Christopher Columbus
Son of a wool merchant, and born in Genoa in about 1451, Christopher Columbus got a job on a merchant boat merely as a teenager. Columbus often never wrote in his own native language, but in one of his writings he claimed that he went to see at the age of 10. In 1473, Columbus began his apprenticeship as business agent for the important Centurione. Columbus went on many voyages, but his most important was when he landed in the New World in 1492.