Word: morisons
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ADMIRAL OF THE OCEAN SEA-Samuet Eliot Morison-Atlantic-Little, Brown...
...which took ten years to complete, is the definitive job on Columbus. It warps the U.S. mind a little tighter to its neglected Spanish-American heritage, and presents the most complete picture yet published of the one historical figure about whom every American knows something. That something, says Historian Morison, is usually wrong...
Nobody, for example, really knows what Columbus looked like. There are at least 71 "alleged original portraits" in existence. Since no two look alike, Author Morison prefers an imaginary, 119th-Century portrait that "gives an impression of force, dignity and integrity...
...found its way to Columbus' contemporary biographer, Bartolome de Las Casas, who abstracted from it the text we have today. The same or another copy was used by Ferdinand Columbus (the Admiral's bastard son), who quoted long passages in writing his father's life. Professor Morison believes that these and other data are contemporary documentation enough. The real confusion about Columbus, he believes, has been caused by more recent biographies written by "armchair admirals" who know nothing about...
...round (they had known it long before); the story of Columbus and his egg was probably a figment of the imagination of a later writer; it is untrue that the invention of the astrolabe enabled Columbus to discover America--he didn't know how to use it then. Professor Morison can write beautiful prose, yet he employs colloquial language to good effect ("All in all, it seems to me that Columbus's shipmates were 'good guys' . . ."). The charts in the books, by Erwin Raisy, of the institute of Geographical Exploration, are excellent...