Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [220]
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 book Christopher 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