"Christopher Columbus: A Bibliographic Voyage" by Jack Shreve in "Choice" (January 1991, Vol. 29, pp. 703-711) Introduction For those with a passion for rating the relative greatness of historical figures, the question of where to place Christopher Columbus is not easy. Whether seen as arch-villain of the modern era for bringing genocide and pollution to an unsullied earthly paradise or as someone worthy of sainthood, Columbus is indisputably a presence in history. A. Roselly de Lorgues, in "Christophe Colomb", actually argued for his official sainthood within the Catholic Church. Michael H. Hart in "The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History", listed him among the top ten figures of all times worldwide, placing Columbus in ninth position, immediately following Gutenberg and preceding Einstein. Columbus's best known American biographer, Samuel Eliot Morison, made an even more sweeping claim, that Columbus did more to direct the course of history than any person since the Emperor Augustus (whom Michael Hart ironically ranked nineteenth--far below Columbus). Even Kirkpatrick Sale, in "The Conquest of Paradise", whose Columbus is the remorseless despoiler of an uncorrupted natural order, views his subject as the most important figure in human history because he made it possible for Europe to acquire its hegemony over the rest of the world and to force its unecological pragmatism on the delicate balance of the earth. We are so familiar with the story of Columbus that it hardly requires retelling. Born in Genoa but a wanderer most of his life, he had the gift of will that enabled him to pursue a dream that, although based upon error, produced important results entirely different from what he had imagined. The demands he made upon the Spanish Crown for himself and his heirs were great, and the monarchs soon rued their generosity to him even as they grew rich from his discoveries. After his second voyage he donned the habit of a Dominican friar and retreated deep into religious mysticism. Because of administrative difficulties after his third voyage to the New World, he was sent back to Spain in chains, and although the chains were quickly removed upon debarking, Columbus kept the chains with him as a symbol for the rest of his life, and the subject of the shackled admiral has served to fascinate artists ever since (e.g., Randolph Rogers, who sculpted the Columbus Door of the central portico of the United States Capitol Building). Because the rival explorer Amerigo Vespucci was quicker than Columbus to recognize the discovery as a new hemisphere, it was his name instead that was affixed to the continent. The controversy over the greatness of Columbus is but one of many that surround the admiral's reputation. The romance of the Columbus story, amply represented in all genres of literature and art, has muddied the already opaque biographical waters, and the necessarily interdisciplinary scholar who chooses to examine the origins, motives, and conclusions of Columbus must accept that many of his conclusions are likely to assume polemical proportions. The Columbus myth is bound to be dissected mercilessly during the course of this year's quincentenary and far into the future, and we can be certain that significant revisionism will take place. So multifaceted is the personality of Columbus and so numerous are both the facts and the legends of his life that even a book-length bibliography about him could hardly approach completeness. Because of the spatial constraints of this bibliography, therefore, not only is the number of books discussed here not exhaustive but neither are the categories into which the essay has been divided. Certain entire categories, such as the controversy over the location of his mortal remains or the litigations of the Columbus family against the Spanish crown, have had to be considered beyond the scope of an abbreviated and general survey such as this. All of the books discussed in this essay are felt to have worth as potential additions to American collections. Because interest in Columbus research has been at times in the past comparatively limited and because many of the books written about him have not been translated into English, it should be borne in mind that some books on Columbus are going to be difficult to locate. It should also be kept in mind that because this bibliography was prepared six months in advance of its appearance here, it necessarily omits works that have been published during that time period. Biographies and Related Studies In the modern English-speaking world, Washington Irving was one of the first true Columbus scholars. Invited to Madrid by the American charge d'affaires in order to translate Martin Fernandez de Navarrete's monumental assemblage of source materials on the life of Columbus, "Coleccion de los viages y descubrimientos que hicieron por mar los Espanoles desde fines del siglo XV", Irving soon decided to write his own four-volume "History of the Life and Voyages of Columbus". Despite an active imagination and the fact that the appearance of subsequent data sometimes invalidated his conclusions, Irving employed modern research methods, and his work is still readable today. An example of an error later corrected by new evidence is Irving's assumption that Columbus was born about 1435 and was already aged by the time he reached the West Indies; the mystery of his precise age at the time of discovery was cleared up in 1904 when an Italian scholar named Ugo Assereto published a legal document establishing for certain that Columbus was born in 1451. Irving's work remained definitive for more than a century until it was superseded in 1942 by "Admiral of the Ocean Sea" by Samuel Eliot Morison, the naval historian of World War II and himself a rear admiral in the United States Naval Reserves, who as early as 1916 had dreamed of retracing the route of Columbus across the Atlantic and who was able to do so in 1939. Naturally his biography emphasizes the navigational aspects of the discovery, giving Columbus high marks for dead-reckoning seamanship but faulting him for pride and inflexibility, traits ultimately responsible for his poor administrative record. The publishing history of the Morison biography was idiosyncratic. The original two-volume set of "Admiral of the Ocean Sea" came out in 1942, fully fortified with footnotes and other scholarly appurtenances. Later that same year a one-volume edition