Rosa’s argument wasn’t well received among the academic community. And despite his claims that further DNA testing could help prove his theory, the cost of running such tests means that’s unlikely to happen in the near future. Plus DNA tests have already been done: 2006 saw the beginning of a project that took samples from possible descendants of Columbus across Europe and matched them with DNA from his supposed tomb in Seville. In Catalonia, swabs were taken from the cheeks of men with the surname Colom; in Italy from those with the surname Colombo and in Portugal swabs were taken from descendants of the deposed royal family, the Duke of Bragança and Count of Ribeira Grande: all in an effort to find that ever-allusive matching Y chromosome. The results, unfortunately, were inconclusive.
Portugal does however remain an attractive theory, just not with an exiled Polish king as Columbus’s father. A more realistic theory is that Columbus was born in Cuba, Portugal to Portuguese nobility. Christened Salvador Fernandes Zarco, he was given the pseudonym of Christopher Columbus (meaning bearer of Christ and the Holy Spirit) and sent to Spain as a spy in order to divert the Spanish from lucrative trade routes between Africa and the Indies. There’s some evidence to support this theory. One piece is a letter in which Columbus refers to Portugal as his “homeland”; another is a court document referring to him as Portuguese. But until something more substantial arises, it’s likely to remain just that: a theory.
That there existed a Genovese Christopher Columbus (or rather a Cristoforo Colombo) is almost beyond doubt because of the weight of archived contemporary records. Whether this is the same man who “discovered” the Americas, however, is a different matter altogether. True, there’s a lot to link the two. But at the same time, it’s hard to reconcile Columbus’s Genovese origins with his Catalan library, his Castilian language, his aristocratic Portuguese wife and the vast helpings of Hebrew that pepper his surviving writings.
What’s sure is that the debate will long continue to rage while the man who opened the Americas up to the Europeans—thereby significantly shaping today’s world—still holds cultural value. True, Columbus’s value, like all commodities, is subject to fluctuations. His associations with genocide and the initiation of the trans-Atlantic slave trade put a black mark next to his name that’s unlikely to fade anytime in the near future. But countries will continue to claim him. And until DNA yields new results, or fresh evidence arises, we’ll have to make do with one of Columbus’s more ambiguous responses when asked about his origins: “Vine de nada“—”I came from nothing”.