Samuel Eliot Morison · 1942 · sea

Samuel Eliot Morison's 1942 life of Columbus, which took the Pulitzer and remains the best-charted account of the four voyages - because Morison sailed the routes himself in a ketch and a schooner before writing it, checking landfalls and courses against what a fifteenth-century navigator could actually have done.

1. 1
   Palos de la Frontera

   3 August 1492, and three ships leave the Rio Tinto - two caravels and a converted merchantman, and a Genoese who has spent seven years failing to persuade anybody that the ocean is narrower than it is.

2. 2
   San Sebastian

   La Gomera in the Canaries, the last land: refitting, provisioning, and the westerly departure on 6 September into the trade winds, which nobody in Europe knew would carry a ship across.

3. 3
   San Salvador

   2 a.m. on 12 October, a sailor named Rodrigo sights a white cliff in the moonlight - and Columbus goes ashore at an island the Lucayans call Guanahani and takes possession of it for Castile.

4. 4
   Cuba

   Coasting west in the belief that this is the Asian mainland and Cathay lies a few days further - and sending an ambassador inland with letters for the Great Khan, who returns having found tobacco instead.

5. 5
   La Navidad

   Hispaniola, and the Santa Maria aground on Christmas night - her timbers used to build a fort, and thirty-nine men left in it because there is no longer room to carry them home.

6. 6
   Lisbon

   Driven into the Tagus by a storm in March 1493 and obliged to explain himself to the King of Portugal, who had turned the voyage down twice - the most awkward audience in the history of exploration.

7. 7
   Dominica

   The second voyage, seventeen ships and twelve hundred men, making a faster southerly crossing - and a landfall in the Lesser Antilles that opens the whole eastern Caribbean at once.

8. 8
   La Isabela

   The first intended European town in the Americas, founded on a bad harbour on a fever coast - and abandoned within five years, by which time La Navidad's garrison had been dead for one.

9. 9
   Trinidad

   The third voyage, further south again, and three hills sighted together which give the island its name - and beyond it, water so fresh that Columbus concludes correctly that a continent must be draining into it.

10. 10
    Paria

    The mainland of South America, 1 August 1498 - the first European landing on the continent, made by a man who decides he has found the earthly paradise and says so in writing.

11. 11
    Santo Domingo

    The colony in revolt, and a royal commissioner who puts the Admiral in irons and ships him home - Columbus keeping the chains afterwards and asking to be buried with them.

12. 12
    Veragua

    The fourth voyage and the Panama coast, looking for a strait through to the Indian Ocean that is not there - and finding gold, and a hostile shore, and ships eaten through by shipworm.

13. 13
    St Ann's Bay

    Marooned on Jamaica for a year with two sinking caravels run aground for shelter - and the lunar eclipse of February 1504, which Columbus predicts from his almanac to frighten the Taino into feeding him.

14. 14
    Valladolid

    1506, and a death in lodgings - still convinced he had reached Asia, still in litigation with the Crown, and buried four times on two continents before anyone settled where he should stay.