Christopher Columbus and How He Received and Imparted the Spirit of Discovery

by Justin Winsor

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

Letter found by Bergenroth.

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

Columbus gives papers to Bernaldez.

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

Varieties of the Spanish text.

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

Origin of the Latin text.

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