NewswireTODAY - /newswire/ - Madalena - Pico, Azores, Portugal, 2009/10/05 - These days Christopher Columbus is a controversial subject in many places. Native Americans accuse him of genocide and in Caracas, Venezuela, his statue was torn down from its 30-foot high pedestal and dragged through the streets in anger.

Longtime Christopher Columbus historian and author, Manuel Rosa, is a special invitee of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences’s Diversity Council where, tomorrow, October 6, he will give a lecture entitled “Unmasking Columbus” during NIEHS’s 2009 Hispanic Heritage Celebration at its Research Triangle Park location in Durham, North Carolina, USA.

Mr. Rosa accepts that Columbus was a highly trained nobleman and a Portuguese spy infiltrated in Spain whose purpose was to take Spanish ships as far from India as possible in order to protect India's trade routes for the Portuguese king.

Having spent the last 18 years investigating the historic events relative to that First Voyage to America and with two best selling books in Portugal, Mr. Rosa is seen as a leading expert on the subject of Columbus's relations with Portugal. His new book titled Columbus: The Untold Story, will be released this November 24, in Seville, Spain. These books are causing a lot of disconcert in the members of the academia of those countries who are being forced to reconsider their view that Columbus was a poor peasant from Genoa and was lost during his voyage.

The history of Columbus has been a point of contention between academics for hundreds of years. No one seems to know for certain where the navigator came from nor what his true motives were for heading West in search of an India that was located to the East. In his own notes Columbus writes that the Cape of Good Hope was already discovered by the Portuguese in 1488, therefore the question arises as to why he didn't take that shorter route in 1492. This is just one of the many questions Mr. Rosa has tried to answer during his years of investigating and make part of the lecture he will present tomorrow at NIEHS.

Among the supporters of this new theory is Professor Joaquim Veríssimo Serrão -Ex-President of the University of Lisbon and President of the Portuguese Academy of History from 1975 to 2006- who, in the Preface for the latest book, acknowledges that the author “has made a meticulous study of the life and deeds of Columbus.”

Christopher Columbus vs. Cristobal Colon - For more info, please visit CristovaoColon.com/.

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