Italian mariner and navigator; widely believed to be the first European to sail across the Atlantic Ocean and successfully land on the American continent. Born Cristoforo Colombo, between August and October 1451, in Genoa, Italy. Columbus was the eldest son of Domenico Colombo, a wool-worker and small-scale merchant, and his wife, Susanna Fontanarossa; he had two younger brothers, Bartholomew and Diego. He received little formal education and was a largely self-taught man, later learning to read Latin and write Castilian.

　　Columbus began working at sea early on, and made his first considerable voyage, to the Aegean island of Chios, in 1475. A year later, he survived a shipwreck off Cape St. Vincent and swam ashore, after which he moved to Lisbon, Portugal, where his brother Bartholomew was living. Both brothers worked as chartmakers, but Columbus already nurtured dreams of making his fortune at sea. In 1477, he sailed to England and Ireland, and possibly Iceland, with the Portuguese marine, and he also bought sugar in Madeira for a Genoese firm.

　　In 1479, Columbus married Felipa Perestello e Moniz, from an impoverished noble Portuguese family. Their son, Diego, was born in 1480. Felipa died in 1485, and Columbus later began a relationship with Beatriz Enruez de Harana of Cordoba, with whom he had a second son, Ferdinand. (Columbus and Beatriz never married, but he provided for her in his will and legitimatized Ferdinand, in accordance with Castilian law.)By the mid-1480s, Columbus had become focused on his plans of discovery, chief among them the desire to discover a westward route to Asia. In 1484, he had asked King John II of Portugal to back his voyage west, but had been refused. The next year, he went to Spain with his young son, Diego, to seek the aid of Queen Isabella of Castile and her husband, King Ferdinand of Aragon. Though the Spanish monarchs at first rejected Columbus, they gave him a small annuity to live on, and he remained hopeful of convincing them. In January of 1492, after being twice rebuffed, Columbus obtained the support of Ferdinand and Isabella. The favorable response came directly after the fall of Granada, the last Moorish stronghold in Spain, which led Spanish Christians to believe they were close to eliminating the spread of Islam in southern Europe and beyond. Christian missionary zeal, as well as the desire to increase Spanish prominence in Europe over that of Portugal and the desire for gold and conquest, were the primary driving forces behind Columbus?historic voyage.

　　On August 3, 1492, the fleet of three ships he Ni, the Pinta, and the Santa Maret forth from Palos, on the Tinto River in southern Spain. After spending nearly a month in the Canary Islands, off the mainland of northwest Africa, the ships continued west, following the parallel of Gomera. According to records of the voyage, weather remained fair throughout. The first sighting of land came at dawn on October 12. (Though Columbus claimed that he himself, on the Ni, was the first to see land, later evidence showed that the sighting was made from the Pinta.) The place of the first Caribbean landfall was most likely modern San Salvador, or Watling Island, in the Bahamas.