Having been known to historians and archivists somewhat longer than the Spanish Quarto and Folio, the Simancas manuscript has been a subject of interest since the early nineteenth century, but only a few scholars had access to it in the nineteenth century, and no full view of the manuscript was presented, to my knowledge, until Demetrio Ramos Pérez produced what appears to be a full-size traced facsimile of the manuscript, folded and tipped-in for his 1986 Primera noticia. Scholars have recorded their impressions of the manuscript, some with mere notices of its existence and others making assertions about its nature, all providing potential points of departure for examining the physical evidence of the manuscript as it exists today.
Mid-nineteenth-century historian of British relations with Spain Gustav Adolph Bergenroth records that Simancas Archivist Tomás González found the Simancas manuscript of the Columbus letter on 12 September 1818 “when [González] was occupied in putting in order the documents returned from France” (48).1 Martín Fernández de Navarrete set the transcript into type in the first volume of his Colección de Viages, affirming that he had copied it from the original document,2 and he prints González’s certification of the document at its close: “Está copiado literalmente del documento original que obra en este Real Archivo de Simancas” (I 175).3 It is dated 28 December 1818. González’s handwritten transcript of the Simancas manuscript for Spain’s Royal Academy of History, reproduced in Sanz’s Secreto, is dated 20 January 1821. Alexander von Humboldt refers to the manuscript in the second volume of his geographical history (1837): “la lettre de l’amiral écrite en partie le 15 février de las islas Terceras, en partie du port de Lisbonne, le 4 mars 1493, à l’escribano de razon de los Sres. Reyes Catholicos (don Luis de Santangel), lettre conservée aux archives de Simancas” [the letter of the Admiral, written partly in the Azores (Islas Terceras) on the 15th of February and partly in the Port of Lisbon the 4th of March … the letter preserved in the Archives of Simancas].4 That the Letter has remained there and that González’s transcript of it and the original are accessible today suggests extraordinary archival care and good fortune.5
In 1827, Samuel Kettell made an English translation of the Santángel Letter based on Fernández de Navarrete’s transcript, and in the 1860s, Bergenroth provided an English-language summary of the Simancas text in his Calendar of late fifteenth-century documents pertaining to Spain and England. Bergenroth describes the document he saw in the Archive as “a letter written by Columbus from the Canarian Islands to a friend of his, when he, on his first expedition, was on return to Europe.”6 A contemporary of Bergenroth’s, British Museum librarian and geographer Richard Henry Major, noted (Select) that the Simancas manuscript contained a closing text lacking in the Latin versions: “At the end of the Simancas copy is the expression: ‘Esta carta envio Colon al Escribano de Racion de las islas halladas en las Indias e otra de sus altezas.’”7 This label appears on the Spanish quarto printing, with which Major was familiar by the time of his book’s second edition in 1870, and would be found on the Folio at its discovery nineteen years later.
José Asensio, in an article published in 1891, soon after the discovery of the Folio, rationalizes the Simancas manuscript as one of many copies that circulated at the time, having served as fair copies for the Folio and Quarto impressions.8 In 1892, Clements R. Markham, a Columbus biographer, concluded that the Simancas manuscript must be “a careless copy” whose copyist wrote “Canarias” rather than “Sta. María” — or sa only — and the number 15 rather than 18 as the day in February when the Letter proper was completed (131). In the late 1920s, historian Cecil Jane asserted that the original of the document to which González’s notation refers “no longer exist[ed],” and Jane interpreted González’s catalogue notation to mean that González had transcribed a “very damaged” fifteenth-century document for the archives because the original was in a dilapidated condition.9 For that reason, Jane theorizes, Fernández de Navarrete published his transcription in 1825 from the copy González had made (Four Voyages cxxiv). While Jane’s surmise on Fernández de Navarrete’s transcript may be true, the fifteenth-century manuscript existed when González found and copied it, as its condition today attests. Another twenty-five years passed before Carlos Sanz (Secreto 1959) declared, in some accord with Asensio and Markham, that the Simancas manuscript was “no más que otra copia servil de la primera edición castellana en folio” [no more than another servile copy of the first edition Spanish folio] (245), but Sanz had the foresight to provide Tomás González’s manuscript transcription of the document with González’s certification immediately following the text as the final item of Secreto (509–517).10 The document is dated 20 January 1821.
