ABSTRACT
By his reckoning, and if there were favorable winds, he had thought it would be a journey ofno more than eight weeks sailing to the west. And, as he expected, his crew did sight land at just about the right latitude. But what Cristobal Colón did not know was that his calculation of the diameter of the earth was off by at least a third. He planned to reach the islands off China and then Mainland China itself, but instead Christopher Columbus (as Colón’s name was later spelled) stumbled upon two entire continents that lay unexpectedly in the path he had imagined; even more surprising, the indigenous people possessed gold and silver. The natives’ initial generous greetings coupled with their possession of gold would be their undoing. Their “guests” almost immediately became their conquerors.1
