In 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue. And however difficult that first voyage with the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria was, it was a pleasure cruise compared to the rough seas he’s had to navigate over the past three or four decades, a period during which his reputation has gone from one of history‘s greatest heroes to one of its worst villains. Once celebrated for his accomplishments, he is now condemned for them, indicted as instigator and mastermind of colonialism, imperialism, genocide, and a host of other maladies that have afflicted humanity ever since he set sail. The evil of the West incarnate, Columbus has become the personification of that most infamous of monsters: the dead white European male.

While this iconoclasm may seem to be a late 20th-century development (one that culminated in the 21st century with the destruction of multiple statues of the Genoese mariner during the George Floyd riots in 2020), turbulence on Columbus’s journey to posterity is by no means a new phenomenon. As Matthew Restall makes clear in The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus, an informative and often eyebrow-raising new study of the many faces Columbus has worn — and been made to wear — over the years, debate about the nature and significance of the man and his achievement began almost as soon as he set foot back in Spain. People, it turns out, have been fighting over Columbus’s remains for centuries.

Restall’s subject isn’t Columbus, but what he calls “Columbiana,” the detritus of fantasy, rumor, innuendo, and falsehood that has accreted around him for the last 500 years. These “misconceptions and myths,” he avers, are the reason Columbus has “become more alive, more present, through the past five centuries,” especially the last two. But in one of Columbiana’s numerous ironies, it has thrived precisely the more........

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