[5] Some of the documents at Simancas and in other repositories, beginning with 1485, have been edited in the Rolls Series (published for the English Government) by G. A. Bergenroth and by Gayangos (London, 1862-1879), in the Calendar of Letters, Despatches, and State Papers relating to Negotiations between England and Spain, contained in five volumes. Vol. i. comes through 1509; and the first paper in it is a complaint of Ferdinand and Isabella against Columbus for his participancy in the piratical service of the French in 1485. Various documents from the archives of Simancas are given in Alaman’s La República Megicana, three volumes, 1844-1849. We get glimpses in the Historia of Las Casas of a large number of the letters of Columbus, to which he must have had access, but which are now lost. Harrisse thinks it was at Simancas, that Las Casas must have found them; for when engaged on that work he was living within two leagues of that repository. It seems probable, also, that Las Casas must have had use of the Biblioteca Colombina, when it was deposited in the convent of San Pablo (1544-1552), from whose Dominican monks Harrisse thinks it possible that Las Casas obtained possession of the Toscanelli map. He regrets, however, that for the personal history of Columbus and his family, Las Casas furnishes no information which cannot be found more nearly at first hand elsewhere. See Harrisse, Christophe Colomb, i. 122, 125-127, 129, 133.
[6] Robertson prefixes to his History a list of the Spanish books and manuscripts which he had used.
“The English reader,” writes Irving in 1828, when he had published his own Life of Columbus, “hitherto has derived his information almost exclusively from the notice of Columbus in Dr. Robertson’s History; this, though admirably executed, is but a general outline.”—Life of Irving, ii. 313.
[7] Harrisse, Christophe Colomb, i. 35. He also refers to the notarial records preserved at Seville, as having been but partially explored for elucidations of the earliest exploration. He found among them the will of Diego, the younger brother of Columbus (p. 38). Alfred Demersay printed in the Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, June, 1864, a paper, “Une mission geographique dans les archives d’Espagne et de Portugal,” in which he describes, particularly as regards their possessions of documents relating to America, the condition at that time of the archives of the Torre do Tombo at Lisbon (of which, after 1842 and till his death, Santarem was archivist); those of the Kingdom of Aragon at Barcelona, and of the Indies at Seville; and the collections of Muñoz, embracing ninety-five vols. in folio, and thirty-two in quarto, and of Mata-Lanares, included in eighty folios, in the Academy of History at Madrid. He refers for fuller details to Tiran’s Archives d’Aragon et de Simancas (1844), and to Joáo Pedro Ribeiro’s Memorias Authenticas para a Historia do real Archivo, Lisbon, 1819.
[8] This authority to search was given later, in 1781 and 1788.
[9] This volume is worth about five dollars.
[10] It was he who allowed Irving to use them.
[11] J. C. Brevoort, in the Magazine of American History, March, 1879. Cf. Prescott’s Ferdinand and Isabella (1873), ii. 508, and his Mexico, preface.
[12] Vol. i. p. 56, referring to Fuster’s “Copia de los manuscritos que recogió D. Juan Bautista Muñoz,” in Biblioteca Valenciana, ii. 202-238.
[13] Harrisse, in his Notes on Columbus, p. 5, describes a collection of manuscripts which were sold by Obadiah Rich, in 1848 or 1849, to James Lenox, of New York, which had been formed by Uguina, the friend of Muñoz. There is in the Academy of History at Madrid a collection of documents said to have been formed by Don Vargas Ponçe.