The Cuba oath: the notary's threatened penaltyFernand Pérez de Luna; certified copy by Diego de Peñalosa · June 12, 1494
Capitulations of Santa Fe (terms with the Crown)Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, with Christopher Columbus · April 17, 1492
II · Christians and Spices 1434–1480s
The Ottoman Turks and the Routes of Oriental TradeAlbert Howe Lybyer · October 1915
Henry urges Gil Eanes onward, as Zurara later reported itPrince Henry of Portugal, reported by Gomes Eanes de Zurara; translated by C. R. Beazley and Edgar Prestage · 1434 · reported in 1453
Sails and instruments: knowledge put to workOur synthesis of maritime histories
Families separated at LagosGomes Eanes de Zurara; translated by C. R. Beazley and Edgar Prestage · 1444 · written later in 1453
III · The Short World 1492
Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher ColumbusSamuel Eliot Morison · 1942
Columbus invokes Aristotle's small worldChristopher Columbus; translated by R. H. Major · 1498
Journal of the First Voyage (Diario), in Las Casas's abstractChristopher Columbus, abstracted by Bartolomé de las Casas; translated by Clements Markham · 1492 (Las Casas's abstract)
IV · In the Way October 1492 – February 1493
Taking people and proposing subjugationChristopher Columbus, preserved in Bartolomé de las Casas's abstract; translated by Clements R. Markham · 12 and 14 October 1492
Torres and Jerez: languages for Asia, tobacco in CubaChristopher Columbus, abstracted by Bartolomé de las Casas; translated by Clements R. Markham · 2 and 6 November 1492
Guacanagarí: rescue, weapons, and political advantageColumbus / Las Casas; Diego Álvarez Chanca; our explicitly identified inference · December 1492–November 1493
Guacanagarí’s assistance, gold and bells, and a cannon demonstrationChristopher Columbus, abstracted by Bartolomé de las Casas; translated by Clements Markham · 1492 (Las Casas's abstract)
Letter to Luis de Santangel on the first voyageChristopher Columbus; translated by R. H. Major · February–March 1493
Letter to Santangel: the promised cargoChristopher Columbus; translated by R. H. Major · 1493
V · A Line Down the Atlantic 1493–1498
Inter caetera (papal bull)Pope Alexander VI · May 4, 1493
Treaty of TordesillasFerdinand and Isabella of Castile and Aragon, and John II of Portugal · June 7, 1494
The second voyage carries a colonial food economyBartolomé de las Casas; Christopher Columbus, translated by R. H. Major · 1493–1494
La Navidad: destruction and disputed explanationsDiego Álvarez Chanca; translated by R. H. Major, revised by the 1906 editors · 1494, reporting November 1493
A Tunisian merchant and a Portuguese envoy at CalicutAnonymous participant in Vasco da Gama’s voyage; translated by E. G. Ravenstein · May 21, 1498
VI · Enemies of the Mexica 1519
Codex Mendoza (tribute roll of the Aztec empire)Nahua scribes and painters, with a Spanish gloss · about 1541
Malintzin’s transfer and the language relayBernal Díaz del Castillo · 1519 recalled decades later
Second Letter to Charles V (from Segura de la Frontera)Hernán Cortés; translated by Francis Augustus MacNutt · October 30, 1520
Tlaxcala chooses allianceDíaz del Castillo; Tlaxcalan council’s later pictorial account · September 1519
Malintzin at Cholula, in Díaz’s accountBernal Díaz del Castillo; our translation of his public-domain Spanish · October 1519 recalled decades later
The meeting and its later claimsBernal Díaz; Nahua informants and Sahagún; Hernán Cortés · November 8, 1519
Díaz remembers approaching the lake citiesBernal Díaz del Castillo; translated by Alfred P. Maudslay · 1519 recalled decades later
VII · The Fall of Tenochtitlan 1519–1521; later population estimates
Tlaxcalan deliberation, the flight, and Maxixcatzin’s deathBernal Díaz del Castillo · Events 1520
The Memoirs of the Conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo — Tlaxcala's councilBernal Díaz del Castillo; translated by John Ingram Lockhart · about 1568
Smallpox and the loss of ordinary movementNahua collaborators of Tlatelolco and Bernardino de Sahagún · epidemic of 1520
Third Letter to Charles V (from Coyoacán)Hernán Cortés; translated by Francis Augustus MacNutt · May 15, 1522
Malintzin relays the demand for more goldNahua collaborators of Tlatelolco and Bernardino de Sahagún · events after 1521 siege
The Peopling of Mexico from Origins to Revolution (Table 2)Robert McCaa · 1997 web draft
The Peopling of Mexico from Origins to Revolution (section 2: disease and recovery)Robert McCaa · 1997 web draft
Encomienda: imposed tribute and labor claimsCollege Board; John J. Newman and John M. Schmalbach
VIII · Small World The 1500s
Potatoes, preserved chuño, and the food trade to PotosíPedro de Cieza de León; translated by Clements R. Markham · 1553
The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492Alfred W. Crosby Jr. · 1972
Early dispersal of domestic horses into the Great Plains and northern RockiesWilliam T. T. Taylor, Pablo Librado, Indigenous research collaborators and coauthors · March 31, 2023
The Changing Significance of Latin American Silver in the Chinese Economy, 16th-19th CenturiesRichard von Glahn · 2019
Cycles of Silver: Global Economic Unity through the Mid-Eighteenth CenturyDennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez · 2002
Silver’s different purchasing power in two marketsDennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez · 2002
Trade, credit, pooled investment, and a gradual economic transitionCollege Board; John J. Newman and John M. Schmalbach
The voyage intended for the discovery of Cathay (1553)Richard Hakluyt, printing the record of Sir Hugh Willoughby's fleet · 1553 (printed 1589)
Privy Purse Expenses of King Henry VIIClerks of the king's chamber, for Henry VII · August 10, 1497
A particuler discourse concerning the greate necessitie and manifolde commodyties that are like to growe to this Realme of Englande by the Westerne discoueries lately attemptedRichard Hakluyt the younger · 1584
An argument for Protestant colonizationRichard Hakluyt the younger · 1584
An argument for colonies as a source of trade goodsRichard Hakluyt the younger · 1584
An argument for colonies against SpainRichard Hakluyt the younger · 1584
Later English and French exploration motivesJohn J. Newman and John M. Schmalbach; College Board
Slave raids against Lucayan communitiesWilliam F. Keegan · 1992
Exam Room only
Florentine Codex, Book 12: The Conquest of MexicoNahua collaborators of Bernardino de Sahagún; English translation by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble · about 1555–1577
A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher ColumbusWashington Irving · 1828
The Potato's Contribution to Population and Urbanization: Evidence from a Historical ExperimentNathan Nunn and Nancy Qian · May 2011
Wind furnaces at PotosíPedro de Cieza de León; translated by Clements R. Markham · 1553
Díaz on the language relayBernal Díaz del Castillo; translated by Alfred P. Maudslay · about 1568
Moctezuma's welcome in a later Nahua accountNahua contributors and Bernardino de Sahagún; Spanish column of the Florentine Codex · Encounter 8 November 1519
Background
Erdapfel (terrestrial globe)Martin Behaim, with the painter Georg Glockendon · 1492
Lisbona (view of Lisbon)Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg · 1572
Catalan Atlas (panel with Mansa Musa)Attributed to Abraham Cresques, Majorca · 1375
The True History of the Conquest of New SpainBernal Díaz del Castillo, a soldier of Cortés; translated by Alfred P. Maudslay · written by about 1568
Lending to the Borrower from Hell: Debt, Taxes, and Default in the Age of Philip IIMauricio Drelichman and Hans-Joachim Voth · 2011
Charter of the East India CompanyQueen Elizabeth I, letters patent to the merchants of London · December 31, 1600
True Relation of the Hardships Suffered by Governor Fernando de Soto (by a Gentleman of Elvas)A Portuguese gentleman of Elvas, a member of the expedition; translated by Buckingham Smith · Évora, 1557
Florentine Codex, Book 12: the great sicknessNahua elders and scholars with Bernardino de Sahagún; page painted in Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco · about 1555–1577
Florentine Codex, Book 10: The PeopleNahua elders and scholars with Bernardino de Sahagún; translated by Charles E. Dibble and Arthur J. O. Anderson · about 1569
Relation of the Pequot WarresLion Gardener (Gardiner), of East Hampton · June 12, 1660
Proof of service (probanza) of Juan GarridoJuan Garrido, before Spanish officials in Mexico City · September 27, 1538
The Book of Ser Marco Polo: ChipanguMarco Polo, told to Rustichello of Pisa; translated by Henry Yule · about 1298
Martin Behaim: His Life and His GlobeE. G. Ravenstein · 1908
Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry: Christmas husbandlie fareThomas Tusser · 1570s editions; wording from 1580
Lienzo de Tlaxcala (reconstruction)Tlaxcalan painters for the council of Tlaxcala; reconstruction by Byron Ellsworth Hamann · 1552 (reconstruction 2010)
Atlas of World Population HistoryColin McEvedy and Richard Jones · 1978
Universalis cosmographia (world map of 1507)Martin Waldseemüller · 1507
Address Before the New England Society, New YorkRobert C. Winthrop · December 23, 1839
Christopher Columbus, MarinerSamuel Eliot Morison · 1955
Letter to Santangel: earlier in the letterChristopher Columbus; translated by R. H. Major · 1493
American silver reaching East Asia: an estimateJacques Melitz, discussing Pierre Chaunu’s estimate · 2019
The Columbian Exchange: A History of Disease, Food, and IdeasNathan Nunn and Nancy Qian · 2010
Francisco Niño's reason: 335 leagues of coastFrancisco Niño, as recorded by Fernand Pérez de Luna · June 12, 1494
A ship's boy reacts: a dramatized imageOur writers and artists, using Pérez de Luna's record · June 12, 1494 · reconstructed reaction
Cuitláhuac’s short rule and deathFrancisco López de Gómara · 1552
Huayna Capac’s death and the uncertain diseaseRobert McCaa, Aleta Nimlos and Teodoro Hampe-Martínez · 2004
Chinese merchants and silver at ManilaAntonio de Morga; translated by Henry E. J. Stanley · 1609
The expulsion order and the July deadlineFerdinand and Isabella · March 31, 1492
Columbus turns the wreck into a settlement opportunityChristopher Columbus, in Las Casas's abstract; translated by Clements R. Markham · December 26, 1492
Juan de la Cosa’s recorded affirmationFernand Pérez de Luna, notary; certified copy by Diego de Peñalosa · June 12, 1494
The oath record dismisses island knowledgeFernand Pérez de Luna’s notarial record of Columbus’s requisition · June 12, 1494
Juan de la Cosa’s chart, signed 1500Juan de la Cosa; surviving chart held by Museo Naval, Madrid · Signed 1500
The interpreter recorded as Diego ColónChristopher Columbus and Bartolomé de las Casas; historical identification discussed by Esteban Mira Caballos · Second voyage, 1493–1496
The crew complains; Columbus insists on continuingChristopher Columbus, abstracted by Bartolomé de las Casas; translated by Clements Markham · 1492 (Las Casas's abstract)
Columbus names the returning interpreterChristopher Columbus and Bartolomé de las Casas; historical identification discussed by Esteban Mira Caballos · February 26, 1495
I · The Oath
June 12, 1494
Notarial record · our translation from Spanish
The Cuba oath: the notary's threatened penalty
Fernand Pérez de Luna; certified copy by Diego de Peñalosa · June 12, 1494
Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.
On screen: I · The Oath
English translation
OUR TRANSLATION, EXCERPT: …a hundred lashes, and they would cut out his tongue.
SPANISH: y si fuere Grumete ó persona de tal suerte, que le daria ciento azotes y le cortarían la lengua
CONTEXT, OUR SUMMARY: Columbus required the notary to ask the crews of three caravels whether they doubted that the coast was mainland at the beginning of the Indies. Pérez de Luna records that he imposed a penalty on anyone who later contradicted the answer given: 10,000 maravedís and the loss of the tongue; for a ship's boy or a person of that sort, a hundred lashes and the loss of the tongue. The opening quotes only the last penalty fragment. It is a threat in a written record, not evidence of a punishment being carried out. The record attributes the penalty to the notary; we do not say Columbus ordered mutilation.
QUESTION IN SPANISH: que dijesen si tenían dubda alguna que esta tierra no fuese la tierra-firme al comienzo de las Indias
QUESTION, OUR IDIOMATIC TRANSLATION: that they should say whether they had any doubt that this land was the mainland at the beginning of the Indies. The Spanish no after dubda is treated as expletive in this context, not as a reversal of the asserted geography. This question is contextual information, not an additional spoken line. The translation and shortened performed warning are not recovered English dialogue. The certified copy is dated January 14, 1495, not June 14.
Sourcing
Historical situation
On the Niña off Cuba, 12 June 1494, during Columbus's second voyage; the notary also questioned the San Juan and Cardera separately. A surviving certified copy was made in Isabela in January 1495.
Intended audience
The ships' crews, royal officers and later readers of the legal record.
Purpose
To establish an authoritative affirmation that the coast was mainland and foreclose later contradiction.
Point of view
A colonial notary acting at the Admiral's request. A recorded oath under threatened punishment is evidence of coercion, not independent proof of the coastline's geography. On-camera delivery stages his written record; the voice's pronouns remain those of the record.
Martín Fernández de Navarrete, Colección de los viajes y descubrimientos, tomo II, 2nd ed. (Madrid, 1859), document LXXVI, pp. 162–168, especially pp. 163–164. Public-domain Spanish. Our English translation.
Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, with Christopher Columbus · April 17, 1492
Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.
On screen: I · The Oath; III · The Short World
[Summary of the terms, not the original wording:] The Crown grants Columbus, if he discovers and takes islands and mainland in the Ocean Sea, the office of Admiral of the Ocean Sea, the posts of viceroy and governor of the lands he finds, and the title Don. The offices are to pass to his heirs. He is to keep one tenth of the riches taken there, after costs. The Crown confirmed the titles in a formal Privilege issued at Granada on April 30, 1492, whose English text is at the link; that document does not carry the tenth.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Signed in the Spanish army camp at Santa Fe outside Granada, three months after the last Muslim kingdom in Iberia fell, after years of refusals and after Columbus's backers at court had argued his case again.
Intended audience
Columbus and the two monarchs and their officials; the contract was then copied into the royal registers.
Purpose
To fix exactly what the Crown would pay for the gamble: rank, government and a share of the profits, in a form that followed medieval Catalan-Aragonese contracts for seagoing ventures.
Point of view
The Crown of Castile and Aragon, which risked little (three small ships) and stood to gain a great deal, and Columbus, who bargained hard for titles that would make him a noble.
Capitulations of Santa Fe (Archivo General de Indias, Seville), April 17, 1492; terms as summarized in Samuel Eliot Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea (Boston: Little, Brown, 1942). The Privilege of Granada (April 30, 1492) confirming the offices: English text from F. N. Thorpe, ed., Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters (Washington, 1909), Avalon Project.
The Ottoman Turks and the Routes of Oriental Trade
Albert Howe Lybyer · October 1915
Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.