A little more than twenty-five years after Sanz published his theories on the Letter and the manuscript, Ramos (Primera 1986) attempted to quash Sanz’s conclusion that the Simancas manuscript was just another “servile copy” of the folio Letter by elevating the textual status of the Simancas manuscript based on his theory of its composition and aim. Asensio’s idea of several manuscript copies of the Letter, one of which is represented by the Simancas manuscript, along with Jane’s theories of courtly “editing” by Santángel, Columbus’s virtual illiteracy, and a royal impetus to print the document converge in Ramos’s theory that the Simancas manuscript is one of two nearly identical final copies of a letter devised by Fernando and Santángel from a letter of Columbus’s and produced in court by simultaneous dictation. Ramos asserts that the Simancas manuscript’s fellow went to the printer as the Folio’s fair copy and that the Simancas manuscript, the surviving twin, assumes precedence over the Folio and other printed editions.11
The pervasive concurrence between the readings of the Simancas manuscript and the Folio suggest that the manuscript used as the printer’s copy for the Folio was a close relative to the Simancas manuscript, but certain distinctions noted here, in the variorum, and in chapter 7 indicate that the compositor’s copy was unlike the Simancas manuscript in important ways. The evidence further suggests that the Simancas manuscript was produced from a master document by one who was reading it for himself as he copied rather than taking down the text by dictation. Some of the orthographic (spelling) differences between the Simancas manuscript and the printed Folio may suggest dictation, but these may as well owe to an educated writer’s preferences at a period when formal spelling standards did not exist. The errors and omissions one finds in the Simancas manuscript are clearly the kind that arise in the process of document-to-document copying, in which the moving eye loses its place and falls amiss, picking up the expected word or phrase in a nearby line, an error known as an “eye-skip.”12
Carlos Sanz’s theory of the origin of the manuscript — that the Simancas manuscript is and was meant to be a “servile” copy of the Folio — may have been partly based on Sanz’s observations of visual-error variants and omissions. The Simancas scribe writes como de aquella, for example, and then writes como de a second time and strikes it out. Where the Folio reads pase A las indias, the manuscript reads pase las yndias, omitting A; where the Folio reads para fazer otras y grande amistad (2r.7–8), the manuscript reads para fazer y grande amystad (2r.107), omitting otras; where the Folio and Quarto agree on clxxxviii, the MS 1v.97 reads cxxx viii, omitting l; where the Folio and Quarto read mandaran cargar y, the MS 2r.137 reads mandaren y, omitting cargar; and where the Folio and Quarto read vna arro[u]a o dos, MS 1v.161 reads, una o dos, lacking arroua (arroba).13
Each of these omissions is likely the result of an eye-skip, and the manuscript presents at least several additional distinctions with the Folio, none of which is a result of taking a text by dictation. At MS 1r.9–10, for example, the scribe writes segui la costa, perhaps intentionally suppressing the redundant pronoun of segui io la costa (underscoring added). The manuscript’s corrective la ysla ysabella (1r.8) with ysla stricken through may be compared with the Folio’s la isla bella (1r.8).14At MS 2v.154, the scribe writes que no solamente ala espana mas a todos; suppressing the word a preceding todos, he changes the syntax of the sentence, apparently getting the understanding as he is reading that cristianos (the following noun) does not work as a dative. Without a, cristianos might then be taken as the subject of the next verb (ternan) though the change is problematic.15 In the next line (2v.155), the scribe writes and strikes caravela and writes calauera immediately after, for the spelling used in the Folio (2v.5) and Quarto (4v.9).16The Folio and Quarto’s tornandose is replaced at MS 2v.153 with ay[u]ntandose (prob. rdg), a distinction not based on auditory misunderstanding. The Simancas manuscript omits an entire line in the close of the Letter, yet the omitted line is found on the Folio and Quarto. No manuscript that duplicates the Simancas manuscript in these ways could have been used as the fair copy for the Folio.17
So why was this copy produced? The manuscript considered holistically reveals something about the writer’s practices, whether they were those of a professional court scribe or those of a courtier who was familiar with scribal protocols like abbreviatura and conventions of pointing a manuscript, and also suggests the nature of the initiative that prompted its copying. Like hand-written materials in later periods, those of the Middle Ages had a hierarchy. A man copying a document for his or another’s private use might relax his vigilance and produce a text with characteristics of the Simancas manuscript — its uneven lines, the inconsistent size of the script, numerous strikeouts and corrections, and ambiguous word formations — yet his retaining scribal abbreviatura and punctuation shows his customary use of them as a reader or writer. While more careful scribal work may show some similar features, their frequency through the Simancas manuscript strongly suggests pragmatic or personal ends for its copying. Its being folded twice beyond the vertical fold that marks off its writing areas supports that idea: someone folded the pages in half horizontally and then vertically to make the manuscript a convenient size for tucking away into a pocket or chest. These folds, according to rubbing and wear along both fold lines and the losses at their mid-page intersection and outer edges, make them good candidates for being closely contemporary with the production of the text. I doubt we can get nearer than that. They perhaps imply that the manuscript was never intended to be gathered up with others and bound in a codex, but that it was retained and put away as a personal keepsake, bumped around at the corners and opened and refolded often enough to produce some of the wear to the writing area that we see today, whatever the motive for its genesis.
The (vertical) gutter fold, viewed between the inside “pages” (1v and 2r), goes beyond the expedient hand folding that reduced the size of the finished document. Viewed from the perspective of 2r, the fold shows a neat set of parallel crease lines, probably made along a rule, with the edge of the rule creating the “gutter.” Beyond the discoloration made by handling at the upper and lower extremes of the fold and the broadly distributed, spotty discoloration around it that suggests foxing, two shades of discoloration, a lighter, straight-line inner area and an irregular, darker area extending toward the writing surface at 2r and into it at 1v, become visible beginning at lines 2r.108–118 and 2r.123–139. Creating an exact fold around the edge of a rule probably reflects contemporary as well as later practice, and the straight-line area in a distinct shade may suggest a strip of sizing or a thin paste laid down along the fold.18
Commenting on Fernández de Navarrete’s edition of the Simancas manuscript, Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen, Viscount of Porto Seguro, Brazil, wrote that the Simancas manuscript was “not the original,” that there must have been another, “more correct” version of the Letter that preceded it (v–vi). Varnhagen was certain of all this because he had found just such a manuscript, he asserted, and he published his transcription of it at Valencia under the editorial pseudonym “Genaro H. de Volafan.”19 In the “Advertencia preliminar” [foreword] to his edition, Varnhagen/Volafan described the manuscript as being collated in the middle of a small quarto of manuscript leaves that bore the inscription “de D. Juan de Sanfelices” [belonging to don Juan de Sanfelices] on the first leaf (vi).20
Having few references to the manuscript’s previous private ownership, bibliographers of the late nineteenth century treated the “Varnhagen–Sanfelices” manuscript, as I will refer to it here, as if it were a document virtually contemporary with the recently discovered Quarto and the newly discovered Folio. Varnhagen’s dating its hand at the “sixteenth century” (v) had apparently been persuasive. The editor of an 1892 Spanish edition of Columbus materials (Relaciones y cartas de Cristóbal Colón), one of the few to pick up the personal name, calls the manuscript “una copia antigua” that had passed from the hands of “D. Juan Sanfelices” [sic] to the Colegio Mayor de Cuenca at Salamanca (184).21 De Lollis assigns the Varnhagen–Sanfelices manuscript a place in his textual comparisons (li–liiii), and Michael Kerney, Justin Winsor, and Henry Harrisse all regarded it as a useful text of the Letter. Varnhagen (as Volafan) recognizes, in the foreword to his comparative edition, his Sanfelices manuscript and Leandro de Cosco’s Latin as “idénticos” and its Spanish (castellano) text “como el verdadero original de la epístola dirigida de Lisboa al tesorero de Aragon D. Gabriel Sanchez, que [fue] traducida al latin [sic] por Leandro de Cosco” [as the true original of the letter directed from Lisbon to the treasurer of Aragon … that was translated into Latin by Leandro de Cosco] (v–vi).
