Lesson video

Hello everyone.

This is the ocean.

It's a nice ocean.

Calm and blue.

Looks peaceful.

But in October 1492, three ships sailing across this ocean were not at peace.

They were losing hope of ever seeing land again.

The sailors aboard the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria looked to their leader, Christopher Columbus, for help.

But Columbus knew about as much as they did.

They were sailing into the unknown.

Day after day they were surrounded by the ocean blue, hoping to find the path to Asia that Columbus had insisted could be reached.

The sailors grew desperate and Columbus looked to the heavens for answers.

Then, on October 12th, a flicker of hope.

Land was spotted.

The three ships raced towards the shore and rushed onto the beaches.

Finally, they thought, we have reached the Indies.

They were wrong, of course, but with this voyage, the course of history was forever changed.

Hi everyone.

My name is Mr. Wallace and thanks for joining me.

This is the first of four lessons that we're going to do on Christopher Columbus, but more broadly, the impact of Columbus's voyage, part of which you just heard me talking you through.

We're going to be looking at 1492 and why many historians call this year a turning point in history.

To do that we're going to need to know exactly what happened and what did it lead to and what even is a turning point.

Why is this voyage so significant? Why did it matter so much, both in Europe and in the Americas.

Now, before we go into that, you're going to need to make sure you've got some things before we can get started.

So you should have a pen, some paper or a book to write in and ideally you'll have a hassle-free, distraction-free environment.

If you need to go and get those, just pause the video here and make sure you've got them.

If you're ready to start, we can begin.

Hi everyone, I'm over up in the corner now.

Before we really start, I just want you to quickly have a look at this very famous painting of the landing of Columbus in what we would now call the Caribbean, but he didn't know that.

So have a look at this painting here.

You can see Columbus here with this flag representing the kingdoms of Castille and Aragon in Spain.

The people who'd funded his voyage.

You can also see the knights that he'd taken with him.

You can see his ships in the background, and so on.

This is the popular image that has followed Columbus over the years, very kind of heroic pose, the world kind of opening up to him, leader of these men that are behind him.

What is interesting is back here.

You can see a group of indigenous islanders, people who are originally from that place, from that island that he's landed on, who, they appear to be bowing down to him.

Some appear to be running away, perhaps in surprise, perhaps in fear.

It's not really clear.

But this is the image that many people have had of this voyage for a long time.

That Columbus was a great leader, that he had achieved an incredible feat that everyone laughed at him for even trying to do.

And that the indigenous people of the island, many of them perhaps even thought they were gods and were completely unsurprised.

And what we're going to have to do in this first lesson is really encounter the truth of Columbus and the story.

And that means putting aside some of the stereotypes and frankly, myths that surround Columbus and really getting to the heart of what actually happened in 1492.

Only when we actually know specifically the events and why Columbus is perceived as the way he is and why nowadays we're beginning to rethink Columbus, then we can really look at the impact of his voyage.

This means we're going to have to do a little bit of historical myth-busting, so myth versus reality.

And this will help as well because many of you, I suspect, probably know a little bit about this already.

I know it's quite common, many of my students come to secondary school having studied Columbus a little bit before.

And I don't know how this happens, but they always come believing the same things, which aren't 100% true.

And we need to get to the reality of the situation.

I'm just going to take myself off the screen so you can see everything.

So on the left you're going to see a common myth pop up and on the right, what is really true.

So myth, Columbus discovered America.

Now this often comes down to simply how we use the word discovered.

But millions of people lived there.

For the millions of people that lived in America they would be quite surprised to find that someone had discovered their land.

They were already on it.

Second myth.

Columbus was the first European to land in the Americas.

Now this was a belief for a long time, but in reality historians accept that the Vikings made it there first.

Leif Erikson was the notable leader of that Viking expedition which went to Newfoundland, which is just off the coast of Canada.

And people thought the world was flat.

This one I get every single year.

Columbus was going to sail across the Atlantic and everyone thought that he was silly and they laughed at him because they thought the world was flat and he was going to fall off the edge of the world.

They'd known it was a globe for thousands of years.

The ancient Greeks had worked out the Earth was a globe.

Columbus knew it.

Everybody knew it.

They didn't know the size of it though, again, a great many educated people had gotten very, very close to getting a very accurate understanding of the size of it.

Columbus thought it was a little bit smaller than it really is, but they knew it was a globe.

The whole idea that people in the middle ages thought, or in this kind of early modern period, thought that there was a flat Earth, it's just a complete myth and we need to get rid of those things straight away.

