Number of ships commissioned to columbus

 At the end of the century, in 1492, Spain’s Queen Isabella commissioned the Genoese Christopher Columbus to undertake a voyage with three ships and some 100 men to find a new route to the East Indies and to set up a trading post for further expansion. This voyage led him to the shores of San Salvador in the Bahamas. Convinced that he had landed in the Indies, he named the indigenous people Indians. The continent, however, was named after a Florentine merchant, Amerigo Vespucci, who traveled there nine years later under the Portuguese flag. In one of his letters to his patron, he wrote that he had discovered Mundus Novus, the New World that had been unknown to their ancestors.