Did Columbus do anything else important besides discover America?
Though not the first to reach the Americas from Europe, it was Columbus’ voyages that led to general European awareness of the hemisphere and the successful establishment of European cultures in the New World. While history places great significance on his first voyage of 1492, he did not actually reach the mainland until his third voyage in 1498. In 1470, he was in the service of René I of Anjou in a Genoese ship hired to support his unfortunate attempt to conquer the Kingdom of Naples. Later he allegedly made a trip to Chios, in the Aegean Sea. In May 1476, he took part in an armed convoy sent by Genoa to carry a valuable cargo to northern Europe. Following Washington Irving’s myth-filled 1828 biography of Columbus, Americans commonly believed Columbus had difficulty obtaining support for his plan because Europeans thought the Earth was flat. In fact, few at the time of Columbus’s voyage, and virtually no sailors or navigators, believed this. Most scholars accepted Ptolemy’s claim th
