This caricature of Columbus as little more than a rapacious villain is as simplistic and wrongheaded as the version of him as a savior-hero who proved the world was round. As usual, reality is complex and doesn’t provide easy, comfortable answers.

It could be said that Columbus’s years of navigating the Spanish courts and courtiers was a greater feat than navigating the Atlantic, which hardly went as planned. He was driven but diplomatic, traits he employed in his dealings with indigenous communities of the Americas, where he and his men also committed atrocities in the name of holy conquest.

As I said, I’m not here to praise the man but to celebrate his deeds. Columbus taught himself Latin to study ancient and medieval manuscripts for clues about the circumference of the globe and his prospective journeys. True, his calculations were wildly off, overestimating the size of Asia and underestimating the size of the globe. But he also knew that he had to make the mission sound easier, like any startup seeking venture capital. Columbus yearned to fulfill the prophecy of Seneca’s Medea: “An age will come after many years when the Ocean will loose the chains of things, and a huge land lie revealed.” And so he did, in four remarkable voyages that charted and changed the world.