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The Last Voyage of Columbus

by Martin Dugard

Back Bay Books  / Little, Brown & Co, New York (2006)

294 pp, $14.95 in paperback

ISBN 0-316-15456-3

Actually, Dugard writes a fairly sympathetic book about Christopher Colombus's fourth and final voyage of discovery, the one in which he visited Panama in 1503.

A journalist and historian with a beautiful writing style, Dugard was inspired to get into this subject by Warren White's discovery near Nombre de Dios of a ship that may or may not be one of Columbus's. Dugard, like this writer, thinks that it probably is and notes that the circumstances in which leftover guns were abandoned suggest that Colombus feared an attack at the time he scuttled that worm-eaten vessel.

As well he should have.

This is not the tale of an amoral monster, but of an ambitious man who spent much of his life playing palace politics, got a throw-away deal from a Spanish monarchy that didn't really expect him to make it back the first time around, and then when it became increasingly clear what his share would be of the Spanish conquests became the object of a severe feeding frenzy. It's a story of religious and political intrigue, rivalries among sailors and the circumstances in which Spain found itself when the Arabs and Jews were expelled. It's a recounting of the harsh realities of life aboard ships five centuries ago.

All of which provided a background to why Columbus, whose preference was to make Catholics rather than corpses or slaves of the natives, having been cordially greeted and treated as a friend when he landed in Veraguas, ended up stealing and kidnapping and very lucky to get away from Quibian's vengeance in one piece.

This is a fast moving tale of slow moving little ships, of heroism and cowardice, of loyalty and mutiny. An aging mariner going blind from too many years of squinting at the horizon and navigating by the sun, often bedridden with gout and sometimes delirious with fever, Columbus set sail from Spain with a crew largely composed of teenagers who had never been to sea before. Beset by a hurricane he was denied safe harbor by a political rival, and having survived that ordeal and gone on to new discoveries and adventures before finding himself shipwrecked in Jamaica with that same rival dragging his feet about a rescue, he nevertheless made it back to Spain but found himself permanently out of favor.

So how brilliant a work of history is this? It's not a carefully footnoted work resulting from the labors of a PhD in history spending years poring over primary sources in ancient archives. But Dugard knew from the secondary sources where the disagreements were and in these cases did occasionally refer to the primary sources when reaching conclusions about old controversies --- not so much to resolve the debates of academia but to get the story of a great adventure right. The result is popular writing for thinking people, a valuable piece of the puzzle for someone trying to figure out Panamanian history, a good read for rainy season days.

It's also a book about how a man who started out with honorable intentions managed to tick off the locals. A lot has changed in 500 years, but not very much about human nature, so that morality play, too, is a useful lesson for our times.

Books, The Last Voyage of Columbus
Film, The Good Shepherd

Theater, Honk Jr.