The Santa Maria was also known at the time as La Gallega, meaning "The Galician." The Niña is now believed to be a nickname for a ship originally called the Santa Clara, and the Pinta was probably also a nickname, though the ship’s real name isn’t clear. The Washington Post, for example, observed that: Yet uncertainty remains among historians about the "official" or "original" names of the ships, as opposed to the nicknames given to them by their crews. No contemporaneous images of his famous 1492-93 expedition's three ships exist, but we at least know the names of those vessels, right?Īs we all learned by rote in school, they were the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. It turns out that even some inconsequential basic "facts" about Columbus' famed first voyage are problematic. The big question for Columbus, it turns out, was not the shape of the Earth but the size of the ocean he was planning to cross. Several books published in Europe between 12 discussed the Earth’s shape, including “The Sphere,” written in the early 1200s, which was required reading in European universities in the 1300s and beyond. Columbus in fact owned a copy of Ptolemy’s Geography, written at the height of the Roman Empire, 1,300 years before Chris Columbus set sail. That information was already a generally accepted fact among educated people of Columbus' time, and, in any case, Columbus didn't definitively establish it by circumnavigating the globe:Īs early as the sixth century B.C., Pythagoras - later followed by Aristotle and Euclid - wrote about Earth as a sphere, and historians say there is no doubt that the educated in Columbus’s day knew quite well that the Earth was round. And finally, Columbus certainly didn't " prove" the Earth was round, nor did he set out to do so. And even if Columbus had reached North America proper by ship at some point, it's unlikely he would have been the first person, or even the first European, to do so. During his first expedition (1492-93), Columbus' ships touched on various islands that we now know as the Bahamas, Cuba, and Hispaniola, i.e., the Dominican Republic and Haiti. At no time during any of his four voyages across the Atlantic did Christopher Columbus make landfall at, or set foot on, the North American continent. We're now more aware that much of that simple historical narrative is inaccurate. But roughly 5 or 10 cents (US) is about right.One of the primary historical "facts" many of us learned as schoolchildren was that "In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue," and in three ships named the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, the intrepid Italian explorer -sponsored by Spanish monarchs - sailed across the Atlantic Ocean and "discovered America," in the process finally proving to the world that the Earth was round. So what is a maravedi worth? It is impossible to say, because the value of goods has varied so much since then. On the first voyage, the crew was paid as follows: Masters and pilots, 2000 maravedis per month able seamen, 1000 maravedis per month ordinary seamen and ship's boys, 666 maravedis per month. Rodrigo de Escobedo, secretary of the fleet.Cristobal Colon (Christopher Columbus), captain-general. A comparison of the two lists can be found in The Log ofĬhristopher Columbus by Robert Fuson (see the Gould's research differs from earlier work published by John Boyd Published in fragments, but a summary is given below. Alice Bache Gould spent decades combing variousĪrchives in Spain, eventually accounting for each of the 87 crewmen of Of the four voyages of Columbus, only the crew of the first voyage Man in a fight, and three of his friends who then helped him escape The voyage, but only four men took up the offer: one who had killed a Spanish Sovereigns offered amnesty to convicts who would sign up for They were mostly 'hometown boys' fromĪndalusia, and nearly all experienced seamen. Contrary to popular myth, Columbus's crew on the first voyage were
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