On screen: II · Christians and Spices
…the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks deserves special attention, since that conquest has been imagined to have closed the routes of the Levant to such an extent as to force the western Europeans to seek new routes. If this had been the case the price of spices must have shown a marked increase between 1453 and 1498, which it did not do… The entire hypothesis seems to be a legend of recent date, developed out of the catastrophic theory which made the fall of Constantinople an event of primary importance in the history of mankind.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Published in October 1915, in the second year of the First World War, when the Ottoman Empire was at war with Britain and France and the story that 'the Turks closed the road to Asia' was a popular way to explain the age of discovery.
Intended audience
Scholars: readers of the English Historical Review.
Purpose
To test, against spice-price records and trade evidence, the idea that the Turkish capture of Constantinople in 1453 forced Europeans to look for a sea route to Asia.
Point of view
An American historian of the Ottoman Empire. Later historians, including Frederic Lane in 1940, refined his picture of the spice trade, but his point that spice prices did not jump after 1453 has held up.
A. H. Lybyer, 'The Ottoman Turks and the Routes of Oriental Trade,' English Historical Review 30, no. 120 (Oct. 1915): 577-588, note 32; DOI 10.1093/ehr/xxx.cxx.577. Full text: Project Gutenberg ebook 50860.
English translation by C. R. Beazley and Edgar Prestage, 1896
You cannot find a peril so great that the hope of reward will not be greater.
SOURCE CONTEXT, OUR SUMMARY: In chapter IX, Zurara reports Henry encouraging Gil Eanes before the 1434 voyage past Cape Bojador. The exact English sentence above is from Beazley and Prestage's public-domain translation. Chapter VII explains Henry's interest in trade, the strength of Muslim powers, Christian allies and spreading the faith. Those motives are paraphrased by the narrator. Henry's quay setting and gestures are reconstructed. He sponsored African voyages; we do not put him aboard them or invent a navigation school at Sagres.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Zurara wrote in 1453 about the prince's earlier patronage of Portuguese voyages along Africa's Atlantic coast.
Intended audience
The Portuguese court and readers of a chronicle celebrating royal expansion.
Purpose
To honor Henry's persistence and explain the ventures he supported.
Point of view
A favorable court chronicler reporting a prince's speech roughly nineteen years later. The quotation is verbatim in the cited English translation, not an independently preserved transcript of Henry's voice.
Gomes Eannes de Azurara [Zurara], The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, trans. C. R. Beazley and Edgar Prestage, vol. I (Hakluyt Society, 1896), ch. IX, p. 33; motives in ch. VII, pp. 27–30. Sentence. English translation public domain.
Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.
On screen: II · Christians and Spices
[Paraphrase:] These tools had histories across cultures. Chinese compass knowledge, Mediterranean sailing practice and astronomical instruments developed and transmitted through the Muslim world contributed to European ocean navigation. A lateen sail does not let a vessel sail directly into the wind. A compass indicates direction; latitude work requires observation of celestial altitude and appropriate astronomical knowledge. The pilot shown indoors prepares his instrument rather than taking a latitude measurement through the window. Knowing the earth was round did not settle the distance to Asia. The working sail scene is an illustrative later-fifteenth-century reconstruction, not a claim about the rig of Eanes's 1434 vessel.
Sourcing
Historical situation
A synthesis of established navigation history for our explanation of Atlantic expansion.
Intended audience
AP U.S. History students studying maritime technology and motives for exploration.
Purpose
To connect practical work with the tools that made voyages possible, while avoiding the flat-earth myth and a claim of exclusively European invention.
Point of view
The reconstructed workers illustrate practices without adding named testimony.
Samuel Eliot Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea (1942), navigation discussion. College Board APUSH CED Topic 1.4, p. 46, KC-1.2.I.C. No new direct quotation or unverified page number is asserted.
English translation by C. R. Beazley and Edgar Prestage (1896 edition)
…then was it needful to part fathers from sons, husbands from wives, brothers from brothers.
SOURCE CONTEXT, OUR SUMMARY: Zurara describes the division of African captives at Lagos on August 8, 1444. He reports Henry present on a horse and receiving a share. We use neither a disputed 'first slave market' claim nor the claim that slavery began here. Zurara's grief sits inside a chronicle that praises the prince and justifies expansion through conversion. His on-camera address performs words he wrote in 1453; it does not establish that he stood in this field or spoke them there. The families' particular movements and faces are reconstructed; no invented individual dialogue is assigned to them.
Sourcing
Historical situation
A court chronicler describes captives divided in Lagos after Portuguese raiding on Africa's Atlantic coast.
Intended audience
The Portuguese court and later readers of the chronicle.
Purpose
To record and praise Henry's expansion while describing the captives' suffering.
Point of view
The author expresses pity but writes in service of the prince and accepts the religious justification for captivity. His account mediates the captives' experience; it is not their own surviving testimony.
Zurara, The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, trans. Beazley and Prestage, vol. I (Hakluyt Society, 1896), ch. XXV, pp. 80–83, quoted fragment p. 82. Public-domain translation.
Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus
Samuel Eliot Morison · 1942
Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.
On screen: III · The Short World
[Paraphrase:] Morison describes Portuguese and Castilian objections to Columbus's projected distance west to Asia. Columbus's short crossing underestimated the scale of the task; neither party's proposal accounted for the inhabited Americas between Europe and Asia. Caravels, compass navigation and accumulated maritime knowledge made Atlantic crossings possible without making his estimate correct. The footnote reconstructs Behaim using Columbus's short degree. Actual is measured between the respective meridians along latitude 28° N, not the shortest navigable route, a Bahamas distance, or a voyage log. The fallback bars use this documented comparison; they are not measurements read directly from Behaim's surviving globe and do not implement the bespoke globe's projection. A separate instrument reconstruction must document its own assumptions and units.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Published in 1942, after a Harvard expedition retraced Columbus's voyages under sail in 1939-40, during the Second World War.
Intended audience
General readers and scholars, in what became the standard English-language biography of its day.
Purpose
To tell Columbus's life from a sailor's point of view, checking his navigation against the sea itself.
Point of view
Morison was a Harvard naval historian and sailor who admired Columbus as a seaman. Later historians criticized the book's admiring tone toward Columbus and its treatment of the Native peoples.
Samuel Eliot Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus (Boston: Little, Brown, 1942), vol. I, ch. VI, “The Enterprise of the Indies,” distance table and footnote. Table, numbers and assumptions; printed page number remains unverified. Transcription: https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/samuel-eliot-morison-admiral-of-the-ocean-sea ; edition record/scan linked below. These are nautical miles.
Christopher Columbus; translated by R. H. Major · 1498
Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.
On screen: III · The Short World
English translation by R. H. Major (1870 edition)
Aristotle says that the world is small, and the water very limited in extent, and that it is easy to pass from Spain to the Indies.
Sourcing
Historical situation
A letter on the third voyage, six years after the first crossing. We perform these later words in an earlier setting and label that explicitly.
Intended audience
Ferdinand and Isabella, sponsors of Columbus's voyages.
Purpose
To support his account of geography by invoking learned authorities.
Point of view
Columbus cites Aristotle as he understands him.
Christopher Columbus, letter on the third voyage (1498), in R. H. Major, trans., Select Letters of Christopher Columbus, 2nd ed. (Hakluyt Society, 1870), p. 145.
English translation by Clements Markham (1893 edition)
Thus, after having turned out all the Jews from all your kingdoms and lordships, in the same month of January, your Highnesses gave orders to me that with a sufficient fleet I should go to the said parts of India, and for this they made great concessions to me, and ennobled me, so that henceforward I should be called Don, and should be Chief Admiral of the Ocean Sea… The cause was that the star makes the movement, and not the needles… Thus two reckonings were kept on this voyage, the shorter being feigned, and the longer being the true one… Here the people could endure no longer. They complained of the length of the voyage… But the Admiral, at ten in the previous night, being on the castle of the poop, saw a light… it was like a wax candle rising and falling… for with fifty men they can all be subjugated and made to do what is required of them… On the spheres I saw, and on the delineations of the map of the world, Cipango is in this region.
Sourcing
Historical situation
First voyage, 1492–1493; original journal lost, surviving in Las Casas's later abstract. The prologue compresses Granada, expulsion and commission into January. We correct the chronology: Santa Fe, 17 April; expulsion departures by the end of July; Palos, 3 August.
Intended audience
Ferdinand and Isabella. Columbus wrote the log to be read by the monarchs who paid for the voyage and who held him to account.
Purpose
To report to the Crown what he found, to justify the expedition, and to show that he had reached the Indies and would find gold there.
Point of view
Columbus was an ambitious Genoese sailor who had bargained for titles and a share of the profit. Las Casas's abstract says he kept a shorter reckoning for the crew; scholars disagree about whether this was deception or the use of different leagues. Las Casas abridged the journal and sometimes wrote in his own voice. In c02 his written words are performed retrospectively; the prologue is not evidence that the expulsions preceded the April agreement or that he spoke these lines at departure.
Christopher Columbus, Journal of the first voyage (Diario de a bordo), as abstracted by Bartolomé de las Casas; trans. Clements R. Markham, The Journal of Christopher Columbus (London: Hakluyt Society, 1893), prologue and entries for Sept. 9, 17 and 25 and Oct. 10, 11, 14 and 24, 1492. For individual lines use the dated entry, not a merged speech: 12 October, p. 38; 14 October, p. 41; 2 November, p. 66; returning envoys, p. 71; 25–26 December, pp. 134–138.
English translation by Clements R. Markham (1893 edition)
[12 October:] I, our Lord being pleased, will take hence, at the time of my departure, six natives for your Highnesses, that they may learn to speak. [14 October:] for with fifty men they can all be subjugated and made to do what is required of them. [Editorial note: the first is a stated intention concerning six people, not a total of all later captives. The second is Columbus's boast, not an independently established measure of military power. Lucayan people already had languages; learn to speak expresses his demand that they learn his language. The original journal is lost; Las Casas preserved these passages as Columbus's words.]
Sourcing
Historical situation
The first days of contact at Guanahaní in the Bahamas, already inhabited by Lucayan communities. The exact modern island identification is disputed.
Intended audience
Ferdinand and Isabella, to whom Columbus addressed his account.
Purpose
To report people and resources in terms useful to the Crown and his expedition, including captives who could become interpreters.
Point of view
The taker's account. The performance is explicitly labeled written testimony, not recovered beach dialogue. The Native people described are not voiceless merely because this surviving record is Spanish.
Markham, The Journal of Christopher Columbus (1893), 12 October, p. 38; 14 October, p. 41.
Torres and Jerez: languages for Asia, tobacco in Cuba
Christopher Columbus, abstracted by Bartolomé de las Casas; translated by Clements R. Markham · 2 and 6 November 1492
Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.
On screen: IV · In the Way
English translation by Clements R. Markham (1893 edition)
[The 2 November entry describes Luis de Torres:] had been a Jew, knowing Hebrew, Chaldee, and even some Arabic. [The returned envoys' report in the 6 November entry:] men and women with a half-burnt weed in their hands, being the herbs they are accustomed to smoke. [Editorial note: Chaldee is glossed as Aramaic. The journal reports both Torres and Rodrigo de Jerez. We give the reported phrase to the Torres performer without adding first-person wording or pretending his exact spoken words survive.]
Sourcing
Historical situation
An embassy sent inland from Cuba to seek the ruler Columbus expected to find in Asia; the envoys returned after encountering an inhabited village.
Intended audience
Columbus's royal patrons, through a journal surviving only in Las Casas's later abstract.
Purpose
To report the envoys' observations and search for a ruler and trade.
Point of view
Spanish observations mediated through Columbus and Las Casas. The words are Markham's translation of reported observations, not a surviving Torres letter. Torres's later fate is not established here.
Clements R. Markham, trans., The Journal of Christopher Columbus (Hakluyt Society, 1893), pp. 66, 69–71, entries for 2 and 6 November.
Guacanagarí: rescue, weapons, and political advantage
Columbus / Las Casas; Diego Álvarez Chanca; our explicitly identified inference · December 1492–November 1493
Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.
On screen: IV · In the Way
[Paraphrase:] The 25–26 December journal records Guacanagarí mobilizing canoes, storage and guards after the Santa María grounded. On 26 December Columbus demonstrated a lombard and a hand-gun after talk of enemies the account calls Caniba or Caribs. This passage does not name Caonabó or record Guacanagarí requesting the weapon. We conditionally interpret political usefulness; we do not recover his private thought. Chanca describes later conflict involving Caonabó and Mayreni in a separate account of La Navidad. We omit a garrison total and give no invented dialogue.
Sourcing
Historical situation
An existing Taíno polity rescued a stranded foreign expedition; the foreigners established a settlement on its coast.
Intended audience
Columbus's royal patrons and, for Chanca's later report, Seville's town council.
Purpose
Columbus presents support for a settlement; Chanca describes the second voyage and conflicting explanations for its destruction.
Point of view
Spanish accounts credit Guacanagarí's practical aid but cannot give unmediated access to his intentions. A political advantage is plausible and labeled as inference.
Markham, Journal (1893), entries 25–26 December 1492, pp. 133–138, and 2 January 1493. For later rival relations: Chanca, letter on the second voyage, R. H. Major translation revised in J. E. Olson and E. G. Bourne, eds., The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot (1906), pp. 299–305.
Journal record · syllables with uncertain pronunciation
Guacanagarí’s assistance, gold and bells, and a cannon demonstration
Christopher Columbus, abstracted by Bartolomé de las Casas; translated by Clements Markham · 1492 (Las Casas's abstract)
Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.
On screen: IV · In the Way
English translation by Clements Markham (1893 edition)
RECORDED SYLLABLES: Chuq chuq. PARAPHRASE: On 26 December the journal describes Guacanagarí visiting almost weeping, offering possessions and help. A canoe arrives with gold to exchange for hawk’s bells; its occupants call these syllables. Later Guacanagarí discusses Caniba enemies; Columbus signals promises of royal protection and fires a lombard, whose noise makes people fall to the ground. We do not identify Caonabó as the target or conflate this occasion with a later visit. Spoken pronunciation is an approximation of Markham’s printed transcription, not recovered Taíno speech.
Sourcing
Historical situation
First voyage, 1492–1493; original journal lost, surviving in Las Casas's later abstract. The prologue compresses Granada, expulsion and commission into January. We correct the chronology: Santa Fe, 17 April; expulsion departures by the end of July; Palos, 3 August.
Intended audience
Ferdinand and Isabella. Columbus wrote the log to be read by the monarchs who paid for the voyage and who held him to account.
Purpose
To report to the Crown what he found, to justify the expedition, and to show that he had reached the Indies and would find gold there.
Point of view
Columbus’s account reports actions, syllables and his interpretation of signs. It does not establish a transparent shared language or Guacanagarí’s private thoughts.
Columbus journal, Las Casas abstract, 25–26 December 1492; Markham, Journal (1893), pp. 133–138, especially pp. 135–136 on Guacanagarí and bells, pp. 137–138 on the demonstration.
