Herrera.
Herrera, so far as his record concerns Columbus, simply gives us what he takes from Las Casas. He was born about the time that the older writer was probably making his investigations. Herrera did not publish his results, which are slavishly chronological in their method, till half a century later (1601-15). Though then the official historiographer of the Indies, with all the chances for close investigation which that situation afforded him, Herrera failed in all ways to make the record of his Historia that comprehensive and genuine source of the story of Columbus which the reader might naturally look for. The continued obscuration of Las Casas by reason of the long delay in printing his manuscript served to give Herrera, through many generations, a prominence as an authoritative source which he could not otherwise have had. Irving, when he worked at the subject, soon discovered that Las Casas stood behind the story as Herrera told it, and accordingly the American writer resorted by preference to such a copy of the manuscript of Las Casas as he could get. There is a manifest tendency in Herrera to turn Las Casas's qualified statements into absolute ones.
Later Spanish writers.
The personal contributions of the later writers, Muñoz and Navarrete, have been already considered, in speaking of the diversified mass of documentary proofs which accompany or gave rise to their narratives.
The Colon en España of Tomas Rodriguez Pinilla (Madrid, 1884) is in effect a life of the Admiral; but it ignores much of the recent critical and controversial literature, and deals mainly with the old established outline of events.
German writers.
Humboldt.
Among the Germans there was nothing published of any importance till the critical studies of Forster, Peschel, and Ruge, in recent days. De Bry had, indeed, by his translations of Benzoni (1594) and Herrera (1623), familiarized the Germans with the main facts of the career of Columbus. During the present century, Humboldt, in his Examen Critique de l'Histoire et de la Geographie du Nouveau Continent, has borrowed the language of France to show the scope of his critical and learned inquiries into the early history of the Spanish contact in America, and has left it to another hand to give a German rendering to his labors. With this work by Humboldt, brought out in its completer shape in 1836-39, and using most happily all that had been done by Muñoz and Navarrete to make clear both the acts and environments of the Admiral, the intelligence of our own time may indeed be said to have first clearly apprehended, under the light of a critical spirit, in which Irving was deficient, the true significance of the great deeds that gave America to Europe. Humboldt has strikingly grouped the lives of Toscanelli and Las Casas, from the birth of the Florentine physician in 1397 to the death of the Apostle to the Indians in 1566, as covering the beginning and end of the great discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.