This letter, the earliest published narrative of Columbus’s first voyage, was issued in Barcelona in April, 1493, not far from the time when the discoverer was received in state by the King and Queen. The Escribano de Racion, to whom it was addressed, was Luis de Santangel, who had deeply interested himself in the project of Columbus and had advanced money to enable Queen Isabella to meet the expenses of the voyage. He, no doubt, placed a copy in the hands of the printer. Only two printed copies of this Spanish letter, as it is called, have come down to us. One is a folio of the first imprint, discovered and reproduced in 1889. Of this the unique copy is in the Lenox Library in New York; its first page is reproduced in facsimile in this volume, by courteous permission of the authorities of the library. The other is a quarto of the second and slightly corrected imprint, first made known in 1852 and first reproduced in 1866. Facsimiles of both are given in Thacher’s Christopher Columbus, II. 17-20 and 33-40.
Columbus sent a duplicate of this letter with some slight changes to Gabriel Sanxis (Spanish form, Sanchez), the treasurer of Aragon, from whose hands a copy came into the possession of Leander de Cosco, who translated it into Latin, April 29, 1493.
This Latin version was published in Rome, probably in May, 1493, and this issue was rapidly followed by reprints in Rome, Basel, Paris, and Antwerp. It is to this Latin version that the European world outside of Spain was indebted for its first knowledge of the new discoveries.
A poetical paraphrase in Italian by Giuliano Dati was published in Rome in June, 1493. This is reprinted in Major’s Select Letters of Columbus. The first German edition of the letter was published in Strassburg in 1497.
In the years 1493-1497 the Santangel letter was printed twice in Spanish, and the duplicate of it, the Sanchez letter, was printed nine times in Latin, five times in Dati’s Italian paraphrase, and once in German. Until the publication in 1571 of the Historie, the Italian translation of Ferdinand Columbus’s biography of his father, which contains an abridgment of Columbus’s Journal, these letters and the account in Peter Martyr’s Decades de Rebus Oceanicis, were the only sources of information in regard to the first voyage accessible to the world at large. The translation here given is that contained in Quaritch’s The Spanish Letter of Columbus (London, 1893), with a few minor changes in the wording. An English translation of the Latin or Sanchez letter may be found in the first edition of Major’s Select Letters of Columbus (London, 1847). This version is reprinted in P. L. Ford’s Writings of Christopher Columbus, New York, 1892. By an error in the title of the first edition, Rome, 1493, Sanchez’s Christian name is given as Raphael.
The text of the Santangel letter published by Navarrete in 1825 was derived from a manuscript preserved in the Spanish Archives at Simancas. In 1858 the Brazilian scholar Varnhagen published an edition of the Sanchez letter from a manuscript discovered by him in Valencia. Neither of these manuscripts, however, has the authority of the first printed editions.
E. G. B.