…they are guileless, and so liberal of all they have that no one would believe it who had not seen it. They never refuse anything that they possess when it is asked of them… They are not acquainted with any kind of worship, and are not idolaters; but believe that all power and, indeed, all good things are in heaven… spices also, and cotton, as much as their Highnesses shall command to be shipped… slaves, as many of these idolators as their Highnesses shall command to be shipped.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Written on the voyage home in February 1493 and printed in Barcelona within weeks. Columbus had reached the Bahamas, Cuba and Hispaniola, and had a small amount of gold and a handful of captives to show.
Intended audience
Luis de Santangel, the royal treasurer who helped raise the money, and through him the Crown. Printed editions soon carried it across Europe.
Purpose
To announce the discovery, present the islands as rich and easy to take, and win backing for a much larger second voyage.
Point of view
Columbus, writing as a salesman for his own venture. He praises the Taíno as gentle and generous and, in the same letter, offers the Crown as many of them as slaves as it commands.
Christopher Columbus, letter to Luis de Santangel (1493); trans. R. H. Major, Select Letters of Christopher Columbus, 2nd ed. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1870), pp. 7–8 and 15. The edition prints “idolaters” on p. 8 and “idolators” in the shipments passage on p. 15.
Christopher Columbus; translated by R. H. Major · 1493
Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.
On screen: IV · In the Way
English translation by R. H. Major (1870 edition)
…they are guileless, and so liberal of all they have that no one would believe it who had not seen it. They never refuse anything that they possess when it is asked of them… They are not acquainted with any kind of worship, and are not idolaters; but believe that all power and, indeed, all good things are in heaven… spices also, and cotton, as much as their Highnesses shall command to be shipped… slaves, as many of these idolators as their Highnesses shall command to be shipped.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Written on the voyage home in February 1493 and printed in Barcelona within weeks. Columbus had reached the Bahamas, Cuba and Hispaniola, and had a small amount of gold and a handful of captives to show.
Intended audience
Luis de Santangel, the royal treasurer who helped raise the money, and through him the Crown. Printed editions soon carried it across Europe.
Purpose
To announce the discovery, present the islands as rich and easy to take, and win backing for a much larger second voyage.
Point of view
Columbus, writing as a salesman for his own venture. He praises the Taíno as gentle and generous and, in the same letter, offers the Crown as many of them as slaves as it commands.
Christopher Columbus, letter to Luis de Santangel (1493); trans. R. H. Major, Select Letters of Christopher Columbus, 2nd ed. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1870), p. 15. The printed spelling is “idolators.” Short excerpt; omission marked with an ellipsis.
…give, grant, and assign to you and your heirs and successors, kings of Castile and Leon, forever… all islands and mainlands found and to be found, discovered and to be discovered towards the west and south, by drawing and establishing a line from the Arctic pole, namely the north, to the Antarctic pole, namely the south, no matter whether the said mainlands and islands are found and to be found in the direction of India or towards any other quarter, the said line to be distant one hundred leagues towards the west and south from any of the islands commonly known as the Azores and Cape Verde.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Issued in Rome in May 1493, two months after Columbus's return, when Spain and Portugal both claimed the right to lands in the Atlantic and Ferdinand and Isabella asked the pope to confirm theirs.
Intended audience
The kings of Castile and León, and behind them the kings of Portugal and other Christian rulers who might contest the claim.
Purpose
To give Spain the right to take and rule newly found lands west of a line, on condition that they were not already held by a Christian prince, and to convert the inhabitants.
Point of view
Rodrigo Borgia, a Spaniard by birth, speaking for the papacy on the Spanish crown's request. No Native people were consulted.
Pope Alexander VI, bull Inter caetera, May 4, 1493; English translation in Frances Gardiner Davenport, ed., European Treaties Bearing on the History of the United States and Its Dependencies to 1648 (Washington: Carnegie Institution, 1917), pp. 75–78 (quoted passage, p. 77), reproduced on papalencyclicals.net. The translation note (p. 75, n. 22, referring to p. 61, n. 19) acknowledges use of Blair and Robertson, The Philippine Islands, vol. 1, pp. 97–114.
…for the sake of peace and concord, and for the preservation of the relationship and love of the said King of Portugal for the said King and Queen of Castile, Aragon, etc., it being the pleasure of their Highnesses, they, their said representatives… covenanted and agreed that a boundary or straight line be determined and drawn north and south, from pole to pole, on the said ocean sea, from the Arctic to the Antarctic pole. This boundary or line shall be drawn straight, as aforesaid, at a distance of three hundred and seventy leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands…
Sourcing
Historical situation
Negotiated in the Castilian town of Tordesillas in 1494, after Portugal's king objected that the pope's line of 1493 cut Portuguese ships off from their route around Africa.
Intended audience
The two crowns, their officials and captains, and other European rulers who were told the two kingdoms had divided the ocean between them.
Purpose
To avoid war between Spain and Portugal by moving the dividing line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, so that Portugal held the sea route to Africa and India and, as it turned out, the bulge of Brazil.
Point of view
Two crowns dividing lands neither had seen, in a document that treats the peoples who lived there as absent. It shows how Europeans imagined the world could be divided by treaty.
Treaty of Tordesillas, 7 June 1494, English translation in Frances Gardiner Davenport, ed., European Treaties Bearing on the History of the United States and Its Dependencies to 1648 (Washington: Carnegie Institution, 1917), pp. 95–100; reproduced by the Avalon Project, Yale Law School.
Bartolomé de las Casas; Christopher Columbus, translated by R. H. Major · 1493–1494
Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.
On screen: V · A Line Down the Atlantic
[Paraphrase:] Las Casas records seventeen vessels leaving Cádiz on 25 September 1493. At La Gomera on 5 October the fleet buys calves, goats, sheep and eight sows, plus chickens and plant seeds. Cane is not listed in that loading passage. Columbus reports planted cane taking root in his 30 January 1494 memorial; this establishes cane in the colony, not its loading port. We narrate the livestock list and teach sugar separately in the Columbian Exchange interaction.
Sourcing
Historical situation
The second expedition supplied a colonial settlement with organisms and goods from across the Atlantic.
Intended audience
Las Casas’s later historical readers; Ferdinand and Isabella, addressed through Antonio de Torres in Columbus’s memorial.
Purpose
The chronicle recounts the voyage; the memorial seeks resources and presents the colony’s prospects to its sponsors.
Point of view
Two distinct accounts, written for different purposes. Columbus’s optimistic crop report is an interested request for continued support, not an independent survey of lasting agricultural success.
Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, book I, ch. LXXXIII, tomo II (Madrid: Miguel Ginesta, 1875), p.3, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/50351/50351-h/50351-h.htm ; Columbus, Memorial to Antonio de Torres, 30 January 1494, trans. R.H. Major, Select Letters (1870), pp.80–85, especially p.81, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/77820/77820-h/77820-h.htm .
Diego Álvarez Chanca; translated by R. H. Major, revised by the 1906 editors · 1494, reporting November 1493
Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.
On screen: V · A Line Down the Atlantic
[Paraphrase:] Chanca records contradictory early reports of disease, quarrels, fighting and burning. He describes the ruins he saw and reports complaints about Spaniards taking women. His party connected those complaints with the killings; this is an inference by Spanish observers, not omniscient reconstruction. Reported witnesses attributed attacks to Caonabó and Mayreni. Some Spaniards suspected Guacanagarí and others rejected that suspicion because his settlement had also burned. We name the uncertainty and show aftermath rather than an invented account of the attack. A larger second fleet was already present when the ruins were investigated.
Sourcing
Historical situation
A physician accompanying the second expedition describes arrival at the abandoned first settlement.
Intended audience
The town council of Seville.
Purpose
To report events and conditions of the expedition and support Chanca's interests at home.
Point of view
An expedition member who saw the aftermath, not the destruction. He depended on interpreted local testimony and participated in Spanish suspicions.
Diego Álvarez Chanca, letter on the second voyage (1494), Major translation revised in Olson and Bourne, The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985–1503 (1906), pp. 298–306, especially pp. 300–302 for contradictory accounts, seized women and suspicion; pp. 304–305 for Guacanagarí's report.
A Tunisian merchant and a Portuguese envoy at Calicut
Anonymous participant in Vasco da Gama’s voyage; translated by E. G. Ravenstein · May 21, 1498
Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.
On screen: V · A Line Down the Atlantic
English translation by E. G. Ravenstein, 1898
The merchants’ greeting in Ravenstein: “May the Devil take thee! What brought you hither?” They asked what he sought so far away from home, and he told them that we came in search of Christians and of spices.
Sourcing
Historical situation
A Portuguese degredado sent ashore meets two Muslim merchants from Tunis at Calicut after the voyage around Africa.
Intended audience
Portuguese readers of an expedition account.
Purpose
Record the expedition’s encounters and stated aims.
Point of view
The anonymous journal reports an answer indirectly; Ravenstein supplies the public-domain English. The merchant’s greeting is printed as direct speech; the envoy’s response remains an indirect report performed as a clause.
Anonymous Roteiro, A Journal of the First Voyage of Vasco da Gama, 1497–1499, trans. E. G. Ravenstein (Hakluyt Society, 1898), pp. 48–49.
Nahua scribes and painters, with a Spanish gloss · about 1541
Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.
On screen: VI · Enemies of the Mexica
The tribute folios list, town by town, the goods owed to the Aztec rulers, drawn as counted signs; on folio 46r these include cloaks, feather costumes, gold discs and bars, strings of jade and loads of cacao.]
Sourcing
Historical situation
Painted in Mexico City about twenty years after the fall of Tenochtitlan, when the Spanish rulers of New Spain wanted to know what the Aztec empire had owned and collected.
Intended audience
Emperor Charles V, to whom it was meant to be sent (French corsairs captured the ship, and it ended up in England), and the Spanish officials who governed New Spain.
Purpose
To record for the Spanish crown how the Aztec empire worked, and above all what each province paid in tribute.
Point of view
Nahua painters trained in the old pictographic tradition, working under Spanish supervision. A Spanish interpreter wrote the glosses, so the record passes through both worlds.
Arch. Selden A.1, tribute folios (about 1541). Facsimile image via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
Bernal Díaz del Castillo · 1519 recalled decades later
Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.
On screen: VI · Enemies of the Mexica
Narrator paraphrase of Díaz chs. 36–38: women were handed over, baptized and distributed among Spaniards. Malintzin knew the language of Mexico and that of Tabasco; Aguilar understood the latter and rendered it in Spanish. Coercion and the later importance of her work are both visible. We do not claim to recover her consent, private thoughts or an exact conversation.
Sourcing
Historical situation
The expedition’s early encounters at Tabasco and the Gulf coast in 1519.
Intended audience
Spanish readers of a retrospective conquest account.
Purpose
Explain the interpreters and give a soldier’s account of conquest.
Point of view
Díaz narrates the transfer as a conqueror. His account supplies no free employment agreement and is not Malintzin’s autobiography.
Díaz, Historia verdadera chs. XXXVI–XXXVIII. Maudslay vol. I, pp. 132–136. Spanish public-domain text in Gutenberg 64945.
English translation by Francis Augustus MacNutt (1908 edition)
There is one square, twice as large as that of Salamanca, all surrounded by arcades, where there are daily more than sixty thousand souls, buying and selling, and where are found all the kinds of merchandise produced in these countries… There is in this square a very large building, like a Court of Justice, where there are always ten or twelve persons, sitting as judges… There are other persons in the same square who go about continually among the people, observing what is sold, and the measures used in selling.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Written at Segura de la Frontera on 30 October 1520, after the Spanish retreat from Tenochtitlan and before the final siege. This is Cortés’s retrospective account to the emperor.
Intended audience
Emperor Charles V, who had not authorized the expedition. Cortés had defied the governor of Cuba, so the letter also served as his defense.
Purpose
To show Charles that he had found a great, rich empire, that he deserved royal favor, and that his disobedience had served the Crown.
Point of view
Cortés, a conquistador defending himself to the king. He praises the city's order and wealth, and he wrote in the ordinary way of a conquistador about towns he intended to take.
Hernán Cortés, Second Letter to Charles V, Oct. 30, 1520; trans. Francis Augustus MacNutt, Letters of Cortés, vol. 1 (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1908), description of the Tlatelolco market.
Díaz del Castillo; Tlaxcalan council’s later pictorial account · September 1519
Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.
On screen: VI · Enemies of the Mexica
Narrator synthesis: Tlaxcalan forces first fought the newcomers. Leaders then received Cortés and chose alliance for their own strategic purposes. The Lienzo de Tlaxcala later represented Tlaxcalan participation to claim recognition and privileges. This is the 1519 alliance, not the separate 1520 council or Xicotencatl’s execution in 1521. No recorded individual vote or speech is invented.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Tlaxcala opposed the Mexica and encountered a new armed force in 1519.
Intended audience
Díaz’s Spanish readership; the Crown addressed by later Tlaxcalan claims.
Purpose
Account for alliance and establish claims to credit and rewards.
Point of view
Spanish and Tlaxcalan records have their own purposes; strategic alliance cannot be reduced to passive assistance or worship.
Bernal Díaz del Castillo; our translation of his public-domain Spanish · October 1519 recalled decades later
Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.
On screen: VI · Enemies of the Mexica
English translation
Spanish base: por eso, madre, aguardad aquí, comenzaré á traer mi hacienda. Our translation: So, mother, wait here; I will begin bringing my belongings. This is Díaz’s reported reply to a Cholulan noblewoman offering escape and marriage to her son. He then says Malintzin went to Cortés and related the exchange. His claim that an attack on the Spaniards was planned is part of his defense of the massacre, not independently proved by this dialogue. The chapter itself disputes Las Casas’s contrary account. Mother is respectful address to the older woman, not kinship. No private thought or motive is recovered here. REVISED PERFORMANCE TRANSLATION: So wait here, mother. I'll start bringing my things. Same Spanish clause, plain English wording; earlier English above is retained as translation history, not a second spoken quotation.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Díaz recalls a massacre in which Spaniards and their allies participated.
Intended audience
Spanish readers, royal audiences and the veterans’ descendants.
Purpose
Defend the conquistadors’ conduct and justify the violence as a response to a plot.
Point of view
A participant writing decades later, assigning detailed dialogue to others and explicitly rebutting Las Casas. Attribution is essential; the allegation and the massacre are not equivalent evidentiary claims.
Díaz, Verdadera historia de los sucesos de la conquista de la Nueva-España, vol. I (1862), ch. LXXXIII, printed pp. 366–367 (offer, reply, report to Cortés), pp. 368–372 (massacre), pp. 376–378 (polemical justification). This is our Spanish-based translation, not Anderson/Dibble, James Lockhart or a blended English edition.
Bernal Díaz; Nahua informants and Sahagún; Hernán Cortés · November 8, 1519
Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.
On screen: VI · Enemies of the Mexica
English translation by A. P. Maudslay (1910 edition)
Narrator paraphrase, not a composite quotation. Díaz’s ch. 88 describes the meeting and attendants preventing Cortés’s embrace. Cortés’s Second Letter presents the encounter within his claim to have obtained obedience to Charles V. We distinguish these interested accounts. No Anderson/Dibble English, no invented Nahuatl and no exact dialogue are used in this fallback.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Rulers meet through interpreters at the entrance to Tenochtitlan; subsequent war changes how participants remember the meeting.
Intended audience
Different audiences: the emperor, Spanish readers and later collectors of Nahua testimony.
