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that the journey across the Atlantic could be as little as three thousand miles, six hundred miles of which could be cut off by setting sail from the newly conquered Canary Islands. This distance could easily be traversed by Spanish vessels.
    Crossing their fingers that Colón was right, the monarchs submitted his proposal to a committee of experts in astronomy, navigation, and natural philosophy. The committee of experts rolled its collective eyes. From its perspective, Colón’s claim that he—a poorly educated man fumbling with a quadrant on a wave-tossed ship—had refuted Eratosthenes was like someone claiming to have demonstrated in a backwoods shack that gravity didn’t pull iron as much as scientists thought, and that one could therefore hoist an anvil with a loop of thread. In the end, though, the king and queen ignored the experts—they told Colón to try the thread.
    After landing in the Americas in 1492, the admiral naturally claimed that his ideas had been vindicated. 3 The delighted monarchs awarded him honors and wealth. He died in 1506, a rich man surrounded by a loving family; nevertheless, he died a bitter man. As evidence had emerged of his failings, personal and geographical, the Spanish court had revoked most of his privileges and shunted him aside. In the anger and humiliation of his later years, he slid into religious messianism. He came to believe that he was God’s “messenger,” destined to show the world “the new heaven and earth of which Our Lord spoke through Saint John in the Apocalypse.” In one of his last reports to the king, the admiral suggested that he, Colón, would be the ideal person to convert the emperor of China to Christianity.
    Much the same mix of grandiosity and disappointment characterized the Columbus monument. Del Monte y Tejada’s proposal for a memorial to the admiral was finally approved in 1923, at a meeting of the Western Hemisphere’s governments. Progress was slow—the design competition wasn’t held for another eight years, and the monument itself wasn’t built for another six decades. During most of that time the Dominican Republic was ruled by the tyrant Rafael Trujillo. A classic case of narcissistic personality disorder, Trujillo erected scores of statues to himself and hung a giant neon sign that read “God and Trujillo” over the harbor of Santo Domingo, which he had renamed Trujillo City. As his reign grew more barbarous, international enthusiasm for the lighthouse waned—supporting the project was seen as endorsing the dictator. Many nations boycotted the inauguration, on October 12, 1992. Pope John Paul II reneged on his promise to celebrate a Mass at the opening, though he did appear nearby a day before. Meanwhile, protesters set police barricades on fire, denouncing the admiral as “the exterminator of a race.” Residents of the walled-off slums around the monument told reporters that they thought Colón deserved no commemoration at all.
    A thesis of this book is that their belief, no matter how understandable, is mistaken. The Columbian Exchange had such far-reaching effects that some biologists now say that Colón’s voyages marked the beginning of a new biological era: the Homogenocene. The term refers to homogenizing: mixing unlike substances to create a uniform blend. With the Columbian Exchange, places that were once ecologically distinct have become more alike. In this sense the world has become one, exactly as the old admiral hoped. The lighthouse in Santo Domingo should be regarded less as a celebration of the man who began it than a recognition of the world he almost accidentally created, the world of the Homogenocene we live in today.

    Every American nation promised to contribute to the Columbus memorial when it was approved in 1923, but the checks were slow in coming—the U.S. Congress, for example, didn’t appropriate its share for another six years. In May of 1930 Dominican army head Rafael Trujillo became president in a