The ever-expanding literature on Columbus encompasses diverse languages and historical traditions. To give some idea of its size, Simonetta Conti’s Bibliografia colombiana, 1793–1990, which includes books and articles in a variety of languages, runs to well over seven hundred pages, yet even this massive compendium ends before the outpouring of additional documents and translations inspired by the Columbus Quincentenary in 1992. As my own narrative makes plain, Columbus’s legacy and reputation were highly controversial right from the start. Throughout his career, glory and dishonor ran neck and neck, and the race continues to this day.
Fortunately, Columbus, his son, various Spanish ministers, sailors, and historians all left accounts of his actions—often voluminous and impassioned, pleading for the Admiral of the Ocean Sea or against him, and in some cases, both for and against him. These firsthand reports, with their often contrasting testimony, make it possible to understand Columbus’s voyages in a multidimensional way. The Repertorium Columbianum , comprising over five thousand pages of original source material published in thirteen volumes overseen by Geoffrey Symcox of UCLA beginning in the late 1980s, contributed greatly to the subject, as did the multivolume Nuova Raccolta Colombiana, published in Italian and English by the Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, Libreria dello Stato, in Rome over a period of years around the quincentenary of his first voyage, in 1992.
Among outstanding American works on the subject, Samuel Eliot Morison’s Admiral of the Ocean Sea (1942) remains the largest maritime database pertaining to Columbus. Morison is preoccupied with comparisons between Columbus’s routes and his own journeys by sea and air, which often loom larger than his subject’s. His views of the people and cultures that Columbus and his crew encountered in the New World are reflected in his patrician outlook and that of the World War II era. In trying to retrace some of Columbus’s voyages with a modern fleet, he occasionally relied on flawed data, and as a result many of his landfalls occurred scores of miles from Columbus’s presumed original course. (To paraphrase the song, Morison was at times looking for the Admiral in all the wrong places.) For more on this, see Hobbs, “The Track of the Columbus Caravels in 1492.”
Washington Irving’s exhaustive and well-sourced Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828) provides the color and context absent from Morison’s more technical study—and even Morison relies heavily on Irving’s account. More recently, Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s succinct biography, Columbus (1991), presents an astringent critique of its subject, and John Noble Wilford’s The Mysterious History of Columbus (1991) offers provocative commentary about questions concerning the Admiral’s voyages. Finally, The Worlds of Christopher Columbus (1992), by William D. Phillips Jr. and Carla Rahn Phillips, brings context to bear on Columbus’s life and times. Foreignlanguage biographies of Columbus often take their lead from Morison, for example, Paolo Emilio Taviani’s Cristoforo Columbo (Istituto Geografico de Agostini, 1974, two volumes). An exception is Henry Harisse’s thorough Christophe Columbe (1884–5), which portrays Columbus in a benign light that seems remarkable by today’s standards. I am indebted to all these historians for their energetic, rigorous approaches to the formidable subject of Christopher Columbus.
In most cases, I have indicated the source of quotations in my own text, whether it is Columbus himself, his son Ferdinand, Bartolomé de Las Casas, or commentators such as Peter Martyr.
Prologue
Of all the unresolved questions surrounding Columbus’s voyages, the location of his first landfall is among the most persistent and revealing of his motives. Columbus had a strong incentive to announce that he had found something of significance, and to claim it for Spain (and for his future wealth and titles), so it would seem to be in his interest to be as precise as possible about what he had found, and where. But there were also reasons for him to obscure the exact location. Laboring under his Chinese delusion, he assumed he was approaching Asia. In addition, he did not want to divulge this vital piece of information to his rivals, including those at court in Spain. So he had to steer between the Scylla of revelation and the Charybdis of his geographical handicaps. Anyone capable of making his crew, boys and men alike, swear an oath that Cuba belonged to the mainland rather than admitting it was an island, as Columbus did, was capable of obscuring his route. Add to these considerations the changes wrought by five hundred years of erosion, and the chances of pinpointing his first landfall are slim indeed. Nonetheless, hypotheses abound.
