Original subtitles

The New World, home to a complex patchwork of indigenous people, an intricate medley

of ancient cultures and traditions, trade routes and languages.

In some ways, indigenous culture was way more advanced than actually European society at

the same time.

These were the Americas.

Four thousand miles away, a fractured Europe battled its way through the final decade of

the 15th century, its kingdoms clamoring for new lands, fabulous wealth and ever more power.

The Iberian Peninsula is the preeminent power, without a shadow of doubt.

This was an era of immense growth and expansion, with the Spanish Empire at its vanguard.

This expansion was incredibly rapid.

Ours is a tale of an Iberian queen's chance encounter with a small-time Italian mapmaker,

Christopher Columbus, a man swept up by a grand dream whose greatest mistake would go

on to birth the Age of Exploration.

In a way, Columbus became the first conquistador by accident.

He inaugurated the process of conquest used by other conquistadors.

But were these men the brave Catholic pioneers spoken of across half a millennia of Spanish

literature?

Or simply a gold-hungry elite crashing through the Americas, decimating unsuspecting indigenous

populations with war and disease?

We are about to hear the true story of the Conquistadors.

The Iberian Peninsula, a vast coastline stretching out towards its neighboring continent of Africa.

Encouraging trade, but also providing temptation.

This was a fragile kingdom, scarred by centuries of religious warfare, by a clash of cultures

and of faiths, of Christians and Muslims, of shifting power and beliefs.

The political environment of Iberia in the 15th century was pretty complicated.

You had three leading Christian kingdoms, Portugal, Castile, Aragon.

When we think about the Iberian Peninsula, or we use names like Spain or Portugal, we

do that very often equating, really, Spain to Castile.

Castile being the central kingdom, being the one who would have more sort of relationship

with other European powers we are aware of.

But it was richer, so that's why we think of it as the center.

Spain is a tricky name to trace, that its origin goes back to the Latin word Hispania,

and so in that sense it goes back to the Roman period, at least for referring to the Iberian

Peninsula.

But it's a term that sort of takes a while to come into play.

In the beginning, most would simply describe themselves as Christians.

In the middle part of that century, Castile is actually racked through a civil war over

who's going to be the new monarch.

Eventually that war ends and you have the ascension of Isabella of Castile.

And one way that the Christian kingdoms try and improve their position is by allying,

and so you have the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella.

It's basically going to unify the power of Aragon and Castile, two very prosperous kingdoms,

in the Iberian Peninsula and kind of join their forces.

This became kind of like the unit around which the power of Spain as a discomposite

monarchy is going to become quite important in the early modern period.

Isabella in particular had a vision of kind of unifying the entire territory of the Iberian

Peninsula, not only under one crown, but also under one single faith.

Religious violence had immersed the peninsula for nearly 800 years, since the earlier 8th

century invasion of Iberia by the North African Berber Muslims.

Ferdinand and Isabella looked to expand their territory by going after the remaining Islamic

caliphates in the southern part of the peninsula.

And they bring to fruition a process that many scholars have called the Reconquista.

Most of the time, Christians and Muslims and Jews are living side by side in peace.

Every now and then there are wars and violence and gradually Christians retake control of

the peninsula.

In 1492, the last Muslim kingdom on the Iberian Peninsula, Granada, falls to Queen Isabella's

army.

Her devotion to Christianity knew no bounds.

Her ruthless violent mission, a world bonded by one faith.

At the same time, they're going to force all Jews to convert to Christianity or leave.

They are going to also create the Inquisition that's in charge of policing new converts,

new Christians, and Christians in general.

The perception of what makes an early modern state becomes different.

It's not anymore the diversity, it's not anymore that sort of pragmatic dealings with people

of different faiths for economic gain or intellectual debate, but rather it's one ruler, one language,

one religion.

There Aragon and Castile formed a mighty Catholic kingdom, the beginnings of a global superpower.

But to the east, the Byzantine Empire teetered on the edge of collapse, the Ottomans desperate

for control.

This chaotic power shift jeopardizing lucrative trade routes connecting Iberia and Asia.

For Europeans at this time, not just Spain, Asia was the site of great wealth and luxuries

and so the trade route to Asia was of paramount importance.

The Ottoman expansion in the eastern Mediterranean didn't close off the trade routes, but it

made the cost of that trade more because the Ottomans began to put in new taxes on those

trade routes.

It's going to make it very difficult for these European kingdoms to access these luxury goods

that they crave from Asia.

