Columbus: Misguided Navigator of History

Christopher Columbus didn't discover America, he just got historically lost because he

was terrible at math. Back in 1492, Columbus bet everything that the Earth was

small enough to sail west to Asia. He was wrong. He crashed into the Bahamas instead,

totally convinced he was in the East Indies. His own journals are actually terrifying.

He wrote about how the Indigenous people were so nice and unarmed that they would make perfect

servants. Things got so brutal under his watch that the Spanish king actually had

him arrested and dragged back to Europe in chains. He died stripped of his titles,

never knowing he kicked off an era that swapped food and disease across the globe,