Sascha lappessen biography of christopher columbus

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Christopher Columbus (also known as (Cristoforo Colombo [Italian]; Cristóbal Colón [Spanish]) was an Italian explorer credited with the “discovery” of the Americas. The Canaries, the Azores and the Madeira island groups had all been discovered within the past century. In the meantime, in a desperate effort to induce the natives to continue provisioning him and his hungry men, he successfully intimidated the natives by correctly predicting a lunar eclipse, using astronomic tables made by Rabbi Avraham Zacuto, who was working for the King of Portugal.

sascha lappessen biography of christopher columbus

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Christopher Columbus, commonly rendered in Spanish as Cristóbal Colón (1451 - May 20, 1506) was a Genoese-born navigator, explorer, and colonizer whose epochal voyage west across the Atlantic Ocean, in 1492, in search of a direct sea route to the Indies, established permanent European contact with the unknown lands and peoples of North and South America.

The complaints of earlier colonists had taken their toll and Columbus was forced to include convicts among the assemblage. It is borne by four statues of kings representing the Kingdoms of Castile, Leon, Aragon, and Navarre.

Traditionally, Columbus is viewed as a man of heroic stature by some people in the United States.

Hero worship of Columbus perhaps reached a zenith around 1892, the 400th anniversary of his first arrival in the Americas. He named the island Hispaniola. Native American populations throughout the Western hemisphere would be decimated through colonial occupation by the Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English, largely through epidemic diseases brought by The anniversary of the 1492 voyage is observed as Columbus Day throughout the Americas and in Spain.

Not finding the King in Lisbon, Columbus wrote a letter to him and waited for the king's reply, which requested that he go to Vale do Paraíso to meet with His Majesty.

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New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopediastandards.

Accepting the length of a degree to be 56 2/3 miles, from the writings of Alfraganus, he therefore calculated the circumference of the Earth as 25,255 km (15,700 modern statute miles) at most, and the distance from the Canary Islands to Japan as 3000 Italian miles (some 3700 km).

Columbus and his men were stranded on Jamaica for a year. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.0 License (CC-by-sa), which may be used and disseminated with proper attribution.

They accepted his letter and let Columbus and his brothers go. His mother was Susanna Fontanarossa. Christopher became an apprentice in his father’s wool weaving business, but he also studied mapmaking and sailing as well. Educated people of the day recognized that the earth was a sphere, but no European was aware of the existence of the American continents and the Pacific Ocean.

Those who failed to reach their quota would have their hands chopped off. Hearing this, Christopher Columbus decided to try and make this revolutionary journey himself.