appeared, lacking the footnotes and a great deal of specific navigational data as well as an entire chapter on the spread of syphilis. It was the truncated biography that won a Pulitzer prize for that year, but it was the untampered-with original that was quickly translated into Spanish and the other major European languages. A decade later, Morison decided to recast his biography in such a way as to attract a greater readership. This version, called "Christopher Columbus, Mariner", is not meant to be scholarly, but it does contain in an appendix the first translation in fifty years of Columbus's "Letter on his First Voyage," commonly called the "Letter to Santangel." Much of the Morison biography of Columbus is available in still another book, "The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages, A.D. 1492-1616", which has the inestimable advantage of an updated bibliography. Although definitive on the personal and maritime aspects of Columbus's life, Morison's work is weaker on the political and economic milieu of the Age of Discovery. Many feel that the finest single biography is "Cristobal Colon y el descubrimiento de America" by the Spaniard Antonio Ballesteros Beretta, who reacted against the emphasis of the non-Hispanic scholars on the maritime aspect of Columbian historiography. Unfortunately this has not been translated, which is also the case with "Christophe Columbe" by Jacques Heers, which is particularly notable for its coverage of the early-Renaissance zeitgeist. Sometimes called Morison's European counterpart--and indeed even viewed by the cavalier Morison as a colleague--is Paolo Emilio Taviani, a professional legislator as well as a professor of economic history, whose two-volume "Cristoforo Colombo: la genesi della grande scoperta" has been translated into English and whose two-volume sequel, "I viaggi di Cristoforo Colombo: la grande scoperta" has not. In each set, the first volume of text has as its counterpart a second volume of notes and scholarly apparatus. In the English translation, "Christopher Columbus: The Grand Design", the two volumes are incorporated as one. Because it is so lavishly illustrated, it has been called one of the handsomest books ever published about Columbus. Nonetheless Taviani's style is digressive and repetitive and his method is more compendious than critical. Neither does Taviani make distinctions among his secondary sources, so that as much importance is attributed to lightweight writers on Columbus as to pioneering scholars. Another commercially successful Italian biography is "Christopher Columbus" by journalist and television commentator Gianni Granzotto. Portraying Columbus as a magnificent bungler, his work is old-fashioned and chatty, marred by a limited awareness of historical context, too much dependence on the author's own activities in search of Columbus, and a certain disdain for historiography; in his bibliography, for example, he claims that those authors who fictionalized about Columbus's life led him to more insights "than a hundred scholarly books." Another impressionistic biography by a nonhistorian is Jacob Wasserman's "Columbus: Don Quixote of the Seas", a work specifically credited by Granzotto in his bibliography. Wasserman identified two separate and conflicting characteristics in Columbus; an idealism like that of Don Quixote and a "Jewish" obsession with secrecy. But suggesting a Jewish connection for Columbus had been done almost forty years earlier, when Meyer Kayserling in "Christopher Columbus and the Participation of the Jews in the Spanish and Portuguese Discoveries" carefully surveyed the prominence of Jews and converted Jews in the story of Columbus's enterprise, contending that about a third of his first crew were Jewish. Wasserman's book, however, bridged the gap between what must have appeared as a half-baked hypothesis and the heatedly controversial issue that the alleged Jewishness of Columbus would soon become in the hands of Salvador de Madariaga. Madariaga, a Spanish journalist, diplomat, and critic, saw Jewishness as the key to the character of Columbus. In "Christopher Columbus: Being the Life of the Very Magnificent Lord Don Cristobal Colon", he maintained that although born in Genoa, Columbus was the son of transplanted Sephardic Jews; that Columbus knew this; and that others knew it as well. In Spain the surname Colon had been a Jewish name, and a Jewish ancestry for Columbus would explain why he so readily abandoned the Italian form Colombo to revert to an original form. Earlier, Washington Irving explained this by claiming that Columbus had unetymologically derived his name from the latin colonus, which reduced logically to Colon in Spanish. In addition, to support his claim of Jewishness for Columbus, Madariaga isolated three characteristics of the Columbus personality: skill at bargaining, familiarity with the Old Testament, and fondness for prophecy. Since the court of Ferdinand and Isabella harbored many converted Jews (called conversos) who formed a sort of mutual assistance network, it followed, for Madariaga, that Columbus received their encouragement and sympathy because of a shared heritage. In a famous review of the Madariaga work in the "American Historical Review" (April 1940), Samuel Eliot Morison charged that the book could never be admitted to the canon of Columbus studies because the main supposition is simply unproven by available evidence: there is no record of his ever having been slurred by the epithet of "Jew." After the near-demolition of Madariaga's argument, one fact remains: the Hebrew name borne by the mother of Columbus-- Susanna. The possibility of a remoter Jewish background (and this is even conceded by Morison) could explain his mother's name as well, perhaps, as his obsession with the prophecies of the Old Testament. The Language of Columbus If the "Jewishness" of Columbus rests on scant evidence, there was, at least, a vaguely Jewish aura surrounding the expedition of 1492, about which Simon Wiesenthal, the detective who tracked down Adolf Eichmann and other Nazi war criminals, wrote in his book "Sails of Hope". Without belaboring the Jewish origins of Columbus, per se, Wiesenthal contended that the Jewish-born Christians who financed the expedition for the Spanish Crown had hopes of discovering the lost tribes, or else a new land to which Jews could emigrate rather than convert to Christianity, now that time was running out