No gamble in history has been more momentous than the landfall of Columbus's ship the Santa Maria in the Americas in 1492 - an event that paved the way for the conquest of a 'New World'. The accounts collected here provide a vivid narrative of his voyages throughout the Caribbean and finally to the mainland of Central America, although he still believed he had reached Asia. Columbus himself is revealed as a fascinating and contradictory figure, fluctuating from awed enthusiasm to paranoia and eccentric geographical speculation. Prey to petty quarrels with his officers, his pious desire to bring Christian civilization to 'savages' matched by his rapacity for gold, Columbus was nonetheless an explorer and seaman of staggering vision and achievement.

The Year is 1500. Christopher Columbus, stripped of his title Admiral of the Ocean Seas, waits in chains in a Caribbean prison built under his orders, looking out at the colony that he founded, nurtured, and ruled for eight years. Less than a decade after discovering the New World, he has fallen into disgrace, accused by the royal court of being a liar, a secret Jew, and a foreigner who sought to steal the riches of the New World for himself. The tall, freckled explorer with the aquiline nose, whose flaming red hair long ago turned gray, passes his days in prayer and rumination, trying to ignore the waterfront gallows that are all too visible from his cell. And he plots for one great escape, one last voyage to the ends of the earth, one final chance to prove himself. What follows is one of history's most epic -- and forgotten -- adventures. Columbus himself would later claim that his fourth voyage was his greatest. It was without doubt his most treacherous. Of the four ships he led into the unknown, none returned. Columbus would face the worst storms a European explorer had ever encountered. He would battle to survive amid mutiny, war, and a shipwreck that left him stranded on a desert isle for almost a year. On his tail were his enemies, sent from Europe to track him down. In front of him: the unknown. Martin Dugard's thrilling account of this final voyage brings Columbus to life as never before-adventurer, businessman, father, lover, tyrant, and hero.

Christopher Columbus returned to Europe in the final days of 1500, ending his third voyage to the Indies not in triumph but in chains. Seeking to justify his actions and protect his rights, he began to compile biblical texts and excerpts from patristic writings and medieval theology in a manuscript known as the Book of Prophecies. This unprecedented collection was designed to support his vision of the discovery of the Indies as an important event in the process of human salvation - a first step toward the liberation of Jerusalem and the Holy Land from Muslim domination. This work is part of a twelve-volume series produced by U.C.L.A.'s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies which involved the collaboration of some forty scholars over the course of fourteen years. In this volume of the series, Roberto Rusconi has written a complete historical introduction to the Book of Prophecies, describing the manuscript's history and analyzing its principal themes. His edition of the documents, the only modern one, includes a complete critical apparatus and detailed commentary, while the facing-page English translations allow Columbus's work to be appreciated by the general public and scholars alike.

This impeccably researched and “adventure-packed” (The Washington Post) account of the obsessive quest by Christopher Columbus’s son to create the greatest library in the world is “the stuff of Hollywood blockbusters” (NPR) and offers a vivid picture of Europe on the verge of becoming modern. At the peak of the Age of Exploration, Hernando Colón sailed with his father Christopher Columbus on his final voyage to the New World, a journey that ended in disaster, bloody mutiny, and shipwreck. After Columbus’s death in 1506, eighteen-year-old Hernando sought to continue—and surpass—his father’s campaign to explore the boundaries of the known world by building a library that would collect everything ever printed: a vast holding organized by summaries and catalogues; really, the first ever database for the exploding diversity of written matter as the printing press proliferated across Europe. Hernando traveled extensively and obsessively amassed his collection based on the groundbreaking conviction that a library of universal knowledge should include “all books, in all languages and on all subjects,” even material often dismissed: ballads, erotica, news pamphlets, almanacs, popular images, romances, fables. The loss of part of his collection to another maritime disaster in 1522, set off the final scramble to complete this sublime project, a race against time to realize a vision of near-impossible perfection. “Magnificent…a thrill on almost every page” (The New York Times Book Review), The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books is a window into sixteenth-century Europe’s information revolution, and a reflection of the passion and intrigues that lie beneath our own insatiable desires to bring order to the world today.