Purpose
Report, remember or justify the encounter and conquest.
Point of view
Courtesy, ceremonial restraint, translation and a conquistador’s legal claim must not be collapsed into an uncontested surrender.
Bernal Díaz, The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, trans. A. P. Maudslay, vol. II (Hakluyt Society, 1910), ch. LXXXVIII, meeting: https://archive.org/details/truehistoryofcon0002bern; Hernán Cortés, Second Letter (30 October 1520), trans. Francis A. MacNutt, Letters of Cortés, vol. I (1908), pp. 235–236, claimed obedience: https://archive.org/details/lettersofcorts01cortuoft. 24v–25v, Early Nahuatl Library transcription. This is a comparison of accounts, not a composite quotation; exact builder renderings are separately interpreted.
Bernal Díaz del Castillo; translated by Alfred P. Maudslay · 1519 recalled decades later
Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.
On screen: VI · Enemies of the Mexica
English translation by Alfred P. Maudslay
And some of our soldiers even asked whether the things that we saw were not a dream? The amazement belongs to the approach to the lake cities and causeways, not a literal statement by soldiers recorded on the spot.
Sourcing
Historical situation
A veteran remembers the early expedition decades later.
Intended audience
Spanish readers and descendants of the conquistadors.
Purpose
Explain Malintzin’s importance and defend the soldiers’ account of conquest.
Point of view
Spanish testimony acknowledges dependence on a Native interpreter while narrating events from the conquistadors’ interests.
Díaz, True History, trans. A. P. Maudslay, vol. II, ch. LXXXVII, p. 37; verbatim English.
Tlaxcalan deliberation, the flight, and Maxixcatzin’s death
Bernal Díaz del Castillo · Events 1520
Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.
On screen: VII · The Fall of Tenochtitlan
[Paraphrase.] After the Spanish flight, Díaz reports competing arguments in Tlaxcala and continued alliance. He later describes Cortés mourning Maxixcatzin, who died of smallpox. These are retrospective reports, not council minutes. DIRECTOR CHECK: Lockhart ch. CXXIX pp. 360–362 explicitly reports Xicotencatl the Younger proposing an alliance with Mexico and the other chiefs rejecting his plan. Narration uses that attested disagreement; a proposed additional claim about arriving Mexica peace envoys is omitted because this cited passage does not establish it.
Sourcing
Historical situation
A Spanish veteran recounts the conquest and the dependence of the Spaniards on Native allies.
Intended audience
Spanish readers, royal officials, and descendants of conquest participants.
Purpose
Explain decisions and defend the veteran conquerors’ contribution.
Point of view
Díaz was a Spanish participant allied with Tlaxcala. He wrote later and cannot supply verbatim council votes. The 1520 deliberation must not be presented as causing Xicotencatl’s 1521 execution.
Díaz, Memoirs of the Conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo, trans. John Ingram Lockhart (1844), vol. I, ch. CXXIX, pp. 360–362, council. The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, trans. A. P. Maudslay, vol. II, ch. CXXXVI, p. 301, mourning. The Toxcatl massacre and flight are also narrated in the conquest accounts.
The Memoirs of the Conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo — Tlaxcala's council
Bernal Díaz del Castillo; translated by John Ingram Lockhart · about 1568
Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.
On screen: VII · The Fall of Tenochtitlan
English translation by John Ingram Lockhart, 1844
EXCERPT: it is since that time only we eat salt again
SUMMARY: Díaz reports competing proposals after the retreat in 1520. Maxixcatzin cites renewed access to salt and cotton as reasons to maintain the alliance. The account records no ballot and does not establish that this debate caused Xicotencatl’s execution in 1521.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Díaz recalls a council in Tlaxcala after the Spanish retreat in 1520, writing decades later.
Intended audience
Spanish readers and descendants of conquest participants.
Purpose
To record the conquest and defend the importance of its participants and allies.
Point of view
A Spanish veteran reports Maxixcatzin's argument. This is reported speech through Díaz and an English translator, not a transcript of the council.
Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Memoirs of the Conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo, trans. John Ingram Lockhart (London: J. Hatchard and Son, 1844), vol. I, ch. CXXIX, pp. 360–362; excerpt p. 361. The excerpt is a fragment of the argument Díaz attributes to Maxixcatzin.
Nahua collaborators of Tlatelolco and Bernardino de Sahagún · epidemic of 1520
Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.
On screen: VII · The Fall of Tenochtitlan
English translation
OUR TRANSLATION: They could not stir, move from their place, or turn from one side to the other. PUBLIC-DOMAIN SPANISH: que no se podian bullir ni manear de vn lugar ni boluerse de vn lado a otro. The original continues with disrupted care and hunger. No modern English translation is used for the performance. CARE/HUNGER PARAPHRASE: Many also died of hunger because nobody could prepare food. Spanish: muchos murieron de hambre porque no auia quien podiese hazer comida. This describes deaths during illness and loss of care, not a claim that recovered survivors invariably starved.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Nahua testimony was collected after the conquest in a collaborative colonial manuscript.
Intended audience
Sahagún, his Nahua collaborators, and readers of their bilingual colonial account; the Spanish column addresses a different reading public from the Nahuatl.
Purpose
Remember the epidemic’s effects on bodies and households.
Point of view
The Nahuatl and Spanish columns are not identical; this excerpt translates the Spanish clause only.
53r, Spanish column. Public-domain original transcribed at Early Nahuatl Library by James Lockhart. English performed here is our translation of that Spanish, not Anderson–Dibble or Lockhart’s English.
English translation by Francis Augustus MacNutt (1908 edition)
…The alguacil mayor proceeded five or six leagues towards that town of Tascaltecal which is nearest to the borders of Culua, and there he met the Spaniards and the people who were to bring the brigantines. The day after he arrived they left there with the planks and cross timbers, all of which were carried in the most perfect order by eight thousand of the men; a marvellous sight to see, and it seems to me even to hear of, the bringing of thirteen small ships overland a distance of about eighteen leagues.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Written in May 1522, nine months after Tenochtitlan fell. Cortés describes the siege of the island city, including the brigantines his carpenters built in Tlaxcala and had carried across the mountains to Lake Texcoco.
Intended audience
Emperor Charles V, to whom Cortés owed an account of the conquest and a claim to govern what he had taken.
Purpose
To present the conquest as a triumph of planning and to secure his own appointment as governor of New Spain.
Point of view
Cortés, describing the victory in his own favor. He credits his Spanish carpenters and gives no name and little credit to the thousands of Tlaxcalan and other Native allies who carried the ships and who made up most of the army.
Hernán Cortés, Third Letter to Charles V, May 15, 1522; trans. Francis Augustus MacNutt, Letters of Cortés, vol. 2 (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1908), p. 31, the carrying of the brigantines to Lake Texcoco.
Nahua collaborators of Tlatelolco and Bernardino de Sahagún · events after 1521 siege
Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.
On screen: VII · The Fall of Tenochtitlan
OUR TRANSLATION: Our captain says it is not all here. PUBLIC-DOMAIN SPANISH: dixo luego Marina: el n̄r̄o capitan dize que no esta aqui todo. The abbreviation n̄r̄o means nuestro. The introductory “then Marina said” identifies reported speech. Do not substitute Anderson–Dibble’s or Lockhart’s English, or call this a direct contemporary transcript.
Sourcing
Historical situation
After Tenochtitlan’s fall, Cortés demands recovery of gold; the later record describes Marina conveying the demand.
Intended audience
Sahagún, his Nahua collaborators, and readers of their bilingual colonial account; the Spanish column addresses a different reading public from the Nahuatl.
Purpose
Record the victors’ demands and the responses of Native lords.
Point of view
This is later reported speech, not Malintzin’s own surviving manuscript. The words transmit the captain’s demand; they establish no private intention or personal greed.
85v, Spanish column. Public-domain Spanish transcribed by James Lockhart, Early Nahuatl Library. The Nahuatl question on fol. 86r is a different wording.
The Peopling of Mexico from Origins to Revolution (Table 2)
Robert McCaa · 1997 web draft
Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.
On screen: VII · The Fall of Tenochtitlan
[Paraphrase of McCaa's Table 2:] McCaa's Table 2 lists authoritative estimates of how far the native population of Mexico, or parts of it, fell between 1519 and 1595. The estimates differ widely, from about 22 percent to about 96 percent. Eight of the eleven rows fall between about 64 and 96 percent. McCaa writes that there is consensus that the sixteenth century was a demographic disaster. The gap reflects different guesses about the population in 1519 and different ways of reading tribute and church records.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Prepared in the late 1990s for a population history of North America, when demographers were still arguing over how many people lived in Mexico in 1519.
Intended audience
Historians and demographers, and students of population history.
Purpose
To compare the main published estimates side by side, so that readers can see how much they disagree and what they agree on.
Point of view
McCaa is a historical demographer who works with Mexican and Peruvian records. The table gathers other scholars' estimates instead of offering one of his own.
Robert McCaa, The Peopling of Mexico from Origins to Revolution, preliminary web draft (1997), Table 2; later chapter in Michael R. Haines and Richard H. Steckel, eds., A Population History of North America (Cambridge University Press, 2000). The table compares estimates with differing geographical coverage for 1519–1595. A population decline is not a measured percentage killed by one disease.
Over-work, disruption of the native economy, ecological distress, and forced relocation were much more significant than war in causing the demographic disaster, but disease remains the principal explanation for most historians, just as it was four centuries ago for the first chroniclers. … The epidemic was particularly severe because, unlike in Europe, where the virus was a childhood disease, in Mexico it found “virgin soil,” striking entire households, adults as well as children, in one massive blow. With almost everyone ill at once, there was no one to provide food, water, or care so that many who fell ill died, not of smallpox, but of hunger, dehydration, and despair.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Written in the late 1990s for a population history of North America, when demographers had begun to agree that disease was the main cause of the sixteenth-century collapse but still argued about how much else contributed.
Intended audience
Historians and demographers, and students of population history.
Purpose
To explain why the native population of Mexico fell so far after 1519, weighing disease against war, overwork and disruption.
Point of view
McCaa is a historical demographer who works with Mexican and Peruvian records. He sums up a long scholarly debate, and he names the schools of thought instead of hiding them.
Robert McCaa, The Peopling of Mexico from Origins to Revolution, preliminary web draft (1997), §2; later chapter in Haines and Steckel, A Population History of North America (2000). The full field contains separate passages with an ellipsis. No measured fraction of deaths attributable to disease is claimed.
College Board; John J. Newman and John M. Schmalbach
Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.
On screen: VII · The Fall of Tenochtitlan
[Paraphrase.] Encomienda assigned Spaniards claims to tribute and labor from Native communities. Colonial authorities imposed extraction; disease was not its legal or moral justification and did not create the institution.
Sourcing
Historical situation
A teaching synthesis of the Spanish colonial labor system.
Intended audience
AP U.S. History teachers and students studying Spanish colonial institutions.
Purpose
Introduce a term whose institutions and coercion are examined in p1-03.
Point of view
A compressed curricular definition; tribute practices changed across regions and time. The painting is an interpretation, not a reconstructed grant ceremony.
AP U.S. History Course and Exam Description, Topic 1.5, KC-1.2.II.B. Newman and Schmalbach, United States History: AP Edition, Topic 1.5.
Potatoes, preserved chuño, and the food trade to Potosí
Pedro de Cieza de León; translated by Clements R. Markham · 1553
Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.
On screen: VIII · Small World
English translation by Clements R. Markham, 1864
Their principal food is potatoes, which are like earth nuts, as I have before declared in this history. They dry these potatoes in the sun, and keep them from one harvest to another. After they are dried they call these potatoes chuñus, and they are highly esteemed and valued among them. [Editorial note: The next sentence describes Spaniards profiting by selling this food at the Potosí mines. That connection is paraphrased in the narration; “chuñus” is the spelling in the cited main text.]
Sourcing
Historical situation
A Spanish traveler describes Andean food and the early colonial mining economy in the late 1540s.
Intended audience
Spanish readers and royal officials seeking accounts of Andean lands, peoples, and colonial resources.
Purpose
Record the lands, livelihoods and resources he observed.
Point of view
Cieza is a Spanish observer. Andean knowledge makes preservation possible; he records Spaniards profiting by selling the preserved food. His reported sailing age conflicts with other chronology, so the narration says only that he sailed young.
Cieza, Crónica del Perú, Part I (1553), prologue and ch. XCIX; trans. Clements R. Markham, The Travels of Pedro de Cieza de León (Hakluyt Society, 1864), pp. 360–361. Ch. XCIX, not CIX, is the food/mines passage. Public-domain translation. Direct check of the linked Gutenberg transcription resolves a ledger conflict: the main text prints “chuñus” with ñ (pp. 360–361); the footnote has a different spelling.
The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492
Alfred W. Crosby Jr. · 1972
Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.
On screen: VIII · Small World
[Paraphrase of Crosby's argument:] The meeting of the Old and New Worlds after 1492 was a biological event as much as a political one. Crops such as maize, potatoes and manioc, and animals such as the turkey, went east. Wheat, sugar, horses, cattle, pigs and sheep, and the diseases smallpox and measles, went west. Crosby named this two-way traffic the Columbian Exchange. Its effect on the peoples of the Americas was catastrophic, and its effect on the diet of Europe, Africa and Asia was large and lasting.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Published in 1972, when historians were beginning to write about the environment and public health, and when the 1992 quincentenary was still twenty years away.
Intended audience
Historians and general readers. The book was short, readable and widely assigned in college courses.
Purpose
To argue that the biological consequences of 1492 (crops, animals, germs) mattered as much as the political ones.
Point of view
A historian of Europe and of disease, writing from the view that ecology and germs shaped events. He gave the term 'Columbian Exchange' to the field.
Alfred W. Crosby Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972). Excerpt is a paraphrase.
Early dispersal of domestic horses into the Great Plains and northern Rockies
William T. T. Taylor, Pablo Librado, Indigenous research collaborators and coauthors · March 31, 2023
Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.
On screen: VIII · Small World
EXCERPT: They were deeply integrated into Indigenous societies before the arrival of 18th-century European observers
SUMMARY: Horses had reached the northern Rockies and central Plains by the first half of the seventeenth century, likely through Indigenous exchange networks. This later example concerns Indigenous adoption and dispersal; it does not locate those horses on the Plains in 1493.
Sourcing
Historical situation
An interdisciplinary study tests horse-dispersal histories previously dominated by colonial records.
Intended audience
Researchers and readers of Science, including communities whose histories it studies.
Purpose
To reconstruct early horse movements using archaeological, genetic, isotopic and dating evidence alongside Indigenous knowledge.
Point of view
Collaborative research makes Indigenous networks central and challenges chronologies based only on European observers. The authors qualify exchange networks as likely.
William T. T. Taylor et al., 'Early dispersal of domestic horses into the Great Plains and northern Rockies,' Science 379 (2023): 1316–1323, abstract p. 1316. DOI: 10.1126/science.adc9691. Excerpt is an exact sentence fragment, with its trailing clause omitted.
The Changing Significance of Latin American Silver in the Chinese Economy, 16th-19th Centuries
Richard von Glahn · 2019
Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.
