DNA gives hope to Columbus biographers

BARCELONA - When schoolchildren turn to the chapter on Christopher Columbus's humble origins as the son of a wool-weaver in Genoa, they are not generally told that he might instead have been born out of wedlock to a Portuguese prince. Or that he might have been a Jew whose parents converted to escape the Spanish Inquisition. Or a rebel in the medieval kingdom of Catalonia.

Yet five centuries after he opened the door to the New World, revisionist biographers of Columbus have found a new hope for vindication: DNA.

In 2004, a Spanish geneticist, Dr. Jose A. Lorente, extracted genetic material from a cache of Columbus's bones in Seville to settle a dispute about where he was buried. Ever since, he has been beset by amateur historians, government officials, and self-styled Columbus relatives of multiple nationalities clamoring for a genetic retelling of the textbook tale.

Even adherents of the Italian orthodoxy concede that little is known about the provenance of the Great Navigator, who seems to have obscured his past purposely.

A Genoese Cristoforo Colombo almost certainly existed. Archives record his birth and early life. But there is little to tie that man to the one who crossed the Atlantic in 1492. Columbus kept books in Catalan and his handwriting has, according to some, a Catalonian flair. He married a Portuguese noblewoman. He wrote in Castilian.

"What I want to write is the final book on Columbus, and I will not be able to do it without science to settle this," said Francesc Albardaner, who hoped that DNA would endorse his belief in the Catalonian Columbus.