Word: columbus
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...authentic portrait of Columbus done from life exists, but there are verbal descriptions: tall, a long face, ruddy skin, reddish hair that turned white in middle age. Adopting Spain as his homeland in 1484, Columbus was never to use Italian in his writings. But he soon became bookworm enough to be seen as an amateur geographer as well as a mariner, and to accumulate a large library. Alas, only four of these volumes survive with his annotations...
...Though Columbus was already a first-rate practical sailor, his idea of the unexplored Atlantic was formed as much by books as by navigation: writings of the ancients (Pliny, Strabo and especially Ptolemy), medieval cosmographers, collections of "marvels." These gave him a framework in which to sell his plans to patrons: his letters to Ferdinand and Isabella, King and Queen of Spain, begging their patronage for the "Enterprise of the Indies," are full of appeals to the authority of older writers...
...what? On the belief that one could reach China and "Cipangu" (Japan) by sailing west. No European ship had reached the Orient by sailing east around the bottom of Africa yet, either. But Columbus was convinced that the westward passage would be shorter and easier. The enterprise of the Indies had nothing to do with discovering America, or even with any suspicion that America existed. Columbus was looking for China and Japan, and long after reaching the Caribbean he remained convinced, against any and all evidence, that he had done...
...Columbus was in fact a very rigid man, and his inflexibility combined with piety and opportunism to produce behavior not far from paranoid. His growing ambition encouraged the belief, typical of obsessed loners, that everyone except God was against him. He was so certain that his enterprise of the Indies was a fulfillment of God's designs that he even greeted the wreck of the Santa Maria as a sign of divine approbation. He had an apocalyptic turn of mind...
...Columbus could be extremely petty, as when he claimed for himself the prize money he had promised to the first crewman to sight westward land. His reports to the crown were absurdly self-serving, especially those composed after the first voyage, which are a tissue of hustling lies about "incredible amounts" of gold and spices -- which, however, got him 17 ships for the second voyage. His fixations often skewed his charting, so that Columbus mistook islands for continental coasts and thus claimed to have found what...