1492: Colombo

Illustration designed by Joos van Winge for a 1598 edition of
“A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies” (1552)
by Bartolome de las Casas.

Under Colombo’s leadership, Spanish soldiers cut off the hands and noses of native slaves who do not bring them enough gold.

Horrified by the treatment of the American Indian slaves, de las Casas recommends shipping in slaves from Africa.

On September 6, 1492 Cristoforo Colombo's ships sail across the Atlantic from the Canary Islands, Spain.

On October 12, 1492, Colombo sets foot on an island in the Bahamas that the native Taino call “Guanahani.”

Colombo calls it “San Salvador.”

Colombo takes six friendly natives captive on his first trip back from America. 

On his second, he returns to Spain with more than 500 that he intends to sell as slaves. He “intended to create a market in enslaved Americans and a substantial number of Natives were taken as slaves, but ultimately this project failed because too many Native people died” (9).

Within twenty-five years of his arrival at Guanahani, most of the Taíno have died from enslavement, massacre, or disease.

Colombo did not set foot in land claimed by the current United States.

In 1494, Portugal’s King Joao II and Spain’s Fernando and Isabel meet in Tordesillas, Spain to divide up the “New World.”

“The Spanish founded colonies at present-day St. Augustine, Florida (1565), and Santa Fe, New Mexico (1610), and Dutch settlers established New Netherland (1614), which came to include New York City and Albany (1614)." All of these cities are older than the English settlements at Boston (1630), Plymouth (1620) and Jamestown 1607).

The pre-Columbian population of what is now the United States and Canada, with its more widely scattered societies, has been variously estimated at somewhere between 600,000 and 2,000,000. Many historians believe that as much as 90% of the population in the Americas died within a few generations of the arrival of Europeans in the Americas.