1492: The Conquest of Paradise: Framing the Story

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1492: The Conquest of Paradise, Christopher Columbus, Gerard Depardieu, Latin America, Medieval Europe, Medieval Spain

In my previous comments on 1492: The Conquest of Paradise (1992, dir. Ridley Scott), I examined the way the film substantially misrepresents the life of Columbus in a variety of ways, particularly by trying to make it fit with American high school textbook accounts of Columbus and by trying to shift the blame for his misdeeds after he arrived in the Caribbean. But that analysis focuses on the film as a presentation of history.

The film actually wears a thin fig-leaf of protection against charges of historical inaccuracy. It has an undeveloped frame tale that presents the film as actually being based on a biography of Columbus written by his illegitimate son Fernando. It opens with a brief voice-over narrative of Fernando (Loren Dean), who recalls his father saying “Nothing that results from human progress is achieved by unanimous consent. And those who are enlightened before the others are condemned to pursue that light in spite of others.” (Needless to say, this is a fake quote from Columbus, not something he actually said. the concept of ‘human progress’ didn’t exist in the 15th century.)

The adult Fernando falls silent as the film shows Christopher (Gerard Depardieu) and Fernando sitting by the sea watching a ship sail out of sight. Periodically, Fernando figures in the story, though not in a very important way.

The film ends after Columbus’ third voyage. An older, unwell Christopher is seated in a chair looking out to sea. Fernando asks his father to tell him what he remembers and takes up a quill in preparation to take dictation. Christopher says “I remember…” and the film essentially ends as Fernando waits for him to continue.

Fernando

By book-ending the film with these two moments of recollection, the film essentially tells us that it is not showing us history the way it actually happened, but rather history as Christopher and Fernando chose to present it.

Fernando did in fact write a biography of his father. Its rather long title gets shorted in English to The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus by his son Fernando. It was written more than 3 decades after his father’s death, and thus isn’t his father’s memoires in any real sense, but Fernando did have all his father’s papers and journals, and so had a great deal of material to work with in composing his father’s stories.

Fernando was writing with a purpose. He explicitly says that he is seeking to counter the negative stories that have circulated about his father. He objects to the claim that his father was of humble origins, and instead hints that he was descended from royalty. He seeks to refute the claim that other Spaniards had found the Caribbean before Columbus, and says, probably incorrectly, that his father attended a university as a young man. Overall, he wanted to present his father as a great man who had accomplished remarkable things, and he was supporting his brother Diego, who was embroiled in a lawsuit to recover some of their father’s property and legal rights.

As a result, the film consistently presents Columbus as a man who recognizes that he is doing something remarkable. He knows that he is an important historical figure. The quote at the start of the film is complete fabrication, but it is typical of Depardieu’s Columbus and his sense that he knows better than those around him, a sense that the film consistently reinforces, even when it’s wrong.

During his debate at the university of Salamanca, Christopher suggests that he considers himself a ‘chosen one’. Later, after he is recalled to Spain, he tells Sanchez, a resentful noble, that he has accomplished something that Sanchez, for all his nobility, could not do. At the end of the film, one of the university faculty members comments that Columbus has wasted his life, but Sanchez retorts that if either of them are remembered at all, it will be because of Columbus. So by the end of the film, Columbus’ sense of himself as a historically important figure is beginning to be recognized by those around him, most importantly his son Fernando.

If the film is meant to be Fernando’s biography of his father rather than an objective reporting of what happened, the film’s lapses into inaccuracy are less problematic, because they can be seen as Fernando eulogizing his father and trying to craft an image of him as a man who mattered.

However, the film’s frame-tale doesn’t really work. It’s too slight and undeveloped. The voice-over narrative that opens the film is never repeated, so the audience essentially forgets it and is only reminded right at the end of the film. Furthermore, the film can’t really be from Fernando’s point of view. At one point, Columbus himself briefly narrates the film, and on various occasions the film shows things that happen when Columbus is not present and could not possibly know about. Instead, it’s just a clumsy narrative technique that wasn’t well-thought-out.

Want to Know More?

1492: Conquest of Paradiseis available on Amazon.

If you want to read Fernando’s biography of his father, you can find it on Amazon as The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus: by his Son Ferdinand.

