From the Oatmeal.com
Columbus Day
Obviously I'm a little late posting this for actual Columbus Day, but the information in here is still accurate even if the day has passed.
A couple sidenotes:
1) This fits very nicely with what one of my Calvin professors once said about Columbus: "There is so much garbage written about Columbus.  The fact is he was wrong and all of his critics were exactly right.  Every educated person back then knew that the world was round, the debate was just over how large it was.   Columbus thought it would be quicker to get to India by sailing the other way around the world, and all his critics said, 'No, you idiot, the world is much larger than that.  You'll be at sea for months.'  And they were right, except for the discovery of a huge landmass nobody knew about."
2).  I recently got into a semantic argument with some co-workers about whether Columbus actually discovered America or not.  I tend to think he did.  I know there were already people there, and I know Lief Erikson already got there 1,000 years before, et cetera, But I still think by most definitions of discover, what Columbus did qualifies as a discovery.  And the dictionary backs me up.  (Co-workers, if you're reading this...)--Discover can mean to find unexpectedly, or to bring to public attention what was previously only known to a small group.  It doesn't necessarily mean you were the first person ever to find something.
But the semantic debate aside, there's no denying Columbus was not a very nice man.