Neither hero nor villain

"Thus Columbus-the-hero and Columbus-the-villain live on, mutually sustained by the passion which continuing controversy imparts to their supporters. No argument can dispel [either of] the[se two falsehoods], however convincing; no evidence, however compelling. They have eclipsed the real Columbus and, judged by their effects, have outstriped him in importance. For one of the sad lessons historians learn is that history is influenced less by the facts as they happen than by the falsehoods men believe."

     Felipe Fernández-Armesto, at the time Professor of Modern History, University of Oxford, and the author of an important Columbus biography published by Oxford University Press in 1991 ("arguably one of the best-written and most historically sensitive" available, according to Dr. Valerie I. J. Flint in the Encyclopaedia Britannica's Britannica Library), but now William P. Reynolds Professor of History, University of Notre Dame.  "Columbus - Hero or Villain?," History today 42, no. 5 (May 1992):  9 (4-9).
     And yet it seems clear that there are, in Fernández-Armesto's mind, respects in which Columbus was and remains the former at least, not (of course) to mention respects in which he was clearly a man of his own time, indeed more Genoese than Spanish, given, for example, that he "never understood [already contemporary] Spanish[/Castilian] scruples about slavery" (6).  And yet the Spaniard Las Casas supposedly "revered him, and pitied, rather than censured, the imperfections of his attitude to the natives"!  (Though I suppose the question might be, again, In which respects? and Right up until his death in 1566, 61 years after Columbus'?)