Columbus
By Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
Oxford University Press. 218 pp. $16.95
Reviewed by Mario Giorgetti
On the morning of August 3, 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed his three caravelles, the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria, west across the Atlantic from the Spanish port of Palos in search of the unknown. In the 500 hundred years since, so much myth and legend have been woven around the figure and exploits of the celebrated navigator that it is often extremely difficult to separate truth from fiction.
Editor and historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, in this learned but very accessible book on the life of the great Genoese mariner, has reinterpreted the evidence and sifted out apocryphal and romanticised elements, leaving us with a terse and unembellished historical account. "The most important purpose of this book", writes Fernandez-Armesto in the preface, "is to cover the essentials, decently but with becoming brevity".
Columbus was a man of extraordinary vision and, in this sense, ahead of his time. But he was also of course a product of his time, shaped both by the new ideas and by the prejudices of his day. Equipped with a talent for social climbing as well as navigation, he fabricated his own aristocratic lineage and romanticised his early life to conceal his humble origins. Many biographers have since generally accepted some of the fanciful features of Columbus' life as historical fact, and at times have drawn quite unlikely conclusions.
On the other hand, there are also those who, especially in recent times, have tended to discredit Columbus' achievements. His discoveries are seen in retrospect as having initiated the eventual destruction of the New World's cultures and the ruthless exploitation of the land by the imperial powers of Spain, Portugal, France and Britain.
But Columbus could hardly have foreseen such consequences. Fernandez-Armesto sees him as driven less by greed for riches and empire than by an overwhelming ambition to escape his lowly origins to a aristocratic milieu more fitting his vigorous intellect.
His talent for social climbing and lobbying at court was unparallelled since Marco Polo, driven by similar commercial motives and romantic aspirations, managed to gain acceptance at the court of the Kublai Khan two centuries earlier. Columbus' success in attaining power and influence at the greatest court in Renaissance Europe and finally securing patronage from Queen Isabella for his voyage of discovery was the result of a very astute public relations exercise which a less confident, less obsessed, more reasonable man would have given up as impossible.
Few historians have been able to resist the temptation to believe the unbelievable when writing about one of the most romantic figures in ndez-Armesto's biography brings the legend back to reality.