The Four Voyages Of Columbus

From the author of the Magellan biography, Over the Edge of the World, a mesmerizing new account of the great explorer. Christopher Columbus's 1492 voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in search of a trading route to China, and his unexpected landfall in the Americas, is a watershed event in world history. Yet Columbus made three more voyages within the span of only a decade, each designed to demonstrate that he could sail to China within a matter of weeks and convert those he found there to Christianity. These later voyages were even more adventurous, violent, and ambiguous, but they revealed Columbus's uncanny sense of the sea, his mingled brilliance and delusion, and his superb navigational skills. In all these exploits he almost never lost a sailor. By their conclusion, however, Columbus was broken in body and spirit. If the first voyage illustrates the rewards of exploration, the latter voyages illustrate the tragic costs- political, moral, and economic. In rich detail Laurence Bergreen re-creates each of these adventures as well as the historical background of Columbus's celebrated, controversial career. Written from the participants' vivid perspectives, this breathtakingly dramatic account will be embraced by readers of Bergreen's previous biographies of Marco Polo and Magellan and by fans of Nathaniel Philbrick, Simon Winchester, and Tony Horwitz.

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.

Originally published: New York: Viking Adult, 2011.

2011 Reprint of the 1920 Edition. Illustrated by Cosgrove. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. This is the actual log of Christopher Columbus as copied out by his companion, Bartholomew Las Casas. Besides being authentic source material about the voyage and the core of the Columbus legend, this journal has all the day-by-day enchantment of a long sea voyage with all the drama of a small ship steering into the unknown-the first pelican, a crab in the seaweed, a branch of roseberries and a carved log found floating in the water, mutterings of mutiny and the constant watch for signs of land. John Cosgrove, the illustrator, adds to the book on every page with pictures of whales and riggings, compasses and charts, which are both decorative and accurate pictorial footnotes to the log.