Narrative and Critical History of America, Vol. 2 (of 8) / Spanish Explorations and Settlements in America from the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Century

by Unknown

CHAPTER I.

COLUMBUS AND HIS DISCOVERIES.

BY JUSTIN WINSOR,

The Editor.

BEYOND his birth, of poor and respectable parents, we know nothing positively about the earliest years of Columbus. His father was probably a wool-comber. The boy had the ordinary schooling of his time, and a touch of university life during a few months passed at Pavia; then at fourteen he chose to become a sailor. A seaman’s career in those days implied adventures more or less of a piratical kind. There are intimations, however, that in the intervals of this exciting life he followed the more humanizing occupation of selling books in Genoa, and perhaps got some employment in the making of charts, for he had a deft hand at design. We know his brother Bartholomew was earning his living in this way when Columbus joined him in Lisbon in 1470. Previous to this there seems to be some degree of certainty in connecting him with voyages made by a celebrated admiral of his time bearing the same family name, Colombo; he is also said to have joined the naval expedition of John of Anjou against Naples in 1459.[48] Again, he may have been the companion of another notorious corsair, a nephew of the one already mentioned, as is sometimes maintained; but this sea-rover’s proper name seems to have been more likely Caseneuve, though he was sometimes called Coulon or Colon.[49]

Columbus spent the years 1470-1484 in Portugal. It was a time when the air was filled with tales of discovery. The captains of Prince Henry of Portugal had been gradually pushing their ships down the African coast and in some of these voyages Columbus was a participant. To one of his navigators Prince Henry had given the governorship of the Island of Porto Santo, of the Madeira group. To the daughter of this man, Perestrello,[50] Columbus was married; and with his widow Columbus lived, and derived what advantage he could from the papers and charts of the old navigator. There was a tie between his own and his wife’s family in the fact that Perestrello was an Italian, and seems to have been of good family, but to have left little or no inheritance for his daughter beyond some property in Porto Santo, which Columbus went to enjoy. On this island Columbus’ son Diego was born in 1474.

It was in this same year (1474) that he had some correspondence with the Italian savant, Toscanelli, regarding the discovery of land westward. A belief in such discovery was a natural corollary of the object which Prince Henry had had in view,—by circumnavigating Africa to find a way to the countries of which Marco Polo had given golden accounts. It was to substitute for the tedious indirection of the African route a direct western passage,—a belief in the practicability of which was drawn from a confidence in the sphericity of the earth. Meanwhile, gathering what hope he could by reading the ancients, by conferring with wise men, and by questioning mariners returned from voyages which had borne them more or less westerly on the great ocean, Columbus suffered the thought to germinate as it would in his mind for several years. Even on the voyages which he made hither and thither for gain,—once far north, to Iceland even, or perhaps only to the Faröe Islands, as is inferred,—and in active participation in various warlike and marauding expeditions, like the attack on the Venetian galleys near Cape St. Vincent in 1485,[51] he constantly came in contact with those who could give him hints affecting his theory. Through all these years, however, we know not certainly what were the vicissitudes which fell to his lot.[52]

It seems possible, if not probable, that Columbus went to Genoa and Venice, and in the first instance presented his scheme of western exploration to the authorities of those cities.[53] He may, on the other hand; have tried earlier to get the approval of the King of Portugal. In this case the visit to Italy may have occurred in the year following his departure from Portugal, which is nearly a blank in the record of his life. De Lorgues believes in the anterior Italian visit, when both Genoa and Venice rejected his plans; and then makes him live with his father at Savone, gaining a living by constructing charts, and by selling maps and books in Genoa.

It would appear that in 1484 Columbus had urged his views upon the Portuguese King, but with no further success than to induce the sovereign to despatch, on other pretences, a vessel to undertake the passage westerly in secrecy. Its return without accomplishing any discovery opened the eyes of Columbus to the deceit which that monarch would have put upon him, and he departed from the Portuguese dominions in not a little disgust.[54]

The death of his wife had severed another tie with Portugal; and taking with him his boy Diego, Columbus left, to go we scarcely know whither, so obscure is the record of his life for the next year. Muñoz claims for this period that he went to Italy. Sharon Turner has conjectured that he went to England; but there seems no ground to believe that he had any relations with the English Court except by deputy, for his brother Bartholomew was despatched to lay his schemes before Henry VII.[55] Whatever may have been the result of this application, no answer seems to have reached Columbus until he was committed to the service of Spain.

It was in 1485 or 1486—for authorities differ[56]—that a proposal was laid by Columbus before Ferdinand and Isabella; but the steps were slow by which he made even this progress. We know how, in the popular story, he presented himself at the Franciscan Convent of Santa María de la Rábida, asking for bread for himself and his boy. This convent stood on a steep promontory about half a league from Palos, and was then in charge of the Father Superior Juan Perez de Marchena.[57] The appearance of the stranger first, and his talk next, interested the Prior; and it was under his advice and support after a while—when Martin Alonzo Pinzon, of the neighboring town of Palos, had espoused the new theory—that Columbus was passed on to Cordova, with such claims to recognition as the Prior of Rabidá could bestow upon him.

It was perhaps while success did not seem likely here, in the midst of the preparations for a campaign against the Moorish kings, that his brother Bartholomew made his trip to England.[58] It was also in November, 1486, it would seem, that Columbus formed his connection with Beatrix Enriquez, while he was waiting in Cordova for the attention of the monarch to be disengaged from this Moorish campaign.

COLUMBUS’ ARMOR.

This follows a cut in Ruge’s Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, p. 245. The armor is in the Collection in the Royal Palace at Madrid.

Among those at this time attached to the Court of Ferdinand and Isabella was Alexander Geraldinus, then about thirty years old. He was a traveller, a man of letters, and a mathematician; and it was afterward the boast of his kinsman, who edited his Itinerarium ad regiones sub æquinoctiali plaga constitutas[59] (Rome, 1631), that Geraldinus, in one way and another, aided Columbus in pressing his views upon their Majesties. It was through Geraldinus’ influence, or through that of others who had become impressed with his views, that Columbus finally got the ear of Pedro Gonzales de Mendoza, Archbishop of Toledo. The way was now surer. The King heeded the Archbishop’s advice, and a council of learned men was convened, by royal orders, at Salamanca, to judge Columbus and his theories. Here he was met by all that prejudice, content, and ignorance (as now understood, but wisdom then) could bring to bear, in the shape of Scriptural contradictions of his views, and the pseudo-scientific distrust of what were thought mere visionary aims. He met all to his own satisfaction, but not quite so successfully to the comprehension of his judges. He told them that he should find Asia that way; and that if he did not, there must be other lands westerly quite as desirable to discover. No conclusion had been reached when, in the spring of 1487, the Court departed from Cordova, and Columbus found himself left behind without encouragement, save in the support of a few whom he had convinced,—notably Diego de Deza, a friar destined to some ecclesiastical distinction as Archbishop of Seville.

During the next five years Columbus experienced every vexation attendant upon delay, varied by participancy in the wars which the Court urged against the Moors, and in which he sought to propitiate the royal powers by doing them good service in the field. At last, in 1491, wearied with excuses of pre-occupation and the ridicule of the King’s advisers, Columbus turned his back on the Court and left Seville,[60] to try his fortune with some of the Grandees. He still urged in vain, and sought again the Convent of Rabida. Here he made a renewed impression upon Marchena; so that finally, through the Prior’s interposition with Isabella, Columbus was summoned to Court. He arrived in time to witness the surrender of Granada, and to find the monarchs more at liberty to listen to his words. There seemed now a likelihood of reaching an end of his tribulations; when his demand of recognition as viceroy, and his claim to share one tenth of all income from the territories to be discovered, frightened as well as disgusted those appointed to negotiate with him, and all came once more to an end. Columbus mounted his mule and started for France. Two finance ministers of the Crown, Santangel for Arragon and Quintanilla for Castile, had been sufficiently impressed by the new theory to look with regret on what they thought might be a lost opportunity. Isabella was won; and a messenger was despatched to overtake Columbus.

The fugitive returned; and on April 17, 1492, at Santa Fé, an agreement was signed by Ferdinand and Isabella which gave Columbus the office of high-admiral and viceroy in parts to be discovered, and an income of one eighth of the profits, in consideration of his assuming one eighth of the costs. Castile bore the rest of the expense; but Arragon advanced the money,[61] and the Pinzons subscribed the eighth part for Columbus.

The happy man now solemnly vowed to use what profits should accrue in accomplishing the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre from the Moslems. Palos, owing some duty to the Crown, was ordered to furnish two armed caravels, and Columbus was empowered to fit out a third. On the 30th of April the letters-patent confirming his dignities were issued. His son Diego was made a page of the royal household. On May 12 he left the Court and hastened towards Palos. Here, upon showing his orders for the vessels, he found the town rebellious, with all the passion of a people who felt that some of their number were being simply doomed to destruction beyond that Sea of Darkness whose bounds they knew not. Affairs were in this unsatisfactory condition when the brothers Pinzon threw themselves and their own vessels into the cause; while a third vessel, the “Pinta,” was impressed,—much to the alarm of its owners and crew.

PARTING OF COLUMBUS WITH FERDINAND AND ISABELLA.

Fac-simile of the engraving in Herrera. It originally appeared in De Bry, part iv.

EARLY VESSELS.

This representation of the vessels of the early Spanish navigators is a fac-simile of a cut in Medina’s Arte de navegar, Valladolid, 1545, which was re-engraved in the Venice edition of 1555. Cf. Carter-Brown Catalogue, vol. i. nos. 137, 204; Ruge, Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, pp. 240, 241; Jurien de la Gravière’s Les marins du XV^e et du XVI^e siècle, vol. i. pp. 38, 151. In the variety of changes in methods of measurement it is not easy to find the equivalent in tonnage of the present day for the ships of Columbus’s time. Those constituting his little fleet seem to have been light and swift vessels of the class called caravels. One had a deck amidships, with high forecastle and poop, and two were without this deck, though high, and covered at the ends. Captain G. V. Fox has given what he supposes were the dimensions of the larger one,—a heavier craft and duller sailer than the others. He calculates for a hundred tons,—makes her sixty-three feet over all, fifty-one feet keel, twenty feet beam, and ten and a half feet draft of water. She carried the kind of gun termed lombards, and a crew of fifty men. U. S. Coast Survey Report, 1880, app. 18; Becher’s Landfall of Columbus; A. Jal’s Archéologie navale (Paris, 1840); Irving’s Columbus, app. xv.; H. H. Bancroft, Central America, i. 187; Das Ausland, 1867, p. 1. There are other views of the ships of Columbus’ time in the cuts in some of the early editions of his Letters on the discovery. See notes following this chapter.

And so, out of the harbor of Palos,[62] on the 3d of August, 1492, Columbus sailed with his three little vessels. The “Santa Maria,” which carried his flag, was the only one of the three which had a deck, while the other two, the “Niña” and the “Pinta,” were open caravels. The two Pinzons commanded these smaller ships,—Martin Alonzo the “Pinta”, and Vicente the “Niña.”

BUILDING A SHIP.

This follows a fac-simile, given in Ruge, Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen p. 240, of a cut in Bernhardus de Breydenbach’s Peregrinationes, Mainz, 1486.

The voyage was uneventful, except that the expectancy of all quickened the eye, which sometimes saw over-much, and poised the mind, which was alert with hope and fear. It has been pointed out how a westerly course from Palos would have discouraged Columbus with head and variable winds. Running down to the Canaries (for Toscanelli put those islands in the latitude of Cipango), a westerly course thence would bring him within the continuous easterly trade-winds, whose favoring influence would inspirit his men,—as, indeed, was the case. Columbus, however, was very glad on the 22d of September to experience a west wind, just to convince his crew it was possible to have, now and then, the direction of it favorable to their return. He had proceeded, as he thought, some two hundred miles farther than the longitude in which he had conjectured Cipango to be, when the urging of Martin Alonzo Pinzon, and the flight of birds indicating land to be nearer in the southwest, induced him to change his course in that direction.[63]

COURSE OF COLUMBUS ON FIRST VOYAGE.

This follows a map given in Das Ausland, 1867, p. 4, in a paper on Columbus’ Journal, “Das Schiffsbuch des Entdeckers von Amerika.” The routes of Columbus’ four voyages are marked on the map accompanying the Studi biografici e bibliografici published by the Società Geografica Italiana in 1882. Cf. also the map in Charton’s Voyageurs, iii. 155, reproduced on a later page.

About midnight between the 11th and 12th of October, Columbus on the lookout thought he saw a light moving in the darkness. He called a companion, and the two in counsel agreed that it was so.[64] At about two o’clock, the moon then shining, a mariner on the “Pinta” discerned unmistakably a low sandy shore. In the morning a landing was made, and, with prayer[65] and ceremony, possession was taken of the new-found island in the name of the Spanish sovereigns.

SHIP OF COLUMBUS’S TIME.

This follows a fac-simile, given in Ruge, Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, p. 241, of a cut in Bernhardus de Breydenbach’s Peregrinationes, Mainz, 1486.

On the third day (October 14) Columbus lifted anchor, and for ten days sailed among the minor islands of the archipelago; but struck the Cuban coast on the 28th.[66] Here the “Pinta,” without orders from the Admiral, went off to seek some gold-field, of which Martin Alonzo Pinzon, its commander, fancied he had got some intimation from the natives. Pinzon returned bootless; but Columbus was painfully conscious of the mutinous spirit of his lieutenant.[67] The little fleet next found Hayti (Hispaniæ insula,[68] as he called it), and on its northern side the Admiral’s ship was wrecked. Out of her timbers Columbus built a fort on the shore, called it “La Navidad,” and put into it a garrison under Diego de Arana.[69]

NATIVE HOUSE IN HISPANIOLA.

Fac-simile of a cut in Oviedo, edition of 1547, fol. lix. There is another engraving in Charton’s Voyageurs, iii. 124. Cf. also Ramusio, Nav. et Viaggi, iii.

With the rest of his company and in his two smaller vessels, on the 4th of January, 1493, Columbus started on his return to Spain. He ran northerly to the latitude of his destination, and then steered due east. He experienced severe weather, but reached the Azores safely; and then, passing on, entered the Tagus and had an interview with the Portuguese King. Leaving Lisbon on the 13th, he reached Palos on the 15th of March, after an absence of over seven months.

CURING THE SICK.

This is Benzoni’s sketch of the way in which the natives cure and tend their sick at Hispaniola. Edition of 1572, p. 56.

He was received by the people of the little seaport with acclamations and wonder; and, despatching a messenger to the Spanish Court at Barcelona, he proceeded to Seville to await the commands of the monarchs. He was soon bidden to hasten to them; and with the triumph of more than a conqueror, and preceded by the bedizened Indians whom he had brought with him, he entered the city and stood in the presence of the sovereigns. He was commanded to sit before them, and to tell the story of his discovery. This he did with conscious pride; and not forgetting the past, he publicly renewed his previous vow to wrest the Holy Sepulchre from the Infidel.

THE TRIUMPH OF COLUMBUS.

This is a reduction of a fac-simile by Pilinski, given in Margry’s Les Navigations Françaises, p. 360,—an earlier reproduction having been given by M. Jal in La France maritime. It is also figured in Charton’s Voyageurs, iii. 139. The original sketch, by Columbus himself, was sent by him from Seville in 1502, and is preserved in the city hall at Genoa. M. Jal gives a description of it in his De Paris à Naples, 1836, i. 257. The figure sitting beside Columbus is Providence; Envy and Ignorance are hinted at as monsters following in his wake; while Constancy, Tolerance, the Christian Religion, Victory, and Hope attend him. Above all is the floating figure of Fame blowing two trumpets, one marked “Genoa,” the other “Fama Columbi.” Harrisse (Notes on Columbus, p. 165) says that good judges assign this picture to Columbus’s own hand, though none of the drawings ascribed to him are authentic beyond doubt; while it is very true that he had the reputation of being a good draughtsman. Feuillet de Conches (Revue contemporaine, xxiv. 509) disbelieves in its authenticity. The usual signature of Columbus is in the lower left-hand corner of the above sketch, the initial letters in which have never been satisfactorily interpreted; but perhaps as reasonable a guess as any would make them stand for “Servus supplex Altissimi Salvatoris—Christus, Maria, Yoseph—Christo ferens.” Others read, “Servidor sus Altezas sacras, Christo, Maria, Ysabel [or Yoseph].” The “Christo ferens” is sometimes replaced by “El Almirante.” The essay on the autograph in the Cartas de Indias is translated in the Magazine of American History, Jan., 1883, p. 55. Cf. Irving, app. xxxv. Ruge, Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, p. 317; Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings, xvi. 322, etc.

The expectation which had sustained Columbus in his voyage, and which he thought his discoveries had confirmed, was that he had reached the western parts of India or Asia; and the new islands were accordingly everywhere spoken of as the West Indies, or the New World.

COLUMBUS AT HISPANIOLA.

Fac-simile of engraving in Herrera, who follows DeBry.

HANDWRITING OF COLUMBUS.

Last page of an autograph letter preserved in the Colombina Library at Seville, following a photograph in Harrisse’s Notes on Columbus, p. 218.

The ruling Pope, Alexander VI., was a native Valencian; and to him an appeal was now made for a Bull, confirming to Spain and Portugal respective fields for discovery. This was issued May 4, 1493, fixing a line, on the thither side of which Spain was to be master; and on the hither side, Portugal. This was traced at a meridian one hundred leagues west of the Azores and Cape de Verde Islands, which were assumed to be in the same longitude practically. The thought of future complications from the running of this line to the antipodes does not seem to have alarmed either Pope or sovereigns; but troubles on the Atlantic side were soon to arise, to be promptly compounded by a convention at Tordesillas, which agreed (June 4, ratified June 7, 1494) to move the meridian line to a point three hundred and seventy leagues west of the Cape de Verde Islands,—still without dream of the destined disputes respecting divisions on the other side of the globe.[70]

ARMS OF COLUMBUS.

As given in Oviedo’s Coronica, 1547, fol. x., from the Harvard College copy. There is no wholly satisfactory statement regarding the origin of these arms, or the Admiral’s right to bear them. It is the quartering of the royal lion and castle, for Arragon and Castile, with gold islands in azure waves. Five anchors and the motto,

“A [or POR] Castilla y a [or POR] Leon Nuevo Mundo dio [or HALLO] Colon,”

were later given or assumed. The crest varies in the Oviedo (i. cap. vii.) of 1535.

Thus everything favored Columbus in the preparations for a second voyage, which was to conduct a colony to the newly discovered lands. Twelve hundred souls were embarked on seventeen vessels, and among them persons of consideration and name in subsequent history,—Diego, the Admiral’s brother, Bernal Diaz del Castillo, Ojeda, and La Cosa, with the Pope’s own vicar, a Benedictine named Buil, or Boil.

FRUIT-TREES OF HISPANIOLA.

This is Benzoni’s sketch, edition of 1572, p. 60.

Columbus and the destined colonists sailed from Cadiz on the 25th of September. The ships sighted an island on the 3d of November, and continuing their course among the Caribbee Islands, they finally reached La Navidad, and found it a waste. It was necessary, however, to make a beginning somewhere; and a little to the east of the ruined fort they landed their supplies and began the laying out of a city, which they called Isabella.[71] Expeditions were sent inland to find gold. The explorers reported success. Twelve of the ships were sent home with Indians who had been seized; and these ships were further laden with products of the soil which had been gathered. Columbus himself went with four hundred men to begin work at the interior mines; but the natives, upon whom he had counted for labor, had begun to fear enslavement for this purpose, and kept aloof. So mining did not flourish. Disease, too, was working evil. Columbus himself had been prostrated; but he was able to conduct three caravels westward, when he discovered Jamaica. On this expedition he made up his mind that Cuba was a part of the Asiatic main, and somewhat unadvisedly forced his men to sign a paper declaring their own belief to the same purport.[72]

INDIAN CLUB.

As given in Oviedo, edition of 1547, fol. lxi.

Returning to his colony, the Admiral found that all was not going well. He had not himself inspired confidence as a governor, and his fame as an explorer was fast being eclipsed by his misfortunes as a ruler. Some of his colonists, accompanied by the papal vicar, had seized ships and set sail for home. The natives, emboldened by the cruelties practised upon them, were laying siege to his fortified posts. As an offset, however, his brother Bartholomew had arrived from Spain with three store-ships; and later came Antonio de Torres with four other ships, which in due time were sent back to carry some samples of gold and a cargo of natives to be sold as slaves. The vessels had brought tidings of the charges preferred at Court against the Admiral, and his brother Diego was sent back with the ships to answer these charges in the Admiral’s behalf. Unfortunately Diego was not a man of strong character, and his advocacy was not of the best.

INDIAN CANOE.

As depicted in Oviedo, edition of 1547, fol. lxi. There is another engraving in Charton’s Voyageurs, iii. 106, called “Pirogue Indienne.”

INDIAN CANOE.

Benzoni gives this drawing of the canoes of the coast of the Gulf of Paria and thereabout. Edition of 1572, p. 5.

In March (1495) Columbus conducted an expedition into the interior to subdue and hold tributary the native population. It was cruelly done, as the world looks upon such transactions to-day.

Meanwhile in Spain reiteration of charges was beginning to shake the confidence of his sovereigns; and Juan Aguado, a friend of Columbus, was sent to investigate. He reached Isabella in October,—Diego, the Admiral’s brother, accompanying him. Aguado did not find affairs reassuring; and when he returned to Spain with his report in March (1496), Columbus thought it best to go too, and to make his excuses or explanations in person. They reached Cadiz in June, just as Niño was sailing with three caravels to the new colony.

COLUMBUS AT ISLA MARGARITA.

Fac-simile of engraving in Herrera.

Ferdinand and Isabella received him kindly, gave him new honors, and promised him other outfits. Enthusiasm, however, had died out, and delays took place. The reports of the returning ships did not correspond with the pictures of Marco Polo, and the new-found world was thought to be a very poor India after all. Most people were of this mind; though Columbus was not disheartened, and the public treasury was readily opened for a third voyage.

AMERICANS.

This is the earliest representation which we have of the natives of the New World, showing such as were found by the Portuguese on the north coast of South America. It has been supposed that it was issued in Augsburg somewhere between 1497 and 1504, for it is not dated. The only copy ever known to bibliographers is not now to be traced. Stevens, Recoll. of James Lenox, p. 174. It measures 13½ × 8½ inches, with a German title and inscription, to be translated as follows:—

“This figure represents to us the people and island which have been discovered by the Christian King of Portugal, or his subjects. The people are thus naked, handsome, brown, well-shaped in body; their heads, necks, arms, private parts, feet of men and women, are a little covered with feathers. The men also have many precious stones on their faces and breasts. No one else has anything, but all things are in common. And the men have as wives those who please them, be they mothers, sisters, or friends; therein make they no distinction. They also fight with each other; they also eat each other, even those who are slain, and hang the flesh of them in the smoke. They become a hundred and fifty years of age, and have no government.”

The present engraving follows the fac-simile given in Stevens’s American Bibliographer, pp. 7, 8. Cf. Sabin, vol. i. no. 1,031; vol. v. no. 20,257; Harrisse, Bibl. Amer. Vet., no. 20.

Coronel sailed early in 1498 with two ships, and Columbus followed with six, embarking at San Lucar on the 30th of May. He now discovered Trinidad (July 31), which he named either from its three peaks, or from the Holy Trinity; struck the northern coast of South America,[73] and skirted what was later known as the Pearl coast, going as far as the Island of Margarita. He wondered at the roaring fresh waters which the Orinoco pours into the Gulf of Pearls, as he called it, and he half believed that its exuberant tide came from the terrestrial paradise.[74] He touched the southern coast of Hayti on the 30th of August. Here already his colonists had established a fortified post, and founded the town of Santo Domingo. His brother Bartholomew had ruled energetically during the Admiral’s absence, but he had not prevented a revolt, which was headed by Roldan. Columbus on his arrival found the insurgents still defiant, but was able after a while to reconcile them, and he even succeeded in attaching Roldan warmly to his interests.