Let's put the traditional stories to one side.

Columbus discovered nothing, he landed there.

He was not the first person to land there.

Though he was one of the first Europeans to bring that information back.

That's where the change comes in.

That's what Leif Erikson did not do.

He was able to make it to the Americas, but stayed there and died there.

Columbus made it to the Americas and came back.

So that knowledge transformed the world.

And no one thought the world was flat.

And nowadays only crazy people think the world is flat.

Now, here is a statue of Columbus in Boston, in America, taken a few weeks before I've recorded this video.

And you may notice something important here.

He no longer has a head.

So Columbus statues appear all over North, Central and South America.

But as I was saying a few moments ago, people are beginning to rethink Columbus and really consider whether or not he is the sort of person you would want to have a statue of, and what that suggests.

There's a lot more to his story than someone who sailed to America and sailed back.

And that's what we're going to explore today.

When you learn that you might understand why some people are less happy with this statue.

So let's start here.

Before we get to Columbus's voyage we need to learn what was the world like before.

So what are we looking at here? This would be a good chance for you to pause the video and really examine the image on your screen.

What are we looking at and is there any part of this that you recognise? So pause the video here and we'll come back in a second and examine what it is that is on the screen.

Okay.

So what can we see? Well, what are we looking at? It's a map of the world drawn before the time of Columbus.

And on the left hand side you can see us.

Here is Europe.

Now, when I'm looking at maps, and one of the great things that make kind of looking at maps easier is looking for certain shapes.

And one of the most famous shapes of course is one that we would be familiar with on our island, 'cause we would look at that quite regularly.

You can see Britain here.

But it's not 100% accurate.

But the boot of Italy is one of the more commonly told shapes in all of world maps.

You should be able to spot, if you realise okay, we've got Britain, we've got France, Italy, Spain, this is Europe.

Now the rest of it doesn't really look like much of what the world is but if you have a general understanding of world geography you might be able to make some of it out.

So if Europe is on this side, down here you have the west coast of Africa.

And as you go round this western coast it's very accurate, but the more south you get the less accurate it becomes.

And that's because at this point no one had sailed around Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope, and made it to the Indian Ocean.

So there was trade across the African coast, but it hadn't reached around the African coast.

So you've got Europe and Africa.

Over here, this jagged piece of land which kind of pierces into the ocean, that's India.

And to the side we can begin to see what we would now call China and Japan.

Now this part of the world is also known as the Indies.

Back in Columbus's time they used the Indies to refer to Asia in general.

So not just India, but China, Indonesia, the islands that surround Southeast Asia, that was all known as the Indies.

So you've got the home of precious goods, spices, silks, rosewater, indigo dyes, all sorts of things coming from this part of the world.

You've got no known route around Africa.

Africa an enormous continent, very very stormy at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

Very difficult, no one had yet managed to sail around the Cape of Good Hope.

And Europe is on the edge of the world.

Okay, the edge of the world.

All of the precious items that it wants has to get from the other side of the Asian continent.

And so this is an enormous area of land that as traders move across, prices increase and people in Europe end up spending quite a lot of money on things like spices and silk.

That's why only the really rich could gets it.

They couldn't go and get it themselves 'cause they can't sail around Africa.

So Europe is kind of penned in at the edge of the world.

It's not the centre of the world, it's not the heart of the world, it's just a edge.

Now those trade routes I just talked about you may have heard of before.

They're commonly called the Silk Roads and it's more than just one road and it's more than the routes that you can see on this map here.

The Silk Roads are a network of trade routes that link China, India, Persia, Arabia, all with Europe.

In blue, they're the ones that go by sea.

So you can see the Indian Ocean, people sailing around, trading here as well.

So if Europeans wanted to get hold of goods from China, they had to go through merchants of the Silk Road.

Eventually they would make it to Europe through places such as Constantinople, which is just in Eastern Europe here, or through Egypt.

And that was their only access.

Now this part of the world you may have studied before is not Christian.

The religion that is followed in this part of the world is Islam.

And throughout the 11th, 12th, 13th centuries, there are a series of crusades and wars between Christianity and Islam.

So it wasn't always safe to trade, it wasn't always safe to travel, meaning that sometimes Europe felt cut off from access to trade.

It wasn't always completely restricted but it was hard for Europeans to get some of those products, some of the luxury goods, some of the valuables from the East into Europe.

Okay, so Europe is very much kind of marginalised, it's on the margins, it's at the edge of the known world at this time.

