CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS

AND HOW HE RECEIVED AND
IMPARTED THE SPIRIT
OF DISCOVERY

BY

JUSTIN WINSOR

They that go down to the sea in ships,
that do business in great waters, these
see the works of the Lord and his wonders
in the deep.—Psalms, cvii. 23, 24

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1891

Copyright, 1891,
By JUSTIN WINSOR.
All rights reserved.

The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A.
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.

To FRANCIS PARKMAN, LL.D.,

The Historian of New France.

Dear Parkman:—

You and I have not followed the maritime peoples of western Europe in planting and defending their flags on the American shores without observing the strange fortunes of the Italians, in that they have provided pioneers for those Atlantic nations without having once secured in the New World a foothold for themselves.

When Venice gave her Cabot to England and Florence bestowed Verrazano upon France, these explorers established the territorial claims of their respective and foster motherlands, leading to those contrasts and conflicts which it has been your fortune to illustrate as no one else has.

When Genoa gave Columbus to Spain and Florence accredited her Vespucius to Portugal, these adjacent powers, whom the Bull of Demarcation would have kept asunder in the new hemisphere, established their rival races in middle and southern America, neighboring as in the Old World; but their contrasts and conflicts have never had so worthy a historian as you have been for those of the north.

The beginnings of their commingled history I have tried to relate in the present work, and I turn naturally to associate in it the name of the brilliant historian of France and England in North America with that of your obliged friend,

Cambridge, June, 1890.

[CONTENTS AND ILLUSTRATIONS.]

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS.

[CHAPTER I.]

SOURCES, AND THE GATHERERS OF THEM.

In considering the sources of information, which are original, as distinct from those which are derivative, we must place first in importance the writings of Columbus himself. We may place next the documentary proofs belonging to private and public archives.

His prolixity.

Harrisse points out that Columbus, in his time, acquired such a popular reputation for prolixity that a court fool of Charles the Fifth linked the discoverer of the Indies with Ptolemy as twins in the art of blotting. He wrote as easily as people of rapid impulses usually do, when they are not restrained by habits of orderly deliberation. He has left us a mass of jumbled thoughts and experiences, which, unfortunately, often perplex the historian, while they of necessity aid him.

His writings.

Ninety-seven distinct pieces of writing by the hand of Columbus either exist or are known to have existed. Of such, whether memoirs, relations, or letters, sixty-four are preserved in their entirety. These include twenty-four which are wholly or in part in his own hand. All of them have been printed entire, except one which is in the Biblioteca Colombina, in Seville, the Libro de las Proficias, written apparently between 1501 and 1504, of which only part is in Columbus's own hand. A second document, a memoir addressed to Ferdinand and Isabella, before June, 1497, is now in the collection of the Marquis of San Roman at Madrid, and was printed for the first time by Harrisse in his Christophe Colomb. A third and fourth are in the public archives in Madrid, being letters addressed to the Spanish monarchs: one without date in 1496 or 1497, or perhaps earlier, in 1493, and the other February 6, 1502; and both have been printed and given in facsimile in the Cartas de Indias, a collection published by the Spanish government in 1877. The majority of the existing private papers of Columbus are preserved in Spain, in the hands of the present representative of Columbus, the Duke of Veragua, and these have all been printed in the great collection of Navarrete. They consist, as enumerated by Harrisse in his Columbus and the Bank of Saint George, of the following pieces: a single letter addressed about the year 1500 to Ferdinand and Isabella; four letters addressed to Father Gaspar Gorricio,—one from San Lucar, April 4, 1502; a second from the Grand Canaria, May, 1502; a third from Jamaica, July 7, 1503; and the last from Seville, January 4, 1505;—a memorial addressed to his son, Diego, written either in December, 1504, or in January, 1505; and eleven letters addressed also to Diego, all from Seville, late in 1504 or early in 1505.

MANUSCRIPT OF COLUMBUS
[From a MS. in the Biblioteca Colombina, given in Harrisse's Notes on Columbus.]

All in Spanish.

Without exception, the letters of Columbus of which we have knowledge were written in Spanish. Harrisse has conjectured that his stay in Spain made him a better master of that language than the poor advantages of his early life had made him of his mother tongue.

His privileges.

Columbus was more careful of the documentary proofs of his titles and privileges, granted in consequence of his discoveries, than of his own writings. He had more solicitude to protect, by such records, the pecuniary and titular rights of his descendants than to preserve those personal papers which, in the eyes of the historian, are far more valuable. These attested evidences of his rights were for a while inclosed in an iron chest, kept at his tomb in the monastery of Las Cuevas, near Seville, and they remained down to 1609 in the custody of the Carthusian friars of that convent. At this date, Nuño de Portugallo having been declared the heir to the estate and titles of Columbus, the papers were transferred to his keeping; and in the end, by legal decision, they passed to that Duke of Veragua who was the grandfather of the present duke, who in due time inherited these public memorials, and now preserves them in Madrid.

Codex Diplomaticus.

In 1502 there were copies made in book form, known as the Codex Diplomaticus, of these and other pertinent documents, raising the number from thirty-six to forty-four. These copies were attested at Seville, by order of the Admiral, who then aimed to place them so that the record of his deeds and rights should not be lost. Two copies seem to have been sent by him through different channels to Nicoló Oderigo, the Genoese ambassador in Madrid; and in 1670 both of these copies came from a descendant of that ambassador as a gift to the Republic of Genoa. Both of these later disappeared from its archives. A third copy was sent to Alonso Sanchez de Carvajal, the factor of Columbus in Española, and this copy is not now known. A fourth copy was deposited in the monastery of Las Cuevas, near Seville, to be later sent to Father Gorricio. It is very likely this last copy which is mentioned by Edward Everett in a note to his oration at Plymouth (Boston, 1825, p. 64), where, referring to the two copies sent to Oderigo as the only ones made by the order of Columbus, as then understood, he adds: "Whether the two manuscripts thus mentioned be the only ones in existence may admit of doubt. When I was in Florence, in 1818, a small folio manuscript was brought to me, written on parchment, apparently two or three centuries old, in binding once very rich, but now worn, containing a series of documents in Latin and Spanish, with the following title on the first blank page: 'Treslado de las Bullas del Papa Alexandro VI., de la concession de las Indias y los titulos, privilegios y cedulas reales, que se dieron a Christoval Colon.' I was led by this title to purchase the book." After referring to the Codice, then just published, he adds: "I was surprised to find my manuscript, as far as it goes, nearly identical in its contents with that of Genoa, supposed to be one of the only two in existence. My manuscript consists of almost eighty closely written folio pages, which coincide precisely with the text of the first thirty-seven documents, contained in two hundred and forty pages of the Genoese volume."

Caleb Cushing says of the Everett manuscript, which he had examined before he wrote of it in the North American Review, October, 1825, that, "so far as it goes, it is a much more perfect one than the Oderigo manuscript, as several passages which Spotorno was unable to decipher in the latter are very plain and legible in the former, which indeed is in most complete preservation." I am sorry to learn from Dr. William Everett that this manuscript is not at present easily accessible.

Of the two copies named above as having disappeared from the archives of Genoa, Harrisse at a late day found one in the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris. It had been taken to Paris in 1811, when Napoleon I. caused the archives of Genoa to be sent to that city, and it was not returned when the chief part of the documents was recovered by Genoa in 1815. The other copy was in 1816 among the papers of Count Cambiaso, and was bought by the Sardinian government, and given to the city of Genoa, where it is now deposited in a marble custodia, which, surmounted by a bust of Columbus, stands at present in the main hall of the palace of the municipality. This "custodia" is a pillar, in which a door of gilded bronze closes the receptacle that contains the relics, which are themselves inclosed in a bag of Spanish leather, richly embossed. A copy of this last document was made and placed in the archives at Turin.

Their publication by Spotorno.

These papers, as selected by Columbus for preservation, were edited by Father Spotorno at Genoa, in 1823, in a volume called Codice diplomatico Colombo-Americano, and published by authority of the state. There was an English edition at London, in 1823; and a Spanish at Havana, in 1867. Spotorno was reprinted, with additional matter, at Genoa, in 1857, as La Tavola di Bronzo, il pallio di seta, ed il Codice Colomboamericano, nuovamente illustrati per cura di Giuseppe Banchero.

THE GENOA CUSTODIA.

Letters to the Bank of St. George.

This Spotorno volume included two additional letters of Columbus, not yet mentioned, and addressed, March 21, 1502, and December 27, 1504, to Oderigo. They were found pasted in the duplicate copy of the papers given to Genoa, and are now preserved in a glass case, in the same custodia. A third letter, April 2, 1502, addressed to the governors of the bank of St. George, was omitted by Spotorno; but it is given by Harrisse in his Columbus and the Bank of Saint George (New York, 1888). This last was one of two letters, which Columbus sent, as he says, to the bank, but the other has not been found. The history of the one preserved is traced by Harrisse in the work last mentioned, and there are lithographic and photographic reproductions of it. Harrisse's work just referred to was undertaken to prove the forgery of a manuscript which has within a few years been offered for sale, either as a duplicate of the one at Genoa, or as the original. When represented as the original, the one at Genoa is pronounced a facsimile of it. Harrisse seems to have proved the forgery of the one which is seeking a purchaser.

COLUMBUS'S LETTER, APRIL 2, 1502, ADDRESSED TO THE BANK OF ST. GEORGE IN GENOA.
[Reduced in size by photographic process.]

Marginalia.

Toscanelli's letter.

Some manuscript marginalia found in three different books, used by Columbus and preserved in the Biblioteca Colombina at Seville, are also remnants of the autographs of Columbus. These marginal notes are in copies of Æneas Sylvius's Historia Rerum ubique gestarum (Venice, 1477) of a Latin version of Marco Polo (Antwerp, 1485?), and of Pierre d'Ailly's De Imagine Mundi (perhaps 1490), though there is some suspicion that these last-mentioned notes may be those of Bartholomew, and not of Christopher, Columbus. These books have been particularly described in José Silverio Jorrin's Varios Autografos ineditos de Cristóbal Colon, published at Havana in 1888. In May, 1860, José Maria Fernandez y Velasco, the librarian of the Biblioteca Colombina, discovered a Latin text of the letter of Toscanelli, written by Columbus in this same copy of Æneas Sylvius. He believed it a Latin version of a letter originally written in Italian; but it was left for Harrisse to discover that the Latin was the original draft. A facsimile of this script is in Harrisse's Fernando Colon (Seville, 1871), and specimens of the marginalia were first given by Harrisse in his Notes on Columbus, whence they are reproduced in part in the Narrative and Critical History of America (vol. ii.).