Columbus’ absence from Spain, however, left his good name without sponsors; and to satisfy detractors, a new commissioner was sent over with enlarged powers, even with authority to supersede Columbus in general command, if necessary. This emissary was Francisco de Bobadilla, who arrived at Santo Domingo with two caravels on the 23d of August, 1500, finding Diego in command, his brother the Admiral being absent. An issue was at once made. Diego refused to accede to the commissioner’s orders till Columbus returned to judge the case himself; so Bobadilla assumed charge of the Crown property violently, took possession of the Admiral’s house, and when Columbus returned, he with his brother was arrested and put in irons. In this condition the prisoners were placed on shipboard, and sailed for Spain. The captain of the ship offered to remove the manacles; but Columbus would not permit it, being determined to land in Spain bound as he was; and so he did. The effect of his degradation was to his advantage; sovereigns and people were shocked at the sight; and Ferdinand and Isabella hastened to make amends by receiving him with renewed favor. It was soon apparent that everything reasonable would be granted him by the monarchs, and that he could have all he might wish, short of receiving a new lease of power in the islands, which the sovereigns were determined to see pacified at least before Columbus should again assume government of them. The Admiral had not forgotten his vow to wrest the Holy Sepulchre from the Infidel; but the monarchs did not accede to his wish to undertake it. Disappointed in this, he proposed a new voyage; and getting the royal countenance for this scheme, he was supplied with four vessels of from fifty to seventy tons each,—the “Capitana,” the “Santiago de Palos,” the “Gallego,” and the “Vizcaino.” He sailed from Cadiz May 9, 1502, accompanied by his brother Bartholomew and his son Fernando. The vessels reached San Domingo June 29.

Bobadilla, whose rule of a year and a half had been an unhappy one, had given place to Nicholás de Ovando; and the fleet which brought the new governor,—with Maldonado, Las Casas, and others,—now lay in the harbor waiting to receive Bobadilla for the return voyage. Columbus had been instructed to avoid Hispaniola; but now that one of his vessels leaked, and he needed to make repairs, he sent a boat ashore, asking permission to enter the harbor. He was refused, though a storm was impending. He sheltered his vessels as best he could, and rode out the gale. The fleet which had on board Bobadilla and Roldan, with their ill-gotten gains, was wrecked, and these enemies of Columbus were drowned. The Admiral found a small harbor where he could make his repairs; and then, July 14, sailed westward to find, as he supposed, the richer portions of India in exchange for the barbarous outlying districts which others had appropriated to themselves. He went on through calm and storm, giving names to islands,—which later explorers re-named, and spread thereby confusion on the early maps. He began to find more intelligence in the natives of these islands than those of Cuba had betrayed, and got intimations of lands still farther west, where copper and gold were in abundance. An old Indian made them a rough map of the main shore. Columbus took him on board, and proceeding onward a landing was made on the coast of Honduras August 14. Three days later the explorers landed again fifteen leagues farther east, and took possession of the country for Spain. Still east they went; and, in gratitude for safety after a long storm, they named a cape which they rounded Gracias á Dios,—a name still preserved at the point where the coast of Honduras begins to trend southward. Columbus was now lying ill on his bed, placed on deck, and was half the time in revery. Still the vessels coasted south. They lost a boat’s crew in getting water at one place; and tarrying near the mouth of the Rio San Juan, they thought they got from the signs of the natives intelligence of a rich and populous country over the mountains inland, where the men wore clothes and bore weapons of steel, and the women were decked with corals and pearls. These stories were reassuring; but the exorcising incantations of the natives were quite otherwise for the superstitious among the Spaniards.

They were now on the shores of Costa Rica, where the coast trends southeast; and both the rich foliage and the gold plate on the necks of the savages enchanted the explorers. They went on towards the source of this wealth, as they fancied. The natives began to show some signs of repulsion; but a few hawk’s-bells beguiled them, and gold plates were received in exchange for the trinkets. The vessels were now within the southernmost loop of the shore, and a bit of stone wall seemed to the Spaniards a token of civilization. The natives called a town hereabouts Veragua,—whence, years after, the descendants of Columbus borrowed the ducal title of his line. In this region Columbus dallied, not suspecting how thin the strip of country was which separated him from the great ocean whose farther waves washed his desired India. Then, still pursuing the coast, which now turned to the northeast, he reached Porto Bello, as we call it, where he found houses and orchards. Tracking the Gulf side of the Panama isthmus, he encountered storms that forced him into harbors, which continued to disclose the richness of the country.[75]

It became now apparent that they had reached the farthest spot of Bastidas’ exploring, who had, in 1501, sailed westward along the northern coast of South America. Amid something like mutinous cries from the sailors, Columbus was fain to turn back to the neighborhood of Veragua, where the gold was; but on arriving there, the seas, lately so fair, were tumultuous, and the Spaniards were obliged to repeat the gospel of Saint John to keep a water-spout, which they saw, from coming their way,—so Fernando says in his Life of the Admiral. They finally made a harbor at the mouth of the River Belen, and began to traffic with the natives, who proved very cautious and evasive when inquiries were made respecting gold-mines. Bartholomew explored the neighboring Veragua River in armed boats, and met the chief of the region, with retainers, in a fleet of canoes. Gold and trinkets were exchanged, as usual, both here and later on the Admiral’s deck. Again Bartholomew led another expedition, and getting the direction—a purposely false one, as it proved—from the chief in his own village, he went to a mountain, near the abode of an enemy of the chief, and found gold,—scant, however, in quantity compared with that of the crafty chief’s own fields. The inducements were sufficient, however, as Columbus thought, to found a colony; but before he got ready to leave it, he suspected the neighboring chief was planning offensive operations. An expedition was accordingly sent to seize the chief, and he was captured in his own village; and so suddenly that his own people could not protect him. The craft of the savage, however, stood him in good stead; and while one of the Spaniards was conveying him down the river in a boat, he jumped overboard and disappeared, only to reappear, a few days later, in leading an attack on the Spanish camp. In this the Indians were repulsed; but it was the beginning of a kind of lurking warfare that disheartened the Spaniards. Meanwhile Columbus, with the ship, was outside the harbor’s bar buffeting the gales. The rest of the prisoners who had been taken with the chief were confined in his forecastle. By concerted action some of them got out and jumped overboard, while those not so fortunate killed themselves. As soon as the storm was over, Columbus withdrew the colonists and sailed away. He abandoned one worm-eaten caravel at Porto Bello, and, reaching Jamaica, beached two others.

A year of disappointment, grief, and want followed. Columbus clung to his wrecked vessels. His crew alternately mutinied at his side, and roved about the island. Ovando, at Hispaniola, heard of his straits, but only tardily and scantily relieved him. The discontented were finally humbled; and some ships, despatched by the Admiral’s agent in Santo Domingo, at last reached him, and brought him and his companions to that place, where Ovando received him with ostentatious kindness, lodging him in his house till Columbus departed for Spain, Sept. 12, 1504.

On the 7th of November the Admiral reached the harbor of San Lucar. Weakness and disease later kept him in bed in Seville, and to his letters of appeal the King paid little attention. He finally recovered sufficiently to go to the Court at Segovia, in May, 1505; but Ferdinand—Isabella had died Nov. 26, 1504—gave him scant courtesy. With a fatalistic iteration, which had been his error in life, Columbus insisted still on the rights which a better skill in governing might have saved for him; and Ferdinand, with a dread of continued maladministration, as constantly evaded the issue. While still hope was deferred, the infirmities of age and a life of hardships brought Columbus to his end; and on Ascension Day, the 20th of May, 1506, he died, with his son Diego and a few devoted friends by his bedside.

HOUSE IN WHICH COLUMBUS DIED.

This follows an engraving in Ruge, Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, p. 313, taken from a photograph. The house is in Valladolid.

The character of Columbus is not difficult to discern. If his mental and moral equipoise had been as true, and his judgment as clear, as his spirit was lofty and impressive, he could have controlled the actions of men as readily as he subjected their imaginations to his will, and more than one brilliant opportunity for a record befitting a ruler of men would not have been lost. The world always admires constancy and zeal; but when it is fed, not by well-rounded performance, but by self-satisfaction and self-interest, and tarnished by deceit, we lament where we would approve. Columbus’ imagination was eager, and unfortunately ungovernable. It led him to a great discovery, which he was not seeking for; and he was far enough right to make his error more emphatic. He is certainly not alone among the great men of the world’s regard who have some of the attributes of the small and mean.

[CRITICAL ESSAY ON THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION.]

It would appear, from documents printed by Navarrete, that in 1470 Columbus was brooding on the idea of land to the west. It is not at all probable that he would himself have been able to trace from germ to flower the conception which finally possessed his mind.[76] The age was ripened for it; and the finding of Brazil in 1500 by Cabral showed how by an accident the theory might have become a practical result at any time after the sailors of Europe had dared to take long ocean voyages. Columbus grew to imagine that he had been independent of the influences of his time; and in a manuscript in his own hand, preserved in the Colombina Library at Seville, he shows the weak, almost irresponsible, side of his mind, and flouts at the grounds of reasonable progress which many others besides himself had been making to a belief in the feasibility of a western passage. In this unfortunate writing he declares that under inspiration he simply accomplished the prophecy of Isaiah.[77] This assertion has not prevented saner and later writers[78] from surveying the evidences of the growth of the belief in the mind, not of Columbus only, but of others whom he may have impressed, and by whom he may have been influenced. The new intuition was but the result of intellectual reciprocity. It needed a daring exponent, and found one.

The geographical ideas which bear on this question depend, of course, upon the sphericity of the earth.[79] This was entertained by the leading cosmographical thinkers of that age,—who were far however from being in accord in respect to the size of the globe. Going back to antiquity, Aristotle and Strabo had both taught in their respective times the spherical theory; but they too were widely divergent upon the question of size,—Aristotle’s ball being but mean in comparison with that of Strabo, who was not far wrong when he contended that the world then known was something more than one third of the actual circumference of the whole, or one hundred and twenty-nine degrees, as he put it; while Marinus, the Tyrian, of the opposing school, and the most eminent geographer before Ptolemy, held that the extent of the then known world spanned as much as two hundred and twenty-five degrees, or about one hundred degrees too much.[80] Columbus’ calculations were all on the side of this insufficient size.[81] He wrote to Queen Isabella in 1503 that “the earth is smaller than people suppose.” He thought but one seventh of it was water. In sailing a direct western course his expectation was to reach Cipango after having gone about three thousand miles. This would actually have brought him within a hundred miles or so of Cape Henlopen, or the neighboring coast; while if no land had intervened he would have gone nine thousand eight hundred miles to reach Japan, the modern Cipango.[82] Thus Columbus’ earth was something like two thirds of the actual magnitude.[83] It can readily be understood how the lesser distance was helpful in inducing a crew to accompany Columbus, and in strengthening his own determination.

Whatever the size of the earth, there was far less palpable reason to determine it than to settle the question of its sphericity. The phenomena which convince the ordinary mind to-day, weighed with Columbus as they had weighed in earlier ages. These were the hulling down of ships at sea, and the curved shadow of the earth on the moon in an eclipse. The law of gravity was not yet proclaimed, indeed; but it had been observed that the men on two ships, however far apart, stood perpendicular to their decks at rest.

Columbus was also certainly aware of some of the views and allusions to be found in the ancient writers, indicating a belief in lands lying beyond the Pillars of Hercules.[84] He enumerates some of them in the letter which he wrote about his third voyage, and which is printed in Navarrete. The Colombina Library contains two interesting memorials of his connection with this belief. One is a treatise in his own hand, giving his correspondence with Father Gorricio, who gathered the ancient views and prophecies;[85] and the other is a copy of Gaietanus’ edition of Seneca’s tragedies, published indeed after Columbus’ death, in which the passage of the Medea, known to have been much in Columbus’ mind, is scored with the marginal comment of Ferdinand, his son, “Hæc prophetia expleta ē per patrē meus cristoforū colō almirātē anno 1492.”[86] Columbus, further, could not have been unaware of the opposing theories of Ptolemy and Pomponius Mela as to the course in which the further extension of the known world should be pursued. Ptolemy held to the east and west theory, and Mela to the northern and southern view.

PTOLEMY.

Fac-simile of a cut in Icones sive imagines vivæ literis cl. virorum ... cum elogiis variis per Nicolaum Reusnerum. Basiliæ, CIƆ IƆ XIC, Sig. A. 4.

The Angelo Latin translation of Ptolemy’s Greek Geographia had served to disseminate the Alexandrian geographer’s views through almost the whole of the fifteenth century, for that version had been first made in 1409. In 1475 it had been printed, and it had helped strengthen the arguments of those who favored a belief in the position of India as lying over against Spain. Several other editions were yet to be printed in the new typographical centres of Europe, all exerting more or less influence in support of the new views advocated by Columbus.[87] Five of these editions of Ptolemy appeared during the interval from 1475 to 1492. Of Pomponius Mela, advocating the views of which the Portuguese were at this time proving the truth, the earliest printed edition had appeared in 1471. Mela’s treatise, De situ orbis, had been produced in the first century, while Ptolemy had made his views known in the second; and the age of Vasco da Gama, Columbus, and Magellan were to prove the complemental relations of their respective theories.

PTOLEMY.

Fac-simile of cut in Icones sive imagines virorum literis illustrium ... ex secunda recognitione Nicolai Reusneri. Argentorati, CIƆ IƆ XC, p. 1. The first edition appeared in 1587. Brunet, vol. iv., col. 1255, calls the editions of 1590 and Frankfort, 1620, inferior.

ALBERTUS MAGNUS.

Fac-simile of cut in Reusner’s Icones, Strasburg, 1590, p. 4. There is another cut in Paulus Jovius’s Elogia virorum litteris illustrium, Basle, 1575, p. 7 (copy in Harvard College Library).

MARCO POLO.

This follows an engraving in Ruge’s Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, p. 53. The original is at Rome. There is a copy of an old print in Jules Verne’s Découverte de la Terre.

It has been said that Macrobius, a Roman of the fifth century, in a commentary on the Dream of Scipio, had maintained a division of the globe into four continents, of which two were then unknown. In the twelfth century this idea had been revived by Guillaume de Conches (who died about 1150) in his Philosophia Minor, lib. iv. cap. 3. It was again later further promulgated in the writings of Bede and Honoré d’Autun, and in the Microcosmos of Geoffroy de Saint-Victor,—a manuscript of the thirteenth century still preserved.[88] It is not known that this theory was familiar to Columbus. The chief directors of his thoughts among anterior writers appear to have been, directly or indirectly, Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, and Vincenzius of Beauvais;[89] and first among them, for importance, we must place the Opus Majus Of Roger Bacon, completed in 1267. It was from Bacon that Petrus de Aliaco, Or Pierre d’Ailly (b. 1340; d. 1416 or 1425), in his Ymago mundi, borrowed the passage which, in this French imitator’s language, so impressed Columbus.[90]

ANNOTATIONS BY COLUMBUS.

On a copy of Pierre d’Ailly’s Imago mundi, preserved in the Colombina Library at Seville, following a photograph in Harrisse’s Notes on Columbus, p. 84.

An important element in the problem was the statements of Marco Polo regarding a large island, which he called Cipango, and which he represented as lying in the ocean off the eastern coast of Asia. This carried the eastern verge of the Asiatic world farther than the ancients had known; and, on the spherical theory, brought land nearer westward from Europe than could earlier have been supposed. It is a question, however, if Columbus had any knowledge of the Latin or Italian manuscripts of Marco Polo,—the only form in which anybody could have studied his narrative before the printing of it at Nuremberg in 1477, in German, a language which Columbus is not likely to have known. Humboldt has pointed out that neither Columbus nor his son Ferdinand mentions Marco Polo; still we know that he had read his book. Columbus further knew, it would seem, what Æneas Sylvius had written on Asia. Toscanelli had also imparted to him what he knew. A second German edition of Marco Polo appeared at Augsburg in 1481. In 1485, with the Itinerarius of Mandeville,[91] published at Zwolle, the account—“De regionibus orientalibus”—of Marco Polo first appeared in Latin, translated from the original French, in which it had been dictated. It was probably in this form that Columbus first saw it.[92] There was a separate Latin edition in 1490.[93]

The most definite confirmation and encouragement which Columbus received in his views would seem to have come from Toscanelli, in 1474. This eminent Italian astronomer, who was now about seventy-eight years old, and was to die, in 1482, before Columbus and Da Gama had consummated their discoveries, had reached a conclusion in his own mind that only about fifty-two degrees of longitude separated Europe westerly from Asia, making the earth much smaller even than Columbus’ inadequate views had fashioned it; for Columbus had satisfied himself that one hundred and twenty degrees of the entire three hundred and sixty was only as yet unknown.[94] With such views of the inferiority of the earth, Toscanelli had addressed a letter to Martinez, a prebendary of Lisbon, accompanied by a map professedly based on information derived from the book of Marco Polo.[95] When Toscanelli received a letter of inquiry from Columbus, he replied by sending a copy of this letter and the map. As the testimony to a western passage from a man of Toscanelli’s eminence, it was of marked importance in the conversion of others to similar views.[96]

It has always been a question how far the practical evidence of chance phenomena, and the absolute knowledge, derived from other explorers, bearing upon the views advocated by Columbus, may have instigated or confirmed him in his belief. There is just enough plausibility in some of the stories which are cited to make them fall easily into the pleas of detraction to which Columbus has been subjected.

ANNOTATIONS BY COLUMBUS.

On a copy of the Historia rerum ubique gestarum of Æneas Sylvius, preserved in the Colombina Library at Seville, following a photograph in Harrisse’s Notes on Columbus, appendix.

A story was repeated by Oviedo in 1535 as an idle rumor, adopted by Gomara in 1552 without comment, and given considerable currency in 1609 by Garcilasso de la Vega, of a Spanish pilot,—Sanches, as the name is sometimes given,—who had sailed from Madeira, and had been driven west and had seen land (Hispaniola, it is inferred), and who being shipwrecked had been harbored by Columbus in his house. Under this roof the pilot is said to have died in 1484, leaving his host the possessor of his secret. La Vega claimed to have received the tale from his father, who had been at the Court of Spain in the time of Ferdinand and Isabella. Oviedo repeated it, but incredulously;[97] and it was later told by Gomara, Acosta, Eden, and others. Robertson,[98] Irving,[99] and most later writers find enough in the indecision and variety of its shapes to discard it altogether. Peter Martyr, Bernaldez, and Herrera make no mention of it. It is singular, however, that Ferdinand de Galardi, in dedicating his Traité politique des abassadeurs, published at Cologne in 1666, to a descendant of Columbus, the Duke of Veraguas, mentions the story as an indisputable fact;[100] and it has not escaped the notice of querulous writers even of our day.[101]

Others have thought that Columbus, in his voyage to Thule or Iceland,[102] in February, 1477, could have derived knowledge of the Sagas of the westerly voyages of Eric the Red and his countrymen.[103] It seems to be true that commercial relations were maintained between Iceland and Greenland for some years later than 1400; but if Columbus knew of them, he probably shared the belief of the geographers of his time that Greenland was a peninsula of Scandinavia.[104]

The extremely probable and almost necessary pre-Columbian knowledge of the northeastern parts of America follows from the venturesome spirit of the mariners to those seas for fish and traffic, and from the easy transitions from coast to coast by which they would have been lured to meet the more southerly climes. The chances from such natural causes are quite as strong an argument in favor of the early Northmen venturings as the somewhat questionable representations of the Sagas.[105] There is the same ground for representing, and similar lack of evidence in believing, the alleged voyage of Joāo Vas Costa Cortereal to the Newfoundland banks in 1463-1464. Barrow finds authority for it in Cordeyro, who gives, however, no date in his Historia Insulana das Ilhas a Portugal, Lisbon, 1717; but Biddle, in his Cabot, fails to be satisfied with Barrow’s uncertain references, as enforced in his Chronological History of Voyages into the Arctic Regions, London, 1818.[106]

Another of these alleged northern voyagers was a Polish navigator, John Szkolny,—a name which we get in various Latinized or other forms, as Scolve, Skolnus, Scolvus, Sciolvus, Kolno, etc.,—who is said to have been on the Labrador coast in 1476, while in the service of Denmark. It is so stated by Wytfliet,[107] Pontanus,[108] and Horn.[109] De Costa cites what is known as the Rouen globe, preserved in Paris, and supposed to belong to about 1540, as showing a legend of Skolnus reaching the northwest coast of Greenland in 1476.[110] Hakluyt quotes Gemma Frisius and Girava. Gomara, in 1553, and Herrera, in 1601, barely refer to it.[111]

There is also a claim for a Dieppe navigator, Cousin, who, bound for Africa, is said to have been driven west, and reached South America in 1488-1489. The story is told by Desmarquets in his Mémoires chronologiques pour servir à l’histoire de Dieppe, i. 92, published at Paris, 1785. Major, giving the story an examination, fully discredits it.[112]

There remains the claim for Martin Behaim, the Nuremberg cosmographer and navigator, which rests upon a passage in the Latin text of the so-called Nuremberg Chronicle[113] which states that Cam and Behaim, having passed south of the equator, turned west and (by implication) found land. The passage is not in the German edition of the same year, and on reference to the manuscript of the book (still preserved in Nuremberg) the passage is found to be an interpolation written in a different hand.[114] It seems likely to have been a perversion or misinterpretation of the voyage of Diego Cam down the African coast in 1489, in which he was accompanied by Behaim. That Behaim himself did not put the claim forward, at least in 1492, seems to be clear from the globe, which he made in that year, and which shows no indication of the alleged voyage. The allegation has had, however, some advocates; but the weight of authority is decidedly averse, and the claim can hardly be said to have significant support to-day.[115]

It is unquestionable that the success of the Portuguese in discovering the Atlantic islands and in pushing down the African coast, sustained Columbus in his hope of western discovery, if it had not instigated it.[116] The chance wafting of huge canes, unusual trunks of trees, and even sculptured wood and bodies of strange men, upon the shores of the outlying islands of the Azores and Madeira, were magnified as evidences in his mind.[117] When at a later day he found a tinned iron vessel in the hands of the natives of Guadeloupe, he felt that there had been European vessels driven along the equatorial current to the western world, which had never returned to report on their voyages.

Of the adventurous voyages of which record was known there were enough to inspire him; and of all the mysteries of the Sea of Darkness,[118] which stretched away illimitably to the west, there were stories more than enough. Sight of strange islands had been often reported; and the maps still existing had shown a belief in those of San Brandan[119] and Antillia,[120] and of the Seven Cities founded in the ocean waste by as many Spanish bishops, who had been driven to sea by the Moors.[121]

The Fortunate Islands[122] (Canaries) of the ancients—discovered, it is claimed, by the Carthaginians[123]—had been practically lost to Europe for thirteen hundred years, when, in the beginning of the fifteenth century (1402), Juan de Béthencourt led his colony to settle them.[124] They had not indeed been altogether forgotten, for Marino Sanuto in 1306 had delineated them on a map given by Camden, though this cartographer omitted them on later charts. Traders and pirates had also visited them since 1341, but such acquaintance had hardly caused them to be generally known.[125]

THE ATLANTIC OF THE ANCIENTS AS MAPPED BY LELEWEL.

This is part of a map of the ancient world given in Lelewel’s Die Entdeckung der Carthager und Griechen auf dem Atlantischen Ocean, Berlin, 1831.

The Canaries, however, as well as the Azores, appear in the well-known portolano of 1351,[126] which is preserved in the Biblioteca Mediceo-Laurenziana in Florence. A chart of the Brothers Pizigani, dated in 1367, gives islands which are also identified with the Canaries, Azores, and Madeira;[127] and the Canaries also appear on the well-known Catalan mappemonde of 1375.[128] These Atlantic islands are again shown in a portolano of a period not much later than 1400, which is among the Egerton manuscripts in the British Museum, and is ascribed to Juan da Napoli;[129] and in 1436 they are conspicuous on the detailed sea-chart of Andrea Bianco. This portolano has also two islands on the extreme western verge of the sheet,—“Antillia” and “De la man Satanaxio,” which some have claimed as indicating a knowledge of the two Americas.[130] It was a map brought in 1428 from Venice by Dom Pedro,—which, like the 1351 map, showed the Azores,—that induced Prince Henry in 1431 to despatch the expedition which rediscovered those islands; and they appear on the Catalan map, which Santarem (pl. 54) describes as “Carte de Gabriell de Valsequa, faite à Mallorcha en 1439.” It was in 1466 that the group was colonized, as Behaim’s globe shows.[131]

The Madeira group was first discovered by an Englishman,—Machin, or Macham,—in the reign of Edward III. (1327-1378). The narrative, put into shape for Prince Henry of Portugal by Francisco Alcaforado, one of his esquires, was known to Irving in a French translation published in 1671, which Irving epitomizes.[132] The story, somewhat changed, is given by Galvano, and was copied by Hakluyt;[133] but, on account of some strangeness and incongruities, it has not been always accepted, though Major says the main recital is confirmed by a document quoted from a German collection of voyages, 1507, by Dr. Schmeller, in the Memoirs of the Academy of Science at Munich, 1847, and which, secured for Major by Kunstmann, is examined by him in his Prince Henry.[134] The group was rediscovered by the Portuguese in 1418-1420.[135] Prince Henry had given the command of Porto Santo to Perestrello; and this captain, in 1419, observing from his island a cloud in the horizon, found, as he sailed to it, the island now called Madeira. It will be remembered that it was the daughter of Perestrello whom Columbus at a later day married.[136]

It was not till 1460[137] that the Cape De Verde Islands were found, lying as they do well outside of the route of Prince Henry’s vessels, which were now following down the African coast, and had been pursuing explorations in this direction since 1415.

