Rediscovering Columbus

GETTY IMAGES (2) STONE FACE A statue of Christopher Columbus in New York City.“CHRISTOPHER Columbus is still alive.” So writes Matthew Restall in his biography of the weaver’s son from Genoa who became one of the most famous people of all history and, we might say, the greatest impeller of Christianity after Jesus Christ himself.What Mr. Restall means is that the great explorer is still at the center of a swarm of unresolved polemics. Historians have not, in other words, laid him to unanimous rest. In fact, to describe Columbus (1451-1506) or his achievements in any of the admiring ways that were largely conventional for 500 years—as the discoverer of America, for instance, or the deliverer of Christianity to the New World—is to trigger a countercharacterization of him as an apocalyptic destroyer of indigenous people. In that vein, dozens of statues of Columbus have been taken down across the United States in the wake of the civic disorder sparked in 2020 by Black Lives Matter. When Columbus’s statue was yanked from Newark, N.J., the city’s mayor insisted that he had no objections to people celebrating Columbus: “We're just asking that you not make us celebrate him as well.”Mr. Restall quotes the iconoclast mayor in “The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus,” a somewhat unconventional biography of the man who was born Cristoforo Colombo; became Christovam Colom upon moving to the Portuguese capital, Lisbon, in 1476; and reinvented himself one last time—as Cristóbal Colón—upon his migration to the Spanish city of Seville, a decade later, in the service of Queen Isabel of Castile. In addition to being peripatetic, he was also an eccentric: In “Columbus” (1991)—a biography published to coincide with the quincentennial of the discovery of the Americas—Felipe Fernández-Armesto calls him “a crank.”