On screen: VIII · Small World
The important role of Chinese demand for silver in stimulating worldwide silver-mining and shaping the first truly global trading system has become commonly recognised in the world history scholarship. The commercial dynamism of China during the 16th-19th centuries was integrally related to the importation of foreign silver, initially from Japan but principally from Latin America. Yet the significance of imports of Latin American silver for the Chinese economy changed substantially over these three centuries in tandem with the rhythms of China's domestic economy as well as the global trading system. This article traces these changes, including the adoption of a new standard money of account — the yuan — derived from the Spanish silver peso coin.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Published in 2019, in an economic-history journal, at a time when historians were treating the silver trade as the start of a single world economy.
Intended audience
Economic historians of Iberia, Latin America and China.
Purpose
To trace how the importance of American silver to the Chinese economy changed over three centuries.
Point of view
A historian of the Chinese economy at a University of California campus. He stresses how much China's demand shaped the flow of silver, not only Spain's supply.
Richard von Glahn, 'The Changing Significance of Latin American Silver in the Chinese Economy, 16th-19th Centuries,' Revista de Historia Económica / Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History (online July 23, 2019), pp. 1-33; DOI 10.1017/S0212610919000193 (open access). The excerpt is the article's abstract. The article supports the trading context; we cite Melitz separately for the estimated share of American silver reaching East Asia.
Economic history · reported historical price ranges
Cycles of Silver: Global Economic Unity through the Mid-Eighteenth Century
Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez · 2002
Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.
On screen: VIII · Small World
EXCERPT: silver exchanged for gold at a ratio of 5.5:1 or 7:1 in Canton
SUMMARY: The reported 1590s gold:silver weight ratios are 1:5.5–7 for Canton and 1:12.5–14 for Spain. At those ranges, 100 grams of silver corresponds to about 14.29–18.18 grams of gold in Canton and 7.14–8 grams in Spain. The fixed 100 grams is a teaching unit, not a coin weight. Chuan’s 1969 original, cited by these authors, was not independently inspected by the production. Page 417 discusses tax payments in silver. These ranges do not measure costs, losses, or guaranteed profits. Silver, trade, credit, and pooled investment contributed to gradual economic change; this article alone does not prove that silver created capitalism.
Sourcing
Historical situation
A modern account of early global silver markets.
Intended audience
World historians and economic historians.
Purpose
To explain interconnected trade through demand and price differences.
Point of view
The authors emphasize Chinese demand; their historical price ranges are observations, not guaranteed merchant profits.
Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, 'Cycles of Silver: Global Economic Unity through the Mid-Eighteenth Century,' Journal of World History 13, no. 2 (2002): 391–427. Excerpt and 1590s Canton/Spain ranges p. 393, citing Chuan (1969), p. 2; silver tax demand p. 417. DOI: 10.1353/jwh.2002.0035.
Silver’s different purchasing power in two markets
Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez · 2002
Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.
On screen: VIII · Small World
[Paraphrase.] Reported 1590s gold-to-silver weight ratios are about 1:12.5–14 in Spain and 1:5.5–7 at Canton. The same weight of silver could buy more gold at Canton. Costs and risks separated a price difference from realized profit.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Economic historians explain silver flows through differing market values and demand.
Intended audience
World historians and economic historians investigating intercontinental markets.
Purpose
Connect American production, Asian demand and intercontinental trade.
Point of view
The ranges are historical reports, not a continuous Seville price series. I7 inverts them: 100 g silver buys about 7.14–8 g gold in Spain or 14.29–18.18 g at Canton. The 100 g unit is not a coin denomination. Chinese silver taxation is also supported by von-glahn-silver-2019.
Flynn and Giráldez, “Cycles of Silver: Global Economic Unity through the Mid-Eighteenth Century,” Journal of World History 13, no. 2 (2002): 391–427, especially pp. 393 and 417. DOI 10.1353/jwh.2002.0035.
Trade, credit, pooled investment, and a gradual economic transition
College Board; John J. Newman and John M. Schmalbach
Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.
On screen: VIII · Small World
[Paraphrase.] New mineral wealth and expanding commerce contributed to changes from land-based feudal relations toward capitalism. Credit and pooled investment helped fund trade and distribute financial risks. These institutions had multiple origins and did not begin with American silver.
Sourcing
Historical situation
A curricular synthesis links exploration with European economic change.
Intended audience
AP U.S. History teachers and students connecting overseas expansion to European economic change.
Purpose
Make the financing mechanism explicit without a single-cause origin story.
Point of view
This is an explanatory synthesis, not the speech of a sixteenth-century merchant. Changes were gradual and geographically uneven.
AP U.S. History Course and Exam Description, Fall 2026 edition, Topic 1.4, p. 46, KC-1.2.I.B–C. Newman and Schmalbach, United States History: AP Edition, Topics 1.3–1.4. Compare existing drelichman-voth-2011 and muscovy-voyage-1553 for credit and pooled-voyage examples.
The voiage intended for the discoverie of Cathay, and divers other regions, dominions, Islands, and places unknowen, set forth by the right worshipful, master Sebastian Cabota Esquire, and Governour of the mysterie and company of the Marchants Adventurers of the citie of London: which fleete being furnished, did set forth the tenth day of May, 1553. and in the seventh yeere of our most dread Soveraigne Lord, and King, Edward the sixt.
Sourcing
Historical situation
London, spring 1553. A company of merchants had raised money for three ships to find a northern way to China (Cathay). Sir Hugh Willoughby's two ships wintered on the coast of Lapland, where the crews died; the third, under Richard Chancellor, reached Russia.
Intended audience
The company's own investors and officers, and later the English readers of Hakluyt's collection of voyages.
Purpose
To record the fleet's aim, ships and crews, and afterwards to give English merchants and the Crown an example of what a joint-stock voyage could attempt.
Point of view
Hakluyt promoted English overseas trade through collected voyage accounts. The record establishes a commercial objective; it does not prove a modern limited-liability arrangement or guarantee any investor’s profit.
Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation (Glasgow: J. MacLehose, 1903), vol. 2, p. 211, the 'true copie of a note found written in one of the two ships, to wit, the Speranza.' The 240 shares at £25 each (£6,000) are not in this text: Walter Besant, The Rise of the Empire (London: H. Marshall, 1897), pp. 28-29. The 1553 venture preceded the 1555 Muscovy charter.
Clerks of the king's chamber, for Henry VII · August 10, 1497
Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.
On screen: VIII · Small World
…For twenty jacquetts of the best sorte, £19. 6s. 4d. For browdering of the same jacquetts, £18… To hym that founde the new Isle, £10.
Sourcing
Historical situation
An entry in the king's private account book for August 1497, the month John Cabot came home from the coast of North America.
Intended audience
The king and the officers who audited his private spending.
Purpose
To record a cash payment. It was bookkeeping, not an announcement.
Point of view
A clerk noting the sum in the ordinary run of household costs, between clothes and gifts. He names no one. Later editors supplied Cabot's name and the place.
Privy Purse Expenses of Henry VII, entry for Aug. 10, 1497, printed in Samuel Bentley, ed., Excerpta Historica, or Illustrations of English History (London: Bentley, 1831), p. 113. Bentley prints the sum as £10; the manuscript gives it in Roman numerals.
A particuler discourse concerning the greate necessitie and manifolde commodyties that are like to growe to this Realme of Englande by the Westerne discoueries lately attempted
[Heads of Chapters.] I. That this westerne discoverie will be greately for thinlargemente of the gospell of Christe, whereunto the princes of the refourmed relligion are chefely bounde, amongest whome her Majestie ys principall… III. That this westerne voyadge will yelde unto us all the comodities of Europe, Affrica, and Asia, as farr as wee were wonte to travell, and supply the wantes of all our decayed trades… V. That this voyadge will be a greate bridle to the Indies of the Kinge of Spaine, and a meane that wee may arreste at our pleasure… one or twoo hundred saile of his subjectes shippes at the fysshinge in Newfounde lande.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Written in 1584 at Sir Walter Ralegh's request, while Ralegh's two ships were exploring the North American coast and England and Spain were sliding toward war.
Intended audience
Queen Elizabeth I and her chief ministers, whom Hakluyt hoped to persuade to back English settlements in North America.
Purpose
To argue that English colonies would spread the Protestant gospel, supply the goods England bought elsewhere, and weaken Spain by threatening its treasure fleets.
Point of view
A clergyman and geographer who never crossed the Atlantic. He collected sailors' reports and tailored the argument for a queen: religion, profit and rivalry with Spain, and no mention of what the settlers might owe the people already living in America.
Richard Hakluyt, A Discourse Concerning Western Planting (written 1584), ed. Charles Deane, Documentary History of the State of Maine, vol. II (Cambridge: John Wilson and Son, 1877), heads of chapters, pp. 3–5; ch. V repeats the “bridle” argument on p. 45.
Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.
On screen: VIII · Small World
PERFORMED ADAPTATION: This western discovery will be greatly for the enlargement of the gospel of Christ. ORIGINAL: That this westerne discoverie will be greately for thinlargemente of the gospell of Christe, whereunto the princes of the refourmed relligion are chefely bounde, amongest whome her Majestie ys principall. Spelling is modernized for performance and the introductory “That” is omitted; no invented substantive claim.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Hakluyt argues for English western colonies as competition with Spain intensifies.
Intended audience
Elizabeth I and royal advisers considering English western colonization.
Purpose
Persuade Elizabeth I to support colonization through religious, commercial and strategic arguments.
Point of view
An English Protestant advocate speaks about English policy. This is not evidence that French motives were identical.
Hakluyt, A Discourse Concerning Western Planting (1584), ed. Charles Deane (Cambridge, 1877), Heads of Chapters, ch. I, pp. 3–5. Adaptation modernizes spelling, expands “thinlargemente” to “the enlargement,” and omits the introductory “That.”
An argument for colonies as a source of trade goods
Richard Hakluyt the younger · 1584
Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.
On screen: VIII · Small World
PERFORMED ADAPTATION: This western voyage will yield unto us all the commodities of Europe, Africa, and Asia, as far as we were wont to travel. ORIGINAL: That this westerne voyadge will yelde unto us all the comodities of Europe, Affrica, and Asia, as farr as wee were wonte to travell, and supply the wantes of all our decayed trades. Spelling is modernized for performance, the introductory “That” is omitted, and the heading's last clause (“and supply the wants of all our decayed trades”) is cut; the limiting clause “as far as we were wont to travel” is kept, so the claim is not widened. No invented substantive claim.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Hakluyt argues for English western colonies as competition with Spain intensifies.
Intended audience
Elizabeth I and royal advisers considering English western colonization.
Purpose
Persuade Elizabeth I to support colonization through religious, commercial and strategic arguments.
Point of view
An English Protestant advocate speaks about English policy. This is not evidence that French motives were identical.
Hakluyt, A Discourse Concerning Western Planting (1584), ed. Charles Deane (Cambridge, 1877), Heads of Chapters, ch. III, pp. 3–5. Adaptation modernizes spelling, omits the introductory “That,” and excerpts the heading (its final clause is cut).
Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.
On screen: VIII · Small World
PERFORMED ADAPTATION: This voyage will be a great bridle to the Indies of the King of Spain. ORIGINAL: That this voyadge will be a greate bridle to the Indies of the Kinge of Spaine, and a meane that wee may arreste at our pleasure… one or twoo hundred saile of his subjectes shippes at the fysshinge in Newfounde lande. Spelling is modernized for performance and the introductory “That” is omitted; no invented substantive claim.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Hakluyt argues for English western colonies as competition with Spain intensifies.
Intended audience
Elizabeth I and royal advisers considering English western colonization.
Purpose
Persuade Elizabeth I to support colonization through religious, commercial and strategic arguments.
Point of view
An English Protestant advocate speaks about English policy. This is not evidence that French motives were identical.
Hakluyt, A Discourse Concerning Western Planting (1584), ed. Charles Deane (Cambridge, 1877), Heads of Chapters, ch. V, pp. 3–5; argued at length on p. 45. Adaptation modernizes spelling and omits the introductory “That.”
John J. Newman and John M. Schmalbach; College Board
Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.
On screen: VIII · Small World
[Paraphrase.] Later English and French exploration sought wealth, trade and political advantage against Spanish power. Reformation-era religious divisions added motives to existing economic and imperial competition. France and England did not follow an identical religious policy.
Sourcing
Historical situation
A modern synthesis of early Atlantic imperial competition.
Intended audience
AP U.S. History teachers and students comparing European exploration motives.
Purpose
Distinguish overlapping religious, political and commercial motives.
Point of view
We pair the synthesis with Hakluyt’s specifically English Protestant appeal; we don't call the French monarchy Protestant.
Newman and Schmalbach, United States History: AP Edition, Topics 1.1 and 1.3, especially “Motives for Exploration” and “Religious Conflict”. AP U.S. History Course and Exam Description, KC-1.2.I.A.
Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.
On screen: VIII · Small World
[Paraphrase.] Spanish slave raiders carried Lucayans away from their Bahamian homes during the early sixteenth century. We give no unsupported headcount, island-wide extinction date, or individual captive’s fate.
Sourcing
Historical situation
An archaeologist reconstructs Lucayan life and the consequences of contact and slave raiding.
Intended audience
Archaeologists, Caribbean historians, and readers studying Lucayan society and contact.
Purpose
Restore inhabited communities to a history often told only through European voyages.
Point of view
Archaeology and fragmentary colonial records cannot recover a specific interpreter’s death or return. The final painting deliberately shows a living home before removal.
Keegan, The People Who Discovered Columbus: The Prehistory of the Bahamas (University Press of Florida, 1992). Historical claim previously. Our limited statement is removal by slave raids, not a claim of total biological extinction.
English translation by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble, 1975
For in truth they thirsted mightily for gold … There was death from hunger; there was no one to take care of another
Sourcing
Historical situation
Nahua men of Tlatelolco, trained by Franciscans to write Nahuatl in Latin letters, recorded the memories of elders about 1555, some thirty-five years after the events.
Intended audience
Bernardino de Sahagún, the Franciscan friar who directed the project, and the Nahua scholars who worked with him.
Purpose
To preserve an account of the conquest from the side of the defeated, as part of a larger encyclopedia of Nahua life.
Point of view
Survivors and their pupils, writing under Spanish rule, with grief and contempt for the invaders. They remember the gift-giving and the siege from the receiving end. The text was edited by a friar who also had a purpose. The Nahuatl account and Sahagún’s Spanish column are distinct texts. These English fragments are Anderson and Dibble’s rendering of the Nahuatl; they cannot be assigned to the Spanish column.
53r (epidemic); trans. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble, The Conquest of Mexico, 2nd ed. (Santa Fe / Salt Lake City: School of American Research / University of Utah, 1975). Short separate excerpts, not a continuous speech. This copyrighted English is their translation, never our original translation.
