He was a pretty determined character and not much got in his way. You can read the log of his first voyage to the New World HERE in downloadable, searchable pdf format.
Columbus was the son of moderately prosperous Genovaise wool merchant and was sent to school to become a naval officer. He did some time in the Genoese Navy, going to sea for the first time when he was 10 as a midshipman’s apprentice and mustering out at 21, then became the captain of a merchantman, a business agent, and made a name for himself as a great navigator and bold adventurer searching out valuable new merchant import/export markets along the west African coast previously not on the charts.
He became very wealthy and his second wife was a 25 year-old noblewoman from the Monastery of All Saints in Lisbon who had won medals from Portugal for academic achievements. She was one of Portugal’s twelve elite Comendadoras of the Military Order of Saint James. Her name was Filipa Moniz Perestrelo, daughter of Bartolomeu Perestrelo (bear with me) a Portuguese Knight of Santiago, governor of Porto Santo, member of the household of Prince John, Lord of Reguengos de Monsaraz (Master of Santiago,) and of Prince Henry the Navigator’s household.
Through his father-in-law, Columbus had free access to Prince Henry the Navigator’s library, which was arguably the largest collection of charts, shipping and navigational notes both historic and contemporaneous in the world at the time. Not even the Pope and his emissaries had access to this library as many of the documents were held as military secrets. Henry bought this information at great expense from spies and merchantmen as far abroad as Asia.
Columbus was a very ambitious and competent sailor fired up by the fact that he had married far above his station. Men like this often would rather die nobly trying to make a name for themselves, rather than live life as failures in the eyes of their wives, their families and thus themselves.
He was making an average of 4 knots per hour per day and had moved back into the wind a week before his arrival at San Salvador. His logs and other documents show that they were under stress, but not to the point of mutiny and days away from death from dehydration or malnutrition as many people believe. Check the charts. If he hadn’t hit tiny San Salvador, he would have hit either Cat Island, Long Island, or Exuma within a few hours. If he managed to somehow accidently thread that needle without sighting land, he would have run smack-dab into Cuba within a few days and history would not have been changed.