Last Voyage of Columbus, The by Martin Dugard

The long freckled face with the aquiline nose, so ruddy at sea, had assumed an alabaster pallor during his confinement. He was forty-nine in an era when most men died before thirty widowed, crow's feet darting across his temples, the father of one son by marriage and another out of passion.

The fragile gust was yet another reminder that the freedom of wind and open sea-the freedom that had defined his life-beckoned less than a half mile away. A verdant morning breeze wafted in through the window, on its way from the green mountains of Hispaniola out to the Caribbean's turquoise waters.

Even lying flat on his back, he could feel their heaviness against his flesh and anticipate the manacles' noisy clank as he threw his feet over the edge of the bed.Ĭolumbus was alone in the bare cell. His ankles and wrists had long ago been rubbed raw by iron shackles. Armed guards stood outside the thick wooden door. It was eight years, almost to the hour, since he had discovered the New World. The sun was rising over Santo Domingo, the city named for his father, as Christopher Columbus woke to yet another morning in prison. Martin Dugard’s thrilling account of this final voyage brings Columbus to life as never before-adventurer, businessman, father, lover, tyrant, and hero. On his tail were his enemies, sent from Europe to track him down. He would battle to survive amid mutiny, war, and a shipwreck that left him stranded on a desert isle for almost a year. Columbus would face the worst storms a European explorer had ever encountered. Of the four ships he led into the unknown, none returned. It was without doubt his most treacherous. Columbus himself would later claim that his fourth voyage was his greatest.

What follows is one of history’s most epic - and forgotten - adventures.

And he plots for one great escape, one last voyage to the ends of the earth, one final chance to prove himself. The tall, freckled explorer with the aquiline nose, whose flaming red hair long ago turned gray, passes his days in prayer and rumination, trying to ignore the waterfront gallows that are all too visible from his cell. Less than a decade after discovering the New World, he has fallen into disgrace, accused by the royal court of being a liar, a secret Jew, and a foreigner who sought to steal the riches of the New World for himself. Christopher Columbus, stripped of his title Admiral of the Ocean Seas, waits in chains in a Caribbean prison built under his orders, looking out at the colony that he founded, nurtured, and ruled for eight years.

Last Voyage of Columbus, The by Martin Dugard