The sixteenth-century historian Girolamo Benzoni told a story about a dinner party that Christopher Columbus attended with a group of Spanish nobles. It would have been a dazzling affair – the aristocracy of the day entertaining the man who discovered the New World. The nobles wanted to hear stories of his expeditions and share in the glory by association with the great man. But not all of them were impressed. One commented that Columbus’s discovery of a new route to the Ind