JOURNAL OF THE FIRST VOYAGE OF COLUMBUS
INTRODUCTION
The contents of Columbus’s Journal of his first voyage were first made known to the public in the epitome incorporated in Ferdinand Columbus’s life of the Admiral, which has come down to us only in the Italian translation of Alfonso Ulloa, the Historie del S. D. Fernando Colombo nelle quali s’ha particolare e vera relazione della vita e de’ fatti dell’ Ammiraglio D. Christoforo Colombo suo padre, etc. (Venice, 1571). This account is accessible in English in Churchill’s Voyages, Vol. II., and in Pinkerton’s Voyages, Vol. XII.
Another epitome was prepared by Bartolomé de Las Casas and inserted in his Historia de las Indias. This account was embodied in the main by Antonio de Herrera in his Historia General de las Indias Occidentales (Madrid, 1601). It is accessible in English in John Stevens’s translation of Herrera (London, 1725-1726).
These independent epitomes of the original were supplemented in 1825 by the publication by the Spanish archivist Martin Fernandez de Navarrete in his Coleccion de los Viages y Descubrimientos que hicieron por mar los Españoles desde fines del siglo XV. of a considerably more detailed narrative (likewise independently abridged from the original) which existed in two copies in the archives of the Duke del Infantado. Navarrete says that the handwriting of the older copy is that of Las Casas and that Las Casas had written some explanatory notes in the margin. This longer narrative, here reprinted, was first translated by Samuel Kettell of Boston and published in 1827 under the title Personal Narrative of the First Voyage of Columbus. The next translation was that of Clements R. Markham for the Hakluyt Society in 1893. A third and very exact rendering appeared in 1903 in John Boyd Thacher’s Christopher Columbus, Vol. I.
The translation given here is that of Sir Clements R. Markham with some slight revisions. When we recall the very scanty and fragmentary knowledge which we have of the Cabot voyages, and how few in fact of the great discoverers of this era left personal narratives of their achievements, we realize our singular good fortune in possessing so full a daily record from the hand of Columbus himself which admits us as it were “into the very presence of the Admiral to share his thoughts and impressions as the strange panorama of his experiences unfolded before him.”[88-1] Sir Clements R. Markham declares the Journal “the most important document in the whole range of the history of geographical discovery, because it is a record of the enterprise which changed the whole face, not only of that history, but of the history of mankind.”[88-2]
Edward G. Bourne.