There have been claims advanced by Margry in his Les navigations Françaises et la révolution maritime du XIV^e au XVI^e siècle, d’après les documents inédits tirés de France, d’Angleterre, d’Espagne, et d’Italie, pp. 13-70, Paris, 1867, and embraced in his first section on “Les marins de Normandie aux côtes de Guinée avant les Portugais,” in which he cites an old document, said to be in London, setting forth the voyage of a vessel from Dieppe to the coast of Africa in 1364. Estancelin had already, in 1832, in his Navigateurs Normands en Afrique, declared there were French establishments on the coast of Guinea in the fourteenth century,—a view D’Avezac says he would gladly accept if he could. Major, however, failed to find, by any direction which Margry could give him, the alleged London document, and has thrown—to say the least—discredit on the story of that document as presented by Margry.[138]

PRINCE HENRY.

This follows a portrait in a contemporary manuscript chronicle, now in the National Library at Paris, which Major, who gives a colored fac-simile of it, calls the only authentic likeness, probably taken in 1449-1450, and representing him in mourning for the death of his brother Dom Pedro, who died in 1449. There is another engraving of it in Jules Verne’s La Découverte de la Terre, p. 112.

Major calls the portrait in Gustave de Veer’s Life of Prince Henry, published at Dantzig, in 1864, a fancy one. The annexed autograph of the Prince is the equivalent of Iffante Dom Anrique.

Prince Henry, who was born March 4, 1394, died Nov 15, 1463. He was the third son of John I. of Portugal; his mother was a daughter of John of Gaunt, of England.

The African explorations of the Portuguese are less visionary, and, as D’Avezac says, the Portuguese were the first to persevere and open the African route to India.[139]

The peninsular character of Africa—upon which success in this exploration depended—was contrary to the views of Aristotle, Hipparchus, and Ptolemy, which held to an enclosed Indian Ocean, formed by the meeting of Africa and Asia at the south.[140] The stories respecting the circumnavigation of Africa by the ancients are lacking in substantial proof; and it seems probable that Cape Non or Cape Bojador was the limit of their southern expeditions.[141] Still, this peninsular character was a deduction from imagined necessity rather than a conviction from fact. It found place on the earliest maps of the revival of geographical study in the Middle Ages. It is so represented in the map of Marino Sanuto in 1306, and in the Lorentian portolano of 1351. Major[142] doubts if the Catalan map of 1375 shows anything more than conjectural knowledge for the coasts beyond Bojador.

Of Prince Henry—the moving spirit in the African enterprise of the fifteenth century—we have the most satisfactory account in the Life of Prince Henry of Portugal, surnamed the Navigator, and its Results ... from Authentic Contemporary Documents, by Richard Henry Major, London, 1868,[143]—a work which, after the elimination of the controversial arguments, and after otherwise fitting it for the general reader, was reissued in 1877 as The Discoveries of Prince Henry the Navigator. These works are the guide for the brief sketch of these African discoveries now to be made, and which can be readily followed on the accompanying sketch-map.[144]

SKETCH-MAP OF THE PORTUGUESE DISCOVERIES IN AFRICA.

Cf. Heinrich Wuttke’s “Zur Geschichte der Erdkunde in der letzten hälfte des Mittelalters: Die Karten der Seefahrenden Völker süd Europas bis zum ersten Druck der Erdbeschreibung des Ptolemäus,” in the Jahrbuch des Vereins für Erdkunde in Dresden, 1870; J. Codine’s “Découverte de la côte d’Afrique par les Portugais pendant les années, 1484-1488,” in the Bulletin de la Société de Géographie de Paris, 1876; Vivien de Saint-Martin’s Histoire de la géographie et des découvertes géographiques, depuis les temps les plus reculés jusqu’à nos jours, p. 298, Paris, 1873; Ruge’s Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, p. 81; Clarke’s Progress of Maritime Discovery, p. 140; and G. T. Raynal’s Histoire philosophique et politique des établissemens et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes, Geneva, 1780; Paris, 1820. Paulitschke’s Afrika-literatur in der Zeit von 1500 bis 1750, Vienna, 1882, notes the earliest accounts.

Prince Henry had been with his father at the capture of Ceuta, opposite Gibraltar, in 1415, when the Portuguese got their first foothold in Africa. In 1418 he established a school of nautical observation at Sagres,[145] the southwestern promontory of his father’s kingdom, and placed the geographer, Jayme,[146] of Majorca, in charge of it. The Prince at once sent out his first expedition down the Barbary coast; but his vessel, being driven out of its course, discovered the Island of Porto Santo. Expedition after expedition reached, in successive years, the vicinity of Cape Bojador; but an inexpressible dread of the uncertainty beyond deferred the passage of it till 1434. Cape Blanco was reached in 1445; Cape Verde shortly after; and the River Gambia in 1447.

Cadamosto and his Venetians pushed still farther, and saw the Southern Cross for the first time.[147] Between 1460 and 1464 they went beyond Cape Mesurado. Prince Henry dying in 1463, King Alfonso, in 1469, farmed out the African commerce, and required five hundred miles to be added yearly to the limit of discovery southward. Not long after, Diego Cam reached the Congo coast, Behaim accompanying him. In 1487, after seventy years of gradual progress down six thousand miles of coast, southward from Cape Non, the Portuguese under Diaz reached the Stormy Cape,—later to be called the Cape of Good Hope. He but just rounded it in May, and in December he was in Portugal with the news. Bartholomew, the brother of Columbus, had made the voyage with him.[148] The rounding of the Cape was hardly a surprise; for the belief in it was firmly established long before. In 1457-1459, in the map of Fra Mauro, which had been constructed at Venice for Alonzo V., and in which Bianco assisted, the terminal cape had been fitly drawn.[149]

PORTUGUESE MAP, 1490.

This map follows a copy in the Kohl Collection (no. 23), after the original, attached to a manuscript theological treatise in the British Museum. An inscription at the break in the African coast says that to this point the Portuguese had pushed their discoveries in 1489; and as it shows no indication of the voyages of Columbus and Da Gama, Kohl places it about 1490. It may be considered as representing the views current before these events, Asia following the Ptolemean drafts. The language of the map being partly Italian and partly Portuguese, Kohl conjectures that it was made by an Italian living in Lisbon; and he points out the close correspondence of the names on the western coast of Africa to the latest Portuguese discoveries, and that its contour is better than anything preceding.

HO COMDE ALMIRANTE (Da Gama’s Autograph).

VASCO DA GAMA.

This follows the engravings in Ruge’s Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, p. 111, and in Stanley’s Da Gama, published by the Hakluyt Society. The original belongs to the Count de Lavradio. Another portrait, with a view of Calicut, is given in Lafitau’s Découvertes des Portugais, Paris, 1734, iii. 66.

Such had been the progress of the Portuguese marine, in exemplification of the southerly quest called for by the theory of Pomponius Mela, when Columbus made his westerly voyage in 1492 and reached, as he supposed, the same coast which the Portuguese were seeking to touch by the opposite direction.[150] In this erroneous geographical belief Columbus remained as long as he lived,—a view in which Vespucius and the earlier navigators equally shared;[151] though some, like Peter Martyr,[152] accepted the belief cautiously. We shall show in another place how slowly the error was eradicated from the cartography of even the latter part of the sixteenth century.

During the interval when Columbus was in Spain, between his second and third voyages, Vasco da Gama sailed from Lisbon, July 8, 1497, to complete the project which had so long animated the endeavors of the rival kingdom. He doubled the Cape of Good Hope in Nov. 1497, and anchored at Calicut, May 20, 1498,—a few days before Columbus left San Lucar on his third voyage. In the following August, Da Gama started on his return; and after a year’s voyage he reached Lisbon in August, 1498.

THE LINE OF DEMARCATION (Spanish claim, 1527).

This is the outline of the anonymous map of 1527, sometimes ascribed to Ferdinand Columbus, but held by Harrisse to be the work of Nuña Garcia de Toreno. It was an official map of the Spanish Hydrographical Office, and gives the Spanish view of the meridian on which the line of demarcation ran. It follows a copy in the Kohl Collection, no. 38. The line is similarly drawn on the Ribero map of 1529. The Portuguese view is shown in the Cantino map of 1502, and in what is known as the Portuguese chart of 1514-1520.

The Portuguese had now accomplished their end. The éclat with which it would have been received had not Columbus opened, as was supposed, a shorter route, was wanting; and Da Gama, following in the path marked for him, would have failed of much of his fame but for the auspicious applause which Camoens created for him in the Lusiad.[153]

ALEXANDER VI.

This follows the cut in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, xxvii. 500, representing a bust in the Berlin Museum.

Da Gama at Calicut and Columbus at Cuba gave the line of demarcation of Alexander VI. a significance that was not felt to be impending, five years earlier, on the 3d and 4th of May, 1493, when the Papal Bull was issued.[154] This had fixed the field of Spanish and Portuguese exploration respectively west and east of a line one hundred leagues[155] west of the Azores, following a meridian at a point where Columbus had supposed the magnetic needle[156] pointed to the north star.[157] The Portuguese thought that political grounds were of more consideration than physical, and were not satisfied with the magnet governing the limitation of their search. They desired a little more sea-room on the Atlantic side, and were not displeased to think that a meridian considerably farther west might give them a share of the new Indies south and north of the Spanish discoveries; so they entered their protest against the partition of the Bull, and the two Powers held a convention at Tordesillas, which resulted, in June, 1494, in the line being moved two hundred and seventy leagues westerly.[158] No one but vaguely suspected the complication yet to arise about this same meridian, now selected, when the voyage of Magellan should bring Spaniard and Portuguese face to face at the Antipodes. This aspect of the controversy will claim attention elsewhere.[159] From this date the absolute position of the line as theoretically determined, was a constant source of dispute, and the occasion of repeated negotiations.[160]

[NOTES.]

[A.] First Voyage.—As regards the first voyage of Columbus there has come down to us a number of accounts, resolvable into two distinct narratives, as originally proceeding from the hand of Columbus himself,—his Journal, which is in part descriptive and in part log, according to the modern understanding of this last term; and his Letters announcing the success and results of his search. The fortunes and bibliographical history of both these sources need to be told:

Journal.—Columbus himself refers to this in his letter to Pope Alexander VI. (1503) as being kept in the style of Cæsar’s Commentaries; and Irving speaks of it as being penned “from day to day with guileless simplicity.” In its original form it has not been found; but we know that Las Casas used it in his Historia, and that Ferdinand Columbus must have had it before him while writing what passes for his Life of his father. An abridgment of the Journal in the hand of Las Casas, was discovered by Navarrete, who printed it in the first volume of his Coleccion in 1825; it is given in a French version in the Paris edition of the same (vol. ii.), and in Italian in Torre’s Scritti di Colombo, 1864. Las Casas says of his abstract, that he follows the very words of the Admiral for a while after recording the landfall; and these parts are translated by Mr. Thomas, of the State Department at Washington, in G. A. Fox’s paper on “The Landfall” in the Report of the Coast Survey for 1880. The whole of the Las Casas text, however, was translated into English, at the instigation of George Ticknor, by Samuel Kettell, and published in Boston as A Personal Narrative of the First Voyage in 1827;[161] and it has been given in part, in English, in Becher’s Landfall of Columbus. The original is thought to have served Herrera in his Historia General.[162]

Letters.—We know that on the 12th of February, 1493, about a week before reaching the Azores on his return voyage, and while his ship was laboring in a gale, Columbus prepared an account of his discovery, and incasing the parchment in wax, put it in a barrel, which he threw overboard. That is the last heard of it. He prepared another account, perhaps duplicate, and protecting it in a similar way, placed it on his poop, to be washed off in case his vessel foundered. We know nothing further of this account, unless it be the same, substantially, with the letters which he wrote just before making a harbor at the Azores. One of these letters, at least, is dated off the Canaries; and it is possible that it was written earlier on the voyage, and post-dated, in expectation of his making the Canaries; and when he found himself by stress of weather at the Azores, he neglected to change the place. The original of neither of these letters is known.

One of them was dated Feb. 15, 1493, with a postscript dated March 4 (or 14, copies vary, and the original is of course not to be reached; 4 would seem to be correct), and is written in Spanish, and addressed to the “Escribano de Racion,” Luis de Santangel, who, as Treasurer of Aragon, had advanced money for the voyage. Columbus calls this a second letter; by which he may mean that the one cast overboard was the first, or that another, addressed to Sanchez (later to be mentioned), preceded it. There was at Simancas, in 1818, an early manuscript copy of this letter, which Navarrete printed in his Coleccion, and Kettell translated into English in his book (p. 253) already referred to.[163]

In 1852 the Baron Pietro Custodi left his collection of books to the Biblioteca Ambrosiana at Milan; and among them was found a printed edition of this Santangel letter, never before known, and still remaining unique. It is of small quarto, four leaves, in semi-gothic type, bearing the date of 1493,[164] and was, as Harrisse and Lenox think, printed in Spain,—Major suggests Barcelona, but Gayangos thinks Lisbon. It was first reprinted at Milan in 1863, with a fac-simile, and edited by Cesare Correnti, in a volume, containing other letters of Columbus, entitled, Lettere autografe edite ed inedite di Cristoforo Colombo.[165] From this reprint Harrisse copied it, and gave an English translation in his Notes on Columbus, p. 89, drawing attention to the error of Correnti in making it appear on his titlepage that the letter was addressed to “Saxis,”[166] and testifying that, by collation, he had found but slight variation from the Navarrete text. Mr. R. H. Major also prints the Ambrosian text in his Select Letters of Columbus, with an English version appended, and judges the Cosco version could not have been made from it. Other English translations may be found in Becher’s Landfall of Columbus, p. 291, and in French’s Historical Collections of Louisiana and Florida, 2d series, ii. 145.

In 1866 a fac-simile edition (150 copies) of the Ambrosian copy was issued at Milan, edited by Gerolamo d’Adda, under the title of Lettera in lingua Spagnuola diretta da Cristoforo Colombo a Luis de Santangel.[167] Mr. James Lenox, of New York, had already described it, with a fac-simile of the beginning and end, in the Historical Magazine (vol. viii. p. 289, September, 1864, April, 1865); and this paper was issued separately (100 copies) as a supplement to the Lenox edition of Scyllacius. Harrisse[168] indicates that there was once a version of this Santangel letter in the Catalan tongue, preserved in the Colombina Library at Seville.

A few years ago Bergenroth found at Simancas a letter of Columbus, dated at the Canaries, Feb. 15, 1493, with a postscript at Lisbon, March 14, addressed to a friend, giving still another early text, but adding nothing material to our previous knowledge. A full abstract is given in the Calendar of State Papers relating to England and Spain, p. 43.

A third Spanish text of a manuscript of the sixteenth century, said to have been found in the Colegio Mayor de Cuenca, was made known by Varnhagen, the Minister of Brazil to Portugal, who printed it at Valencia in 1858 as Primera epistola del Almirante Don Christóbal Colon, including an account “de una nueva copia de original manuscrito.” The editor assumed the name of Volafan, and printed one hundred copies, of which sixty were destroyed in Brazil.[169] This letter is addressed to Gabriel Sanchez, and dated “sobre la isla de Sa. Maria, 18 de Febrero;” and is without the postscript of the letters of Feb. 15. It is almost a verbatim repetition of the Simancas text. A reprint of the Cosco text makes a part of the volume; and it is the opinion of Varnhagen and Harrisse that the Volafan text is the original from which Cosco translated, as mentioned later.

Perhaps still another Spanish text is preserved and incorporated, as Muñoz believed, by the Cura de los Palacios, Andrés Bernaldez, in his Historia de los reyes católicos (chap. cxviii). This book covers the period 1488-1513; has thirteen chapters on Columbus, who had been the guest of Bernaldez after his return from his second voyage, in 1496, and by whom Columbus is called “mercador de libros de estampa.” The manuscript of Bernaldez’s book long remained unprinted in the Royal Library at Madrid. Irving used a manuscript copy which belonged to Obadiah Rich.[170] Prescott’s copy of the manuscript is in Harvard College Library.[171] Humboldt[172] used it in manuscript. It was at last printed at Granada in 1856, in two volumes, under the editing of Miguel Lafuente y Alcántara.[173] It remains, of course, possible that Bernaldez may have incorporated a printed Spanish text, instead of the original or any early manuscript, though Columbus is known to have placed papers in his hands.

The text longest known to modern students is the poor Latin rendering of Cosco, already referred to. While but one edition of the original Spanish text appeared presumably in Spain (and none of Vespucius and Magellan), this Latin text, or translations of it, appeared in various editions and forms in Italy, France, and Germany, which Harrisse remarks[174] as indicating the greater popular impression which the discovery of America made beyond Spain than within the kingdom; and the monthly delivery of letters from Germany to Portugal and the Atlantic islands, at this time, placed these parts of Europe in prompter connection than we are apt to imagine.[175] News of the discovery was, it would seem, borne to Italy by the two Genoese ambassadors, Marchesi and Grimaldi, who are known to have left Spain a few days after the return of Columbus.[176] The Spanish text of this letter, addressed by Columbus to Gabriel or Raphael Sanchez, or Sanxis, as the name of the Crown treasurer is variously given, would seem to have fallen into the hands of one Aliander de Cosco, who turned it into Latin, completing his work on the 29th of April. Harrisse points out the error of Navarrete and Varnhagen in placing this completion on the 25th, and supposes the version was made in Spain. Tidings of the discovery must have reached Rome before this version could have got there; for the first Papal Bull concerning the event is dated May 3. Whatever the case, the first publication, in print, of the news was made in Rome in this Cosco version, and four editions of it were printed in that city in 1493. There is much disagreement among bibliographers as to the order of issue of the early editions. Their peculiarities, and the preference of several bibliographers as to such order, is indicated in the following enumeration, the student being referred for full titles to the authorities which are cited:—

I. Epistola Christofori Colom [1493]. Small quarto, four leaves (one blank), gothic, 33 lines to a page. Addressed to Sanchis. Cosco is called Leander. Ferdinand and Isabella both named in the title. The printer is thought to be Plannck, from similarity of type to work known to be his.

Major calls this the editio princeps, and gives elaborate reasons for his opinion (Select Letters of Columbus, p. cxvi). J. R. Bartlett, in the Carter-Brown Catalogue, vol. i. no. 5, also puts it first; so does Ternaux. Varnhagen calls it the second edition. It is put the third in order by Brunet (vol. ii. col. 164) and Lenox (Scyllacius, p. xliv), and fourth by Harrisse (Notes on Columbus, p. 121; Bibl. Amer. Vet., no. 4).

There are copies in the Lenox, Carter-Brown, and Huth (Catalogue, i. 336) libraries; in the Grenville (Bibl. Gren., p. 158) and King’s Collections in the British Museum; in the Royal Library at Munich; in the Collection of the Duc d’Aumale at Twickenham; and in the Commercial Library at Hamburg.[177] The copy cited by Harrisse was sold in the Court Collection (no. 72) at Paris in 1884.

II. Epistola Christofori Colom, impressit Rome, Eucharius Argenteus [Silber], anno dñi MCCCCXCIII. Small quarto, three printed leaves, gothic type, 40 lines to the page. Addressed to Sanches. Cosco is called Leander. Ferdinand and Isabella both named.

Major, who makes this the second edition, says that its deviations from No. I. are all on the side of ignorance. Varnhagen calls it the editio princeps. Bartlett (Carter-Brown Catalogue, no. 6) puts it second. Lenox (Scyllacius, p. xlv) calls it the fourth edition. It is no. 3 of Harrisse (Bibl. Amer. Vet., no. 3; Notes on Columbus, p. 121). Graesse errs in saying the words “Indie supra Gangem” are omitted in the title.

There are copies in the Lenox, Carter-Brown, Huth (Catalogue, i. 336), and Grenville (Bibl. Gren., p. 158) Libraries. It has been recently priced at 5,000 francs. Cf. Murphy Catalogue, 629.

III. Epistola Christofori Colom. Small quarto, four leaves, 34 lines, gothic type. Addressed to Sanxis. Cosco is called Aliander. Ferdinand only named.

This is Major’s third edition. It is the editio princeps of Harrisse, who presumes it to be printed by Stephanus Plannck at Rome (Notes on Columbus, p. 117; Bibl. Amer. Vet., vol. i.); and he enters upon a close examination to establish its priority. It is Lenox’s second edition (Scyllacius, p. xliii). Bartlett places it third.

There are copies in the Barlow (formerly the Aspinwall copy) Library in New York; in the General Collection and Grenville Library of the British Museum; and in the Royal Library at Munich. In 1875 Mr. S. L. M. Barlow printed (50 copies) a fac-simile of his copy, with a Preface, in which he joins in considering this the first edition with Harrisse, who (Notes on Columbus, p. 101) gives a careful reprint of it.

IV. De insulis inventis, etc. Small octavo, ten leaves, 26 and 27 lines, gothic type. The leaf before the title has the Spanish arms on the recto. There are eight woodcuts, one of which is a repetition. Addressed to Sanxis. Cosco is called Aliender. Ferdinand only named. The words “Indie supra Gangem” are omitted in the title.

This is Major’s fourth edition. Lenox makes it the editio princeps (as does Brunet), and gives fac-similes of the woodcuts in his Scyllacius, p. xxxvi. Bossi supposed the cuts to have been a part of the original manuscript, and designed by Columbus.[178] Harrisse calls it the second in order, and thinks Johannes Besicken may have been the printer (Bibl. Amer. Vet., 2), though it is usually ascribed to Plannck, of Rome. It bears the arms of Granada; but there was no press at that time in that city, so far as known, though Brunet seems to imply it was printed there.

The only perfect copy known is one formerly the Libri copy, now in the Lenox Library, which has ten leaves. The Grenville copy (Bibl. Gren., p. 158), and the one which Bossi saw in the Brera at Milan, now lost, had only nine leaves.

Hain (Repertorium, no. 5,491) describes a copy which seems to lack the first and tenth leaves; and it was probably this copy (Royal Library, Munich) which was followed by Pilinski in his Paris fac-simile (20 copies in 1858), which does not reproduce these leaves, though it is stated by some that the defective British Museum copy was his guide. Bartlett seems in error in calling this fac-simile a copy of the Libri-Lenox copy.[179]

COLUMBUS’ LETTER NO. III.

V. Epistola de insulis de novo repertis, etc. Small quarto, four leaves, gothic, 39 lines; woodcut on verso of first leaf. Printed by Guy Marchand in Paris, about 1494. Addressed to Sanxis. Cosco is called Aliander. Ferdinand only named.

This is Lenox’s (Scyllacius, p. xlv.), Major’s, and Harrisse’s fifth (Notes on Columbus, p. 122; Bibl. Amer. Vet., p. 5) edition.

The Ternaux copy, now in the Carter-Brown Library, was for some time supposed to be the only copy known; but Harrisse says the text reprinted by Rosny in Paris, in 1865, as from a copy in the National Library at Paris, corresponds to this. This reprint (125 copies) is entitled, Lettre de Christophe Colomb sur la découverte du nouveau monde. Publiée d’après la rarissime version Latine conservée à la Bibliothèque Impériale. Traduite en Français, commentée [etc.] par Lucien de Rosny. Paris: J. Gay, 1865, 44 pages octavo. This edition was published under the auspices of the “Comité d’Archéologie Américaine.”[180]

REVERSE OF TITLE OF NOS. V. AND VI.

