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Introduction: John Dyson's Columbus: For Gold, God, and Glory
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18753 |
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BOOK WORLD
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12 / 1991 |
235 Words |
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Editor
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Did Columbus have a secret map of charts to guide him to the Indies on his first voyage? In the following excerpt from Columbus: For Gold, God and Glory author John Dyson argues that he certainly did, citing as evidence the many peculiar entries in Columbus' daily log. Building upon the research of Spanish navigators Luis Coin Cuenca, Dyson theorizes that Columbus not only deceived his own crew about the actual distances sailed each day--which Columbus admitted--but that he deceived the world about his actual route on the first voyage.
But how credible a theory? Two commentaries speak to this and other questions following the excerpt. First, Joseph Judge, a former senior editor of National Geographic and himself an expert on Columbus' first landfall, summarizes Dyson's argument and challenges it point by point (p.372). His essay is followed by Dyson's response to the criticism (p.392). Finally scholar and publisher Adolfo Caso measures the picture of Columbus emerging from the work of Dyson and other researchers (p.394). The new theory, though full of surprises, confirms the received picture of Columbus as a compiled and mysterious figure. Caso writes that so much has been written about Columbus that he has entered the world of mythology, wherein facts, let alone truth, have become almost irrelevant. (See the special section "When World Collide," p.26, for related stories.) --The Editor
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