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1492: The Conquest of Paradise: Trouble In Paradise

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1492: The Conquest of Paradise, Adrian de Moxica, Bartolome de las Casas, Christopher Columbus, Francisco Bobadilla, Francisco Roldan, Gerard Depardieu, Latin America, Medieval Europe, Medieval Spain, Michael Winscott, Ridley Scott

As I mentioned in my last post, the traditional Columbus narrative that most Americans learn focuses almost entirely on his first voyage to the New World and the supposed obstacles leading up to that voyage. But 1492: The Conquest of Paradise (1992, dir. Ridley Scott) covers that material in only about 40 minutes or so. The remaining two thirds of the film are devoted to what came after Columbus arrived on the Bahamian island (probably) now known as San Salvador. The fact that Scott devoted a majority of the film to what came after the discovery of the New World is definitely to his credit; this is a portion of Columbus’ story that is largely unknown to the average American. Unfortunately, what is less to Scott’s credit is the systematic effort the film makes to exonerate Columbus from some of the things he did after he discovered San Salvador.

(And to be clear, Columbus discovered the “New World” the same way hipsters discover new bands. It’s new to them, but that doesn’t mean that no one else knew about it before them. They just want to pretend that.)

In an unintentionally accurate metaphor, Columbus is apparently going to stab the surf.

The film depicts Columbus (Gerard Depardieu) as experiencing a deep sense of wonder about the lush jungle environment of San Salvador. In a voice-over narration by Columbus, he says that he has found a new Eden, a theme the film reinforces with shots of snakes (one of whom kills a crew member, in a foreshadowing that this Eden is not all smiles and fluffy bunnies). Throughout the rest of the film, Columbus is shown as idealistically longing for this promised land, envisioning Spaniards and native peoples living together harmoniously. He wants to convert them to Christianity, but he wants to achieve this peacefully.

They discover the native Arawak people and build a tentative relationship with them. Columbus expresses interest in the gold artifacts they possess, and the Arawak chieftain gives him some. Parts of the film are here drawing directly off of Columbus’ journal, but what the film leaves out here is that Columbus took a number of Arawaks captive and tried to force them to show him where the gold came from. He leaves 39 men behind to build a fort and then returns to Spain with gold, parrots, and native men (which the film again conveniently forgets to explain were his prisoners). The film also falsely represents him as introducing tobacco to the Spanish court.

The Second Voyage of Gerard Depardieu

The film then collapses Columbus’ second and third voyage into one long sequence. He prepares a second expedition, but it is clear that his rise to prominence is resented by the Spanish nobility, who emerge as the bad guys of the second half of the film, especially Adrian de Moxica (Michael Winscott), a surly trouble-making noble whose hair and make-up are styled to make him look creepy. Over the course of the film Moxica emerges as the real snake in Eden. He repeatedly wants to kill natives and has to be talked down by Columbus, who just wants peace. It is implied that he helps one of his men rape a native woman. He resents Columbus’ demands that he engage in physical labor. When the natives begin bringing gold dust to the settlement, he chops the hand off a man who hasn’t found any. Columbus arrests him for this, but then a local tribe stages an ambush and Columbus has to take men to suppress it. While he is gone, Moxica is released from prison, burns Columbus’ house and leads a rebellion. When Columbus finally defeats and corners him, Moxica jumps off a cliff rather than surrender.

With a face like that, you know Moxica eats babies for breakfast

The minor problem in this narrative is that Moxica was not the leader of the rebellion; he was only a participant in Francisco Roldán’s rebellion. He was captured and hanged, while Roldán successfully negotiated with Columbus for peace. It’s possible to reconcile much of the film’s version of events with the actual events, but Moxica’s role in the whole matter is exaggerated.

The bigger problem is that Scott is leaving out the fact that Columbus himself was guilty of most of the things the film shows Moxica doing. When Columbus arrived back on San Salvador, he discovered the Taino people had destroyed the fort and killed the men who had stayed behind. In retaliation, Columbus forced the Taino to provide gold dust on a regular basis and cut the hands off those who failed to deliver the tribute. He began enslaving native peoples and may have participated in the rape of at least one of them. He resisted the conversion of the native peoples because it was illegal under Spanish law to enslave Christians. In other words, Columbus showed comparatively little interest in peacefully co-existing with the natives and instead violently exploited and enslaved them.

