Christopher Columbus

This Portrait was made by the Florentine painter Ridolfo Ghirlandaio (1483-1561). It was executed in the first half of the sixteenth century, after the death of Columbus. No portraits of Columbus during his life are known to exist.

Christopher Columbus
(1451 – 1506)
Navigator, colonizer, and explorer from Genoa, Italy, whose voyages across the Atlantic Ocean led to general European awareness of the American continents in the Western Hemisphere.

Columbus made four voyages attempting, among other things to establish a settlement on the island of Hispaniola.

It is quite likely that Columbus introduced smallpox into the America, unknowingly, resulting in a loss of over 90% of the population of Eastern Woodland Indians and indigenous peoples of the Islands where he stopped enroute, by the time settlement began in earnest more than 100 years later.

The term "pre-Columbian" is usually used to refer to the peoples and cultures of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus and his European successors.