In their only fully collaborative literary work, Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich have written a gripping novel of history, suspense, recovery, and new beginnings. The Crown of Columbus chronicles the adventures of a pair of mismatched lovers--Vivian Twostar, a divorced, pregnant anthropologist, and Roger Williams, a consummate academic, epic poet, and bewildered father of Vivian's baby--on their quest for the truth about Christopher Columbus and themselves. When Vivian uncovers what is presumed to be the most diary of Christopher Columbus, she and Roger are drawn into a journey from icy New Hampshire to the idyllic Caribbean in search of "the greatest treasure of Europe." Lured by the wild promise of redeeming the past, they are plunged into a harrowing race against time and death that threatens--and finally changes--their lives. A rollicking tale of adventure, The Crown of Columbus is also contemporary love story and a tender examination of parenthood and passion.

Between 1492 and 1504, Christopher Columbus made four attempts to find the East by heading West. In the process he lost a fair number of ships; on his last journey alone he lost no fewer than four. Although Columbus also left written documentation of where his boats had gone down, no one has been able to locate even one of the wrecks. (His reports were probably inaccurate, perhaps willfully so--he was frequently less than truthful about his adventures in the New World.) In the mid-1990s, an American expatriate living in Panama--an aging surfer dude who ran a Scuba-diving outfitting shop and diving school--a Panamanian real estate agent, and an American on vacation with his son all claimed to have been the first to locate the remains of a small ship lying in fairly shallow waters in a small gulf in Panama. No one took the discovery seriously, since it had not been made by a team of established archeologists and scientists. Finally, in 2002, the authors of this book--journalists and amateur divers--decided to investigate. They organized a team of American scientists, all of them experts in carbon dating and underwater shipwrecks, who established not only that the Panama wreck was the oldest ever found in the entire Western Hemisphere--dating from around 1500--but that it was very likely the remains of one of Columbus' last ships, the Vizcaina. To be published on the 500th anniversary of Columbus' death, THE VOYAGE OF THE VIZCAINA is a riveting account of shipwreck and adventure, giving readers the story of how the wreck was found and salvaged. Working backward, Brinkbaumer and Hoges combine archaeology and history to recreate the circumstances of the fourth journey, which began in 1502 and ended in 1504. This book is unique in its extensive use of detailed findings to frame its fascinating discoveries and conclusions about exploration in the New World, as well as about the genius and shortcomings of the man known as the Admiral, and credited with the greatest discovery of all time.