Word: columbus
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Columbus' Journal is also missing. But a copy found its way to Columbus' contemporary biographer, Bartolome de Las Casas, who abstracted from it the text we have today. The same or another copy was used by Ferdinand Columbus (the Admiral's bastard son), who quoted long passages in writing his father's life. Professor Morison believes that these and other data are contemporary documentation enough. The real confusion about Columbus, he believes, has been caused by more recent biographies written by "armchair admirals" who know nothing about...
...correct some of their mistakes, Professor Morison decided to apply the alfresco, learn-by-doing methods that Francis Parkman used for his History of France in the New World. In the summer of 1939 Morison and some friends bought the barkentine, Capitana, which was "near enough to Columbus' larger ships in rig and burthen to enable us to cross the ocean under conditions very similar to those of his day. . . ." In the Capitana they explored the European end of Columbus' routes, then headed back across the Atlantic. "Our crossing from Gomera to Trinidad was approximately on the route...
Sailing the same kind of ships, making the same reckonings from the same stars, Author Morison came to understand the problems Columbus solved. Result is a book written with quarter-deck authority and a seaborn, salty spaciousness...
...Dead Reckoner. In rediscovering what Columbus did, Author Morison also rediscovered who Columbus was. Just before his Third Voyage, Columbus de posed that he came originally from Genoa ("from it I came and in it I was born...
This is reason enough, thinks Author Morison, to believe that Columbus was not a Spaniard or a Portuguese (both na tions claim him as a native son). Salvador de Madariaga's recent ingenious attempt to prove that Columbus was an unconverted Jew is dismissed as "a significant pattern of hypotheses and innuendoes unsupported by anything so vulgar as fact." Professor Morison also smiles wanly at stories like Columbus and the egg.* Nor, says he, did Isabella pawn her jewels to outfit Columbus' ships. She only said she would if it was necessary; it wasn...