The National Geographic of November 1986 offered an account by Joseph Judge of a thorough scientific investigation into the location of Columbus’s first landfall, the result of five years of analysis. “No fewer than nine landfall islands have been suggested, defended, and opposed,” Judge writes. “Cat, Watling, Conception, Samana Cay, Plana Cays, Mayaguana, East Caicos, Grand Turk, and Egg in the northwestern Bahamas.” Each candidate for first landfall had a distinguished proponent. Samana, for example, was the choice in 1862 of Gustavus V. Fox, who was Lincoln’s assistant secretary of the navy; the National Geographic itself endorsed this choice in 1894, and there the case rested until 1942, when Samuel Eliot Morison came out in favor, unequivocally, of Watling Island, now known as San Salvador—sixty-five miles to the west of Samana Cay. However, in a dissenting opinion in the same November 1986 issue of National Geographic, Luis Marden argued, after an exhaustive examination of the evidence and navigational techniques available to Columbus, that Morison and others might well have been mistaken about the most basic unit of measurement, the sea league, which Marden puts at 2.82 nautical miles, which ruled out Samana Cay as the first landfall by some ten miles. He concluded, “We cannot say that we have established with absolute certainty the precise point of Columbus’s landfall. Currents may vary, and there are still unknown factors.” Nevertheless, the uninhabited island of Samana Cay remains the choice of Dr. James B. Garvin, chief scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD, based on his careful analysis of satellite data of Columbus’s track.
All of these choices share an assumption: Columbus meant to indicate the actual location of his first landfall. On this basis both Morison and Judge insisted that the answer must closely fit Columbus’s description in the log. But that approach might well be flawed. Columbus’s description was curiously generic, as if he were not paying close attention, or deliberately trying to be vague. And what about erosion altering the reefs, shoals, harbors, and beaches, as was likely to happen over time? What if Columbus camouflaged the location to protect his claim, as if it were buried treasure that he wanted no one else to find? He was not above manipulating data in the log to suit his purposes, and what more likely occasion than his first landfall to throw others off his track? Or was he sincere, but having one of his delusional episodes ? Keep in mind that this is the same Columbus who, on a later voyage, believed the seas sloped upward in the vicinity of paradise. He wrote about that phenomenon with as much conviction as he reported any of his other findings. Who is to say exactly when Columbus was delusional and when he was not? Because of these questions, it seems unlikely the exact landfall will ever be determined with complete assurance.
For another consideration of the erratic history of the first landfall, see John Noble Wilford’s The Mysterious History of Columbus, pages 129 and following.
Chapter 1: Thirty-three Days
Luis de Torres was not, as has been sometimes claimed, subsequently the owner of an enormous estate in the New World.
Tobacco is mentioned in Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, page 91, note 2. Fernández de Oviedo discusses pineapples on page 99 of Oviedo on Columbus.
The subsequent journey, beginning around December 16, was as follows, based on Columbus’s log:
Daring to enter “an arm of the sea” reaching inland aboard one of his longboats, he observed villages consisting of attractive dwellings, all the while terrifying their dwellers. One look at the approaching Europeans and their weapons, one whiff of their unfamiliar scent, and “they all fled.” The explorer assumed “those people must have been persecuted because they had so much fear.” Persecuted by whom? Columbus did not say, but his guess was a good one. As soon as he and his crew drew nigh, “signal fires” illuminated ubiquitous lookout posts, warning of, rather than heralding, his arrival in this strange land. “These people must have been persecuted because they had so much fear.” Overwhelmed by the sand, the sea, and the fragrant air, Columbus named the region Paradise Valley, and the river the Guadalquivir after the main waterway to Seville.
