Despite four voyages that opened the Americas to European colonization, Columbus died convinced he had found a western route to Asia, never grasping the true magnitude of his discovery. Stripped of the governorship of the lands he'd claimed and embroiled in disputes over promised riches and titles, he died a bitter man whose name would nonetheless become permanently attached to the encounter between two hemispheres.
Columbus spent his final years a diminished figure, physically wracked by what was likely a form of arthritis or Reiter's syndrome, and politically sidelined after his mismanagement of Hispaniola led the Spanish crown to strip him of his governorship in 1500. He undertook a fourth and final voyage in 1502-1504, an ill-fated expedition that left him shipwrecked in Jamaica for months, before he returned to Spain broken and complaining bitterly of unpaid debts owed to him by the crown.
He died in Valladolid on May 20, 1506, still petitioning King Ferdinand for the titles and riches promised in the original 1492 contract, and still insisting, against mounting evidence, that the lands he'd encountered were the outer edges of Asia rather than an entirely unknown continent. His own son Diego and later biographers would fight for decades over his legacy and unpaid claims.
The irony of history is stark: the man who never understood what he'd found would give his name, however indirectly, to an entire hemisphere's colonial encounter, and his remains would themselves travel across the Atlantic multiple times, interred in Spain, then Santo Domingo, then possibly Seville, a fittingly restless afterlife for a man who spent his career chasing horizons he misunderstood.
Key people: Christopher Columbus