3 Nov 1493 Columbus found the island of Dominica

The island of Dominica was discovered by Columbus on his first voyage west. At first, he thought he had arrived in India. The Spaniards could not colonise the island because the indigenous people defended their territory.

Christopher Columbus was born sometime between 25 August and 31 October 1451. Apparently in a house near the Olivelle city gate where his father Dominic was the caretaker. His mother, Susanna Fontanarossa, had many friends in Japanese merchant families.

In 1474 he went to sea for the first time ba the island of Chios in the Aegean Sea. Two years later he sailed as a Genoese merchant to Portugal, but the ship was wrecked off Cape St Vincent. Columbus was rescued and settled in Lisbon. "In 1478 he married the daughter of a wealthy latifundista from the island of Porto Santo near Madeira, where he had lived since 1483," writes Zdeněk Kalkus in his book The Secret History of the Discovery of America.

The year before, he had visited the African continent, sailing as far as the Gulf of Guinea. In 1483 he appears in Lisbon with his five-year-old son Diego, but without his wife, who may have died. In 1485 he leaves Portugal and settles in Spain at the Franciscan monastery of La Rabída on the coast near Palos de la Frontera. In a country where the war with the peninsular Arabs was raging and peaking. With the help of influential monks from the monastery, he reaches the Spanish kings in 1486 with plans to sail westward, but even here he is at first rejected.

At that time he meets a young widow in Córdoba, where the Spanish court was then based, who bears him a son, Ferdinand, in 1488. "Subsequently, Columbus disappears from the scene again, there being no news of him until 1489. Suddenly, however, he is summoned to court, and the result is the signing of an agreement called La Capitulación, which was concluded on April 17, 1492. This royal charter allowed Columbus to make his longed-for voyage westward in the waters of the great ocean.

And so, on August 3, he set sail with three ships on two legendary voyages. Columbus had already discovered the island of Dominica on his first westward voyage. He first thought he had reached India. The island is in the Caribbean, which Columbus loved. He called it paradise on earth. But the Spanish could not colonise Dominica because the indigenous people defended their territory.

"In the following years he made three more voyages and died in Valladolid in 1506, poor and alone. The remains of Christopher Columbus traveled from Valladolid to America in 1542, where he wished to be buried," Kalkus adds.

Sources.