At midnight, Sunday, December 16, a “light offshore breeze” picked up, and along with it, the explorer’s fortunes. He “sailed close-hauled along the coast of Hispaniola.” At three in the morning, “a wind sprang up” and as he approached the “middle of the gulf ”—anyone’s guess which one, with Columbus obscuring his track to preserve secrecy—his fleet encountered a tiny, isolated craft: one canoe bearing one Indian. Columbus wrote that he wondered how this “Indian could stay afloat with such a strong wind,” and moved quickly to seize him and have him “brought aboard ship.” Columbus resorted to his standard procedure for dealing with unwilling guests, bestowing glass beads, bells, and brass rings on the Indian, whom he transported sixteen miles to a position “near the sea.” Disembarking at another settlement consisting of new houses, the Indian became the explorer’s goodwill ambassador, telling the locals that the great chief and his men, the Admiral and the Christians, as they thought of themselves, were “good people,” and confirming rumors that had already reached the ears of the inhabitants.
Walking out of the dense, leafy growth came five hundred men, and eventually, their chief. Impressed and gratified, the Admiral described the extraordinary sight: “One by one, and many by many, they came to the ship, bringing nothing with them, although they wore the finest gold in the ears or in the nose, which they gave with good grace.” He responded to their generosity, and to the lure of gold, by ordering them to be treated honorably because “they are the best people in the world and above all the gentlest.” During these respectful rituals, their twenty-one-year-old king remained safely on the beach, earning Columbus’s goodwill by encouraging a flow of intelligence concerning the location of gold. Even they reminded him of his adopted home. “This king and all the others went naked as their mothers bore them, and so too the women, without any shame; and they are the most handsome men and women that he had found hitherto; so white that if they went clothed and protected themselves from the sun and air they would be almost as white as in Spain.” The gratifying potential of gold prompted Columbus to lavish praise on their island, and he went so far as to claim that in all Castile “nothing compared with it for beauty and excellence.” The very trees were exceptional, to his way of thinking, “so luxuriant that their leaves ceased to be green, and were of blackish verdure.” Here, he concluded, could be found “everything that man could want.”
That night, the young king ventured aboard the flagship, and cast doubt on the story of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, and Columbus’s mission. Through interpreters, the navigator and his officers heard that the king believed these three ships had come from the sky, as did the “Sovereigns of Castile,” who were “not of this world.”
Columbus interpreted these naive words with dismaying opportunism. “You may believe that this island and all the others are as much yours as Castile,” he advised. “There is nothing wanting save a settlement, and to command them [the inhabitants] to do as what you will.” Having made this assessment, he naturally took the next step: “I, with the people on board, who are not many, could overrun all these islands without opposition; for already I have seen that when only three of the mariners went ashore, where there was a formidable multitude of these Indians, all fled, without seeking to do them ill.” Even better, “they bear no arms, and are completely defenseless . . . so that a thousand [of them] would not face three [of Castile]; and so they are fit to be ordered about and made to work, to sow and do all else that may be needed, and you may build towns and teach them to go clothed, and to [live by] our customs.” In other words, their nakedness, their innocence, and their gentleness could be employed against them; these “best people in the world” would make ideal slaves of Castile, or so he wanted his Sovereigns to believe. If he could not bring Ferdinand and Isabella gold and a direct route over water to the Indies, he would instead bring them slaves and an empire.
Chapter 2: Son of Genoa
For an insider’s appreciation of La Superba, “Genoa the Proud,” see Emilio Pandiani, Vita privata genovese nel Rinascimento (1915) and Vita della Repubblica di Genova nell’Etá di Cristoforo Columbo (1952).
The Piccolomini quotation is drawn from Gaetano Ferro, Liguria and Genoa at the Time of Columbus (1992), page 197 (vol. 3, Nuova Raccolta Colombiana).
Paolo Emilio Taviani discusses the genealogy of Columbus’s mother in Cristoforo Colombo: Genius of the Sea (1990). Also see Genoa, Commissione Colombiana, Christopher Columbus: Documents and Proofs of His Genoese Origin (1932) and Silvio A. Bedini, The Christopher Columbus Encyclopedia (1992), vol. 1, page 283.