Varnhagen eventually recanted these claims, and Michael Kerney, commenting in 1891 on that change of heart, laments Varnhagen’s distancing himself from his “Valencia MS” (11). Despite Varnhagen’s rejection, Kerney asserts that it is “the best text of the Columbus letter” (11), and his confidence apparently carried weight. In 1893, for example, Wilberforce Eames refers without disclaimers to the Varnhagen–Sanfelices manuscript as “[a]nother manuscript, in Spanish, addressed to Don Gabriel Sánchez,” and in the same year, Edward W. B. Nicholson, in his introduction to one of the Paris Latin quarto editions, adopts Kerney’s confidence, too, writing that the manuscript represented the “first edition in the original language” (3).22 In Quaritch’s 1893 Spanish Letter, Kerney continued to regard Varnhagen’s transcript as sufficiently worthy of confidence to supply readings for the Folio.23
By 1930, Cecil Jane’s references to the Varnhagen–Sanfelices manuscript show greater caution. In his Four Voyages, Jane offers the fresh insight that the manuscript could not have been a copy made from the original Letter as Varnhagen had thought (and had already discounted), and Jane surmises, based on Cesare De Lollis’s conclusion, that the Varnhagen–Sanfelices manuscript was probably in a hand later than was previously thought. Jane, ever skeptical but perhaps correct in this instance, stipulates that the manuscript was only ever known “through [Varnhagen’s] account” and had been lost at his writing (cxxv). I have found no evidence to contradict either claim.
The identity of the owner and the dating of the manuscript, like its eventual fate and provenance, remain problematic. I suggest that it probably belonged to the Juan de Sanfelices who was active in Spain’s relations with “the Indies” in the seventeenth century — though my conjecture is based only on a confluence of circumstances and chronology that appear to be supported by the nature of the collation in which the Letter manuscript was found, by notices of Juan de Sanfelices in contemporary documents, and by later references to him at the period.24 Among the contents of the Varnhagen–Sanfelices collation, according to Jane, were “extracts from the Ceremonial del Consejo de las Indias” and “other documents relating to the New World” (cxxv). The collation appears to comport with the career of “D[on] Juan de Sanfelices” who is titled licenciado in a letter of 1640 written by Jesuit Sebastián González in Madrid to Jesuit Rafael Pereyra, who was then in Sevilla (Real Academia 467–468).25 Among the papers of Juan Palafox de Mendoza, Bishop of Puebla, Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo describes a letter written to Palafox’s “old friend” Juan de Sanfelices, “councillor [sic] of the Indies” in 1645.26 A twentieth-century article in the weekly newspaper El Motín (1913) refers to “D. Juan de Sanfelices de Guevara, del Consejo Real de Castilla y Presidente de la Real Audiencia de la misma ciudad,” as having discovered and published Jesuit abuses in Sevilla in 1645.27 Álvarez de Toledo records that in 1645, Juan de Sanfelices and others on the Council of the Indies (the Real y Supremo Consejo de Indias) “had been replaced” (191).28
Braulio Vázquez of AGI has located a letter dated 12 January 1648 citing a disbursement to “Don Juan de Sanfelices Guevara del Consejo de Castilla.” José Miguel Gallardo translates a letter datelined 12 February 1674 from the “War Board” (Consejo) of the Indies to the queen and finds the name “Don Juan de Sanfelices” among those written “on the margin of the documents.”29The noble Juan de Sanfelices, licenciado, member of the Council of the Indies, defender of private rights compromised by Jesuit misdeeds, and correspondent of the Bishop of Puebla in the 1640s remains a good candidate for the owner of the quarto volume that Varnhagen describes, and it is plausible to suppose his involvement in the governance of the West Indies would give such a man reason to possess a copy of Columbus’s Letter along with other documents related to the islands.30
Varnhagen evidently understood at some point that his manuscript was later than he had thought, and a seventeenth-century chronology for it, along with a view of the Spanish Quarto facsimile, helped to distance Varnhagen from his claims. Harrisse reports that Varnhagen eventually decided that the manuscript was “an amalgam, fabricated more than one hundred and twenty years after the event [i.e., after 1643], and made out of elements borrowed from a text akin to the Simancas copy, from de Cosco’s Latin translation and from Herrera.”31Varnhagen writes that the “remaining errors” in his manuscript gave him pause in light of other matters, making him conclude that “that copy of ours” did not come from any original, but from the same defective — printed? — copy from which Simancas was made.32
Varnhagen discounts the value of the Simancas manuscript, then, too, assigning both to a single bad original from which Simancas derived the greater number of errors, though his manuscript had the advantage of clearing up some of them. “Tales son nuestras convicciones,” he concludes, observing that he is devaluing a personal holding, acquired legally and in good faith, for the sake of “un impulso mas [sic] noble,” namely, the love of truth (“Introduccion” [sic] xv). Still, with its hint of a don Juan de Sanfelices connection and its unique inclusion of the place name Teneryfe in an area of problematic text that is otherwise unresolved, this missing manuscript and its accompanying leaves have a small role in the story of the Spanish Letter.33
Shortly before the 500th anniversary of the first landfall, a libro copiador, a copybook, having Columbus interest was reported to have been located by an antiquarian dealer based in Tarragona, and by October 1988, Antonio Rumeu de Armas had completed his edition and critical study of the materials. The first item in the libro copiador is a letter to Fernando and Isabel, ostensibly the “lost” one that was enclosed with the Santángel Letter. Rumeu de Armas’s two-volume work giving the texts and his criticism of the libro copiador was published in 1989, but the quality of the editorial work was greeted with dismay by some critics, leading Juan Gil to edit the work anew for his and Consuelo Varela’s new edition of Textos y documentos completos in 1992.34 This writing no doubt contains some resonant and high-interest material, and it is tempting to accept it as presented.
