Pinzón brothers

The Pinzón brothers were Spanish sailors, pirates, explorers and fishermen, natives of Palos de la Frontera, Huelva, Spain. Martín Alonso, Francisco Martín and Vicente Yáñez, participated in Christopher Columbus's first expedition to the New World (generally considered to constitute the discovery of the Americas by Europeans) and in other voyages of discovery and exploration in the late 15th and early 16th centuries.A document in the Archivo de Simancas in the ''Registro general del Sello'', dated March 1505, gives the terms of the inheritance of the estate of the Pinzón brothers' mother. This document is the source for the parents of the brothers being Martín Alonso Pinzón (father) and Mayor Vicente (mother), who left them some houses in the Barrero neighborhood of Palos, indicating that the family had been in Palos for at least one generation before the brothers.
Cited in:
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* Dentro del proceso de apelación de la sentencia de Dueñas -pleito iniciado por Diego Colón y que continuó Luis Colón- en probanza realizada en 1532 por Juan Martín Pinzón, hijo de Martín Alonso Pinzón, la primera pregunta del interrogatorio dice lo siguiente:

Within the appeal trial against of the ''Dueñas'' lawsuit filed by Columbus's son Diego Colón continued by Diego's son Luis Colón in testimony made in 1532 by John Martin Pinzon, son of Martin Alonso Pinzon, the first question reads:

To all of this. the response was affirmative.

The testimony is reproduced in:
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Cited in:
* The link is to archive.org.
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The brothers were sailors along the coast of Huelva, and thanks to their many commercial voyages and piracy along the coast, they were famous along the entire coast. The strategic position offered by the historic Atlantic port of Palos, from which expeditions had set forth to the African coasts de Palencia, Alfonso. Década III, libro 26, capítulo 6. as well as to the war against Portugal, for which most of the armadas set forth from this town, organized, on many occasions, by this family.

Martín Alonso and Vicente Yáñez, captains of the caravels '' La Pinta'' and ''La Niña'', respectively on Columbus's first voyage, are the best known of the brothers, but the third brother, the lesser-known Francisco Martín, was aboard the ''Pinta'' as its master.

It was thanks to Martín Alonso that the seamen of the Tinto-Odiel were motivated to participate in Columbus's undertaking. He also supported the project economically, supplying money from his personal fortune. On the website of the Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes.

Francisco, master of the ''Pinta'', appears to have participated in Columbus's third and fourth voyages of discovery as well as in the first, but because his name was a common one, the facts of his life cannot be easily sorted out from those of contemporaries with the same name.

Vicente Yáñez, the youngest of the three brothers, besides participating in Columbus's first voyage, once Columbus's monopoly on transatlantic trade was ended, made several voyages to the Americas on his own account and is generally credited with the discovery of Brazil.

Although they sometimes quarreled with Columbus, on several occasions the Pinzón brothers were instrumental in preventing mutiny against him, particularly during the first voyage. On 6 October, Martín intervened in a dispute between Columbus and the crew by proposing an altered course (which Columbus eventually accepted) and thus calmed simmering unrest. A few days later, on the night of 9 October 1492, the brothers were forced to intercede once again, and this time they proposed the compromise that if no land was sighted during the next three days, the expedition would return to Spain.José Manuel Azcona Pastor, ''Possible paradises: Basque emigration to Latin America'', University of Nevada Press, 2004, pg. 14

/ref> On the morning of the 12th, land (there is some question of the location: ''see Guanahani'') was in fact sighted by Juan Rodriguez Bermejo (also known as Rodrigo de Triana).

The port of Palos at the end of the 15th century

The Pinzón brothers lived in the era of the greatest splendor of the port town of Palos de la Frontera, participating in the majority of the activities undertaken by that port.

The historic port of Palos was a river port, protected from winds and from pirate attacks, both major hazards to the ports of the time. It was located on the lower portion of the Río Tinto known then as the Canal de Palos, about from its mouth at the Atlantic and its confluence with the Odiel. The port probably grew simultaneously with the town, first as an anchorage for small vessels engaged almost exclusively in fishing on the beaches and estuaries and occasional commercial transactions to supply the small population.

For many, the expression ''port of Palos'' brings to mind the present-day port with its old wharf, the ''muelle de la Calzadilla'' from which the ''Plus Ultra'' flying boat departed in 1926 to cross the Atlantic. This is not the 15th century port. The municipal ordinances of the era (''Ordenanzas Municipales de Palos (1484–1521)''), focused mainly on regulating the town's maritime activities never use the terms ''puerto'' (port) or ''muelle'' (wharf). The caravels of Palos "arrived at the riverbank" (''"aportaban a la ribera"''), where they discharged their goods and auctioned their fish. That is to say, the activities of the port were not conducted in any single place, but along the length of the bank of the Río Tinto, because of the large number of ships and relatively high volume of merchandise they had to handle.

Progressively, the river became Palos's principal means of connection to the outside world and the port the axis of its relation to the surrounding towns. This maritime orientation modified the shape of the town, previously a conical area centered around the church and castle. The Calle de la Ribera ("Riverbank Street") connecting the town center to the port became the town's principal artery, and the port the authentic heart of the local economy.

On the eve of Columbus's first voyage, the entire riverbank between the present-day wharfs near the center of Palos and away at La Rábida Monastery was an active port. The caravels anchored in the center of the river, where the depth was sufficient for their drafts, and paid for the rights to anchor there. From the caravels, boats and dinghies loaded or unloaded the goods "tying up to the shore" (''"amarrando en la ribera"''). The port had a population density similar to that to the town proper, from what we can deduce from the ''Ordenanza Municipal'', which prohibited weapons on the riverbank because the people there were as tightly packed as in the town proper (the expression used is ''"tan aparejadas como en la Villa"'': ''aparejadas'' is nautical Spanish for something that has been furnished or supplied). Beginning in the first third of the 15th century, the port of Palos experienced continual economic growth, obtaining an importance well beyond the local area and achieving even international dimensions, as is testified by the frequent presence of English, Breton, Flemish, and Italian ships.

Following in the wake of the Portuguese, the ships of Palos traveled to the Canary Islands and Guinea, with their rich fisheries and the commercial possibility of trade in gold, spices, and slaves. In the second half of the 15th century, Palos reaches a population of three thousand. The ''alota'' of Palos, a type of customs warehouse, paid the largest tribute of any such facility to the Duke of Medina Sidonia

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