The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus Are Better

Preface he life and voyages of Christopher Columbus are better documented than those of any other great navigator of his T period. Many contemporaries who knew him personally and had the literary ability to portray his life and accomplishments wrote about him in great detail. The first chronicler to report on Columbus was the Italian Peter Martyr (Pietro Martire), born in 1456 in Lombardy in the town of Anghiera on the south shore of Lake Maggiore. One of the most learned men of his age, he was the true Renaissance man. At the age of thirty he was invited by the Spanish ambassador in Rome to join the faculty at Salamanca and given the task of instructing the scions of the royal household. He was presented to the Sovereigns at Saragossa during the war with Granada and as a member of the military retinue kept a record, through his letter writing, of many campaigns against the Moors. He was sent as ambassador extraordinary by Ferdinand and Isabella to the sultan of Egypt to settle a very delicate problem: the sultan had threatened to put all Christians in his realm to death unless Spain put an end to the war with Granada. He discharged his duties with great ability and through clever diplomacy persuad- ed the sultan to retract his ultimatum. Peter Martyr was with the court at Barcelona in April 1493, when Columbus returned from his first voyage to the New World. He was able to obtain firsthand accounts from the Ad- miral and his shipmates—a practice he followed whenever the opportunity presented itself. Through these interviews, Martyr eventually wrote a history of the discoveries even though he himself never sailed on any of the voyages. His principal work is an account of the discoveries of the New World in eight parts, each containing ten chapters written in Latin but later translated into various languages. In many ways Peter Martyr may be considered the first news reporter in history, because in letters to distinguished contemporaries, he related current occurrences of the times. He was the Court’s secretary and historian. In one of his letters from Barcelona, dated May 1, 1493, and addressed to Count Borromeo, he gave the first brief account of Columbus’s momentous discovery: Within these last few days, a certain Christopher Columbus has arrived from the Western antipodes; a man of Liguria whom my Sovereigns reluctantly entrusted with three ships to reach that region, for they thought that what he said was fabulous. He has returned and brought specimens of many precious things, but particularly gold, which those countries naturally produce.1 Martyr’s letters have the timely immediacy of a news wire to a metropolitan newspaper. In another letter to Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, dated September 13, 1493, he gave a more detailed account of the voyage: The wonders of this terrestrial globe, around which the sun makes a circuit in the space of four and twenty hours, have until our time, as you are well aware, been known only in regard to one hemisphere, merely from the Golden Chersonese (the Malay Pen- insula) to our Spanish Gades (Cádiz). The rest has been given up as unknown by cosmographers and if any mention of it has been made, it has been slight and dubious. But now, Oh blessed enter- prise! Under the auspices of our Sovereigns, what has hitherto lain hidden since the first origin of things, has at length been developed. The thing has thus occurred—attend illustrious Prince! A certain Christopher Columbus, a Ligurian, dispatched to those regions with three vessels by my Sovereigns, pursuing the western sun five thousand miles above Gades, achieved his way to the antipodes. Three and thirty successive days they navigated with nought but sky and water. At length from the masthead of the largest vessel in which Columbus sailed, those on the lookout proclaimed the sight of land. He coasted along six islands one of them, as all his follow- ers declare beguiled perchance by the novelty of the scene, is larger than Spain.2 Peter Martyr was such an avid letter writer that a collection of them made up thirty-eight books, each containing the letters of one year. Published in 1530, they are of great historical interest because of their spontaneity and candor; however, for the same reasons, they suffer at times from inaccuracies and ex- aggerations. In 1524 he was appointed to the Counsel of the Indies and died in 1526 in Valladolid, having served the Spanish royalty for thirty-eight years. One of the most important sources of information on the life of the discoverer of America is the biography written by his son, Ferdinand Columbus. This has been praised by Benjamin Keen as a “moving personal document