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Vatican archives.

Hidden manuscripts.

Letters about Columbus.

Harrisse tells us in 1887 that he had been waiting two years for permission to search the archives of the Vatican. What may yet be revealed in that repository, the world waits anxiously to learn. It may be that some one shall yet discover there the communication in which Ferdinand and Isabella announced to the Pope the consummation of the hopes of Columbus. It may be that the diplomatic correspondence covering the claims of Spain by virtue of the discovery of Columbus, and leading to the bull of demarcation of May, 1493, may yet be found, accompanied by maps, of the highest interest in interpreting the relations of the new geography. There is no assurance that the end of manuscript disclosures has yet come. Some new bit of documentary proof has been found at times in places quite unexpected. The number of Italian observers in those days of maritime excitement living in the seaports and trading places of Spain and Portugal, kept their home friends alert in expectation by reason of such appetizing news. Such are the letters sent to Italy by Hanibal Januarius, and by Luca, the Florentine engineer, concerning the first voyage. There are similar transient summaries of the second voyage. Some have been found in the papers of Macchiavelli, and others had been arranged by Zorzi for a new edition of his documentary collection. These have all been recovered of recent years, and Harrisse himself, Gargiolli, Guerrini, and others, have been instrumental in their publication.

Spanish archives.

Simancas and Seville.

Simancas.

It was thirty-seven years after the death of Columbus before, under an order of Charles the Fifth, February 19, 1543, the archives of Spain were placed in some sort of order and security at Simancas. The great masses of papers filed by the crown secretaries and the Councils of the Indies and of Seville, were gradually gathered there, but not until many had been lost. Others apparently disappeared at a later day, for we are now aware that many to which Herrera refers cannot be found. New efforts to secure the preservation and systematize the accumulation of manuscripts were made by order of Philip the Second in 1567, but it would seem without all the success that might have been desired. Towards the end of the last century, it was the wish of Charles the Third that all the public papers relating to the New World should be selected from Simancas and all other places of deposit and carried to Seville. The act was accomplished in 1788, when they were placed in a new building which had been provided for them. Thus it is that to-day the student of Columbus must rather search Seville than Simancas for new documents, though a few papers of some interest in connection with the contests of his heirs with the crown of Castile may still exist at Simancas. Thirty years ago, if not now, as Bergenroth tells us, there was little comfort for the student of history in working at Simancas. The papers are preserved in an old castle, formerly belonging to the admirals of Castile, which had been confiscated and devoted to the uses of such a repository. The one large room which was assigned for the accommodation of readers had a northern aspect, and as no fires were allowed, the note-taker found not infrequently in winter the ink partially congealed in his pen. There was no imaginable warmth even in the landscape as seen from the windows, since, amid a treeless waste, the whistle of cold blasts in winter and a blinding African heat in summer characterize the climate of this part of Old Castile.

Of the early career of Columbus, it is very certain that something may be gained at Simancas, for when Bergenroth, sent by the English government, made search there to illustrate the relations of Spain with England, and published his results, with the assistance of Gayangos, in 1862–1879, as a Calendar of Letters, Despatches, and State Papers relating to Negotiations between England and Spain, one of the earliest entries of his first printed volume, under 1485, was a complaint of Ferdinand and Isabella against a Columbus—some have supposed it our Christopher—for his participancy in the piratical service of the French.

ARCHIVO DE SIMANCAS. [From Parcerisa and Quadrado's España.]

Seville.

Harrisse complains that we have as yet but scant knowledge of what the archives of the Indies at Seville may contain, but they probably throw light rather upon the successors of Columbus than upon the career of the Admiral himself.

Seville notarial records.

The notarial archives of Seville are of recent construction, the gathering of scattered material having been first ordered so late as 1869. The partial examination which has since been made of them has revealed some slight evidences of the life of some of Columbus's kindred, and it is quite possible some future inquirer will be rewarded for his diligent search among them.

It is also not unlikely that something of interest may be brought to light respecting the descendants of Columbus who have lived in Seville, like the Counts of Gelves; but little can be expected regarding the life of the Admiral himself.

Santa Maria de las Cuevas.

