Suddenly it seemed as if his prayers had been answered: “I saw several things that were indications of land.” For one thing, “A large flock of sea birds flew overhead.” And for another, a slender reed floated past his flagship, Santa María, and it was green, indicating it had grown nearby. Pinta’s crew noticed the same thing, as well as a “manmade” plank, carved by an unknown hand, perhaps with an “iron tool.” Those aboard Niña spotted a stick, equally indicative that they were approaching land. He encouraged the crew to give thanks rather than mutiny at this critical moment, doubled the number of lookouts, and promised a generous reward to the first sailor to spot terra firma.

And then, for hours, nothing.

Around ten o’clock that night, Columbus anxiously patrolled the highest deck, the stern castle. In the gloom, he thought he saw something resembling “a little wax candle bobbing up and down.” Perhaps it was a torch belonging to fishermen abroad at night, or perhaps it belonged to someone on land, “going from house to house.” Perhaps it was nothing more than a phantom sighting, common at sea, even for expert eyes. He summoned a couple of officers; one agreed with his assessment, the other scoffed. No one else saw anything, and Columbus did not trust his own instincts. As he knew from experience, life at sea often presented stark choices. If he succeeded in his quest to discover the basis of a Spanish empire thousands of miles from home, he would be on his way to fulfilling his pledge to his royal sponsors and attaining heroic status and unimaginable wealth. After all the doubts and trials he had endured, his accomplishment would be vindication of the headiest sort. But if he failed, he would face mutiny by his obstreperous crew, permanent disgrace, and the prospect of death in a lonely patch of ocean far from home.

Addressing the “most Christian and very Exalted, Excellent and mighty Princes, King and Queen of the Spains and of the Islands of the Sea, our Lord and Lady, in the present year 1492”—his Sovereigns, Ferdinand and Isabella, in other words—he reminisced about their war against the Moors (Muslims), especially their memorable retaking of the “the very great City of Granada”—the former Moorish stronghold. Columbus was there, or so he claimed. He “saw the Royal Standards of Your Highnesses” appear on the “towers of Alhambra,” the former seat of Moorish rule. He even saw “the Moorish King come forth to the gates of the city and kiss the Royal Hands of Your Highnesses.” Even then, Columbus reminded them, he was thinking of his grand design to establish trade with the fabled “Grand Khan” in the east, the “King of Kings.” And it so happened, according to his epic recitation of events, that the Sovereigns, avowed enemies of “all idolatries and heresies,” resolved to send him—Christopher Columbus—to India in order to convert those in distant lands to “our Holy Faith”—the only faith. Recasting events slightly to flatter Ferdinand and Isabella, he claimed that they “ordained that I should not go by land”—why, as a mariner, would he?—but “by the route of the Occident,” in other words, by water.

In reciting this very recent history, Columbus made sure to incorporate the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, accomplished by a royal decree dated March 31, 1492, which he welcomed as the final impetus for his voyage. “After all the Jews had been exiled from your realms and dominions in the same month of January Your Highnesses commanded me that with a sufficient fleet I should go to India, and for this granted me many graces.” And what graces they were. They “ennobled me so that henceforth I might call myself ‘Don’ and be ‘Grand Admiral of the Ocean Sea and Viceroy and Perpetual Governor’ of all the islands and mainland that I should discover and win.” Not only that, “My eldest son should succeed me, and thus from rank to rank for ever.” His preening revealed that hereditary titles and wealth had inspired him to go as much as anything else.

Thereafter, his tone became more practical and objective.

“I departed from the city of Granada on the 12th day of the month of May of the same year 1492, on a Saturday, and came to the town of Palos, which is a seaport, where I fitted for the sea three vessels”—Niña, Pinta, and his flagship, Santa María—“well suited for such an enterprise, and I departed well furnished with very many provisions and many seamen on the third day of the month of August on a Friday, at half an hour before sunrise, and took the route for the Canary Islands of Your Highnesses . . . that I might thence take my course and sail until I should reach the Indies, and give the letters of Your Highnesses to those princes, and thus comply with what you had commanded.”

That was the plan, in all its grandeur and simplicity.

His journal was to form an important part of the enterprise, and he explained his purpose: “I thought to write down upon this voyage in great detail from day to day all that I should do and see, and encounter.” Like all such journals, it had its share of unconscious distortions, intentional omissions, which occurred whenever he deemed it necessary to conceal his route from rivals, or when the reality of his exploration strayed from his expectations. For all its lacunae, it remains the best guide to both his deeds and deceptions. With it, he planned to “make a new chart of navigation, upon which I shall place the whole sea and lands of the Ocean Sea in their proper positions under their bearings, and, further, to compose a book, and set down everything as in a real picture.” He knew that keeping this record, in addition to all his other duties, would tax his energy to the hilt. “Above all it is very important that I forget sleep,” he reminded himself, “and labor much at navigation, because it is necessary, and which will be a great task.”

As he embarked on this task, something happened on that October night, something unexpected, appearing sooner than anticipated: the light, if it was a light, from a distant shore, telling him that he had arrived.