And they can't get around Africa and they have to go through the merchants of the Silk Road.

That drives up the prices and sometimes that can be dangerous.

Enter Christopher Columbus.

Columbus is from the city of Genoa, or Genoa, in Italy.

It was a merchant city and a seafaring city.

So early on in his life he was used to being at sea and he was used to trading.

And he wanted to be an explorer and in the culture of the time, especially for people who wanted to be noble, so wanted to have a little bit of land, there was this romantic idea, and by romantic I don't mean like between a man and a woman, I mean like ideal.

This way that they thought the ideal way of living was to be an explorer.

That you could have adventure, that you could have titles, you could become a lord or a knight.

That you could have wealth.

And that if you didn't have any at the moment, the best way to rise in society, the best way to increase your place in society, was to become that adventurer, that explorer.

And this is where, in his middle age, he begins to consider sailing across the Atlantic to get to the Indies or to get to Asia.

At least that's what he tells people.

Really what's in Columbus's mind, based on all the documents that he left behind is, he wants land.

He wants titles, he wants wealth.

He wants to improve his life and he'll figure out a way to get there.

So, I said before that people knew the world was a globe.

Here is an example of what people believed the world looked like at this time.

On this side of the globe you can see Europe, you can see Spain, Hispania, here.

You can see the Azores Islands, these are owned by Portugal and they're in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

And you can see the Canary Islands just off the coast of Africa.

They're controlled by Spain.

No America, no American continent, 'cause it wasn't yet discovered.

Wasn't yet, discovered is the wrong word.

See, we fall into those habits all the time.

Discovered is the wrong word.

It wasn't yet landed at by a European, with the information brought home.

Instead they thought, if you sailed all the way across you could get to China, Japan and to Indonesia, these spice islands.

And maybe you could bypass the Silk Road, maybe you could bypass Africa altogether.

Now this was seen as reckless, dangerous and having a very small chance of actually happening.

But no one believed that the world was flat.

They just thought this was too dangerous.

No one really knew 100% how big the world was.

And so this was sailing into the unknown.

So Columbus goes all the way around Europe, trying to get support for this voyage.

And no one's interested.

They've got their own problems. Monarchs in Spain are too busy fighting what's called the Reconquista.

They're trying to take back Spain from Islamic rulers that have ruled it for hundreds of years.

He goes to Italy, he goes to France, no one is interested in his plan.

It costs too much money and has such a small chance of success.

Eventually he goes to the Court of Ferdinand and Isabella of Castille, which is part of Spain.

And he persuades them to fund his voyage and he basically changes his target based on what he thinks they would be interested in.

He just wants to explore and get himself that land and title.

Now what would appeal to them? Access to China? Probably.

Gold, probably.

Spreading religion, probably.

More land for Spain, probably.

So all of these things are part of the sales pitch.

When he's appealing to Ferdinand and Isabella, all of these things are ways that he is selling the trip to them.

If you fund me sailing into the unknown, you could become rich.

You could trade with China directly rather than going through all of these middlemen and merchants.

You can spread Christianity, which, believe me, was a key motivation of the monarchs in Europe.

And you can have more land.

So eventually he gets the support of Ferdinand and Isabella.

It doesn't really cost them much money, in fact they get other people to help pay for it as well.

If it succeeds, there'll be all sorts of great things for them.

If it doesn't succeed, they haven't lost that much.

And, in reality, they probably didn't expect much from it.

Now this is a quote from Columbus himself about what he wanted from this.

Going to read through it and I want you to think, what does Columbus personally want.

Not Ferdinand and Isabella, but what does he want? So let me just read it through.

"So that from henceforth, I should be entitled to call myself High Admiral of the Ocean Sea and Governor of all the islands and mainland I might discover, or that might be discovered after, in the ocean sea.

And that my eldest son should follow me and his son from him, forever and ever." So what is it he wants? Does he want to become rich? Does he want to find China? Does he want to take land? I'm going to give you five seconds to think about this.

Five, four, three, two, one.

Okay.

Point at the one that you think it is.

Absolutely right, he wants to take land.

He is saying here I will be governor of all the islands and mainland I might discover.

He wants land, he wants status.

The whole idea of finding the Indies, that just helps get the king and queen on board.

That persuades them to do it.

He wants to become a lord, he wants to become more of a noble.

Now, quick question to see if you were listening.

Columbus was funded by the Ferdinand, should be the king, or just by Ferdinand and Isabella of Castille, which is where.

Castille is where? Spain, Italy, or Portugal.