The personal fame of Columbus is much more intimately connected with the monastery of Santa Maria de las Cuevas. Here his remains were transported in 1509; and at a later time, his brother and son, each Diego by name, were laid beside him, as was his grandson Luis. Here in an iron chest the family muniments and jewels were kept, as has been said. It is affirmed that all the documents which might have grown out of these transactions of duty and precaution, and which might incidentally have yielded some biographical information, are nowhere to be found in the records of the monastery. A century ago or so, when Muñoz was working in these records, there seems to have been enough to repay his exertions, as we know by his citations made between 1781 and 1792.

Portuguese archives. Torre do Tombo.

The national archives of the Torre do Tombo, at Lisbon, begun so far back as 1390, are well known to have been explored by Santarem, then their keeper, primarily for traces of the career of Vespucius; but so intelligent an antiquary could not have forgotten, as a secondary aim, the acts of Columbus. The search yielded him, however, nothing in this last direction; nor was Varnhagen more fortunate. Harrisse had hopes to discover there the correspondence of Columbus with John the Second, in 1488; but the search was futile in this respect, though it yielded not a little respecting the Perestrello family, out of which Columbus took his wife, the mother of the heir of his titles. There is even hope that the notarial acts of Lisbon might serve a similar purpose to those which have been so fruitful in Genoa and Savona. There are documents of great interest which may be yet obscurely hidden away, somewhere in Portugal, like the letter from the mouth of the Tagus, which Columbus on his return in March, 1493, addressed to the Portuguese king, and the diplomatic correspondence of John the Second and Ferdinand of Aragon, which the project of a second voyage occasioned, as well as the preliminaries of the treaty of Tordesillas.

Santo Domingo archives.

Lawsuit papers.

There may be yet some hope from the archives of Santo Domingo itself, and from those of its Cathedral, to trace in some of their lines the descendants of the Admiral through his son Diego. The mishaps of nature and war have, however, much impaired the records. Of Columbus himself there is scarce a chance to learn anything here. The papers of the famous lawsuit of Diego Colon with the crown seem to have escaped the attention of all the historians before the time of Muñoz and Navarrete. The direct line of male descendants of the Admiral ended in 1578, when his great-grandson, Diego Colon y Pravia, died on the 27th January, a childless man. Then began another contest for the heritage and titles, and it lasted for thirty years, till in 1608 the Council of the Indies judged the rights to descend by a turn back to Diego's aunt Isabel, and thence to her grandson, Nuño de Portugallo, Count of Gelves. The excluded heirs, represented by the children of a sister of Diego, Francisca, who had married Diego Ortegon, were naturally not content; and out of the contest which followed we get a large mass of printed statements and counter statements, which used with caution, offer a study perhaps of some of the transmitted traits of Columbus. Harrisse names and describes nineteen of these documentary memorials, the last of which bears date in 1792. The most important of them all, however, is one printed at Madrid in 1606, known as Memorial del Pleyto, in which we find the descent of the true and spurious lines, and learn something too much of the scandalous life of Luis, the grandson of the Admiral, to say nothing of the illegitimate taints of various other branches. Harrisse finds assistance in working out some of the lines of the Admiral's descendants, in Antonio Caetano de Sousa's Historia Genealogica da Casa Real Portugueza (Lisbon, 1735–49, in 14 vols.).

The Muñoz collection.

The most important collection of documents gathered by individual efforts in Spain, to illustrate the early history of the New World, was that made by Juan Bautista Muñoz, in pursuance of royal orders issued to him in 1781 and 1788, to examine all Spanish archives, for the purpose of collecting material for a comprehensive History of the Indies. Muñoz has given in the introduction of his history a clear statement of the condition of the different depositories of archives in Spain, as he found them towards the end of the last century, when a royal order opened them all to his search. A first volume of Muñoz's elaborate and judicious work was issued in 1793, and Muñoz died in 1799, without venturing on a second volume to carry the story beyond 1500, where he had left it. He was attacked for his views, and there was more or less of a pamphlet war over the book before death took him from the strife; but he left a fragment of the second volume in manuscript, and of this there is a copy in the Lenox Library in New York. Another copy was sold in the Brinley sale. The Muñoz collection of copies came in part, at least, at some time after the collector's death into the hands of Antonio de Uguina, who placed them at the disposal of Irving; and Ternaux seems also to have used them. They were finally deposited by the Spanish government in the Academy of History at Madrid. Here Alfred Demersey saw them in 1862–63, and described them in the Bulletin of the French Geographical Society in June, 1864, and it is on this description as well as on one in Fuster's Biblioteca Valenciana, that Harrisse depends, not having himself examined the documents.

