Columbus in Tales of Transhumanism

Columbus himself never said the world was round - he thought it was pear-shaped and about a quarter of its actual size. Despite his later reputation, his voyage of 1492 wasn’t intended to discover a new continent but to prove that Asia was much closer than anyone had imagined. He was wrong.

Columbus never actually set foot on mainland America - the closest he cam was the Bahamas (probably the small island of Plana Cays) - but made his crew swear an oath that, if anyone asked, they would say they’d reached India. He died in Valladolid in 1506 and remained convinced to the end that he’d reached the coast of Asia.

There is a remarkable degree of uncertainty about Columbus. Mot of the evidence points to him being the son of a Genoese weaver called Domenico Columbo, but there are enough inconsistencies for him to be claimed as Sephardic Jewish, Spanish, Corsican, Portuguese, Catalan or even Greek. He spoke the Genovese dialect (not Italian) as his first tongue and learned to read and write in Spanish (with a marked Portuguese accent) and Latin. He even wrote a secret diary in Greek.

We don’t know what he looked like, as no authentic portrait survives, but his son claimed he was blonde until the age of thirty, whereupon his hair turned completely white. We don’t even know where he is buried. We do know his corpse had its flesh removed, as was the style for the great and the good in the sixteenth century, and that his bones were interred first in Valladolid, then in the Carthusian monastery in Seville, then in Santa Domingo, Cuba, then Havana, then, and apparently finally, in Seville Cathedral in 1898.
However, a casket with his name on remains in Santa Domingo and now Genoa and Pavia have also made competing claims to hold bits and pieces of him. DNA tests are under way, but it seems likely that the final resting place of Christopher Columbus - or Columbo, or Colón (as he preferred) - will remain as contentious as the rest of his life and achievements.