A letter written by Christopher Columbus on February 15, 1493, is the first known document announcing the results of his first voyage that set out in 1492 and reached the Americas. The letter was ostensibly written by Columbus himself, aboard the caravel Niña, on the return leg of his voyage.[2] A postscript was added upon his arrival in Lisbon on March 4, 1493, and it was probably from there that Columbus dispatched two copies of his letter to the Spanish court.
The letter was instrumental in spreading the news throughout Europe about Columbus's voyage. Almost immediately after Columbus's arrival in Spain, printed versions of the letter began to appear. A Spanish version of the letter (presumably addressed to Luis de Santángel), was printed in Barcelona by early April 1493, and a Latin translation (addressed to Gabriel Sánchez) was published in Rome around a month later (ca. May 1493). The Latin version was swiftly disseminated and reprinted in many other locations—Basel, Paris, Antwerp, etc.—still within the first year of his arrival.
In his letter, Christopher Columbus claimed to have discovered and taken possession of a series of islands on the edge of the Indian Ocean in Asia; Columbus was not aware that he had stumbled upon a new continent. He described the islands, particularly Hispaniola and Cuba, exaggerating their size and wealth, and suggested that mainland China probably lay nearby. He also gave a brief description of the native Arawaks (whom he called "Indians"), emphasizing their docility and amenability, and the prospects of their conversion to Catholicism. However, the letter also revealed local rumors about a fierce man-eating tribe of "monsters" in the area (probably Caribs), although Columbus himself disbelieved the stories, and dismissed them as a myth. The letter provides very few details of the oceanic voyage itself, and covers up the loss of the flagship of his fleet, the Santa María, by suggesting Columbus left it behind with some colonists, in a fort he erected at La Navidad in Hispaniola. In the letter, Columbus urges the Catholic monarchs to sponsor a second, larger expedition to the Indies, promising to bring back immense riches.
A slightly different version of Columbus's letter, in manuscript form, addressed to the Catholic monarchs of Spain, was found in 1985, part of the Libro Copiador collection, and has led to some revision of the history of the Columbus letter.[3]
The two earliest published copies of Columbus's letter on the first voyage aboard the Niña were donated in 2017 by the Jay I. Kislak Foundation to the University of Miami library in Coral Gables, Florida, where they are housed.[4]
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- ^ The ship shown in this 1494 woodcut is actually directly copied from an earlier 1486 woodcut by Erhard Reuwich of a ship in the harbor of Modone Archived October 11, 2013, at the Wayback Machine. See Davies (1911: p. xxix)
- ^ Ife, Barry W. (1992) "Introduction to the Letters from America", King's College London. [1] Archived April 24, 2021, at the Wayback Machine. Accessed February 12, 2012.
- ^ Zamora (1993); Henige (1994)
- ^ Veciana-Suarez, Ana (January 22, 2017). "This college donation is truly historic. And it's not just the artifacts involved". Miami Herald. Archived from the original on February 23, 2017. Retrieved February 22, 2017.