Reviews for The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus

The average rating for The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-03-25 00:00:00 Bob Smith I bought this book for a course I took on colonial American history during my sophomore year of college. I never read more than 50 pages of it, probably, since I was drowning in other assignments and readings at the time, but I held onto it in the optimistic hopes of returning to some day in the future. It's been a few years since then, but I have finally gotten around to reading this book cover-to-cover! But I have to admit, even for someone like me who leans towards academic texts, this was a hard book to get through. It's lengthy and full of complicated details, and even though the subject matter is absolutely fascinating, the first quarter of the book was still a bit of a slog. Nonetheless, once I got into the hang of it, I quite enjoyed it all. Although the mindset of the fifteenth century European was depressing as all hell, I knew almost nothing about the lives of the various indigenous folks first encountered in the Atlantic, and Abulafia does a fantastic job at showing how these various peoples appeared to Columbus and his peers. Prior to this class (and later, this book) I had never even really heard of the Canary Islands, and this book does a thorough, albeit intimidatingly so, job of showing the fifteenth century mindset and the astonishment, wonder, and curiosity brought up by the European discovery of places like the Canary Islands and islands off the new world. I also liked how Abulafia captured the personalities of individuals from this early time of discovery. Columbus is obviously somewhat of a main character here, but plenty of stories of indigenous people (mostly chiefs, but some others as well) and other Europeans get page time as well. One particular moment that stood out to me, among many, is of a native man (I forget from which group) who was invited to sleep on deck of a European ship, and he took care to smooth down the feathers of his feathered headdress before laying his head down to make sure it didn't ruffle. Little moments like that go a long way into making this less of a story about Grand Ideas and Discoveries and more about individuals interacting with other individuals. Too bad I already know how it all ended.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-06-05 00:00:00 Joaquin Silveira A fascinating book which looks at the 'discoveries' in the Atlantic specifically from the viewpoint of the interactions between Europeans and those who were 'discovered', and what attitudes and preconceptions led the Spanish and Portuguese to view the 'New World' in the way they did. The author argues that the early discoveries by Columbus and Vespucci set the scene for what followed, with the decimation of millions of people in two continents, including of course sophisticated civilisations such as those of the Mexica (Aztecs) and the Inca. If the existence of developed civilisations answered the question of whether the newly-discovered people were truly human or not, it never satisfactorily resolved the bigger question of their rights. Or, that is to say, while there might have been high-minded declarations of their rights based on the arguments of Las Casas and others, in practice they were largely ignored.