Before dawn, Columbus led the Niña, Pinta, and Santa María out of the small Andalusian port of Palos de la Frontera. Backed by the Spanish crown after years of rejection elsewhere, his voyage aimed to reach the Indies by sailing west. Instead, the expedition reached the Bahamas in October, triggering centuries of European colonization of the Americas.
The three ships carried roughly ninety men and provisions calculated for a voyage whose true distance no one aboard actually knew. Columbus had spent nearly a decade petitioning European courts, and Spain's Catholic Monarchs agreed only after the fall of Granada freed up royal attention and funds.
His navigational log, kept partly in secret to avoid alarming the crew about the true distance traveled, became one of the most consequential documents in maritime history. Columbus believed he was charting a shorter route to Japan and China; he never accepted that he had found a new continent.
The departure from Palos, a fishing town whose harbor has long since silted up, is commemorated today as the starting point of an encounter that would reshape ecosystems, economies, and empires across two hemispheres — for better and, for millions of indigenous people, catastrophically for worse.
Key people: Christopher Columbus