Safe passage to Asia would be essential if Iberia was to thrive, but new routes across

perilous terrain proved fraught with danger and only one feasible option remained, tackling

the seas.

So began nearly a century of heated competition between Spain and Portugal, the Age of Exploration,

as the two main Iberian powers battled the oceans.

It's Portugal that really paves the way for Western Europeans to move across the Atlantic

by focusing on developing trade routes along Atlantic Africa.

The Portuguese exploration of the western coast of Africa is going to be to find another

route east around Africa to Asia.

The result of this expedition was actually quite high.

Portugal gets really important territories, you know, prestigious positions, places like

Madeira and Del Sores.

One of humanity's bleakest schemes was born during these fateful expeditions, the African

slave trade.

As the Portuguese expanded down the African coastline, one of the things that they very

quickly recognized they could bring back as trade or to trade for there and then have

markets for back in Europe was enslaved peoples.

By then, the institution of slavery was quite ordinary in Europe at the time, in the Mediterranean.

In the Iberian Peninsula, it was not uncommon to find white slaves from the Caucasus, the

Caspian Sea.

But those sources of slaves started to disappear precisely in the aftermath of the fall of

the Byzantine Empire.

So African slaves, either from North Africa or from actually sub-Saharan Africa, became

more and more frequent.

The association between blackness, Africanness, and slavery became dominant in the European

mind.

The Portuguese movement helps to pioneer navigation in the Atlantic world, helps to in many ways

create new networks of trade, which are bringing money into the Iberian Peninsula.

There was a real sense that Castile needed to do something to compete with Portugal.

They've had a little bit of expansion into the Canaries, they claim those.

But as Queen of Castile, Isabella wanted to bring Castile a greater share of this overseas

trade and expansion.

Queen Isabella wouldn't have to wait long before just such an opportunity arrived, in

the form of a little-known Italian mapmaker harboring serious ambitions.

Christopher Columbus.

Christopher Columbus was a sailor, a merchant.

He had worked extensively the Atlantic trade routes.

He had experience as a navigator.

Some historians claim that he knew pretty well from the Gulf of Guinea all the way to

Iceland.

He ended up in Iberia quite by accident.

The ship on which he was sailing was attacked, and so everybody had to jump overboard.

And Columbus was a strong swimmer, and he swam something like seven miles, and ended

up at the southwestern tip of Portugal.

And that's when he started making a living by selling books and also drawing maps.

So that gave him access to this very vibrant maritime community of Portugal.

That is crucial.

It was there where he figured out that yes, traveling west, finding a route to Asia was

doable.

The planet's oceans remained a terrifying mystery.

Explorers, reliant upon little more than a hearty dose of good fortune, every voyage

marred by the lack of fresh fruit and vegetables on board.

Scurvy would often take grip, death always lurking nearby.

The European imagination of the world, we can roughly understand through the old medieval

TO maps.

A TO map is a map that essentially shows the T inside an O, and this was a way of dividing

the world into Europe and the two portions of Africa and Asia.

So those three landmasses, Europe, Asia, and Africa, pretty much describe the contours

of what Europeans know to exist at this time.

The other model we have for that time period are perhaps the Portolan charts that were

used by navigators.

There's some really quite striking precision in the Portolan charts about the immediate

contours of Europe and some of the ports that they know very well, the trade routes that

they are accustomed to traveling, but everything beyond that is sort of a great mystery.

Now maps were important.

In fact, they were held as highly state secrets.

Penalty of death could be imposed if you were found to be providing maps to people not within

the realm of your kingdom.

Maps were also political documents because they told the world, this is my domain.

This is what we created.

And maps were also works of art and often played to the ego of the person who had the

map made or the person who was trying to claim the domain of those regions through this map.

So Columbus is like many other individuals that are looking to profit from the desire

to get goods from outside of Europe.

And Columbus has this idea that if you can go west, you can get to the east.

And he tried to sell this idea to different kings in Europe with little success really.

He tried England, he tried Portugal, and they questioned his theories about how big

the earth was.

Nautical people, people who were into the business of exploring and supporting exploration,

they had a very clear idea that the world was round, that there was this big ocean.

Most people understood the exact size of the world that had been calculated even without

it being circumnavigated.

Columbus said, no, no, no, the world is much smaller than that, which means I can just

sail across what we think of as the Atlantic Ocean to reach Asia.

And they said, no, you can't.

It's much further than that.

They were right.

If you put those two, a Pacific and Atlantic Ocean together, ships in the 16th century

aren't going to be able to make that voyage, everyone would die of scurvy.