VI. Epistola de insulis noviter repertis, etc. Small quarto, four leaves, gothic, 39 lines; woodcut on verso of first leaf. Guiot Marchant, of Paris, printer. Addressed to Sanxis. Cosco is called Aliander. Ferdinand only named.

This is Major’s sixth edition; Harrisse (Notes on Columbus, p. 122; Bibl. Amer. Vet., no. 6) and Lenox (Scyllacius, p. xlvii) also place it sixth. There are fac-similes of the engraved title in Harrisse, Lenox, and Stevens’s American Bibliographer, p. 66.

There are copies in the Carter-Brown, Bodleian (Douce), and University of Göttingen libraries; one is also shown in the Murphy Catalogue, no. 630.

John Harris, Sen., made a fac-simile edition of five copies, one of which is in the British Museum.

VII. Epistola Cristophori Colom, etc. Small quarto, four leaves, gothic, 38 lines. Addressed to Sanxis. Th. Martens is thought to be the printer.

This edition has only recently been made known. Cf. Brunet, Supplément, col. 276. The only copy known is in the Bibliothèque Royale at Brussels.

The text of all these editions scarcely varies, except in the use of contracted letters. Lenox’s collation was reprinted, without the cuts, in the Historical Magazine, February, 1861. Other bibliographical accounts will be found in Graesse, Trésor; Bibliotheca Grenvilliana, i. 158; Sabin, Dictionary, iv. 274; and by J. H. Hessels in the Bibliophile Belge, vol. vi. The cuts are also in part reproduced in some editions of Irving’s Life of Columbus, and in the Vita, by Bossi.[181]

In 1494 this Cosco-Sanchez text was appended to a drama on the capture of Granada, which was printed at Basle, beginning In laudem Serenissimi Ferdinandi, and ascribed to Carolus Veradus. The “De insulis nuper inventis” is found at the thirtieth leaf (Bibl. Amer. Vet., no. 15; Lenox’s Scyllacius, p. xlviii; Major, no. 7; Carter-Brown Catalogue, no. 13). There are copies in the Carter-Brown, Harvard College, and Lenox libraries.[182]

By October, in the year of the first appearance (1493) of the Cosco-Sanchez text, it had been turned into ottava rima by Guiliano Dati, a popular poet, to be sung about the streets, as is supposed; and two editions of this verse are now known. The earliest is in quarto, black letter, two columns, and was printed in Florence, and called Questa e la Hystoria ... extracte duna Epistola Christofano Colombo. It was in four leaves, of coarse type and paper; but the second and third leaves are lacking in the unique copy, now in the British Museum, which was procured in 1858 from the Costabile sale in Paris.[183]

COLUMBUS’ LETTER NO. VI.

The other edition, dated one day later (Oct. 26, 1493), printed also at Florence, and called La Lettera dell’isole, etc., is in Roman type, quarto, four leaves, two columns, with a woodcut title representing Ferdinand on the European, and Columbus on the New World shore of the ocean.[184] The copy in the British Museum was bought for 1,700 francs at the Libri sale in Paris; and the only other copy known is in the Trivulgio Library at Milan.

In 1497 a German translation, or adaptation, from Cosco’s Latin was printed by Bartlomesz Küsker at Strasburg, with the title Eyn schön kübsch lesen von etlichen inszlen die do in kurtzen zyten funden synd durch dē künig von hispania, und sagt vō groszen wunderlichen dingen die in dē selbē inszlen synd. It is a black-letter quarto of seven leaves, with one blank, the woodcut of the title being repeated on the verso of the seventh leaf.[185] There are copies in the Lenox (Libri copy) and Carter-Brown libraries; in the Grenville and Huth collections; and in the library at Munich.

The text of the Cosco-Sanchez letter, usually quoted by the early writers, is contained in the Bellum Christianorum Principum of Robertus Monarchus, printed at Basle in 1533.[186]

THE LANDING OF COLUMBUS.

B. Landfall.—It is a matter of controversy what was Guanahani, the first land seen by Columbus. The main, or rather the only, source for the decision of this question is the Journal of Columbus; and it is to be regretted that Las Casas did not leave unabridged the parts preceding the landfall, as he did those immediately following, down to October 29. Not a word outside of this Journal is helpful. The testimony of the early maps is rather misleading than reassuring, so conjectural was their geography.

CUT IN THE GERMAN TRANSLATION OF THE FIRST LETTER OF COLUMBUS (TITLE).

It will be remembered that land was first seen two hours after midnight; and computations made for Fox show that the moon was near the third quarter, partly behind the observer, and would clearly illuminate the white sand of the shore, two leagues distant. From Columbus’s course there were in his way, as constituting the Bahama group,—taking the enumeration of to-day, and remembering that the sea may have made some changes,—36 islands, 687 cays, and 2,414 rocks. By the log, as included in the Journal, and reducing his distance sailed by dead reckoning—which then depended on observation by the eye alone, and there were also currents to misguide Columbus, running from nine to thirty miles a day, according to the force of the wind—to a course west, 2° 49′ south, Fox has shown that the discoverer had come 3,458 nautical miles. Applying this to the several islands claimed as the landfall, and knowing modern computed distances, we get the following table:—

Islands.	Course.	Miles.	An Excess of
To Grand Turk Mariguana Watling Cat Samana	W. 8°– 1′ S. W. 6° 37′ S. W. 4° 38′ S. W. 4° 20′ S. W. 5° 37′ S.	2834 3032 3105 3141 3072	624 426 353 317 387

Columbus speaks of the island as being “small,” and again as “pretty large” (bien grande). He calls it very level, with abundance of water, and a very large lagune in the middle; and it was in the last month of the rainy season, when the low parts of the islands are usually flooded.

Some of the features of the several islands already named will now be mentioned, together with a statement of the authorities in favor of each as the landfall.

San Salvador, or Cat.—This island is forty-three miles long by about three broad, with an area of about one hundred and sixty square miles, rising to a height of four hundred feet, the loftiest land in the group, and with no interior water. It is usual in the maps of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to identify this island with the Guanahani of Columbus. It is so considered by Catesby in his Natural History of Carolina (1731); by Knox in his Collection of Voyages (1767); by De la Roquette in the French version of Navarrete, vol. ii. (1828); and by Baron de Montlezun in the Nouvelles annales des voyages, vols. x. and xii. (1828-1829). Alexander Slidell Mackenzie, of the United States Navy, worked out the problem for Irving; and this island is fixed upon in the latter’s Life of Columbus, app. xvi., editions of 1828 and 1848. Becher claims that the modern charts used by Irving were imperfect; and he calls “not worthy to be called a chart” the La Cosa map, which so much influenced Humboldt in following Irving, in his Examen critique (1837), iii. 181, 186-222.

GERMAN TRANSLATION OF THE FIRST LETTER OF COLUMBUS (TEXT).

Watling’s.—This is thirteen miles long by about six broad, containing sixty square miles, with a height of one hundred and forty feet, and having about one third its area of interior water. It was first suggested by Muñoz in 1793. Captain Becher, of the Royal Navy, elaborated the arguments in favor of this island in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, xxvi. 189, and Proceedings, i. 94, and in his Landfall of Columbus on his First Voyage to America, London, 1856. Peschel took the same ground in his Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen (1858). R. H. Major’s later opinion is in support of the same views, as shown by him in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society (1871), xvi. 193, and Proceedings, xv. 210. Cf. New Quarterly Review, October, 1856.

Lieut. J. B. Murdock, U. S. N., in a paper on “The Cruise of Columbus in the Bahamas, 1492,” published in the Proceedings (April, 1884, p. 449) of the United States Naval Institute vol. x, furnishes a new translation of the passages in Columbus’ Journal bearing on the subject, and made by Professor Montaldo of the Naval Academy, and repeats the map of the modern survey of the Bahamas as given by Fox. Lieutenant Murdock follows and criticises the various theories afresh, and traces Columbus’ track backward from Cuba, till he makes the landfall to have been at Watling’s Island. He points out also various indications of the Journal which cannot be made to agree with any supposable landfall.

THE BAHAMA GROUP.

This map is sketched from the chart, made from the most recent surveys, in the United States Coast-Survey and given in Fox’s monograph, with the several routes marked down on it. Other cartographical illustrations of the subject will be found in Moreno’s maps, made for Navarrete’s Coleccion in 1825 (also in the French version); in Becher’s paper in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, xxvi. 189, and in his Landfall of Columbus; in Varnhagen’s Das wahre Guanahani; in Major’s paper in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, 1871, and in his second edition of the Select Letters, where he gives a modern map, with Herrera’s map (1601) and a section of La Cosa’s; in G. B. Torre’s Scritti di Colombo, p. 214; and in the section, “Wo liegt Guanahani?” of Ruge’s Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, p. 248, giving all routes, except that offered by Fox. See further on the subject R. Pietschmann’s “Beiträge zur Guanahani-Frage,” in the Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Geographie (1880), i. 7, 65, with map; and A. Breusing’s “Geschichte der Kartographie,” in Ibid., ii. 193.

Grand Turk.—Its size is five and one half by one and a quarter miles, with an area of seven square miles; its highest part seventy feet; and one third of its surface is interior water. Navarrete first advanced arguments in its favor in 1825, and Kettell adopted his views in the Boston edition of the Personal Narrative of Columbus. George Gibbs argued for it in the New York Historical Society’s Proceedings (1846), p. 137, and in the Historical Magazine (June, 1858), ii. 161. Major adopted such views in the first edition (1847) of his Select Letters of Columbus.

Mariguana.—It measures twenty-three and one half miles long by an average of four wide; contains ninety-six square miles; rises one hundred and one feet, and has no interior water. F. A. de Varnhagen published at St. Jago de Chile, in 1864, a treatise advocating this island as La verdadera Guanahani, which was reissued at Vienna, in 1869, as Das wahre Guanahani des Columbus.[187]

Samana, or Attwood’s Cay.—This is nine miles long by one and a half wide, covering eight and a half square miles, with the highest ridge of one hundred feet. It is now uninhabited; but arrow-heads and other signs of aboriginal occupation are found there. The Samana of the early maps was the group now known as Crooked Island. The present Samana has been recently selected for the landfall by Gustavus V. Fox, in the United States Coast Survey Report, 1880, app. xviii.,—“An attempt to solve the problem of the first landing-place of Columbus in the New World.” He epitomized this paper in the Magazine of American History (April, 1883), p. 240.

SIGN-MANUALS OF FERDINAND AND ISABELLA.

[C.] Effect of the Discovery in Europe.—During the interval between the return of Columbus from his first voyage and his again treading the soil of Spain on his return from the second, 1494, we naturally look for the effect of this astounding revelation upon the intelligence of Europe. To the Portuguese, who had rejected his pleas, there may have been some chagrin. Faria y Sousa, in his Europa Portuguesa, intimates that Columbus’ purpose in putting in at the Tagus was to deepen the regret of the Portuguese at their rejection of his views; and other of their writers affirm his overbearing manner and conscious pride of success. The interview which he had with John II. is described in the Lyuro das obras de Garcia de Resende.[188] Of his reception by the Spanish monarchs at Barcelona,[189] we perhaps, in the stories of the historians, discern more embellishments than Oviedo, who was present, would have thought the ceremony called for. George Sumner (in 1844) naturally thought so signal an event would find some record in the “Anals consulars” of that city, which were formed to make note of the commonest daily events; but he could find in them no indication of the advent of the discoverer of new lands.[190] It is of far more importance for us that provision was soon made for future records in the establishment of what became finally the “Casa de la Contratacion de las Indias,” at this time put in charge of Juan de Fonseca, who controlled its affairs throughout the reign of Ferdinand.[191] We have seen how apparently an eager public curiosity prompted more frequent impressions of Columbus’ letter in other lands than in Spain itself; but there was a bustling reporter at the Spanish Court fond of letter-writing, having correspondents in distant parts, and to him we owe it, probably, that the news spread to some notable people. This was Peter Martyr d’Anghiera. He dated at Barcelona, on the ides of May, a letter mentioning the event, which he sent to Joseph Borromeo; and he repeated the story in later epistles, written in September, to Ascanio Sforza, Tendilla, and Talavera.[192] There is every reason to suppose that Martyr derived his information directly from Columbus himself. He was now probably about thirty-seven years old, and he had some years before acquired such a reputation for learning and eloquence that he had been invited from Italy (he was a native of the Duchy of Milan) to the Spanish Court. His letters, as they have come down to us, begin about five years before this,[193] and it is said that just at this time (1493) he began the composition of his Decades. Las Casas has borne testimony to the value of the Decades for a knowledge of Columbus, calling them the most worthy of credit of all the early writings, since Martyr got, as he says, his accounts directly from the Admiral, with whom he often talked. Similar testimony is given to their credibleness by Carbajal, Gomez, Vergara, and other contemporaries.[194] Beginning with Muñoz, there has been a tendency of late years to discredit Martyr, arising from the confusion and even negligence sometimes discernible in what he says. Navarrete was inclined to this derogatory estimate. Hallam[195] goes so far as to think him open to grave suspicion of negligent and palpable imposture, antedating his letters to appear prophetic. On the other hand, Prescott[196] contends for his veracity, and trusts his intimate familiarity with the scenes he describes. Helps interprets the disorder of his writings as a merit, because it is a reflection of his unconnected thoughts and feelings on the very day on which he recorded any transactions.[197]

What is thought to be the earliest mention in print of the new discoveries occurs in a book published at Seville in 1493.—Los tratados del Doctor Alonso Ortiz. The reference is brief, and is on the reverse of the 43d folio.[198] Not far from the same time the Bishop of Carthagena, Bernardin de Carvajal, then the Spanish ambassador to the Pope, delivered an oration in Rome, June 19, 1493, in which he made reference to the late discovery of unknown lands towards the Indies.[199] These references are all scant; and, so far as we know from the records preserved to us, the great event of the age made as yet no impression on the public mind demanding any considerable recognition.

[D.] Second Voyage (Sept. 25, 1493, to June 11, 1496).—First among the authorities is the narrative of Dr. Chanca, the physician of the Expedition. The oldest record of it is a manuscript of the middle of the sixteenth century, in the Real Academia de la Historia at Madrid. From this Navarrete printed it for the first time,[200] under the title of “Segundo Viage de Cristobal Colon,” in his Coleccion, i. 198.

Not so directly cognizant of events, but getting his information at second hand from Guglielmo Coma,—a noble personage in Spain,—was Nicolas Scyllacius, of Pavia, who translated Coma’s letters into Latin, and published his narrative, De insulis meridiani atque indici maris nuper inventis, dedicating it to Ludovico Sforza, at Pavia (Brunet thinks Pisa), in 1594 or 1595. Of this little quarto there are three copies known. One is in the Lenox Library; and from this copy Mr. Lenox, in 1859, reprinted it sumptuously (one hundred and two copies[201]), with a translation by the Rev. John Mulligan. In Mr. Lenox’s Introduction it is said that his copy had originally belonged to M. Olivieri, of Parma, and then to the Marquis Rocca Saporiti, before it came into Mr. Lenox’s hands, and that the only other copy known was an inferior one in the library of the Marquis Trivulzio at Milan. This last copy is probably one of the two copies which Harrisse reports as being in the palace library at Madrid and in the Thottiana (Royal Library) at Copenhagen, respectively.[202] Scyllacius adds a few details, current at that time, which were not in Coma’s letters, and seems to have interpreted the account of his correspondent as implying that Columbus had reached the Indies by the Portuguese route round the Cape of Good Hope. Ronchini has conjectured that this blunder may have caused the cancelling of a large part of the edition, which renders the little book so scarce; but Lenox neatly replies that “almost all the contemporaneous accounts are equally rare.”

Another second-hand account—derived, however, most probably from the Admiral himself—is that given by Peter Martyr in his first Decade, published in 1511, and more at length in 1516.[203]

Accompanying Columbus on this voyage was Bernardus Buell, or Boil, a monk of St. Benoit, in Austria, who was sent by Pope Alexander VI as vicar-general of the new lands, to take charge of the measures for educating and converting the Indians.[204] It will be remembered he afterward became a caballer against the Admiral. What he did there, and a little of what Columbus did, one Franciscus Honorius Philoponus sought to tell in a very curious book, Nova typis transacta navigatio novi orbis Indiæ occidentalis,[205] which was not printed till 1621. It is dedicated to Casparus Plautius, and it is suspected that he is really the author of the book, while he assumed another name, more easily to laud himself. Harrisse describes the book as having “few details of an early date, mixed with much second-hand information of a perfectly worthless character.”

So far as we know, the only contemporary references in a printed book to the new discoveries during the progress of the second voyage, or in the interval previous to the undertaking of the third voyage, in the spring of 1498, are these: The Das Narrenschiff (Ship of Fools) of Sebastian Brant, a satire on the follies of society, published at Basle in 1494,[206] and reprinted in Latin in 1497, 1498, and in French in 1497, 1498, and 1499,[207] has a brief mention of the land previously unknown, until Ferdinand discovered innumerable people in the great Spanish ocean. Zacharias Lilio, in his De origine et laudibus scientiarum, Florence, 1496,[208] has two allusions. In 1497 Fedia Inghirami, keeper of the Vatican Archives, delivered a funeral oration on Prince John, son of Ferdinand and Isabella, and made a reference to the New World. The little book was probably printed in Rome. There is also a reference in the Cosmographia of Antonius Nebrissensis, printed in 1498.[209]

SEBASTIAN BRANT.

Fac-simile of cut in Reusner’s Icones, Strasburg, 1590.

[E.] Third Voyage (May 30, 1498, to Nov. 20, 1500).—Our knowledge of this voyage is derived at first hand from two letters of Columbus himself, both of which are printed by Navarrete, and by Major, with a translation. The first is addressed to the sovereigns, and follows a copy in Las Casas’s hand, in the Archives of the Duque del Infantado. The other is addressed to the nurse of Prince John, and follows a copy in the Muñoz Collection in the Real Academia at Madrid, collated with a copy in the Columbus Collection at Genoa, printed by Spotorno.[210]

MAP OF COLUMBUS’ FOUR VOYAGES
(WESTERN PART).

A reproduction of the map in Charton’s Voyageurs, iii. 179.

MAP OF COLUMBUS’ FOUR VOYAGES
(EASTERN PART.)

A reproduction of the map in Charton’s Voyageurs, iii. 178.

[F.] Fourth Voyage (May 9, 1502, to Nov. 7, 1504).—While at Jamaica Columbus wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella a wild, despondent letter,[211] suggestive of alienation of mind. It brings the story of the voyage down only to July 7, 1503, leaving four months unrecorded. Pinelo says it was printed in the Spanish, as he wrote it; but no such print is known.[212] Navarrete found in the King’s private library, at Madrid, a manuscript transcript of it, written, apparently, about the middle of the sixteenth century; and this he printed in his Coleccion.[213] It was translated into Italian by Costanzo Bayuera, of Brescia, and published at Venice, in 1505, as Copia de la lettera per Colombo mandata.[214] Cavaliere Morelli, the librarian of St. Mark’s, reprinted it, with comments, at Bassano, in 1810, as Lettera rarissima di Cristoforo Colombo.[215] Navarrete prints two other accounts of this voyage,—one by Diego Porras;[216] the other by Diego Mendez, given in his last will, preserved in the Archives of the Duke of Veraguas.[217]

While Columbus was absent on this voyage, as already mentioned, Bergomas had recorded the Admiral’s first discoveries.[218]

[G.] Lives and Notices of Columbus.—Ferdinand Columbus—if we accept as his the Italian publication of 1571—tells us that the fatiguing career of his father, and his infirmities, prevented the Admiral from writing his own life. For ten years after his death there were various references to the new discoveries, but not a single attempt to commemorate, by even a brief sketch, the life of the discoverer. Such were the mentions in the Commentariorum urbanorum libri of Maffei,[219] published in 1506, and again in 1511; in Walter Ludd’s Speculi orbis, etc.;[220] in F. Petrarca’s Chronica;[221] and in the Oratio[222] of Marco Dandolo (Naples),—all in 1507. In the same year the narrative in the Paesi novamente retrovati (1507) established an account which was repeated in later editions, and was followed in the Novus orbis of 1532. The next year (1508) we find a reference in the Oratio[223] of Fernando Tellez at Rome; in the Supplementi de le chroniche vulgare, novamente dal frate Jacobo Phillipo al anno 1503 vulgarizz. per Francesco C. Fiorentino (Venice);[224] in Johannes Stamler’s Dyalogus;[225] in the Ptolemy published at Rome with Ruysch’s map; and in the Collectanea[226] of Baptista Fulgosus, published at Milan.

In 1509 there is reference to the discoveries in the Opera nova of the General of the Carmelites, Battista Mantuanus.[227] Somewhere, from 1510 to 1519, the New Interlude[228] presented Vespucius to the English public, rather than Columbus, as the discoverer of America, as had already been done by Waldseemüller at St. Dié.

THE GIUSTINIANI PSALTER.

Fac-simile of a portion of the page of Giustiniani Psalter, which shows the beginning of the marginal note on Columbus.

In 1511 Peter Martyr, in his first Decade, and Sylvanus, in his annotations of Ptolemy, drew attention to the New World; as did also Johannes Sobrarius in his Panegyricum carmen de gestis heroicis divi Ferdinandi Catholici.[229] The Stobnicza (Cracow) Appendix to Ptolemy presented a new map of the Indies in 1512; and the Chronicon of Eusebius, of the same date, recorded the appearance of some of the wild men of the West in Rouen, brought over by a Dieppe vessel. Some copies, at least, of Antonio de Lebrija’s edition of Prudentii opera, printed at Lucca, 1512, afford another instance of an early mention of the New World.[230] Again, in 1513, a new edition of Ptolemy gave the world what is thought to have been a map by Columbus himself; and in the same year there was a Supplementum supplementi of Jacobo Philippo, of Bergomas.[231] In 1514 the De natura locorum (Vienna), of Albertus Magnus, points again to Vespucius instead of Columbus;[232] but Cataneo, in a poem on Genoa,[233] does not forget her son, Columbus.

These, as books have preserved them for us, are about all the contemporary references to the life of the great discoverer for the first ten years after his death.[234] In 1516, where we might least expect it, we find the earliest small gathering of the facts of his life. In the year of Columbus’ death, Agostino Giustiniani had begun the compilation of a polyglot psalter, which was in this year (1516) ready for publication, and, with a dedication to Leo X., appeared in Genoa. The editor annotated the text, and, in a marginal note to verse four of the nineteenth Psalm, we find the earliest sketch of Columbus’ life. Stevens[235] says of the note: “There are in it several points which we do not find elsewhere recorded, especially respecting the second voyage, and the survey of the south side of Cuba, as far as Evangelista, in May, 1494. Almost all other accounts of the second voyage, except that of Bernaldez, end before this Cuba excursion began.”

