Columbus: The Four Voyages by Laurence Bergreen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Fascinating take on the complex and frustratingly vainglorious explorer. Finding a New World, he chooses violence, theft, and slavery as standard protocol. We are probably all the poorer for it, now.
The malingering of his men, the gold-thirst of Columbus and the shocked reaction and unheeded advice of Bartolomé de las Casas along with the Colubmus family affair of his brothers and son all add to this telling of start of the Columbian Exchange, including Columbus's hyper-Christian fantasies such that the Earth was pear-shaped and he found the base of the nipple-stem that led to Heaven.
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