The volume under review is a beautiful example of the bookmaker’s art. Printed on matte-coated paper and expensively bound in Sweden, it was written and illustrated by an artist whose previous works, The Quest for India and The Ship, led him naturally to a study of Columbus. Some of the illustrations are explicatory, but too many represent only Landström’s imagination of what Columbus and his shipmates might have seen.
Determining the positive contribution of this work to Columbus historiography is both a simple and a complex task. The book is not a biography of Columbus in the conventional sense. The author admits that he has not unearthed any new material. Indeed, in large measure this is a documentary narrative retold by Landström from familiar contemporary sources: the Historias of Las Casas and Bernáldez, Ferdinand Columbus’ biography of his father, and Columbus’ own Jottrnal. This is not an effective or readable method of writing a biography or telling a story.
What then is the book’s raison d’être? If anything, it is the exposition of what Landström considers as Columbus’ great secret, the “revolutionary innovation” (p. 191) which persuaded the Spanish monarchs to back him. This secret was his route across the ocean: west with the trade winds, and back to Spain with the westerlies. Columbus had supposedly acquired this singular bit of maritime lore as a result of observations he had made on voyages before the transatlantic crossing of 1492.
This interpretation is simple conjecture on the author’s part, resting on absolutely no evidence. It was mostly chance mixed with a little common sense that Columbus followed a latitude where the northeast tradewinds prevailed. More than likely, as Samuel Eliot Morison has noted, he chose this particular route because, according to contemporary maps, Cipangu (Japan) lay on this parallel. Furthermore, a route due west from the Iberian peninsula was out of the question, for every sailor knew that Portuguese mariners had attempted to pursue such a course many times only to be driven back by the prevailing westerlies. Even if Columbus did know of the northeast winds in the region of the Canaries, he certainly could not have known that these same winds would prevail all the way to the Orient, his destination, or to America, his landfall. Columbus was lucky.
In addition to the documentary narrative, the reader is given illustrated discussions of navigation (including instruments which Columbus never used), cartography, and tools of the period under study. Landström has a go at reconstructing the Santa María, and his dimensions of 28 feet (beam), 56 feet (length of keel), and 82 feet (overall length) are as good as those of any previously reconstructed model, if somewhat wider than most. The usual portraits of the Discoverer are included, and the author, in a caveat lector, correctly acknowledges that none can be accepted as authentic. His bibliography, while lengthy, is barely adequate. For one thing, Landström failed to utilize Antonio Ballesteros y Beretta’s Cristóbal Colón y el descubrimiento de América (1945), which is probably the best synthesis of Columbus’ early years. A far more grievous omission results from his failure to do more than sample the vast body of excellent peRíodical literature available.
