The Columbus Conspiracy: In Investigation into the Secret History of Christopher Columbus

Lisa Arsenault is a public-school teacher in Ajax, Ontario.

Christopher Columbus, according to the author, was a member of the
“Grail Conspiracy,” that group of men and women who have, for two
thousand years, protected the holy grail—that is, the holy blood: the
descendants of Jesus Christ. Columbus’s mandate was to discover a new
land where the members of Christ’s family would be safe from discovery
and consequent persecution, primarily by the Catholic Church. Therefore,
Columbus was much more interested in North America, a prospective safe
haven for the holy family, than he was in the Indies—though naturally
he pitched the Indies to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella (Catholic
monarchs) as his goal in order to gain financing for his voyages. This
theory provides a neat solution to the time-honored problem of how
Columbus, a master mariner, could have mistaken North America for the
Indies, particularly when everybody at the time kept telling him that
there was a huge land mass between Europe and China.

According to his agreement with Ferdinand and Isabella, Columbus was
granted rulership over all lands he discovered on his way to the
Indies—the inference being that he had to actually reach the Indies
before he could make good his claim to landfalls along the way. Over
several voyages Columbus tried desperately to find a passage between
North and South America (the Panama Canal, of course, was built much
later) so that he could cross the Pacific to China and thereby fulfill
the terms of his contract, but he succumbed to illness and death before
he could realize his goal.

This book should be read as a companion to Bradley’s Holy Grail
Across the Atlantic, which promotes and elaborates on the same theory of
a conspiracy through the ages to protect and find a safe haven for the
holy family. Whether one accepts Bradley’s theory or not, his premise
is thought-provoking at the very least and would seem to answer a lot of
the questions that have been asked for centuries about the mysterious
Christopher Columbus.