The Navarrete collection.

Martin Fernandez de Navarrete was guided in his career as a collector of documents, when Charles the Fourth made an order, October 15, 1789, that there should be such a work begun to constitute the nucleus of a library and museum. The troublous times which succeeded interrupted the work, and it was not till 1825 that Navarrete brought out the first volume of his Coleccion de los Viages y Descubrimientos que hicieron por Mar los Españoles desde Fines del Siglo XV., a publication which a fifth volume completed in 1837, when he was over seventy years of age.

Any life of Columbus written from documentary sources must reflect much light from this collection of Navarrete, of which the first two volumes are entirely given to the career of the Admiral, and indeed bear the distinctive title of Relaciones, Cartas y otros Documentos, relating to him.

The researches of Navarrete.

Navarrete was engaged thirty years on his work in the archives of Spain, and was aided part of the time by Muñoz the historian, and by Gonzales the keeper of the archives at Simancas. His researches extended to all the public repositories, and to such private ones as could be thought to illustrate the period of discovery. Navarrete has told the story of his searches in the various archives of Spain, in the introduction to his Coleccion, and how it was while searching for the evidences of the alleged voyage of Maldonado on the Pacific coast of North America, in 1588, that he stumbled upon Las Casas's copies of the relations of Columbus, for his first and third voyages, then hid away in the archives of the Duc del Infantado; and he was happy to have first brought them to the attention of Muñoz.

There are some advantages for the student in the use of the French edition of Navarrete's Relations des Quatre Voyages entrepris par Colomb, since the version was revised by Navarrete himself, and it is elucidated, not so much as one would wish, with notes by Rémusat, Balbi, Cuvier, Jomard, Letronne, St. Martin, Walckenaer, and others. It was published at Paris in three volumes in 1828. The work contains Navarrete's accounts of Spanish pre-Columbian voyages, of the later literature on Columbus, and of the voyages of discovery made by other efforts of the Spaniards, beside the documentary material respecting Columbus and his voyages, the result of his continued labors. Caleb Cushing, in his Reminiscences of Spain in 1833, while commending the general purposes of Navarrete, complains of his attempts to divert the indignation of posterity from the selfish conduct of Ferdinand, and to vindicate him from the charge of injustice towards Columbus. This plea does not find to-day the same sympathy in students that it did sixty years ago.

Madrid Academy of History.

Father Antonio de Aspa of the monastery of the Mejorada, formed a collection of documents relating to the discovery of the New World, and it was in this collection, now preserved in the Academy of History at Madrid, that Navarrete discovered that curious narration of the second voyage of Columbus by Dr. Chanca, which had been sent to the chapter of the Cathedral, and which Navarrete included in his collection. It is thought that Bernaldez had used this Chanca narrative in his Reyes Católicos.

Coleccion de Documentos Ineditos.

Navarrete's name is also connected, as one of its editors, with the extensive Coleccion de Documentos Ineditos para la Historia de España, the publication of which was begun in Madrid in 1847, two years before Navarrete's death. This collection yields something in elucidation of the story to be here told; but not much, except that in it, at a late day, the Historia of Las Casas was first printed.

In 1864, there was still another series begun at Madrid, Coleccion de Documentos Ineditos relativos al Descubrimiento, Conquista y Colonizacion de las Posesiones Españolas en América y Oceania, under the editing of Joaquin Pacheco and Francisco de Cárdenas, who have not always satisfied students by the way in which they have done their work. Beyond the papers which Navarrete had earlier given, and which are here reprinted, there is not much in this collection to repay the student of Columbus, except some long accounts of the Repartimiento in Española.

Cartas de Indias.

The latest documentary contribution is the large folio, with an appendix of facsimile writings of Columbus, Vespucius, and others, published at Madrid in 1877, by the government, and called Cartas de Indias, in which it has been hinted some use has been made of the matter accumulated by Navarrete for additional volumes of his Coleccion.

PART OF A PAGE IN THE GIUSTINIANI PSALTER, SHOWING THE BEGINNING OF THE EARLIEST PRINTED LIFE OF COLUMBUS. [From the copy in Harvard College Library.]