Harrisse's memorial of Columbus.

It is understood that, under the auspices of the Italian government, Harrisse is now engaged in collating the texts and preparing a national memorial issue of the writings of Columbus, somewhat in accordance with a proposition which he made to the Minister of Public Instruction at Rome in his Le Quatrième Centenaire de la Découverte du Nouveau Monde (Genoa, 1887).

Columbus's printed works.

There are references to printed works of Columbus which I have not seen, as a Declaracion de Tabla Navigatoria, annexed to a treatise, Del Uso de la Carta de Navegar, by Dr. Grajales: a Tratado de las Cinco Zonas Habitables, which Humboldt found it very difficult to find.

ANNOTATIONS BY COLUMBUS ON THE IMAGO MUNDI.
[From Harrisse's Notes on Columbus.]

His lost writings.

Of the manuscripts of Columbus which are lost, there are traces still to be discovered. One letter, which he dated off the Canaries, February 15, 1493, and which must have contained some account of his first voyage, is only known to us from an intimation of Marino Sanuto that it was included in the Chronica Delphinea. It is probably from an imperfect copy of this last in the library at Brescia, that the letter in question was given in the book's third part (A. D. 1457-1500), which is now missing. We know also, from a letter still preserved (December 27, 1504), that there must be a letter somewhere, if not destroyed, sent by him respecting his fourth voyage, to Messer Gian Luigi Fieschi, as is supposed, the same who led the famous conspiracy against the house of Doria. Other letters, Columbus tells us, were sent at times to the Signora Madonna Catalina, who was in some way related to Fieschi.

In 1780, Francesco Pesaro, examining the papers of the Council of Ten, at Venice, read there a memoir of Columbus, setting forth his maritime project; or at least Pesaro was so understood by Marin, who gives the story at a later day in the seventh volume of his history of Venetian commerce. As Harrisse remarks, this paper, if it could be discovered, would prove the most interesting of all Columbian documents, since it would probably be found to fall within a period, from 1473 to 1487, when we have little or nothing authentic respecting Columbus's life. Indeed, it might happily elucidate a stage in the development of the Admiral's cosmographical views of which we know nothing.

We have the letter which Columbus addressed to Alexander VI., in February, 1502, as preserved in a copy made by his son Ferdinand; but no historical student has ever seen the Commentary, which he is said to have written after the manner of Cæsar, recounting the haps and mishaps of the first voyage, and which he is thought to have sent to the ruling Pontiff. This act of duty, if done after his return from his last voyage, must have been made to Julius the Second, not to Alexander.

Journal of his first voyage.

Irving and others seem to have considered that this Cæsarian performance was in fact, the well-known journal of the first voyage; but there is a good deal of difficulty in identifying that which we only know in an abridged form, as made by Las Casas, with the narrative sent or intended to be sent to the Pope.

Ferdinand, or the writer of the Historie, later to be mentioned, it seems clear, had Columbus's journal before him, though he excuses himself from quoting much from it, in order to avoid wearying the reader.

The original "journal" seems to have been in 1554 still in the possession of Luis Colon. It had not, accordingly, at that date been put among the treasures of the Biblioteca Colombina. Thus it may have fallen, with Luis's other papers, to his nephew and heir, Diego Colon y Pravia, who in 1578 entrusted them to Luis de Cardona. Here we lose sight of them.

Abridged by Las Casas.

Las Casas's abridgment in his own handwriting, however, has come down to us, and some entries in it would seem to indicate that Las Casas abridged a copy, and not the original. It was, up to 1886, in the library of the Duke of Orsuna, in Madrid, and was at that date bought by the Spanish government. While it was in the possession of Orsuna, it was printed by Varnhagen, in his Verdadera Guanahani (1864). It was clearly used by Las Casas in his own Historia, and was also in the hands of Ferdinand, when he wrote, or outlined, perhaps, what now passes for the life of his father, and Ferdinand's statements can sometimes correct or qualify the text in Las Casas. There is some reason to suppose that Herrera may have used the original. Las Casas tells us that in some parts, and particularly in describing the landfall and the events immediately succeeding, he did not vary the words of the original. This Las Casas abridgment was in the archives of the Duke del Infantado, when Navarrete discovered its importance, and edited it as early as 1791, though it was not given to the public till Navarrete published his Coleccion in 1825. When this journal is read, even as we have it, it is hard to imagine that Columbus could have intended so disjointed a performance to be an imitation of the method of Cæsar's Commentaries.

The American public was early given an opportunity to judge of this, and of its importance. It was by the instigation of George Ticknor that Samuel Kettell made a translation of the text as given by Navarrete, and published it in Boston in 1827, as a Personal Narrative of the first Voyage of Columbus to America, from a Manuscript recently discovered in Spain.

Descriptions of his first voyage.

We also know that Columbus wrote other concise accounts of his discovery. On his return voyage, during a gale, on February 14, 1493, fearing his ship would founder, he prepared a statement on parchment, which was incased in wax, put in a barrel, and thrown overboard, to take the chance of washing ashore. A similar account, protected in like manner, he placed on his vessel's poop, to be washed off in case of disaster. Neither of these came, as far as is known, to the notice of anybody. They very likely simply duplicated the letters which he wrote on the voyage, intended to be dispatched to their destination on reaching port. The dates and places of these letters are not reconcilable with his journal. He was apparently approaching the Azores, when, on February 15, he dated a letter "off the Canaries," directed to Luis de Santangel. So false a record as "the Canaries" has never been satisfactorily explained. It may be imagined, perhaps, that the letter had been written when Columbus supposed he would make those islands instead of the Azores, and that the place of writing was not changed. It is quite enough, however, to rest satisfied with the fact that Columbus was always careless, and easily erred in such things, as Navarrete has shown. The postscript which is added is dated March 14, which seems hardly probable, or even possible, so that March 4 has been suggested. He professes to write it on the day of his entering the Tagus, and this was March 4. It is possible that he altered the date when he reached Palos, as is Major's opinion. Columbus calls this a second letter. Perhaps a former letter was the one which, as already stated, we have lost in the missing part of the Chronica Delphinea.

Letter to Santangel.

Letter to Sanchez.

The original of this letter to Santangel, the treasurer of Aragon, and intended for the eyes of Ferdinand and Isabella, was in Spanish, and is known in what is thought to be a contemporary copy, found by Navarrete at Simancas; and it is printed by him in his Coleccion, and is given by Kettell in English, to make no other mention of places where it is accessible. Harrisse denies that this Simancas manuscript represents the original, as Navarrete had contended. A letter dated off the island of Santa Maria, the southernmost of the Azores, three days after the letter to Santangel, February 18, essentially the same, and addressed to Gabriel Sanchez, was found in what seemed to be an early copy, among the papers of the Colegio Mayor de Cuenca. This text was printed by Varnhagen at Valencia, in 1858, as Primera Epistola del Almirante Don Cristóbal Colon, and it is claimed by him that it probably much more nearly represents the original of Columbus's own drafting.

Printed editions.

There was placed in 1852 in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana at Milan, from the library of Baron Pietro Custodi, a printed edition of this Spanish letter, issued in 1493, perhaps somewhere in Spain or Portugal, for Barcelona and Lisbon have been named. Harrisse conjectures that Sanchez gave his copy to some printer in Barcelona. Others have contended that it was not printed in Spain at all. No other copy of this edition has ever been discovered. It was edited by Cesare Correnti at Milan in 1863, in a volume called Lettere autografe di Cristoforo Colombo, nuovamente stampate, and was again issued in facsimile in 1866 at Milan, under the care of Girolamo d'Adda, as Lettera in lingua Spagnuola diretta da Cristoforo Colombo a Luis de Sant-Angel. Major and Becher, among others, have given versions of it to the English reader, and Harrisse gives it side by side with a French version in his Christophe Colomb (i. 420), and with an English one in his Notes on Columbus.

This text in Spanish print had been thought the only avenue of approach to the actual manuscript draft of Columbus, till very recently two other editions, slightly varying, are said to have been discovered, one or both of which are held by some, but on no satisfactory showing, to have preceded in issue, probably by a short interval, the Ambrosian copy.

One of these newly alleged editions is on four leaves in quarto, and represents the letter as dated on February 15 and March 14, and its cut of type has been held to be evidence of having been printed at Burgos, or possibly at Salamanca. That this and the Ambrosian letter were printed one from the other, or independently from some unknown anterior edition, has been held to be clear from the fact that they correspond throughout in the division of lines and pages. It is not easily determined which was the earlier of the two, since there are errors in each corrected in the other. This unique four-leaf quarto was a few months since offered for sale in London, by Ellis and Elvey, who have published (1889) an English translation of it, with annotations by Julia E. S. Rae. It is now understood to be in the possession of a New York collector. It is but fair to say that suspicions of its genuineness have been entertained; indeed, there can be scarce a doubt that it is a modern fabrication.

The other of these newly discovered editions is in folio of two leaves, and was the last discovered, and was very recently held by Maisonneuve of Paris at 65,000 francs, and has since been offered by Quaritch in London for £1,600. It is said to have been discovered in Spain, and to have been printed at Barcelona; and this last fact is thought to be apparent from the Catalan form of some of the Spanish, which has disappeared in the Ambrosian text. It also gives the dates February 15 and March 14. A facsimile edition has been issued under the title La Lettre de Christophe Colomb, annonçant la Découverte du Nouveau Monde.

Caleb Cushing, in the North American Review in October, 1825, refers to newspaper stories then current of a recent sale of a copy of the Spanish text in London, for £33 12s. to the Duke of Buckingham. It cannot now be traced.

Catalan text.

Harrisse finds in Ferdinand's catalogue of the Biblioteca Colombina what was probably a Catalan text of this Spanish letter; but it has disappeared from the collection.

Letter found by Bergenroth.

Bergenroth found at Simancas, some years ago, the text of another letter by Columbus, with the identical dates already given, and addressed to a friend; but it conveyed nothing not known in the printed Spanish texts. He, however, gave a full abstract of it in the Calendar of State Papers relating to England and Spain.

Columbus gives papers to Bernaldez.

