Just one person permanently transformed the whole world with a simple step onto land. His name was Christopher Columbus, and he did so when arrived in the Americas on the fateful year of 1492. Throughout his whole life he participated in sea voyages, but perhaps no other voyage of his or anyone else’s amounted to the day that he spotted the Bahamas.
Columbus was born on October 31, 1451 in Genoa, Italy. In 1476, when he was just a young teenager, he completed his first Atlantic expedition. However, that trip could’ve been his last: the ship was assaulted by French privateers off the coast of Portugal. Fortunately for him, Columbus escaped and swam to shore to Lisbon, Portugal. There, he met his future wife Felipa Perestrello. They eventually married and had son Diego together in 1480. Shortly thereafter, Felipa passed away. Diego then moved to Spain where he later became father to Fernando with a lady named Beatriz Enriquez de Araro. Columbus, still interested in maritime voyages, began to ponder a different way to reach India and
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Today he is seen as a controversial figure not because of that mistake, but because of the largely negative actions he took when he reached the Americas. His treatment of the natives and brutal tactics he used have rather recently began to loom over his accomplishments in the history books. It does however remain undeniable that he did allow Europeans to become aware of the presence of the Americas. That one voyage inspired the immigration of countless people of a variety of different backgrounds to North, South, and Central America. Consequently, an extreme exchange of agriculture, medicines, goods, religions, ideas, and unfortunately diseases occurred, which produced negative and positive effects on the land. Moreover, this vast exchange virtually impacted every continent and country, forever influencing what laid ahead in the