We neglected Columbus on Columbus Day (other than a discussion of Mayor Bloomberg's decision not to march in NYC's parade). Gary Farber points us to a rather grim assessment of Columbus in the New Yorker:

Columbus was one of history's great optimists. When he read in Marco Polo that the palace of the Japanese king had floors of gold "two fingers thick," he accepted it as fact. Cuba, he was convinced, was part of the Malay Peninsula; things of value were more plentiful in the south; and the riches of the Orient - or, barring that, the rewards of Paradise - were always just around the corner. On all of these points, of course, he was wrong, and should have been fatally so, except that he was also fantastically lucky.

Columbus made four round-trip voyages from Spain to the New World, each of which was a stunning feat of seamanship. To sail west across the Atlantic, a ship needs to find the easterly trade winds; to sail east it has to find the less consistent westerlies, and can easily end up becalmed. Several times, Columbus almost didn't make it back. Returning from his First Voyage, he ran into a storm so ferocious that he decided his best hope for posterity was to write up an account of his discoveries, seal it in a barrel, and toss the whole thing overboard. (This manuscript was "found" four centuries later, in a wonderfully clumsy fraud.) But Columbus kept squeaking by and, in keeping with his general view of things, interpreted his good fortune as a sign that he had been singled out by God. In his later years, he assembled a book of Biblical passages showing that his discoveries were a prelude to the Day of Judgment, and took to signing his name with an elaborate Christological cryptogram. By this point, he may or may not have been mad.

Among the few quincentenary projects to reach a satisfactory conclusion is a twelve-volume series called, somewhat portentously, the Repertorium Columbianum. The series, produced by U.C.L.A.'s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, features new English translations of the most important documents associated with Columbus's voyages, including his "Book of Prophecies," transcripts of his logs, and the earliest accounts of his arrival in the New World. Some forty scholars collaborated on the project, which took fourteen years to complete; this fall, a decade behind schedule, the twelfth volume will finally appear. The series goes a long way toward explaining, if inadvertently, why the quincentenary turned into a fiasco. In his writings, Columbus reveals that the flip side of his optimism was a casual greed and cruelty. He appears to have been dishonest with just about everyone he encountered and, most of all, with himself, as he forever tried to rationalize his idiosyncratic preconceptions. If we are, indeed, always refashioning history to suit our self-image, then what are we to make of the fact that the Columbus who emerges from the Repertorium is evidently a quack?

In Columbus's day, most geographers still relied on Ptolemy, who posited that the "known world" stretched a hundred and eighty degrees from east to west; the rest was water. This was a gross overstatement: the real span of what Ptolemy meant by the "known world" - Eurasia and Africa - was only about a hundred and twenty degrees. Still, even Ptolemy's calculations left far too much ocean to be traversed in an eighty-foot boat. Columbus rejected Ptolemy in favor of Pierre d'Ailly, an early-fifteenth-century French astrologer, who maintained that land extended for two hundred and twenty-five degrees, water for only a hundred and thirty-five. From there, Columbus argued that the travels of Marco Polo proved that China stretched farther east, that Japan was thirty degrees east of China, and that, because he planned to embark from the Canary Islands, he could subtract nine more degrees of water. When all this was not sufficient, he argued that d'Ailly had been too conservative all along.
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