Reflections of a stormy petrel

Exactly. There was nothing miraculous or even surprising about Columbus sailing to the Caribbean; had he not done so, America would have been discovered by the Portuguese captain Cabral ten years later, when he drifted off his route to the Cape and India, and discovered Brazil. Besides, there is good reason to believe that illiterate British and Breton fishermen had already discovered the banks of Newfoundland and had kept the discovery secret to their own advantage. The point is that as soon as the route to America was found, there were hundreds of ships ready to exploit it. Within twenty years, even before Cortez invaded the mainland, Spain had established an empire in the island, with cities like Havana already in place. And that is just one of the points.