Columbus is known, after his return from the second voyage, to have been the guest of Andrès Bernaldez, the Cura de los Palacios, and he is also known to have placed papers in this friend's hands; and so it has been held probable by Muñoz that another Spanish text of Columbus's first account is embodied in Bernaldez's Historia de los Reyes Católicos. The manuscript of this work, which gives thirteen chapters to Columbus, long remained unprinted in the royal library at Madrid, and Irving, Prescott, and Humboldt all used it in that form. It was finally printed at Granada in 1856, as edited by Miguel Lafuente y Alcántara, and was reprinted at Seville in 1870. Harrisse, in his Notes on Columbus, gives an English version of this section on the Columbus voyage.

Varieties of the Spanish text.

These, then, are all the varieties of the Spanish text of Columbus's first announcement of his discovery which are at present known. When the Ambrosian text was thought to be the only printed form of it, Varnhagen, in his Carta de Cristóbal Colon enviada de Lisboa á Barcelona en Marzo de 1493 (Vienna, 1869; and Paris, 1870), collated the different texts to try to reconstruct a possible original text, as Columbus wrote it. In the opinion of Major no one of these texts can be considered an accurate transcript of the original.

Origin of the Latin text.

There is a difference of opinion among these critics as to the origin of the Latin text which scholars generally cite as this first letter of Columbus. Major thinks this Latin text was not taken from the Spanish, though similar to it; while Varnhagen thinks that the particular Spanish text found in the Colegio Mayor de Cuenca was the original of the Latin version.

Transient fame of the discovery.

There is nothing more striking in the history of the years immediately following the discovery of America than the transient character of the fame which Columbus acquired by it. It was another and later generation that fixed his name in the world's regard.

English mentions of it.

Harrisse points out how some of the standard chroniclers of the world's history, like Ferrebouc, Regnault, Galliot du Pré, and Fabian, failed during the early half of the sixteenth century to make any note of the acts of Columbus; and he could find no earlier mention among the German chroniclers than that of Heinrich Steinhowel, some time after 1531. There was even great reticence among the chroniclers of the Low Countries; and in England we need to look into the dispatches sent thence by the Spanish ambassadors to find the merest mention of Columbus so early as 1498. Perhaps the reference to him made eleven years later (1509), in an English version of Brandt's Shyppe of Fools, and another still ten years later in a little native comedy called The New Interlude, may have been not wholly unintelligible. It was not till about 1550 that, so far as England is concerned, Columbus really became a historical character, in Edward Hall's Chronicle.

Speaking of the fewness of the autographs of Columbus which are preserved, Harrisse adds: "The fact is that Columbus was very far from being in his lifetime the important personage he now is; and his writings, which then commanded neither respect nor attention, were probably thrown into the waste-basket as soon as received."

Editions of the Latin text.

Nevertheless, substantial proof seems to exist in the several editions of the Latin version of this first letter, which were issued in the months immediately following the return of Columbus from his first voyage, as well as in the popular versification of its text by Dati in two editions, both in October, 1493, besides another at Florence in 1495, to show that for a brief interval, at least, the news was more or less engrossing to the public mind in certain confined areas of Europe. Before the discovery of the printed editions of the Spanish text, there existed an impression that either the interest in Spain was less than in Italy, or some effort was made by the Spanish government to prevent a wide dissemination of the details of the news.

The two Genoese ambassadors who left Barcelona some time after the return of Columbus, perhaps in August, 1493, may possibly have taken to Italy with them some Spanish edition of the letter. The news, however, had in some form reached Rome in season to be the subject of a papal bull on May 3d. We know that Aliander or Leander de Cosco, who made the Latin version, very likely from the Sanchez copy, finished it probably at Barcelona, on the 29th of April, not on the 25th as is sometimes said. Cosco sent it at once to Rome to be printed, and his manuscript possibly conveyed the first tidings, to Italy,—such is Harrisse's theory,—where it reached first the hands of the Bishop of Monte Peloso, who added to it a Latin epigram. It was he who is supposed to have committed it to the printer in Rome, and in that city, during the rest of 1493, four editions at least of Cosco's Latin appeared. Two of these editions are supposed to be printed by Plannck, a famous Roman printer; one is known to have come from the press of Franck Silber. All but one were little quartos, of the familiar old style, of three or four black-letter leaves; while the exception was a small octavo with woodcuts. It is Harrisse's opinion that this pictorial edition was really printed at Basle. In Paris, during the same time or shortly after, there were three editions of a similar appearance, all from one press. The latest of all, brought to light but recently, seems to have been printed by a distinguished Flemish printer, Thierry Martens, probably at Antwerp. It is not improbable that other editions printed in all these or other cities may yet be found. It is noteworthy that nothing was issued in Germany, as far as we know, before a German version of the letter appeared at Strassburg in 1497.

FIRST PAGE, COLUMBUS'S FIRST LETTER, LATIN EDITION, 1493.
[From the Barlow copy, now in the Boston Public Library.]

The text in all these Latin editions is intended to be the same. But a very few copies of any edition, and only a single copy of two or three of them, are known. The Lenox, the Carter-Brown, and the Ives libraries in this country are the chief ones possessing any of them, and the collections of the late Henry C. Murphy and Samuel L. M. Barlow also possessed a copy or two, the edition owned by Barlow passing in February, 1890, to the Boston Public Library. This scarcity and the rivalry of collectors would probably, in case any one of them should be brought upon the market, raise the price to fifteen hundred dollars or more. The student is not so restricted as this might imply, for in several cases there have been modern facsimiles and reprints, and there is an early reprint by Veradus, annexed to his poem (1494) on the capture of Granada. The text usually quoted by the older writers, however, is that embodied in the Bellum Christianorum Principum of Robertus Monarchus (Basle, 1533).

Order of publication.

In these original small quartos and octavos, there is just enough uncertainty and obscurity as to dates and printers, to lure bibliographers and critics of typography into research and controversy; and hardly any two of them agree in assigning the same order of publication to these several issues. The present writer has in the second volume of the Narrative and Critical History of America grouped the varied views, so far as they had in 1885 been made known. The bibliography to which Harrisse refers as being at the end of his work on Columbus was crowded out of its place and has not appeared; but he enters into a long examination of the question of priority in the second chapter of his last volume. The earliest English translation of this Latin text appeared in the Edinburgh Review in 1816, and other issues have been variously made since that date.

Additional sources respecting the first voyage.

We get some details of this first voyage in Oviedo, which we do not find in the journal, and Vicente Yañez Pinzon and Hernan Perez Matheos, who were companions of Columbus, are said to be the source of this additional matter. The testimony in the lawsuit of 1515, particularly that of Garcia Hernandez, who was in the "Pinta," and of a sailor named Francisco Garcia Vallejo, adds other details.

Second voyage.

There is no existing account by Columbus himself of his experiences during his second voyage, and of that cruise along the Cuban coast in which he supposed himself to have come in sight of the Golden Chersonesus. The Historie tells us that during this cruise he kept a journal, Libro del Segundo Viage, till he was prostrated by sickness, and this itinerary is cited both in the Historie and by Las Casas. We also get at second-hand from Columbus, what was derived from him in conversation after his return to Spain, in the account of these explorations which Bernaldez has embodied in his Reyes Católicos. Irving says that he found these descriptions of Bernaldez by far the most useful of the sources for this period, as giving him the details for a picturesque narrative. On disembarking at Cadiz in June, 1495, Columbus sent to his sovereigns two dispatches, neither of which is now known.

Columbus's letters.

It was in the collection of the Duke of Veragua that Navarrete discovered fifteen autograph letters of Columbus, four of them addressed to his friend, the Father Gaspar Gorricio, and the rest to his son Diego. Navarrete speaks of them when found as in a very deplorable and in parts almost unreadable condition, and severely taxing, for deciphering them, the practiced skill of Tomas Gonzalez, which had been acquired in the care which he had bestowed on the archives of Simancas. It is known that two letters addressed to Gorricio in 1498, and four in 1501, beside a single letter addressed in the last year to Diego Colon, which were in the iron chest at Las Cuevas, are not now in the archives of the Duke of Veragua; and it is further known that during the great lawsuit of Columbus's heirs, Cristoval de Cardona tampered with that chest, and was brought to account for the act in 1580. Whatever he removed may possibly some day be found, as Harrisse thinks, among the notarial records of Valencia.

Third voyage.

Two letters of Columbus respecting his third voyage are only known in early copies; one in Las Casas's hand belonged to the Duke of Orsuna, and the other addressed to the nurse of Prince Juan is in the Custodia collection at Genoa. Both are printed by Navarrete.

Fourth voyage.

Columbus, in a letter dated December 27, 1504, mentions a relation of his fourth voyage with a supplement, which he had sent from Seville to Oderigo; but it is not known. We are without trace also of other letters, which he wrote at Dominica and at other points during this voyage. We do know, however, a letter addressed by Columbus to Ferdinand and Isabella, giving some account of his voyage to July 7, 1503. The lost Spanish original is represented in an early copy, which is printed by Navarrete. Though no contemporary Spanish edition is known, an Italian version was issued at Venice in 1505, as Copia de la Lettera per Colombo mandata. This was reprinted with comments by Morelli, at Bassano, in 1810, and the title which this librarian gave it of Lettera Rarissima has clung to it, in most of the citations which refer to it.

Peter Martyr, writing in January, 1494, mentions just having received a letter from Columbus, but it is not known to exist.

Las Casas uses Columbus's papers.

Las Casas is said to have once possessed a treatise by Columbus on the information obtained from Portuguese and Spanish pilots, concerning western lands; and he also refers to Libros de Memorias del Almirante. He is also known by his own statements to have had numerous autograph letters of Columbus. What has become of them is not known. If they were left in the monastery of San Gregorio at Valladolid, where Las Casas used them, they have disappeared with papers of the convent, since they were not among the archives of the suppressed convents, as Harrisse tells us, which were entrusted in 1850 to the Academy of History at Madrid.

Work on the Arctic pole.

In his letter to Doña Juana, Columbus says that he has deposited a work in the Convent de la Mejorada, in which he has predicted the discovery of the Arctic pole. It has not been found.

Missing letters.

Harrisse also tells us of the unsuccessful search which he has made for an alleged letter of Columbus, said in Gunther and Schultz's handbook of autographs (Leipzig, 1856) to have been bought in England by the Duke of Buckingham; and it was learned from Tross, the Paris bookseller, that about 1850 some autograph letters of Columbus, seen by him, were sent to England for sale.

