oct 12, 1492 - European Discovery of
The Americas
Description:
It was in the year 1492 when Italian explorer Christopher Columbus approached the Catholic Monarchs of Spain and offered to help them join the spice trade, as Portugal was just about to do. The Spanish royals initially declined this offer but eventually agreed to fund Columbus' mission. Columbus' theory on how to get to India a different way was to sail West of Europe and go around the globe eventually arriving at the East Indies. And so it was that in the August of 1492 Christopher Columbus set sail with three ships across the Atlantic Ocean.
While the main basis of his idea was correct, Columbus greatly underestimated the size of the planet and overestimated the size of Asia. This meant that after sailing for about three months, he came across, not the East Indies, but rather a series of islands now known as The Bahamas. Unbeknownst to him, he had just discovered the western hemisphere, a New World that contained two massive continents. He had just discovered the Americas.
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