Christopher Columbus and the New World of His Discovery — Volume 7
1492
Christopher Columbus and the New World of His Discovery — Volume 7
1492
In the autumn of 1500, the man who had dared to sail into the unknown returned to Hispaniola in chains. This is the story of Columbus's shattering fall from grace, rendered with cinematic intensity by Filson Young. Francisco de Bobadilla arrives in San Domingo to find a colony in crisis: public executions, starving settlers, and a governor whose dreams of gold have curdled into brutal repression. What follows is a swift and humiliating coup. Columbus and his brothers are arrested, their governance dismantled, their legacy thrown into question. The narrative pulses with the ironies that history loves: the discoverer of a New World, powerless to save himself from the old world's justice. Through Columbus's own letters, we glimpse a man wounded but unbowed, nursing grievances and grand schemes even as his enemies close in. Young paints the political machinations of the Spanish court, where rivals scent blood and the hero of 1492 becomes a convenient scapegoat for every colonial failure. This is not a biography of triumph. It is an autopsy of hubris, a minute-by-minute account of how ambition curdles into catastrophe. For readers who crave history told as drama, who want to understand the man behind the myth and the moment his legend cracked.
Editions
X-Ray
“Columbus tried to pour the wine of civilisation into very old bottles; you, more wisely, are trying to pour the old wine of our country into new bottles. Yet there is no great unlikeness between the two tasks: it is all a matter of bottling; the vintage is the same, infinite, inexhaustible, and as punctual as the sun and the seasons. It was Columbus’s weakness as an administrator that he thought the bottle was everything; it is your strength that you care for the vintage, and labour to preserve its flavour and soft fire. Yours,””
— Filson Young