Columbus's maps.

After his return from his first voyage, Columbus prepared a map and an accompanying table of longitudes and latitudes for the new discoveries. They are known to have been the subject of correspondence between him and the queen.

There are various other references to maps which Columbus had constructed, to embody his views or show his discoveries. Not one, certainly to be attributed to him, is known, though Ojeda, Niño, and others are recorded as having used, in their explorations, maps made by Columbus. Peter Martyr's language does not indicate that Columbus ever completed any chart, though he had, with the help of his brother Bartholomew, begun one. The map in the Ptolemy of 1513 is said by Santarem to have been drawn by Columbus, or to have been based on his memoranda, but the explanation on the map seems rather to imply that information derived from an admiral in the service of Portugal was used in correcting it, and since Harrisse has brought to light what is usually called the Cantino map, there is strong ground for supposing that the two had one prototype.

Italian notarial records.

Let us pass from records by Columbus to those about him. We owe to an ancient custom of Italy that so much has been preserved, to throw in the aggregate no small amount of light on the domestic life of the family in which Columbus was the oldest born. During the fourteen years in which his father lived at Savona, every little business act and legal transaction was attested before notaries, whose records have been preserved filed in filzas in the archives of the town.

These filzas were simply a file of documents tied together by a string passed through each, and a filza generally embraced a year's accumulation. The photographic facsimile which Harrisse gives in his Columbus and the Bank of Saint George, of the letter of Columbus preserved by the bank, shows how the sheet was folded once lengthwise, and then the hole was made midway in each fold.

We learn in this way that, as early as 1470 and later, Columbus stood security for his father. We find him in 1472 the witness of another's will. As under the Justinian procedure the notary's declaration sufficed, such documents in Italy are not rendered additionally interesting by the autograph of the witness, as they would be in England. This notarial resource is no new discovery. As early as 1602, thirteen documents drawn from similar depositaries were printed at Genoa, in some annotations by Giulio Salinerio upon Cornelius Tacitus. Other similar papers were discovered by the archivists of Savona, Gian Tommaso and Giambattista Belloro, in 1810 (reprinted, 1821) and 1839 respectively, and proving the general correctness of the earlier accounts of Columbus's younger days given in Gallo, Senarega, and Giustiniani. It is to be regretted that the original entries of some of these notarial acts are not now to be found, but patient search may yet discover them, and even do something more to elucidate the life of the Columbus family in Savona.

Savona.

There has been brought into prominence and published lately a memoir of the illustrious natives of Savona, written by a lawyer, Giovanni Vincenzo Verzellino, who died in that town in 1638. This document was printed at Savona in 1885, under the editorial care of Andrea Astengo; but Harrisse has given greater currency to its elucidations for our purpose in his Christophe Colomb et Savone (Genoa, 1877).

Genoa notarial records.

Harrisse is not unwisely confident that the nineteen documents—if no more have been added—throwing light on minor points of the obscure parts of the life of Columbus and his kindred, which during recent years have been discovered in the notarial files of Genoa by the Marquis Marcello Staglieno, may be only the precursors of others yet to be unearthed, and that the pages of the Giornale Ligustico may continue to record such discoveries as it has in the past.

Records of the Bank of St. George.

The records of the Bank of Saint George in Genoa have yielded something, but not much. In the state archives of Genoa, preserved since 1817 in the Palazzetto, we might hope to find some report of the great discovery, of which the Genoese ambassadors, Francesco Marchesio and Gian Antonio Grimaldi, were informed, just as they were taking leave of Ferdinand and Isabella for returning to Italy; but nothing of that kind has yet been brought to light there; nor was it ever there, unless the account which Senarega gives in the narrative printed in Muratori was borrowed thence. We may hope, but probably in vain, to have these public archives determine if Columbus really offered to serve his native country in a voyage of discovery. The inquirer is more fortunate if he explores what there is left of the archives of the old abbey of St. Stephen, which, since the suppression of the convents in 1797, have been a part of the public papers, for he can find in them some help in solving some pertinent questions.

Vatican archives.

Hidden manuscripts.

Letters about Columbus.

Harrisse tells us in 1887 that he had been waiting two years for permission to search the archives of the Vatican. What may yet be revealed in that repository, the world waits anxiously to learn. It may be that some one shall yet discover there the communication in which Ferdinand and Isabella announced to the Pope the consummation of the hopes of Columbus. It may be that the diplomatic correspondence covering the claims of Spain by virtue of the discovery of Columbus, and leading to the bull of demarcation of May, 1493, may yet be found, accompanied by maps, of the highest interest in interpreting the relations of the new geography. There is no assurance that the end of manuscript disclosures has yet come. Some new bit of documentary proof has been found at times in places quite unexpected. The number of Italian observers in those days of maritime excitement living in the seaports and trading places of Spain and Portugal, kept their home friends alert in expectation by reason of such appetizing news. Such are the letters sent to Italy by Hanibal Januarius, and by Luca, the Florentine engineer, concerning the first voyage. There are similar transient summaries of the second voyage. Some have been found in the papers of Macchiavelli, and others had been arranged by Zorzi for a new edition of his documentary collection. These have all been recovered of recent years, and Harrisse himself, Gargiolli, Guerrini, and others, have been instrumental in their publication.

Spanish archives.

Simancas and Seville.

Simancas.

It was thirty-seven years after the death of Columbus before, under an order of Charles the Fifth, February 19, 1543, the archives of Spain were placed in some sort of order and security at Simancas. The great masses of papers filed by the crown secretaries and the Councils of the Indies and of Seville, were gradually gathered there, but not until many had been lost. Others apparently disappeared at a later day, for we are now aware that many to which Herrera refers cannot be found. New efforts to secure the preservation and systematize the accumulation of manuscripts were made by order of Philip the Second in 1567, but it would seem without all the success that might have been desired. Towards the end of the last century, it was the wish of Charles the Third that all the public papers relating to the New World should be selected from Simancas and all other places of deposit and carried to Seville. The act was accomplished in 1788, when they were placed in a new building which had been provided for them. Thus it is that to-day the student of Columbus must rather search Seville than Simancas for new documents, though a few papers of some interest in connection with the contests of his heirs with the crown of Castile may still exist at Simancas. Thirty years ago, if not now, as Bergenroth tells us, there was little comfort for the student of history in working at Simancas. The papers are preserved in an old castle, formerly belonging to the admirals of Castile, which had been confiscated and devoted to the uses of such a repository. The one large room which was assigned for the accommodation of readers had a northern aspect, and as no fires were allowed, the note-taker found not infrequently in winter the ink partially congealed in his pen. There was no imaginable warmth even in the landscape as seen from the windows, since, amid a treeless waste, the whistle of cold blasts in winter and a blinding African heat in summer characterize the climate of this part of Old Castile.

Of the early career of Columbus, it is very certain that something may be gained at Simancas, for when Bergenroth, sent by the English government, made search there to illustrate the relations of Spain with England, and published his results, with the assistance of Gayangos, in 1862-1879, as a Calendar of Letters, Despatches, and State Papers relating to Negotiations between England and Spain, one of the earliest entries of his first printed volume, under 1485, was a complaint of Ferdinand and Isabella against a Columbus—some have supposed it our Christopher—for his participancy in the piratical service of the French.

ARCHIVO DE SIMANCAS.
[From Parcerisa and Quadrado's España.]

Seville.

Harrisse complains that we have as yet but scant knowledge of what the archives of the Indies at Seville may contain, but they probably throw light rather upon the successors of Columbus than upon the career of the Admiral himself.

Seville notarial records.

The notarial archives of Seville are of recent construction, the gathering of scattered material having been first ordered so late as 1869. The partial examination which has since been made of them has revealed some slight evidences of the life of some of Columbus's kindred, and it is quite possible some future inquirer will be rewarded for his diligent search among them.

It is also not unlikely that something of interest may be brought to light respecting the descendants of Columbus who have lived in Seville, like the Counts of Gelves; but little can be expected regarding the life of the Admiral himself.

Santa Maria de las Cuevas.

The personal fame of Columbus is much more intimately connected with the monastery of Santa Maria de las Cuevas. Here his remains were transported in 1509; and at a later time, his brother and son, each Diego by name, were laid beside him, as was his grandson Luis. Here in an iron chest the family muniments and jewels were kept, as has been said. It is affirmed that all the documents which might have grown out of these transactions of duty and precaution, and which might incidentally have yielded some biographical information, are nowhere to be found in the records of the monastery. A century ago or so, when Muñoz was working in these records, there seems to have been enough to repay his exertions, as we know by his citations made between 1781 and 1792.

Portuguese archives. Torre do Tombo.

The national archives of the Torre do Tombo, at Lisbon, begun so far back as 1390, are well known to have been explored by Santarem, then their keeper, primarily for traces of the career of Vespucius; but so intelligent an antiquary could not have forgotten, as a secondary aim, the acts of Columbus. The search yielded him, however, nothing in this last direction; nor was Varnhagen more fortunate. Harrisse had hopes to discover there the correspondence of Columbus with John the Second, in 1488; but the search was futile in this respect, though it yielded not a little respecting the Perestrello family, out of which Columbus took his wife, the mother of the heir of his titles. There is even hope that the notarial acts of Lisbon might serve a similar purpose to those which have been so fruitful in Genoa and Savona. There are documents of great interest which may be yet obscurely hidden away, somewhere in Portugal, like the letter from the mouth of the Tagus, which Columbus on his return in March, 1493, addressed to the Portuguese king, and the diplomatic correspondence of John the Second and Ferdinand of Aragon, which the project of a second voyage occasioned, as well as the preliminaries of the treaty of Tordesillas.

Santo Domingo archives.

Lawsuit papers.