Giustiniani, who was born in 1470, died in 1536, and his Annali di Genoa[236] was shortly afterward published (1537), in which, on folio ccxlix, he gave another account of Columbus, which, being published by his executors with his revision, repeated some errors or opinions of the earlier Psalter account. These were not pleasing to Ferdinand Columbus,[237] the son of the Admiral,—particularly the statement that Columbus was born of low parentage,—“vilibus ortus parentibus.” Stevens points out how Ferdinand accuses Giustiniani of telling fourteen lies about the discoverer; “but on hunting them out, they all appear to be of trifling consequence, amounting to little more than that Columbus sprang from humble parents, and that he and his father were poor, earning a livelihood by honest toil.”[238]

To correct what, either from pride or from other reasons, he considered the falsities of the Psalter, Ferdinand was now prompted to compose a Life of his father,—or at least such was, until recently, the universal opinion of his authorship of the book. As to Ferdinand’s own relations to that father there is some doubt, or pretence of doubt, particularly on the part of those who have found the general belief in, and pretty conclusive evidence concerning, the illegitimacy of Ferdinand an obstacle in establishing the highly moral character which a saint, like Columbus, should have.[239]

Ferdinand Columbus, or Fernando Colon, was born three or four years before his father sailed on his first voyage.[240] His father’s favor at Court opened the way, and in attendance upon Prince Juan and Queen Isabella he gained a good education. When Columbus went on his fourth voyage, in 1502, the boy, then thirteen years of age, accompanied his father. It is said that he made two other voyages to the New World; but Harrisse could only find proof of one. His later years were passed as a courtier, in attendance upon Charles V. on his travels, and in literary pursuits, by which he acquired a name for learning. He had the papers of his father,[241] and he is best known by the Life of Columbus which passes under his name. If it was written in Spanish, it is not known in its original form, and has not been traced since Luis Colon, the Duque de Veraguas, son of Diego, took the manuscript to Genoa about 1568. There is some uncertainty about its later history; but it appeared in 1571 at Venice in an Italian version made by Alfonzo de Ulloa, and was entitled Historie del S. D. Fernando Colombo; nelle quali s’ ha particolare & vera relatione della vita, & de’ fatti dell’Ammiraglio D. Christoforo Colombo, suo padre. It is thought that this translation was made from an inaccurate copy of the manuscript, and moreover badly made. It begins the story of the Admiral’s life with his fifty-sixth year, or thereabout; and it has been surmised that an account of his earlier years—if, indeed, the original draft contained it—was omitted, so as not to obscure, by poverty and humble station, the beginnings of a luminous career.[242] Ferdinand died at Seville, July 12, 1539,[243] and bequeathed, conditionally, his library to the Cathedral. The collection then contained about twenty thousand volumes, in print and manuscript; and it is still preserved there, though, according to Harrisse, much neglected since 1709, and reduced to about four thousand volumes. It is known as the Biblioteca Colombina.[244] Spotorno says that this Luis Colon, a person of debauched character, brought this manuscript in the Spanish language to Genoa, and left it in the hands of Baliano de Fornari, from whom it passed to another patrician, Giovanni Baptista Marini, who procured Ulloa to make the Italian version in which it was first published.[245]

Somewhat of a controversial interest has been created of late years by the critiques of Henry Harrisse on Ferdinand Columbus and his Life of his father, questioning the usually accepted statements in Spotorno’s introduction of the Codice of 1823. Harrisse undertakes to show that the manuscript was never in Don Luis’ hands, and that Ferdinand could not have written it. He counts it as strange that if such a manuscript existed in Spain not a single writer in print previous to 1571 refers to it. “About ten years ago,” says Henry Stevens,[246] “a society of Andalusian bibliographers was formed at Seville. Their first publication was a fierce Hispano-French attack on the authenticity of the Life of Columbus by his second son, Ferdinand, written by Henri Harrisse in French, and translated by one of the Seville bibliófilos, and adopted and published by the Society. The book [by Columbus’ son] is boldly pronounced a forgery and a fraud on Ferdinand Columbus. Some fifteen reasons are given in proof of these charges, all of which, after abundant research and study, are pronounced frivolous, false, and groundless.” Such is Mr. Stevens’s view, colored or not by the antipathy which on more than one occasion has been shown to be reciprocal in the references of Stevens and Harrisse, one to the other, in sundry publications.[247] The views of Harrisse were also expressed in the supplemental volume of his Bibliotheca Americana Vetustissima, published as Additions in 1872. In this he says, regarding the Life of Columbus: “It was not originally written by the son of the bold navigator; and many of the circumstances it relates have to be challenged, and weighed with the utmost care and impartiality.”

The authenticity of the book was ably sustained by D’Avezac before the French Academy in a paper which was printed in 1873 as Le livre de Ferdinand Colomb: Revue critique des allégations proposées contre son authenticité. Harrisse replied in 1875 in a pamphlet of fifty-eight pages, entitled L’histoire de C. Colomb attribuée à son fils Fernand: Examen critique du mémoire lu par M. d’Avezac à l’Académie, 8, 13, 22 Août, 1873. There were other disputants on the question.[248]

The catalogue of the Colombina Library as made by Ferdinand shows that it contained originally a manuscript Life of the Admiral written about 1525 by Ferdinand Perez de Oliva, who presumably had the aid of Ferdinand Columbus himself; but no trace of this Life now exists,[249] unless, as Harrisse ventures to conjecture, it may have been in some sort the basis of what now passes for the work of Ferdinand.

For a long time after the Historie of 1571 there was no considerable account of Columbus printed. Editions of Ptolemy, Peter Martyr, Oviedo, Grynæus, and other general books, made reference to his discoveries; but the next earliest distinct sketch appears to be that in the Elogia virorum illustrium of Jovius, printed in 1551 at Florence, and the Italian version made by Domenichi, printed in 1554.[250] Ramusio’s third volume, in 1556, gave the story greater currency than before; but such a book as Cunningham’s Cosmographical Glasse, in its chapter on America, utterly ignores Columbus in 1559.[251] We get what may probably be called the hearsay reports of Columbus’ exploits in the Mondo nuovo of Benzoni, first printed at Venice in 1565. There was a brief memorial in the Clarorum Ligurum elogia of Ubertus Folieta, published at Rome in 1573.[252] In 1581 his voyages were commemorated in an historical poem, Laurentii Gambaræ Brixiani de navigatione Christophori Columbi, published at Rome.[253] Boissard, of the De Bry coterie at Frankfort in 1597, included Columbus in his Icones virorum illustrium;[254] and Buonfiglio Costanzo, in 1604, commemorated him in the Historia Siciliana, published at Venice.[255]

Meanwhile the story of Columbus’ voyages was told at last with all the authority of official sanction in the Historia general of Herrera. This historian, or rather annalist, was born in 1549, and died in 1625;[256] and the appointment of historiographer given him by Philip II. was continued by the third and fourth monarchs of that name. There has been little disagreement as to his helpfulness to his successors. All critics place him easily first among the earlier writers; and Muñoz, Robertson, Irving, Prescott, Ticknor, and many others have united in praise of his research, candor, and justness, while they found his literary skill compromised in a measure by his chronological method. Irving found that Herrera depended so much on Las Casas that it was best in many cases to go to that earlier writer in preference;[257] and Muñoz thinks only Herrera’s judicial quality preserved for him a distinct character throughout the agglutinizing process by which he constructed his book. His latest critic, Hubert H. Bancroft,[258] calls his style “bald and accurately prolix, his method slavishly chronological,” with evidence everywhere in his book of “inexperience and incompetent assistance,” resulting in “notes badly extracted, discrepancies, and inconsistencies.” The bibliography of Herrera is well done in Sabin.[259]

Herrera had already published (1591) a monograph on the history of Portugal and the conquest (1582-1583) of the Azores, when he produced at Madrid his great work, Historia general de los hechos de los Castellanos, in eight decades, four of which, in two volumes, were published in 1601, and the others in 1615.[260] It has fourteen maps; and there should be bound with it, though often found separate, a ninth part, called Description de las Indias occidentales.[261] Of the composite work, embracing the nine parts, the best edition is usually held to be one edited by Gonzales Barcia, and supplied by him with an index, which was printed in Madrid during 1727, 1728, 1729, and 1730, so that copies are found with all those dates, though it is commonly cited as of 1730.[262]

The principal chronicles of Spanish affairs in the seventeenth century contributed more or less to Columbus’ fame;[263] and he is commemorated in the Dutch compilation of Van den Bos, Leven en Daden der Zeehelden, published at Amsterdam in 1676, and in a German translation in 1681.[264]

There were a hundred years yet to pass before Robertson’s History of America gave Columbus a prominence in the work of a historian of established fame; but this Scotch historian was forced to write without any knowledge of Columbus’ own narratives.

In 1781 the earliest of the special Italian commemorations appeared at Parma, in J. Durazzo’s Elogi storici on Columbus and Doria.[265] Chevalier de Langeac in 1782 added to his poem, Colomb dans les fers à Ferdinand et Isabelle, a memoir of Columbus.[266]

The earliest commemoration in the United States was in 1792, on the three hundredth anniversary of the discovery, celebrated by the Massachusetts Historical Society, when Dr. Jeremy Belknap delivered an historical discourse,[267] included later with large additions in his well-known American Biography. The unfinished history of Muñoz harbingered, in 1793, the revival in Europe of the study of his career. Finally, the series of modern Lives of Columbus began in 1818 with the publication at Milan of Luigi Bossi’s Vita di Cristoforo Colombo, scritta e corredata di nuove osservazioni.[268] In 1823 the introduction by Spotorno to the Codice, and in 1825 the Coleccion of Navarrete, brought much new material to light; and the first to make use of it were Irving, in his Life of Columbus, 1828,[269] and Humboldt, in his Examen critique de l’histoire de la géographie du nouveau continent, published originally, in 1834, in a single volume; and again in five volumes, between 1836 and 1839.[270] “No one,” says Ticknor,[271] “has comprehended the character of Columbus as Humboldt has,—its generosity, its enthusiasm, its far-reaching visions, which seemed watchful beforehand for the great scientific discovery of the sixteenth century.” Prescott was warned by the popularity of Irving’s narrative not to attempt to rival him; and his treatment of Columbus’ career was confined to such a survey as would merely complete the picture of the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella.[272]

In 1844 there came the first intimation of a new style of biography,—a protest against Columbus’ story being longer told by his natural enemies, as all who failed to recognize his pre-eminently saintly character were considered to be. There was a purpose in it to make the most possible of all his pious ejaculations, and of his intention, expressed in his letter to the Pope in 1502, to rescue the Holy City from the infidel, with his prospective army of ten thousand horse and a hundred thousand foot. The chief spokesman of this purpose has been Roselly de Lorgues. He first shadowed forth his purpose in his La croix dans les deux mondes in 1844. It was not till 1864 that he produced the full flower of his spirit in his Christophe Colomb, Histoire de sa vie et de ses voyages d’après des documents authentiques tirés d’Espagne et d’Italie.[273] This was followed, in 1874, by his L’ambassadeur de Dieu et le Pape Pie IX. All this, however, and much else by the abetters of the scheme of the canonization of Columbus which was urged on the Church, failed of its purpose; and the movement was suspended, for a while at least, because of an ultimate adverse determination.[274]

Of the other later lives of Columbus it remains to mention only the most considerable, or those of significant tendency.

The late Sir Arthur Helps wrote his Spanish Conquest of America with the aim of developing the results—political, ethnological, and economic—of the conquest, rather than the day-by-day progress of events, and with a primary regard to the rise of slavery. His Life of Columbus is simply certain chapters of this larger work excerpted and fitted in order.[275] Mr. Aaron Goodrich, in A History of the so-called Christopher Columbus, New York, 1874, makes a labored and somewhat inconsiderate effort, characterized by a certain peevish air, to prove Columbus the mere borrower of others’ glories.[276]

In French, mention may be made of the Baron de Bonnefoux’s Vie de Christophe Colomb, Paris, 1853,[277] and the Marquis de Belloy’s Christophe Colomb et la découverte du Nouveau Monde, Paris, 1864.[278]

In German, under the impulse given by Humboldt, some fruitful labors have been given to Columbus and the early history of American discovery; but it is only necessary to mention the names of Forster,[279] Peschel,[280] and Ruge.[281]

[H.] Portraits of Columbus.—Of Columbus there is no likeness whose claim to consideration is indisputable. We have descriptions of his person from two who knew him,—Oviedo and his own son Ferdinand; we have other accounts from two who certainly knew his contemporaries,—Gomara and Benzoni; and in addition we possess the description given by Herrera, who had the best sources of information. From these we learn that his face was long, neither full nor thin; his cheek-bones rather high; his nose aquiline; his eyes light gray; his complexion fair, and high colored. His hair, which was of light color before thirty, became gray after that age. In the Paesi novamente retrovati of 1507 he is described as having a ruddy, elongated visage, and as possessing a lofty and noble stature.[282]

PAULUS JOVIUS.

Fac-simile of cut in Reusner’s Icones, Basle, 1589. There is another cut in Pauli Jovii elogia virorum bellica virtute illustrium, Basle, 1575 (copy in Harvard College Library).

These are the test with which to challenge the very numerous so-called likenesses of Columbus; and it must be confessed not a single one, when you take into consideration the accessories and costume, warrants us in believing beyond dispute that we can bring before us the figure of the discoverer as he lived. Such is the opinion of Feuillet de Conches, who has produced the best critical essay on the subject yet written.[283]

COLUMBUS (after Giovio).

Fac-simile of the woodcut in Paolo Giovio’s Elogia virorum bellica virtute illustrium (Basle, 1596), p. 124. There are copies in the Boston Athenæum and Boston Public Library. It is also copied in Charton’s Voyageurs, iii. 81, from whom Hazard (Santo Domingo, New York, 1873, p. 7) takes it. The 1575 edition is in Harvard College Library, and the same portrait is on p. 191. This cut is also re-engraved in Jules Verne’s La découverte de la terre, p. 113.

A vignette on the map of La Cosa, dated 1500, represents Saint Christopher bearing on his shoulders the infant Christ across a stream. This has been considered symbolical of the purpose of Columbus in his discoveries; and upholders of the movement to procure his canonization, like De Lorgues, have claimed that La Cosa represented the features of Columbus in the face of Saint Christopher. It has also been claimed that Herrera must have been of the same opinion, since the likeness given by that historian can be imagined to be an enlargement of the head on the map. This theory is hardly accepted, however, by the critics.[284]

THE YANEZ COLUMBUS
(National Library, Madrid).

This picture was prominently brought before the Congress of Américanistes which assembled at Madrid in 1881, and not, it seems, without exciting suspicion of a contrived piece of flattery for the Duke of Veraguas, then presiding over this same congress. Cf. Cortambert, Nouvelle histoire des voyages, p. 40.

Discarding the La Cosa vignette, the earliest claimant now known is an engraving published in the Elogia virorum illustrium (1575)[285] of Paolo Giovio (Paulus Jovius, in the Latin form). This woodcut is thought to have been copied from a picture which Jovius had placed in the gallery of notable people which he had formed in his villa at Lake Como. That collection is now scattered, and the Columbus picture cannot be traced; but that there was a portrait of the discoverer there, we know from the edition of Vasari’s Lives of the Painters printed by Giunti at Florence (1568), wherein is a list of the pictures, which includes likenesses of Vespucius, Cortes, and Magellan, besides that of “Colombo Genovese.” This indicates a single picture; but it is held by some that Jovius must have possessed two pictures, since this woodcut gives Columbus the garb of a Franciscan, while the painting in the gallery at Florence, supposed also to follow a picture belonging to Jovius, gives him a mantle. A claim has been made that the original Jovius portrait is still in existence in what is known as the Yanez picture, now in the National Library in Madrid, which was purchased of Yanez in Granada in 1763. It had originally a close-fitting tunic and mantle, which was later painted over so as to show a robe and fur collar. This external painting has been removed; and the likeness bears a certain resemblance to the woodcut and to the Florence likeness. The Yanez canvas is certainly the oldest in Spain; and the present Duque de Veraguas considers it the most authentic of all the portraits.[286] The annexed cut of it is taken from an engraving in Ruge’s Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen (p. 235). It bears the inscription shown in the cut.[287]

The woodcut (1575) already mentioned passes as the prototype of another engraving by Aliprando Capriolo, in the Ritratti di cento capitani illustri, published at Rome in 1596.[288]

The most interesting of all pictures bearing a supposed relation to the scattered collection at Lake Como is in the gallery at Florence, which is sometimes said to have been painted by Cristofano dell’Altissimo, and before the year 1568. A copy of it was made for Thomas Jefferson in 1784, which was at Monticello in 1814; and, having been sent to Boston to be disposed of, became the property of Israel Thorndike, and was by him given to the Massachusetts Historical Society, in whose gallery it now is; and from a photograph of it the cut (p. 74) has been engraved.[289] It is perhaps the most commonly accepted likeness in these later years.[290]

COLUMBUS (after Capriolo).

This is a reproduction of the cut in Charton’s Voyageurs, iii. 85. It is also copied in Carderera, and in the Magasin pittoresque, troisième année, p. 316.

After the woodcut of 1575, the next oldest engraved likeness of Columbus is the one usually called the De Bry portrait. It shows a head with a three-cornered cap, and possesses a Dutch physiognomy,—its short, broad face not corresponding with the descriptions which we find in Oviedo and the others. De Bry says that the original painting was stolen from a saloon in the Council for the Indies in Spain, and, being taken to the Netherlands, fell into his hands. He claims that it was painted from life by order of Ferdinand, the King. De Bry first used the plate in Part V. of his Grands Voyages, both in the Latin and German editions, published in 1595, where it is marked as engraved by Jean de Bry. It shows what seem to be two warts on the cheek, which do not appear in later prints.[291] Feuillet de Conches describes a painting in the Versailles gallery like the De Bry, which has been engraved by Mercuri;[292] but it does not appear that it is claimed as the original from which De Bry worked.[293]

COLUMBUS (the Jefferson copy of the Florence picture).

Jomard, in the Bulletin de la Société de Géographie (3d series), iii. 370, printed his “Monument à Christophe Colomb: son portrait,”[294] in explanation and advocacy of a Titianesque canvas which he had found at Vicenza, inscribed “Christophorus Columbus.”

THE DE BRY PORTRAIT OF COLUMBUS.

He claimed that the features corresponded to the written descriptions of Columbus by his contemporaries and accounted for the Flemish ruff, pointed beard, gold chain, and other anachronous accessories, by supposing that these had been added by a later hand. These adornments, however, prevented Jomard’s views gaining any countenance, though he seems to have been confident in his opinion. Irving at the time records his scepticism when Jomard sent him a lithograph of it. Carderera and Feuillet de Conches both reject it.

JOMARD’S PICTURE OF COLUMBUS.

This is a reproduction of the cut in Charton’s Voyageurs, iii. 87.

A similar out-of-date ruff and mustache characterize the likeness at Madrid associated with the Duke of Berwick-Alba, in which the finery of a throne makes part of the picture. The owner had a private plate engraved from it by Rafael Esteve, a copy of which, given by the engraver to Obadiah Rich, who seems to have had faith in it, is now in the Lenox Library.[295]

A picture belonging to the Duke of Veraguas is open to similar objections,—with its beard and armor and ruff; but Muñoz adopted it for his official history, the plate being drawn by Mariano Maella.[296]

A picture of a bedizened cavalier, ascribed to Parmigiano (who was three years old when Columbus died), is preserved in the Museo Borbonico at Naples, and is, unfortunately, associated in this country with Columbus, from having been adopted by Prescott for his Ferdinand and Isabella,[297] and from having been copied for the American Antiquarian Society.[298] It was long since rejected by all competent critics.

A picture in the Senate chamber (or lately there) at Albany was given to the State of New York in 1784 by Mrs. Maria Farmer, a granddaughter of Governor Jacob Leisler, and was said to have been for many years in that lady’s family.[299] There are many other scattered alleged likenesses of Columbus, which from the data at hand it has not been easy to link with any of those already mentioned.[300]

COLUMBUS.—THE HAVANA MEDALLION.

Reproduced from a cut in Charton’s Voyageurs, iii. 188.

The best known, probably, of the sculptured effigies of Columbus is the bust of Peschiera, which was placed in 1821 at Genoa on the receptacle of the Columbus manuscripts.[301] The artist discarded all painted portraits of Columbus, and followed the descriptions of those who had known the discoverer.[302]

COLUMBUS.

This is copied from one given in Ruge’s Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, p. 234, which follows a photograph of the painting in the Ministry of Marine at Madrid.

The most imposing of all the memorials is the monument at Genoa erected in 1862 after a design by Freccia, and finished by Michel Canzio.[303]

[I.] Burial and Remains of Columbus.—There is no mention of the death of Columbus in the Records of Valladolid. Peter Martyr, then writing his letters from that place, makes no reference to such an event. It is said that the earliest contemporary notice of his death is in an official document, twenty-seven days later, where it is affirmed that “the said Admiral is dead.”[304] The story which Irving has written of the successive burials of Columbus needs to be rewritten; and positive evidence is wanting to show that his remains were placed first, as is alleged, in a vault of the Franciscans at Valladolid. The further story, as told by Irving, of Ferdinand’s ordering the removal of his remains to Seville seven years later, and the erection of a monument, is not confirmed by any known evidence.[305] From the tenor of Diego’s will in March, 1509, it would seem that the body of Columbus had already been carried to Seville, and that later, the coffins of his son Diego and of his brother Bartholomew were laid in Seville beside him, in the cuevas, or vaults of the Carthusians. Meanwhile the Cathedral in Santo Domingo was begun,—not to be completed till 1540; and in this island it had been the Admiral’s wish to be buried.

COLUMBUS (from Montanus).

His family were desirous of carrying out that wish; but it seemed to require three royal orders to make good the project, and overcome objections or delays. These orders were dated June 2, 1537, Aug. 22, 1539, and Nov. 5, 1540.[306] It has been conjectured from the language of Ferdinand Columbus’ will, in 1539, that the remains were still in the cuevas; and it is supposed that they were carried to Santo Domingo in 1541,—though, if so, there is no record of their resting-place from 1536,—when they are said, in the Convent’s Records,[307] to have been delivered up for transportation. The earliest positive mention of their being in the Cathedral at Santo Domingo is in 1549;[308] and it is not till the next century that we find a positive statement that the remains of Diego were also removed.[309] Not till 1655 does any record say that the precise spot in the Cathedral containing the remains was known, and not till 1676 do we learn what that precise spot was,—“on the right of the altar.” In 1683 we first learn of “a leaden case in the sanctuary, at the side of the platform of the high altar, with the remains of his brother Don Luis on the other side, according to the tradition of the aged in this island.”[310] The book from which this is extracted[311] was published in Madrid, and erred in calling Luis a brother instead of grandson, whose father, Diego, lying beside the Admiral, seems at the time to have been forgotten.[312]

COFFER AND BONES.

This follows an engraving given in John G. Shea’s “Where are the Remains of Columbus?” in Magazine of American History, January, 1883, and separately. There are other engravings in Tejera, pp. 28, 29, and after a photograph in the Informe de la Real Academia, p. 197. The case is 16⅝ x 8½ x 8⅛ inches.

Just a century later, in 1783, Moreau de Saint-Méry, prefacing his Description topographique of Santo Domingo,[313] sought more explicit information, and learned that, shortly before his inquiry, the floor of the chancel had been raised so as to conceal the top of the vault, which was “a case of stone” (containing the leaden coffin), on the “Gospel side of the sanctuary.” This case had been discovered during the repairs, and, though “without inscription, was known from uninterrupted and invariable tradition to contain the remains of Columbus;” and the Dean of the Chapter, in certifying to this effect, speaks of the “leaden urn as a little damaged, and containing several human bones;” while he had also, some years earlier, found on “the Epistle side” of the altar a similar stone case, which, according to tradition, contained the bones of the Admiral’s brother.[314]

A few years later the treaty of Basle, July 22, 1795, gave to France the half of Santo Domingo still remaining to Spain; and at the cost of the Duke of Veraguas, and with the concurrence of the Chapter of the Cathedral, the Spanish General, Gabriel de Aristazabal, somewhat hurriedly opened a vault on the left of the altar, and, with due ceremony and notarial record,[315] took from it fragments of a leaden case and some human bones, which were unattested by any inscription found with them. The relics were placed in a gilt leaden case, and borne with military honors to Havana.[316] It is now claimed that these remains were of Diego, the son, and that the vault then opened is still empty in the Cathedral, while the genuine remains of Columbus were left undisturbed.

In 1877, in making some changes about the chancel, on the right of the altar, the workmen opened a vault, and found a leaden case containing human bones, with an inscription showing them to be those of Luis, the grandson. This led to a search on the opposite, or “Gospel, side” of the chancel, where they found an empty vault, supposed to be the one from which the remains were taken to Havana. Between this and the side wall of the building, and separated from the empty vault by a six-inch wall, was found another cavity, and in it a leaden case. There seem to have been suitable precautions taken to avoid occasion for imputations of deceit, and with witnesses the case was examined.[317] In it were found some bones and dust, a leaden bullet,[318] two iron screws, which fitted the holes in a small silver plate found beneath the mould in the bottom of the case.[319] This casket bore on the outside, on the front, and two ends—one letter on each surface—the letters C. C. A. On the top was an inscription here reduced:—

This inscription is supposed to mean “Discoverer of America, first Admiral.” Opening the case, which in this situation presented the appearance shown in the cut on page 80, the under surface of the lid was found to bear the following legend:—

This legend is translated, “Illustrious and renowned man, Christopher Columbus.”[320] A fac-simile of the inscription found on the small silver plate is given on page 82, the larger of which is understood to mean “A part of the remains of the first Admiral, Don Christopher Columbus, discoverer.”[321] The discovery was made known by the Bishop, Roque Cocchia, in a pastoral letter,[322] and the news spread rapidly.[323] The Spanish King named Señor Antonio Lopez Prieto, of Havana, to go to Santo Domingo, and, with the Spanish consul, to investigate. Prieto had already printed a tract, which went through two editions, Los restos de Colon: exámen histórico-critico, Havana, 1877.