for them in Spain. Wiesenthal points out that a converted Jew named Luis de Torres was brought along on Columbus's first voyage as an interpreter of Hebrew and Arabic in the event that the discovered Asiatics were familiar with these languages. Because the written language of Columbus's journal bears no similarity to the well-known Judeo-Spanish (or Ladino) texts of the 15th century, Spanish philologist Ramon Menendez Pidal in his study, "La lengua de Cristobal Colon" rejected the possibility of a Jewish Columbus if this assumption were to be based on linguistic evidence alone. But the surprisingly rich command of the Spanish language as used by Columbus poses two additional problems: (1) identifying precisely the many now-obsolete 15th-century maritime words (about which Julio F. Guillen Tato has written in "La parla marinera en el diario del primer viaje de Cristobal Colon") and (2) solving the mystery of its nonstandard peculiarities, which Menendez Pidal explained as inadvertent interference from Portuguese, the result of Columbus's twelve years of residency in Portugal (1476-1488). But Menendez Pidal's explanation may be true only in part, according to Virgil I. Milani in "The Written Language of Christopher Columbus", because many of the nonstandard words typical of his personal vocabulary could just as easily be explained as borrowings from the Genoese dialect. Milani also explains why Columbus wrote so seldom in Italian-- because after years of wandering and homelessness, he probably forgot its finer points, if indeed he had ever even learned the artificial literary language of a not-yet-united Italy. Milani also supplies a glossary of academic words used by Columbus which antedate their first recorded use in Spanish dictionaries (e.g., diametro, espeluncas, multitud). Thus, Milani points out, Columbus was not only out of place in Spain as a non-Spaniard, but was also out of place chronologically, since in his lexical choice he was years ahead of 15th-century Spain. Another article on Columbus's language "The Language of Christopher Columbus" by R.J. Penny, which follows basically the contentions of Milani, is included in B.W. Ife's "Christopher Columbus: Journal of the First Voyage". The Family of Columbus Even if King John II of Portugal failed to finance the dream of Columbus, Columbus's ties to Portugal were many and would be even more evident to us today if the Lisbon court and notarial records had not been destroyed in the earthquake of 1755. While living in Portugal, Columbus married in 1479 Felipa Perestrello e Moniz of a well-connected but impoverished family of Italian and Portuguese origin. She is the subject of a brief and now rare biography "The Wife of Columbus" by Nicolau Florentino (pen name of Antonio Maria Freitas) and Regina Maney, and of a newer but similarly brief biography, "The Admiral and his Lady", by Maria de Freitas Treen. After the death of Felipa in the middle 1480s and his departure from Portugal, Columbus formed a liaison in Spain with Beatriz Enriquez de Harana, cousin of Diego de Harana, who became the marshal of the fleet on the first voyage to America. The relationship between Columbus and his mistress is the subject of "Beatriz Enriquez de Harana y Cristobal Colon" by Jose de la Torre y del Cerro. More recently, a biography of their illegitimate son, Fernando Colon, was written by Antonio Rumeu de Armas, "Hernando Colon, historiador del descubrimiento de America", and a biography of Columbus's only legitimate son was undertaken by Luis Arranz Marquez in "Don Diego Colon, almirante, virrey y gobernador de las Indias". Diego Colon, who received the inherited titles of admiral and viceroy of the Indies and governed the area from Santo Domingo until his death in 1526, sued the Spanish Crown for the privileges that had been outlined in the pre-Discovery agreement called the "Capitulaciones" of 1492. This suit continued for three hundred years, and its vicissitudes and genealogical convolutions are studied exhaustively in "The Legacy of Columbus" by Otto Schoenrich. The earlier history of the immediate heirs of Columbus is told by Troy S. Floyd in "The Columbian Dynasty in the Caribbean 1492- 1527". Fernando Colon, the illegitimate son of Columbus who was born at Cordova in 1488 and accompanied his father on the fourth voyage, is important as the first biographer of his famous father. Annotated and translated by Benjamin Keen as "The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus by His Son", his "Historie", as the book was called, survived only in an Italian translation published in 1571 and was thought to have been used by Bartolome de Las Casas as preparation for his "Historia de las Indias". A great bibliophile, Fernando owned books that had been annotated by his father and he boasted a magnificent library of his own, some of which now forms part of the Biblioteca Colombina at the Cathedral of Seville. There has long been some concern that Fernando did not write the biography attributed to him and Alejandro Cioranescu's "Primera biografia de Colon: Fernando Colon y Bartolome de las Casas" argues that, contrary to what was assumed, most of the book was taken from Las Casas' "Historia de las Indias" and that the fraud was perpetrated by his nephew Luis Colon, the son of Diego. Ranked together with Las Casas and Fernando Colon as the quadrumvirate of contemporaneous writers who described Columbus and his voyages are Peter Martyr d'Anghera, and Italian humanist who was the first to refer to the discovery of a "new world," and Gonzalo Fernandez Oviedo y Valdes, the court chronicler of Ferdinand and Isabella. The latter wrote the four-volume "Historia general y natural de las Indias"; untranslated but studied in Antonello Gerbi's "Nature in the New World", translated by Jeremy Moyle. The work of Peter Martyr, "De Orbe Novo", published in Venice in 1504, was translated in two volumes by Francis Augustus McNutt as "De Orbo Novo, the Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera". Columbus's Log and Other Writings In his book "In Search of Columbus", David Henige, who examined the various editions of the Columbus journal or log and is sharply critical of the liberties taken by their editors and translators, has observed that the "reconstruction" of this work from someone else's transcription is without precedent in literary history. The original transcript is a holograph found in 1791 of 67 double-sided folios in