The subtitle “The Conquest of Paradise” is clearly meant to convey Ridley Scott’s sense that the Spanish mistreated the Carib peoples. The opening credits play over wood-block scenes of Spaniards massacring natives. Depardieu’s Columbus wants to treat them well, while the Spaniards around him want to abuse and exploit them. It’s laudable that Scott wanted to present this side of the story to an American population that is still today largely unaware of these issues, but his insistence on treating Columbus as the hero of the story prevents him from admitting that Columbus was in fact the driving force behind much of this ‘Conquest of Paradise’. So once again, the film’s insistence on a heroic Columbus turns the facts upside down. The hero is shown opposing the evils he himself enacted.

Columbus making some new friends

Nor does the film want to admit that Columbus and his brothers were largely incompetent governors. The film depicts Moxica rebelling because Columbus is preventing him from abusing the natives, because he resents a commoner having authority over him, and because he is unhappy that he is being forced to labor like a commoner. One colonist accuses him of treating the natives better than the Spaniards. So Columbus’ problem is that he’s too good to the natives. Here the typical American film’s prejudice against aristocrats comes through. Moxica is a noble and therefore a bad guy, while Columbus is a commoner and therefore a good guy. Never mind the fact that Columbus had been ennobled by the Spanish government; Columbus remembers his roots.

The film shows natives being sent to Spain as slaves, as a punishment for their rebellion, but never explains who took the decision to impose this punishment, even though it obviously has to be Columbus, since he’s the guy in charge. Then a (fictitious) hurricane strikes San Salvador, badly damaging everything. This provides the opening his opponents need, and they orchestrate his recall to Spain and the loss of his office and much of his property, with the film suggesting that he was left quite poor.

In reality, Columbus made numerous mistakes as governor. He sent Isabella 500 slaves, which angered her, because she objected to the enslavement of Spanish subjects, so she sent them back with a stern rebuke. The colony struggled not because of a hurricane but because of Columbus’ poor decisions. What drove Roldán’s rebellion was apparently a sense that Columbus and his brothers were mismanaging the colony, because the Spaniards wanted the right to exploit the natives for their own profit instead of just for Columbus’ profit. Ultimately, Columbus capitulated and signed a deal with Roldán that established the encomienda system that permitted the virtual enslavement of natives.

Columbus recognized that he was losing control of the situation and asked the Spanish Crown for assistance. Instead, Isabella sent Francisco de Bobadilla to conduct an investigation. Ultimately Bobadilla removed Columbus from office, sent him back to Spain as a prisoner, and assumed the governorship for two years until he was replaced.

In 2006, a scholar in Spain discovered Bobadilla’s report about the accusations against Columbus. The report, which names 23 witnesses, including both supporters and opponents of Columbus, describes him as a tyrant who sought to maintain his authority through violence and intimidation. It claims that Columbus regularly employed torture, mutilation, and slavery as punishment to keep control of the colony. He punished a native rebellion by dismembering the rebels and parading their body parts around. We must be cautious about simply trusting Bobadilla’s report; since he took over Columbus’ office, we can see a motive for exaggerating Columbus’ misdeeds.

But other sources confirm the general picture of the report. One Spanish priest, Bartolemé de las Casas, claimed that between 3 and 4 million native people died under Columbus’ rule. This may well be an exaggeration; an incomplete census taken by Columbus’ brother found 1.13 million people on Hispaniola, but if even a tenth of de las Casas’ figure is accurate, it’s still pretty horrible. By 1540, the Taino people had become extinct; in 1514, the native population of Hispaniola had been reduced to around 22,000. In 1542, de las Casas’ report about the Spanish treatment of the natives shocked Charles V into abolishing the encomienda system, although the system that replaced it wasn’t much better.

However, in fairness to Columbus, not all of the death toll was intentional; the natives were particularly vulnerable to Old World diseases that had inadvertently been brought along. Claims that Columbus presided over a virtual holocaust of natives are a conflation of his actual misdeeds with a death toll from disease that Columbus could not have anticipated or prevented.

Bobadilla’s report wasn’t rediscovered until more than a decade after 1492 was released, so Scott couldn’t have included these specific charges, but much of Columbus’ brutality against the natives and the charges of mismanagement were well known to scholars when he made the film. So while Scott wants to be honest with the audience about how poorly the Spanish treated the native peoples, he is also engaging in misdirection, trying to shift the blame for Columbus’ actions onto Moxica. He’s trying to eat his cake and have it too, and the result is a film that obscures the past as much as it reveals it.

