Columbus makes landfall in the Bahamas
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After a five-week trade-wind passage from the Canaries, Columbus's three ships raised an island in the Bahamas that its inhabitants called Guanahaní. Which modern island this was has never been settled — San Salvador (Watlings Island) and Samana Cay are the leading candidates — and the surviving evidence is an abstract of the journal made by Bartolomé de las Casas rather than the original. The date is Julian, as recorded. What began that day was not a discovery of a route to Asia, which is what Columbus believed he had achieved, but sustained biological contact between hemispheres separated for millennia.
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