the handwriting of Bartolome de Las Casas, who used it to prepare his "Historia de las Indias". Published in five volumes in 1875-76, it can be read in a one-volume English abridgment by A.M. Collard, "History of the Indies". So careful was Las Casas in his transcription of the long-vanished complete log of Columbus that he apologized for the admiral's non-native and faulty Castilian. Yet Las Casas's holography is still an abstract of someone else's work, and today the bewildering number of books all purporting to be the log of Columbus differ not only in translation but also in length and content. Robert H. Fuson's "The Log of Columbus" handsomely printed in black and red ink and embellished with woodcuts and maps, is faulted by Henige for its author's attempts to eliminate redundancies and to "restore" to the log material from Las Casas's "Historia" and from Fernando Colon's "Historie" which he judged to have been part of the original unabstracted log. This accusation, so typical of the deep-rooted problems plaguing the transmission of historical data, is all the more ironic because Fuson himself had written an article ("The Diario de Colon: A Legacy of Poor Transcription, Translation and Interpretation," included in "In The Wake of Columbus", edited by Louis De Vorsey and John Parker), that criticizes other editions of the log for precisely these same reasons. In addition to Fuson's log and in chronological order are the best known editions of the log of Columbus: Clements S. Markham, "The Journal of Christopher Columbus"; John Boyd Thacher, "Christopher Columbus: His Life, His Work, His Remains"; Cecil Jane, "Select Documents Illustrating the Four Voyages of Columbus", from which the journal was later extracted, revised, and annotated by Louis-Andre Vigneras and published in 1960; J.M. Cohen, "The Four Voyages of Columbus"; Samuel Eliot Morison, "Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus"; B.W. Ife, "The Journal of the First Voyage"; and Oliver Dunn and James E. Kelley Jr., "The Diario of Christopher Columbus's First Voyage to America, 1492-1493". The tendency of the recently published journals such as those by Ife and by Dunn and Kelley is to provide the Spanish "original" along with the English translation on facing pages, and the Dunn-Kelley version is the only rendition thus far whose preparation has been subjected to the rigors of computer technology. Also descriptive of the first voyage is the Columbus Letter of 1493, which is sometimes included parenthetically in biographies of Columbus. In 1966 this was issued as a book unto itself, "Epistola de Insulis Nuper Inventis", with both its Latin original and a translation into English by Frank E. Robbins. Before he left for his third voyage Columbus had bound together and distributed for safekeeping all of the royal concessions made to him by the Spanish monarchs including the "Capitulaciones" of 1492 and all subsequent cedulas and letters granting to him and his heirs privileges (available as "El libro de los privilegios del almirante Cristobal Colon: 1498", edited by Ciriaco Perez Bustamente). His unfinished "Book of Prophecies" "The Libro de Las Profecias of Christopher Columbus", an en face edition translated and annotated by Delno C. West and August Kling, although assembled in 1501, was not published until 1892 (in Italian) and not translated into English until 1991, probably because its eschatological concerns and tinge of fanaticism ran so directly counter to the celebrated image of Columbus as the quintessential Renaissance man. The book is a collection of prophecies from the Bible, and from other classical (Seneca) and medieval (Joachim of Fiore) sources that is really quite typical of the most extreme brand of medieval millennarianism, emphasizing the need for the recovery of Mount Zion from Islamic hands and the conversion of all peoples to Christianity before the Second Coming can occur. Since gold could furnish the funds to recover Jerusalem and the new "Indians" were available for conversion, Columbus at this time or perhaps throughout his lifetime savored the etymological implications of his name ("bearer of Christ"), conveniently emblematic of his divinely ordained mission to carry Christianity to pagan lands and to usher in the millennium. This long- understudied religiosity of Columbus is examined by Alain Milhou in "Colon y su mentalidad mesianica en el ambiente franciscanista espanol". The Toscanelli Letter As Paolo Revelli demonstrated in "Cristoforo Colombo e la scuola cartografica genovese", there was a long-standing tradition of mapmaking excellence in Genoa, and it was this ambience that nourished the youthful Columbus. In 1474 a Florentine physician and cartographer named Paolo Toscanelli wrote a letter urging a diplomatic representative of King Alfonso V of Portugal to sail west from his kingdom toward China. When Columbus heard of this, he wrote to the Florentine and received a reply urging him to sail west "to the place where the spices grow" as well as a sailing chart to further encourage him. Henry Vignaud, a gifted and prolific Columbus scholar who had correctly decided in favor of 1451 as Columbus's birth year even before the appearance of documentation verifying his estimate, came to doubt the authenticity of the Toscanelli correspondence (in "Toscanelli and Columbus") and evolved the theory that Columbus was not so much interested in finding China as he was in finding land for himself and his heirs. Then, according to Vignaud, he conspired with his son Fernando and Las Casas and forged the letter from Toscanelli to convince the public that he had really sailed in search of Asia as a disguise for the true reason. Today the majority view is that the Toscanelli letter to Columbus is indeed authentic. The Landfall Question and Other Murky Waters One of the controversies that has generated the most published material is the "Landfall Question"; that is, where did Columbus actually land on October 12, 1492? Columbus biographers Morison and Taviani claim that Watlings Island (renamed San Salvador in 1926) is the site, but other navigational buffs have put forward at least eleven other Caribbean islands as contenders. Various articles advancing evidence for why this or that island should be considered as Columbus's original Guanahani have been amassed in several collections, especially "In the Wake of Columbus: Islands and Controversy", edited by Louis De Vorsey and