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Quest for Columbus: America’s most wanted
Carl Muller meets the man who is pinning down Christopher Columbus
Peter Dickson of Arlington, Virginia, was in a pool chair at a Kandy hotel when I met him. He's been unravelling the threads - a tangle of threads, he says - that will reveal the true identity of Christopher Columbus!

He told me so much that I listened avidly and asked if I could make notes. He smiled. "You can begin by noting that I was a former intelligence analyst for the CIA." I raised an eyebrow and he laughed loudly. "Now I'm an independent researcher, I follow paper trails."

We spent over an hour together. After all, I was in conversation with a man who wrote that 1978 biography, Kissinger and the Meaning of History. He is now researching Columbus, and the story so far is fascinating.

It all began when Dickson asked himself whether Columbus was a good sea-going navigator who was the son of a poor, illiterate Genoese wool-weaver; or was he a politically well-connected explorer who had to flee the aftermath of a royal conspiracy that came unstuck. Dickson went on his paper trail: legal documents and family records. He said he wanted to de-mythicise the popular Columbus story that everyone has swallowed.

He found, in sifting through 500-year-old passenger-ship registers and notarial records, the historical evidence that practically rewrote the context of events preceding the discovery of America. What he found, he said, was "mind-blowing". Even he could not have envisioned it. "How could the historians have overlooked it all for so long? It's a huge intellectual scandal!"

Dickson's curiosity was roused because of Columbus' ambiguous origins. He had access to the royal courts of Portugal and Spain years before he set sail on his voyage of discovery. It meant that Columbus had some blue-collar background and economic status. Also, he belonged to the Colon family; so Dickson began to trace Columbus' family lineage through other members of that family.

He was then told by Professor Richard Kagan of the Johns Hopkins University that the old passenger-ship records for Spain from the 1500s still existed. In the first volume of Catalogo de Pasajeros a Indias, 1509-1534 that lay in the University of Maryland's McKeldon Library, he found a record of Francesco Colon. "It was a genealogical side-door, but it produced the Columbus connection. It stunned me."

As Dickson said, Columbus married Filippa Perestrello Moniz, a girl of the most powerful family in Portugal and who belonged to the Braganza clan. His eyes gleamed. "How could Columbus have married so high if he was just the son of an illiterate wool-weaver?"

What Dickson has now got together is that by 1485, most of the Braganza family fled Portugal for the safety of Spain after the clan had unsuccessfully tried to assassinate Portugal's King Joao. The king had twelve of the conspirators executed, ten of whom were related to Columbus' wife. Others fled to Spain at the time Columbus decided to come to Portugal with his infant son. Filippa went to Spain, reluctant to accompany her husband to Portugal, fearing the wrath of King Joao. However, by the time Columbus went to Spain to seek the investment of Ferdinand and Isabella for his voyages, King Joao had pieced together his close family ties with the Braganza clan. This explains why King Joao issued a warrant for Columbus' capture and sent three ships to stop the explorer's voyage.

"Columbus escaped, but this changes the historical context of that first voyage. Columbus was a wanted man! How do we write about this great historical event of 1492 from that perspective?"

As far as Dickson has progressed, his findings have perplexed the Italians because it poses serious genealogical questions; upset the Spanish because the whole dynamic of the discovery of America is becoming more Portuguese in context; annoyed the Portuguese because their historians always played down the murderous bent of King Joao. “I'm researching Filippa. Historians can't tell what happened to her. Why would she marry a poor wool-weaver's son? The social gap was enormous. Unless, of course, Columbus was a different man than what everyone thinks he was. Once I track down Filippa, a lot of things are going to fall into place.”

The crows were settling in the trees when I rose to go. Dickson says he will soon put it all together in a book but only when he can definitely prove that Columbus was a filthy rich man and that his wealth was enough to pull Ferdinand and Isabella into investing in his venture.

Soon the world is going to know and all America, Italy, Spain and Portugal will know who Columbus really was. Nice to think that fair warning of this momentous story comes from Kandy!

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