A Few Other Things

Two other elements of the high school textbook narrative need to be briefly addressed. The first is that Columbus never realized what he had found. In the film, when he is removed from office (which happened in 1500), Bobadilla tells him that Amerigo Vespucci has discovered the mainland just beyond the Caribbean Islands. There is some uncertainty about how many voyages Vespucci made (at least one, and possibly two fabricated letters supposedly by Vespucci have muddied the waters), but he definitely sailed along the Brazilian coastline in 1501 and may have made a voyage in 1499. So the film suggests that it was Vespucci who finally located South America.

Amerigo Vespucci

However, in 1498, at least one year before Vespucci, Columbus found the mouth of the Orinoco river and correctly recognized that he had to have found a continent and not just another island. In 1502, during his fourth and last voyage, he found Honduras and Panama, and was told by the natives of another ocean. Thus he probably figured out that he had not found China or India, although we cannot be certain.

Also, the film implies that Columbus died poor. When he returns to Seville after being released from a Spanish prison, he is reunited with his mistress Beatriz (whom the film allows us to think is actually his wife) and she tells him that “they” took everything from their house. It’s true that the Spanish Crown stripped him of most of his titles and refused to pay him the 10% of all profits from the colonies as they had earlier agreed to do, but he was not left penniless. He died in relative comfort and his son was eventually able to reclaim some of the rights that had been granted to him. His descendants today still hold his title “Admiral of the Ocean Sea”, as an epilogue text to 1492 tells us.

Want To Know More?

1492: Conquest of Paradiseis available on Amazon.

Columbus’ writings are available from Penguin as The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Classics)

Marvin Lunenfeld’s 1492: Discovery, Invasion, Encounter: Sources and Interpretations (Sources in Modern History Series)would be a good place to start learning about the impact of Columbus on the ‘new world’ he found. Another good book is William D. and Carla Rahn Philip’s The Worlds of Christopher Columbus.

1492: The Conquest of Paradise: (Not) Your High School Columbus

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1492: The Conquest of Paradise, Christopher Columbus, Flat Earth, Gerard Depardieu, Latin America, Medieval Europe, Medieval Spain, Ridley Scott, The Caribbean

In 1992, there was obvious interest in the anniversary of Columbus’ famous voyage of discovery, so not one but two films were released to cash in on public interest. Ilya Salkind’s Chrisopher Columbus: The Discovery faired quite poorly at the box office and was viewed as something of a fiasco. 1492: The Conquest of Paradise (dir. Ridley Scott) didn’t do very well at the box office either; apparently there was less interest than people thought (Americans not interested in history? What a shock!). But Scott’s film got somewhat better reviews, and it’s probably a little bit more remembered nowadays, so I’m going to tackle this one first. I’ll probably get around to the other film at some later date.

The Basic Problem with Columbus

The essential problem with telling Columbus’ story is that Americans tend to have a very strong idea of what it looks like, largely derived from high school history textbooks. And much of what these textbooks have to say about Columbus is crap.

In his 1995 book Lies My Teacher Told Me, James Loewen examined the most widely-used high school American history textbooks and studied both what percentage of their material was factually correct and how this material was presented to students. His conclusion is that a very high percentage of the material is either provably false or simply made-up speculation. In his chapter on Columbus, he offers a composite paragraph representing what these textbooks generally have to say, which I reproduce here; boldface portions are what scholars can actually say with reasonable certainty.

“Born in Genoa of humble parents, Christopher Columbus grew up to be an experienced seafarer, venturing as far as Iceland and West Africa. His adventures convinced him that the world must be round, and that sailing west could have the fabled riches of the East—spices and gold—, superseding the overland routes, which the Turks had closed off to commerce. To get funding for his enterprise, he beseeched monarch after monarch in Western Europe. After first being dismissed Isabella of Spain, Columbus finally got his chance when Isabella decided to underwrite a modest expedition. Columbus outfitted three pitifully small ships, the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria and set forth from Spain. After an arduous journey of more than two months, during which his mutinous crew nearly threw him overboard, Columbus discovered the West Indies on October 12, 1492. Unfortunately, although he made three more voyages to America, he never knew he had discovered a new world. Columbus died in obscurity, unappreciated and penniless. Yet without his daring, American history would have been very different, because in a sense he made it all possible.” (Loewen, p.54)

As you can see, more of the paragraph is speculation or falsehood than is fact. From your own education, you might remember details such as that the voyage involved heavy storms, that Columbus altered the logs of his journey, or that the crew was on the brink of mutiny when land was sighted. These are common details included in some high school textbooks, but they’re made up. The fact is that we don’t actually know much about the journey itself.