There may be yet some hope from the archives of Santo Domingo itself, and from those of its Cathedral, to trace in some of their lines the descendants of the Admiral through his son Diego. The mishaps of nature and war have, however, much impaired the records. Of Columbus himself there is scarce a chance to learn anything here. The papers of the famous lawsuit of Diego Colon with the crown seem to have escaped the attention of all the historians before the time of Muñoz and Navarrete. The direct line of male descendants of the Admiral ended in 1578, when his great-grandson, Diego Colon y Pravia, died on the 27th January, a childless man. Then began another contest for the heritage and titles, and it lasted for thirty years, till in 1608 the Council of the Indies judged the rights to descend by a turn back to Diego's aunt Isabel, and thence to her grandson, Nuño de Portugallo, Count of Gelves. The excluded heirs, represented by the children of a sister of Diego, Francisca, who had married Diego Ortegon, were naturally not content; and out of the contest which followed we get a large mass of printed statements and counter statements, which used with caution, offer a study perhaps of some of the transmitted traits of Columbus. Harrisse names and describes nineteen of these documentary memorials, the last of which bears date in 1792. The most important of them all, however, is one printed at Madrid in 1606, known as Memorial del Pleyto, in which we find the descent of the true and spurious lines, and learn something too much of the scandalous life of Luis, the grandson of the Admiral, to say nothing of the illegitimate taints of various other branches. Harrisse finds assistance in working out some of the lines of the Admiral's descendants, in Antonio Caetano de Sousa's Historia Genealogica da Casa Real Portugueza (Lisbon, 1735-49, in 14 vols.).

The Muñoz collection.

The most important collection of documents gathered by individual efforts in Spain, to illustrate the early history of the New World, was that made by Juan Bautista Muñoz, in pursuance of royal orders issued to him in 1781 and 1788, to examine all Spanish archives, for the purpose of collecting material for a comprehensive History of the Indies. Muñoz has given in the introduction of his history a clear statement of the condition of the different depositories of archives in Spain, as he found them towards the end of the last century, when a royal order opened them all to his search. A first volume of Muñoz's elaborate and judicious work was issued in 1793, and Muñoz died in 1799, without venturing on a second volume to carry the story beyond 1500, where he had left it. He was attacked for his views, and there was more or less of a pamphlet war over the book before death took him from the strife; but he left a fragment of the second volume in manuscript, and of this there is a copy in the Lenox Library in New York. Another copy was sold in the Brinley sale. The Muñoz collection of copies came in part, at least, at some time after the collector's death into the hands of Antonio de Uguina, who placed them at the disposal of Irving; and Ternaux seems also to have used them. They were finally deposited by the Spanish government in the Academy of History at Madrid. Here Alfred Demersey saw them in 1862-63, and described them in the Bulletin of the French Geographical Society in June, 1864, and it is on this description as well as on one in Fuster's Biblioteca Valenciana, that Harrisse depends, not having himself examined the documents.

The Navarrete collection.

Martin Fernandez de Navarrete was guided in his career as a collector of documents, when Charles the Fourth made an order, October 15, 1789, that there should be such a work begun to constitute the nucleus of a library and museum. The troublous times which succeeded interrupted the work, and it was not till 1825 that Navarrete brought out the first volume of his Coleccion de los Viages y Descubrimientos que hicieron por Mar los Españoles desde Fines del Siglo XV., a publication which a fifth volume completed in 1837, when he was over seventy years of age.

Any life of Columbus written from documentary sources must reflect much light from this collection of Navarrete, of which the first two volumes are entirely given to the career of the Admiral, and indeed bear the distinctive title of Relaciones, Cartas y otros Documentos, relating to him.

The researches of Navarrete.

Navarrete was engaged thirty years on his work in the archives of Spain, and was aided part of the time by Muñoz the historian, and by Gonzales the keeper of the archives at Simancas. His researches extended to all the public repositories, and to such private ones as could be thought to illustrate the period of discovery. Navarrete has told the story of his searches in the various archives of Spain, in the introduction to his Coleccion, and how it was while searching for the evidences of the alleged voyage of Maldonado on the Pacific coast of North America, in 1588, that he stumbled upon Las Casas's copies of the relations of Columbus, for his first and third voyages, then hid away in the archives of the Duc del Infantado; and he was happy to have first brought them to the attention of Muñoz.

There are some advantages for the student in the use of the French edition of Navarrete's Relations des Quatre Voyages entrepris par Colomb, since the version was revised by Navarrete himself, and it is elucidated, not so much as one would wish, with notes by Rémusat, Balbi, Cuvier, Jomard, Letronne, St. Martin, Walckenaer, and others. It was published at Paris in three volumes in 1828. The work contains Navarrete's accounts of Spanish pre-Columbian voyages, of the later literature on Columbus, and of the voyages of discovery made by other efforts of the Spaniards, beside the documentary material respecting Columbus and his voyages, the result of his continued labors. Caleb Cushing, in his Reminiscences of Spain in 1833, while commending the general purposes of Navarrete, complains of his attempts to divert the indignation of posterity from the selfish conduct of Ferdinand, and to vindicate him from the charge of injustice towards Columbus. This plea does not find to-day the same sympathy in students that it did sixty years ago.

Madrid Academy of History.

Father Antonio de Aspa of the monastery of the Mejorada, formed a collection of documents relating to the discovery of the New World, and it was in this collection, now preserved in the Academy of History at Madrid, that Navarrete discovered that curious narration of the second voyage of Columbus by Dr. Chanca, which had been sent to the chapter of the Cathedral, and which Navarrete included in his collection. It is thought that Bernaldez had used this Chanca narrative in his Reyes Católicos.

Coleccion de Documentos Ineditos.

Navarrete's name is also connected, as one of its editors, with the extensive Coleccion de Documentos Ineditos para la Historia de España, the publication of which was begun in Madrid in 1847, two years before Navarrete's death. This collection yields something in elucidation of the story to be here told; but not much, except that in it, at a late day, the Historia of Las Casas was first printed.

In 1864, there was still another series begun at Madrid, Coleccion de Documentos Ineditos relativos al Descubrimiento, Conquista y Colonizacion de las Posesiones Españolas en América y Oceania, under the editing of Joaquin Pacheco and Francisco de Cárdenas, who have not always satisfied students by the way in which they have done their work. Beyond the papers which Navarrete had earlier given, and which are here reprinted, there is not much in this collection to repay the student of Columbus, except some long accounts of the Repartimiento in Española.

Cartas de Indias.

The latest documentary contribution is the large folio, with an appendix of facsimile writings of Columbus, Vespucius, and others, published at Madrid in 1877, by the government, and called Cartas de Indias, in which it has been hinted some use has been made of the matter accumulated by Navarrete for additional volumes of his Coleccion.

PART OF A PAGE IN THE GIUSTINIANI PSALTER, SHOWING THE BEGINNING OF THE EARLIEST PRINTED LIFE OF COLUMBUS.
[From the copy in Harvard College Library.]

[CHAPTER II.]

BIOGRAPHERS AND PORTRAITISTS.

Contemporary notices.

Giustiniani.

We may most readily divide by the nationalities of the writers our enumeration of those who have used the material which has been considered in the previous chapter. We begin, naturally, with the Italians, the countrymen of Columbus. We may look first to three Genoese, and it has been shown that while they used documents apparently now lost, they took nothing from them which we cannot get from other sources; and they all borrowed from common originals, or from each other. Two of these writers are Antonio Gallo, the official chronicler of the Genoese Republic, on the first and second voyages of Columbus, and so presumably writing before the third was made, and Bartholomew Senarega on the affairs of Genoa, both of which recitals were published by Muratori, in his great Italian collection. The third is Giustiniani, the Bishop of Nebbio, who, publishing in 1516, at Genoa, a polyglot Psalter, added, as one of his elucidations of the nineteenth psalm, on the plea that Columbus had often boasted he was chosen to fulfill its prophecy, a brief life of Columbus, in which the story of the humble origin of the navigator has in the past been supposed to have first been told. The other accounts, it now appears, had given that condition an equal prominence. Giustiniani was but a child when Columbus left Genoa, and could not have known him; and taking, very likely, much from hearsay, he might have made some errors, which were repeated or only partly corrected in his Annals of Genoa, published in 1537, the year following his own death. It is not found, however, that the sketch is in any essential particular far from correct, and it has been confirmed by recent investigations. The English of it is given in Harrisse's Notes on Columbus (pp. 74-79). The statements of the Psalter respecting Columbus were reckoned with other things so false that the Senate of Genoa prohibited its perusal and allowed no one to possess it,—at least so it is claimed in the Historie of 1571; but no one has ever found such a decree, nor is it mentioned by any who would have been likely to revert to it, had it ever existed.

Bergomas.

The account in the Collectanea of Battista Fulgoso (sometimes written Fregoso), printed at Milan in 1509, is of scarcely any original value, though of interest as the work of another Genoese. Allegetto degli Allegetti, whose Ephemerides is also published in Muratori, deserves scarcely more credit, though he seems to have got his information from the letters of Italian merchants living in Spain, who communicated current news to their home correspondents. Bergomas, who had published a chronicle as early as 1483, made additions to his work from time to time, and in an edition printed at Venice, in 1503, he paraphrased Columbus's own account of his first voyage, which was reprinted in the subsequent edition of 1506. In this latter year Maffei de Volterra published a commentary at Rome, of much the same importance. Such was the filtering process by which Italy, through her own writers, acquired contemporary knowledge of her adventurous son.

The method was scarcely improved in the condensation of Jovius (1551), or in the traveler's tales of Benzoni (1565).

Casoni, 1708.

Bossi.

Harrisse affirms that it is not till we come down to the Annals of Genoa, published by Filippo Casoni, in 1708, that we get any new material in an Italian writer, and on a few points this last writer has adduced documentary evidence, not earlier made known. It is only when we pass into the present century that we find any of the countrymen of Columbus undertaking in a sustained way to tell the whole story of Columbus's life. Léon had noted that at some time in Spain, without giving place and date, Columbus had printed a little tract, Declaration de Tabla Navigatoria; but no one before Luigi Bossi had undertaken to investigate the writings of Columbus. He is precursor of all the modern biographers of Columbus, and his book was published at Milan, in 1818. He claimed in his appendix to have added rare and unpublished documents, but Harrisse points out how they had all been printed earlier.

Bossi expresses opinions respecting the Spanish nation that are by no means acceptable to that people, and Navarrete not infrequently takes the Italian writer to task for this as for his many errors of statement, and for the confidence which he places even in the pictorial designs of De Bry as historical records.

There is nothing more striking in the history of American discovery than the fact that the Italian people furnished to Spain Columbus, to England Cabot, and to France Verrazano; and that the three leading powers of Europe, following as maritime explorers in the lead of Portugal, who could not dispense with Vespucius, another Italian, pushed their rights through men whom they had borrowed from the central region of the Mediterranean, while Italy in its own name never possessed a rood of American soil. The adopted country of each of these Italians gave more or less of its own impress to its foster child. No one of these men was so impressible as Columbus, and no country so much as Spain was likely at this time to exercise an influence on the character of an alien. Humboldt has remarked that Columbus got his theological fervor in Andalusia and Granada, and we can scarcely imagine Columbus in the garb of a Franciscan walking the streets of free and commercial Genoa as he did those of Seville, when he returned from his second voyage.