John Parker, and "Columbus and his World", published proceedings of a conference held at San Salvador Island, Bahamas, in the fall of 1986. The National Geographic Society, which favors Samana Cay as the site of Columbus's first landing, issued a widely circulated map ("Where Did Columbus Discover America?") in the November 1986 issue of its magazine, and this map is extremely useful in the study of the question. More interesting perhaps than the identification of the actual site is the reason behind all of this confusion in the first place. Kirkpatrick Sale suggests two possibilities--first, that Columbus was imprecise about the site because it really did not matter much to him (Columbus, according to Sale, was seeking gold, not land); and second, that he deliberately wished to keep it a secret to prevent his own companions and Portuguese competitors from claiming his discovery. For those desirous of studying the composition of the motley crew that accompanied Columbus on his first voyage, there is Alicia Bache Gould's "Nueva lista documentada de los tripulantes de Colon en 1492", which probably represents the finest original research on Columbus accomplished in this century. The definitive work on the ships of the first voyage is Jose Maria Martinez-Hidalgo's "Columbus' Ships", which argues that although the Pinta and the Nina (the favorite ship of Columbus) were caravels, the larger Santa Maria was a nao rather than a caravel. Another of the controversies surrounding Columbus is whether his crew returned to Europe infected with such New World diseases as syphilis, yaws, and pinta. Pier Augusto Gemignani in "La scoperta di Colombo e la medicina" studied the reciprocal effects of Old and New World diseases and how these diseases were treated. Alfred W. Crosby analyzed the interaction between Old and New World ecosystems forced int contact by the arrival of Columbus in "The Columbian Exchange" and credits the germs of the Europeans rather than their weapons with the decimation of the indigenous peoples. Because of Columbus, he says, the flora and fauna of the Old and New Worlds have been reduced and specialized by man, and this specialization almost always narrows the possibility for future biological development. If Columbus's men conveyed the organism treponemata that causes syphilis and yaws back to Europe, and the evidence is good that they did, then Columbus, according to Crosby, deserves to rank with the serpent in the Garden of Eden. There have always been debunkers of Columbus, and most recently works by Carl Sauer and Kirkpatrick Sale stand out. Sauer, a geographer, explains Columbus in "The Early Spanish Main" as an uneducated man of active mind obsessed with greed and portrays Francisco de Bobadilla, the royal commissioner responsible for sending Columbus back to Spain in chains, not as the familiar arbitrary tyrant but as a conscientious, if unimaginative, officer who did what he thought was best. In "The Conquest of Paradise", Kirkpatrick Sale, who characterizes Columbus as unstable, avaricious, and deceptive, calls for a full-scale reassessment of all that happened in his wake and for a reevaluation of the discovery in terms that relate to the contemporary world. In addition, he takes it upon himself to dispel six myths about Columbus--(1) that he sailed to prove the world was round; (2) that Isabella pawned her jewels to finance his endeavor; (3) that the crew were composed of criminals; (4) that they mutinied on the first voyage; (5) that Columbus died in obscurity; and (6) that he died insisting that he had reached Asia. Reference Works Foster Provost is the author of the handy and affordable "Columbus Dictionary", some 150 pages of alphabetically arranged terms (e.g., capitulations, nao), names (e.g., Toscanelli, Bobadilla) and places (e.g., Guanahani, Palos) connected with the life and career of Columbus. Most items have a bibliography of one or two items. "The Christopher Columbus Encyclopedia" edited by Silvio Bedini, comprises two volumes and contains some 350 signed original articles on every facet of Columbus studies imaginable, ranging from Norsemen to Pietro Martire d'Anghiera, from Fontanarossa, Susanna (Columbus's mother) to Giovanni Colombo (his grandfather), from Domesticated Animals to Distance, Measurement of. Provost's immensely useful "Columbus: An Annotated Guide to Scholarship on his Life and Writings, 1750-1988" is a veritable cornucopia of nearly 800 books and articles, flawed only by some minor problems with its method of indexing. Although Simonetta Conti's "Un secolo di bibliografia colombiana, 1880-1985" contains a staggering 3,271 entries, the work is insufficiently indexed and is unannotated. Also deserving of mention is a Library of Congress typescript by Donald H. Mugridge, "Christopher Columbus: A Selected List of Books and Articles by American Authors or Published in America, 1892-1950". It contains 100 annotated items but is limited to authors born in the United States. For maps there is "The Rand McNally World Atlas of Exploration", edited by Eric Newby; and more precisely relating to Columbus is Kenneth Nebenzahl's "Atlas of Columbus and the Great Discoveries", which traces the progress of mapping during the 15th and 16th centuries by means of reproductions of manuscripts and engravings from collections all over the world. Other Books About Columbus There are several worthy biographies written during this century, which retell the traditional tale of Columbus without contributing significantly to any of the controversies. These include Filson Young's "Christopher Columbus and the New World of His Discovery"; Andre de Hevesy's "The Discoverer: A New Narrative of the Life and Hazardous Adventures of the Genoese, Christopher Columbus"; Daniel Sargent's "Christopher Columbus"; Daniel J. Carrison's "Christopher Columbus, Navigator to the New World"; and John Stewart Collis's "Christopher Columbus". Also to be considered as a traditional biography that especially also concerns itself with the world that produced him and with the previous visits by Europeans to the world that he discovered is G.R. Crone's "The Discovery of America". In addition, there are a number of books on the theme of Columbus that stand out for their graphic contribution as much as, or more than, for their text. Bjorn Landstrom's "The Story of Don Cristobal Colon, Admiral of the Ocean Sea" has the lengthiest text and even a thesis, for he attributes