THE NINE LIVES OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS

A fluent investigation into the “manufactured mysteries” surrounding the famous—and infamous—navigator.

As historian Restall notes, Christopher Columbus’ name is all over the map, with “some six thousand instances across every continental state” in the U.S. and dozens of other places claiming him as their native son. He is supposed to be a man of mystery, of shrouded origins, who divined that the earth was not flat and that sailing west across the Atlantic would not result in dropping off the edge of the planet. That gift of insight is all nonsense, Restall writes, since the flat Earth theory (never mind its current believers) had long before been disproven and the ocean currents were fairly well known. Further, Restall makes an airtight case for Columbus’ Genoese origin, disproving the claims of later scholars that he was Spanish to begin with, born to become one of the “merchant mariners [who] tied together the economies of northern Europe and the Mediterranean” and driven to explore not for its own sake but in the interest of securing new markets. “Columbus’s thinking was that of an uneducated but self-­taught late-medieval man,” illiterate into his 20s, the author writes. Columbus was also a self-inventor, as Restall demonstrates while examining the several guises Columbus wore, from likely participant in the African slave trade to busy self-promoter, selling his scheme to travel across the ocean first to Portugal, unsuccessfully, before landing the patronage of the Castilian court. Restall doesn’t exactly defend Columbus from the current view that he was an agent of genocide, though his own take is tempered: “Columbus was an instrument of empire, not its creator but a tool at its early modern dawn; he was thus easily misappropriated in service of modern ideologies.”

An intriguing portrait of a man who, while surely no innocent, has been mythologized for centuries since his death.