Details of the plague can be found in Pandiani, Vita della Repubblica di Genova (1952).
The descriptions of Genoa harbor, city, and trade are drawn from Vita della Repubblica di Genova. Pandiani’s Vita privata genovese nel Rinascimento describes Genoese trade and sailing. Accounts of slavery in Genoa, which imprinted itself on Columbus’s consciousness, come from the same author’s Vita privata genovese nel Rinascimento, pages 205–13.
Among the earliest to sing Genoa’s praises was the fourteenth-century Italian scholar and traveler (sometimes called the “first tourist”) Francesco Petrarca, or Petrarch. In his “Itinerarium ad Sepulcrum Domini” (“Journey to the Holy Sepulchre”), a travel guide that he wrote for a friend in about 1350, Petrarca said, “Let’s go to Genoa. Here you will see rising from a rocky mountain an imperious city of proud walls and superb men, whose very appearance announces her as the Lady of the Sea.”
Works on the Inquisition are numerous. Useful summaries include François Soyer’s The Persecution of the Jews and Muslims of Portugal (2007), pages 140 and following. Also, Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s 1492 (2009) contains a lucid consideration of the subject in a global context, beginning on page 99.
An analysis of the evidence of the Perestrello-Columbus marriage can be found in Rebecca Catz’s “Christopher Columbus’ Portuguese Family,” a paper presented at the XIII Symposium on Portuguese Traditions at UCLA on April 21, 1990, and in her bookChristopher Columbus and the Portuguese (1993), pp. 15–16. See also Las Casas on Columbus, pages 30–47. For more on the controversy surrounding Felipa’s death, see Justin Winsor’s antique but reliable Christopher Columbus (1892), pages 154–55.
Columbus’s assertion that he observed Ferdinand and Isabella occupy the Alhambra can be found in Wilford’s The Mysterious History of Columbus, pages 25–26. Finally, Morison’s Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus discusses the peripatetic Sovereigns on page 299.
Chapter 3: Shipwreck
To navigators, coral reefs pose a lethal menace, but to an oceanographer or naturalist, they rank among the wonders of the deep: fragile, varied ecosystems of hard corals made of skeletons secreting calcium carbonate, the primary component of pearls, eggshells, and especially seashells. There is more to a coral reef than a pile of shells, however. Sponges, worms, and bivalves, among other marine creatures, bore into the calcium carbonate, reducing the coral skeletons into sediment filling the gaps in the reef. Eventually, algae and other microorganisms hold the reef in position. Nearing the end of his voyage aboard the Beagle, a naval survey brig, Charles Darwin became fascinated by reefs during his passage through the Indian Ocean in 1836, and after intense study, offered a theory of coral formation the following year in which he identified three main types: the fringing reef, the barrier reef, and the atoll. Fringing reefs commonly border continental and island shorelines, especially in the Caribbean. Farther offshore can be found barrier reefs, which come into being when the ocean floor sinks, and fringing reefs are pulled away from shore.
Barrier reefs are prevalent in the Indo-Pacific, and also in the Caribbean. Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, extending over 1,200 miles, is considered the largest of its type. Finally, if the reef sinks below the ocean surface, it can be considered an atoll, and surrounds a lagoon.
On the voyage out, Columbus had erroneously considered the appearance of sargassum a sign that he was approaching land, and he set about sounding the depths of the Atlantic only to find that he was nowhere near the shore, a mistake he did not repeat when inbound.
For more on the mesmerizing Sargasso Sea and seaweed, see Stan Ulanski, The Gulf Stream (2008), pages 78–81, a worthwhile popular account.
Chapter 4: “The People from the Sky”
For more on the Treaty of Alcáçovas, see Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, pages 40 and 344.
