Certainly this, the first record of America, written by the brave hand of Columbus, would be the most precious relic in all the chronicles of our country. Alas, that it never has been found! And if I thought there were one chance in a million of finding it I would take my power boat, the First Folio, and cruise in the neighborhood of the Azores forever!
It is also curious that another letter, which Columbus wrote the day after he arrived at Santa Maria to his friend Luis de Santangel, has never been found. Nor has another and more concise account of his experiences, which he wrote in an exultant vein to the Reyes Catolicos, Ferdinand and Isabella, immediately upon landing in Lisbon, ever seen the light of day.
Every school child is taught the date of Columbus’s arrival at Palos, March 15, 1493. On that very same day he dispatched two letters to the Court, then sitting at Barcelona. Another, much briefer and more to the point, he sent to another friend, Gabriel Sanchez, then the royal treasurer.
About one month after Columbus returned to Spain, a second letter which he indited to Luis de Santangel was printed on two leaves, folio size. Evidently these were sent out in all directions and must have been in great demand. You can well realize that the excitement created by the publication of his stupendous discovery was tremendous. And yet it is very strange that but one copy of the entire edition has survived. These two leaves are the actual cornerstone of American history. They are worth not only their weight in radium many times over, but, to the book lover, his very chances of Paradise! They are now, I am proud to state, not in some musty old castle of Spain, but in the Lenox Foundation, a part of the New York Public Library, in the heart of New York City. There, if you show the appropriate desire, you may see it any day. Some authorities think this letter was printed by Rosenbach, one of the earliest Spanish printers, and probably one of my forbears. The old fool! Why didn’t he save at least one copy for his descendants?
Of the second edition of this letter, with the Fates still pursuing, there is likewise but one remaining copy. To-day it reposes in a very safe place, the Ambrosian Library in Milan. The present Pope, Pius XI, who should be the patron saint of all modern book collectors, was first the assistant in this library, and finally the librarian. In bygone years his knowledge of books and his infectious enthusiasm inspired many a bookman. How it must have delighted him to have this great letter of Columbus in his care!
Edition after edition of the first Columbus letter soon appeared. The news was so astounding that all who could read wanted to see for themselves the discoverer’s own description of this amazing new land. Four editions appeared in Rome, two in Basle, three in Paris, and one in Antwerp. These were all published in Latin or Italian. Florence printed the news four separate times; strange to relate, the first edition in German did not appear until 1497. But the Germans enhanced their edition with one of the most amusing woodcuts I have ever seen. It is a picture of the King of Spain and Columbus, who seem to be explaining their great achievement (doubtless as an offering) to Jesus Christ. There were six copies of it known until recently, three of which are in this country: one in the Lenox Library, one in the John Carter Brown collection at Providence, Rhode Island, and one in the safekeeping of the Huntington Library. But only last year, when I visited an old library in the west of England, the private collection of a friend of mine, I had a curious experience.
It was at that hour which is neither day nor night, and the dressing gong for dinner had sounded. I put my hand out in the half light to steady myself after “tea,” and touched—not the fille de chambre, as Sterne relates in his Sentimental Journey, but the edges of something projecting from a shelf of an old bookcase. I had the strange feeling of an omen about to be realized, one of those peculiar premonitions women are always boasting of. I loosened the books on either side, drew out the object, and went soberly to the nearest window, to find that I had not one but two copies of this German Columbus letter! That was enough to stagger anyone. One is now in the collection of that great lover and connoisseur of books, Mr. Grenville Kane, of Tuxedo Park, New York, who is now the doyen of American collectors; the other is cherished by my old friend Mr. H. V. Jones.
The story of this country unfolds itself like some gorgeous panorama as you look through the books which chronicle the stirring times of the early adventurers. Who wouldn’t choose to hear tales from actual eyewitnesses, rather than read them rehashed in a fusty history book? The principal performers in the great historical dramas have themselves told us stories of daring, of bravery, of great disasters and victories. Such men were Amerigo Vespucci; Waldseemüller, the famous geographer, whose Cosmographiæ Introductio, published at St. Dié in 1507, was the first book which gave the name, America, to the New World; Peter Martyr, the first historian of the Indies, who described the voyages of his friends and contemporaries, Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Magellan, Cabot, and Vespucci. Martyr’s Decades of the New World should quicken the pulse of every lover of American history, for it contains most of the knowledge we have of the very earliest “inventions,” as they were called.
Elsewhere I have told of my purchase of the Ellsworth copy of the Gutenberg Bible. Included in the lot with it was one of the earliest charts showing the east coast of America. It dates around 1501-02. I was present at the sale of this famous map, known as the King-Hamy chart, when it brought $17,600, and was one of the unhappy underbidders thereon. I thought it was lost to me and my heirs forevermore. However, when the Ellsworth collection was sold, I radioed my bid from mid-Atlantic and secured it.
Early portolano charts, as these first navigators’ maps are called, are extremely interesting. They indicate, step by step, the latest discoveries as they were made. You can see for yourself, if you follow the development from the first faint coast lines on the earliest charts to the recognizable later outlines, the wonderful progress made by various explorers in less than a century. Every year new ports, new bays, new islands, new harbors of refuge are seen. The first mariners in the waters of the New Islands, as they were called, sent their original and very rough working charts, made from the actual observations of pilots, to the great cartographers in Spain and Italy. Those men were really artists. Baptista Agnesi was one of the most famous of the chart makers. He and his colleagues all produced beautiful, illuminated atlases containing elaborately decorated maps, gorgeously bound, which they sold to the great princes and merchants of the day. The maps were much in demand as table books for the libraries of wealthy men.