to Columbus more credit for using navigational instruments than does Morison, although otherwise he follows Morison's conclusions about seamanship. Some of the many sketches in the book are the author's own, along with many contemporary or near-contemporary woodcuts and maps to demonstrate how the discoveries of Columbus were publicized to the world. It includes reproductions of three Columbus portraits as well as selections from the Columbus journal from September 8 to October 12, 1492. Ernle Bradford's "Christopher Columbus" is anecdotal in treatment rather than analytical, and it particularly stresses Columbus's insistence that he had found the Indies even in the absence of gold and spices. The crowning glory of Bradford's book is in its 33 color plates and its many smaller illustrations. "The Life and Times of Columbus" by Cesare Giardini, part of the "Curtis International Portraits of Greatness" series has an even briefer text but still more illustrations, including a two-page gallery of 18 portraits of Columbus. "The Voyages of Columbus" by Australian writers Rex and Thea Rientis is another gallery of Discovery-related illustrations with accompanying text. Michael Paiewonsky's "Conquest of Eden, 1493-1515", which includes a translation of the Columbus letter of March 1493 as well as other eyewitness accounts of the various Caribbean islands, is unique because its publisher, MAPes MONDe of St. Thomas, Virgin Island, had recourse for its illustrations to its own archives of West Indian icons and books. In 1961 Columbus biographer Samuel Eliot Morison linked up with Mauricio Obregon, president of the International Aviation Federation, and together they decided to fly over the Caribbean, taking photographs of every spot Columbus had seen. Morison already knew the area from retracing the Admiral's trails by ship two decades before. The pair had to skirt Duvalier's Haiti and Castro's Cuba, but their book "The Caribbean as Columbus Saw It" contains striking photographs of places and people, including the Caribs of Domenica, the sole survivors of the indigenous races that Columbus found in this part of the world. Similar to this is "Columbus in the New World" by Bradley Smith, which retraces with photographs and quotations each of the four voyages of Columbus. In addition to portraits of Columbus, some of which are reproduced in works cited above, which emphasize graphics, there are monuments to Columbus all over Spain, Italy, and the Americas. All monuments and portraits in existence by 1893 are catalogued in a brief but important work by William Eleroy Curtis, "Christopher Columbus: His Portraits and His Monuments". Since almost all of the portraits claiming to be Columbus were not painted during his lifetime, there are many journal articles that debate the claims made for this or that portrait as the most authentic. Columbus in Poetry and Fiction For a discussion of Columbus in poetry, Sara Agnes Ryan's "Christopher Columbus in Poetry, History and Art" should be consulted. Poets as much as artists have been inspired by the faith and persistence of Columbus and nowhere more so than in the United States, where he came to personify the young nation's struggle for greatness. Eighteenth-century Connecticut Wit Joel Barlow in "The Vision of Columbus" used Columbus as the person to whom an angel reveals the glorious future in store for America. James Russell Lowell in his "Columbus" endowed the admiral with an intelligent sensitivity that in fact he may not have possessed. Walt Whitman in his "Prayer of Columbus" contrasted the abject exterior condition of the aging mariner with the strength of his interior faith ("Intentions, purports, aspirations, mine, leaving results to Thee"). After yielding to repeated entreaties from prominent Americans for him to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the Discovery of America, Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote another "Columbus" poem, beginning inevitably with the word, "Chains" and portraying Bobadilla as "one as ignorant and impolitic as a beast." Sounding a discordant note, Edgar Lee Masters in his epic "The New World" created a Columbus who dreamed of both paradise and gold. Already the author of a biography debunking Abraham Lincoln, Masters pulled no punches about the effect that the arrival of Columbus had upon the unfortunate natives: "In twelve years from the day Columbus kneeled/ Upon San Salvador, and gave thanks to God/ A million natives perished at the hands of the Spaniards." But more recently the Costa Rican poet Laureano Alban has written an epic poem, "The Endless Voyage", which presents the voyages of Columbus as a metaphor for the human confrontation with the unknown. Similar to Alban's intent is "The Discovery of America," a long poem written by the American Orientalist Ernest Francisco Fenollosa before the turn of this century. Divided into symphonic movements, t celebrates the rapture of discovery and marvels at the faith kept by "The first and last begotten hero of the sea." Similarly, novelists have been drawn to Columbus, starting in this country with James Fenimore Cooper, whose "Mercedes of Castile" is a love story set against the background of the first voyage. The Spaniard Vicente Blasco Ibanez, who wrote "Unknown Lands" about two brothers who sail with Columbus, chose to portray Columbus as half-prophet and half-charlatan. Rafael Sabatini's "Columbus, a Romance" tells the love story of Columbus and the beautiful Beatriz Enriquez de Harana. James Street, whose Columbus is an arrogant visionary in "The Velvet Doublet", tells the story of the sailor who first sighted the cliffs of San Salvador only to be denied by the temperamental admiral the coveted prize--the velvet doublet--promised to the first man to see the New World. James Gant's "Columbus" emphasizes the dream- come-true aspect of his life and makes much of his relations with many women. Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier in "The Harp and the Shadow" concerns himself with the early hopes of Pope Pius IX for a Columbus canonization and then delights in depicting the man as an exploitative conniver shamelessly hypocritical about his Christianity. More recently several novelists have been attracted to the idea of a Jewish Columbus. Argentinean Abel Posse in "The Dogs of Paradise" zeros in on a Jewish-born Columbus who is now a mystic with few temporal allegiances, and a crew of jailbirds and apostate Jews who are about to unload their sewage on the shores of the New World. Another novelist for whom the Jewishness of Columbus assumes importance is Stephen Marlowe, whose "The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus" presents an omniscient hero poking fun at his own biographers, even quoting from the heated polemic that took place between Morison and Madariaga over his alleged Jewishness, which in this case is ironically not "alleged" at all. Conclusion There seems to be no question that the personality of Columbus was unusually multifarious to have given rise to such a wide array of nuanced interpretations and depictions. This essay has only grazed the surface of the Columbus corpus. Because of the quintessential tragedy of the Columbus figure, because of the many tantalizing enigmas that enshroud his life, and most recently because of our fascination with the ethics of his discovery, he has served to fuel the imagination of legions of writers and historians, of whom only a select minority have been examined and evaluated here. Editor's Note. Without departing from the Library of Congress form of entry, we could not list all the works attributed to Columbus under his name in a uniform way. Therefore, to locate a particular work in the Works Cited list, it may be necessary to look under the title or under the name of an editor or translator. Works Cited Alban, Laureano. "The Endless Voyage", tr. by Frederick H. Fornoff. Ohio University, 1983 (CH, Apr '85). Arranz Marquez, Luis. "Don Diego Colon, Almirante, Virrey y Gobernador de las Indias". Madrid: CSIC/Instituto "Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo", 1982- . Ballesteros y Beretta, Antonio. "Cristobal Colon y el Descubrimiento de America". 2v. Barcelona: Salvat, 1945. Barlow, Joel. "The Works of Joel Barlow". 2v. Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1970. Blasco Ibanez, Vicente. "Unknown Lands, the Story of Columbus", tr. by Arthur Livingston. E.P. Dutton, 1929. Bradford, Ernle. "Christopher Columbus". Viking, 1973. Carpentier, Alejo. "The Harp and the Shadow: A Novel". tr. by Thomas Christensen and Carol Christensen. Mercury House, 1990 (CH, Nov '90). Carrison, Daniel J. "Christopher Columbus: Navigator to the New World". F. Watts, 1967. "The Christopher Columbus Encyclopedia", ed. by Silvio Bedini. Simon & Schuster, 1991. Cioranescu, Alejandro. "Primera Biografia de C. Colon: Fernando Colon y Bartolome de las Casas". Tenerife: Aula de Cultural de Tenerife, 1960. Cohen, J.M., comp. "The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus: Being His Own Log-Book, Letters and Dispatches with Connecting Narrative Drawn from the Life of the Admiral by His Son Hernando Colon and Other Contemporary Historians". Penguin, 1969 (CH, Sep '70). Collis, John Stewart. "Christopher Columbus". Stein & Day, 1977 (CH, Sep '77). Colon, Cristobal. "The Journal of the First Voyage", by Christopher Columbus; ed. by B.W. Ife. Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1990. Colon, Fernando. "The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus, by his son Ferdinand"; tr. and annot. by Benjamin Keen. Rutgers, 1959. Columbus, Christopher. "The Diario of Christopher Columbus's First Voyage to America, 1492-1493", abstracted by Bartolome de las Casas; transcribed ad tr. by Oliver Dunn and James E. Kelley. English and Spanish. Oklahoma, 1989 (CH, Mar '91). -----. "Epistola de Insulis Nuper Inventis", tr. by Frank E. Robbins. University Mircofilms, 1966. -----. "The Four Voyages of Columbus: A History in Eight Documents, Including Five by Christopher Columbus, in the Original Spanish, with English Translations", tr. and ed. by Cecil Jane. Dover, 1988. -----. "Journal", tr. by Cecil Jane; rev. and annot. by L.A. Vigneras. London: A. Blond, 1960. -----. "Libro de las Privilegios del Almirante don Cristobal Colon, 1498", ed. by Ciriaco Perez-Bustamente. Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1951. -----. "The Log of Christopher Columbus", tr. by Robert H. Fuson. International Marine Publishing Company, 1987 (CH, apr '88). Conti, Simonetta. "Un Secolo di Bibliografia Colombiana (1880- 1985)". Genova: Cassa di Risparmio di Genova e Imperia, 1986. Cooper, James Fenimore. "Mercedes of Castile: or, The Voyage to Cathay". Lea & Blanchard, 1840. Crone, G.R. "The Discovery of America". Weybright & Talley, 1969. Crosby, Alfred W. "The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492". Greenwood, 1972 (CH, Mar '73). Curtis, William Eleroy. "Christopher Columbus: His Portraits and His Monuments". Lowdermilk, 1893. Fenollosa, Ernest Francisco. "East and West: The Discovery of America and Other Poems". T.Y. Crowell, 1893. Floyd, Troy S. "The Columbian Dynasty in the Caribbean, 1492- 1526". New Mexico, 1973 (CH, Apr '74). Freitas, Antonio M. de. "The Wife of Columbus", by Nicolau Florentino [pseud.] and Regina Maney. Stettiner, Lambert & Company, 1893. Gant, James. "Columbus". London: Sphere Books, 1970. Gemignani, Pier Augusto. "La Scoperta di Colombo e la Medicina". Genova: Edizioni Culturali Internazionali, 1988. Gerbi, Antonello. "Nature in the New World: From Christopher Columbus to Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo", tr. by Jeremy Moyle. Pittsburgh, 1985. Giardini, Cesare. "The Life & Times of Columbus", tr. by Frances Lanza. Curtis Books, 1967. Gould, Alicia Bache. "Nueva Lista Documentada de los Tripulantes de Colon en 1492". Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1984. Granzotto, Gianni. "Christopher Columbus", tr. by Stephen Sartarelli. Doubleday, 1985. Guillen Tato, Julio Fernando. "La Parla Marinera en el Diario del Primer Viaje de Cristobal Colon". Madrid: Instituto Historico de Marina, 1951. Hart, Michael H. "The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History". Hart, 1978. Heers, Jacques. "Christophe Colomb". Paris: Hachette, 1981. Henige, David. "In Search of Columbus: The Sources for the First Voyage". Arizona, 1991 (CH, Dec '91). Hevesy, Andre de. "The Discoverer: A New Narrative of the Life and Hazardous Adventures of the Genoese, Christopher Columbus", tr. by Robert M. Coates. Macauley, 1928. "In the Wake of Columbus: Islands and Controversy", ed. by Louis De Vorsey and John Parker. Wayne State, 1985. Irving, Washington. "A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus". 