He knew nothing of celestial navigation or of the existence of the Pacific Ocean. He was a self-promoting and ambitious entrepreneur. His maps were a hybrid of fantasy and delusion. When he did make land, he enslaved the populace he found, encouraged genocide, and polluted relations between peoples. He ended his career in near lunacy. But Columbus had one asset that made all the difference, an inborn sense of the sea, of wind and weather, and of selecting the optimal course to get from A to B. Laurence Bergreen's energetic and bracing book gives the whole Columbus and most importantly, the whole of his career, not just the highlight of 1492. Columbus undertook three more voyages between 1494 and 1504, each designed to demonstrate that he could sail to China within a matter of weeks and convert those he found there to Christianity. By their conclusion, Columbus was broken in body and spirit, a hero undone by the tragic flaw of pride. If the first voyage illustrates the rewards of exploration, this book shows how the subsequent voyages illustrate the costs - political, moral, and economic.

Letter Of Christopher Columbus To Rafael Sanchez, Written On Board The Caravel While Returning From His First Voyage has been considered by academicians and scholars of great significance and value to literature. This forms a part of the knowledge base for future generations. So that the book is never forgotten we have represented this book in a print format as the same form as it was originally first published. Hence any marks or annotations seen are left intentionally to preserve its true nature.

This definitive edition of Columbus's account of the voyage presents the most accurate printed version of his journal available to date. Unfortunately both Columbus's original manuscript, presented to Ferdinand and Isabella along with other evidence of his discoveries, and a single complete copy have been lost for centuries. The primary surviving record of the voyage-part quotation, part summary of the complete copy-is a transcription made by Bartolome de las Casas in the 1530s. This new edition of the Las Casas manuscript presents its entire contents-including notes, insertions, and canceled text-more accurately, completely, and graphically than any other Spanish text published so far. In addition, the new translation, which strives for readability and accuracy, appears on pages facing the Spanish, encouraging on-the- spot comparisons of the translation with the original. Study of the work is further facilitated by extensive notes, documenting differences between the editors' transcription and translation and those of other transcribers and translators and summarizing current research and debates on unanswered current research and debates on unanswered questions concerning the voyage. In addition to being the only edition in which Spanish and English are presented side by side, this edition includes the only concordance ever prepared for the Diario. Awaited by scholars, this new edition will help reduce the guesswork that has long plagued the study of Columbus's voyage. It may shed light on a number of issues related to Columbus's navigational methods and the identity of his landing places, issues whose resolution depend, at least in part, on an accurate transcription of the Diario. Containing day-by-day accounts of the voyage and the first sighting of land, of the first encounters with the native populations and the first appraisals of his islands explored, and of a suspenseful return voyage to Spain, the Diario provides a fascinating and useful account to historians, geographers, anthropologists, sailors, students, and anyone else interested in the discovery-or in a very good sea story. Oliver Dunn received the PH.D. degree from Cornell University. He is Professor Emeritus in Purdue University and a longtime student of Spanish and early history of Spanish America. James E. Kelley, Jr., received the M.A. degree from American University. A mathematician and computer and management consultant by vocation, for the past twenty years he has studied the history of European cartography and navigation in late-medieval times. Both are members of the Society for the History of Discoveries and have written extensively on the history of navigation and on Columbus's first voyage, Although they remain unconvinced of its conclusions, both were consultants to the National geographic Society's 1986 effort to establish Samana Cay as the site of Columbus's first landing.

"The book is an idea that has finally found its time." --Publisher's Weekly "I think your book on Christopher Columbus is important. I'm more grateful for that book than any other book I have read in a couple of years." --Kurt Vonnegut