The latest of the considerable popular Italian lives of Columbus is G. B. Lemoyne's Colombo e la Scoperta dell' America, issued at Turin, in 1873.

Portuguese writers.

We may pass now to the historians of that country to which Columbus betook himself on leaving Italy; but about all to be found at first hand is in the chronicle of João II. of Portugal, as prepared by Ruy de Pina, the archivist of the Torre do Tombo. At the time of the voyage of Columbus Ruy was over fifty, while Garcia de Resende was a young man then living at the Portuguese court, who in his Choronica, published in 1596, did little more than borrow from his elder, Ruy; and Resende in turn furnished to João de Barros the staple of the latter's narrative in his Decada da Asia, printed at Lisbon, in 1752.

Spanish writers.

Peter Martyr.

We find more of value when we summon the Spanish writers. Although Peter Martyr d'Anghiera was an Italian, Muñoz reckons him a Spaniard, since he was naturalized in Spain. He was a man of thirty years, when, coming from Rome, he settled in Spain, a few years before Columbus attracted much notice. Martyr had been borne thither on a reputation of his own, which had commended his busy young nature to the attention of the Spanish court. He took orders and entered upon a prosperous career, proceeding by steps, which successively made him the chaplain of Queen Isabella, a prior of the Cathedral of Granada, and ultimately the official chronicler of the Indies. Very soon after his arrival in Spain, he had disclosed a quick eye for the changeful life about him, and he began in 1488 the writing of those letters which, to the number of over eight hundred, exist to attest his active interest in the events of his day. These events he continued to observe till 1525. We have no more vivid source of the contemporary history, particularly as it concerned the maritime enterprise of the peninsular peoples. He wrote fluently, and, as he tells us, sometimes while waiting for dinner, and necessarily with haste. He jotted down first and unconfirmed reports, and let them stand. He got news by hearsay, and confounded events. He had candor and sincerity enough, however, not to prize his own works above their true value. He knew Columbus, and, his letters readily reflect what interest there was in the exploits of Columbus, immediately on his return from his first voyage; but the earlier preparations of the navigator for that voyage, with the problematical characteristics of the undertaking, do not seem to have made any impression upon Peter Martyr, and it is not till May of 1493, when the discovery had been made, and later in September, that he chronicles the divulged existence of the newly discovered islands. The three letters in which this wonderful intelligence was first communicated are printed by Harrisse in English, in his Notes on Columbus. Las Casas tells us how Peter Martyr got his accounts of the first discoveries directly from the lips of Columbus himself and from those who accompanied him; but he does not fail to tell us also of the dangers of too implicitly trusting to all that Peter says. From May 14, 1493, to June 5, 1497, in twelve separate letters, we read what this observer has to say of the great navigator who had suddenly and temporarily stepped into the glare of notice. These and other letters of Peter Martyr have not escaped some serious criticism. There are contradictions and anachronisms in them that have forcibly helped Ranke, Hallam, Gerigk, and others to count the text which we have as more or less changed from what must have been the text, if honestly written by Martyr. They have imagined that some editor, willful or careless, has thrown this luckless accompaniment upon them. The letters, however, claimed the confidence of Prescott, and have, as regards the parts touching the new discoveries, seldom failed to impress with their importance those who have used them. It is the opinion of the last examiner of them, J. H. Mariéjol, in his Peter Martyr d'Anghera (Paris, 1887), that to read them attentively is the best refutation of the skeptics. Martyr ceased to refer to the affairs of the New World after 1499, and those of his earlier letters which illustrate the early voyage have appeared in a French version, made by Gaffarel and Louvot (Paris, 1885).

The representations of Columbus easily convinced Martyr that there opened a subject worthy of his pen, and he set about composing a special treatise on the discoveries in the New World, and, under the title of De Orbe Novo, it occupied his attention from October, 1494, to the day of his death. For the earlier years he had, if we may believe him, not a little help from Columbus himself; and it would seem from his one hundred and thirty-five epistles that he was not altogether prepared to go with Columbus, in accounting the new islands as lying off the coast of Asia. He is particularly valuable to us in treating of Columbus's conflicts with the natives of Española, and Las Casas found him as helpful as we do.

These Decades, as the treatise is usually called, formed enlarged bulletins, which, in several copies, were transmitted by him to some of his noble friends in Italy, to keep them conversant with the passing events.

Trivigiano.

A certain Angelo Trivigiano, into whose hands a copy of some of the early sections fell, translated them into easy, not to say vulgar, Italian, and sent them to Venice, in four different copies, a few months after they were written; and in this way the first seven books of the first decade fell into the hands of a Venetian printer, who, in April, 1504, brought out a little book of sixteen leaves in the dialect of that region, known in bibliography as the Libretto de Tutta la Navigation de Re de Spagna de le Isole et Terreni novamente trovati. This publication is known to us in a single copy lacking a title, in the Biblioteca Marciana. Here we have the first account of the new discoveries, written upon report, and supplementing the narrative of Columbus himself. We also find in this little narrative some personal details about Columbus, not contained in the same portions when embodied in the larger De Orbe Novo of Martyr, and it may be a question if somebody who acted as editor to the Venetian version may not have added them to the translation. The story of the new discoveries attracted enough notice to make Zorzi or Montalboddo—if one or the other were its editor—include this Venetian version of Martyr bodily in the collection of voyages which, as Paesi novamente retrovati, was published at Vicentia somewhere about November, 1507. It is, perhaps, a measure of the interest felt in the undertakings of Columbus, not easily understood at this day, that it took fourteen years for a scant recital of such events to work themselves into the context of so composite a record of discovery as the Paesi proved to be; and still more remarkable it may be accounted that the story could be told with but few actual references to the hero of the transactions, "Columbus, the Genoese." It is not only the compiler who is so reticent, but it is the author whence he borrowed what he had to say, Martyr himself, the observer and acquaintance of Columbus, who buries the discoverer under the event. With such an augury, it is not so strange that at about the same time in the little town of St. Dié, in the Vosges, a sequestered teacher could suggest a name derived from that of a follower of Columbus, Americus Vespucius, for that part of the new lands then brought into prominence. If the documentary proofs of Columbus's priority had given to the Admiral's name the same prominence which the event received, the result might not, in the end, have been so discouraging to justice.

Martyr, unfortunately, with all his advantages, and with his access to the archives of the Indies, did not burden his recital with documents. He was even less observant of the lighter traits that interest those eager for news than might have been expected, for the busy chaplain was a gossip by nature: he liked to retail hearsays and rumors; he enlivened his letters with personal characteristics; but in speaking of Columbus he is singularly reticent upon all that might picture the man to us as he lived.

Oviedo.

Ramusio.

When, in 1534, these portions of Martyr's Decades were combined with a summary of Oviedo, in a fresh publication, there were some curious personal details added to Martyr's narrative; but as Ramusio is supposed to have edited the compilation, these particulars are usually accredited to that author. It is not known whence this Italian compiler could have got them, and there is no confirmation of them elsewhere to be found. If these additions, as is supposed, were a foreign graft upon Martyr's recitals, the staple of his narrative still remains not altogether free from some suspicions that, as a writer himself, he was not wholly frank and trustworthy. At least a certain confusion in his method leads some of the critics to discover something like imposture in what they charge as a habit of antedating a letter so as to appear prophetic; while his defenders find in these same evidences of incongruity a sign of spontaneity that argues freshness and sincerity.

Bernaldez.

The confidence which we may readily place in what is said of Columbus in the chronicle of Ferdinand and Isabella, written by Andrès Bernaldez, is prompted by his acquaintance with Columbus, and by his being the recipient of some of the navigator's own writings from his own hands. He is also known to have had access to what Chanca and other companions of Columbus had written. This country curate, who lived in the neighborhood of Seville, was also the chaplain of the Archbishop of Seville, a personal friend of the Admiral, and from him Bernaldez received some help. He does not add much, however, to what is given us by Peter Martyr, though in respect to the second voyage and to a few personal details Bernaldez is of some confirmatory value. The manuscript of his narrative remained unprinted in the royal library at Madrid till about thirty-five years ago; but nearly all the leading writers have made use of it in copies which have been furnished.

Oviedo.

In coming to Oviedo, we encounter a chronicler who, as a writer, possesses an art far from skillful. Muñoz laments that his learning was not equal to his diligence. He finds him of little service for the times of Columbus, and largely because he was neglectful of documents and pursued uncritical combinations of tales and truths. With all his vagaries he is a helpful guide. "It is not," says Harrisse, "that Oviedo shows so much critical sagacity, as it is that he collates all the sources available to him, and gives the reader the clues to a final judgment." He is generally deemed honest, though Las Casas thought him otherwise. The author of the Historie looks upon him as an enemy of Columbus, and would make it appear that he listened to the tales of the Pinzons, who were enemies of the Admiral. His administrative services in the Indies show that he could be faithful to a trust, even at the risk of popularity. This gives a presumption in favor of his historic fairness. He was intelligent if not learned, and a power of happy judgments served him in good stead, even with a somewhat loose method of taking things as he heard them. He further inspires us with a certain amount of confidence, because he is not always a hero-worshiper, and he does not hesitate to tell a story, which seems to have been in circulation, to the effect that Columbus got his geographical ideas from an old pilot. Oviedo, however, refrains from setting the tale down as a fact, as some of the later writers, using little of Oviedo's caution, and borrowing from him, did. His opportunities of knowing the truth were certainly exceptional, though it does not appear that he ever had direct communication with the Admiral himself. He was but a lad of fifteen when we find him jotting down notes of what he saw and heard, as a page in attendance upon Don Juan, the son of the Spanish sovereigns, when, at Barcelona, he saw them receive Columbus after his first voyage. During five years, between 1497 and 1502, he was in Italy. With that exception he was living within the Spanish court up to 1514, when he was sent to the New World, and passed there the greater part of his remaining life. While he had been at court in his earlier years, the sons of Columbus, Diego and Ferdinand, were his companions in the pages' anteroom, and he could hardly have failed to profit by their acquaintance. We know that from the younger son he did derive not a little information. When he went to America, some of Columbus's companions and followers were still living,—Pinzon, Ponce de Leon, and Diego Velasquez,—and all these could hardly have failed to help him in his note-taking. He also tells us that he sought some of the Italian compatriots of the Admiral, though Harrisse judges that what he got from them was not altogether trustworthy. Oviedo rose naturally in due time into the position of chronicler of the Indies, and tried his skill at first in a descriptive account of the New World. A command of Charles the Fifth, with all the facilities which such an order implied, though doubtless in some degree embarrassed by many of the documentary proofs being preserved rather in Spain than in the Indies, finally set him to work on a Historia General de las Indias, the opening portions of which, and those covering the career of Columbus, were printed at Seville in 1535. It is the work of a consistent though not blinded admirer of the Discoverer, and while we might wish he had helped us to more of the proofs of his narrative, his recital is, on the whole, one to be signally grateful for.