In considering the libro’s probable documentary value — particularly that of the ostensible letter to the sovereigns (No. 1) — as a part of the critical work on the Letter and in annotating its text, one must grapple with the essential nature of the libro copiador. A libro copiador begins its existence as a gathering of blank pages used by a young person for copying out assigned materials in the process of mastering the complete range of skills necessary to produce formal penmanship. In English usage, a “copybook” is understood more as a pupil’s “notebook” than as a “book” per se. By the nature of the exercises meant to be done in the copybook, the student performing them lacks experience and competence in penmanship, and in the work of copying, the writer is also a novice.
In presenting the texts, Rumeu de Armas refers to the copybook exercises as “el manuscrito,” a term that applies to this compilation of tutorial exercises only in the literal sense of their being “written by hand,” a claim that one can make for a grocery list having no scholarly interest or merit. He refers to the exercises as “escrito colombino” [Columbian writing], which it is not in any critical sense, anymore than a nineteenth-century schoolboy’s copying Alice in Wonderland would be a “writing” of Lewis Carroll’s.
Rumeu de Armas’s title and text name the set of exercises the “Libro copiador de Cristóbal Colón” [Christopher Columbus’s Copybook], and again, the slippage is obvious if not intentional. These rhetorical leaps amount to critical fallacies that work to validate the find without basis and to persuade the reader to adopt an unwarranted conclusion by dint of repetition. Such designations populate the work and are picked up whole, along with their implied assumptions of value and authenticity, by subsequent commentators.35 In spite of the attractive content of these copied texts, this misdirecting presentation of them by the person who knew more about them than anyone is off-putting.
Rumeu de Armas asserts that the said copybook exercises are closely related to the “original texts” based on his approximate dating, but dating this hand requires, in my view, a long window of chronology with the potential to reach into the eighteenth century, where Spanish hands having similar characteristics are well-attested.36 Unfortunately, any effort to subject important data of date, place, writer, and context to minimally informed speculation based on geographical or personal provenance is forestalled because, as Rumeu de Armas affirms, the origins — recent and historical — of the notebook are cloaked in secrecy: “[I]t is difficult to clarify [the copybook’s] remote provenance” as its origins are “covered in mystery,” and “an unconfirmed rumor” whispers that it was first held in an unnamed library on the island of Mallorca (I 19, in translation) and that a book dealer of Tarragona, José del Río, owner of the shop “Catedral” (la Librería Anticuaria Catedral), was its most recent owner and knew nothing of its provenance that was worth sharing (I 20).
Juan Gil’s essay and Gil and Varela’s informe on these papers validating paper and ink, recording the book dealer’s transaction, and noting some of the problems, along with Gil’s exacting transcriptions of the texts (Textos 76 ff.) merit further attention. Gil and Varela refer to these copies as “Tarragona” (Tarr.) and recognize their limitations and possibilities as comparative texts. A highly skeptical or conservative view of the authenticity, dating, and value of these texts remains warranted, and critics who denigrate the Diario or reject it entirely because it is an edited and summarized compilation might be expected to find a great deal less value in the copy book texts since their dating and nearness to Columbus’s hand, as well as the copyist’s identity, are unknown factors — and they are found in a libro copiador.
If the copybook could be given an authentic historical provenance and dating, one might then tentatively affirm certain things about the copybook’s contents; for now, some unknown person, probably in early-to-mid-adolescence, was set to practice his or her handwriting and copying (?) skills on these leaves at some undetermined time, probably no earlier, based on the hand, than the last quarter of the sixteenth century and as late as the close of the eighteenth century, at some undetermined place, whether in Spain or Italy (suggested by the traits of the hand), using a cache of texts of unknown derivation and provenance.37 If the copybook is authentic, its writer’s primary aim may not have been to reproduce an exact text, but to practice penmanship by copying some text, and these might have been selected because of family connections or a history lesson – or perhaps the pupil was born on October 12th.
On the other hand, should these leaves not be historical in nature but have been created as a forgery coming to light at the threshold of the 500th anniversary in the hope of financial gain, the project is admirably suited to the task: by its nature, its hand will not have to meet the standard of belonging to any known person, and its material will not be required to be associated with autograph copies nor with a particular family, private library, or period. Four texts in the libro copiador treat the second voyage, which has always been the lacuna of Columbian accounts of the voyages though Hernando records a log for the voyage.38 If I am not mistaken, only one text, the last in the collation, has been before published in any form, and that “end of the book” offering of a text with its only contemporary, extant correlative as a unique 1505 printing in Italian translation is — convenient.39 In the same vein, it is noteworthy that each of the voyages is represented and that the better known and attested contemporary documents are absent. Gifted and determined forgers specialize in the acquisition, preparation, and production of period materials, so authentic paper and ink are no certain proof of a document’s authenticity, as Gil (“Falsificaciones colombinas”) and others have pointed out. The libro copiador is eminently an ideal forgery project.40
Transparent proofs must converge absolutely and become public in matters of text, history, and science before a document can be considered “authentic” in any sense that matters in the study of Columbian texts. One element out of place, and, like the Vinland Map or a fake Monet, the whole is rendered a forgery. Varnhagen’s efforts with his Sanfelices manuscript and De Lollis’s, in his careful and constant regard for Varnhagen’s manuscript in his Raccolta, are professional and personal investments that need not be repeated.