Going to give you five seconds again.

Five, four, three, two, one.

Point at the one that it is.

Absolutely right, they're part of Spain.

And lastly, many people thought the trip would fail because the world was flat.

Five seconds.

Four, three, two, one.

It's false, let's just banish that from our minds.

They thought it was dangerous.

They thought it had a very, very low chance of succeeding, but they didn't think it was flat.

Now, with all of that in mind, I want you now in a moment to pause this video, move forward in the lesson, read through the information about his voyage and answer these questions.

When you're done, we'll come back, go through the answers and get a really true, accurate picture of this voyage and put those myths to rest.

Okay, pause the video here and come back when you've finished those questions.

Let's go.

Okay, welcome back.

By this point you should have answered the questions so we can check through the answers.

Now whenever we go through the answers, I'm going to give you two.

An acceptable answer, like a right answer, but a good answer.

And the good answer is always in a full sentence.

It will add a little bit more detail and depth.

So try and make sure your answers are as close to the good answer as possible.

Maybe add some detail if you can.

Don't worry if it's not word for word, that's fine.

You may put it in your own words, that's absolutely fine.

But try and make sure that you are writing in full sentences and in detail.

So, number one.

Where did Columbus expect to land by sailing due west? The acceptable answer is China.

But in a sentence, full sentence, Columbus expected to land in the Chinese port of Guangzhou if they sailed due west.

Simple as that.

Question two.

What did Columbus name the first island that he arrived at? The acceptable answer, San Salvador.

The good answer, the first island that Columbus arrived at was named San Salvador.

This was a small island and did not offer much wealth or trade for Columbus, so he continued exploring.

Three.

Why was the island of Ayiti, or Hispaniola, important to Columbus? The acceptable answer here is because it contained gold and the local population called the Taino, who could be conquered.

But let's add a little bit of detail.

Hispaniola was so important to Columbus as it had gold.

This was important to take back to Spain, to convince them that the area was worth exploring and taking control over.

It was populated by a group called the Taino and Columbus captured some and took them back to Spain as captives.

So he was particularly interested in this island because it seemed wealthier, it seemed ripe for the conquest and the indigenous people that lived there, known as the Taino, they seemed like they would offer a rich reward for conquest.

They were cultured.

They were clearly intelligent people that had something of value.

They had something of value.

So he captured some and took them back to Europe as an example of the riches and the potential of this region.

Four.

What did Columbus take back to Spain to convince them that the area was worth colonising? The acceptable answer.

Various items and captured people to show the Spanish king and queen.

A good answer.

When Columbus returned to Spain he took with him captured Taino as examples of the local indigenous people he believed could be enslaved or converted to Christianity.

He also took back gold and new discoveries such as pineapples and tobacco.

So there we're getting some specifics.

Pineapples, tobacco products that had never been seen in Europe before, they'd never reached Europe.

And the Taino, and it's important to note here the potential to convert them to Christianity, because Columbus was always split.

He always had these two things in his mind, that people could both be enslaved and become Christian.

It wasn't one or the other.

And this ability to see multiple kinds of ways of exploiting a region, of taking advantage of a region, is one of the things that kind of marked him out as kind of a ruthless person.

Why was Columbus's power as governor taken away in 1499? Because he treated the Taino with cruelty.

A more detailed answer here will explain some of that ruthlessness I just talked about.

Columbus had his power taken away because reports had reached Spain of how brutally the Taino had been treated.

An example of this is how all Taino had to gather gold for him and if they did not get enough they would have their hands chopped off.

Thousands of Taino died because of his rule and many more were enslaved and sent back to Spain.

And in fact the stories of what happened to the Taino are incredibly brutal and really very tragic.

Thousands, hundreds of thousands of Taino are said to have died within the first year of Columbus arriving.

And we're talking about worse treatments than even having hands chopped off.

There were some brutal public floggings.

And when all of this reached Spain, they were completely unaware of just the kind of governor that Columbus and his family had become.

and his power was taken away.

So this image is where we kind of began our lesson and you can see in here how he is usually presented.

But having gone through that I think we can accept that there's probably a different story to tell.

It's not quite the heroic voyage that is often talked about.

Now this is the route that he originally took, okay.

You can see the arrow here pointing in this direction, so he came in here.

Here's San Salvador.

But that was seen as not particularly useful to him.

He then sails around, he lands on Cuba and then eventually he lands on the island that the locals called Ayiti and he named Hispaniola.

And this was the island with the Taino and this was the island where he captured people, forced them to find him gold and so on.

