In 1992 we mark the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's first voyage to the New World. But for most of us, this pivotal figure remains as distant and mysterious as the New World must have seemed to him. What sort of man was Columbus? Was he a zealous crusader or a mystic seer, as various legends have it, or an embodiment of bourgeois capitalism, as new interpretations claim? In this concise, authoritative biography, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto...