manythings said:
Christopher Columbus, contrary to what everyone was always taught, was considered an immense fuckwit, tool and criminal. That's why he, a spaniard, had to go to portugal to get funding for his expedition. Also that whole "Everyone thought the earth was flat thing"? Bullshit as well, navigation was based on the priniciple that the earth was round and had been since ancient Greece and Egypt.
Granted that the world being spherical had been well known about by scholars for almost two thousand years, your assessment of Columbus is at least a little bit off. He was Italian and since Italy's naval powers concerned themselves exclusively on the Mediterranean trade routes, he was left to have to go to another power to ask for funding. He went to Portugal first because Prince Henry "the Navigator" had been funding expeditions to sail around Africa for decades by then. Columbus made his pitch (using some incredibly bad math) that he thought that China was much closer to the west than conventional math would suggest. Prince Henry (who was a mathematician in his own right) called bullshit on him and tossed his ass out. That's why Columbus ended up in Spain and got backing from Queen Isabella (who apparently was not nearly as good with numbers as Henry was).
Little known fact about Columbus: He died having never laid his eyes on the mainland, still convinced that he'd made it to the East Indies islands. Thus the reason they are still known as the "West Indies" and many Native Americans as "Indians" to this day.
