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.