Three ships left Palos de la Frontera on the morning tide of 3 August 1492 expecting to reach the court of the Great Khan within weeks — ten weeks later they raised an island no European had ever charted, and the captain died still insisting it was Asia

Christopher Columbus needed eight years to find a sponsor. He needed ten weeks to be proven wrong about almost everything he had promised them.

Who financed the voyage, and why did it take so long to approve?

Columbus pitched his plan to reach Asia by sailing west to the Portuguese crown around 1484; a royal commission rejected it, correctly, on the grounds that his distance estimate was far too short. He tried Spain next. Ferdinand and Isabella's own experts, meeting at Salamanca, reached the same conclusion in 1486. Columbus had shrunk the earth's circumference and stretched Asia eastward until the two errors nearly canceled out, putting Japan a plausible-sounding 2,400 miles from the Canary Islands. The real figure is closer to 12,000. Nobody in Spain owned an inhabitable, resource-rich landmass sitting undiscovered in between, which is the only reason the arithmetic worked at all.

The crown said no twice more before the fall of Granada in January 1492 freed royal attention and money for the gamble. Isabella agreed to terms in April: Columbus would be made "Admiral of the Ocean Sea," governor of whatever he found, and entitled to a cut of the resulting trade. The Santa Fe Capitulations cost the treasury relatively little; much of the funding came from Genoese and Florentine bankers in Seville, not the queen's jewels, contrary to the popular story.

What did the fleet actually look like?

Two caravels and one larger carrack: the Niña and the Pinta, both under 70 feet, fast and shallow-drafted; and the Santa María, the flagship, slower and less maneuverable, which is exactly the trait that would sink her. Martín Alonso Pinzón captained the Pinta and his brother Vicente Yáñez Pinzón the Niña, both experienced local shipmasters whose cooperation Columbus had bought with promises rather than earned with reputation, since he was a foreigner asking Spanish sailors to trust him past the edge of the charts.

The three ships cleared Palos de la Frontera, a small Andalusian port on the Río Tinto, before dawn on 3 August 1492, carrying somewhere near ninety men. They stopped at the Canary Islands for a month of repairs and resupply, then struck out west on 6 September into open ocean no European expedition had crossed.

How do you keep a crew from mutinying for five weeks?

You lie to them, carefully and by degrees. Columbus recorded two distances each day in his journal: the true figure, and a shorter one he showed the men, on the theory that an underestimated voyage would frighten them less than an accurate one. On 9 September, for instance, he logged the day's run at 60 leagues but told the crew 48. The gap widened as the weeks went on and land kept failing to appear.

It nearly wasn't enough. By early October, sailors on all three ships were talking openly about turning back, and some accounts describe threats against Columbus himself. Floating vegetation, a carved stick, and flocks of land birds gave him just enough evidence to hold the course a few more days.

Land came at two in the morning on 12 October, sighted by a Pinta sailor named Rodrigo de Triana. Columbus later claimed he had seen a light the night before and collected the reward promised to whoever spotted land first, a dispute that outlasted him. The island belonged to the Lucayan people, part of the wider Taíno world, who called it Guanahani; Columbus renamed it San Salvador. Which modern Bahamian island that was is still argued over, with San Salvador Island the leading (though not universal) candidate among historians and geographers who have tried to reconcile the log's bearings with the archipelago's actual coastlines.

What went wrong on Christmas Day?

The Santa María did. Cruising off the coast of Hispaniola in calm water on the night of 24–25 December, with Columbus asleep and a ship's boy left at the helm against orders, the flagship drifted onto a reef and stuck fast. The crew got the men off safely, but the ship could not be freed and was effectively a wreck.

Columbus made the best of it. He had the vessel dismantled and its timbers hauled ashore to build a small fort and settlement, which he named La Navidad for the day it began. With two ships now too small to carry everyone home, he left roughly 39 men behind as its garrison — the first European settlement in the Americas since the Norse expeditions to Newfoundland five centuries earlier, and a short-lived one: when Columbus returned in November 1493 on his second voyage, he found La Navidad burned and every man there dead, killed in a conflict with a neighboring Taíno chiefdom whose people the garrison had reportedly abused.

What did Columbus actually think he had found?

Asia: specifically, the outer islands of the Indies, near enough to Japan and the court of the Great Khan that he expected to make contact any week. He carried a letter of introduction addressed to the Khan and a translator fluent in Arabic, on the assumption that it would double as the language of Asian courts. Neither was used.

He held that conviction for the rest of his life. Columbus made three more Atlantic crossings, reached the South American mainland in 1498, and mapped a long stretch of Caribbean and Central American coastline without ever conceding that any of it was a landmass previously unknown to Europe. He died in Valladolid on 20 May 1506, still filing his discoveries under Asia; the word "America," honoring the navigator Amerigo Vespucci, appeared on a printed map for the first time the following year, coined by a German cartographer who had never met either man.

The gap between what Columbus thought he had accomplished and what he had actually done is the crux of every argument that still follows him. Maine, Vermont, and New Mexico now mark 12 October as Indigenous Peoples' Day rather than Columbus Day, and dozens of cities have done the same, weighing an anniversary of contact against the account of the Lucayan people who were already living on Guanahani when the ships arrived. Columbus solved for a shortcut and found a hemisphere in the way; five centuries later, the fight is still over whose version of that morning gets told first.

Sources

• Wikipedia, "Voyages of Christopher Columbus"
• Wikipedia, "Christopher Columbus"
• Wikipedia, "La Navidad"
• Wikipedia, "Guanahani"
• Smithsonian Magazine, "The Lost Fort of Columbus"
• USNI Proceedings (April 1926), "The Navigation of Columbus"