To his simplest proposition, the spherical form of the earth, were opposed figurative texts of scripture. They observed, that in the Psalms, the heavens are said to be extended like a hide… and that St. Paul, in his epistle to the Hebrews, compares the heavens to a tabernacle, or tent, extended over the earth, which they thence inferred must be flat. Columbus, who was a devoutly religious man, found that he was in danger of being convicted, not merely of error, but of heterodoxy. Others, more versed in science, admitted the globular form of the earth, and the possibility of an opposite and inhabitable hemisphere; but they brought up the chimera of the ancients, and maintained that it would be impossible to arrive there, in consequence of the insupportable heat of the torrid zone.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Written in the 1820s by an American author living in Spain, more than three hundred years after the meeting of Columbus and the learned men at Salamanca. Irving worked from printed sources and Spanish archives, and his book was an immediate success.
Intended audience
General readers in Britain and the United States who wanted a readable life of Columbus.
Purpose
To tell Columbus's story as a romance, with a lone visionary facing narrow-minded churchmen.
Point of view
Irving, the author of 'Rip Van Winkle' and 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow', was a storyteller more than a research historian. Modern historians (Jeffrey Burton Russell, 1991) show that the learned of 1490 knew the earth was round, and even this page says some of them admitted it. Their real argument was about how big it was.
Washington Irving, A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (London: John Murray, 1828), vol. 1, bk. 2, ch. 4, pp. 124-125.
Our results show that the introduction of the potato was responsible for a significant portion of the increase in population and urbanization observed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. According to our most conservative estimates, the introduction of the potato accounts for approximately one-quarter of the growth in Old World population and urbanization between 1700 and 1900.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Published in 2011 by two economists, after the 500th anniversary debates about Columbus and the Columbian Exchange.
Intended audience
Economists and economic historians, and readers of a leading economics journal.
Purpose
To measure how much a single new crop, the potato, changed population and city growth in Europe and beyond.
Point of view
Two economists who compare regions that could and could not grow potatoes. Their result is a statistical estimate, not a certainty, and other causes also mattered.
Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian, 'The Potato's Contribution to Population and Urbanization: Evidence from a Historical Experiment,' Quarterly Journal of Economics 126, no. 2 (May 2011): 593-650; DOI 10.1093/qje/qjr009. The excerpt is from the abstract. Abstract, p. 593. The share is of growth between 1700 and 1900, not of the total population and not of immediate sixteenth-century growth.
When the wind is fresh they extract much silver, but when there is no wind they cannot by any means extract silver.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Cieza describes Potosí’s early mining and smelting economy, which he saw in 1549.
Intended audience
Spanish readers and royal officials interested in Andean resources and colonial wealth.
Purpose
Explain local techniques and the extraordinary silver production.
Point of view
A Spanish observer credits Indigenous ingenuity. This is before the later colonial mita reorganization; the image must not substitute later mercury-processing works.
Cieza, Crónica del Perú, Part I, ch. CIX; Markham, The Travels of Pedro de Cieza de León (1864), p. 389. Public-domain English.
because without the help of Doña Marina we could not have understood the language of New Spain and Mexico. NARRATION PARAPHRASE: Díaz reports that Malintzin was given away as a child, passed through Xicalango and Tabasco, and spoke the language of Mexico and Tabasco. Our narration attributes the childhood account to him. Spanish ch. XXXVII, printed pp. 155–158, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/64945/pg64945-images.html . This does not validate every detail of his dramatic family-reunion story.
Sourcing
Historical situation
A veteran remembers the early expedition decades later.
Intended audience
Spanish readers and descendants of the conquistadors.
Purpose
Explain Malintzin’s importance and defend the soldiers’ account of conquest.
Point of view
Spanish testimony acknowledges dependence on a Native interpreter while narrating events from the conquistadors’ interests.
Díaz, The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, trans. Maudslay, vol. I (Hakluyt Society, 1908), ch. XXXVII, p. 135. Ellipsis removes the introductory causal clause only.
Spanish column, Book 12, chapter 16, folio 25v: Seays muy bienvenido trabaxos abreys pasado veniendo tan largos caminos descansad agora aqui esta v̄r̄a casa y vuestros palacios. Our translation, shortened: You are very welcome… Rest now; here is your house and your palaces. The ellipsis omits the clause about the hardships of the long journey. We perform a later written account of the welcome, not a surviving recording or an authenticated verbatim transcript of Moctezuma. Malintzin's selectable English renderings are separately labeled dramatized interpretations; none is presented as her recorded sentence.
Sourcing
Historical situation
The chapter recounts the meeting with Cortés on the approach to Tenochtitlan in 1519.
Intended audience
Readers of the colonial-era bilingual history assembled with Nahua contributors under Sahagún.
Purpose
Preserve an account of the conquest and the speeches attributed to its participants.
Point of view
Recorded decades after the encounter, with distinct Nahuatl and Spanish columns. This excerpt is our translation of the Spanish column only. Its welcome does not by itself prove a transfer of sovereignty. We compare competing later representations and cannot recover a verbatim exchange.
This is not the Díaz lodging welcome, the Bustamante 1829 redaction, or copied Anderson/Dibble or Lockhart English.
Martin Behaim, with the painter Georg Glockendon · 1492
Image. An image of the source. The accompanying description is editorial.
Background: not shown on screen.
[Martin Behaim's globe, Nuremberg, 1492, a painted sphere made just before Columbus sailed, shown flat as the gores of Ravenstein's 1908 facsimile. The Atlantic runs from Europe to Asia with islands in it and no continent between. Legends on the island of Cipangu (Japan), in Ravenstein's English translation:] The island Cipengu has a King and language of its own; the inhabitants worship idols. Cipangu where grows much gold. Cipangu is the most noble and richest island in the east, full of spices and precious stones. Its compass is 1,200 miles.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Made in Nuremberg in 1492, before news of Columbus’s first voyage reached Europe. It depicts an ocean between western Europe and eastern Asia, omitting the American continents.
Intended audience
The city council of Nuremberg, which paid for the globe, and merchants and scholars who wanted a picture of the whole world as Europeans then understood it.
Purpose
To gather the best geographical knowledge of the day (Ptolemy, Marco Polo, Portuguese charts) into one model of the world, and to show Nuremberg's merchants where trade could reach.
Point of view
Martin Behaim, a Nuremberg merchant who had spent years in Portugal and claimed a share in its voyages. He had reasons to make his own knowledge look impressive, and his globe repeats Marco Polo's stories as fact.
Martin Behaim, terrestrial globe (Erdapfel), Nuremberg, 1492, Germanisches Nationalmuseum. Image: E. G. Ravenstein, Martin Behaim: His Life and His Globe (London: George Philip, 1908), flat facsimile of the gores (public domain; Wikimedia Commons, File:RavensteinBehaim.jpg). Legends as translated by Ravenstein, Cipangu section (p. 89).
Image. An image of the source. The accompanying description is editorial.
Background: not shown on screen.
[Engraved view of Lisbon in Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg's Civitates orbis terrarum, vol. 1 (Cologne, 1572). Lisbon sits on the north bank of the Tagus, its quays and palaces above a harbor full of ships. The plate was made about eighty years after the voyages we describe.]
Sourcing
Historical situation
Published in Cologne in 1572 in a collection of city views, roughly eighty years after Columbus’s first voyage. It is evidence of the later harbor, not a measured reconstruction of a 1480s caravel.
Intended audience
Educated buyers across Europe (merchants, nobles, scholars) who wanted to see famous cities they would never visit.
Purpose
To show the wealth and look of Europe's cities, and Lisbon above all as the port that gathered the spice trade.
Point of view
Georg Braun, a Cologne cleric who wrote the text, and Frans Hogenberg, an engraver working from other artists' sketches. It shows how a later century pictured Lisbon's ships. It is not an eyewitness view of a 1480s caravel.
Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg, 'Lisbona,' Civitates orbis terrarum, vol. 1 (Cologne, 1572); the Latin caption calls the city a most flourishing market of Portugal. Image via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
Image. An image of the source. The accompanying description is editorial.
Background: not shown on screen.
[Catalan Atlas, Majorca, 1375: a panel of northwest Africa. A crowned, seated king holds a scepter and a large disc of gold. The legend beside him names him Musse Melly, that is Mansa Musa of Mali, who died about 1337. The atlas was drawn some forty years after his reign, from reports that had passed through Mediterranean traders.]
Sourcing
Historical situation
Drawn in Majorca in 1375, a hub of Mediterranean chart-making, about forty years after Mansa Musa's famous pilgrimage to Mecca had made Mali's gold a talking point across Europe and the Islamic world.
Intended audience
Royal and merchant readers; the atlas was made for the court of the Crown of Aragon and later given to the king of France.
Purpose
To give the ruler and his advisers a picture of the whole known world, including where gold came from.
Point of view
A Jewish mapmaking workshop in Majorca working from Mediterranean pilots' charts and travellers' hearsay. It never saw Mali and drew a king as Europeans imagined a rich one.
Catalan Atlas (attributed to Abraham Cresques), 1375, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Espagnol 30, West Africa panel.
Memoir · written decades later · Maudslay translation
The True History of the Conquest of New Spain
Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a soldier of Cortés; translated by Alfred P. Maudslay · written by about 1568
Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.
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English translation by Alfred P. Maudslay, 1908
…a dappled horse almost black, no good for anything… without the help of Doña Marina we could not have understood the language of New Spain and Mexico… we were amazed and said that it was like the enchantments they tell of in the legend of Amadis, on account of the great towers and cues and buildings rising from the water, and all built of masonry. And some of our soldiers even asked whether the things that we saw were not a dream?… [Of all these wonders that I then beheld] to-day all is overthrown and lost, nothing left standing.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Written in Guatemala in the 1560s by an old man who had marched with Cortés as a foot soldier forty-odd years earlier. It was not printed until 1632.
Intended audience
Spanish readers and his own descendants. He wanted the ordinary soldiers of the conquest remembered, not only the captain.
Purpose
To set down what he called the true story of the conquest, and to correct a published life of Cortés that gave the captain nearly all the credit.
Point of view
A veteran remembering vividly, decades later, with pride and a grievance. He is a rich witness to horses, gold and what the soldiers saw, and he wrote long after the events, from memory and from notes.
Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, trans. Alfred P. Maudslay (London: Hakluyt Society, 1908-16): vol. 1, ch. 23 (the horses and their owners) and ch. 37 (Doña Marina); vol. 2, ch. 87 (the causeway to Iztapalapa). Quoted passages: vol. I (1908), ch. XXXVII, pp. 134–135; vol. II (1910), ch. LXXXVII, pp. 37–38. The square brackets in the last sentence are Maudslay’s supplied text.
Lending to the Borrower from Hell: Debt, Taxes, and Default in the Age of Philip II
Mauricio Drelichman and Hans-Joachim Voth · 2011
Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.
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[Paraphrase of the authors' findings:] Philip II of Spain, king from 1556 to 1598, was at war for most of his reign. He borrowed until his debts reached about 60 percent of the kingdom's yearly output, and he stopped payment to his lenders four times. Drelichman and Voth ask how a king could borrow so much and default so often. They find that Genoese bankers, who supplied about two thirds of his short-term loans through overlapping partnerships, acted together. They shut him out of credit after each default until a settlement, and lent again once it was made.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Published in 2011 in a leading economics journal, after a decade of archival work on the loan contracts and bankers' letters of Philip II's Spain.
Intended audience
Economists and economic historians, and through them students of how early states raised money.
Purpose
To explain a puzzle in the history of finance: why bankers kept lending to a king who often stopped paying them.
Point of view
Two economic historians using hand-collected data from Spanish and Genoese archives and the tools of modern economics. Their answer is about lender behavior, not about the silver itself.
Mauricio Drelichman and Hans-Joachim Voth, 'Lending to the Borrower from Hell: Debt, Taxes, and Default in the Age of Philip II,' Economic Journal 121, no. 557 (2011). Excerpt is a paraphrase of the abstract and introduction of the authors' working-paper text.
Queen Elizabeth I, letters patent to the merchants of London · December 31, 1600
Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.
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…we greatly tendering the Honour of our Nation, the Wealth of our People, and the Encouragement of them, and others of our loving Subjects in their good Enterprizes, for the Increase of our Navigation, and the Advancement of lawful Traffick, to the Benefit of our Common Wealth… that they and every of them from henceforth be, and shall be one Body Corporate and Politick, in Deed and in Name, by the Name of The Governor and Company of Merchants of London, Trading into the East-Indies… they shall have Succession…
Sourcing
Historical situation
Issued on the last day of 1600, when English merchants sought a larger share of Asian trade in competition with Portuguese and other merchants and raised funds for an overseas fleet.
Intended audience
The named merchants who signed on, and the English and foreign traders and rulers who would have to recognize their monopoly.
Purpose
To make the merchants one legal body, able to own property and sue, and to give it an exclusive right to English trade east of the Cape of Good Hope.
Point of view
The Crown, which put up no money, wanted a strong trading company and a share of its wealth. The charter praises trade for the nation's good and says little about the people the ships would meet.
Charter of Elizabeth to the Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies, Dec. 31, 1600, in John Shaw, ed., Charters Relating to the East India Company from 1600 to 1761 (Madras: Government Press, 1887), pp. 1-3.
True Relation of the Hardships Suffered by Governor Fernando de Soto (by a Gentleman of Elvas)
A Portuguese gentleman of Elvas, a member of the expedition; translated by Buckingham Smith · Évora, 1557
Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.
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English translation by Buckingham Smith (1866 edition)
The Governor had brought thirteen sows to Florida, which had increased to three hundred swine; and the maize having failed for three or four days, he ordered to be killed daily, for each man, half a pound of pork, on which small allowance, and some boiled herbs, the people with much difficulty lived… Luys de Moscoso ordered the property of the Governor to be sold at public outcry. It consisted of two male and three female slaves, three horses, and seven hundred swine.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Printed in Portugal in 1557, fifteen years after the expedition that crossed the American Southeast from 1539 to 1542 and lost its leader, Hernando de Soto, on the Mississippi.
Intended audience
Portuguese and Spanish readers curious about Florida; the book was later translated into English by Richard Hakluyt.
Purpose
To tell what the expedition suffered and found, and to describe the country. The author's name is unknown.
Point of view
An anonymous member of the expedition, writing after the fact. He counts pigs, horses and slaves as property and says little about the Native people's losses, which were far greater than the Spaniards'.
A Gentleman of Elvas, True Relation of the Hardships Suffered by Governor Fernando de Soto and Certain Portuguese Gentlemen (Évora, 1557), trans. Buckingham Smith (Bradford Club, 1866); reprinted in Edward Gaylord Bourne, ed., Narratives of the Career of Hernando de Soto (New York: Allerton, 1922), vol. 1: the swine on the march inland, and the sale of the Governor's goods after his death. The cited 1922 edition credits Smith on its title page and identifies the original 1866 publication in the contents note.
Nahua elders and scholars with Bernardino de Sahagún; page painted in Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco · about 1555–1577
Image. An image of the source.
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[Descriptive caption:] A Nahua illustration accompanying Book 12’s account of epidemic suffering. The linked reproduction is distributed under the filename FlorentineCodex_BK12_F54_smallpox.jpg. Do not treat that filename as the locator for a spoken text: the epidemic passage used here is Book 12, ch. 29, fol. 53r, with the Spanish-column translation separately identified as rv-fc12-29-spanish-care.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Painted in the later sixteenth century as part of a manuscript recounting the conquest and epidemics, decades after the events of 1520.