So the irony is that he's actually a bad navigator.

And it's by being a bad navigator and being very stubborn about it that he insists on

making those voyages.

The other problem is that because there's no knowledge of what's to the west, it's

hard to know how likely a good return is.

So Columbus is making a tough proposition.

He's making a proposition to go in a direction where no one knows what's there.

And Columbus is telling everyone that they're wrong about the size of the earth.

But from the point of view of Castile and Queen Isabella, it's a reasonable risk to

take.

Columbus was about to encounter his first stroke of luck.

Impeccable timing.

His proposal, a voyage so wildly dangerous it would surely fail, provided a low-risk

opportunity for Queen Isabella.

If, by some miracle, Columbus did succeed, he might just boost Castile's stature in Europe

whilst bringing the unexplored world under the control of her beloved Catholic faith.

One way to think about Spain's ambitions in this period is they understood themselves

to be on a divine mission.

They understood that the Great Judgment would not occur until the entire world was Catholic.

So even though the trade route was important, I would argue that they also had profound

religious goals entwined with them.

And so the Spanish crown accepted Columbus's project.

He signed a very specific capitulation with the king and queen that gave him right to

titles and profit if he delivered his part of the deal, right?

And that part of the deal was to get to Asia.

He gets nothing if it's not Asia.

The stakes couldn't have been higher for Columbus.

If he failed in his quest to discover a new trade route to Asia, not only would he be

in breach of contract, losing out on a great sum of money, but he would also face public

humiliation.

Despite the risks, the Italian mapmaker had no real sense of the size and scale of his

undertaking.

However, the sailors he had hired knew even less than their captain.

Haunted by memories of friends lost to the colossal ocean's relentless hurricanes, for

these simple folk, this vast expanse swum with terror-inducing tales of horrifying

creatures lurking in the deep.

Columbus would attempt to cross this formidable expanse in three modest vessels, the

Santa Maria, the Niña, and the Pinta.

With 300 square meters of sail and over 3,000 meters of rope for rigging, the Santa Maria

held capacity for up to 100 barrels of food and equipment, whilst the Niña and Pinta

were smaller, utilizing conventional square sails for open ocean speed and triangular

Latin sails for coastal maneuverability.

Columbus and his fleet were to be but a piece of flotsam, bobbing alone in an uncharted

body of water, an ocean which covers over 20% of the surface of the globe.

Early August 1492, Columbus sets sail.

With him are 90 proficient seamen bearing a broad set of important skills.

Carpenters, physicians, even goldsmiths were to be found on board.

None of these men had any idea how long they would be away from home, from their lives

and loved ones.

Following a month spent in the Canary Islands restocking provisions, the three ships headed

west into the vast blue expanse, into the unknown.

Columbus had to prove himself worthy of the Atlantic Ocean.

He and his crew were entirely reliant upon his instinct and maritime skills.

So historically, before Columbus and up to Columbus's time and well after Columbus's

time, pilots really sailed by a technique called dead reckoning.

So basically that required a fix, so a point of departure that you knew the location of

and you basically pointed your compass to the place where you wanted to go to and you

just kept track of the distance on a map.

And that generally worked but for smaller bodies of water like the Mediterranean.

But when people started venturing into much larger bodies of water like the Atlantic and

even more so the Pacific, this would not work.

So they developed a technique to first of all determine latitude, that is, north-south

distance.

First developed by the ancient Greeks, the astrolabe helped mariners to roughly determine

their latitude.

Longitude, which are those lines that cross each other, really did not come into existence

until the 18th century.

Longitude depended upon accurate timekeeping.

There were at times some of the foremost pilots in the world were able to use magnetic

declination in order to try to approximate east-west distance.

So these were the technologies that enabled Europeans to travel over these enormous bodies

of water.

As the weeks dripped by, tedium evolved into tension.

Columbus's crew, grappling with a shortfall in provisions and a mounting suspicion that

their intrepid leader might not actually be leading them to dry land.

Narrowly avoiding a fatal mutiny, Columbus convinced his sailors to press on with a glimmer

of hope offered by a sighting of birds flying overhead.

Could this glimpse of life mean that the shores of an unexplored land were, finally, within

reach?

Suddenly, Columbus spotted something.

A dot on the horizon.

After all this time, could it really be land?

His perseverance had prevailed.

Not that he knew it yet, but Christopher Columbus had just become one of the first non-indigenous

people ever to lay eyes on the North American continent.

