I have always heard that Columbus was trying to find a better trading route to the for trade. He was convinced that he had found it and made four voyages.
Something doesn’t add up. Columbus mainly just sailed around the Carribean Islands and just briefly hit the mainland in Central America and South America.
Why did he focus so much on islands instead of the mainland?
I would assume that he was looking for some type of people and goods that were characteristic of Asia. Didn’t he think that maybe he found something else when the accounts of Asia didn’t match especially after 4 voyages.
I’m not a Columbus expert and in any case it’s hard to get inside his head without long study of his writing and correspondence but …
In Columbus’ time there were two estimates for the circumferance of the earth. One was based largely on the work of Erastothenes (sp?) and was pretty close to correct. I don’t know the source of the other but it was quite a bit smaller. Columbus accepted the smaller figure and sold his project to the Spanish royals on that basis. He figured he had sailed the correct distance to have reached The Indies based on the smaller number and I think he was never convinced that he hadn’t.
As Isaac Asimov wrote of the matter, “It doesn’t make any difference how wrong you are as long as you are lucky.”
He didn’t realize it was the mainland. Even after people knew there was a boatland of land out there, the search for a passage to Asia continued for over a hundred years.
Columbus himself calculated the second figure, on the basis of some medieval writings he relied on that proved to be in error. (I don’t recall or have access to the details of what writings.)
But as to why he concentrated on the islands: it was well known in late 15th Century Europe that the spices they used, which were high priced, came from the Spice Islands located southeast of the coast of the mainland. (We call them the Malay Archipelago today.) Ol’ Cristobal was convinced that Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica, et al. were those islands.
While trade with Cathay, Cipango, and other relevant known oriental nations was not to be ignored, gold and spices were the economic driving force behind the expeditions.
Columbus was especially interested in finding Japan (Cipangu), which he knew was an island. When he found himself in the West Indies, he managed to convince himself at first that Cuba was Japan. When that turned out to be obviously incorrect, he then turned his attention to extracting profit - first gold, then slaves - from Hispaniola in order to have something to show his royal patrons for their support.
On his first voyage, he hit the Bahamas, then, based on the stories of the locals, headed for Hispaniola and Cuba expecting to find civilizations there. He then returned to Spain to organize a colonizing expedition.
On his second voyage, he accidently hit the Lesser Antilles, but headed directly to Hispaniola after that to found a new colony there. He also explored Cuba and Jamaica, hoping to find a higher civilization there, or at least more gold.
On his third voyage, he accidently hit Trinidad and the South American mainland, which he wasn’t sure was a continent, and in any case was too far south to be the known parts of Asia. But he was basically on his way back to Hispaniola, and headed back to the colony right away.
On his fourth voyage, after he was removed from the governorship of Hispaniola, he explored the coast of central America. At this point, he was looking for some sort of strait that would take him farther west to China or Japan.
First of all, Columbus was pretty good at deluding himself that the people he had found were actually Asians. And whenever they told him of a richer kingdom farther away, he became convinced that that must actually be China or Japan. But by his fourth voyage, even Columbus realized that the area he had reached was not the known part of Asia. But he still believed it was part of Asia, or close to it, and that just a little more exploring would bring him to China and Japan at last. At this point in his life, Columbus was pretty well nuts.
Why wouldn’t he believe he had reached the indies?
There’s islands roughly where his calculations put the Indies, he’s never seen an east asian before, never been to the far east, and has gotten all of his information 2nd hand. He realizes he’s in the tropics and knows from Marco Polo he’s headed to the tropics.
I do think he realized he hadn’t reached China, but rather thought he had hit the outlying islands. IIRC, The subsequnt voyagers were interested in actually reaching the mainland, and they did, though of the wrong continent.
Thanks for all the great replies so far. I wish this information would be more well known in the general population. I find it suprising that people celebrate Columbus as the discoverer of America (not because of the Native American or the Vikings but because of his own flaws). He never even realized that South America was a continent and never had anything to do with mainland North America. A discoverer of a land mass should hopefully be able to correctly identify where and what it is at least in a vague way.
I would think that he would have collected many sources of 2nd hand information before he planned the trip. There must have been some stuff like clothing,
language patterns, and architecture, and flora and fauna that didn’t match at all.
The biggest problem however, is that if he was looking for a trade route for these valuable spices and other Asian goods, then what did he think when he couldn’t find many of those at all at on four voyages.
Marco Polo’s travels to Asia took place over two hundred years before Columbus. Where were the spice markets that supposedly justified the great cost of four voyages?
It’s hard to fault his logic. He knew Japan was an island somewhere west across the ocean. He sailed west and found an island pretty much where he predicted it would be. So he assumed he was in Japan.
Keep in mind that there wasn’t all that much information about Japan known to Columbus. And while he might have had his doubts about being on Japan specifically, he probably figured he was on Borneo or Luzon or Taiwan or any of the dozens of other islands that were off the coast of East Asia. It really did make more sense for him to assume he was on an unknown island off the shore of a known continent rather than thinking he had discovered a whole new hemisphere.
Most European information on Asia in the 1400’s wasn’t 2nd hand, but rather 4th or 5th hand. It was so unreliable as to be worthless. The one exception was Marco Polo’s book, which had a fair amount of accurate information, but as you note it was 200 years out of date. (Columbus still thought the ruler of China was the Great Khan, a title which had gone out with the Yuan dynasty more than 100 years earlier.)
In what is now Indonesia. The spice islands were very real, and trade with the Orient was in fact very lucrative, so it’s now wonder that Columbus wanted very badly to believe he had found a western route and outflanked the nefarious Portuguese.
Not with what passed for “reliable information” in Western Europe at the time. It’s unlikely CC would have had access to a reliable account of the clothing, language patterns, architecture, flora and fauna of the Malay archipelago. As others mentioned, he figured quickly that he had reached some boondocks outlying islands and not China or India, which were better documented. With no real references, running into people and nature that looked and sounded neither European, nor African, nor Middle Eastern, pretty much left him to conclude he’d run into some backwards tribes in an outlying territory of Asia, that had not yet been described or documented.
The key motivation in finding a route to the Spice Islands was to cut out the middlemen. This was even more urgent since the Ottomans had gained complete control of the Middle East and Southeast Europe and the trade routes and markets therein, through which anything Asian had to go to get to Europe.
That’s a very modernistic viewpoint. Columbus did not have satellites and GPS. He was exploring what was, quite literally, territory unknown to him and his civilization.
Columbus was truly the luckiest crackpot in history. His theory about the location of Asia relative to Europe was completely wrong, and the real geographical experts knew it. In the popular mind, Columbus was supposedly arguing that the world was round, while the wise men insisted it was flat. Actually the experts told him he couldn’t reach Asia by sailing west because it was too far away , not because the idea wasn’t right in theory.
As has already been stated, according to Columbus’s own calculations, he was exactly where Asia should be, so at least by his own lights, he felt he was vindicated.
Yes, that’s correct. Vespucci was a member of expeditions that explored the coast of South America, and was the first, or at least among the first, to promulgate the view that it was a new unknown continent instead of part of Asia. And that led the geographer Martin Waldseemüller to name the new continent America on his world map of 1507.