Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [217]
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