The Worlds of Christopher Columbus

"The strength of this book is that the Phillips are historians of this time period in the history of the Atlantic world and the Mediterranean world. They really understand the historical context. And they do a very good job of emphasising a crucial point, one that I emphasise too, which is that Columbus was not alone. He was part of a phenomenon involving hundreds of ships and many thousands of Italians, Spaniards and Portuguese who were, in his lifetime, all exploring the Atlantic Ocean. If you were a student in one of my graduate seminars, I would tell you to read these books in sequence—Fernández-Armesto first and then the Phillips’ book. You’d notice that they don’t question the story of Columbus battling pirates and other stories he questions. And then, noting the differences, you can make up your own mind! The short answer is yes. The longer answer is that I wasn’t hell-bent on being a contrarian: I set out to be open-minded. I really wanted to examine respectfully all the claims on Columbus from parts of the Iberian Peninsula, for example. The seed for my book was planted when I was in Galicia in Spain, where they have a museum in the house where they claim he was born, and so on. I didn’t want to dismiss all of this as being clearly invented. I wanted to take it seriously. As a result, I discovered that Columbus, or the entire industry surrounding him, is so heavily imbued with mythology that the book ended up being myth busting. I invented a word—‘faithistory’—which refers to a view of history in which people approach an event or subject with a pre-existing belief. Everything they then read, they reject or accept depending on how it fits with their faith, just as people do when they have any other kind of ideology, religious or not. I realised I needed to come up with a term to encapsulate for the reader these kinds of opinions or beliefs."