Admiral of the Ocean Sea

Reviewing "Columbus - The Four Voyages," a new book by Laurence Bergreen, the New York Times' Ian Toll opens with an insightful (and I think accurate) take on the controversial "Admiral of the Ocean Sea": "In 5,000 years of recorded history, scarcely another figure has ignited as much controversy. Each second Monday in October, the familiar arguments flare up. Christopher Columbus, rediscoverer of America, was a visionary explorer. He was a harbinger of genocide. He was a Christianizing messiah. He was a pitiless slave master. He was a lionhearted seaman, a rapacious plunderer, a masterly navigator, a Janus-faced schemer, a liberator of oppressed tribes, a delusional megalomaniac. In “Columbus,” Laurence Bergreen, the author of several biographies, allows scope for all these judgments. But Christopher Columbus was in the first place a terribly interesting man — brilliant, audacious, volatile, paranoid, narcissistic, ruthless and (in the end) deeply unhappy." Toll writes that in Bergreen's telling, "Columbus emerges in these pages as an immensely courageous but less than heroic figure." He concludes: "Columbus was not the enlightened rationalist of legend; he was a self-appointed messiah who called himself 'Columbus, the Christ-bearer,' and believed with utter conviction that he was an instrument of divine will. But if Columbus was a Christian, he might have paused to consider the rhetorical question posed in Mark 8:36 (slightly altered to fit the circumstance): 'For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain a New World, and lose his own soul?' ”