The final voyage of Christopher Columbus was by far his most dangerous, unexpected, exhilarating, and consequential. It was, as Pulitzer Prize-winner Samuel Eliot Morison put it, "a story of adventure which imagination could hardly invent; a struggle between man and the elements, in which the most splendid manifestations of devotion, loyalty, and courage are mingled with the vilest human passions."

Shockingly, no book has been written about this fateful final journey until now. Martin Dugard finally brings to light this saga of shipwreck, mutiny, discovery, and political treachery, telling the story of how Columbus's quest to find a passage to the Orient drove him onward in the face of peril.