4v. G. & G. Carvill, 1828. Kayserling, M. "Christopher Columbus and the Participation of the Jews in the Spanish and Portuguese Discoveries", tr. by Charles Gross. Carmi House, 1989. Landstrom, Bjorn. "Columbus: The Story of Don Cristobal Colon, Admiral of the Ocean, and His Four voyages Westward to the Indies, According to Contemporary Sources", tr. by Michael Phillips and Hugh W. Stubbs. London: Macmillan, 1967. Las Casas, Bartolome de. "History of the Indies", tr. and ed. by Andree Collard. Harper & Row, 1971 (CH, Dec '71). Library of Congress. General Reference and Bibliography Division. "Christopher Columbus: A Selected List of Books and Articles by American Authors or Published in America, 1892-1950", comp. by Donald H. Mugridge. Library of Congress, 1950. "The Libro de las Profecias of Christopher Columbus", tr. and commentary by Delno C. West and August Kling. University of Florida, 1991. Lowell, James Russell. "Columbus" in "The Poetical Works of Lowell". Houghton Mifflin, 1876. Madariaga, Salvador de. "Christopher Columbus: Being the Life of the Very magnificent Lord Don Cristobal Colon". London: Hollis & Carter, 1949. Markham, Clements R. "The Journal of the First Voyage of Christopher Columbus Into America and Around the World". Branden Publishing, 1990. Marlowe, Stephen. "The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus". Scribner's, 1987. Martinez-Hidalgo, Jose Maria. "Columbus' Ships", ed. by Howard I. Chapelle. Barre, 1966 (CH, Jan '68). Martyr, Peter. "De Orbe Novo, the Eight Decades of Peter Martyr d'Anghera", tr. and ed. by Francis Augustus McNutt. 2v. G.P. Putnam, 1912. Masters, Edgar Lee. "The New World". D. Appleton-Century Company, 1937. Menendez Pidal, Ramon. "La Lengua de Cristobal Colon: El Estilo de Santa Teresa, y Otros Estudios Sobre el Siglo XVI". Espasa-Calpe, 1942. Milani, Virgil I. "The Written Language of Christopher Columbus". State University of New York at Buffalo, 1973. Milhou, Alain. "Colon y su Mentalidad Mesianica en el Ambiente Franciscanista Espanol". Valladolid: Casa-Museo de Colon Seminario Americanista de la Universidad de Valladolid, 1983. Morison, Samuel Eliot. "Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus". 2v. Little, Brown, 1942. -----. "Christopher Columbus, Mariner". New American Library, 1955. -----. "The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages, A.D. 1492-1616". Oxford, 1974. -----. "Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus". Heritage, 1963. -----. Review of Madariaga Biography Christopher Columbus, "American Historical Review". XIV, No. 3 (April 1940): 653-655. Morison, Samuel Eliot and Mauricio Obregon. "The Caribbean as Columbus Saw It". Little, Brown, 1964. National Geographic Society (U.S.). Cartographic Division. "New Evidence Marks Landfall at Samana Cay: Map". "Where Did Columbus Discover?" (November) The Society, 1986. Navarette, Martin Fernandez de, comp. "Coleccion de los Viages y Descubrimientos que Hicieron por mar los Espanoles Desde Fines del Siglo XV: con Varios Documentos Ineditos Concernientes a la Historia de la Marina Castellana y de los Establecimientos Espanoles en Indias". 5v. Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1825-37. Nebenzahl, Kenneth. "Atlas of Columbus and the Great Discoveries". Rand McNally, 1990 (CH, Mar '91). Newby, Eric. "The Rand McNally World Atlas of Exploration". Rand McNally, 1975 (CH, May '76). Oviedo y Valdes, Gonzalo de Fernandez. "Historia General y Natural de las Indias". 2v. Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1851-1852. Paiewonsky, Michael. "Conquest of Eden, 1493-1515: Other Voyages of Columbus, Guadeloupe, Puerto Rico, Hispaniola, Virgin Islands". Rome: St. Thomas: MAPes MONDe, Editore, 1991. Posse, Abel. "The Dogs of Paradise", tr. by Margaret Sayers Peden. Atheneum, 1989 (CH, Jul '90). Provost, Foster. "Columbus: An Annotated Guide to the Scholarship on His Life and Writings, 1750 to 1988". Omnigraphics, 1991 (CH, Jul '91). -----. "Columbus Dictionary". Omnigraphics, 1991. Revelli, Paolo. "Cristoforo Colombo e la Scuola Cartografica Genovese". 3v. Genova: Stabilimenti Italiani Arti Grafichi, 1937. Rienits, Rex and Thea Rienits. "The Voyages of Columbus". Crescent Books, 1989. Roselly de Lorgues, Antoine Francois Felix. "Christophe Colomb: Historie de sa vie et de ses Voyages". 2v. Paris: Didier et cie, 1856. Rumeu de Armas, Antonio. "Hernando Colon, Historiador del Descubrimiento de America". Madrid: Instituto de Cultura Hispanica, 1973. Ryan, Sara Agnes. "Christopher Columbus in Poetry, History and Art". Mayer & Miller, 1917; repr., Gordon, 1976. Sabatini, Rafael. "Columbus, a Romance". Houghton Mifflin, 1942. Sale, Kirkpatrick. "The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy". Knopf, 1990 (CH, May '91). San Salvador Conference (1st: 1986: College Center of the Finger Lakes, Bahamian Field Station). "Columbus and His World: Proceedings, First San Salvador Conference, held October 30- November 3, 1986, at The College Center of the Finger Lakes, Bahamian Field Station, San Salvador Island, Bahamas", comp. by Donald T. Gerace. The Station, 1987. Sargent, Daniel. "Christopher Columbus". Bruce, 1941. Sauer, Carl Ortwin. "The Early Spanish Main". California, 1966. Schoenrich, Otto. "The Legacy of Christopher Columbus: The Historic Litigations Involving His Discoveries, His Will, His Family and His Descendants ... Resulting from the Discovery of America", comp. from archives in Spain, France, and the Americas. 2v. A.H. Clark, 1949-50. Smith, Bradley. "Columbus in the New World". Doubleday, 1962. Street, James H. "The Velvet Doublet". Doubleday, 1953. Taviani, Paolo Emilio. "Christopher Columbus: The Grand Design". London: Orbis, 1985. "I Viaggi di Colombo: La Grande Scoperta". 2v. Novara: Instituto geografico De Agostini, 1984. Tennyson, Alfred Lord. "The Poetic and Dramatic Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson". Houghton Mifflin, 1898. Thacher, John Boyd. "Christopher Columbus: His Life, His Works, His Remains, as Revealed by Original Printed and Manuscript Records, Together with an Essay on Peter Martyr of Anghera and Bartolome de las Casas, the First Historians of America". 3v. G.P. Putnam's, 1903-04. Torre y del Cerro, Jose de la. "Beatriz Enriquez de Harana y Cristobal Colon: Estudio y Documentos por Jose de la Torre y del Cerro". Madrid: Compania Iberoamericana de Publicaciones (S.A.), 1933 Treen, Maria de Freitas. "The Admiral and His Lady: Columbus and Filipa of Portugal". R. Speller & Sons, 1989. Vignaud, Henry. 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