[Footnote 217: Remember that Columbus touched terra firma at the delta of the Orinoco, August 1st, 1498.]
[Footnote 218: The edition of Hylacomylus bears date 1489, a printer's error.]
[Footnote 219: These registers bear their testimony at the present day. We had occasion to refer to them in the first part of this article.]
Moreover, these errors in dates were extremely common at the commencement of the sixteenth century. Education was incomplete. The means of verification were hard to obtain concerning expeditions that crossed each other in every sense. Thus, in the eighteen years following Vasco de Gama's expedition, the king of Portugal sent no less than 294 vessels to India and to the land of the Holy Cross, (Brazil.) The fourteen expeditions that sailed from Spanish ports between 1496 and 1509, though less numerous, followed each other as closely, and were no less difficult to disentangle.
The hurry of copying and of printing multiplied errors.
The different editions of the voyages of Vespucius are full of contradictions in dates, a confusion that seems to exclude all reasonable suspicion of intentional falsification. [Footnote 220] Christopher Columbus erred as to the duration of the two passages of his first expedition, and that at the very moment, when toward its close, he approached the shores of Europe. [Footnote 221] The most exact and attentive historians err constantly as to well-authenticated facts, as, for instance, Orviédo, the official historian of the Indies, in asserting as a notorious fact that Columbus discovered the Indies in 1491. [Footnote 222]
[Footnote 220: Crit. Exam. vol. v. p. 111.]
[Footnote 221: Ibid. vol. v. p. 201.]
[Footnote 222: Instead of 1492. M. Humboldt cites many similar errors.]