Before sunrise on August 3, 1492, three small wooden ships slipped out of the Spanish port of Palos and pointed their bows toward the open Atlantic. The flagship was the Santa Maria. With it sailed two smaller, faster ships called the Nina and the Pinta. Their captain was an Italian sailor named Christopher Columbus, and he had a wild idea: he believed he could reach Asia by sailing west instead of east.
Columbus had begged for money for years. Kings and councils all said no. Finally Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain agreed to fund him. He carried about 90 sailors, a cabin boy or two, and enough hardtack biscuit, salt pork, and water to last months. The crew got nervous as the weeks dragged by and no land appeared, and Columbus secretly kept two logbooks, one with the real distances and one with smaller numbers so the sailors wouldn't panic.
On October 12, after 70 days at sea, a lookout on the Pinta finally spotted land in the Bahamas. Columbus thought he'd reached the edge of Asia. He hadn't, of course, he'd bumped into islands near a whole continent Europeans didn't know existed. His voyage opened a bridge between Europe and the Americas that changed the entire world, for better and for worse. Foods, animals, languages, and people began crossing the ocean both ways, and the map of the planet was rewritten forever.
