Christopher Columbus is perhaps the most famous explorer of all time. The first time he went to sea, he was fourteen years old. While on a voyage, Columbus’ ship wrecked on the Portuguese coast and from there, he found the City of Lisbon where his younger brother lived. Columbus married and had a son, Diego, with his wife who passed away soon after he was born. In 1485, Columbus and his son moved to Spain.
In Columbus’ time, dead reckoning was the primary way of navigation. Dead reckoning means that to find your position, you have to use the distance you have traveled from a known point, by pricking the point with a pin when they got there. Though the Portuguese were jut developing celestial navigation, Columbus experimented with it from time to time. In this
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He had support and permission from King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella to search for new lands. Columbus promised to bring back silks, gems, gold, and spices from the Far East, and also find a passageway to China. His first discovery was a small island in the Bahamas and they named it San Salvador. On his second voyage, his planned destination was La Navidad, where he had left some of his men in a fortress built from the wreckage of one of his ships, the Santa Maria. When he finally arrived, he found the fortress burned, and all of his men dead. The third voyage began in May of 1498 with six ships: three were to go to Hispaniola to with the colonists’ supplies, and the other three to explore further south. His fourth voyage was to San Domingo on June 29, where he told the governor that a great storm was coming, that he should not follow his plan of sending out a fleet of 30 ships to Spain, but the governor did not believe him and mocked Columbus of being a “phony fortune-teller.” Soon after the fleet departed, a hurricane destroyed all but one of the ships in the fleet, killing all of the men that were not on the remaining