5252 AM · 1492 CE · world history
The European Discovery of America
Three ships cross the Atlantic, and two worlds meet for the first time.
Columbus was looking for a western route to the Indies and believed to his death that he had found it. In October 1492 his three caravels reached the Caribbean. The exchange that followed reshaped the planet's diet—potatoes, maize and tomatoes to Europe, horses and wheat to America—while disease and conquest destroyed most of the native population.
Sources
Documents of the period
- Spanish colonial documents — Columbus’s log (as transmitted by Las Casas) and the Capitulations of Santa Fe
Scholarship
- archaeology of pre-Columbian America — the world before contact; the consequences of the Columbian exchange of plants, animals and diseases
Basis: documents and evidence.