Christopher Columbus the Dream and the Obs

by Gianni Granzotto

Since the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Europe had been cut off from the East with its gold and precious spices. Christopher Columbus was determined to lay claim to these treasures for the glory of Spain. Convinced he could reach the East by sailing west, it was years before the sceptical Ferdinand and Isabella were persuaded to support him. His extraordinary voyage into the void, via a flotilla of three small caravels, fulfilled none of the promise of the East. Columbus refused to recognize that his dream had failed and that he had, in fact, discovered the 'New World". His disastrous administration of the new Spanish colonies and his brutality to the Indians was so outraged his Spanish masters that they brought him home in chains. "CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS" cuts through centuries of conflicting evidence about this complex and obsessive figure to give us a lively and authoritative account of his life that reads like the great adventure story it was.

Genres: History

Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

Reviews

[David Vanness]

My copy is the hardback.

[Lukas Eriksson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Granzotto paints a picture of Columbus instead of just writing cold hard facts about his trips, which I think makes it more entertaining than a lot of history books. The problem I had was that Columbus' life seemed rather romanticized, and that gets a tiny bit tiring after a while. It is however a good first book for a person who doesn't know anything about Columbus.

[Chris Gager · Rating 3 out of 5]

I left my book bag at work the other day and needed to pick one off my shelves to fill in for an evening. This is the one I picked. The correct cover edition is not available. Oh well ... Interesting so far.

Interesting so far, but one wonders about the technique of acting as if the author were a contemporary invisible witness to scenes of Columbus' life.

And they're off, and headed for the Canary Islands. Meanwhile, Colombus has no clue just how long the trip will be. Nor any thought to the existence of the New World. This despite the fact that he did visit Iceland and talked to Norse history "people" there, who must surely have told him about their ancestors brief foray/colonization into Greenland and Newfoundland(L'Anse aux Meadows). The Canadian site was discovered in the 1960's this book was written many years later. Oh well ...

So - CC has made it to the Indies and looked around a bit and had luck both good and bad. One ship sunk(but so far no crewmen have died) ... and has arrived back in Spain to great acclaim. So far so good. The bad stuff will be coming. I have to leave off here to do some needed book club reading. Back in a while ...

- the author keeps saying 90 men, but the numbers given add up to a hundred????????

- the innocent indigenous people remind one of the Crakers in Oryx and Crake.

Getting near the end now as Columbus finds himself arrested in the New World and shipped back to the Old World to face the political music. The author is generally pretty sympathetic to his subject, though one thing that can't be whitewashed is the shipping of Indian slaves back to Spain, where many of them died. Back in the New World, the Spanish are hunting them down on Hispaniola. It's interesting to note that mistreatment of Indians was actually a hot topic back then with plenty of folks, especially clergy, opposed to to the killing and enslaving.