When it comes to transcendent historical figures, Christopher Columbus doth bestride the narrow world like a colossus. Like Gaius Julius Caesar, his ancient Italian kin, Cristoforo Colombo altered the course of human events. Columbus was first and foremost an explorer. In fact, he discovered more territories than Ferdinand Magellan.

“As a master mariner,” wrote historian Samuel Eliot Morison, “Columbus was supreme in his generation. Never was a title more justly bestowed than the one which he most jealously guarded, Admiral of the Ocean Sea.” His supposed sins are, if not fabricated, greatly overstated. Columbus did not introduce slavery to the New World. According to Carol Delaney, a former Stanford University anthropologist, “Slavery was common, even among [native] people in the Caribbean.”