The Caribbean is a variety of islands, large, some small.

They're populated by small to large communities.

Today, we think of them all being sort of connected to a linguistic and ethno-linguistic

group we think about as the Taino.

They all have tribute systems in which commoners pay tribute to nobles.

Nobles were known as caciques.

Tainos worshiped semillas, which are features of the land.

They could be certain kind of sculptures.

So they had a kind of deep association with the land around them.

They were agriculturalists.

They also practiced hunting and fishing and long-distance trading.

Unfortunately, however, as historians, we actually don't know all that much about them

through historical records.

They do not practice writing, at least in systems that we recognize today.

That being said, they are connected to each other through trade, through exchange, and

also through things like marriage and family relationships to establish alliances.

They'd marry with other groups.

We'll never know the exact spot at which Columbus made landfall.

Some believe he dropped anchor at San Salvador, where contact was first made with the indigenous

Taino populations.

Columbus and his men would have been ecstatic to see the beaches of the Antilles.

Obviously, they had been on the voyage longer than they'd hoped.

They were running low on food.

There had been a quasi-mutiny to go back to Spain.

You can imagine that the excitement of reaching what, certainly in that moment, they thought

was the Far East would have been so great.

To see the Taino communities, I think there would have been a great hope of expectation

that all of the risk, all of the tribulations that they'd experienced on the voyage over

would soon be realized in the wealth of Asia.

We have some pretty good accounts for the first encounters between Columbus and the

Taino.

He writes about it in his journal.

We also have accounts from other chroniclers who had talked to the original members of

Columbus's crew, as well as those that come on later voyages.

Not surprisingly, the overwhelming initial sentiment is curiosity.

Obviously, Columbus, when they sight land, is hoping that he is beginning to see places

and people that he would assume would be in the East.

The Tainos were a very peaceful people.

He saw them as sort of these naive children.

In fact, he often kind of talked to them about hijos de dios, or children of God, because

they were so innocent.

And he observed in his letters and his conversations that these people were not only docile and

subservient, but they would be easy to conquer, they would be easy to enslave, and they would

be easy to have their labor exploited for the great glory of Spain.

One thing that these native people had developed were these dugout canoes that really kind

of astounded Columbus and the Europeans, because some of them carried 30 to 40 people.

Some of them were large enough to carry as many as 150 people, and these canoes traveled

very fast and very efficiently, and so there was a great deal of interaction among the

native people in the Caribbean.

These people did not live isolated lives, and so when Columbus came upon them, yes,

they were kind of awed by these strange-looking individuals, but they were not completely

inexperienced in terms of coming across people from different backgrounds.

The biggest difference was at the level of technology, and that Europeans, Iberians,

had technology which was far beyond what was available in the Caribbean.

Although the Taino had canoes and other craft that could cross between the islands, they

were nothing like the caravels that the Spaniards were coming on, and certain technologies like

steel smithing, firearms, these things greatly differentiated the Taino from the Europeans.

Columbus was delighted to set foot on what he believed, and likely prayed, was one of

the tiny islands dotted along Asia's periphery.

He had made it, fulfilling his contract with the queen.

Now he needed to figure out what treasures lay in wait.

This discovery only added to the explorer's swollen sense of confidence.

Soon, an emboldened Columbus went in search of the bustling metropolis of Sipangu, the

island we now call Japan, and the fabled Chinese port town of Saitam.

He instead washed up in Cuba on October 28th, before pushing southeast in his fretful search

for luxurious eastern goods to ship home.

On December 5th, a floundering Columbus runs upon what would prove to be his most important

discovery.

Hispaniola was called Haiti, actually, Haiti, he was actually, that's the original name

of the island, Haiti.

It is in Hispaniola where they're gonna actually try to kind of explore a little more fully,

where they actually get in touch with a chief in the north of the island, and they're gonna

establish kind of a relationship.

It's never clear to what extent Columbus is able to communicate with any of the natives

that he encounters.

Initially, the encounters that Columbus has with the Taino, there are attempts to try

and make one side understood through hand gestures and other sort of pantomime.

What ends up happening is Columbus does know that he needs translators, and one of the

things that he does is that he does steal Taino to try and use them as translators.

And there are other moments in these encounters when Columbus does act in ways that are aggressive.

They use those captive translators to begin to forge relationships with some of these

caciques to get a little bit more information about the island of Hispaniola and its people

to further his goals of commercializing the voyage.

We know that when Columbus arrived on the shores of the Antilles, he chose to call

the people there Indios, because he had believed that he had made it to the Indies, which,

in their mind, encompassed everything from India to China.

