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  • 2020-10-12 (xsd:date)
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  • What Were the Names of Christopher Columbus' Three Ships? (en)
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  • One of the primary historical facts many of us learned as schoolchildren was that In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, and in three ships named the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, the intrepid Italian explorer —sponsored by Spanish monarchs — sailed across the Atlantic Ocean and discovered America, in the process finally proving to the world that the Earth was round. We're now more aware that much of that simple historical narrative is inaccurate. At no time during any of his four voyages across the Atlantic did Christopher Columbus make landfall at, or set foot on, the North American continent. During his first expedition (1492-93), Columbus' ships touched on various islands that we now know as the Bahamas, Cuba, and Hispaniola, i.e., the Dominican Republic and Haiti. And even if Columbus had reached North America proper by ship at some point, it's unlikely he would have been the first person, or even the first European, to do so. And finally, Columbus certainly didn't prove the Earth was round, nor did he set out to do so. That information was already a generally accepted fact among educated people of Columbus' time, and, in any case, Columbus didn't definitively establish it by circumnavigating the globe: It turns out that even some inconsequential basic facts about Columbus' famed first voyage are problematic. No contemporaneous images of his famous 1492-93 expedition's three ships exist, but we at least know the names of those vessels, right? As we all learned by rote in school, they were the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. Yet uncertainty remains among historians about the official or original names of the ships, as opposed to the nicknames given to them by their crews. The Washington Post, for example, observed that: The website for The Columbus Foundation, an entity that operated replicas of two of Columbus' ships (the Niña and the Pinta), also noted the difference between official religious names and nicknames for ships in that time and place: John Dyson's 1991 biography of Columbus avers that the Santa Maria was Columbus' own renaming of a vessel called La Gallega: A Christian Science Monitor contributor went so far as to assert that the ships' common names were irreverent nicknames referring to prostitutes: Completely accurate details about the names of Columbus' ships may be impossible to determine at this remove, but the reality is definitely more complicated than the common mythology so many generations of youngsters were taught. (en)
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