Intended audience
Bernardino de Sahagún and, through him, readers of a Spanish-and-Nahuatl encyclopedia meant to record Nahua knowledge.
Purpose
To show, in the pictures that ran beside the Nahuatl text, what the plague of 1520 did to the people of the valley.
Point of view
Nahua painters who had lived through, or heard from parents about, the plague. Their images accompany a text edited by a friar.
Palat. Public-domain illustration reproduced as Wikimedia Commons file FlorentineCodex_BK12_F54_smallpox.jpg. Image caption only; the text source’s precise locator is ch. 29, fol. No modern translator’s wording is quoted in this image record.
Nahua elders and scholars with Bernardino de Sahagún; translated by Charles E. Dibble and Arthur J. O. Anderson · about 1569
Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.
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It describes the Mexica world by trade and rank: rulers and nobles, merchants, feather-workers, stone-cutters, potters, healers and the sellers of food, cloth and cacao. It is one of the best Nahua descriptions of daily work and of what was bought and sold in the markets.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Written in the 1560s, a generation after the conquest, when Sahagún's Nahua collaborators were setting down what their parents and grandparents knew of city life.
Purpose
To record trades, ranks and customs of the Mexica world before they were forgotten or replaced under Spanish rule.
Point of view
Nahua scholars working with a friar. They describe their own society, which they knew well, but under the conditions of colonial rule and a friar's questions.
Used only as background for the market hover labels; the excerpt is a summary.
Lion Gardener (Gardiner), of East Hampton · June 12, 1660
Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.
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…so must we be one as they are, otherwise we shall be all gone shortly, for you know our fathers had plenty of deer and skins, our plains were full of deer, as also our woods, and of turkies, and our coves full of fish and fowl. But these English having gotten our land, they with scythes cut down the grass, and with axes felled the trees; their cows and horses eat the grass, and their hogs spoil our clam banks, and we shall all be starved; therefore it is best for you to do as we…
Sourcing
Historical situation
Written at East Hampton on Long Island in 1660 by an English engineer who had built Saybrook Fort in 1635. He was recalling events of the late 1630s and early 1640s, about twenty years earlier.
Intended audience
Two friends, Robert Chapman and Thomas Hurlburt, who had asked him for an account of the war. It was later printed for the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Purpose
To set down, for friends and for the record, what he saw and was told during the Pequot War and its aftermath.
Point of view
An English colonist writing as an old soldier and neighbor of the Montauk people. The speech he gives to the Narragansett sachem Miantonomi is his own report, made about two decades later, and passes through his English memory.
Lion Gardener, Relation of the Pequot Warres (written 1660), reporting Miantonomi’s speech of about 1642, in W. Dodge, ed., History of the Pequot War (Cincinnati: J. Harpel, 1860), p. 26. Speech remembered by an English colonist, not a contemporary Native-language transcript.
Juan Garrido, before Spanish officials in Mexico City · September 27, 1538
Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.
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[Summary of the record, not the original wording:] On September 27, 1538, Juan Garrido swore a probanza, a legal proof of merit, in Mexico City. Born in the Kingdom of Kongo and taken young to Portugal, he had served in the conquests of Puerto Rico and Cuba and in the siege of Tenochtitlan, and he asked the Crown for a reward for thirty years of service. He says he was the first to have the idea of sowing wheat in New Spain and to see whether it took, and that he did so at his own expense. The claim is his own; historians repeat it as his claim.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Sworn in Mexico City in 1538, seventeen years after the fall of Tenochtitlan, by a man who had settled there with his family and wanted the Crown's recognition of his long service.
Intended audience
The Spanish officials of New Spain and the Crown's Council of the Indies, who decided who would receive rewards.
Purpose
To prove a claim to royal favor by listing services and calling witnesses, in a form every conquistador used.
Point of view
Garrido, one of a small number of free Black conquistadors, making the best case for himself. The wheat claim is self-reported.
Juan Garrido, petition and probanza de méritos, Mexico City, Sept. 27, 1538, Archivo General de Indias, Seville, México 204, transcribed in Ricardo E. Alegría, Juan Garrido: el conquistador negro en las Antillas, Florida, México y California (San Juan, 2004); English translation of the opening as quoted in the Wikipedia article 'Juan Garrido'; see also Matthew Restall, 'Black Conquistadors: Armed Africans in Early Spanish America,' The Americas 57 (2000). The excerpt is a summary; the archive was not consulted.
Marco Polo, told to Rustichello of Pisa; translated by Henry Yule · about 1298
Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.
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English translation by Henry Yule, 1871
Chipangu is an Island towards the east in the high seas, 1500 miles distant from the Continent; and a very great Island it is. The people are white, civilized, and well-favoured. They are Idolaters, and are dependent on nobody. And I can tell you the quantity of gold they have is endless…
Sourcing
Historical situation
Dictated about 1298 to a fellow prisoner in Genoa, some years after Marco Polo came home from the court of the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan.
Intended audience
European readers, who copied and translated the book for two centuries and wanted marvels, and facts about the wealth of the East.
Purpose
To describe the peoples, cities and riches of Asia, and to tell what a Venetian merchant had been told and had seen there.
Point of view
Polo never visited Japan. He repeated what he was told at Kublai Khan's court, so the distance and the endless gold are hearsay. Columbus later read them as fact.
Marco Polo, The Book of Ser Marco Polo the Venetian, trans. and ed. Henry Yule (London: John Murray, 1871), vol. 2, Book III, ch. 2.
The island Cipengu has a King and language of its own; the inhabitants worship idols. Cipangu where grows much gold. Cipangu is the most noble and richest island in the east, full of spices and precious stones. Its compass is 1,200 miles.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Published in London in 1908, when the 1492 globe in Nuremberg was well known but its legends had not been fully translated into English.
Intended audience
Scholars and general readers interested in the history of exploration.
Purpose
To translate the legends written on Behaim's globe, and to judge how far Behaim's own claims about his career can be trusted.
Point of view
Ravenstein was a German-born British geographer who doubted Behaim's boasts of a large part in the Portuguese voyages. The legends on the globe are Behaim's own words, translated by him.
E. G. Ravenstein, Martin Behaim: His Life and His Globe (London: George Philip & Son, 1908), p. 89, translation of the legends on the island of Cipangu.
Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry: Christmas husbandlie fare
Thomas Tusser · 1570s editions; wording from 1580
Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.
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Beefe, mutton, and porke, shred pies of the best, pig, veale, goose and capon, and turkey well drest; Cheese, apples and nuts, ioly Carols to heare, as then in the countrie is counted good cheare.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Printed in England in the 1570s, less than a century after Columbus, when turkeys brought from Mexico by Spanish ships had already reached English farms.
Intended audience
English farmers, their wives and households, who read or heard rhyming guides to the farming year.
Purpose
To teach practical husbandry in memorable verse, month by month, and to describe a good Christmas table.
Point of view
Tusser was an English farmer and poet writing about how country households ate. The verse mentions turkey with no note of surprise, which suggests it was already an ordinary bird at the feast.
Thomas Tusser, Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry (1573; the turkey line already appears in the 1571 Hundreth Good Pointes), 'Christmas husbandlie fare,' ch. 29; text of the 1580 edition in W. Payne and S. J. Herrtage, eds., Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry (London: English Dialect Society, 1878).
Tlaxcalan painters for the council of Tlaxcala; reconstruction by Byron Ellsworth Hamann · 1552 (reconstruction 2010)
Image. An image of the source. The accompanying description is editorial.
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[Lienzo de Tlaxcala, painted for Tlaxcala's council in 1552; the cloth itself is lost. This is a 2010 reconstruction by Byron Ellsworth Hamann (Mesolore Project) from 1892 lithographs of tracings made in the 1860s. The scenes run in a grid, each with the name of a town in Nahuatl. At the top, Tlaxcalan lords meet Cortés and Malintzin, and many scenes show Tlaxcalan and Spanish warriors fighting side by side.]
Sourcing
Historical situation
Painted in Tlaxcala in 1552, three decades after the fall of Tenochtitlan, when Spanish officials were cutting back the privileges of Native towns.
Intended audience
The Spanish Crown and its officials in Mexico, who decided what Tlaxcala was owed.
Purpose
To show the Tlaxcalans as allies who had helped win the war, and to remind the Crown of the rewards and privileges they had been promised.
Point of view
Tlaxcalan painters working for their own council. They show what Tlaxcala wanted the Crown to see: its lords as equals and its warriors in nearly every battle. This copy is a modern reconstruction, so the details come through several hands.
Lienzo de Tlaxcala (1552; original lost), digital reconstruction by Byron Ellsworth Hamann, Mesolore Project (2010), from 1892 lithographs based on tracings of the 1860s. Image via Wikimedia Commons.
Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.
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[Paraphrase of the atlas's Europe overview:] McEvedy and Jones give about 80 million people in 1500, 100 million in 1600, 120 million in 1700, 140 million in 1750 and 250 million in 1845. They count European Russia as part of Europe. These are estimates; our chart also shows Biraben's different figures.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Published in 1978, before computers and new archives changed the field, at a time when historians wanted rough numbers for the whole world across many centuries.
Intended audience
Students, teachers and general readers who wanted a single reference book for population history.
Purpose
To give a best guess of population for every region and period, with maps and short essays.
Point of view
Two writers with training in medicine and science rather than in a single national history. Their numbers are estimates, and they say so.
Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones, Atlas of World Population History (London: Allen Lane, 1978), ‘Europe: Overview,’ pp. 26–29. Paraphrase of the figures cited and plotted in our europe-population chart.
Image. An image of the source. The accompanying description is editorial.
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[Martin Waldseemüller's world map of 1507, printed on twelve sheets at Saint-Dié in Lorraine. Portraits of Ptolemy and Amerigo Vespucci look down from the top, and on the southern part of the new land at lower left the word AMERICA appears for the first time on a map. Waldseemüller dropped the name from his later maps.]
Sourcing
Historical situation
Printed in 1507 in the small town of Saint-Dié, fifteen years after Columbus, when printed accounts of Vespucci's voyages were circulating and no one yet agreed what the new land was.
Intended audience
Scholars and educated buyers of maps, who used it with Waldseemüller's book on cosmography.
Purpose
To update Ptolemy's picture of the world with a 'fourth part' and to honor Vespucci, whom the makers thought had first understood that it was a continent.
Point of view
Waldseemüller and his colleagues at Saint-Dié, scholars who relied on printed accounts of Vespucci's voyages. He later dropped the name, but the name had already spread.
Martin Waldseemüller, Universalis cosmographia (Saint-Dié, 1507), Library of Congress. Image via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
The Monarchs of those two kingdoms, indeed, emboldened by their success at the South, had put forth pretensions to the sole jurisdiction of the whole New Hemisphere. But Francis the First had well replied, that he should be glad to see the clause in Adam's Will, which made the Northern Continent their exclusive inheritance, and France, under his lead, had set about securing for herself a share of the spoils. It was under French patronage that John Verazzani was sailing in 1524…
Sourcing
Historical situation
Delivered in New York on December 23, 1839, at the New England Society's annual dinner honoring the Pilgrims' landing, three centuries after the events it retells.
Intended audience
Members of the New England Society and the newspaper readers who saw the printed address.
Purpose
To celebrate the settling of New England and show it as the last of many European attempts to claim North America.
Point of view
A Massachusetts politician and orator. He tells the Francis I remark as a familiar anecdote and gives no source. The earliest source for it is unclear, which is why the narration says Francis 'reportedly' said it.
Robert C. Winthrop, An Address Delivered Before the New England Society in the City of New York, Dec. 23, 1839 (Boston: Perkins & Marvin, 1840), pp. 22-23. The remark's earliest source is unverified: accounts date it between 1524 and 1541, and no primary text was found.
Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.
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[Paraphrase:] This later biography repeats Morison’s interpretation of Columbus’s distance error. The project has checked only snippets, not complete pages. Use the separately identified 1942 table for the teaching comparison; do not convert an “air-line” phrase into a shortest-route measurement or mix nautical and statute miles.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Published in 1955 as a short book written for general readers, drawn from Morison's longer biography of 1942.
Intended audience
General readers and students who wanted Columbus's voyages in one short volume.
Purpose
To explain Columbus's seamanship and his errors about the size of the earth in plain terms.
Point of view
Morison, a Harvard naval historian who sailed Columbus's routes. Historians such as Kelley and Dunn have since challenged his explanation of the mile that Columbus used.
Samuel Eliot Morison, Christopher Columbus, Mariner (Boston: Little, Brown, 1955).
Christopher Columbus; translated by R. H. Major · 1493
Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.
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English translation by R. H. Major (1870 edition)
…they are guileless, and so liberal of all they have that no one would believe it who had not seen it. They never refuse anything that they possess when it is asked of them… They are not acquainted with any kind of worship, and are not idolaters; but believe that all power and, indeed, all good things are in heaven… spices also, and cotton, as much as their Highnesses shall command to be shipped… slaves, as many of these idolators as their Highnesses shall command to be shipped.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Written on the voyage home in February 1493 and printed in Barcelona within weeks. Columbus had reached the Bahamas, Cuba and Hispaniola, and had a small amount of gold and a handful of captives to show.
Intended audience
Luis de Santangel, the royal treasurer who helped raise the money, and through him the Crown. Printed editions soon carried it across Europe.
Purpose
To announce the discovery, present the islands as rich and easy to take, and win backing for a much larger second voyage.
Point of view
Columbus, writing as a salesman for his own venture. He praises the Taíno as gentle and generous and, in the same letter, offers the Crown as many of them as slaves as it commands.
Christopher Columbus, letter to Luis de Santangel (1493); trans. R. H. Major, Select Letters of Christopher Columbus, 2nd ed. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1870), p. 8. Short excerpt; omissions marked with an ellipsis. The complete source card preserves the wider passages.
Jacques Melitz, discussing Pierre Chaunu’s estimate · 2019
Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.
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[Paraphrase:] In a discussion of silver production during 1550–1800, Melitz reports Chaunu’s estimate that over a third of American silver reached East Asia. Melitz identifies China as its main destination. The estimate covers East Asia, not China alone, and does not count only the Manila route.
Sourcing
Historical situation
An economic-history debate about the great flow of silver to China from the mid-1500s through the early 1800s.
Intended audience
Economists and historians studying trade and money.
Purpose
To test explanations for China’s silver imports.
Point of view
Melitz questions earlier economic explanations. The fraction comes from Chaunu; it is an estimate, not a complete record of shipments.
Jacques Melitz, “Some Doubts about the Economic Analysis of the Flow of Silver to China in 1550–1820,” Open Economies Review 30 (2019), 105–131, section 1, DOI 10.1007/s11079-018-9506-z. Paraphrase of the opening paragraph, which cites Pierre Chaunu (1960), pp. 268–269.
The Columbian Exchange: A History of Disease, Food, and Ideas
Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian · 2010
Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.
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EXCERPT: The Columbian Exchange refers to the exchange of diseases, ideas, food crops, and populations
SUMMARY: The crop discussion follows American food plants into Old World agriculture and diets. We use this evidence for the two-way Exchange, not as evidence that benefits were equal or that all pathogen origins are settled. SUGAR CARD PARAPHRASE: An Old World crop spread into American plantations. Profitable plantation production increased demand for enslaved labor. This is a broad account of later developments, not an assertion that slavery began in 1493 or that every plantation shared one labor system.
