples that would remake the world and devastate the Taíno people who greeted the strangers on the beach.