Gomara, in the early part of his history, mixed up what he took from Oviedo with what else came in his way, with an avidity that rejected little.

Historie ascribed to Ferdinand Columbus.

But it is to a biography of Columbus, written by his youngest son, Ferdinand, as was universally believed up to 1871, that all the historians of the Admiral have been mainly indebted for the personal details and other circumstances which lend vividness to his story. As the book has to-day a good many able defenders, notwithstanding the discredit which Harrisse has sought to place upon it, it is worth while to trace the devious paths of its transmission, and to measure the burden of confidence placed upon it from the days of Ferdinand to our own.

The rumor goes that some of the statements in the Psalter note of 1516, particularly one respecting the low origin of the Admiral, disturbed the pride of Ferdinand to such a degree that this son of Columbus undertook to leave behind him a detailed account of his father's career, such as the Admiral, though urged to do it, had never found time to write. Ferdinand was his youngest son, and was born only three or four years before his father left Palos. There are two dates given for his birth, each apparently on good authority, but these are a year apart.

Career of Ferdinand Columbus.

The language of Columbus's will, as well as the explicit statements of Oviedo and Las Casas, leaves no reasonable ground for doubting his illegitimacy. Bastardy was no bar to heirship in Spain, if a testator chose to make a natural son his heir, as Columbus did, in giving Ferdinand the right to his titles after the failure of heirs to Diego, his legitimate son. Columbus's influence early found him a place as a page at court, and during the Admiral's fourth voyage, in 1502-1504, the boy accompanied his father, and once or twice at a later day he again visited the Indies. When Columbus died, this son inherited many of his papers; but if his own avowal be believed, he had neglected occasions in his father's lifetime to question the Admiral respecting his early life, not having, as he says, at that time learned to have interest in such matters. His subsequent education at court, however, implanted in his mind a good deal of the scholar's taste, and as a courtier in attendance upon Charles the Fifth he had seasons of travel, visiting pretty much every part of Western Europe, during which he had opportunities to pick up in many places a large collection of books. He often noted in them the place and date of purchase, so that it is not difficult to learn in this way something of his wanderings.

The income of Ferdinand was large, or the equivalent of what Harrisse calls to-day 180,000 francs, which was derived from territorial rights in San Domingo, coming to him from the Admiral, increased by slave labor in the mines, assigned to him by King Ferdinand, which at one time included the service of four hundred Indians, and enlarged by pensions bestowed by Charles the Fifth.

It has been said sometimes that he was in orders; but Harrisse, his chief biographer, could find no proof of it. Oviedo describes him in 1535 as a person of "much nobility of character, of an affable turn and of a sweet conversation."

Biblioteca Colombina.

When he died at Seville, July 12, 1539, he had amassed a collection of books, variously estimated in contemporary accounts at from twelve to twenty thousand volumes. Harrisse, in his Grandeur et Décadence de la Colombine (2d ed., Paris, 1885), represents Ferdinand as having searched from 1510 to 1537 all the principal book marts of Europe. He left these books by will to his minor nephew, Luis Colon, son of Diego, but there was a considerable delay before Luis renounced the legacy, with the conditions attached. Legal proceedings, which accompanied the transactions of its executors, so delayed the consummation of the alternative injunction of the will that the chapter of the Cathedral of Seville, which, was to receive the library in case Don Luis declined it, did not get possession of it till 1552.

The care of it which ensued seems to have been of a varied nature. Forty years later a scholar bitterly complains that it was inaccessible. It is known that by royal command certain books and papers were given up to enrich the national archives, which, however, no longer contain them. When, in 1684, the monks awoke to a sense of their responsibility and had a new inventory of the books made, it was found that the collection had been reduced to four or five thousand volumes. After the librarian who then had charge of it died in 1709, the collection again fell into neglect. There are sad stories of roistering children let loose in its halls to make havoc of its treasures. There was no responsible care again taken of it till a new librarian was chosen, in 1832, who discovered what any one might have learned before, that the money which Ferdinand left for the care and increase of the library had never been applied to it, and that the principal, even, had disappeared. Other means of increasing it were availed of, and the loss of the original inestimable bibliographical treasures was forgotten in the crowd of modern books which were placed upon its shelves. Amid all this new growth, it does not appear just how many of the books which descended from Ferdinand still remain in it. Something of the old carelessness—to give it no worse name—has despoiled it, even as late as 1884 and 1885, when large numbers of the priceless treasures still remaining found a way to the Quay Voltaire and other marts for old books in Paris, while others were disposed of in London, Amsterdam, and even in Spain. This outrage was promptly exposed by Harrisse in the Revue Critique, and in two monographs, Grandeur et Décadence, etc., already named, and in his Colombine et Clément Marot (Paris, 1886); and the story has been further recapitulated in the accounts of Ferdinand and his library, which Harrisse has also given in his Excerpta Colombiana: Bibliographie de Quatre Cents Pièces Gothiques Francaises, Italiennes et Latines du Commencement du XVI Siecle (Paris, 1887), an account of book rarities found in that library.

SPECIMENS OF THE NOTES OF FERDINAND COLUMBUS ON HIS BOOKS.
[From Harrisse's Grandeur el Décadence de la Colombine (Paris, 1885).]

Perez de Oliva.

We are fortunate, nevertheless, in having a manuscript catalogue of it in Ferdinand's own hand, though not a complete one, for he died while he was making it. This library, as well as what we know of his writings and of the reputation which he bore among his contemporaries, many of whom speak of him and of his library with approbation, shows us that a habit, careless of inquiry in his boyhood, gave place in his riper years to study and respect for learning. He is said by the inscription on his tomb to have composed an extensive work on the New World and his father's finding of it, but it has disappeared. Neither in his library nor in his catalogue do we find any trace of the life of his father which he is credited with having prepared. None of his friends, some of them writers on the New World, make any mention of such a book. There is in the catalogue a note, however, of a life of Columbus written about 1525, of which the manuscript is credited to Ferdinand Perez de Oliva, a man of some repute, who died in 1530. Whether this writing bore any significant relation to the life which is associated with the owner of the library is apparently beyond discovery. It can scarcely be supposed that it could have been written other than with Ferdinand's cognizance. That there was an account of the Admiral's career, quoted in Las Casas and attributed to Ferdinand Columbus, and that it existed before 1559, seems to be nearly certain. A manuscript of the end of the sixteenth century, by Gonzalo Argote de Molina, mentions a report that Ferdinand had written a life of his father. Harrisse tells us that he has seen a printed book catalogue, apparently of the time of Muñoz or Navarette, in which a Spanish life of Columbus by Ferdinand Columbus is entered; but the fact stands without any explanation or verification. Spotorno, in 1823, in an introduction to his collection of documents about Columbus, says that the manuscript of what has passed for Ferdinand's memoir of his father was taken from Spain to Genoa by Luis Colon, the Duke of Veragua, son of Diego and grandson of Christopher Columbus. It is not known that Luis ever had any personal relations with Ferdinand, who died while Luis was still in Santo Domingo.

Character of the Historie.

It is said that it was in 1568 that Luis took the manuscript to Genoa, but in that year he is known to have been living elsewhere. He had been arrested in Spain in 1558 for having three wives, when he was exiled to Oran, in Africa, for ten years, and he died in 1572. Spotorno adds that the manuscript afterwards fell into the hands of a patrician, Marini, from whom Alfonzo de Ullua received it, and translated it into Italian. It is shown, however, that Marini was not living at this time. The original Spanish, if that was the tongue of the manuscript, then disappeared, and the world has only known it in this Italian Historie, published in 1571. Whether the copy brought to Italy had been in any way changed from its original condition, or whether the version then made public fairly represented it, there does not seem any way of determining to the satisfaction of everybody. At all events, the world thought it had got something of value and of authority, and in sundry editions and retranslations, with more or less editing and augmentation, it has passed down to our time—the last edition appearing in 1867—unquestioned for its service to the biographers of Columbus. Muñoz hardly knew what to make of some of "its unaccountable errors," and conjectured that the Italian version had been made from "a corrupt and false copy;" and coupling with it the "miserable" Spanish rendering in Barcia's Historiadores, Muñoz adds that "a number of falsities and absurdities is discernible in both." Humboldt had indeed expressed wonder at the ignorance of the book in nautical matters, considering the reputation which Ferdinand held in such affairs. It began the Admiral's story in detail when he was said to be fifty-six years of age. It has never been clear to all minds that Ferdinand's asseveration of a youthful want of curiosity respecting the Admiral's early life was sufficient to account for so much reticence respecting that formative period. It has been, accordingly, sometimes suspected that a desire to ignore the family's early insignificance rather than ignorance had most to do with this absence of information. This seems to be Irving's inference from the facts.

Attacked by Harrisse.

In 1871, Henry Harrisse, who in 1866 had written of the book, "It is generally accepted with some latitude," made the first assault on its integrity, in his Fernando Colon, published in Seville, in Spanish, which was followed the next year by his Fernand Colomb, in the original French text as it had been written, and published at Paris. Harrisse's view was reënforced in the Additions to his Bibliotheca Americana Vetustissima, and he again reverted to the subject in the first volume of his Christophe Colomb, in 1884. In the interim the entire text of Las Casas's Historia had been published for the first time, rendering a comparison of the two books more easy. Harrisse availed himself of this facility of examination, and made no abatement of his confident disbelief. That Las Casas borrowed from the Historie, or rather that the two books had a common source, Harrisse thinks satisfactorily shown. He further throws out the hint that this source, or prototype, may have been one of the lost essays of Ferdinand, in which he had followed the career of his father; or indeed, in some way, the account written by Oliva may have formed the basis of the book. He further implies that, in the transformation to the Italian edition of 1571, there were engrafted upon the narrative many contradictions and anachronisms, which seriously impair its value. Hence, as he contends, it is a shame to impose its authorship in that foreign shape upon Ferdinand. He also denies in the main the story of its transmission as told by Spotorno.

