The Great Explorers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). The section on Columbus includes a summary of the traditional view on Columbus’s intended destination. While you’re at it, read the rest of the book; there was no better historian of the sea than Morison .

Kirkpatrick Sale,

The Conquest of

(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990). Sale offers one of the latest (and best) presentations of the Vignaud position as part of a more general attack on Columbus, in which he blames the explorer for just about everything that went wrong with America, from enslaving blacks and Indians to destroying the environment. Not always convincing, but always lively and provocative .

John Noble Wilford,

The Mysterious History of Columbus (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991). An absorbing survey of the ways historians from Columbus’s time on have mythologized, debunked, and otherwise interpreted the man and his journeys .

Valerie I. J. Flint,

The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1992). A fascinating, though somewhat academic, interpretation of the medieval sources of Columbus’s view of the world; here is, Flint writes, “not the New World Columbus found, but the Old World which he carried with him in his head.”

William D. Phillips Jr. and Carla Rahn Phillips,

The Worlds of Christopher Columbus (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1992). A balanced history of the explorer’s life and times, especially strong on his time in Spain .

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