Explaining a few discoveries

Charles Day, in his editorial “Discoveries and explanations ,” uses Christopher Columbus as an example of a quintessential “discoverer” and erroneously states that in May 1498 Columbus “set out . . . on his third and final voyage” (emphasis mine). Day’s story forgets what followed after that third voyage, which ended when Columbus was arrested and shipped back to Spain in chains for committing atrocities, including enslaving the local population in defiance of Queen Isabella’s orders: Columbus returned to the Americas in 1502 on his fourth voyage.

The story of Columbus’s visits to the Americas has been mangled and abridged for centuries—most famously by the persistent and baseless conflation of his voyages with the flat-Earth myth. ¹ Perhaps that tendency comes from the discordance between using Columbus as an exemplar of discovery and acknowledging his crimes against humanity, which were widely condemned even during his lifetime.