As Columbus passed a sleepless night, the fleet coasted close enough to the shore for his disgruntled men to spy “naked people” rather than the sophisticated and handsomely garbed Chinese that he had expected to meet. Based on his naive reading of Marco Polo’s Travels, the navigator believed he had arrived at the eastern shore of China just as he had promised Ferdinand and Isabella he would.

He would spend the rest of his life—and three subsequent voyages—attempting to make good on that pledge. Many in Europe were inclined to dismiss Polo’s account, by turns fantastic and commercial, as a beguiling fantasy, while others, Columbus especially, regarded it as the pragmatic travel guide that Polo intended. His attempt to find a maritime equivalent to Marco Polo’s journey to Asia bridged the gap between the medieval world of magic and might, and the stark universe of predator and prey of the Renaissance. Although Marco Polo had completed his journey two hundred years earlier, Columbus nevertheless expected to find the Mongol empire intact, and Kublai Khan, or another Grand Khan like him, alive and well and ready to do business. But Kublai was long gone, and his empire in ruins.

Protected by his delusion, Columbus conveniently concluded that he had reached an island or peninsula on the outskirts of China, a leap made possible only by omitting the Americas and the Pacific Ocean from his skewed geography. And as for the promised reward, which should have gone to the humble seaman, Rodrigo de Triana, who had first sighted land, Columbus decided that his own vision of the glowing candle took precedence, and so he kept the proceeds for himself.

To the end of his days, Columbus remained convinced that he sailed for, and eventually arrived at, the outskirts of Asia. His unshakeable Chinese delusion motivated his entire subsequent career in exploration. No comparable figure in the age of discovery was so mistaken as to his whereabouts. Had Columbus been the one to name his discovery, he might well have called it “Asia” rather than “America.”

Obsessed with his God-given task of finding Asia, Columbus undertook four voyages within the span of a decade, each very different, each designed to demonstrate that he could sail to China within a matter of weeks and convert those he found there to Christianity. But as the voyages grew in complexity and sophistication, and as Columbus failed to reconcile his often violent experiences as a captain and provincial governor with the demands of his faith, he became progressively less rational and more extreme, until it seemed as if he lived more in his glorious illusions than in the grueling reality his voyages laid bare. If the first voyage illustrates the rewards of exploration, the subsequent three voyages illustrate the costs—political, moral, and economic.

The celebrated first voyage (1492–93) illustrated the discovery of a New World and all its promise, and portended much trouble to come. After this triumph, matters darkened considerably during the hastily assembled second voyage (1493–96). Columbus intended to solidify his navigational accomplishments of the previous year, colonize the New World, and locate China once and for all. But because of his inability to control the men of this vastly expanded fleet, and his inability to solve the China puzzle, he came close to squandering everything he had attained.

The grim third voyage (1498–1500) was entirely different in character, taking Columbus farther south than ever before. Although he kept up a brave pretense of finding China, he was forced to acknowledge that he might have stumbled across a separate and distinct “new world.” Meanwhile, his management of the fledgling Spanish empire, and his quest for gold, devolved into cruel mistreatment of the Indians. The master of navigation became the victim on land of his lack of administrative ability.

As the voyage proceeded, Columbus became increasingly detached from reality, losing himself in extended mystical reveries. At one point, he persuaded himself he had located the entrance to paradise. Throughout his quest, the rational, in the form of maritime expertise, and the mystical occasionally blended into harmonious action, but more often were at odds, resulting in conflicts extending from the natural world to the supernatural. Despite his web of delusions, Columbus discovered so many lands that if he had succeeded in retaining control of all he had explored, with the right to pass on his titles to his heirs—as Ferdinand and Isabella had once promised—he and his new dynasty would have ruled over a kingdom larger and more powerful than Spain itself. So Ferdinand and Isabella decided to replace him with a lesser official, but, playing to his vanity, they permitted him to retain empty titles such as admiral and viceroy.

Ever resilient, Columbus beseeched his Sovereigns for the means to make one more voyage to the New World. His wish was soon granted, and why not? It was more convenient to send Columbus away than to keep him at home.

The wild fourth voyage (1502–4), often called the High Voyage, was a family enterprise, and Columbus included his young son Ferdinand to help secure the family legacy. Ferdinand’s account of his father’s life is an often overlooked trove of information and observations about Columbus, not as history has judged him, but as his intimates saw him—the story of a father and son caught in the grip of imperial ambition. What began as a journey of personal vindication of his honor ended as a Robinson Crusoe–like adventure of shipwreck and rescue imperiling the lives of all who participated. No wonder it was Columbus’s favorite of his four voyages.

At close range, Columbus’s accomplishments seem anything but foreordained or clear-cut. An aura of chaos hovers over his entire life and adventures, against which he tries to impose his remarkably serene will. But as his son Ferdinand makes clear, his father is always vulnerable—to the whims of monarchs, to tides and storms, and to the moods of the sailors serving under him. He emerges as a hostage to fortune in the high-stakes game of European expansion; time and again, his exploits could have gone one way or another, were it not for his singular vision.

In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII initiated a new calendar, still in use today, to compensate for accumulated errors in the Julian calendar. Ten days were omitted, so October 5, 1582, became October 15.

Thus, the eclipse Columbus experienced in Jamaica on February 29, 1504, corresponds to March 10, 1504, in the Gregorian calendar.