Christopher Columbus and the New World of His Discovery | Page 2

to the one, a year or
two may suffice for the other; and an entirely different set of qualities
must be employed in the two tasks. I cannot make it too clear that I
make no claim to have added one iota of information or one fragment
of original research to the expert knowledge regarding the life of
Christopher Columbus; and when I add that the chief collection of facts
and documents relating to the subject, the 'Raccolta

Columbiana,'--[Raccolta di Documenti e Studi Publicati dalla R.
Commissione Colombiana, &c. Auspice il Ministero della Publica
Istruzione. Rome, 1892-4.]--is a work consisting of more than thirty
folio volumes, the general reader will be the more indulgent to me. But
when a purely human interest led me some time ago to look into the
literature of Columbus, I was amazed to find what seemed to me a
striking disproportion between the extent of the modern historians'
work on that subject and the knowledge or interest in it displayed by
what we call the general reading public. I am surprised to find how
many well-informed people there are whose knowledge of Columbus is
comprised within two beliefs, one of them erroneous and the other
doubtful: that he discovered America, and performed a trick with an
egg. Americans, I think, are a little better informed on the subject than
the English; perhaps because the greater part of modern critical
research on the subject of Columbus has been the work of Americans.
It is to bridge the immense gap existing between the labours of the
historians and the indifference of the modern reader, between the
Raccolta Columbiana, in fact, and the story of the egg, that I have
written my narrative.
It is customary and proper to preface a work which is based entirely on
the labours of other people with an acknowledgment of the sources
whence it is drawn; and yet in the case of Columbus I do not know
where to begin. In one way I am indebted to every serious writer who
has even remotely concerned himself with the subject, from Columbus
himself and Las Casas down to the editors of the Raccolta. The chain of
historians has been so unbroken, the apostolic succession, so to speak,
has passed with its heritage so intact from generation to generation, that
the latest historian enshrines in his work the labours of all the rest. Yet
there are necessarily some men whose work stands out as being more
immediately seizable than that of others; in the period of whose care
the lamp of inspiration has seemed to burn more brightly. In a matter of
this kind I cannot pretend to be a judge, but only to state my own
experience and indebtedness; and in my work I have been chiefly
helped by Las Casas, indirectly of course by Ferdinand Columbus,
Herrera, Oviedo, Bernaldez, Navarrete, Asensio, Mr. Payne, Mr.
Harrisse, Mr. Vignaud, Mr. Winsor, Mr. Thacher, Sir Clements

Markham, Professor de Lollis, and S. Salvagnini. It is thus not among
the dusty archives of Seville, Genoa, or San Domingo that I have
searched, but in the archive formed by the writings of modern workers.
To have myself gone back to original sources, even if I had been
competent to do so, would have been in the case of Columbian research
but a waste of time and a doing over again what has been done already
with patience, diligence, and knowledge. The historians have been
committed to the austere task of finding out and examining every fact
and document in connection with their subject; and many of these facts
and documents are entirely without human interest except in so far as
they help to establish a date, a name, or a sum of money. It has been
my agreeable and lighter task to test and assay the masses of bed-rock
fact thus excavated by the historians for traces of the particular ore
which I have been seeking. In fact I have tried to discover, from a
reverent examination of all these monographs, essays, histories,
memoirs, and controversies concerning what Christopher Columbus did,
what Christopher Columbus was; believing as I do that any labour by
which he can be made to live again, and from the dust of more than
four hundred years be brought visibly to the mind's eye, will not be
entirely without use and interest. Whether I have succeeded in doing so
or not I cannot be the judge; I can only say that the labour of
resuscitating a man so long buried beneath mountains of untruth and
controversy has some times been so formidable as to have seemed
hopeless. And yet one is always tempted back by the knowledge that
Christopher Columbus is not only a name, but that the human being
whom we so describe did