Most famously, you probably heard the story that everyone in Columbus’ day thought the world was flat and that it was possible to sail off the edge of the world. According to the story, Columbus was the first person to realize that the world was round. That’s crap too, made up by Washington Irving for his History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, a three-volume historical novel published in 1828. Irving was consciously trying to create a patriotic American mythology, and he succeeded well enough to embed this myth of the flat earth in American minds still to this day. Mercifully, as Loewen points out, the textbooks have mostly abandoned this particular bit of nonsense.

The fact is that educated people and sailors have understood that the Earth is round since at least the 4^th century BC or so. There are many ways to recognize the sphericity of the planet, including the curved shadow it casts on the moon during a lunar eclipse, the fact that where you are influences which constellations you can see, and the fact that when ships sail away from land, they gradually disappear from view hull-first. The reason that Europeans generally didn’t try sailing westward was that they understood that the circumference of the Earth is more than 22,000 miles. Since they didn’t know about the existence of the Americas, they assumed that the distance from Europe westward to Asia was too great to sail, because it would be impossible to take along enough fresh water for the entire journey. What is important about Columbus here is not that he figured out that the Earth was round, but that he miscalculated the circumference as being much less than it was, and he also thought that Japan was further to the east of China than it is. As a result, he estimated that the journey involved about 3,000 miles, rather than the nearly 20,000 miles it actually involves. So instead of being a brilliant geographer, he was actually quite a bad one.

The First Voyage of Gerard Depardieu

The first third of 1492: The Conquest of Paradise focuses, unsurprisingly, on the lead up to the first voyage of Christopher Columbus (Gerard Depardieu). The film does a delicate dance between the facts and the traditional narrative that Americans have been spoon-fed. It wants to include the stuff you learned in high school, but it doesn’t want to be blatant about it. Right at the start of the film, in 1491, we see Columbus teaching his young son Fernando. He shows Fernando how ships disappear out of view hull-first, and he illustrates the sphericity of the Earth using an orange. So the film implies the flat-earth story without actually asserting it. Young Fernando might plausibly think the Earth is flat, so Columbus teaching him the truth is technically accurate without the film having to claim that everyone thought the world was flat.

Soon he is informed that a friendly monk has arranged for him to have a meeting with the faculty of the University of Salamanca to present his radical theories (in reality, the meeting happened 6 years earlier, because Queen Isabella had already agreed to patronize him). The film shows the faculty understanding that the world is round; they cite Aristotle and Ptolemy’s calculations that the world was too large to allow sailing westward to Asia (actually the calculations are those of Eratosthenes of Cyrene, but at least they’re in the ball-park). In reply, Columbus cites Pierre D’ailly and a few other medieval authorities and argues that the world is smaller than the ancient calculations. So the film gives a reasonably accurate depiction of what the issues are, although it doesn’t explain that Columbus’ figures are woefully wrong. He’s the hero, and he did actually get to the Americas, so explaining that he was wrong and got lucky is sort of embarrassing. But the refusal to acknowledge this seriously distorts at least two scenes in the film, including this one.

Because the film can’t admit that Columbus was mistaken, the uninformed viewer is likely to take away from the scene that the faculty were wrong when in fact they are basically correct. The scholars are depicted as arrogantly mocking Columbus and refusing to consider new ideas. But since Columbus is the hero and must be right, even though his arguments are actually wrong, the scholars opposing him must be wrong and therefore bad, even though they’re actually right. And this, unfortunately, is the basic tone this part of the film takes. Everything Columbus does is good, even though in fact he’s wrong. It makes analyzing the film a little maddening because black is white and down is up.