It would be pretty to think the story might come out on the other end with a historically verifiable provenance of writer, place, time, and source texts because the libro copiador contains so much tantalizing and intriguing material that it is tempting to accept it as it is. Angelo Trevigiano’s assurance to Domenico Malipiero in August 1501 that Columbus has just promised to accommodate Trevigiano by allowing him to copy all the letters that Columbus had written to the king and queen on the subject of his voyages is a tale suggestive of the nature of such a provenance. The assertion of that promise implies that Columbus at that date claimed to possess copies of all those letters and that he was willing to allow them to be copied by certain people.41 The first term — Columbus’s possession of copies of his writing — is completely credible, and it is possible that he had caused multiple copies of those letters to be produced. One might suggest, then, that some such copies derived from copies that eventually track back to his autograph document might have been laid away in the early sixteenth century, and at some distant day, a cache of them was taken from a holding place in some great personal library to serve the tutor of a young descendant of some courtier or foreign diplomat of Columbus’s time as material for copybook exercises. To compare the libro copiador’s letter to the king and queen with the Folio, then, might be worth some trouble, though the problem remains of the derivative copy and the unknown scribes who intervened between the — quite possibly difficult — Columbus autograph or its copy, written in a “rounder” hand by Columbus’s order, and the supposed young writer of the pages of the libro copiador.
By comparison with the discoveries of historians and scholars of texts in places and contexts that have some logical connection to the document in question and its writer, the copybook exercises have little to recommend them at present except the temptation of their tantalizing content and — possibly — a youthful cursive hand seen in the progress of development.42 If they are truth and not fiction, their discovery suggests that the documents from which they were copied — documents that then had to exist alongside them in time and space — may one day be found.
Notes
1 Justin Winsor later gives Bergenroth credit for “discovering” the Simancas manuscript (“Notes” 47), and indeed he may have “rediscovered” it when many had forgotten it. Bergenroth’s first volume of his Calendar (Henry VII 1485–1509) was published in 1862, and he records in his “Introduction” that he was at work on the documents cited there for two years (cxxxvi). Bergenroth, then, came to the Simancas Archive around 1859–1860, many years after González (1780–1833) had transcribed the manuscript and Fernández de Navarrete had published his transcription of the text in 1825. See Bergenroth’s Calendar (48 No. 80, bracketed note). Bergenroth writes that González “superintended the arrangement of the State Papers after their restoration by France” following the defeat and abdication of Napoleon in 1814. William Cornwallis Cartwright, Bergenroth’s biographer, calls the removal by Napoleon’s order “the spoliation of the Archive” and records that when ordered “to restore their plunder,” the French Government “imperfectly fulfilled its obligation” leaving “certain pigeon-holes in the Archives of Simancas covered with a paper on which is written ‘Los Documientos [sic] estan [sic] in Paris,’” where monsieur “Teulet of the Archives of France … treats them with tender care,” holding the conviction that the papers would be more useful “if they [all] were in his keeping” (60). Neither González nor the archivists of Bergenroth’s time, however, “detected any loss [among Spain’s state papers] which could be attributed to … wanton spoliation” by French troops (Calendar ix). Such destruction would have been against the aims that Bergenroth ascribes to Napoleon of establishing a master archive of Europe’s historical papers at Paris (vii–ix). Though neither Bergenroth nor Cartwright credits the story that Spain’s state papers were wantonly destroyed by Napoleon’s troops, both record the tale of the documents’ imperfect restoration. Cartwright gives detail of the depositions on the incidents and the character of the witnesses (60–61). Also see the introduction to Benjamin Franklin Stevens’s 1893 edition of Columbus’s Book of Privileges for a further perspective on Napoleon’s effort to move Europe’s archives to Paris (xxv–xxxii).
2 See Fernández de Navarrete (167–175). Tomás González discovered, catalogued, and transcribed the manuscript ahead of Fernández de Navarrete’s publishing his edition of it. Ramos (Primera) asserts the Simancas manuscript to be in the hand of Santángel, based on an entry cited by Ramos as having been written by Tomás González and recorded, not on the sleeve of the present document nor as an attachment to it, but in the Inventario razonado de los papeles de Estado de la Negociación de España que se hallan en este Real Archivo de Simancas (1818): “Copia de mano de Luis de Santangel, escribano de ración de los Señores Reyes Católicos, de una carta que le escribió el Almirante Cristóbal Colón …” [copy in the hand of Santángel … a letter written to him by the Admiral Christopher Columbus.] (90). Margarita Zamora either repeats Ramos’s assertion or else gives her personal reading of the notation: “A manuscript copy in Santángel’s hand …” (5). I have been unable to locate any document definitively attributed to the hand of Santángel, however, and the Simancas Archive reports being aware of no document in Santángel’s hand among its holdings. Nowhere in Fernández de Navarrete’s printed edition of the Simancas manuscript or on González’s autograph transcript of the text (reproduced in Sanz) or on the original manuscript held at the Archive (given here in facsimile) is thereany assertion concerning in whose hand the Simancas text is written. Having the hand definitively identified by comparative methods would be significant.
3 Translation: (The foregoing) is copied literally from the original document housed in this Royal Archive of Simancas. The affidavit is dated 28 December 1818. The certification of González’s transcript of the Simancas manuscript in González’s hand given in facsimile by Sanz (Secreto), however, is dated 20 January 1821.
4 See Humboldt’s Examen critique (II 338).
5 William Cornwallis Cartwright, praising Bergenroth and the Simancas Archive, observes that “Private persons (and their names are as well known in [the Royal Archive of ] Simancas as in the Manuscript Department of the British Museum) have carried away some interesting letters…” (59). Such an “interesting” letter as the Simancas manuscript and González’s transcript of it would have made attractive pickings for any serious manuscript thief over the past two-hundred years, yet it escaped being carried off during the years when it was most vulnerable.
6 See Bergenroth’s Calendar 15 Feb. 1493, No. 80 (43 ff.) and Cartwright’s “A Memorial Sketch” on Bergenroth’s difficulties in the Simancas Archive (esp. 98 ff.). See Cartwright for his excerpt of Bergenroth’s account of the Simancas manuscript (98).
7 The quotation comes from the 1870 revision of Major’s 1847 edition of Select (cxxv). On Major, see Lee’s entry in The Dictionary of National Biography.
8 Asensio writes, “[A]unque es muy importante, parece que debe tenerse por una de las muchas copias que en el mismo tiempo circularon, y que sirvieron de originales á los impresos antes mencionados [i.e., the Folio and Quarto]” (11). This sounds much like the statement De Lollis makes in the Raccolta (1892) (xl) theorizing the circulation of many manuscripts of the Letter.
