This is one of the subpages for the main Timeline page for The History of the Americans Podcast.
1430s – 1450s – Prince Henry “the Navigator’s” incubator for explorers discovered the western Azores for Portugal in the 1430s, and by 1452 the Portuguese reached Corvo, the westernmost of the chain sitting only about a thousand miles from Labrador.
Summer 1451 (precise date uncertain) – Christopher Columbus born in Genoa.
1460s – 1480s – Portuguese explore the west coast of Africa and set up trading operations. In 1488, Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope, suggesting a sea route to India bypassing Arab-Muslim traders in the Middle East and Central Asia.
1484 – Portuguese King John II established a scientific advisory board, the Junta dos Mathematicos, to study “matters of navigation and discovery.” This board of accomplished scholars was charged with developing improved tools and tables for navigation and assessing the value of proposals for exploration.
Late 1484 – Christopher Columbus pitches his “Enterprise of the Indies” to John II of Portugal for the first time. He is turned down for the first time.
May 1486 – Columbus pitches the Dual Monarchs of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella, for the first time. They turn him down in part because they are fully engaged prosecuting their war against the Muslims in Spain.
1488 – Columbus returns to Portugal at the invitation of John II, but is turned down a second time when Dias returns with the news that he had turned the Cape of Africa.
~1489 – Christopher Columbus dispatches his brother Bartholomew to pitch the deal to the King of England, Henry VII. Henry turns him down. Bartholomew heads to France.
1490 – Bartholomew Columbus is at the French court, trying to secure the backing of King Charles VIII. Charles doesn’t buy the deal, but his older sister, Anne de Beaujeu, promoted the expedition in court and gave Bartholomew a job and a bed at the palace.
Fall 1491 – Isabella sends Christopher Columbus, now back in Spain, money for clothes and a mule and summons him to court. Discussions resume while the Dual Monarchs wrap up the “reconquest” of Spain.
January 2, 1492 – Columbus joins the Spanish victory procession as it marches into Granada, the last Muslim stronghold to fall. Then, Ferdinand and Isabella turn him down, supposedly in a final decision. Columbus gets on his mule and heads to France to join his brother.
Later in January, 1492 – Ferdinand’s close advisor, Luis de Santangel, the “keeper of the privy purse,” persuades Isabella that backing Columbus is a very inexpensive hedge against the risk that France backs him and he succeeds. She dispatches fast riders to bring him back to Seville. Negotiations on the terms of the “Great Enterprise” begin immediately.
April 17-30, 1492 – The key documents reflecting the investments to be made and equity compensation and other emoluments for Columbus in the event of success are finalized and signed by Columbus and for the Crown. Columbus is made an Admiral of Spain.
Summer 1492 – With the backing of Ferdinand and Isabella, Columbus secures the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria, crews and officers to man them, and supplies necessary for the voyage.
August 3, 1492 – The little fleet departs for points west.
September 9, 1492 – The fleet leaves the Canaries with water, food, and wine enough to last a year.
October 7, 1492 – Columbus ordered the course changed from straight west to west-by-southwest because he saw great flocks of birds passing overhead in that direction.
October 12, 1492 – “Rodrigo de Triana, lookout on Pinta’s forecastle, sees something like a white sand cliff gleaming in the moonlight on the western horizon, then another, and a dark line of land connecting them. “Tierra! Tierra!” he shouts, and this time land it is.” – Samuel Eliot Morison. It was the Bahamian island the locals called Guanahani, and Columbus named San Salvador.
November 22, 1492 – The Pinta, under the command of Martin Alonso Pinzon, loses contact with Nina and Santa Maria off the coast of Cuba. Pinzon went on a frolic and detour looking for gold.
December 5, 1492 – Nina and Santa Maria reach the western end of Hispaniola, off the coast of today’s Haiti. On December 12 Columbus raises a “great cross” in a bay of the island.
