What's a good book about Christopher Columbus?

Black_Train_Song · June 21, 2005, 2:51am

The thread title pretty much says it all.
I’m looking for something that’ll keep my interest and doesn’t read like a history textbook. On the same token I don’t need to know what he ate for breakfast every day. Thanks!

Exapno_Mapcase · June 21, 2005, 5:02pm

The classic heroic dead white male book about Columbus is Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus, by Samuel Eliot Morison.

The classic Columbus was a genocidal bigot book is The Conquest Of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy, by KIRKPATRICK SALE.

There’s been more recent books somewhere in the middle, but what fun would that be?

Black_Train_Song · June 21, 2005, 5:28pm

Hmm, which one to start with. I’m gonna go with hero first I think.

Thanks!

Argent_Towers · June 21, 2005, 5:33pm

Don’t some claim that Columbus was either Jewish or of Jewish ancestry?

An_Arky · June 21, 2005, 5:39pm

Columbus in the Americas (Turning Points in History) by William Least Heat-Moon. It’s taken from logbooks and other first-hand accounts.

Exapno_Mapcase · June 21, 2005, 6:01pm

Yes, but modern scholars have fairly conclusively debunked that notion.

http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/columbus/experts/questions.html

Dear Professor Merrill,
Despite your research and the research of others in the program, can we be sure that Columbus was not Jewish?

I enjoyed the program, but there was no mention of the Hebrew found in some of his letters to his son. This seems significant for someone who may have been in hiding as a crypto-Jew or converso. Second, I didn’t understand how the DNA evidence disproved a Jewish ancestry. You talked about the Y chromosome from the father, but what if the mother had been the Jew? And it omitted that Jewish roots are largely a tribal affiliation — few Jews, even in the 1400s, would have chromosomal markers showing them to be Jewish. Aside from the Cohanim, descendants of the priestly tribe, I wouldn’t expect to find a Jewish gene.

Third, he carried quite a number of hidden Jews on his initial voyage to the New World and there is evidence that the trip was funded by Jews and not by the Spanish crown. Doesn’t this lend support to a possible hidden Jewish ancestry?

It seemed to me that the evaluation was very black and white. Either he was a sailor or a mercenary. A Jew or a Spaniard. Why not both? It is well documented that Spanish Jews continued to live in Spain during that time.

Granted, many Sephardic families (my own included) came to the New World after Columbus’ discoveries when the Inquisition made staying impossible, but many had too much wealth to leave behind. I still believe Columbus falls into that category.

Regards,
—Michelle

A: Michelle,
Thanks for the thoughtful letter. Let me touch briefly on some of your points:

What Hebrew? It’s possible that a mark found on some of the letters to his son were the Hebrew letters beth hai, but not everyone sees that. That’s all that has ever been claimed about his use of Hebrew, and that’s not much.

I’m the wrong person to ask about the DNA evidence. Apparently the chromosomal marker associated with ethnic Jewishness is fairly clear, but I don’t know if it appears in every ethnic Jew. It’s certainly true that Jews in Iberia, like Christians and Muslims, were ethnically mixed.

Not quite a number of crypto-Jews, that is to say Jews pretending to be Christians, but some to be sure. There were lots of crypto-Jews in Iberia at the time, and it’s natural that some of them wished to live in a safer place than Castile or Aragon.

The voyage’s finances came from various sources, among them money confiscated from Jews that ended up in the hands of Lluis de SantÃ ngel, the Aragonese finance minister. He was a member of the family that had originally been Jewish, as were many prominent men in the Castilian and Aragonese courts. We know that they were from converso families, and we know that they were favored and rewarded by Ferdinand and Isabella.

Columbus shows no signs of insincerity in his Christian faith. For some people that means he was good at dissembling. That’s a frustrating argument, though: If he seemed to be a Jew, he was a Jew; if he seemed to be a Christian, he was a Jew.

I think he may well have been descended from Jews on at least his mother’s side (if he was related to the Cavalleria family, for instance), but we have no proof whatsoever of that.

What I think can be said with a fair degree of certainty is that he was not Italian, and that he was a Catalan Christian. It’s quite possible that his ancestors were from elsewhere and may have had a different religion.

Sincerely,
—C. Merrill

And then there’s this:

Elendil_s_Heir · June 24, 2005, 3:41pm

Robert Lawson’s book I Discover Columbus, c. 1940 or so, is a lot of fun. It’s a kids’ book, part of Lawson’s famous-animals-of-history series (along with Ben and Me, about the mouse who gives Benjamin Franklin all his good ideas; Captain Kidd’s Cat, in which the aforementioned feline tells all about their adventures on the high seas and explains how the guy wasn’t really a pirate, just misunderstood; and Mr. Revere and I, about the horse which Paul Revere rides to warn the Minutemen that the British were coming). I recommend them all.

I Discover Columbus, like the others, has great line drawings and a funny story to tell. The parrot who narrates the tale describes Columbus in generally unflattering but nevertheless affectionate terms (Columbus comes across as an idle dreamer, overly ambitious, attached to lofty titles and fancy clothes, a poor navigator and an even worse sailor). There’s nary a word about Columbus’s depredations against the Indians. Ferdinand, BTW, is portrayed as an impatient loudmouth and Isabella is a sweetly ruthless queen, and the brains of the royal pair.

Overall it’s a light-hearted and worthwhile read.

Rufus_Xavier · June 24, 2005, 4:20pm

My Master Columbus, by Cedric Belfrage, is historical fiction told from the point of view of one of the natives who first encountered Columbus. I read it a long time ago, but I remember enjoying it a lot.