9 Jane sets Gonzalez’s transcript in 1818, the year Bergenroth sets for its discovery, but González’s dating of the document is 1821. See Jane (cxxiv).
10 Sanz’s reproductions are provided as reduced facsimiles. See Bergenroth (43–48) and Sanz’s 1959 Secreto (509–517). By “otra copia,” Sanz implies the Quarto as the first “copia servil” of the Folio (245). For Sanz’s theory on the genesis and use of the manuscript, see Secreto (246–248).
11 See Jane (lxxxvii; cxlii–cxliii). Asensio and Jane do not figure in Ramos’s work.
Ramos “facsimile” of the Simancas manuscript, while serviceable in some respects, is not the same as that attested by the Archive to be the manuscript. The Ramos reproduction appears to be a tracing and at best may be the product of González’s initial step in reading the original for his transcript or his effort to preserve the text in a traced facsimile.
12 Dictation errors and omissions result from an individual’s ear-to-paper misinterpretation of the spoken word, from a misunderstanding of the speaker, from inattention, or from the scribe’s recasting approximations of what he has heard without trying to clarify. Should the speaker be reading from a text rather than dictating original material, the speaker could produce an eye-skip, and either the speaker or the scribe would be likely to catch it unless both were distracted.
13 A consideration in Sanz’s theory of the Simancas manuscript is that this passage in Andrés Bernáldez’s Memorias, both in manuscript (reproduced in Sanz Secreto 462, in the final lines on the page) and in Bernáldez’s printed chronicle (1273) include arroba. Other interesting distinctions exist between Bernáldez’s manuscript pages (as reproduced in Sanz) and the Simancas manuscript around this phrase. Differences exist elsewhere between Bernáldez’s manuscript pages (as reproduced in Sanz) and the printed chronicle, and many others exist between Bernáldez’s texts and the Folio and Simancas manuscript. These latter distinctions are usually in the form of enlarged detail and are probably explained by the time Bernáldez spent with Columbus and his access to Columbus’s papers (Sanz 246). For Sanz’s ideas about the Simancas manuscript’s production and use, see his Secreto (esp. 247–248 and 450).
14 These matching line numbers are, coincidentally, correct.
15 See Folio 2v.3–4 for this sentence. The scribe does not return to the end of the previous line to repair the sense of the foregoing part of the sentence that then becomes problematic.
16 This striking out and rewriting may suggest a landsman correcting caravela, the word he anticipated, for the one he read, calauera. The “correction” produces metathesis of the laterals, /l/ and /r/.
17 A second manuscript taken down by a copyist working alone, using as a copy text the same one used to create the Simancas manuscript, would be likely to have its own set of distinctions from both the Folio and the Simancas manuscript.
18 The material may have been applied at some point to strengthen the joint. These signs may suggest to some observers that the folded sheet was placed into a collation, but there are no prickings to indicate binding into a codex and no clear area of glue. Between 1v.66–69 are what appear to be, with extreme magnification, vestiges of writing that I believe have not been previously noted.
19 See Varnhagen/Volafan’s edition (1858) of his Sanfelices manuscript reproduced in Sanz (Secreto 485 ff.). Varnhagen had previously published an essay on Brazil under the pseudonym “amante do Brasil” (Schwartz 187), and he published another edition of Columbus material in 1869 under a pseudonym. Varnhagen was engaged in diplomatic service in Brazil and in various countries of Spanish America and was at work on several historical projects between 1854 and 1859, the period during which he presumably found the manuscript codex that he later disclaimed. If anyone other than Varnhagen saw and described the manuscript, I have not found that record though Henry Harrisse (because of the time period, his location, and his later comments about the manuscript) may have seen it. Kerney also showed confidence in it. The manuscript appears now to be lost, perhaps destroyed.
20 Varnhagen writes that the words “de D. Juan de Sanfelices” appear [E]n el primer pliego [on the first leaf] (vi). The manuscript is known as the “Valencia” manuscript in some sources, implying that Valencia was the geography of its discovery, as Jane specifies. Its transcript was published at Valencia.
21 Some notes in the 1892 Relaciones y cartas de Cristóbal Colón are cited as “—Navarrete” ([sic], without further reference). Fernández de Navarrete (d. 1844) is not the immediate author of the notes for this publication, but they come from his Colección de los viages (1825 167 ff.).
22 Eames writes that the manuscript, “in Spanish, addressed to Don Gabriel Sanchez [sic], was discovered by Varnhagen in the Colegio Mayor at Cuenca” (“Introduction” xiii). While Varnhagen’s historical work and opinions on Brazilian history had their critics, confidence in him seems wellplaced; he enjoyed connections with men such as Alexander Von Humboldt and was known for exhaustive investigations in Peninsular archives and libraries. To Varnhagen’s researches, for example, we owe discoveries in Peninsular chivalric literature with its redactions and reworkings of the matière de Bretagne (Da Litteratura dos Livros de Cavallarias. Vienna, 1872), and he was known as “the father of modern Brazilian historical scholarship” (Schwartz 185). See Stuart B. Schwartz’s study of Varnhagen.
23 See Kerney’s references (x, 13 n. 5). Sanz reproduces the Varnhagen/Volafan tract (Secreto 483– 493).
24 “Fray Juan de Sanfelices, de Zalamea, escritor,” is given by Nicolás Diaz y Perez [sic] in his chronological listing of “los mas [sic] célebres escritores extremeños” among eighteenth-century writers (240), a gentleman who seems less likely to be the book’s owner.
25 Licenciado is a professional title conferred upon completion of requirements for a profession such as the law. Marvin Lunenfeld, in his discussion of titles designating signatories in certain Royal Council correspondence of the period, finds the title licenciado accompanying the names of “legally trained officials” beginning in the early 1490s (77). Sevilla is the location of the Casa de Contratación, from which the crown exercised control over New World commerce and enterprises and over which the Real y Supremo Consejo de Indias had authority; papers of the Consejo reside in the Archivo General de Indias (AGI) in Sevilla. Braulio Vázquez of AGI reports that Juan de Sanfelices is represented in the documents there as “regente de la Audiencia de los Grados en Sevilla, como presidente de la Casa de la Contratación y como miembro del Consejo de Castilla, en la primera mitad del siglo XVII” (personal email correspondence 28 January 2013).