December 25, 1492 – Santa Maria, the flagship, runs aground off the north coast of Hispaniola and cannot be refloated. Because Nina is a small caravel, she cannot carry most of Santa Maria‘s crew. Columbus picks 39 of them to remain behind in a fort built from lumber salvaged from Santa Maria. He names it La Navidad, in recognition of the day of wreck. It is the first European settlement in the New World. Columbus transfers his flag to Nina, along with indigenous peoples whom he had captured. Europeans would be left behind to a dire fate so that Columbus could bring Indians across the Atlantic.
January 4, 1493 – Nina departs for Europe carrying the greatest secret of all time. On January 6, her lookout spots Pinta sailing toward her. Columbus does not believe Pinzon’s explanation for the six-week separation, but lets it slide for practical reasons.
February 12-14, 1493 – A tremendous storm southwest of the Azores separates Nina and Pinta. On the 14th Columbus becomes so worried that Nina will go down and his secret will be lost he writes a short account of his discovery, seals it in a barrel, and tosses it overboard.
February 15-24, 1493 – The storm has pushed Nina to the Azores, which are under the control of the Portuguese. The governor assumes Columbus has been smuggling in Portuguese territory on the west coast of Africa, and imprisons some of Nina‘s crew when they go ashore. Columbus blusters his way out of the accusation, and the governor releases the prisoners. Nina resumes the voyage east on February 24.
February 26 – March 4, 1493 – Another massive storm hits Nina, and she is driven toward the rocky coast of Portugal at night. Columbus ordered the crew to pull the one remaining sail from storage, wind notwithstanding, and forced a tack to the northwest which the men struggled to maintain the rest of the night. At dawn on March 4th Columbus spotted the famous Rock of Sintra, which marks the entrance to the estuary leading to Lisbon. Nina turned and scudded up river in to the harbor and dropped anchor about four miles downstream from the center of Lisbon, again in the jurisdiction of Spain’s geopolitical rival following a storm.
March 4 -13, 1493 – After some back and forth with the Portuguese navy, King John II invites Columbus to visit him. Columbus brings along the Indians. The Indians make a map of the region on a table with dried beans, which persuades John II that Columbus has found previously unknown lands. He is mad, but perhaps mostly at himself, and releases Columbus who is, after all, an Admiral of Spain.
March 15, 1493 – Nina sails into Palos, Spain, with the disappeared Pinta a few hours behind on the same tide. Captain Pinzon was rowed ashore and taken to his house, where he promptly died.
April 7, 1493 – Columbus receives a letter of congratulations from the Dual Sovereigns, then sitting in Barcelona. Importantly, it commands the Second Voyage, which was important because after that there were always Europeans in the Western Hemisphere.
April 9, 1493 – Word of the discovery begins to spread. The earliest intact Italian letter discussing the discovery is dated April 9, 1493 from a Barcelona merchant to his brother in Milan, only two days after Columbus got his return letter from the Sovereigns.
July 12, 1493 – The date of The Nuremburg Chronicle. Notably, it includes no mention of Columbus’ voyage, Nuremburg being some distance from Spain.
November 1, 1493 – An Italian scholar in the service of Spain, Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, refers to “that famous Columbus the discoverer of a New World,” the first known use of that phrase to describe the Western Hemisphere. Martyr thought the world was too big for Columbus to have found Asia, or lands proximate to it. The debate would rage until 1521, when the survivors of the Magellan expedition returned to Spain.
November 19, 1493 – On the Second Voyage, Columbus sees Puerto Rico for the first time. A young man named Juan Ponce de Leon is among the more than one thousand men of the Second Voyage.
November 23, 1493 – Columbus returns to La Navidad on the Second Voyage, and learns that every European had died.
1496 – With the fall of Tenerife, Spain completes the conquest of the Canary Islands, which has taken more than 90 years. During that long war, Spain had established a plantation economy based on enslaved labor.
1497 – The English King Henry VII hired the Italian Giovanni Caboto – known to Anglophones as John Cabot — to look for a northwest passage to Asia, and in search of that he discovered Newfoundland for the English. The English and northern Europeans would continue to search for a northwest passage for more than 130 years.