#Christopher columbus discovered america full

At the peak of the Age of Exploration, Hernando traveled with Columbus on his final voyage to the New World, a journey that ended in disaster, bloody mutiny, and shipwreck. In this innovative work of history, Edward Wilson-Lee tells the extraordinary story of Hernando Colón, a singular visionary of the printing press-age who also happened to be Christopher Columbus's illegitimate son.

#Christopher columbus discovered america full

'Like a Renaissance wonder cabinet, full of surprises and opening up into a lost world.' -Stephen Greenblatt 'A captivating adventure.For lovers of history, Wilson-Lee offers a thrill on almost every page.Magnificent.' -The New York Times Book Review Named a Best Book of the Year by: * Financial Times * New Statesman * History Today * The Spectator * The impeccably researched and vividly rendered account of the quest by Christopher Columbus's illegitimate son to create the greatest library in the world-'a perfectly pitched poetic drama' (Financial Times) and an amazing tour through sixteenth-century Europe. 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. In rich detail Laurence Bergreen re-creates each of these adventures as well as the historical background of Columbus's celebrated, controversial career. If the first voyage illustrates the rewards of exploration, the latter voyages illustrate the tragic costs- political, moral, and economic. By their conclusion, however, Columbus was broken in body and spirit. In all these exploits he almost never lost a sailor. 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. 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. 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. While he was fairly accurate of the position and shape of the islands we know as Cuba and Hispaniola, his inaccurate depictions of the Bahamas leave the exact location of Guanahani undetermined.From the author of the Magellan biography, Over the Edge of the World, a mesmerizing new account of the great explorer. Years after their historic voyage, in 1500, de la Cosa made a map of where they’d travelled. De la Cosa was a cartographer sailing with Columbus, and also the owner of Columbus’ largest vessel, the Santa Maria. Further complicating the issue is a map made by Juan de la Cosa. The confusion over Guanahani’s modern identity stems primarily from Columbus’ description of the island in his Diario, where he describes Guanahani as having “very green trees and many ponds and fruits of various kinds.” What Columbus couldn’t have known is that this can be said of a great number of the islands in the region. However, the most popular theory is that Guanahani is the island today known as San Salvador (which was known as Watling Island until its name was officially changed to San Salvador in 1925 to recognize it as the site of Columbus’ first landing). The modern identity of Guanahani remains a subject of historical debate, and over the years, multiple Bahamian islands have been suggested as candidates for “Guanahani”, including Sanama Cay, Rum Cay, Grand Turk Island, and the Plana Cays. Columbus and his ships landed on an island that the native Lucayan people called Guanahani. On October 12, 1492, Italian explorer Christopher Columbus made landfall in what is now the Bahamas.