Good God! If anything, Christopher Columbus was an amazingly underrated man!
I understand why he would be underrated, since the general impression modern people have of him is a guy who just stumbled across the new world.
He was pretty amazing. I believe he was the first European mariner to actually divine the warning signs of a hurricane and avoid it...all the others to that point had just stumbled into them.
Another story about him that I find funny, yet is a prime example of his resourcefulness, is the time he and his men were in desperate danger of starving, they were nearly out of food, and the natives didn’t want to help him out (because they had previously cheated and stolen from the natives.)
He knew enough about astronomy to know that a lunar eclipse was going to happen, and he timed it with an hourglass and told the natives that God was going to give them a sign at a certain time, and...voila! They gladly gave him the food!
A great book about him is by Samuel Eliot Morison, “Christopher Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea”. Very well written.
(I love this thread...lots of things we can agree and disagree about things without really ripping each other to shreds...not like pure politics!)