And as a result then, the inhabitants for the Spanish became Indios, generally.

Very quickly, Columbus and the Spaniards that followed began to recognize that there

were many nations of Indias, naciones de Indias, or gentes, peoples.

And so, while the term Indios took as the sort of general racialized term for all of

Native Americans, they did recognize that there were distinctions between different

nations of indigenous peoples, and were very keen to exploit those differences if it was

possible to do so.

The Taino know that these new arrivals have been taking captives, and so there's certainly

a wariness on the part of some caciques to the Spanish.

But the caciques on the island of Hispaniola, there are rivalries between them.

There was at least some incentive to try and see what an alliance with these new arrivals

could be, how it might change the sort of power dynamics on the island.

And so at least one of the caciques, Guancanagari, does choose eventually to sort of open more

lines of communication with Columbus.

The warm approval of this chiefdom leader allowed Columbus space to investigate the

forests, streams, and hills of Hispaniola.

He knew he urgently needed to find, or fabricate, some good news to send home.

There are moments of trade, he's bringing trinkets and different kind of goods to trade

with the natives.

He's going to actually receive some gold pieces and gold jewelry that is going to give

him the sense that there is indeed gold in those lands.

And he's going to report all this to the kings in great detail.

It's a diary he's writing for the kings to read.

And he describes that there's great abundance, that the tropical region would be most suitable

for European agriculture, which it obviously was not, that it would be a great producer

of wealth, and in particular there was gold just sort of readily available in the streams

and rivers that one could just simply go and collect it, that there were great numbers

of indigenous peoples who could be converted to Christianity and then become vassals or

subjugated peoples under his authority or Spanish authority very easily.

He wants the kings to fund a second trip, so when we read Columbus's narrative, we need

to be very much aware that that's what he's set up to do.

So we need to be very careful with the information that he provides because he's painting a very

rosy picture about the possibilities of the land, he talks about the natives as being

very docile, being very willing to learn the new Christian faith.

He is very clearly thinking about every ounce of gold that he finds or hears of as ways

of paying back this expensive endeavor.

And he is also suggesting every time he mentions the conversion of people to Christianity that

if gold is not sufficient, at least we have found Christian souls.

So I do think he's under a great deal of pressure and he is manifesting that in the

two things that the monarchs most want to see, which is gold and potential converts.

He also insists that he's found Asia and that those islands are off the coast of Asia.

Historians have debated ever since whether he really believed that, which I think is

probably the case, or whether he just said that because that was what was in his contract.

So we need to wonder to what extent Columbus had to convince himself that he was indeed

what he said he was because he knew that otherwise he would have nothing.

In a further attempt to gain Isabella's approval, despite his costly mistake, Columbus makes

a point of noting the potential for Spain's very own free workforce in the form of Hispaniola's

indigenous people.

Columbus also touted the quality of the slaves that he found there and the intelligence and

the industry of the slaves that he found in New World.

Before going to the Americas, Columbus had traveled in the company of Portuguese sailors

to what is now the coast of Ghana.

So he had an experience of how the Portuguese had established trading forts that traded

in slaves.

That experience really shaped Columbus's thinking about what to do when you get into a new land

and how to go about trying to develop that land as a European colony.

With Aninia's cabins bulging with the island's most beguiling exotic artifacts, Columbus

wastes no time in racing back to Spain, his letter to the crown hungrily lobbying for

a far larger return voyage.

This lavish patronage was his for the taking, Columbus was certain of it.

However, having run the Santa Maria aground, he would be forced to order 39 of his men

to remain on Hispaniola.

They were to construct and inhabit a permanent fortress and await his return.

It is with the remnants of the Santa Maria that they're going to build what is going

to call the Navidad Fortress or the city of, oh, the town of Navidad, which was founded

on Christmas Day.

That's why it's called Navidad.

This is actually the first European settlement in the Americas.

And it's ostensibly under the protection of Guancanagadi that the Spanish who remain on

Hispaniola when Columbus leaves will be supported and have access to food and trade at their

settlement.

He understands that, you know, the power is not in his side.

So he's going to be conservative.

He's going to actually try to treat the natives as allies and treat them well and gain support

from them because they need it to actually be able to travel back.

They need the food.

They need the supplies.

And so Columbus left his people in charge and he said to them, you are to treat these

individuals with kindness.

You also to continue to explore the island and find whatever wealth that you can.

And you are to be their protector.

