Columbus Reaches the Caribbean
A westward search for Asia instead links the hemispheres for the first time
Quick facts
- Navigator
- Christopher Columbus
- Departed
- 3 August 1492, Spain
- Landfall
- 12 October 1492, Bahamas
- First account printed
- 1493
What happened
Sailing west from Spain on 3 August 1492 in search of a maritime route to Asia, the Genoese navigator Christopher Columbus made landfall on 12 October on a Bahamian island he named San Salvador, where he encountered the Taino people. Over the following months he explored Cuba and Hispaniola before returning to Spain, arriving back on 15 March 1493 and immediately writing an account of his voyage to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella that was printed and circulated across Europe within weeks. He left 39 men behind at a settlement called La Navidad, on the coast of present-day Haiti.
Why it matters
Columbus's landfall opened sustained European contact with the Americas, a contact that within decades brought conquest, forced labor, and epidemic disease that devastated the Taino and other Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, while also linking the Old and New Worlds in an exchange of goods, crops, and people that reshaped both permanently.
How we know
Columbus's own letter describing the 1492 voyage survives in printed editions from 1493, and the Library of Congress holds and describes an early Latin printing of it alongside its account of the Taino people Columbus described.
Sources
- Library of Congress. Columbus and the Taino · Primary source (author-declared)loc.gov · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. Columbus reports on his first voyage, 1493 · Reputable sourcegilderlehrman.org · The domain "gilderlehrman.org" is on our Reputable source registry.
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