In March, 1878, he addressed his Official Report to the Captain-general of Cuba, which was printed in two editions during the same year, as Informe sobre los restos de Colon. It was an attack upon the authenticity of the remains at Santo Domingo. Later in the same year, Oct. 14, 1878, Señor Manuel Colmeiro presented, in behalf of the Royal Academy of History of Madrid, a report to the King, which was printed at Madrid in 1879 as Los restos de Colon: informe de la Real Academia de la Historia, etc. It reinforced the views of Prieto’s Report; charged Roque Cocchia with abetting a fraud; pointed to the A (America) of the outside inscription as a name for the New World which Spaniards at that time never used;[324] and claimed that the remains discovered in 1877 were those of Christopher Columbus, the grandson of the Admiral, and that the inscriptions had been tampered with, or were at least much later than the date of reinterment in the Cathedral.[325] Besides Bishop Roque Cocchia, the principal upholder of the Santo Domingo theory has been Emiliano Tejera, who published his Los restos de Colon en Santo Domingo in 1878, and his Los dos restos de Cristóbal Colon in 1879, both in Santo Domingo. Henry Harrisse, under the auspices of the “Sociedad de Bibliófilos Andaluces,” printed his Los restos de Don Cristóval Colon at Seville in 1878, and his Les sépultures de Christophe Colomb: revue critique du premier rapport officiel publié sur ce sujet, the next year (1879) at Paris.[326] From Italy we have Luigi Tommaso Belgrano’s Sulla recente scoperta delle ossa di Colombo (Genoa, 1878). One of the best and most recent summaries of the subject is by John G. Shea in the Magazine of American History, January, 1883; also printed separately, and translated into Spanish. Richard Cortambert (Nouvelle histoire des voyages, p. 39) considers the Santo Domingo theory overcome by the evidence.

[J.] Date and Place of Birth of Columbus, and Accounts of his Family.—The year and place of Columbus’ birth, and the station into which he was born, are questions of dispute. Harrisse[327] epitomizes the authorities upon the year of his nativity. Oscar Peschel reviews the opposing arguments in a paper printed in Ausland in 1866.[328] The whole subject was examined at greater length and with great care by D’Avezac before the Geographical Society of Paris in 1872.[329] The question is one of deductions from statements not very definite, nor wholly in accord. The extremes of the limits in dispute are about twenty years; but within this interval, assertions like those of Ramusio[330] (1430) and Charlevoix[331] (1441) may be thrown out as susceptible of no argument.[332]

In favor of the earliest date—which, with variations arising from the estimates upon fractions of years, may be placed either in 1435, 1436, or 1437—are Navarrete, Humboldt, Ferdinand Höfer,[333] Émile Deschanel,[334] Lamartine,[335] Irving, Bonnefoux, Roselly de Lorgues, l’Abbé Cadoret, Jurien de la Gravière,[336] Napione,[337] Cancellieri, and Cantù.[338] This view is founded upon the statement of one who had known Columbus, Andres Bernaldez, in his Reyes católicos, that Columbus was about seventy years old at his death, in 1506.

The other extreme—similarly varied from the fractions between 1455 and 1456—is taken by Oscar Peschel,[339] who deduces it from a letter of Columbus dated July 7, 1503, in which he says that he was twenty-eight when he entered the service of Spain in 1484; and Peschel argues that this is corroborated by adding the fourteen years of his boyhood, before going to sea, to the twenty-three years of sea-life which Columbus says he had had previous to his voyage of discovery, and dating back from 1492, when he made this voyage.

A middle date—placed, according to fractional calculations, variously from 1445 to 1447—is held by Cladera,[340] Bossi, Muñoz, Casoni,[341] Salinerio,[342] Robertson, Spotorno, Major, Sanguinetti, and Canale. The argument for this view, as presented by Major, is this: It was in 1484, and not in 1492, that this continuous sea-service, referred to by Columbus, ended; accordingly, the thirty-seven years already mentioned should be deducted from 1484, which would point to 1447 as the year of his birth,—a statement confirmed also, as is thought, by the assertion which Columbus makes, in 1501, that it was forty years since he began, at fourteen, his sea-life. Similar reasons avail with D’Avezac, whose calculations, however, point rather to the year 1446.[343]

A similar uncertainty has been made to appear regarding the place of Columbus’ birth. Outside of Genoa and dependencies, while discarding such claims as those of England,[344] Corsica,[345] and Milan,[346] there are more defensible presentations in behalf of Placentia (Piacenza), where there was an ancestral estate of the Admiral, whose rental had been enjoyed by him and by his father;[347] and still more urgent demands for recognition on the part of Cuccaro in Montferrat, Piedmont, the lord of whose castle was a Dominico Colombo,—pretty well proved, however, not to have been the Dominico who was father of the Admiral. It seems certain that the paternal Dominico did own land in Cuccaro, near his kinspeople, and lived there as late as 1443.[348]

In consequence of these claims, the Academy of Sciences in Genoa named a commission, in 1812, to investigate them; and their report,[349] favoring the traditional belief in Genoa as the true spot of Columbus’ birth, is given in digest in Bossi.[350] The claim of Genoa seems to be generally accepted to-day, as it was in the Admiral’s time by Peter Martyr, Las Casas, Bernaldez, Giustiniani, Geraldini, Gallo, Senaraya, and Foglietto.[351] Columbus himself twice, in his will (1498), says he was born in Genoa; and in the codicil (1506) he refers to his “beloved country, the Republic of Genoa.” Ferdinand calls his father “a Genoese.”[352] Of modern writers Spotorno, in the Introduction to the Codice diplomatico Colombo-Americano (1823), and earlier, in his Della origine e della patria di Colombo (1819), has elaborated the claim, with proofs and arguments which have been accepted by Irving, Bossi, Sanguinetti, Roselly, De Lorgues, and most other biographers and writers.

There still remains the possibility of Genoa, as referred to by Columbus and his contemporaries, signifying the region dependent on it, rather than the town itself; and with this latitude recognized, there are fourteen towns, or hamlets as Harrisse names them,[353] which present their claims.[354]

Ferdinand Columbus resented Giustiniani’s statement that the Admiral was of humble origin, and sought to connect his father’s descent with the Colombos of an ancient line and fame; but his disdainful recognition of such a descent is, after all, not conducive to a belief in Ferdinand’s own conviction of the connection.

FERDINAND OF SPAIN.

This follows an ancient medallion as engraved in Buckingham Smith’s Coleccion. Cf. also the sign-manual on p. 56.

There seems little doubt that his father[355] was a wool-weaver or draper, and owned small landed properties, at one time or another, in or not far from Genoa;[356] and, as Harrisse infers, it was in one of the houses on the Bisagno road, as you go from Genoa, that Columbus was perhaps born.[357]

BARTHOLOMEW COLUMBUS.

This is a fac-simile of an engraving in Herrera (Barcia’s edition). There is a vignette likeness on the title of vol i., edition of 1601. Navarrete’s Memoir of Bartholomew Columbus is in the Coleccion de documentos inéditos, vol. xvi.

The pedigree (p. 87) shows the alleged descent of Columbus, as a table in Spotorno’s Della origine e della patria di Colombo, 1819, connects it with other lines, whose heirs at a later day were aroused to claim the Admiral’s honors; and as the usual accounts of his immediate descendants record the transmission of his rights. After Columbus’ death, his son Diego demanded the restitution of the offices and privileges[358] which had been suspended during the Admiral’s later years.

GENEALOGICAL TABLE.

He got no satisfaction but the privilege of contending at law with the fiscal minister of the Crown, and of giving occasion for all the latent slander about the Admiral to make itself heard. The tribunal was the Council of the Indies; the suit was begun in 1508, and lasted till 1527. The documents connected with the case are in the Archives of the Indies. The chief defence of the Crown was that the original convention was against law and public policy, and that Columbus, after all, did not discover Terra firma, and for such discovery alone honors of this kind should be the reward. Diego won the Council’s vote; but Ferdinand, the King, hesitated to confirm their decision. Meanwhile Diego had married a niece of the Duke of Alva, the King’s favorite, and got in this way a royal grant of something like vice-royal authority in the Indies, to which he went (1509) with his bride, prepared for the proper state and display. His uncles, Bartholomew and Diego, as well as Ferdinand Columbus, accompanied him. The King soon began to encroach on Diego’s domain, creating new provinces out of it.[359] It does not belong to this place to trace the vexatious factions which, through Fonseca’s urging, or otherwise created, Diego was forced to endure, till he returned to Spain, in 1515, to answer his accusers. When he asked of the King a share of the profits of the Darien coast, his royal master endeavored to show that Diego’s father had never been on that coast. After Ferdinand’s death (Jan. 23, 1516), his successor, Charles V., acknowledged the injustice of the charges against Diego, and made some amends by giving him a viceroy’s functions in all places discovered by his father. He was subjected, however, to the surveillance of a supervisor to report on his conduct, upon going to his government in 1520.[360] In three years he was again recalled for examination, and in 1526 he died. Don Luis, who succeeded to his father Diego, after some years exchanged, in 1556, his rights of vice-royalty in the Indies for ten thousand gold doubloons and the title of Duque de Veraguas (with subordinate titles), and a grandeeship of the first rank;[361] the latter, however, was not confirmed till 1712.

His nephew Diego succeeded to the rights, silencing those of the daughter of Don Luis by marrying her. They had no issue; and on his death, in 1578, various claimants brought suit for the succession (as shown in the table), which was finally given, in 1608, to the grandson of Isabella, the granddaughter of Columbus. This suit led to the accumulation of a large amount of documentary evidence, which was printed.[362] The vexations did not end here, the Duke of Berwick still contesting; but a decision in 1790 confirmed the title in the present line. The revolt of the Spanish colonies threatened to deprive the Duke of Veraguas of his income; but the Spanish Government made it good by charging it upon the revenues of Cuba and Porto Rico, the source of the present Duke’s support.[363]

[POSTSCRIPT.]

After the foregoing chapter had been completed, there came to hand the first volume of Christophe Colomb, son origine, sa vie, ses voyages, sa famille, et ses descendants, d’après des documents inédits tirés des Archives de Gênes, de Savone, de Séville, et de Madrid, études d’histoire critique par Henry Harrisse, Paris, 1884.

The book is essentially a reversal of many long-established views regarding the career of Columbus. The new biographer, as has been shown, is not bound by any respect for the Life of the Admiral which for three hundred years has been associated with the name of Ferdinand Columbus. The grounds of his discredit of that book are again asserted; and he considers the story as given in Las Casas as much more likely to represent the prototype both of the Historia general of this last writer and of the Historie of 1571, than the mongrel production which he imagines this Italian text of Ulloa to be, and which he accounts utterly unworthy of credit by reason of the sensational perversions and additions with which it is alloyed by some irresponsible editor. This revolutionary spirit makes the critic acute, and sustains him in laborious search; but it is one which seems sometimes to imperil his judgment. He does not at times hesitate to involve Las Casas himself in the same condemnation for the use which, if we understand him, Las Casas may be supposed, equally with the author or editor of the Historie, to have made of their common prototype. That any received incident in Columbus’ career is only traceable to the Historie is sufficient, with our critic, to assign it to the category of fiction.

This new Life adds to our knowledge from many sources; and such points as have been omitted or slightly developed in the preceding chapter, or are at variance with the accepted views upon which that chapter has been based, it may be well briefly to mention.

The frontispiece is a blazon of the arms of Columbus, “du cartulaire original dressé sous ses yeux à Seville en 1502,” following a manuscript in the Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at Paris. The field of the quarter with the castle is red; that of the lion is silver; that of the anchors is blue; the main and islands are gold, the water blue. It may be remarked that the disposition of these islands seems to have no relation to the knowledge then existing of the Columbian Archipelago. Below is a blue bend on a gold field, with red above (see the cut, ante, p. 15).

In writing in his Introduction of the sources of the history of Columbus, Harrisse says that we possess sixty-four memoirs, letters, or extracts written by Columbus, of which twenty-three are preserved in his own autograph. Of these sixty-four, only the Libro de las profecias has not been printed entire, if we except a Memorial que presentó Cristóbal Colon á los Reyes Catolicos sobre las cosas necesarias para abastecer las Indias which is to be printed for the first time by Harrisse, in the appendix of his second volume. Las Casas’ transcript of Columbus’ Journal is now, he tells us, in the collection of the Duque d’Osuna at Madrid. The copy of Dr. Chanca’s relation of the second voyage, used by Navarrete, and now in the Academy of History at Madrid, belonged to a collection formed by Antonio de Aspa. The personal papers of Columbus, confided by him to his friend Gaspar Gorricio, were preserved for over a century in an iron case in the custody of monks of Las Cuevas; but they were, on the 15th of May, 1609, surrendered to Nuño Gelves, of Portugal, who had been adjudged the lawful successor of the Admiral. Such as have escaped destruction now constitute the collection of the present Duque de Veraguas; and of them Navarrete has printed seventy-eight documents. Of the papers concerning Columbus at Genoa, Harrisse finds only one anterior to his famous voyage, and that is a paper of the Father Dominico Colombo, dated July 21, 1489, of whom such facts as are known are given, including references to him in 1463 and 1468 in the records of the Bank of St. George in Genoa. Of the two letters of 1502 which Columbus addressed to the Bank, only one now exists, as far as Harrisse could learn, and that is in the Hôtel de Ville. Particularly in regard to the family of Columbus, he has made effective use of the notarial and similar records of places where Columbus and his family have lived. But use of depositions for establishing dates and relationship imposes great obligation of care in the identification of the persons named; and this with a family as numerous as the Colombos seem to have been, and given so much to the repeating of Christian names, is more than usually difficult. In discussing the evidence of the place and date of Columbus’ birth (p. 137), as well as tracing his family line (pp. 160 and 166), the conclusion reached by Harrisse fixes the humble origin of the future discoverer; since he finds Columbus’ kith and kin of the station of weavers,—an occupation determining their social standing as well in Genoa as in other places at that time. The table which is given on a previous page (ante, p. 87) shows the lines of supposable connection, as illustrating the long contest for the possession of the Admiral’s honors. His father’s father, it would seem, was a Giovanni Colombo (pp. 167-216), and he the son of a certain Luca Colombo. Giovanni lived in turn at Terrarossa and Quinto. Domenico, the Admiral’s father, married Susanna Fontanarossa, and removed to Genoa between 1448 and 1551, living there afterward, except for the interval 1471-1484, when he is found at Savona. He died in Genoa not far from 1498. We are told (p. 29) how little the Archives of Savona yield respecting the family. Using his new notarial evidence mainly, the critic fixes the birth of Columbus about 1445 (pp. 223-241); and enforces a view expressed by him before, that Genoa as the place of Columbus’ birth must be taken in the broader sense of including the dependencies of the city, in one of which he thinks Columbus was born (p. 221) in that humble station which Gallo, in his “De navigatione Columbi,” now known to us as Printed in Muratori (xxiii. 301), was the first to assert. Giustiniani, in his Psalter-note, and Senarega, in his “De rebus Genuensibus” (Muratori, xxiv. 354) seem mainly to have followed Gallo on this point. There is failure (p. 81) to find confirmation of some of the details of the family as given by Casoni in his Annali della republica di Genova (1708, and again 1799). In relation to the lines of his descendants, there are described (pp. 49-60) nineteen different memorials, bearing date between 1590 and 1792—and there may be others—which grew out of the litigations in which the descent of the Admiral’s titles was involved.

The usual story, told in the Historie, of Columbus’ sojourn at the University of Pavia is discredited, chiefly on the ground that Columbus himself says that from a tender age he followed the sea (but Columbus’ statements are often inexact), and from the fact that in cosmography Genoa had more to teach him than Pavia. Columbus is also kept longer in Italy than the received opinion has allowed, which has sent him to Portugal about 1470; while we are now told—if his identity is unassailable—that he was in Savona as late as 1473 (pp. 253-254).

Documentary Portuguese evidence of Columbus’ connection with Portugal is scant. The Archivo da Torre do Tombo at Lisbon, which Santarem searched in vain for any reference to Vespucius, seem to be equally barren of information respecting Columbus, and they only afford a few items regarding the family of the Perestrellos (p. 44).

The principal contemporary Portuguese chronicle making any reference to Columbus is Ruy de Pina’s Chronica del Rei Dom João II., which is contained in the Colleccão de livros ineditos de historia Portugueza, published at Lisbon in 1792 (ii. 177), from which Garcia de Resende seems to have borrowed what appears in his Choronica, published at Lisbon in 1596; and this latter account is simply paraphrased in the Decada primeira do Asia (Lisbon, 1752) of João de Barros, who, born in 1496, was too late to have personal knowledge of earlier time of the discoveries. Vasconcellos’ Vida y acciones del Rey D. Juan al segundo (Madrid, 1639) adds nothing.

The statement of the Historie again thrown out, doubt at least is raised respecting the marriage of Columbus with Philippa, daughter of Bartholomeu Perestrello; and if the critic cannot disprove such union, he seems to think that as good, if not better, evidence exists for declaring the wife of Columbus to have been the daughter of Vasco Gil Moniz, of an old family, while it was Vasco Gill’s sister Isabel who married the Perestrello in question. The marriage of Columbus took place, it is claimed there is reason to believe, not in Madeira, as Gomara and others have maintained, but in Lisbon, and not before 1474. Further, discarding the Historie, there is no evidence that Columbus ever lived at Porto Santo or Madeira, or that his wife was dead when he left Portugal for Spain in 1484. If this is established, we lose the story of the tie which bound him to Portugal being severed by the death of his companion; and the tale of his poring over the charts of the dead father of his wife at Porto Santo is relegated to the region of fable.

We have known that the correspondence of Toscanelli with the monk Martinez took place in 1474, and the further communication of the Italian savant with Columbus himself has always been supposed to have occurred soon after; but reasons are now given for pushing it forward to 1482.

The evidences of the offers which Columbus made, or caused to be made, to England, France, and Portugal,—to the latter certainly, and to the two others probably,—before he betook himself to Spain, are also reviewed. As to the embassy to Genoa, there is no trace of it in the Genoese Archives and no earlier mention of it than Ramusio’s; and no Genoese authority repeats it earlier than Casoni in his Annali di Genova, in 1708. This is now discredited altogether. No earlier writer than Marin, in his Storia del commercio de’ Veneziani (vol. vii. published 1800), claims that Columbus gave Venice the opportunity of embarking its fortunes with his; and the document which Pesaro claimed to have seen has never been found.

There is difficulty in fixing with precision the time of Columbus’ leaving Portugal, if we reject the statements of the Historie, which places it in the last months of 1484. Other evidence is here presented that in the summer of that year he was in Lisbon; and no indisputable evidence exists, in the critic’s judgment, of his being in Spain till May, 1487, when a largess was granted to him. Columbus’ own words would imply in one place that he had taken service with the Spanish monarchs in 1485, or just before that date; and in another place that he had been in Spain as early as January, 1484, or even before,—a time when now it is claimed he is to be found in Lisbon.

The pathetic story of the visit to Rábida places that event at a period shortly after his arriving in Spain; and the Historie tells also of a second visit at a later day. It is now contended that the two visits were in reality one, which occurred in 1491. The principal argument to upset the Historie is the fact that Juan Rodriguez Cabezudo, in the lawsuit of 1513, testified that it was “about twenty-two years” since he had lent a mule to the Franciscan who accompanied Columbus away from Rábida!

With the same incredulity the critic spirits away (p. 358) the junto of Salamanca. He can find no earlier mention of it than that of Antonio de Remesal in his Historia de la Provincia de S. Vincente de Chyapa, published in Madrid in 1619; and accordingly asks why Las Casas, from whom Remesal borrows so much, did not know something of this junto? He counts for much that Oviedo does not mention it; and the Archives of the University at Salamanca throw no light. The common story he believes to have grown out of conferences which probably took place while the Court was at Salamanca in the winter of 1486-1487, and which were conducted by Talavera; while a later one was held at Santa Fé late in 1491, at which Cardinal Mendoza was conspicuous.

Since Alexander Geraldinus, writing in 1522, from his own acquaintance with Columbus, had made the friar Juan Perez, of Rábida, and Antonio de Marchena, who was Columbus’ steadfast friend, one and the same person, it has been the custom of historians to allow that Geraldinus was right. It is now said he was in error; but the critic confesses he cannot explain how Gomara, abridging from Oviedo, changes the name of Juan Perez used by the latter to Perez de Marchena, and this before Geraldinus was printed. Columbus speaks of a second monk who had befriended him; and it has been the custom to identify this one with Diego de Deza, who, at the time when Columbus is supposed to have stood in need of his support, had already become a bishop, and was not likely, the critic thinks, to have been called a monk by Columbus. The two friendly monks in this view were the two distinct persons Juan Perez and Antonio de Marchena (p. 372).

The interposition of Cardinal Mendoza, by which Columbus secured the royal ear, has usually been placed in 1486. Oviedo seems to have been the source of subsequent writers on the point; but Oviedo does not fix the date, and the critic now undertakes to show (p. 380) that it was rather in the closing months of 1491.

Las Casas charges Talavera with opposing the projects of Columbus: we have here (p. 383) the contrary assertion; and the testimony of Peter Martyr seems to sustain this view. So again the new biographer measurably defends, on other contemporary evidence, Fonseca (p. 386) as not deserving the castigations of modern writers; and all this objurgation is considered to have been conveniently derived from the luckless Historie of 1571.

The close student of Columbus is not unaware of the unsteady character of much of the discoverer’s own testimony on various points. His imagination was his powerful faculty; and it was as wild at times as it was powerful, and nothing could stand in the way of it. No one has emphasized the doleful story of his trials and repressions more than himself, making the whole world, except two monks, bent on producing his ignominy; and yet his biographer can pick (p. 388) from the Admiral’s own admissions enough to show that during all this time he had much encouragement from high quarters. The critic is not slow to take advantage of this weakness of Columbus’ character, and more than once makes him the strongest witness against himself.

It is now denied that the money advanced by Santangel was from the treasury of Aragon. On the contrary, the critic contends that the venture was from Santangel’s private resources; and he dismisses peremptorily the evidence of the document which Argensola, in his Anales de Aragon (Saragossa, 1630), says was preserved in the archives of the treasury of Aragon. He says a friend who searched at Barcelona in 1871, among the “Archivo general de la Corona de Aragon,” could not find it.

Las Casas had first told—guardedly, to be sure—the story of the Pinzons’ contributing the money which enabled Columbus to assume an eighth part of the expense of the first voyage; but it is now claimed that the assistance of that family was confined to exerting its influence to get Columbus a crew. It is judged that the evidence is conclusive that the Pinzons did not take pecuniary risk in the voyage of 1492, because only their advances of this sort for the voyage of 1499 are mentioned in the royal grant respecting their arms. But such evidence is certainly inconclusive; and without the evidence of Las Casas it must remain uncertain whence Columbus got the five hundred thousand maravedis which he contributed to the cost of that momentous voyage.

The world has long glorified the story in the Historie of 1571 about the part which the crown jewels, and the like, played in the efforts of Isabella to assist in the furnishing of Columbus’ vessels. Peter Martyr, Bernaldez, and others who took frequent occasion to sound the praises of her majesty, say nothing of it; and, as is now contended, for the good reason that there was no truth in the story, the jewels having long before been pledged in the prosecution of the war with the Moors.

