On August 3, 1492, Cristoforo Colombo (yes, you non-Italians spell it Christopher Columbus) set sail from Palos de la Frontera, Spain, with three ships – the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria – headed for Asia. And he might have made it, too, eventually… if the Western Hemisphere hadn’t been in the way. As it was, he gets the credit for discovering the Americas (even if a clever cartographer named Amerigo Vespucci grabbed up the naming rights first). Would some other European eventually have had the same idea, twenty, fifty or a hundred years later? Certainly. Eventually, the Europeans...