A lookout on the Pinta sighted land at about two in the morning on October 12, 1492, and Columbus went ashore the same day on an island in the Bahamas. He named it San Salvador. He thought he had reached the East Indies, which is why he called the people he met indios, Indians, a name that stuck to two continents. It was the first recorded landing of the Spanish expedition, and it opened the Americas to European colonisation, which is what the date has meant ever since.
He had crossed the Atlantic on a wager. The mathematics of his time were against him. The ocean was known to be wide, and the scholars of Castile judged that a westward voyage to Asia was far longer than Columbus claimed, which is one reason he had been turned away more than once. Isabella agreed in April 1492. He sailed from Palos on August 3 with three ships, the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria, carrying about 90 men, and he kept a false log, understating the distance so that the crew would not learn how far they had come.
He never accepted what he had found. He made four voyages. He reached Cuba and Hispaniola, and went to his grave insisting that he had been on the edge of Asia, not on a continent that no European map recorded. The first settlement, at La Navidad on Hispaniola, was founded from the wreck of the Santa Maria, and the colony and the trade that followed it transformed the Americas and destroyed most of the people who lived there.
The date is marked as a national holiday in Spain, as Columbus Day in much of the Americas, and now as Indigenous Peoples' Day in several states and cities in the United States, a change that records how the landing itself is read. The island where he stepped ashore is still not certain, and several places in the Bahamas claim it.