The text in all these Latin editions is intended to be the same. But a very few copies of any edition, and only a single copy of two or three of them, are known. The Lenox, the Carter-Brown, and the Ives libraries in this country are the chief ones possessing any of them, and the collections of the late Henry C. Murphy and Samuel L. M. Barlow also possessed a copy or two, the edition owned by Barlow passing in February, 1890, to the Boston Public Library. This scarcity and the rivalry of collectors would probably, in case any one of them should be brought upon the market, raise the price to fifteen hundred dollars or more. The student is not so restricted as this might imply, for in several cases there have been modern facsimiles and reprints, and there is an early reprint by Veradus, annexed to his poem (1494) on the capture of Granada. The text usually quoted by the older writers, however, is that embodied in the Bellum Christianorum Principum of Robertus Monarchus (Basle, 1533).
Order of publication.
In these original small quartos and octavos, there is just enough uncertainty and obscurity as to dates and printers, to lure bibliographers and critics of typography into research and controversy; and hardly any two of them agree in assigning the same order of publication to these several issues. The present writer has in the second volume of the Narrative and Critical History of America grouped the varied views, so far as they had in 1885 been made known. The bibliography to which Harrisse refers as being at the end of his work on Columbus was crowded out of its place and has not appeared; but he enters into a long examination of the question of priority in the second chapter of his last volume. The earliest English translation of this Latin text appeared in the Edinburgh Review in 1816, and other issues have been variously made since that date.
Additional sources respecting the first voyage.
We get some details of this first voyage in Oviedo, which we do not find in the journal, and Vicente Yañez Pinzon and Hernan Perez Matheos, who were companions of Columbus, are said to be the source of this additional matter. The testimony in the lawsuit of 1515, particularly that of Garcia Hernandez, who was in the "Pinta," and of a sailor named Francisco Garcia Vallejo, adds other details.
Second voyage.
There is no existing account by Columbus himself of his experiences during his second voyage, and of that cruise along the Cuban coast in which he supposed himself to have come in sight of the Golden Chersonesus. The Historie tells us that during this cruise he kept a journal, Libro del Segundo Viage, till he was prostrated by sickness, and this itinerary is cited both in the Historie and by Las Casas. We also get at second-hand from Columbus, what was derived from him in conversation after his return to Spain, in the account of these explorations which Bernaldez has embodied in his Reyes Católicos. Irving says that he found these descriptions of Bernaldez by far the most useful of the sources for this period, as giving him the details for a picturesque narrative. On disembarking at Cadiz in June, 1495, Columbus sent to his sovereigns two dispatches, neither of which is now known.