Admiral of the Ocean Sea

This is a sailor's life of the greatest sailor of them all. There has never been a biography of Columbus like it. The reader will feel, and feel correctly, that he knows Columbus — who and what he was, what he did and how he did it — better than the men who sailed with him.

Mr. Morison is a writer with a vivid pen, an historian skilled in sifting the evidence, and a navigator who under sail has followed the paths Columbus made. He read all the records, he did all the dusty research — and then he went and saw for himself. By such a method the old story leaps to sudden life. Mr. Morison's narrative has an early morning freshness, for he shared the Discoverer's tribulations of wind and weather and navigation in craft of much the same dimensions as the two smaller caravels of Columbus.