It is inferred (p. 417) from Las Casas that his abridgment of Columbus’ Journal was made from a copy, and not from the original (Navarrete, i. 134); and Harrisse says that from two copies of this abridgment, preserved in the collection of the Duque d’Osuna at Madrid, Varnhagen printed his text of it which is contained in his Verdadera Guanahani. This last text varies in some places from that in Navarrete, and Harrisse says he has collated it with the Osuna copies without discovering any error. He thinks, however, that the Historie of 1571, as well as Las Casas’ account, is based upon the complete text; and his discrediting of the Historie does not prevent him in this case saying that from it, as well as from Las Casas, a few touches of genuineness, not of importance to be sure, can be added to the narrative of the abridgment. He also points out that we should discriminate as to the reflections which Las Casas intersperses; but he seems to have no apprehension of such insertions in the Historie in this particular case.

The Ambrosian text of the first letter is once more reprinted (p. 419), accompanied by a French translation. In some appended notes the critic collates it with the Cosco version in different shapes, and with that of Simancas. He also suggests that this text was printed at Barcelona toward the end of March, 1493, and infers that it may have been in this form that the Genoese ambassadors took the news to Italy when they left Spain about the middle of the following month.

The closing chapter of this first volume is on the question of the landfall. The biographer discredits attempts to settle the question by nautical reasoning based on the log of Columbus, averring that the inevitable inaccuracies of such records in Columbus’ time is proved by the widely different conclusions of such experienced men as Navarrete, Becher, and Fox. He relies rather on Columbus’ description and on that in Las Casas. The name which the latter says was borne in his day by the island of the landfall was “Triango;” but the critic fails to find this name on any earlier map than that first made known in the Cartas de Indias in 1877. To this map he finds it impossible to assign an earlier date than 1541, since it discloses some reminders of the expedition of Coronado. He instances other maps in which the name in some form appears attached to an island of the Bahamas,—as in the Cabot mappemonde of 1544 (Triangula), the so-called Vallard map (Triango), that of Gutierrez in 1550 (Trriango), that of Alonso de Santa Cruz in his Islario of 1560 (Triangulo). Unfortunately on some of the maps Guanahani appears as well as the name which Las Casas gives. Harrisse’s solution of this conjunction of names is suggested by the fact that in the Weimar map of 1527 (see sketch, ante, p. 43) an islet “Triango” lies just east of Guanahani, and corresponds in size and position to the “Triangula” of Cabot and the “Triangulo” of Santa Cruz. Guanahani he finds to correspond to Acklin Island, the larger of the Crooked Island group (see map, ante, p. 55); while the Plana Cays, shown east of it, would stand for “Triango.” Columbus, with that confusion which characterizes his writings, speaks in one place of his first land being an “isleta,” and in another place he calls it an “isla grande.” This gives the critic ground for supposing that Columbus saw first the islet, the “Triango” of Las Casas, or the modern “Plana Cays,” and that then he disembarked on the “isla grande,” which was Acklin Island. So it may be that Columbus’ own confused statement has misled subsequent writers. If this theory is not accepted, Fox, in selecting Samana, has, in the critic’s opinion, come nearer the truth than any other.

---

[THE EARLIEST MAPS]

OF THE

SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE DISCOVERIES.

BY THE EDITOR.

THE enumeration of the cartographical sources respecting the discoveries of the earlier voyagers began with the list, “Catalogus auctorum tabularum geographicarum, quotquot ad nostram cognitionem hactenus pervenere; quibus addidimus, ubi locorum, quando et a quibus excusi sunt,” which Ortelius in 1570 added to his Theatrum orbis terrarum, many of whose titles belong to works not now known. Of maps now existing the best-known enumerations are those in the Jean et Sébastian Cabot of Harrisse; the Mapoteca Colombiana of Uricoechea; the Cartografia Mexicana of Orozco y Berra, published by the Mexican Geographical Society; and Gustavo Uzielli’s Elenco descritto degli Atlanti, planisferi e carte nautiche, originally published in 1875, but made the second volume, edited by Pietro Amat, of the new edition of the Studi biografici e bibliografici della Società Geografica Italiana, Rome, 1882, under the specific title of Mappamondi, carte nautiche, portolani ed altri monumenti cartografici specialmente Italiani dei secoli XIII-XVII.[364]

The Editor has printed in the Harvard University Bulletin a bibliography Of Ptolemy’s geography, and a calendar, with additions and annotations, of the Kohl collection of early maps, belonging to the Department of State at Washington, both of which contributions called for enumerations of printed and manuscript maps of the early period, and included their reproductions of later years.

The development of cartography is also necessarily made a part of histories of geography like those of Santarem, Lelewel, St.-Martin, and Peschel; but their use of maps hardly made chronological lists of them a necessary part of their works. Santarem has pointed out how scantily modern writers have treated of the cartography of the Middle Ages previous to the era of Spanish discovery; and he enumerates such maps as had been described before the appearance of his work, as well as publications of the earlier ones after the Spanish discovery.[365]

To what extent Columbus had studied the older maps from the time when they began to receive a certain definiteness in the fourteenth century, is not wholly clear, nor how much he knew of the charts of Marino Sanuto, of Pizignani, and of the now famous Catalan map of that period; but it is doubtless true that the maps of Bianco (1436) and Mauro (1460) were well known to him.[366] “Though these early maps and charts of the fifteenth century,” says Hallam,[367] “are to us but a chaos of error and confusion, it was on them that the patient eye of Columbus had rested through long hours of meditation, while strenuous hope and unsubdued doubt were struggling in his soul.”

EARLY COMPASS.

This follows the engraving in Pigafetta’s Voyage and in the work of Jurien de la Gravière. The main points were designated by the usual names of the winds, Levante, east; Sirocco, southeast, etc.

A principal factor in the development of map-making, as of navigation, had been the magnet. It had been brought from China to the eastern coast of Africa as early as the fourth century, and through the Arabs[368] and Crusaders it had been introduced into the Mediterranean, and was used by the Catalans and Basques in the twelfth century, a hundred years or more before Marco Polo brought to Europe his wonderful stories.[369] In that century even it had become so familiar a sight that poets used it in their metaphors. The variation of its needle was not indeed unknown long before Columbus, but its observation in mid-ocean in his day gave it a new significance. The Chinese had studied the phenomenon, and their observations upon it had followed shortly upon the introduction of the compass itself to Western knowledge; and as early as 1436 the variation of the needle was indicated on maps in connection with places of observation.[370]

The earliest placing of a magnetic pole seems due to the voyage of Nicholas of Lynn, whose narrative was presented to Edward III. of England. This account is no longer known,[371] though the title of it, Inventio fortunata, is preserved, with its alleged date of 1355. Cnoyen, whose treatise is not extant, is thought to have got his views about the regions of the north and about the magnetic pole from Nicholas of Lynn,[372] while he was in Norway in 1364; and it is from Cnoyen that Mercator says he got his notion of the four circumpolar islands which so long figured in maps of the Mercator and Finæus school. In the Ruysch map (1508) we have the same four polar islands, with the magnetic pole placed within an insular mountain north of Greenland. Ruysch also depended on the Inventio fortunata. Later, by Martin Cortes in 1545, and by Sanuto in 1588, the pole was placed farther south.[373]

Ptolemy, in the second century, accepting the generally received opinion that the world as known was much longer east and west than north and south, adopted with this theory the terms which naturally grew out of this belief, latitude and longitude, and first instituted them, it is thought, in systematic geography.[374]

Pierre d’Ailly, in his map of 1410,[375] in marking his climatic lines, had indicated the beginnings, under a revival of geographical inquiry, of a systematic notation of latitude. Several of the early Ptolemies[376] had followed, by scaling in one way and another the distance from the equator; while in the editions of 1508 and 1511 an example had been set of marking longitude. The old Arabian cartographers had used both latitude and longitude; but though there were some earlier indications of the adoption of such lines among the European map-makers, it is generally accorded that the scales of such measurements, as we understand them, came in, for both latitude and longitude, with the map which Reisch in 1503 annexed to his Margarita philosophica.[377]

Ptolemy had fixed his first meridian at the Fortunate Islands (Canaries), and in the new era the Spaniards, with the sanction of the Pope, had adopted the same point; though the Portuguese, as if in recognition of their own enterprise, had placed it at Madeira,—as is shown in the globes of Behaim and Schöner, and in the map of Ruysch. The difference was not great; the Ptolemean example prevailed, however, in the end.[378]

In respect to latitude there was not in the rude instruments of the early navigators, and under favorable conditions, the means of closely approximate accuracy. In the study which the Rev. E. F. Slafter[379] has made on the average extent of the error which we find in the records of even a later century, it appears that while a range of sixty geographical miles will probably cover such errors in all cases, when observations were made with ordinary care the average deviation will probably be found to be at least fifteen miles. The fractions of degrees were scarcely ever of much value in the computation, and the minute gradation of the instruments in use were subject to great uncertainty of record in tremulous hands. It was not the custom, moreover, to make any allowance for the dip of the horizon, for refraction or for the parallax; and when, except at the time of the equinox, dependence had to be placed upon tables of the sun’s declination, the published ephemerides, made for a series of years, were the subjects of accumulated error.[380]

REGIOMONTANUS’ ASTROLABE.

This cut follows the engravings in Ruge’s Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, p. 106, and in Ghillany’s Ritter Behaim, p. 40. Cf. Von Murr, Memorabilia bibliothecarum Norimbergensium, i. 9.

With these impediments to accurate results, it is not surprising that even errors of considerable extent crept into the records of latitude, and long remained unchallenged.[381] Ptolemy, in A. D. 150, had placed Constantinople two degrees out of the way; and it remained so on maps for fourteen hundred years. In Columbus’ time Cuba was put seven or eight degrees too far north; and under this false impression the cartography of the Antilles began.

The historic instrument for the taking of latitude was the astrolabe, which is known to have been in use by the Majorcan and Catalanian sailors in the latter part of the thirteenth century; and it is described by Raymond Lullius in his Arte de navegar of that time.[382] Behaim, the contemporary of Columbus, one of the explorers of the African coast, and a pupil of Regiomontanus, had somewhat changed the old form of the astrolabe in adapting it for use on shipboard. This was in 1484 at Lisbon, and Behaim’s improvement was doubtless what Columbus used. Of the form in use before Behaim we have that (said to have belonged to Regiomontanus) in the cut on page 96; and in the following cut the remodelled shape which it took after Behaim.

LATER ASTROLABE.

This cut follows an engraving (Mag. of Amer. Hist., iii. 178) after a photograph of one used by Champlain, which bears the Paris maker’s date of 1603. There is another cut of it in Weise’s Discoveries of America, p. 68. Having been lost by Champlain in Canada in 1613, it was ploughed up in 1867 (see Vol. IV. p. 124; also Canadian Monthly, xviii. 589). The small size of the circle used in the sea-instrument to make it conveniently serviceable, necessarily operated to make the ninety degrees of its quarter circle too small for accuracy in fractions. On land much larger circles were sometimes used; one was erected in London in 1594 of six feet radius. The early books on navigation and voyages frequently gave engravings of the astrolabe; as, for instance, in Pigafetta’s voyage (Magellan), and in the Lichte der Zee-Vaert (Amsterdam, 1623), translated as The Light of Navigation (Amsterdam, 1625). The treatise on navigation which became the most popular with the successors of Columbus was the work of Pedro de Medina (born about 1493), called the Arte de navegar, published in 1545 (reprinted in 1552 and 1561), of which there were versions in French (1554, and Lyons, 1569, with maps showing names on the coast of America for the first time), Italian (1555 with 1554, at end; Court Catalogue, no. 235), German (1576), and English (1591). (Harrisse, Bibl. Amer. Vet., no. 266.) Its principal rival was that of Martin Cortes, Breve compendio de la sphera y de la arte de navegar, published in 1551. In Columbus’ time there was no book of the sort, unless that of Raymond Lullius (1294) be considered such; and not till Enciso’s Suma de geografia was printed, in 1519, had the new spirit instigated the making of these helpful and explanatory books. The Suma de geografia is usually considered the first book printed in Spanish relating to America. Enciso, who had been practising law in Santo Domingo, was with Ojeda’s expedition to the mainland in 1509, and seems to have derived much from his varied experience; and he first noticed at a later day the different levels of the tides on the two sides of the isthmus. The book is rare; Rich in 1832 (no. 4) held it at £10 10s. (Cf. Harrisse, Notes on Columbus, 171; Bibl. Amer. Vet., nos. 97, 153, 272,—there were later editions in 1530 and 1546,—Sabin, vol. vi. no. 22,551, etc.; H. H. Bancroft, Central America, i. 329, 339; Carter-Brown, vol. i. no. 58, with a fac-simile of the title: Cat. Hist. do Brazil, Bibl. Nac. do Rio de Janeiro, no. 2.) Antonio Pigafetta in 1530 produced his Trattato di navigazione; but Medina and Cortes were the true beginners of the literature of seamanship. (Cf. Brevoort’s Verrazano, p. 116, and the list of such publications given in the Davis Voyages, p. 342, published by the Hakluyt Society, and the English list noted in Vol. III. p. 206, of the present History.) There is an examination of the state of navigation in Columbus’ time in Margry’s Navigations Françaises, p. 402, and in M. F. Navarrete’s Sobre la historia de la náutica y de las ciencias matemáticas, Madrid, 1846,—a work now become rare.

The rudder, in place of two paddles, one on each quarter, had come into use before this time; but the reefing of sails seems not yet to have been practised. (Cf. De Gama’s Voyages, published by the Hakluyt Society, p. 242.) Columbus’ record of the speed of his ship seems to have been the result of observation by the unaided eye. The log was not yet known; the Romans had fixed a wheel to the sides of their galleys, each revolution of which threw a pebble into a tally-pot. The earliest description which we have in the new era of any device of the kind is in connection with Magellan’s voyage; for Pigafetta in his Journal (January, 1521), mentions the use of a chain at the hinder part of the ship to measure its speed. (Humboldt, Cosmos, Eng. tr., ii. 631; v. 56.) The log as we understand it is described in 1573 in Bourne’s Regiment of the Sea, nothing indicating the use of it being found in the earlier manuals of Medina, Cortes, and Gemma Frisius. Humfrey Cole is said to have invented it. Three years later than this earliest mention, Eden, in 1576, in his translation of Taisnier’s Navigatione, alludes to an artifice “not yet divulgate, which, placed in the pompe of a shyp, whyther the water hath recourse, and moved by the motion of the shypp, with wheels and weyghts, doth exactly shewe what space the shyp hath gone” (Carter-Brown Catalogue, i. no. 310),—a reminiscence of the Roman side-wheels, and a reminder of the modern patent-log. Cf. article on “Navigation” in Encyclopedia Britannica, ninth ed. vol. xvii.

An instrument which could more readily adapt itself to the swaying of the observer’s body in a sea-way, soon displaced in good measure the astrolabe on shipboard. This was the cross-staff, or jackstaff, which in several modified forms for a long time served mariners as a convenient help in ascertaining the altitude of the celestial bodies. Precisely when it was first introduced is not certain; but the earliest description of it which has been found is that of Werner in 1514. Davis, the Arctic navigator, made an improvement on it; and his invention was called a backstaff.

While the observations of the early navigators in respect to latitude were usually accompanied by errors, which were of no considerable extent, their determinations of longitude, when attempted at all, were almost always wide of the truth,[383]—so far, indeed, that their observations helped them but little then to steer their courses, and are of small assistance now to us in following their tracks. It happened that while Columbus was at Hispaniola on his second voyage, in September, 1494, there was an eclipse of the moon.[384] Columbus observed it; and his calculations placed himself five hours and a half from Seville,—an error of eighteen degrees, or an hour and a quarter too much. The error was due doubtless as much to the rudeness of his instruments as to the errors of the lunar tables then in use.[385]

THE JACKSTAFF.

The removal of the Line of Demarcation from the supposed meridian of non-variation of the needle did not prevent the phenomena of terrestrial magnetism becoming of vast importance in the dispute between the Crowns of Spain and Portugal. It characterizes the difference between the imaginative and somewhat fantastic quality of Columbus’ mind and the cooler, more practical, and better administrative apprehension of Sebastian Cabot, that while each observed the phenomenon of the variation of the needle, and each imagined it a clew to some system of determining longitude, to Columbus it was associated with wild notions of a too-ample revolution of the North Star about the true pole.[386] It was not disconnected in his mind from a fancy which gave the earth the shape of a pear; so that when he perceived on his voyage a clearing of the atmosphere, he imagined he was ascending the stem-end of the pear; where he would find the terrestrial paradise.[387] To Cabot the phenomenon had only its practical significance; and he seems to have pondered on a solution of the problem during the rest of his life, if, as Humboldt supposes, the intimations of his death-bed in respect to some as yet unregistered way of discovering longitude refer to his observations on the magnetic declination.[388]

The idea of a constantly increasing declination east and west from a point of non-variation, which both Columbus and Cabot had discovered, and which increase could be reduced to a formula, was indeed partly true; except, as is now well known, the line of non-variation, instead of being a meridian, and fixed, is a curve of constantly changing proportions.[389]

THE BACKSTAFF.

The earliest variation-chart was made in 1530 by Alonzo de Santa Cruz;[390] and schemes of ascertaining longitude were at once based on the observations of these curves, as they had before been made dependent upon the supposed gradation of the change from meridian to meridian, irrespective of latitude.[391] Fifty years later (1585), Juan Jayme made a voyage with Gali from the Philippine Islands to Acapulco to test a “declinatorum” of his own invention.[392] But this was a hundred years (1698-1702) before Halley’s Expedition was sent,—the first which any government fitted out to observe the forces of terrestrial magnetism;[393] and though there had been suspicions of it much earlier, it was not till 1722 that Graham got unmistakable data to prove the hourly variation of the needle.[394]

The earliest map which is distinctively associated with the views which were developing in Columbus’ mind was the one which Toscanelli sent to him in 1474. It is said to have been preserved in Madrid in 1527;[395] and fifty-three years after Columbus’ death, when Las Casas was writing his history, it was in his possession.[396] We know that this Italian geographer had reduced the circumference of the globe to nearly three quarters of its actual size, having placed China about six thousand five hundred miles west of Lisbon, and eleven thousand five hundred miles east. Japan, lying off the China coast, was put somewhere from one hundred degrees to one hundred and ten degrees west of Lisbon; and we have record that Martin Pinzon some years later (1491) saw a map in Rome which put Cipango (Japan) even nearer the European side.[397]

PIRCKEYMERUS.

Fac-simile of a cut in Reusner’s Icones, Strasburg, 1590, p. 42. This well-known cosmographical student was one of the collaborators of the series of the printed Ptolemies, beginning with that of 1525. There is a well-known print of Pirckeymerus by Albert Dürer, 1524, which is reproduced in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, xix. 114. Cf. Friedrich Campe’s Zum Andenken Wilibald Pirkheimers, Mitglieds des Raths zu Nürnberg (Nürnberg, 58 pp., with portrait), and Wilibald Pirkheimer’s Aufenthalt zu Neunhof, von ihm selbst geschildert; nebst Beiträgen zu dem Leben und dem Nachlasse seiner Schwestern und Töchter, von Moritz Maximilian Meyer (Nürnberg, 1828).

A similar view is supposed to have been presented in the map which Bartholomew Columbus took to England in 1488;[398] but we have no trace of the chart itself.[399]

TOSCANELLI’S MAP.

This is a restoration of the map as given in Das Ausland, 1867, p. 5. The language of the original was doubtless Latin. Another restoration is given in St. Martin’s Atlas, pl. ix.

It has always been supposed that in the well-known globe of Martin Behaim we get in the main an expression of the views held by Toscanelli, Columbus, and other of Behaim’s contemporaries, who espoused the notion of India lying over against Europe.

MARTIN BEHAIM.

This cut follows the engravings in Ghillany’s Behaim, and in Ruge’s Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, p. 105.

Eratosthenes, accepting the spherical theory, had advanced the identical notion which nearly seventeen hundred years later impelled Columbus to his voyage. He held the known world to span one third of the circuit of the globe, as Strabo did at a later day, leaving an unknown two thirds of sea; and “if it were not that the vast extent of the Atlantic Sea rendered it impossible, one might even sail from the coast of Spain to that of India along the same parallel.”[400]

Behaim had spent much of his life in Lisbon and the Azores, and was a friend of Columbus. He had visited Nuremberg, probably on some family matters arising out of the death of his mother in 1487. While in this his native town, he gratified some of his townspeople by embodying in a globe the geographical views which prevailed in the maritime countries; and the globe was finished before Columbus had yet accomplished his voyage. The next year (1493) Behaim returned to Portugal; and after having been sent to the Low Countries on a diplomatic mission, he was captured by English cruisers and carried to England. Escaping finally, and reaching the Continent, he passes from our view in 1494, and is scarcely heard of again.

SECTION OF BEHAIM’S GLOBE.

This globe is made of papier-maché, covered with gypsum, and over this a parchment surface received the drawing; it is twenty inches in diameter. It having fallen into decay, the Behaim family in Nuremberg caused it to be repaired in 1825. In 1847 a copy was made of it for the Dépôt Géographique (National Library) at Paris; the original is now in the city hall at Nuremberg. The earliest known engraving of it is in J. G. Doppelmayr’s Historische Nachricht von den nürnbergischen Mathematikern und Künstlern (1730), which preserved some names that have since become illegible (Stevens, Historical Collection, vol. i. no. 1,396). Other representations are given in Jomard’s Monuments de la géographie; Ghillany’s Martin Behaim (1853) and his Erdglobus des Behaim und der des Schöner (1842); C. G. von Murr’s Diplomatische Geschichte des Ritters Behaim (1778, and later editions and translations); Cladera’s Investigaciones (1794); Amoretti’s translation of Pigafetta’s Voyage de Magellan (Paris, 1801); Lelewel’s Moyen-âge (pl. 40; also see vol. ii. p. 131, and Epilogue, p. 184); Saint-Martin’s Atlas; Santarem’s Atlas, pl. 61; the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, vol. xviii.; Kohl’s Discovery of Maine; Irving’s Columbus (some editions); Gay’s Popular History of the United States, i. 103; Barnes’ Popular History of the United States; Harpers’ Monthly, vol. xlii.; H. H. Bancroft’s Central America, i. 93. Ruge, in his Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, p. 230, reproduces the colored fac-simile in Ghillany, and shows additionally upon it the outline of America in its proper place. The sketch in the text follows this representation. Cf. papers on Behaim and his globe (besides those accompanying the engravings above indicated) in the Journal of the American Geographical Society (1872), iv. 432, by the Rev. Mytton Maury; in the publications of the Maryland Historical Society by Robert Dodge and John G. Morris; in the Jahresbericht des Vereins für Erdkunde (Dresden, 1866), p. 59. Peschel, in his Zeitalter der Entdeckungen (1858), p. 90, and in the new edition edited by Ruge, has a lower opinion of Behaim than is usually taken.

Of Columbus’ maps it is probable that nothing has come down to us from his own hand.[401] Humboldt would fain believe that the group of islands studding a gulf which appears on a coat-of-arms granted Columbus in May, 1493, has some interest as the earliest of all cartographical records of the New World; but the early drawings of the arms are by no means constant in the kind of grouping which is given to these islands.[402] Queen Isabella, writing to the Admiral, Sept. 5, 1493, asks to see the marine chart which he had made; and Columbus sent such a map with a letter.[403] We have various other references to copies of this or similar charts of Columbus. Ojeda used such a one in following Columbus’ route,[404] as he testified in the famous suit against the heirs of Columbus. Bernardo de Ibarra, in the same cause, said that he had seen the Admiral’s chart, and that he had heard of copies of it being used by Ojeda, and by some others.[405] It is known that about 1498 Columbus gave one of his charts to the Pope, and one to René of Lorraine. Angelo Trivigiano, secretary of the Venetian Ambassador to Spain, in a letter dated Aug. 21, 1501, addressed to Dominico Malipiero, speaks of a map of the new discoveries which Columbus had.[406]

LA COSA, 1500.

Three or four maps at least have come down to us which are supposed to represent in some way one or several of these drafts by Columbus. The first of these is the celebrated map of the pilot Juan de la Cosa,[407] dated in 1500, of which some account, with a heliotype fac-simile of the American part of the map, is given in another place.[408] After the death (April 27, 1852) of Walckenaer (who had bought it at a moderate cost of an ignorant dealer in second-hand articles), it was sold at public auction in Paris in the spring of 1853, when Jomard failed to secure it for the Imperial Library in Paris, and it went to Spain, where, in the naval museum at Madrid, it now is.

