In August, 1498, three months into his Third Voyage, Christopher Columbus found himself sailing toward the nipple of the world. He had just spent several weeks navigating off what he believed to be an island in the Far East but was actually Venezuela, and during that time he had noticed several curious phenomena. Great quantities of fresh water were flowing into the ocean; the climate seemed unusually temperate for a region so close to the equator; and the North Star was wandering from its course. Putting all this together, Columbus reasoned that the world was shaped like a ball with a breastlike protuberance. He felt himself not just crossing the ocean but going up it, his whole ship being lifted gently toward the sky. Had he reached the very tip of the protuberance, he concluded, he would have sailed straight into the Terrestrial Paradise. He found this theory so compelling that two months later he sent news of it in a long letter to his patrons, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. What they made of it was not recorded.

Columbus was one of history’s great optimists. When he read in Marco Polo that the palace of the Japanese king had floors of gold “two fingers thick,” he accepted it as fact. Cuba, he was convinced, was part of the Malay Peninsula; things of value were more plentiful in the south; and the riches of the Orient—or, barring that, the rewards of Paradise—were always just around the corner. On all of these points, of course, he was wrong, and should have been fatally so, except that he was also fantastically lucky.

Columbus made four round-trip voyages from Spain to the New World, each of which was a stunning feat of seamanship. To sail west across the Atlantic, a ship needs to find the easterly trade winds; to sail east it has to find the less consistent westerlies, and can easily end up becalmed. Several times, Columbus almost didn’t make it back. Returning from his First Voyage, he ran into a storm so ferocious that he decided his best hope for posterity was to write up an account of his discoveries, seal it in a barrel, and toss the whole thing overboard. (This manuscript was “found” four centuries later, in a wonderfully clumsy fraud.) But Columbus kept squeaking by and, in keeping with his general view of things, interpreted his good fortune as a sign that he had been singled out by God. In his later years, he assembled a book of Biblical passages showing that his discoveries were a prelude to the Day of Judgment, and took to signing his name with an elaborate Christological cryptogram. By this point, he may or may not have been mad.

The version of Columbus’s life that most of us grew up on was invented in the early nineteenth century. Probably the most famous “fact” about Columbus—his insistence, against overwhelming scholastic opposition, that the world was round—was the work of a fabulist, Washington Irving, who wrote the first modern biography of the explorer. (Irving concocted the “fact” to back up his thesis that Columbus’s journeys expressed a bold, proto-American rationalism.) Subsequently, Columbus was taken up by Irish and Italian immigrants, who saw his story, or what passed for it, as proof that Catholicism was no bar to patriotism. The four-hundredth anniversary of his discovery of the New World, in 1892, prompted a yearlong national celebration that included, among scores of tributes, the creation of Columbus Circle in Manhattan. In 1985, Congress established the Christopher Columbus Quincentenary Jubilee Commission, apparently assuming that the five-hundredth anniversary would proceed along similar lines. But by then nearly everything about Columbus, starting with the very notion of discovery, was being reëvaluated.

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Elizabeth Kolbert has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1999. Previously, she worked at the Times, where she wrote the Metro Matters column and served as the paper’s Albany bureau chief. Her three-part series on global warming, “The Climate of Man,” won the 2006 National Magazine Award for Public Interest. In 2010, she received the National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism. She is the editor of “The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2009” and the author of “The Prophet of Love: And Other Tales of Power and Deceit,” “Field Notes from a Catastrophe,” and “The Sixth Extinction,” for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 2015. She received the Blake-Dodd Prize, from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, in 2017. Her latest book is “Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future.”