We can only imagine how incredible it might have been to be left behind.

Those vessels, the only thing that connects you with your homeland, right, with your land,

with your people, the people that you know, and be left in completely unknown land surrounded

by people that you really do not know anything about.

So he's going to go back with all kind of the goods that he's been able to kind of like

accumulate in his time, all the kind of like precious, all the gold that he's been able

to accumulate, different goods that he encountered from cassava to kind of like agricultural

products that he found.

And he also actually took natives with him, forced them to actually come with him because

he intended to actually not only show them to the Queen, but also to sell them as slaves.

For Columbus, I guess it was important for him to prove to the Queen, you know, what

do these natives look like, right?

And he had no qualms whatsoever about taking them and bringing them with him.

The return journey across a tempestuous Atlantic proved perilous.

Fierce storm after fierce storm battered all that remained of the fleet, separating the

two boats, forcing the Niña, with Columbus on board, into port at Lisbon.

The man who would transform Castile's fortunes emerged from the Niña on March 15th, 1493.

Details of his discoveries, alongside well-thumbed reproductions of his famed letter, rapidly

spread across an enraptured Europe.

But the King of Portugal was deeply unimpressed.

He felt these mysterious Asian islands had been illicitly claimed by Spain.

In the Middle Ages, it was not uncommon for different kingdoms, when they had disputes,

to actually go to the Pope and ask for his intercession.

The Pope was concerned about two Catholic powers fighting each other.

And so he came and negotiated a settlement between Spain and Portugal.

The first series, from Pope Alexander VI, known as the Alexandrine Bulls, essentially

divided the world into two spheres of influence, between the Spanish and the Portuguese.

Later on, the Spanish and the Portuguese also negotiate this in the Treaty of Tordesillas,

which creates the dividing line, which goes through the middle of the Atlantic, lops off

the nose of Brazil, and then continues on to the other side of the world.

And so the Philippines are part of the Spanish area, whereas parts of the Spice Islands and

mainland China would be in the Portuguese area.

Can you imagine an individual coming together and saying simply, you know, we're going to

divide the world among ourselves?

What kind of hubris and arrogance is that?

You know, but that's the way the Europeans saw themselves.

Not only the Spaniards, but, you know, the English and the French and the Dutch and the

Portuguese.

They believed that they were the superior civilization, and therefore had the right

to do whatever they needed to do to impose their will on lesser people.

It also takes on an important political aspect, and that is, in order to justify the Spanish

presence in the New World, the Spaniards are responsible for Christianizing the natives.

So they have a legal basis to hold on to the territory, as long as they're Christianizing

the natives.

And that is crucial, because, you know, it's, first of all, somewhat, again, a continuation

of the Reconquista, when you're linking sort of, you know, going ahead with territory,

with converting.

But also it leaves the door open for criticism, because in the moment in which you do not

achieve that conversion, you're not Brazilitizing, you're not making people Christians, anyone

can say, well, then the territory, you know, your right to territorial, you know, control

was linked to conversion, and you're not achieving that.

Columbus's first voyage was a success only insofar as he discovered that there were lands

within reach of European vessels to the West.

It was not a very successful voyage for him financially.

They didn't find a lot of items that were particularly valuable.

But its greatest value was in forging a path that then could be followed again and again

and again in the decades that followed.

The Portuguese were getting way more wealth at the time through their trade in West Africa.

And that is part of the reason why they feel completely fine signing the Treaty of Tordesillas,

because they see themselves as winners of that treaty, because they have preserved for

themselves the commercial potential of West Africa and relegated Spain to whatever they

could find beyond that imaginary line in the middle of the Atlantic.

With that in mind, Spain's bet was really a large bet that could potentially have turned

into nothing.

It turned out to be a big deal, but back then in 1492, 1493, it was not a big event.

It was what somebody has called a non-event.

Columbus, now bolstered by divine backing, once again set his sights westwards.

He hadn't found a swift, safe route to Asia.

He needed to rapidly turn his discovery into a worthy investment for the crown.

Beneath the burden of this enormous pressure, Columbus's impetus shifted from exploration

to conquest.

Cold fear merging with one man's uncompromising ego, which would soon lead to the deaths of

thousands of native people and begin Europe's merciless colonization of the Americas.

Columbus prepared for his return to Hispaniola and to the men he had abandoned at the fortress

of La Navidad.

A far larger fleet of ships set sail, loaded with supplies and heavy weaponry.

They were prepared to use force if necessary.

What they didn't know was that the killing had already begun.