Of the next earliest of the American maps the story has recently been told with great fulness by Harrisse in his Les Cortereal, accompanied by a large colored fac-simile of the map itself, executed by Pilinski. The map was not unknown before,[409] and Harrisse had earlier described it in his Cabots.[410]

We know that Gaspar Cortereal[411] had already before 1500 made some explorations, during which he had discovered a mainland and some islands, but at what precise date it is impossible to determine;[412] nor can we decide upon the course he had taken, but it seems likely it was a westerly one. We know also that in this same year (1500) he made his historic voyage to the Newfoundland region,[413] coasting the neighboring shores, probably, in September and October. Then followed a second expedition from January to October of the next year (1501),—the one of which we have the account in the Paesi novamente retrovati, as furnished by Pasqualigo.[414] There was at this time in Lisbon one Alberto Cantino, a correspondent—with precisely what quality we know not—of Hercule d’Este, Duke of Ferrara; and to this noble personage Cantino, on the 19th of October, addressed a letter embodying what he had seen and learned of the newly returned companions of Gaspar Cortereal.[415]

The Report of Cantino instigated the Duke to ask his correspondent to procure for him a map of these explorations. Cantino procured one to be made; and inscribing it, “Carta da navigar per le Isole novam^te tr.... in le parte de l’India: dono Alberto Cantino Al S. Duca Hercole,” he took it to Italy, and delivered it by another hand to the Duke at Ferrara. Here in the family archives it was preserved till 1592, when the reigning Duke retired to Modena, his library following him. In 1868, in accordance with an agreement between the Italian Government and the Archduke Francis of Austria, the cartographical monuments of the ducal collection were transferred to the Biblioteca Estense, where this precious map now is. The map was accompanied when it left Cantino’s hands by a note addressed to the Duke and dated at Rome, Nov. 19, 1502,[416] which fortunately for us fixes very nearly the period of the construction of the map. A much reduced sketch is annexed.

THE CANTINO MAP.

This is sketched from Harrisse’s fac-simile, which is of the size of the original map. The dotted line is the Line of Demarcation,—“Este he omarco dantre castella y Portuguall,”—which has been calculated by Harrisse to be at 62° 30´ west of Paris.

For the northern coast of South America La Cosa and Cantino’s draughtsmen seem to have had different authorities. La Cosa attaches forty-five names to that coast: Cantino only twenty-nine; and only three of them are common to the two.[417] Harrisse argues from the failure of the La Cosa map to give certain intelligence of the Atlantic coast of the United States (here represented in the north and south trend of shore, north of Cuba), that there was existing in October, 1500, at least in Spanish circles, no knowledge of it,[418] but that explorations must have taken place before the summer of 1502 which afforded the knowledge embodied in this Cantino map. This coast was not visited, so far as is positively known, by any Spanish expedition previous to 1502. Besides the eight Spanish voyages of this period (not counting the problematical one of Vespucius) of which we have documentary proof, there were doubtless others of which we have intimations; but we know nothing of their discoveries, except so far as those before 1500 may be embodied in La Cosa’s chart.[419] The researches of Harrisse have failed to discover in Portugal any positive trace of voyages made from that kingdom in 1501, or thereabout, records of which have been left in the Cantino map. Humboldt had intimated that in Lisbon at that time there was a knowledge of the connection of the Antilles with the northern discoveries of Cortereal by an intervening coast; but Harrisse doubts if Humboldt’s authority—which seems to have been a letter of Pasqualigo sent to Venice, dated Oct. 18, 1501, found in the Diarii of Marino Sanuto, a manuscript preserved in Vienna—means anything more than a conjectural belief in such connection. Harrisse’s conclusion is that between the close of 1500 and the summer of 1502, some navigators, of whose names and nation we are ignorant, but who were probably Spanish, explored the coast of the present United States from Pensacola to the Hudson. This Atlantic coast of Cantino terminates at about 59° north latitude, running nearly north and south from the Cape of Florida to that elevation. Away to the east in mid-ocean, and placed so far easterly as doubtless to appear on the Portuguese side of the Line of Demarcation, and covering from about fifty to fifty-nine degrees of latitude, is a large island which stands for the discoveries of Cortereal, “Terra del Rey du Portuguall;” and northeast of this is the point of Greenland apparently, with Iceland very nearly in its proper place.[420] This Cantino map, now positively fixed in 1502, establishes the earliest instance of a kind of delineation of North America which prevailed for some time. Students of this early cartography have long supposed this geographical idea to date from about this time, and have traced back the origin of what is known as “The Admiral’s Map”[421] to data accumulated in the earliest years of the sixteenth century. Indeed Lelewel,[422] thirty years ago, made up what he called a Portuguese chart of 1501-1504, by combining in one draft the maps of the 1513 Ptolemy, with a hint or two from the Sylvanus map of 1511, acting on the belief that the Portuguese were the real first pursuers, or at least recorders, of explorations of the Floridian peninsula and of the coast northerly.[423]

PETER MARTYR, 1511.

The 1511 map, here given in fac-simile after another fac-simile in the Carter-Brown Catalogue, has been several times reproduced,—in Stevens’s Notes, pl. 4; J. H. Lefroy’s Memorials of the Bermudas, London, 1877; H. A. Schumacher’s Petrus Martyr, New York, 1879; and erroneously in H. H. Bancroft’s Central America, i. 127. Cf. also Harrisse, Bibl. Amer. Vet., no. 66; Additions, p. viii and no. 41; Notes on Columbus, p. 9; and his Les Cortereal, p. 113. Copies of the book are in the Carter-Brown, Lenox, Daly, and Barlow libraries. A copy (no. 1605*) was sold in the Murphy sale. Quaritch has priced a perfect copy at £100. The map gives the earliest knowledge which we have of the Bermudas. Cf. the “Descripcion de la isla Bermuda” (1538), in Buckingham Smith’s Coleccion, p. 92.

PART OF THE ORBIS TYPUS UNIVERSALIS (PTOLEMY, 1513).

The European prolongation of Gronland resembles that of a Portuguese map of 1490. Another reduced fac-simile is given in Ruge’s Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen (1881.) These 1513 maps were reprinted in the Strasburg, 1520, edition of Ptolemy (copies in the Carter-Brown Library and in the Murphy Catalogue, no. 2,053), and were re-engraved on a reduced scale, but with more elaboration and with a few changes, for the Ptolemies of 1522 and 1525; and they were again the basis of those in Servetus’ Ptolemy of 1535.

TABULA TERRE NOVE, OR THE ADMIRAL’S MAP (PTOLEMY, 1513).

Kohl remarks that the names on the South American coast (north part) are carried no farther than Ojeda went in 1499, and no farther south than Vespucius went in 1503; while the connection made of the two Americas was probably conjectural. Other fac-similes of the map are given in Varnhagen’s Premier voyage de Vespucci, in Weise’s Discoveries of America, p. 124; and in Stevens’s Historical and Geographical Notes, pl. 2. Cf. Santarem (Childe’s tr.), 153. Wieser, in his Magalhâes-Strasse (Innsbruck, 1881), p. 15, mentions a manuscript note-book of Schöner, the globe-maker, preserved in the Hof-bibliothek at Vienna, which has a sketch resembling this 1513 map. Harrisse (Les Cortereal, pp. 122, 126) has pointed out the correspondence of its names to the Cantino map, though the Waldseemüller map has a few names which are not on the Cantino. Again, Harrisse (Les Cortereal, p. 128) argues from the fact that the relations of Duke René with Portugal were cordial, while they were not so with Spain, and from the resemblance of René’s map in the Ptolemy of 1513 to that of Cantino, that the missing map upon which Waldseemüller is said to have worked to produce, with René’s help, the so-called “Admiral’s map,” was the original likewise of that of Cantino.

The earliest Spanish map after that of La Cosa which has come down to us is the one which is commonly known as Peter Martyr’s map. It is a woodcut measuring 11 × 7½ inches, and is usually thought to have first appeared in the Legatio Babylonica, or Martyr’s first decade, at Seville, 1511; but Harrisse is inclined to believe that the map did not originally belong to Martyr’s book, because three copies of it in the original vellum which he has examined do not have the map. Quaritch[424] says that copies vary, that the leaf containing the map is an insertion, and that it is sometimes on different folios. Thus of two issues, one is called a second, because two leaves seem to have been reprinted to correct errors, and two new leaves are inserted, and a new title is printed. It is held by some that the map properly belongs to this issue. Brevoort[425] thinks that the publication of the map was distasteful to the Spanish Government (since the King this same year forbade maps being given to foreigners); and he argues that the scarcity of the book may indicate that attempts were made to suppress it.[426]

The maker of the 1513 map as we have it was Waldseemüller, or Hylacomylus, of St. Dié, in the Vosges Mountains; and Lelewel[427] gives reasons for believing that the plate had been engraved, and that copies were on sale as early as 1507. It had been engraved at the expense of Duke René II. of Lorraine, from information furnished by him to perfect some anterior chart; but the plate does not seem to have been used in any book before it appeared in this 1513 edition of Ptolemy.[428] It bears along the coast this legend: “Hec terra adjacentibus insulis inventa est per Columbū ianuensem ex mandato Regis Castelle;” and in the Address to the Reader in the Supplement appears the following sentence, in which the connection of Columbus with the map is thought to be indicated: “Charta antē marina quam Hydrographiam vocant per Admiralem [? Columbus] quondam serenissi. Portugalie [? Hispaniæ] regis Ferdinandi ceteros denique lustratores verissimis pagratiōibus lustrata, ministerio Renati, dum vixit, nunc pie mortui, Ducis illustris. Lotharingie liberalius prelographationi tradita est.”[429]

This “Admiral’s map” seems to have been closely followed in the map which Gregor Reisch annexed to his popular encyclopædia,[430] the Margarita philosophica, in 1515; though there is some difference in the coast-names, and the river mouths and deltas on the coast west of Cuba are left out.

PART OF REISCH’S MAP, 1515.

There is another fac-simile in Stevens’s Historical and Geographical Notes, pl. 4. An edition of Reisch appeared at Freiburg in 1503 (Murphy, no. 3,089); but in 1504 there were two editions, with a mappemonde which had no other reference to America than in the legend: “Hic non terra sed mare est in quo miræ magnitudinis insulæ sed Ptolemæo fuerunt incognitæ.” Some copies are dated 1505. (Murphy, no. 3,090.) A copy dated 1508, Basle, “cum additionibus novis” (Quaritch, no. 12,363; Baer’s Incunabeln, 1884, no. 64, at 36 marks; and Murphy, no. 2,112*) had the same map. The 1515 edition had the map above given. (Harrisse, Bibl. Amer. Vet., no. 82; Additions, no. 45, noting a copy in the Imperial Library at Vienna. Kohl copies in his Washington Collection from one in the library at Munich.) The Basle edition of 1517 has a still different woodcut map. (Beckford, Catalogue, vol. iii. no. 1,256; Murphy, no. 2,112**.) Not till 1535 did an edition have any reference to America in the text. (Bibl. Amer. Vet., no. 208.) The latest edition is that of 1583, Basle, with a mappamonde showing America. (Leclerc, no. 2,926.) Cf. further in D’Avezac’s Waltzemüller, p. 94; Kunstmann’s Entdeckung Amerikas, p. 130; Stevens’s Notes, p. 52; Kohl, Die beiden ältesten General-Karten von America, p. 33.

RUYSCH, 1508.[431]

Stevens and others have contended that this represents Columbus’ Ganges; but Varnhagen makes it stand for the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi,—a supposition more nearly like Reisch’s interpretation, as will be seen by his distinct separation of the new lands from Asia. Reisch is, however, uncertain of their western limits, which are cut off by the scale, as shown in the map; while on the other side of the same scale Cipango is set down in close proximity to it.

STOBNICZA, 1512.

It is held that this map shows the earliest attempt to represent on a plane a sphere truncated at the poles. Wieser (Magalhaês-Strasse, p. 11) speaks of a manuscript copy of Stobnicza’s western hemisphere, made by Glareanus, which is bound with a copy of Waldseemüller’s Cosmographiæ introductio, preserved in the University Library at Munich. Cf. Vol. III. p. 14, with references there, and Winsor’s Bibliography of Ptolemy sub anno 1512; Harrisse, Notes on Columbus, p. 178, and Bibl. Amer. Vet., nos. 69 and 95, and Additions, no. 47. The only copies of the Stobnicza Introductio in this country lack the maps. One in the Carter-Brown Library has it in fac-simile, and the other was sold in the Murphy sale, no. 2,075.

SCHÖNER.

Fac-simile of a cut in Reusner’s Icones (Strasburg, 1590), p. 127. Cf. on Schöner’s geographical labors, Doppelmayr’s Historische Nachricht von den nürnbergischen Mathematikern und Künstlern (1730); Will und Nopitsch’s Nürnbergisches Gelehrten-Lexicon (1757); Ghillany’s Erdglobus des Behaim und der des Schöner; and Varnhagen’s Schöner e Apianus (Vienna, 1872).

It has been supposed that it was a map of this type which Bartholomew Columbus, when he visited Rome in 1505, gave to a canon of St. John Lateran, together with one of the printed accounts of his brother’s voyage; and this canon gave the map to Alessandro Strozzi, “suo amico e compilatore della raccolta,” as is stated in a marginal note in a copy of the Mundus novus in the Magliabecchian library.[432]

Columbus is said to have had a vision before his fourth voyage, during which he saw and depicted on a map a strait between the regions north and south of the Antillian Sea. De Lorgues, with a convenient alternative for his saintly hero, says that the mistake was only in making the strait of water, when it should have been of land!

SCHÖNER, 1515.

According to Wieser (Magalhâes-Strasse, p. 19) this globe, which exists in copies at Weimar (of which Wieser gives the above sketch from Jomard’s fac-simile of the one at Frankfort, but with some particulars added from that at Weimar) and at Frankfort (which is figured in Jomard), was made to accompany Schöner’s Luculentissima quædam terræ totius descriptio, printed in 1515. Cf. Harrisse, Notes on Columbus, p. 179, and Bibl. Amer. Vet., nos. 80, 81; Murphy, no. 2,233. Copies of Schöner’s Luculentissima, etc., are in the Harvard College, Carter-Brown, and Lenox libraries.

In 1523 Schöner printed another tract, De nuper sub Castiliæ, ac Portugaliæ regibus serenissimis repertis insulis ac regionibus, descriptive of his globe, which is extremely rare. Wieser reports copies in the great libraries of Vienna and London only. Varnhagen reprinted it from the Vienna copy, at St. Petersburg in 1872 (forty copies only), under the designation, Réimpression fidèle d’une lettre de Jean Schöner, à propos de son globe, écrite en 1523. The Latin is given in Wieser’s Magalhâes-Strasse, p. 118. Johann Schoner or Schöner (for the spelling varies) was born in 1477, and died in 1547. The testimony of this globe to an early knowledge of the straits afterward made known by Magellan is examined on a later page. The notions which long prevailed respecting a large Antarctic continent are traced in Wieser’s Magalhâes-Strasse, p. 59, and in Santarem, Histoire de la cartographie, ii. 277.

Cf. on the copy at Frankfort,—Vol. III. p. 215, of the present History; Kohl’s General-Karten von Amerika, p. 33, and his Discovery of Maine, p. 159; Encyclopædia Britannica, x. 681; Von Richthofen’s China, p. 641; Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, xviii. 45. On the copy at Weimar, see Humboldt, Examen critique, and his Introduction to Ghillany’s Ritter Behaim.

SCHÖNER, 1520.

This globe, which has been distinctively known as Schöner’s globe, is preserved at Nuremberg. There are representations of it in Santarem, Lelewel, Wieser, Ghillany’s Behaim, Kohl’s Geschichte der Entdeckungsreisen zur Magellan’s-Strasse (Berlin, 1877), p. 8; H. H. Bancroft’s Central America, i. 137; and in Harper’s Magazine, February, 1871, and December, 1882, p. 731. The earliest engraving appeared in the Jahresbericht der technischen Anstalten in Nürnberg für 1842, accompanied by a paper by Dr. Ghillany; and the same writer reproduced it in his Erdglobus des Behaim und der des Schöner (1842). The globe is signed: “Perfecit eum Bambergæ 1520, Joh. Schönerus.” Cf. Von Murr, Memorabilia bibliothecarum Noribergensium (1786), i. 5; Humboldt, Examen critique, ii. 28; Winsor’s Bibliography of Ptolemy sub anno 1522; and Vol. III. p. 214, of the present History.

We have a suspicion of this strait in another map which has been held to have had some connection with the drafts of Columbus, and that is the Ruysch map, which appeared in the Roman Ptolemy of 1508,[433] the earliest published map, unless the St. Dié map takes precedence, to show any part of the new discoveries.

THE TROSS GORES, 1514-1519.

Twelve gores of a globe found in a copy of the Cosmographiæ introductio, published at Lugduni, 1514 (?), and engraved in a catalogue of Tross, the Paris bookseller, in 1881 (nos. xiv. 4,924). The book is now owned by Mr. C. H. Kalbfleisch, of New York. Harrisse (Cabots, p. 182) says the map was engraved in 1514, and ascribes it to Louis Boulenger. (Cf. Vol. III. p. 214, of the present History.) There are two copies of this edition of the Cosmographiæ introductio in the British Museum; and D’Avezac (Waltzemüller, p. 123) says the date of it cannot be earlier than 1517. Harrisse says he erred in dating it 1510 in the Bibl. Amer. Vet., no. 63. Cf. Winsor’s Bibliography of Ptolemy sub anno 1522.

It seems from its resemblance to the La Cosa chart to have been kept much nearer the Columbian draft than the geographer of St. Dié, with his Portuguese helps, was contented to leave it in his map. In La Cosa the vignette of St. Christopher had concealed the mystery of a westerly passage;[434] Ruysch assumes it, or at least gives no intimation of his belief in the inclosure of the Antillian Sea. Harrisse[435] has pointed out how an entirely different coast-nomenclature in the two maps points to different originals of the two map-makers. The text of this 1508 edition upon “Terra Nova” and “Santa Cruz” is by Marcus Beneventanus. There are reasons to believe that the map may have been issued separately, as well as in the book; and the copies of the map in the Barlow Collection and in Harvard College Library are perhaps of this separate issue.[436]

MÜNSTER, 1532.

The distinctive features both of the La Cosa and the Ruysch drafts, of the Cantino map and of the Waldseemüller or St. Dié map of 1513, were preserved, with more or less modifications in many of the early maps. The Stobnicza map—published in an Introductio to Ptolemy at Cracow in 1512—is in effect the St. Dié map, with a western ocean in place of the edge of the plate as given in the 1513 Ptolemy, and is more like the draft of Reisch’s map published three years later.

There are other drawings of this map in Stevens’s Notes; in Nordenskiöld’s Bröderna Zenos (Stockholm, 1883); etc.

The Schöner globe of 1515, often cited as the Frankfort globe; the Schöner globe of 1520; the so-called Tross gores of 1514-1519; the map of Petrus Apianus[437]—or Bienewitz, as he was called in his vernacular—which appeared in the Polyhistoria of Solinus, edited by the Italian monk Camers, and also in 1522 in the De orbis situ of Pomponius Mela, published by Vadianus,—all preserve the same characteristics with the St. Dié map, excepting that they show the western passage referred to in Columbus’ dream, and so far unite some of the inferences from the map of Ruysch. There was a curious survival of this Cantino type, particularly as regards North America for many years yet to come, as seen in the map which Münster added to the Basle edition of the Novus orbis in 1532 and 1537, and in the drawing which Jomard gives[438] as from “une cassette de la Collection Trivulci, dite Cassettina all’Agemina.” This last drawing is a cordiform mappemonde, very like another which accompanied Honter’s Rudimenta cosmographica in 1542, and which was repeated in various editions to as late a period as 1590. Thus it happened that for nearly a century geographical views which the earliest navigators evolved, continued in popular books to convey the most inadequate notion of the contour of the new continent.[439]

SYLVANUS’ MAP, 1511.

The map is given in its original projection in Lelewel, pl. xlv., and on a greatly reduced scale in Daly’s Early Cartography, p. 32. There are copies of this 1511 Ptolemy in the Lenox, Carter-Brown, Astor, Brevoort, Barlow, and Kalbfleisch collections. Cf. Murphy Catalogue, no. 2,051, for a copy now in the American Geographical Society’s Library, and references in Winsor’s Bibliography of Ptolemy sub anno 1511.

In the same year with the publication of the Peter Martyr map of 1511, an edition of Ptolemy, published at Venice and edited by Bernardus Sylvanus, contained a mappemonde on a cordiform projection,—which is said to be the first instance of the use of this method in drafting maps. What is shown of the new discoveries is brought in a distorted shape on the extreme western verge of the map; and to make the contour more intelligible, it is reduced in the sketch annexed to an ordinary plane projection. It is the earliest engraved map to give any trace of the Cortereal discoveries[440] and to indicate the Square, or St. Lawrence, Gulf. It gives a curious Latinized form to the name of the navigator himself in “Regalis Domus” (Cortereal), and restores Greenland, or Engronelant, to a peninsular connection with northwestern Europe as it had appeared in the Ptolemy of 1482.

THE LENOX GLOBE.

It will be seen that, with the exception of the vague limits of the “Regalis Domus,” there was no sign of the continental line of North America in this map of Sylvanus. Much the same views were possessed by the maker of the undated Lenox globe, which probably is of nearly the same date, and of which a further account is given elsewhere.[441]

DA VINCI, NORTHERN HEMISPHERE
(original draft reduced).

Another draft of a globe, likewise held to be of about the same date, shows a similar configuration, except that a squarish island stands in it for Florida and adjacent parts of the main. This is a manuscript drawing on two sheets preserved among the Queen’s collections at Windsor; and since Mr. R. H. Major made it known by a communication, with accompanying fac-similes, in the Archæologia,[442] it has been held to be the work of Leonardo da Vinci, though this has been recently questioned.[443]

DA VINCI, SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE
(original draft reduced).

Another sketch of this hemisphere is given in Harper’s Monthly, December, 1882, p. 733.

If deprived of the associations of that august name, the map loses much of its attraction; but it still remains an interesting memorial of geographical conjecture. It is without date, and can only be fixed in the chain of cartographical ideas by its internal evidence. This has led Major to place it between 1512 and 1514, and Wieser to fix it at 1515-1516.[444] A somewhat unsatisfactory map, since it shows nothing north of “Ysabella” and “Spagnollo,” is that inscribed Orbis typus universalis juxta hydrographorum traditionem exactissime depicta, 1522, L. F., which is the work of Laurentius Frisius, and appeared in the Ptolemy of 1522.[445]

DA VINCI (newly projected).

This follows the projection as given by Wieser in his Magalhaês-Strasse, who dates it 1515-1516.

A new element appears in a map which is one of the charts belonging to the Yslegung der Mer-Carthen oder Cartha Marina, said also to be the work of Frisius, which was issued in 1525, in exposition of his theories of sea-charts.[446]

CARTA MARINA OF FRISIUS, 1525.

COPPO, 1528.

This is drawn from a sketch given by Kohl in his manuscript, “On the Connection of the New and Old World on the Pacific Side,” preserved in the American Antiquarian Society’s Library. There is another copy in his Washington Collection.

The map is explained by the following key: 1. Asia. 2. India. 3. Ganges. 4. Java major. 5. Cimpangi [Japan]. 6. Isola verde [Greenland?]. 7. Cuba. 8. Iamaiqua. 9. Spagnola. 10. Monde nuova [South America].

The map is of interest as the sole instance in which North America is called a part of Africa, on the supposition that a continental connection by the south enclosed the “sea toward the sunset.” The insular Yucatan will be observed in the annexed sketch, and what seems to be a misshapen Cuba. The land at the east seems intended for Baccalaos, judging from the latitude and the indication of fir-trees upon it. This map is one of twelve engraved sheets constituting the above-named work, which was published by Johannes Grieninger in 1530. Friess, or Frisius, who was a German mathematician, and had, as we have seen, taken part in the 1522 Ptolemy, says that he drew his information in these maps from original sources; but he does not name these sources, and Dr. Kohl thinks the maps indicate the work of Waldseemüller.

Among the last of the school of geographers who supposed North America to be an archipelago, was Pierro Coppo, who published at Venice in 1528 what has become a very rare Portolano delli lochi maritimi ed isole der mar.[447]

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