26 See Álvarez de Toledo (147); she cites the document as AI (Archivo de Indias) 34, f. 25v.
27 See “Fray Gerundio” in Works Cited (El Motín 5c–6b).
28 Álvarez de Toledo cites Ernst Schäfer’s Consejo Real as her source (I 358–361).
29 See Gallardo’s series of articles published in the 1930s on Charles Town (Charlestown) and Spanish interests (59–64 and n. 22). The date of this letter is some thirty years after Juan de Sanfelices was supposed to have been removed from the Council according to Schäfer’s record. Neither of the two articles that continue Gallardo’s study of relevant correspondence at the period refers to Juan de Sanfelices. Names written in the margin do not ensure that those named are contemporary with the document or even that the men named are still living at the date of the document.
30 Certain disconnects appear in the document record, however. In his nineteenth-century account of the mid-seventeenth-century uprising against the Spanish in Naples, Ángel de Saavedra, Duque de Rivas, recalls the violent death of an elderly Spaniard called “don” Juan de Sanfelices, “este buen anciano” [this good old man], in 1647. See Ángel de Saavedra’s history of the uprising (240–281, esp. 240; 280–281), where he describes Juan de Sanfelices pleading for his life but being stoned and beaten before being beheaded and having his remains dragged through the streets. Braulio Vázquez’s careful research into this question revealed the disconnect in the dates (personal email 28 January 2013). The Duke’s narrative and the documents located by Vázquez and Gallardo either cloud the issue of when Juan de Sanfelices died or refer to two prominent men bearing the same name, perhaps closely related, living during overlapping years at the period. I came very late unfortunately to Varnhagen’s statement that he felt his manuscript might have belonged to “some counsellor of the Indies” at the end of the sixteenth or the beginning of the seventeenth century. See the following note.
31 Harrisse (“Early” 121) translates and quotes Varnhagen’s introductory remarks to his Carta de Cristobal Colón of 1869.
32 In his “Introduccion” [sic] to his variorum edition of the Letter in 1869, Varnhagen/Volafan writes: “[N]os hacen creer que ella [‘esa nuestra copia’] no precedió de ningun original, sino antes de la mismamala copia procedente del impreso, de la cual se sacaria tambien la de Simancas, aumentandose en esta los errores, y mejorándose aquella por la crítica” (XIV–XV [sic]). Varnhagen published an edition in a few copies in 1869, in which he refers to his discounting the authenticity of his manuscript. See Sanz (Secreto 481).
33 See Varnhagen/Volafan’s edition (6) for the Teneryfe passage. See Folio 1r.26–27 for the corresponding passage.
34 The abbreviation “Tarr.” in Gil and Varela’s Textos y documentos completos (newer edition) refers to the “Tarragona” location of the libro copiador at the time that it was purchased by the Spanish Ministry and became a holding of AGI. The late Juan Adolfo Vázquez’s review of De Armas’s book (along with three other titles) provides a helpful summary of each of the nine letters contained in the libro copiador (Vázquez 271–273).
35 See, for example, the “Introduction” and notes in Zamora’s Reading Columbus where she writes that the “Carta a los Reyes” or “4 March letter” (of the libro copiador) “was probably [the] common matrix” of all the editions of the Letter and of the Simancas manuscript (5 and note, n. 5 in the endnote reference, but corresponding with n. 4 [200–201]). Zamora refers to the copybook’s “Carta a los Reyes” as “lost or suppressed for half a millennium” and writes that it “was only known to have existed at all because it was mentioned in a postscript to the 15 February version” (6), i.e., in the Spanish versions of the Letter.
36 Rumeu de Armas writes, “La fecha aproximada del escrito colombino nos permite colegir el parentesco próximo con los textos originales, de los que pudiera considerarse segunda or tercera copia” [The approximate dating of the Columbian writing permits us to set their close relationship to the original texts, among those that might be considered the second- or third-hand copy] (20). For now, pace.
37 These texts probably reflect originals at a remove of three or four copies in the best case and quite possibly more. For example, should Columbus have caused copies to be made of his papers (as he did), he might have given a set of copies to be copied by a member of the court who requested them for some state or personal reason, and those copies might then have been reproduced twice or more to achieve clean copies for sending to a higher-ranking person, and so on up the line. From Columbus’s diligence in having documents (the Book of Privileges) copied and stored in various safe places before the fourth voyage, one can hardly doubt that Columbus took care to have important papers copied professionally, a habit that Varela substantiates and explains (Textos 81). Columbus also writes of copying and recasting important papers in surviving autograph Letters. In Thacher VIIII / Varela LIV, for example, Columbus thanks Padre Gaspar Gorricio for preparing a document on Columbus’s behalf that will then be suitable to show to the sovereigns (la qual viene proprio fixada para tan altos prinçipes) and asks that it be executed in “a more legible (mas redonda) hand that as a gentleman (señor) you know well how to do” (os la tornar a enbiar para que se escriua en letra mas redonda como señor la sabeys bien hazer). Varela’s transcript sets señor as a nominative of address with a slightly different result (449). A second autograph letter to Padre Gorricio (Varela LVI / Thacher X) refers to Columbus’s need for a certified, durable copy of a document concerning his rights and titles: Mucho he menester un traslado abtorizado de escriuano publico de una provision … y queria que fuese en pergamino [I greatly need a copy authorized by a public scribe (notary public) of a provision … and was hoping that it might be done on parchment] (Varela 450–451). Thacher reports that the copy, given by Fernández de Navarrete (II 221), was produced within four days (Thacher III 159). Autographs are numbered in Thacher (volume III), where a facsimile of the autograph is given prior to its transcription and translation into English, and in Varela’sTextos, where she provides notes with her transcripts. The systems are naturally distinct between Varela and Thacher. The numbering of texts in the earlier edition of Varela was updated to include the “Tarragona” texts (libro copiador), and the numbering given here reflects that of the later edition and its reprint.
