The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus by Matthew Restall

The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus

By Matthew Restall

WW Norton 2025

Penn State University history professor Matthew Restall is certainly correct in opening his delightful new book The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus by declaring that Columbus is still very much alive, “hailed as the heroic founder of democratic nations and the evil architect of genocide.” In the United States of the 21st century, the Columbus Day holiday is awkwardly, insistently twinned with something called Indigenous Peoples’ Day, which is intended to honor the people Columbus exploited, even though it would only really make sense if held in northeastern Africa, the only place on Earth where humans were ever indigenous. The counter-branding effort is understandable, however, since the career of the real, non-legendary Columbus was one long tangle of dauntless seamanship and jaw-dropping barbarity and ambition.

That tangle has always been there, and Restall is again correct in seeing that it’s given rise to many different versions of his subject, reflected in his book’s chapters: the Genoese, the Admiral, the Saint, the Lover, and so on. In pursuing each of these (often largely separate) versions of Columbus, The Nine Lives of Chrstopher Columbus becomes a kind of collage biography, spotlessly conducted by an authority who manages to master the vast Columbiana literature while still keeping an eye on TikTok for the latest Columbus memes. It's an oddly spellbinding performance, easily as involving as any more straightforward biography of the man could be.

A mountain of those straightforward biographies get mentioned or content-checked in the course of The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus; Restall’s End Notes is an overflowing banquet of Columbiana, complete with the author’s extensive thoughts on all of it. Columbus has been the focus of countless hagiographies, and Restall doesn’t outright dismiss any of them, instead sifting for whatever bits might be important for a contemporary assessment. Washington Irving’s big 1828 biography gets the spotlight, as does William Prescott’s glowing portrait of a Columbus who had not “a single blemish on his moral character” – which is quite the stretch for a man who was so eagerly hungry to turn other men into slaves.

Columbus was also hungry for personal glory, coveting the title “Admiral of the Ocean Sea” above even the riches he plundered. As Restall points out, the title was itself a signature of adventure:

Persisting to this day as an aristocratic title, passed down through twenty generations to the current don Cristóbal Colón, the title evokes the triumphal narrative that has come to dominate Columbiana. In that story, the admiral did not merely cross the Ocean Sea, he conquered it. The three small ships of his First Voyage bobbed on a sea that was frighteningly empty, a vast churning void whose threatening, undulating surface barely hid a bottomless violet-black graveyard.

That little shocker – that there is a living don Cristóbal Colón, a current holder of the title “Admiral of the Ocean Sea” – is one of many odd, fascinating details littered throughout Restall’s book about the man whose sneering contemporaries referred to him as the Admiral of the Mosquitoes. When writing about Columbus the Lover, for instance, Restall deals firmly with the rumors that Columbus had sex with manatees and also necessarily addresses the topic of a certain sexually transmitted disease:

Although scholars now believe that different species or subspecies of the syphilis bacterium Treponema pallidum likely existed on both sides of the pre-Columbian Atlantic, the accusation against Columbus is well rooted. It is mostly an indirect allegation (sailors on his ships spread the venereal disease) but sometimes a direct one (Columbus himself did it.) In this century, both variants are easily found scattered across the internet, in news reports, online comments, and social media sites.

The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus cannily leverages the vast mythologizing of Columbus into a narrative of its own, and watching Restall sort through all those mythologies in search of the real man is a genuinely entertaining little voyage of its own.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News