The Muslim Brothers - traduzione in

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.

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 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.

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. 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).