Sourcing
Historical situation
A modern economic-history survey of consequences following contact between the Americas and the Old World.
Intended audience
Economists, historians and readers of the Journal of Economic Perspectives.
Purpose
To synthesize research on the exchange and its long-run consequences.
Point of view
An analytical overview using multiple disciplines. Its dated claims require comparison with later evidence; we use its crop discussion, not its disputed pathogen-origin assertions.
Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian, 'The Columbian Exchange: A History of Disease, Food, and Ideas,' Journal of Economic Perspectives 24, no. 2 (2010): 163–188. Excerpt is the opening sentence fragment on p. 163; maize and cassava discussion pp. 167–170. DOI: 10.1257/jep.24.2.163. Sugar and plantation discussion pp. 178, 181, 184.
Francisco Niño, as recorded by Fernand Pérez de Luna · June 12, 1494
Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.
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English translation
OUR TRANSLATION, EXCERPT: …no island that could have three hundred and thirty-five leagues along one coast…
SPANISH: Francisco Niño, vecino de Moguer, Piloto de la carabela Niña, dijo que para el juramento que había hecho no oyó ni vido isla que pudiese tener trescientas é treinta é cinco leguas en una costa de Poniente á Levante, y aun no acabada de andar
OUR SUMMARY: The pilot said under oath that he had never heard of or seen an island with 335 leagues along one west–east coast that had still not been finished. We perform a translated fragment of this reported reason. We do not add an invented first-person declaration, and 335 leagues remains the witness's navigational claim, not our measurement of Cuba. Francisco Niño of Moguer, pilot of the Niña, is distinct from the boy of the same name from Palos listed aboard the Cardera.
The same document lists Johan de la Cosa of Puerto de Santa María as Maestro de hacer Cartas and a mariner aboard the Niña. His name and profession support c00's final question. His affirmation is reserved for our later return. No surviving passage here establishes a named Taíno interpreter standing beside these men.
Sourcing
Historical situation
The crews were asked to affirm mainland geography during the second voyage off Cuba in June 1494.
Intended audience
The notary, witnesses, Admiral and royal officials who might later consult the certified record.
Purpose
To provide a sailor's reason for affirming that the extensive coast was continental.
Point of view
A pilot's reported testimony in a coercive legal setting. Its numerical precision does not establish its geographical accuracy.
Navarrete, Colección de los viajes y descubrimientos, II, 2nd ed. (1859), doc. LXXVI, p. 164 (within pp. 162–168), Francisco Niño's deposition and the Niña officers' list. Public-domain Spanish. Our English translation.
Our writers and artists, using Pérez de Luna's record · June 12, 1494 · reconstructed reaction
Dramatization. Dramatized, based on the record.
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The notarial record lists several grumetes and threatens a hundred lashes and the loss of a tongue for a later contradictory answer. It records no boy swallowing, no particular facial reaction and no execution of that penalty. The anonymous boy is a visual reconstruction, not an identified historical witness. He is silent and unharmed. The same distinction applies to reconstructed blocking and reactions elsewhere on the oath deck; we do not claim de la Cosa's expression proves a private belief.
Sourcing
Historical situation
A modern reconstruction illustrates the human stakes of a documented 1494 threat.
Intended audience
History students viewing the cold open.
Purpose
To make a coercive oath intelligible without displaying violence or fabricating testimony.
Point of view
Our interpretive visual choice; not additional evidence about any individual crew member.
Reconstruction based on Navarrete, Colección de los viajes y descubrimientos, II (1859), doc. LXXVI, pp. 162–168. The swallow itself has no historical citation because it is explicitly dramatized.
Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.
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[Paraphrase.] Gómara reports Cuitláhuac dying of smallpox after a rule of about sixty days. Other chronologies use different starting points and durations. We omit a reign-length figure.
Sourcing
Historical situation
A Spanish cleric reconstructs the conquest after the event.
Intended audience
Spanish readers of a history that elevated Cortés’s role in the conquest.
Purpose
Narrate changes of Mexica leadership during the war.
Point of view
Gómara was not an eyewitness. The chapter uses an approximate reign length and does not repeat his attribution of the epidemic to an individual.
López de Gómara, Historia de la conquista de México (1552), Cuitláhuac passages; the “No vivió más de sesenta días” clause. UNAM Noticonquista reproduces the death/succession passage from La Conquista de México (Madrid: Dastin Historia, 2000 [1552]), p. 266.
Robert McCaa, Aleta Nimlos and Teodoro Hampe-Martínez · 2004
Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.
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[Paraphrase.] Chroniclers connect Huayna Capac’s death to a widespread pestilence before the 1532 invasion. His death was followed by succession war between Huáscar and Atahualpa. The pathogen remains disputed; smallpox must not be presented as established.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Historians reassess retrospective descriptions of illness and conquest.
Intended audience
Historians and historical demographers evaluating epidemic diagnoses and colonial population evidence.
Purpose
Challenge the automatic diagnosis of smallpox from inconsistent accounts.
Point of view
These authors argue against the standard smallpox explanation. We present uncertainty, not their alternative as settled fact.
McCaa, Nimlos and Hampe-Martínez, “Why Blame Smallpox? The Death of the Inca Huayna Capac and the Demographic Destruction of Tawantinsuyu (Ancient Peru),” American Historical Association annual meeting, 9 January 2004, abstract and chronicle survey. Compare Cieza’s account of the succession.
Antonio de Morga; translated by Henry E. J. Stanley · 1609
Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.
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English translation by Henry E. J. Stanley, 1868
what is given them for it, is silver and reals, for they do not like gold, nor any other goods in exchange, nor do they carry any to China.
Sourcing
Historical situation
A Spanish colonial official describes Chinese merchants trading at Manila around the turn of the seventeenth century.
Intended audience
Spanish readers and officials interested in the Philippine colony and its Asian commerce.
Purpose
Describe Philippine commerce and colonial administration.
Point of view
His report concerns the merchants in this trade, not a claim that all Chinese people always rejected gold. It is an official’s written observation, performed as such.
Morga, Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas (1609), trans. Henry E. J. Stanley, The Philippine Islands, Moluccas, Siam, Cambodia, Japan, and China at the Close of the Sixteenth Century (Hakluyt Society, 1868), p. 340. Exact line.
Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.
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[Paraphrase:] The March 1492 edict required Jewish inhabitants and their households to depart by the end of July and prohibited their return as Jews. We place the April Santa Fe agreement before the July departures and the 3 August sailing. Columbus's journal prologue compresses these events into a misleading January sequence; its words are shown as his testimony, not used to date the expulsion. Torres's conversion is recorded, but we do not infer that expulsion caused his decision to sail.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Issued after the conquest of Granada in 1492, during royal efforts to impose religious uniformity.
Intended audience
Royal officers and Jewish communities throughout the monarchs' realms.
Purpose
To enforce the departure of Jews who did not convert to Christianity.
Point of view
An expelling monarchy's order. Its religious justification is not our judgment of the people expelled.
Edict of expulsion, Granada, 31 March 1492, departure clause; transcript at Center for Online Judaic Studies. Conversion condition also summarized by the National Library of Israel, The Jewish Expulsion From Spain and the Sephardic Diaspora, https://www.nli.org.il/en/discover/judaism/jewish-history/spain-jews-expulsion. Chronology previously.
Columbus turns the wreck into a settlement opportunity
Christopher Columbus, in Las Casas's abstract; translated by Clements R. Markham · December 26, 1492
Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.
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English translation by Clements R. Markham (1893 edition)
[Columbus's words in the journal abstract, with a leading omission:] …in truth, the disaster was really a piece of good fortune. [The continuation explains that without the loss of the ship he would not have left people or assembled supplies for a fortress here.]
Sourcing
Historical situation
After the loss of the Santa María and Guacanagarí's rescue of its cargo.
Intended audience
The Spanish monarchs.
Purpose
To justify a shipwreck as the opening for a permanent foothold.
Point of view
Columbus's claim of providence serves his own settlement ambitions. It does not describe an agreed Taíno interpretation of the wreck.
Markham, Journal (1893), 26 December entry, pp. 137–138;.
Fernand Pérez de Luna, notary; certified copy by Diego de Peñalosa · June 12, 1494
Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.
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English translation
Our translation of the recorded affirmation: he affirmed it and would maintain that it is the mainland and not an island. Spanish: lo afirmaba y defendería que es la tierra-firme y no isla. The longer response repeats the 335-league argument. This is third-person notarial reporting, not a first-person quotation from de la Cosa. The notary is off camera while the scene shows the silent chartmaker.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Columbus requires a geographic testimonial off Cuba; the record describes penalties for subsequently contradicting the answers.
Intended audience
Royal and administrative readers of an authorized record.
Purpose
Establish the expedition’s formal affirmation that the coast is mainland.
Point of view
A coercive official record, not an independent measurement or unpressured vote. De la Cosa is named as a chartmaker aboard Niña. His private belief is not recoverable from compliance.
Navarrete, Colección de los viajes y descubrimientos, II, 2nd ed. (1859), no. LXXVI, p. 165 (within pp. 162–168), de la Cosa’s response. Our short translation preserves third-person reporting; no invented question or first-person affirmation.
Fernand Pérez de Luna’s notarial record of Columbus’s requisition · June 12, 1494
Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.
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English translation
Spanish: creen que no hay en el mundo salvo islas. Our translation: they believe there is nothing in the world but islands. The clause appears in the record’s justification of Columbus’s mainland claim, amid dismissive descriptions of coastal inhabitants. It is not our description of their knowledge, nor a verbatim quotation attributed to an Indigenous speaker.
Sourcing
Historical situation
The expedition attempts to fix a mainland conclusion in an official record off Cuba.
Intended audience
The crowns and readers of the testimonial.
Purpose
Discredit islanders’ knowledge while defending a European geographical claim.
Point of view
Pérez de Luna records Columbus’s requisition. We voice the written record, not independently documented deck dialogue; the people described have no preserved reply here.
Navarrete, Colección, II (1859), no. LXXVI, pp. 162–168. English translated from the public-domain Spanish, not Morison’s modern translation.
Juan de la Cosa; surviving chart held by Museo Naval, Madrid · Signed 1500
Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.
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Description, not a quotation or facsimile: the chart bears de la Cosa’s name and a 1500 date and shows Cuba as an island. Nunn argued for a later copy; other scholarship proposes revision or expansion. We therefore say signed 1500, not demonstrably completed in every detail in 1500. Our temporary harbor painting contains no map or signature and must not be presented as the historical document.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Atlantic navigation begins to produce charts incorporating the Americas.
Intended audience
Patrons, pilots and officials interested in geography.
Purpose
Represent geographical knowledge in a navigational and political artifact.
Point of view
A chart can contradict an earlier sworn assertion without proving when every coastline was drawn or what its maker privately believed in 1494.
Museo Naval, Carta universal de Juan de la Cosa; collection description at Cultural Heritage of Defense. Dating discussion. The primary scan has not yet been delivered to this pair.
Christopher Columbus and Bartolomé de las Casas; historical identification discussed by Esteban Mira Caballos · Second voyage, 1493–1496
Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.
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[Paraphrase.] Columbus's letter of 26 February 1495 identifies Diego Colón as someone who went to Castile and learned Spanish. Las Casas connects him with a man taken from Guanahaní and returned on the second voyage, qualifying his identification with á lo que yo creo. Mira Caballos notes that his Indigenous name is unknown. These records do not establish a place for him on the oath deck on 12 June 1494. We give him no invented dialogue, exact house, return-home scene, or death. The ending's Lucayan household is a reconstruction, not his documented family.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Spanish expeditions depend on Indigenous guides and interpreters while asserting control.
Intended audience
Royal readers of Columbus's account and later readers of the chronicles.
Purpose
Record an interpreter's usefulness to the expedition.
Point of view
Spanish documents preserve a colonial name and selected actions. We state the limits of identification rather than inventing his voice.
Columbus, letter of 26 February 1495, Libro copiador, document 4; Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, ed. Fuensanta del Valle and Sancho Rayón, vol. II (Madrid: Miguel Ginesta, 1875), ch. XCIV, p. 52, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/50351/pg50351-images.html#CAPITULO_XCIV . Esteban Mira Caballos, “Caciques guatiaos en los inicios de la colonización: el caso del indio Diego Colón,” Iberoamericana IV.16 (2004), pp. 7–16, especially pp. 7–9 on the unknown Indigenous name and pp. 10–11 on interpreting and the February 1495 letter. Las Casas qualifies his identification with “á lo que yo creo”; this is not an oath-day passenger list.
The crew complains; Columbus insists on continuing
Christopher Columbus, abstracted by Bartolomé de las Casas; translated by Clements Markham · 1492 (Las Casas's abstract)
Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.
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English translation by Clements Markham (1893 edition)
PERFORMANCE ADAPTATION: However much you complain, I have to go to the Indies, and I will go on until I find them, with the help of Our Lord. MARKHAM: He added that, however much they might complain, he had to go to the Indies, and that he would go on until he found them, with the help of our Lord. Our adaptation changes indirect third-person reporting to direct address. It is not a recovered verbatim deck speech.
Sourcing
Historical situation
First voyage, 1492–1493; original journal lost, surviving in Las Casas's later abstract. The prologue compresses Granada, expulsion and commission into January. We correct the chronology: Santa Fe, 17 April; expulsion departures by the end of July; Palos, 3 August.
Intended audience
Ferdinand and Isabella. Columbus wrote the log to be read by the monarchs who paid for the voyage and who held him to account.
Purpose
To report to the Crown what he found, to justify the expedition, and to show that he had reached the Indies and would find gold there.
Point of view
The original journal is lost; Las Casas abstracts the captain’s account. The crew’s separate version is unavailable. We label our direct-address adaptation.
Columbus journal, Las Casas abstract, 10 October 1492; Clements R. Markham, The Journal of Christopher Columbus (Hakluyt Society, 1893), pp. 34–35.
Christopher Columbus and Bartolomé de las Casas; historical identification discussed by Esteban Mira Caballos · February 26, 1495
Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.
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English translation
OUR TRANSLATION: …this Indian that I bring, who is Diego Colón… …who already speaks our tongue very well. SPANISH EXCERPTS: este indio que yo traigo, que es Diego Colón … el que ya sabe hablar muy bien nuestra lengua. Omissions exclude the preceding encounter and the clause saying he was one of those who went to Castile. This is a dated written assessment of an interpreter, not oath-day dialogue.
Sourcing
Historical situation
Spanish expeditions depend on Indigenous guides and interpreters while asserting control.
Intended audience
Royal readers of Columbus's account and later readers of the chronicles.
Purpose
Record an interpreter's usefulness to the expedition.
Point of view
Spanish documents preserve a colonial name and selected actions. We state the limits of identification rather than inventing his voice.
Columbus, letter of 26 February 1495, Libro copiador, document 4. Spanish quoted in Esteban Mira Caballos, “Caciques guatiaos en los inicios de la colonización: el caso del indio Diego Colón,” Iberoamericana IV.16 (2004), p. 10, citing Szászdi León Borja (1999), p. 30. Performance is our translation of this public-domain letter excerpt.
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