Columbus’s inadvertent return to Portugal rather than Spain remains one of the most hotly contested issues in Columbus scholarship. Partisans of his supposed Portuguese origins seized on it as an example of where his true sympathies lay. Other commentators have suggested that Columbus’s return to the Iberian Peninsula indicated that he unconsciously had his heart set on returning to Portugal all along, or that he pursued a covert agenda favoring João II rather than his announced sponsors, Ferdinand and Isabella. Or even that he functioned all along as a secret agent on behalf of Portugal. Columbus did have some residual feeling for Portugal after all his years there, but in reality, João II contemplated assassinating Columbus to prevent his return to Spain, and the mariner lived to regret washing up on the Portuguese coast in a tempest. Had the weather been better, he would have proceeded directly to Spain rather than engaging in a distracting and dangerous detour.
Had Columbus by some miracle managed to cross the Pacific Ocean and make it to China, no Grand Khan would have greeted him as Marco Polo had once been greeted; instead, he would have been rebuffed by the newly resurgent Ming dynasty, whose bureaucrats had banned maritime trade and led their nation into deep isolationism. How can we know? That was exactly what happened to Columbus’s cousin (on his wife’s side), Rafael Perestrello. He sailed on behalf of Portugal to the Chinese coast in 1513, the first European to accomplish that feat. Perestrello traded successfully in Guangzhou, but when a Portuguese embassy charged with opening formal relations reached the Chinese court, the Ming emperor, Zhengde, threw them in jail, and all dealings between the two nations ceased.
Columbus’s “Letter on the First Voyage,” sometimes known as “The Spanish Letter of Columbus,” has a varied and intriguing history of its own. The original fourpage black-letter document, issued without a title, was probably published in Barcelona in April 1493, based on Columbus’s original manuscript, dated February 15 of that year. The Admiral called it “Columbus’s Letter to Santángel,” although it was actually intended for his Sovereigns. It is possible that the conventions of the royal court demanded that an intermediary, such as King Ferdinand’s finance minister, Luís de Santángel, announce or otherwise convey a document like this to the Sovereigns rather than their receiving it directly.
Leandro de Cosco’s Latin translation, probably completed in late April of the same year, elevated the document’s stature, and went through nine editions in a year’s time. A copy can be found at the New York Public Library, although the images contained within are misleading. One portrays a figure purported to be Columbus disembarking from a large galley with oars. That, like the others, were simply reprints from books already printed in Switzerland. Nevertheless, Columbus’s “Letter on the First Voyage” ranks as the first significant American document.
Chapter 5: River of Blood
Financing the fleet for the second voyage is described in Christopher Columbus: Accounts and Letters, vol. 6, part 2, Nuova Raccolta Colombiana.
Las Casas’s remarks on the voyage are mentioned in Hugh Thomas, Rivers of Gold (2003), page 304.
For a thorough discussion of Fernández de Oviedo, Las Casas, and Martyr, among other Spanish historians who have written about Columbus, see Oviedo on Columbus, vol. 9, Repertorium Columbianum (2000), pages 9–27. Details of Fernández de Oviedo’s biography have been drawn fromOviedo, pages ix–xvii.
The Discoverers (1983) by Daniel Boorstin presents a concise overview of this transformative era of exploration on pages 248–59.
Coma’s description of the raucous departure from Cadiz can be found in “Syllacio’s Letter to the Duke of Milan 13 December 1494” in Morison, Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, pages 229–30. The “huntress” description appears on page 231.
Animals on the ships are described in Christopher Columbus: Accounts and Letters , vol. 6, Nuova Raccolta Colombiana, page 17.
Fernández-Armesto discusses festivities in Columbus, page 53.
The report about Doña Beatriz de Peraza can be found in Morison’s Admiral of the Ocean Sea, page 399.