So much of this book as is authentic, and may be found to be corroborated by other evidence, may very likely be due to the manuscript of Oliva, transported to Italy, and used as the work of Ferdinand Columbus, to give it larger interest than the name of Oliva would carry; while, to gratify prejudices and increase its attractions, the various interpolations were made, which Harrisse thinks—and with much reason—could not have proceeded from one so near to Columbus, so well informed, and so kindly in disposition as we know his son Ferdinand to have been.

Defended by Stevens and others.

So iconoclastic an outburst was sure to elicit vindicators of the world's faith as it had long been held. In counter publications, Harrisse and D'Avezac, the latter an eminent French authority on questions of this period, fought out their battle, not without some sharpness. Henry Stevens, an old antagonist of Harrisse, assailed the new views with his accustomed confidence and rasping assertion. Oscar Peschel, the German historian, and Count Circourt, the French student, gave their opposing opinions; and the issue has been joined by others, particularly within a few years by Prospero Peragallo, the pastor of an Italian church in Lisbon, who has pressed defensive views with some force in his L'Autenticità delle Historie di Fernando Colombo (1884), and later in his Cristoforo Colombo et sua Famiglia (1888). It is held by some of these later advocates of the book that parts of the original Spanish text can be identified in Las Casas. The controversy has thus had two stages. The first was marked by the strenuousness of D'Avezac fifteen years ago. The second sprang from the renewed propositions of Harrisse in his Christophe Colomb, ten years later. Sundry critics have summed up the opposing arguments with more or less tendency to oppose the iconoclast, and chief among them are two German scholars: Professor Max Büdinger, in his Acten zur Columbus' Geschichte (Wien, 1886), and his Zur Columbus Literatur (Wien, 1889); and Professor Eugen Gelcich, in the Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin (1887).

Harrisse's views cannot be said to have conquered a position; but his own scrutiny and that which he has engendered in others have done good work in keeping the Historie constantly subject to critical caution. Dr. Shea still says of it: "It is based on the same documents of Christopher Columbus which Las Casas used. It is a work of authority."

Las Casas.

Reference has already been made to the tardy publication of the narrative of Las Casas. Columbus had been dead something over twenty years, when this good man set about the task of describing in this work what he had seen and heard respecting the New World,—or at least this is the generally accredited interval, making him begin the work in 1527; and yet it is best to remember that Helps could not find any positive evidence of his being at work on the manuscript before 1552. Las Casas did not live to finish the task, though he labored upon it down to 1561, when he was eighty-seven years old. He died five years later. Irving, who made great use of Las Casas, professed to consult him with that caution which he deemed necessary in respect to a writer given to prejudice and overheated zeal. For the period of Columbus's public life (1492-1506), no other one of his contemporaries gives us so much of documentary proof. Of the thirty-one papers, falling within this interval, which he transcribed into his pages nearly in their entirety,—throwing out some preserved in the archives of the Duke of Veragua, and others found at Simancas or Seville,—there remain seventeen, that would be lost to us but for this faithful chronicler. How did he command this rich resource? As a native of Seville, Las Casas had come there to be consecrated as bishop in 1544, and again in 1547, after he had quitted the New World forever. At this time the family papers of Columbus, then held for Luis Colon, a minor, were locked up in a strong box in the custody of the monks of the neighboring monastery of Las Cuevas. There is no evidence, however, that the chest was opened for the inspection of the chronicler. He also professes to use original letters sent by Columbus to Ferdinand and Isabella, which he must have found in the archives at Valladolid before 1545, or at Simancas after that date. Again he speaks of citing as in his own collection attested copies of some of Columbus's letters.

In 1550, and during his later years, Las Casas lived in the monastery of San Gregorio, at Valladolid, leaving it only for visits to Toledo or Madrid, unless it was for briefer visits to Simancas, not far off. Some of the documents, which he might have found in that repository, are not at present in those archives. It was there that he might have found numerous letters which he cites, but which are not otherwise known. From the use Las Casas makes of them, it would seem that they were of more importance in showing the discontent and querulousness of Columbus than as adding to details of his career. Again it appears clear that Las Casas got documents in some way from the royal archives. We know the journal of Columbus on his first voyage only from the abridgment which Las Casas made of it, and much the same is true of the record of his third voyage.

In some portion, at least, of his citations from the letters of Columbus, there may be reason to think that Las Casas took them at second hand, and Harrisse, with his belief in the derivative character of the Historie of Ferdinand Columbus, very easily conjectures that this primal source may have been the manuscript upon which the compiler of the Historie was equally dependent. One kind of reasoning which Harrisse uses is this: If Las Casas had used the original Latin of the correspondence with Toscanelli, instead of the text of this supposed Spanish prototype, it would not appear in so bad a state as it does in Las Casas's book.

LAS CASAS.

If this missing prototype of the Historie was among Ferdinand's books in his library, which had been removed from his house in 1544 to the convent of San Pablo in Seville, and was not removed to the cathedral till 1552, it may also have happened that along with it he used there the De Imagine Mundi of Pierre d'Ailly, Columbus's own copy of which was, and still is, preserved in the Biblioteca Colombina, and shows the Admiral's own manuscript annotations.

It was in the chapel of San Pablo that Las Casas had been consecrated as bishop in 1544, and his associations with the monks could have given easy access to what they held in custody,—too easy, perhaps, if Harrisse's supposition is correct, that they let him take away the map which Toscanelli sent to Columbus, and which would account for its not being in the library now.

His opportunities.

We know, also, that Las Casas had use of the famous letter respecting his third voyage, which the Admiral addressed to the nurse of the Infant Don Juan, and which was first laid before modern students when Spotorno printed it, in 1823. We further understand that the account of the fourth voyage, which students now call, in its Italian form, the Lettera Rarissima, was also at his disposal, as were many letters of Bartholomew, the brother of Columbus, though they apparently only elucidate the African voyage of Diaz.

In addition to these manuscript sources, Las Casas shows that, as a student, he was familiar with and appreciated the decades of Peter Martyr, and had read the accounts of Columbus in Garcia de Resende, Barros, and Castañeda,—to say nothing of what he may have derived from the supposable prototype of the Historie. It is certain that his personal acquaintance brought him into relations with the Admiral himself,—for he accompanied him on his fourth voyage,—with the Admiral's brother, son, and son's wife; and moreover his own father and uncle had sailed with Columbus. There were, among his other acquaintances, the Archbishop of Seville, Pinzon, and other of the contemporary navigators. It has been claimed by some, not accurately, we suspect, that Las Casas had also accompanied Columbus on his third voyage. Notwithstanding all these opportunities of acquiring a thorough intimacy with the story of Columbus, it is contended by Harrisse that the aid afforded by Las Casas disappoints one; and that all essential data with which his narrative is supplied can be found elsewhere nearer the primal source.

Character of his writings.

This condition arises, as he thinks, from the fact that the one engrossing purpose of Las Casas—his aim to emancipate the Indians from a cruel domination—constantly stood in the way of a critical consideration of the other aspects of the early Spanish contact with the New World. It was while at the University of Salamanca that the father of Las Casas gave the son an Indian slave, one of those whom Columbus had sent home; and it was taken from the young student when Isabella decreed the undoing of Columbus's kidnapping exploits. It was this event which set Las Casas to thinking on the miseries of the poor natives, which Columbus had planned, and which enables us to discover, in the example of Las Casas, that the customs of the time are not altogether an unanswerable defense of the time's inhumanity and greed.

As is well known, all but the most recent writers on Spanish-American history have been forced to use this work of Las Casas in manuscript copies, as a license to print such an exposure of Spanish cruelty could not be obtained till 1875, when the Historia was first printed at Madrid.

Herrera.

Herrera, so far as his record concerns Columbus, simply gives us what he takes from Las Casas. He was born about the time that the older writer was probably making his investigations. Herrera did not publish his results, which are slavishly chronological in their method, till half a century later (1601-15). Though then the official historiographer of the Indies, with all the chances for close investigation which that situation afforded him, Herrera failed in all ways to make the record of his Historia that comprehensive and genuine source of the story of Columbus which the reader might naturally look for. The continued obscuration of Las Casas by reason of the long delay in printing his manuscript served to give Herrera, through many generations, a prominence as an authoritative source which he could not otherwise have had. Irving, when he worked at the subject, soon discovered that Las Casas stood behind the story as Herrera told it, and accordingly the American writer resorted by preference to such a copy of the manuscript of Las Casas as he could get. There is a manifest tendency in Herrera to turn Las Casas's qualified statements into absolute ones.

Later Spanish writers.

The personal contributions of the later writers, Muñoz and Navarrete, have been already considered, in speaking of the diversified mass of documentary proofs which accompany or gave rise to their narratives.

The Colon en España of Tomas Rodriguez Pinilla (Madrid, 1884) is in effect a life of the Admiral; but it ignores much of the recent critical and controversial literature, and deals mainly with the old established outline of events.

German writers.

Humboldt.

Among the Germans there was nothing published of any importance till the critical studies of Forster, Peschel, and Ruge, in recent days. De Bry had, indeed, by his translations of Benzoni (1594) and Herrera (1623), familiarized the Germans with the main facts of the career of Columbus. During the present century, Humboldt, in his Examen Critique de l'Histoire et de la Geographie du Nouveau Continent, has borrowed the language of France to show the scope of his critical and learned inquiries into the early history of the Spanish contact in America, and has left it to another hand to give a German rendering to his labors. With this work by Humboldt, brought out in its completer shape in 1836-39, and using most happily all that had been done by Muñoz and Navarrete to make clear both the acts and environments of the Admiral, the intelligence of our own time may indeed be said to have first clearly apprehended, under the light of a critical spirit, in which Irving was deficient, the true significance of the great deeds that gave America to Europe. Humboldt has strikingly grouped the lives of Toscanelli and Las Casas, from the birth of the Florentine physician in 1397 to the death of the Apostle to the Indians in 1566, as covering the beginning and end of the great discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.