38 For firsthand accounts of the second voyage, see chapter 12, note 19.
39 The item known as the Lettera Rarissima is represented by this text, No. 9 in the libro copiador. It is contained in a manuscript dated in the second half of the eighteenth century (Madrid) and in a unique printing of 1505, the translation and its printing taking precedence over the manuscript. Fernández de Navarrete gives it (I 445–460), as do De Lollis (I Pt. 2, 175–205); Jane (II 72–111); Morison (Journals 371–385); and Varela (Documentos No. LXXIV, 485–503), collating it with the text of the libro copiador (Tarr.) edited by Gil. The letter is datelined Jamaica, 1503 and is directed to the sovereigns concerning the fourth voyage. It was edited and published in 1810 (Morelli) in a text available online at Archive.org courtesy of Brandeis University.
40 See Gil’s essay in Textos (70 ff.). The Vinland Map forgery mentioned in chapter 1 took in respected twentieth-century academics and experts; Thomas Chatterton’s medieval verse manuscript forgeries in the eighteenth century convinced scholars and antiquaries of his day; and Vittorio Villa’s forged quarto apparently took in a few antiquarians in the nineteenth century. More recently, Mark Hofmann, a master forger of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century documents and nineteenth-century Latter-Day Saints materials, also fooled many experts, and Thomas McNamara had considerable success forging autograph poems by twentieth-century U.S. poets. The Mark Hofmann Case Collection compiled and catalogued under the direction of David J. Whittaker at Brigham Young University contains documents and provides chronology showing that New York autograph dealer Charles Hamilton both purchased materials directly from Hofmann and certified one of Hofmann’s forgeries. See Kirsten A. Seaver’s Maps, Myths, and Men on the Vinland forgery; Joe Nickell’s Detecting Forgery; Hamilton’s Great Forgers; and Whittaker’s Register of Hofmann-related documents as MSS 1571. Juan Gil describes known Columbus autograph forgeries (70–71). A sketch of the coasts and islands around Hispaniola that was purchased by the House of Alba (described in Thacher I 477 n. 1 and shown in III 89) is now generally considered a forgery. Gregory C. McIntosh describes the “Alba sketch-map” as being “of questionable authorship” (88) and elsewhere notes that it is “[p]robably a forgery of 1892” (Spanish-made), and Fernández-Armesto laments that images of the map continue to appear as illustrations “in sublime indifference to the fact that [the map] was forged” (Amerigo 95). See Gil’s exposition in “Falsificaciones colombinas” regarding the map forgery (Textos 71–72).
41 The text of the Trevigiano (Trivigiano) letter is given as a transcript in Italian and in an English translation by Thacher, who describes the provenance of the letter (II 440–444). Thacher identifies Trevigiano as “Secretary of Domenico Pisani, Ambassador from the Republic of Venice to the Spanish court” (441), and Harrisse describes Trevigiano as “Chancellor [an administrator or “secretary” in the political sense] to the Venetian Embassy and, of course, a frequenter to the [Spanish] Court” (BAV I 75). Trevigiano knew the Italian courtier Peter Martyr and was on terms of friendship, he says, with his countryman Columbus. Trevigiano is credited with publishing the first Decade prematurely, according to Harrisse, quoting Brunet quoting Morelli, and citing additional probative circumstances (BAV 75). Columbus’s determined production of the documents contained in his Privilegios in multiple copies and his circumspect distribution of them to multiple locations on a short timeline before the fourth voyage strongly attests to his care in preserving important documents. I cite Brunet (5th edition) as the most likely to have been used by Harrisse and others in the late nineteenth century.
42 To take another case, Tomás González’s locating the Simancas manuscript of the Letter in crates of royal documents returned to the Archivo Real from France is entirely logical; the hand is undoubtedly contemporary with the Letter and the damage and markings are consistent. Fernández de Navarrete’s discovery of Bartolomé de las Casas’s transcript of Columbus’s shipboard Diario from the first voyage in the library of the Duque del Infantado is entirely plausible in terms of its lengthy possession by a noble family and its preservation in that family’s library. Fernández de Navarrete, like González, provides a formal certification of the document on his transcript, validated by himself and Juan Bautista Muñoz, and stipulates that he located it in the “archivo” of the Duque del Infantado as a “tomito de á folio, forrado en pergamino, con 76 fojas útiles de letra menuda y metida” [small volume in folio covered in parchment (vellum) with 76 leaves of writing in a small, deliberate hand] along with another “old” copy that he judged to be somewhat later than the first, also in folio, with the same kind of covering and 140 leaves. See Fernández de Navarrete’s Viages (I 166).
On the owners of the library where the Diario text was found, see Juan Miguel Soler Saucedo’s Nobleza española for “Infantado,” from which come subsequent citations (241–262). The Duque del Infantado at the period of Fernández de Navarrete’s discovery appears to have been Pedro de Alcántara Álvarez de Toledo Salm-Salm de Silva y Salm (255), who became the thirteenth Duque del Infantado in 1790 at the death of his father (254), and who held the title until his death in 1841 (255). The title, established by Fernando and Isabel, was first conferred on Diego Hurtado de Mendoza y Figueroa, and at the time of the first voyage, Iñigo López de Mendoza y Luna was the second duke, suggesting a plausible chain of possession back to the court and to powerful personalities at the period of its creation. De Lollis labels his text of the Diario as originally held in the library of the “Duca d’Ossuna” (1). The fourteenth Duque del Infantado, Pedro de Alcántara Téllez-Girón y Beaufort-Spontin, who apparently died without legitimate issue, was the eleventh Duque de Osuna (256, 450), and the titles appear to have been united at De Lollis’s writing.
Even Varnhagen’s Sanfelices quarto collation whose first leaf was described as attesting the names of two of its owners, Juan de Sanfelices and the Colegio Mayor de Cuenca, suggests a provenance that would bear renewed investigation if the collation could be found.