The tale of the friar and the cannibals is related in Admiral of the Ocean Sea, page 405. In general, the evidence presented by Columbus and other participants in the voyages is more reliable than subsequent efforts to reinterpret their experiences. For a scholarly discussion of this fraught subject, see Myers, “Island Carib Cannibalism.”
Peter Martyr is believed to have based his description of areítos on the observations of Santiago Cañizares, who had witnessed them. And information about Taíno music and instruments has been drawn from Lynne Guitar, “New Notes about Taíno Music and Its Influence on Contemporary Dominican Life.” Peter Martyr is also known as Peter Martyr d’Anghiera.
Peter Martyr’s letter to Cardinal Ascanio Sforza is in The Discovery of the New World in the Writings of Peter Martyr of Anghiera, vol. 2, Nuova Raccolta Colombiana (1992), page 229.
The remarks by Guillermo Coma are from Morison, Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, page 236.
Fernández de Oviedo expounds on poison apples on page 91 of Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, Natural History of the West Indies.
The term “buccaneer” derives from the French term for the rack, boucan, used for barbecuing meat, an early occupation of such “freebooters,” another word of piratical origin, referring to plundering and booty.
Columbus’s remarks about the city of La Isabela are in Kathleen Deagan and José María Cruxent, Columbus’s Outpost among the Taínos (2002), pages 48–50, 54.
Chapter 6: Rebellion
The list of requested supplies can be found in Deagan and Cruxent, Columbus’s Outpost among the Taínos, page 137.
Ferdinand and Isabella’s kingdom of Castile was only the most recent empire to claim the endlessly contested city of Cadiz, believed to have been founded by Phoenicians as a trading center, who called it Gadir, for “walled city.” In AD 711, the Moors seized it, and held it until 1262, when it was conquered by Alfonso X of Castile. Under Spanish rule, the city assumed the name Cadiz. As exploration grew, Cadiz attracted mariners from across Europe, especially Genoa. By one estimate, nearly half the city consisted of Genoese in search of opportunity, and they were about to greet one of their own.
Columbus’s advice to the Sovereigns is quoted in Christopher Columbus: Accounts and Letters, vol. 6, part 1, Nuova Raccolta Colombiana, pages 13–39.
The letters of Ferdinand and Isabella beginning April 13 are quoted in Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, page 436.
Fernández de Oviedo discusses mining for gold on pages 106–9 of Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, Natural History of the West Indies (1959).
Las Casas’s description of Ojeda can be found in Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, pages 432–33.
On page 36 of Deagan and Cruxent’s Columbus’s Outpost among the Taínos, the authors write that the Indians ate, in addition to hutias, “iguanas, birds, snakes, giant beetle grubs, and insects. This versatility did not commend them to the Spaniards,” who were disgusted by the practice.
Andrés Bernáldez’s vivid and appealing description of the Indians of Jamaica is reproduced in Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, pages 474–76.
Columbus’s remarks about the second voyage come from Christopher Columbus: Accounts and Letters, vol. 6, part 1, Nuova Raccolta Colombiana, written February 26, 1495, pages 267–325 passim.
Chapter 7: Among the Taínos
Michele de Cuneo on La Bella Saonese is quoted in Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, page 478. His other observations can be found in Admiral of the Ocean Sea, pages 482–88.
Columbus writes about converting Indians to Christianity in Christopher Columbus: Accounts and Letters, vol. 6, part 1, Nuova Raccolta Colombiana, pages 340–41. And he explains his ideas about educating Indians on page 355.
Las Casas discusses greyhounds and Indians in Christopher Columbus: Accounts and Letters, vol. 6, part 2, Nuova Raccolta Colombiana, pages 113, 152. And he explores Columbus’s increasingly tormented relations with the Indians on page 492 of Admiral of the Ocean Sea.
In addition to Peter Martyr, Columbus himself refers to the massive number of Indian deaths in a letter to Ferdinand and Isabella dated October 15, 1495, in Christopher Columbus: Accounts and Letters, vol. 6, part 1, Nuova Raccolta Colombiana, page 337. Here he says the famine killed two-thirds of the region’s 50,000 inhabitants, and “it is not over yet, nor do we know when to hope the end.” For more statistics about the depopulation of the Indians, see Admiral of the Ocean Sea, page 493.
