Christopher Columbus and the New World of His Discovery — Volume 5

The fifth volume of Filson Young's monumental history plunges into the most turbulent chapter of Columbus's American enterprise: the founding of the first European colony in the New World. Here is the story of Isabella, the ill-fated settlement where starving settlers, mutinous crewmen, and ailing soldiers turned against their admiral. Young renders the desperation and drama with a novelist's instinct, the failed gold searches, the internal schisms, the tense diplomacy and mounting violence with the Taíno peoples who had welcomed Columbus's arrival. This is colonization stripped of myth: the Spanish Crown's relentless demands for riches, the disintegration of order, and Columbus's desperate voyages to Cuba and Jamaica in search of proof that would justify his expedition. For readers who want history that reads like drama, that shows the human complexity behind the legend, Young's prose delivers an unflinching account of how the New World was born in failure, greed, and tragedy.