Even Depardieu can’t figure out what the film is trying to say

Not long after he is turned down, Columbus is approached by Martín Pinzón, a shipmaster who offers to support him. In reality, it was Columbus who approached Pinzón and had to win his support. Pinzón was a skilled mariner who, according to some French stories, had already discovered the Americas four years earlier. He and his two brothers captained the Pinta and the Niña, vessels they owned, and they provided a very substantial sum of money to fund the voyage. They also recognized that the ships and crew that Columbus has arranged for were inadequate and entirely dismissed them. So these three brothers deserve a great deal of the credit for the success of the voyage. But in the film, Martin Pinzón is depicted essentially as a follower (in the words of Carla Rahn Phillips and William D. Phillips, Jr, as a “supportive sidekick”), and his brothers don’t really feature at all.

Just before the voyage, Columbus confesses to his priest that he’s been lying to everyone. He doesn’t actually know how long the journey is. All he knows is that he’s right. The priest angrily tells him that he must tell all the sailors, and when Columbus refuses he threatens to tell the men himself, until Columbus reminds him that he cannot speak about matters he hears in confession. Columbus demands absolution, and the priest gives it to him.

This scene is incredibly problematic. Its obvious purpose is to ratchet up the drama; Columbus is having a crisis of confidence that he needs to work through, and the revelation of his uncertainty raises the stakes for the journey itself. But it’s pointless and made-up drama; the audience knows he’s going to make it. So really all it does it cast Columbus in the mold of the Heroic Individual. He can’t prove he’s right; he just knows he is. What matters is not anything as unimportant as science; what matters is that he’s certain he’s right (except that he’s not actually certain). And he’s not actually right, because he’s completely miscalculated the distance. What saves him is the fortunate existence of the Bahamas, not his certainty that he can get to Asia. So he’s totally wrong, but thinks he’s right even though he doesn’t know he’s right, but his certainty carries him through and he’s rewarded for being certain but wrong! My head hurts just trying to understand what this scene is actually saying. But I guess we’ve always been at war with Eastasia.

And then there’s the wrongness of the theology in this scene. The priest forgives him even though Columbus is still actively committing a sin and risking the lives of all the sailors in the bargain. In Catholic theology, confession only merits absolution if the sinner is penitent and sincerely intends to amend his sin, but Columbus is demanding forgiveness for a sin he’s still actively committing and refusing to give up. But, if it’s one thing I’ve learned in writing this blog, it’s that the medieval clergy just make everything up as they go along, so Columbus gets his absolution basically for being pushy.

The journey itself manages to avoid most of the textbook clichés about the journey. There’s no storms, there’s a little lesson on how a quadrant is used in navigation, and there’s some nice details about life on board a ship. Pinzón gets anxious and Columbus has to point out that there’s not enough water left to turn around and get home. Then he has to persuade a nervous crew that they need to have faith in God and themselves, and that if they succeed, future generations will talk about how brave they all were. That does the trick, despite not being a very good speech. Then Columbus gets bitten by an insect and realizes they must be near land because I guess they don’t have bugs out at sea.

The actual landfall is nicely done. Instead of someone shouting “land!” as your high school textbook probably had it, the ship drifts through a fog bank and then a lush jungle emerges out of the mists in a really beautiful peace of photography that briefly manages to capture what must have been a genuine sense of wonder about the new land they’ve just arrived at. In some ways, it’s the best moment in the whole film.

What’s nice about this film is, unlike your high school textbook’s story about Columbus, the film’s story is only about a third over. The film is actually far more interested in what happened after Columbus arrived than what it took to get there. But that’s for another post.

Want To Know More?

Read James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong Reprint Edition by Loewen, James W. published by Touchstone (2007) Paperback. No, seriously. Read it. It’s a necessary corrective to a lot of the nonsense in American history textbooks, especially since the Texas Board of Education started getting the final say in what goes into high school textbooks. If I were ever going to teach an American history class, I think I’d use this as my textbook. If you teach high school history, you pretty much have to read this. You might also look at Loewen’s Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History (Multicultural Education Series).

If you want a biography of Columbus, one of the better ones is Kirkpatrick Sale’s Christopher Columbus and the Conquest of Paradise: Second Edition (Tauris Parke Paperbacks).But Sale isn’t a historian, and is not always as objective as he ought to be. So read with caution.

Oh, yeah. 1492: Conquest of Paradiseis available on Amazon.