The Dominican Republic (1998) by Frank Moya Pons reviews the political structure of the Indians, pages 22–23.
Aguado is quoted in Deagan and Cruxent, Columbus’s Outpost among the Taínos, pages 63–64, relying on Las Casas.
Ramon Pané and his Indian investigations receive a thorough consideration in Antonio M. Stevens-Arroyo, Cave of the Jagua [sic] (2006), pages 41–83.
The anecdote about the headless people at La Isabela appears in Columbus’s Outpost among the Taínos on page 72, quoting Las Casas. I have adjusted the translation slightly for syntax.
Interlude: The Columbian Exchange
The starting point for considering the Columbian Exchange is Alfred Crosby’s 1972 work, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (republished in 2003). Related studies of this resonant subject include the following: Woodrow W. Borah and Sherburne F. Cook ’s The Aboriginal Population of Central Mexico on the Eve of the Spanish Conquest (1963); Noble David Cook’s Born to Die; The Native Population of the Americas in 1492 (1992), edited by William M. Denevan; Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (1956); William H. McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples (1976); Elinor G. K. Melville’s A Plague of Sheep (1994); Redcliffe N. Salaman’s The History and Social Influence of the Potato (1993); and Russel Thornton’s American Indian Holocaust and Survival (1987).
The following chart suggests the extent of the Columbian Exchange as it affected both the Old World and the New:
Chapter 8: “A Great Roaring”
Columbus’s impassioned complaints about his detractors at court and the heat he endured on the third voyage can be found in Christopher Columbus: Accounts and Letters of the Second, Third, and Fourth Voyages, vol. 6, part 1, Nuova Raccolta Colombiana, pages 66–67.
For more on Columbus’s flamboyant ideas concerning biblical sites, see Delno C. West, “Christopher Columbus, Lost Biblical Sites, and the Last Crusade.”
The Dragon’s Mouth is mentioned in Las Casas on Columbus, page 46. Meanwhile, references to the earthly paradise and the characteristics of the people he encountered appear in Christopher Columbus: Accounts and Letters of the Second, Third, and Fourth Voyages, vol. 6, part 1, Nuova Raccolta Colombiana, pages 87 and following.
Columbus’s observation that “the world is small” appears in the Letter Rarissima, quoted in Nuova Raccolta, vol. 6, part 1. Columbus wrote this letter in Jamaica in July 1503.
For more about Columbus and the Guaiqueri Indians and chicha, see Morison and Obregón’s The Caribbean as Columbus Saw It (1964), beginning on page 160. This work contains photographs of vistas as they might have appeared to Columbus, but five hundred years of erosion and other changes have altered the land- and seascapes. Nevertheless, this document remains an evocative view of Columbian harbors and ports.
Chapter 9: Roldán’s Revolt
For full accounts of the back-and-forth between the two sides as related by Ferdinand Columbus, see Fernando Colón, The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus by His Son Ferdinand (1959) and The History of the Life and Deeds of the Admiral Don Christopher Columbus, Attributed to His Son Fernando Colón (2004). Also, Las Casas delivers his own stinging assessment in Las Casas on Columbus: The Third Voyage, vol. 11, Repertorium Columbianum (1999). Las Casas lamented that Roldán was never brought to justice in Spain—his lineage worked in his favor, just as Columbus’s worked against him.
Chapter 10: “Send Me Back in Chains”
The letter to Doña Juana appears in Cecil Jane, The Four Voyages of Columbus (1988), vol. 2, page 54.
Letters from Bobadilla read aloud: Las Casas on Columbus: The Third Voyage, pages 24–128. Here, as in many other places, Las Casas shows his mettle as a historian when he refrains from strident editorializing and learned digressions to focus on the matter at hand.
Background about Bobadilla’s inquiry is drawn from the corrective study by Consuelo Varela, La caída de Cristobál Colón, el juicio de Bobadilla (2006).
In Las Casas on Columbus: The Third Voyage, page 136, Las Casas writes that Vallejo was “my good friend.” The letter in which Columbus avows that he has been diligent, and says “I swear,” appears in the same work, page 43.
The Royal Mandate restoring Columbus’s possessions is contained in Morison, Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, pages 300–302.
Chapter 11: El Alto Viaje
John Noble Wilford’s The Mysterious History of Columbus offers an absorbing discussion of the mystical Book of Prophecies on pages 217 and 223.
Ferdinand’s extensive library emphasizes the bookish, scholarly side of the Columbus family. Although Christopher, as a mariner, is considered primarily a man of action, he was thoroughly educated in the sea, and throughout his life he was eager to absorb (if not apply) new information and lore. His brother Bartholomew was, of course, a map and book dealer, and his son a historian and bibliophile.
Ferdinand Columbus never married.
Chapter 12: Castaways in Paradise
Columbus’s striking description of ascending his ship and hearing the voice of God appears in Christopher Columbus: Accounts and Letters of the Second, Third, and Fourth Voyages, vol. 6, part 1, Nuova Raccolta Colombiana, pages 143 and following. The entire letter is an extraordinary cri de coeur that would be easy to dismiss were it not so self-dramatizing and nakedly poignant.
The “Account by Diego Mendez of Certain Incidents on Christopher Columbus’s Last Voyage” can be found in J. M. Cohen, The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1969), pages 305–17.
Chapter 13: February 29, 1504
Las Casas’s first crossing: quoted in David Boyle, Toward the Setting Sun (2008), page 264.
Details of the death of Isabella can be found in Hugh Thomas’s authoritative study, Rivers of Gold, page 236. Thomas appears much less troubled by Columbus’s humanitarian failings than other contemporary historians, and encompasses a wide swath of the age of discovery in his sturdy account.
Isabella’s reputation for piety lived on after her death. A movement took shape to have her canonized for sainthood on the basis of her protection of the poor and of the Indians of the Caribbean, despite her fervent support of the Inquisition and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, the year of Columbus’s first voyage. As recently as 1974, Pope John Paul VI nominated Isabella I for beatification, the third of four steps toward canonization. A person who is beatified has been recognized by the Catholic Church to have ascended to heaven, and can intercede on behalf of the faithful who pray to her. She was survived by her husband, Ferdinand II, who lived on for another eight years, until 1512.
For a review of Columbus’s numerous health issues, see Wilford, The Mysterious History of Columbus, pages 240 and following. And details of Columbus’s burial can be found in “Burial Places of Columbus,” in Silvio Bedini, The Christopher Columbus Encyclopedia, vol. 1, pages 77–80.
Epilogue
The dedication of the Columbus Fountain at Union Station in Washington, DC, to name one prominent example of many, occasioned a tremendous outpouring of official public recognition. The Columbus Fountain was designed by Lorado Taft, an American sculptor who enjoyed celebrity status as a speaker and educator. One hundred fifty thousand people attended the ceremony on June 8, 1912, which was sponsored by the Knights of Columbus, the world’s biggest Catholic fraternal organization, founded in 1882 and named, inevitably, for Christopher Columbus. (Its knights, incidentally, do not belong to a chivalric or sovereign order such as the Knights of Malta; the organization is devoted to charitable service.) During the celebration, General Robert K. Evans, chief of military affairs, served as marshal, leading 15,000 troops, 50,000 representatives of the Knights of Columbus, horsedrawn floats, participants in so-called knightly costumes, and several thousand automobiles as President William Howard Taft watched from the stands. Among other large-scale public events was a Mass with Cardinal James Gibbons, attended by about 10,000 individuals.