[348-2] Pliny, Natural History, book IX., ch. LIV.
[348-3] The name is still used. It is the Rhicopharia mangle. See the description of it in Thompson’s Alcedo’s Geographical and Historical Dictionary of America and the West Indies, Appendix.
[349-1] Las Casas here inserts a long disquisition on pearls which is omitted. It covers pp. 246-252 of the printed edition, Vol. II.
[350-1] I.e., the western end of the Gulf of Paria.
[350-2] These mouths of the Orinoco supplied the fresh water, but they can hardly be the streams referred to by the sailors who explored the western end of the Gulf of Paria. Las Casas had no good map of this region.
[352-1] Columbus elaborated this point in his letter to Ferdinand and Isabella. Major, Select Letters of Columbus, p. 113. Columbus’s estimate of the sacrifice of lives in the exploration of the west coast of Africa must be considered a most gross exaggeration. The contemporary narratives of those explorations give no such impression.
[352-2] Cf. Columbus’s letter to the sovereigns, “Your Highnesses have here another world.” Major, Select Letters of Columbus, p. 148, and the letter to the nurse of Prince John, p. 381, post. “I have placed under the dominion of the King and Queen our sovereigns another world.” These passages clearly show that Columbus during and after this voyage realized that he accomplished something quite different from merely reaching Asia by a western route. He had found a hitherto unknown portion of the world, unknown to the ancients or to Marco Polo, but not for that reason necessarily physically detached from the known Asia. For a fuller discussion of the meaning of the phrase “another world,” “New World,” and of Columbus’s ideas of what he had done, see Bourne, Spain in America, pp. 94-98, and the facsimile of the Bartholomew Columbus map, opposite p. 96.
[352-3] A noteworthy prediction. In fact the discovery of the New World has effected a most momentous change in the relative strength and range of Christianity among the world-religions. During the Middle Ages Christianity lost more ground territorially than it gained. Since the discovery of America its gain has been steady.
[352-4] Such in fact their Highnesses’ grandson, Charles I. (V. as Emperor), was during his long reign, and such during a part of his reign if not the whole, was their great-grandson Philip II. See Oviedo’s reflections upon Columbus’s career. Bourne, Spain in America, p. 82.
[353-1] Las Casas here comments at some length on these remarks of Columbus and the great significance of his discoveries. The passage omitted takes up pp. 255 (line six from bottom) to 258.