NIÑO, PEDRO ALONSO (c. 1468–c. 1505), Spanish explorer, described as “el negro,” who was the pilot of the ship Santa María during the first voyage of Christopher Columbus. Niño was born in the town of Moguer in southern Spain. Little is known about his early life. In 1492 he sailed with Columbus as part of the first European fleet to land in the Americas. His brothers Juan and Francisco traveled with him.
Three ships, the Pinta, Niña, and Santa María, set sail from Palos de la Frontera, Spain, on August 3, 1492, with the intention of finding a new sea route to the Far East. With one stopover in the Canary Islands, the voyage across the Atlantic lasted two months and nine days. The expedition first made landfall in the Bahamas on October 12. Still looking for China or Japan, Columbus’ group traveled through the Bahamas to Cuba. They were blown by a storm to Haiti on December 6, where they first discovered gold. The Santa María accidentally ran aground in Haiti on December 25. The crew used the beached ship to guard and gather more gold, before taking their remaining two ships back to Spain on January 16, 1493. Pedro Alonso Niño returned on the Niña. The sailors on that journey encountered a terrible storm that separated the two ships. The Niña was forced to land on an island in the Portuguese Azores and the crew was briefly imprisoned there. They did not make it back to Spain until March 15, 1493.
Columbus’ crew was multi-national. The majority were Spanish, though some were Basque or Portuguese. Columbus himself was Italian. There are some references to Jewish sailors and at least one Englishman and one Irishman. The description of Niño as “el negro” first appears in a translation of some letters written by Peter Martyr d’Anghiera—an Italian chaplain in service to the Spanish court—to his friends and patrons in which he describes Columbus’ voyages. Whether this means Pedro Alonso Niño was actually of African descent is a matter of debate.
Some scholars argue that the moniker is the result of a misprint or a mistranslation of Niño’s last name, which is sometimes written as “Ningus” or “Ningo.” However, the southern part of the Iberian Peninsula, where Niño was from, was at this time home to a sizable population of people of North African and sub-Saharan African descent. Spain has a long history of interchange with and conquest of North Africa. Sub-Saharan Africans were first brought to Spain as part of the slave trade as early as the eleventh century. There are other records of both free and enslaved Afro-Iberians traveling and working aboard Spanish ships during this period. If Niño was not in fact Afro-Iberian, this error did not raise questions among those translating or reprinting d’Anghiera’s account, indicating that an Afro-Iberian pilot of the Santa María was at least within the realm of possibility for this period.
Niño traveled with Columbus to the New World for the second time in 1493. In 1499 he and a Castilian merchant named Cristóbal Guerra leveraged their experience on the Columbus voyages to seek special permission to undertake a private expedition. They traveled to the Gulf of Paria, between Trinidad and Venezuela, and their mission proved extremely lucrative. On the island of Margarita, they traded items of little European value for an enormous quantity of pearls. Upon their return, Niño was accused of hiding some of his wealth and not handing over the full twenty percent portion he owed to the royal treasury. He was arrested and his property was confiscated. He died shortly thereafter. According to some accounts, he died while still in prison awaiting trial. In others, he died in a shipwreck at sea.