A great liar, a pirate, a raving visionary in the grip of ecstasy, a sailor who has seen everything and is capable of anything: Christopher Columbus is the Admiral, a colossal and contested historical figure—hero of exploration and initiator of colonial oppression, bearer of European civilization to the Americas and, at the same time, the one who set a genocide in motion, sanctioning imperialism and cultural suppression. In this novel, Giosuè Calaciura recounts the organization of the voyage to the Indies, the ferocity of the conquest, technology as a tool of domination, slavery, and violence as the exclusive and ultimate instrument governing the West’s relationship with the “others,” whether Indigenous peoples or non-elite Europeans. Fidelity to the facts and to Columbian chronicles—grounded in the logbook and reinforced by the records of Columbus’s trial conducted by the royal inquisitor Francisco de Bobadilla—is interwoven with literary, evangelical, and fantastical elements that shape, distort, and enliven historical reality, making the deeper truth of those deeds shine through. Thus the crossing becomes epic, daring, reckless, driven by the Admiral’s fevered imagination—a kind of oceanic Don Quixote, stuffed with too many readings, magico-religious practices, hypotheses, and unverified conjectures. A mad adventure that built a world of the unhinged. The conquest of the Indies remains a kind of ever-updated “manual” of contemporary violence, of the loss of any sense of justice and compassion; it is the prototype of the enduring arrogance that governs relations between rich and poor countries, between the wealthy and the dispossessed. The Admiral is also a novel about illusions—the hope for a better world for all, which shatters at every landing.