Then he sailed back to Spain.

In total, he made four voyages.

You can see all four on here.

He gradually worked his way around the Caribbean.

He sailed alongside the coast of Central America.

And he did sail along a little bit of the coast of South America.

And he did step on land in South America very briefly.

But broadly, he just explored these islands.

And for his entire life, he believed that he was close to the Indies, close to China, close to Indonesia.

He was not really aware of North America.

He was not really aware of the significance of his journey.

And of course once he opens the door, many others follow.

He had his four visits, but then many many more explorers, funded by Spain, continued to go to these areas and explore them and having some quite serious, long-lasting and, in many cases, very tragic consequences.

That's what we'll look at in the next couple of lessons.

Today we're going to keep our focus on Columbus.

So here's that picture again from the start, Columbus with no head.

His statue has been beheaded in Boston.

In other parts of America it was taken down entirely.

Americans celebrate Columbus Day but some states in America are beginning to stop that because as they become more aware of the way that he ruled Hispaniola and the type of behaviour that he is associated with, the less they want to celebrate those features of his life.

And it's a complicated part of history because he did such an important thing.

And that was to land in the New World, as they came to call it, and bring that information back for Europe.

That absolutely transformed both sides of the ocean.

Europe and the Americas were utterly transformed by this contact.

So he's such an important person, but there are questions about whether or not that type of person should have a statue.

And there are still various kind of disagreements about this.

Now our question then is why was 1492 a turning point.

Why do historians call it a turning point? So to answer that we need to think, well, what is a turning point? So I've given you three options here.

I want you to choose which one you think is the best description of a turning point in history.

Is it when a major individual changes their mind? Is it something that changes the direction of history and has a long-lasting impact? Or is it when a new discovery or invention is made? Pause the video and think one, two or three.

Which one of those is the best description of a turning point? Okay.

So let's see what you think then.

A turning point is something that changes the direction of history and has a long-lasting impact.

We're not talking about minor changes, subtle, gradual changes.

We're talking about something which dramatically alters the world.

Alters history, alters a nation, alters something.

That alters the direction that history is travelling in.

It's going in one direction and then, because of something, it changes, and all of a sudden everything is different.

There are all sorts of turning points in history and 1492 and the landing of Columbus in the New World is considered one of those turning points.

So why? Want you to write this question out, how might the events of 1492 and Columbus's voyage to the West Indies, as the Caribbean became known, because, if you remember, he thinks he is near the Indies so he just calls them the West Indies.

How might those events be a turning point in world history? So think about the long-lasting impact.

What might the long-lasting impact be? How might it change the direction of history? Try and write down maybe just one answer to this, I'll go through a couple afterwards.

In the next couple of lessons we're going to really build up our knowledge on this.

But how might this be a turning point? Okay, well done.

This is tricky stuff.

We're not just learning about Columbus here but we're kind of thinking big picture.

What might this lead to, what might the big impact be? So here's a couple of ideas.

There is the, and I put this in speech marks here, the discovery of a new continent.

Now for Europeans, they might think this has been discovered, but as we've talked about, there are people there already.

But all of a sudden there is an entire part of the world which they are now aware of.

And it's Spain that is aware of it first.

So this could be a turning point because it provides resources for Spain.

There is an entire new part of the world to explore and people to come into contact with, like the unfortunate Taino.

And earlier on I talked about how Europe was at the edge of the world.

It was at the edge of those trade routes.

Is it still at the edge of the world? This is something that's going to come up over the next few lessons.

Is it still at the edge of the world? Where is Europe's place, now that America has been discovered? I'm going to leave that open as a broad question, because that's something we'll come back to at the end of these four lessons.

Now, just bring myself back onto the screen.

Super impressive work, really well done on getting through this first lesson.

And now you know more about Columbus than frankly most people do.

Most people think about those myths from the start of the lesson.

A lot of people, if you had to talk about Columbus with them, would say oh yeah, people thought the world was flat.

They laughed at him.

Not true.

Oh he discovered America.

Not true.

You have a much better understanding of Columbus now.

And in the next couple of lessons we're going to explore the consequences of this.

What happened after Columbus's visit? And what's the impact on the Old World of Europe and the New World of the Americas? Now I'd be interested to see what you've got so far.

If you'd like to share your work, I really want to see it.

If you would like to, please ask your parent or carer to share your work on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter, tagging OakNational and the hashtag LearnwithOak.

Thank you for your hard work.

I look forward to seeing you in our next lesson.

Have a great day.