that vividly recreates the moral and intellectual atmosphere of Columbus’s world and the swirling passions of which he was the center.”3 Ferdinand Columbus was born in August or September of 1488 in Córdoba, as a result of a love affair that the thirty-seven- year-old Columbus had with a young woman of Córdoba, Beatriz Enríquez de Arana. He lived the first few years of his life with his mother in Córdoba but was appointed a page to the king’s son, Juan, after Columbus’s first voyage. In May 1502, the boy accompanied his father on his fourth voyage: an adventurous, albeit disastrous, voyage that lasted two years and six months; he thus gained much experience and knowledge on all aspects of sailing. In 1509 he accompanied his older brother, Diego, to Hispaniola, but returned to Spain a few months later to resume his scholarly pursuits. He accompanied Emperor Charles V to Italy, Flanders, and Germany and later traveled all over Europe and to parts of Africa and Asia. Through his travels, he acquired much learning in geography, navigation, and natural history. Very fond of books, he began to collect them at a rapid rate and formed a library of nearly twenty thousand books that he stored in a portion of the house he had built near the Guadalqui- vir River in Seville. Today this library, reduced to two thousand of Ferdinand’s own books, is the renowned Biblioteca Colombina. Ferdinand wrote the biography of his father during the last years of his life. He died in 1539 and because he had never married, he left the manuscript to Don Diego’s widow, Doña María de Toledo. Eventually, the manuscript passed into the hands of her “playboy” son, Don Luis, who was hard-pressed for cash, sold it to the Genoese physician Baliano de Fornari. The work was translated into Italian by Alfonso Ulloa, an Italian of Spanish birth, and published in 1571. Unfortunately, the original Spanish manuscript was lost and never found. There is no doubt that some meaning and accuracy of detail have been lost in the translation, and there is evidence that Ulloa injected some personal conclusions to the narrative. However, in any translation of such magnitude, liberties are taken with idiomatic expressions that may modify the meaning of the original text. We thus face the anomaly of a Spanish manuscript translated first into Italian, then again into Spanish, English, and other foreign languages and that may have lost the spirit and flavor of the original. In the present volume, I have quoted liberally from Ferdi- nand’s biography of his father in Benjamin Keen’s translation, entitled The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus by His Son Ferdinand (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1959). Another contemporary who made use of Ferdinand’s original manuscript was Bartolomé de Las Casas in his well-documented Historia de las Indias (Madrid, 1875–76). Besides the manuscript, he also had access to the journals and letters of Columbus and to those written by Christopher’s brother, Don Bartolomé. He had a writing style which was perhaps even more vivid than that of the great explorer himself. De Las Casas’s father had gone to Hispaniola with Columbus on his second voyage and had returned to Seville in 1498. Aroused by his father’s account of the New World, Bartolomé, at the age of twenty-eight, went to Hispaniola in 1502 and witnessed Ovando’s cruel treatment of the Indians. His zeal in the cause of the Indians, evidenced by his famous treatise of denunciation known as the “Brevisima Relación de la Destrucción de las Indias,” lasted a lifetime and earned him the title of “the Apostle of the Indies.” Las Casas joined the Dominican order in 1510 and became a priest, the first to be ordained in the New World. Eventually, he became bishop of Chiapas, and lived in his newly conquered territory of Mexico from 1544 to 1547, after which he returned to Spain and resigned his bishopric in 1550. His Historia de las Indias, consisting of three volumes, was started in 1527 and completed in 1559, when Las Casas was eighty-five years of age. It was not published, however, until 1875–76, because it described in detail the extremely cruel treatment of the Indians at the hands of the conquering Spaniards. A note written in Las Casas’s handwriting begs the College of the Order of Preachers of St. Gregorio in Valladolid, to whom he left the first two volumes, not to let any secular person read his books until forty years after his death. The Historia is notable because it covers the history of Spanish discoveries from 1492 to 1520, encompassing not only Columbus’s voyages but the aftermath of his discoveries and colonization, as actually seen and experienced by the author.

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