Two hours before dawn on October 12, 1492, a sailor on the Pinta saw white limestone catching moonlight. After thirty-three days at sea, Columbus's ships drew sail and waited for the sun. The man who rowed ashore — Cristoforo Colombo of Genoa, Admiral of the Ocean Sea — knelt on the sand and had a notary read aloud a claim of possession in Spanish that no one on the beach except the Spaniards could understand. The Lucayans watching from the trees had no idea what had been done.

This Columbus biography takes the explorer as a serious historical subject — a Genoese wool weaver's son who survived a shipwreck at twenty-four, spent eight years lobbying kings, miscalculated the Earth's circumference by a factor of five, and ended up at the hinge of world history. Historian James R. Whitfield draws on Columbus's own journals, the rediscovered Bobadilla report of 1500, the Biblioteca Colombina annotated books, and ethnohistorical reconstruction of the Taino world to deliver the history of exploration no prior single-volume has assembled this completely.

Inside this Christopher Columbus history:

• The four voyages — from the near-mutiny of October 9, 1492, when Columbus promised to turn back within three days, to the fourth voyage's "broken admiral" stranded on the Jamaican coast (Chapters 4-7)
• The Taino: a world in full — chiefdoms of the Greater Antilles with a population that may have numbered 3 million, hereditary caciques, long-distance canoe trade, and a religious life that European accounts flattened into nothing (Chapter 8)
• The Columbian Exchange — the biological collision that killed an estimated 90 percent of the Greater Antilles indigenous population within a generation and permanently linked two continents separated for 13,000 years (Chapter 9)
• The Bobadilla report rediscovered — the 2006 recovery from Simancas of the 1500 royal investigation documenting specific cruelties by Columbus and his brothers, closing the door on any claim that he was humane while subordinates went too far (Chapter 6)
• Columbus's geographical error — his 2,400-nautical-mile estimate was off by a factor of five, simultaneously the source of his confidence and the reason competent Portuguese geographers rejected him (Chapter 2)
• The making and unmaking of the myth — Washington Irving's 1828 fabrications, the contested 1992 quincentennial, and why honest commemoration requires holding two truths at once (Chapters 10-12)

One driven, mistaken Genoese navigator reached a beach that broke his fall and changed the world. This Columbus biography delivers the complete story — the voyages, the Taino civilization, the Columbian Exchange, the colonial horror, and the five-hundred-year argument over what it all means.

For readers of Charles Mann's 1491 and Laurence Bergreen's COLUMBUS: THE FOUR VOYAGES.