THE SAD FATE OF COLOMBUS' 1492 LOGS

Extract from a paper by Dr B.W.Ife of Kings College, London

When Columbus set sail for the Far East in August 1492 he decided, in view of the significance of what he was about to attempt, to make a documentary record of the voyage in the form of charts and a log book:

"... I decided to write down the whole of this voyage in detail, day by day, everything that I should do and see and undergo, as will be seen in due course. (Prologue)^"

Keeping such a Journal was by no means routine at the time and did not become a legal requirement for captains of vessels flying the Spanish flag until 1575. The importance which Columbus attached to the accurate day-to-day recording of the events of the first voyage cannot be underestimated. By setting the voyage down in writing he ensured a place for himself in history which others have disputed but from which no one has succeeded in displacing him. The written record has become the touchstone of his achievement.

On returning to Spain in the spring of 1493 Columbus presented his record of the voyage to Queen Isabel. She had it copied, retained the original, and gave the copy to Columbus before he set out on the second voyage in the autumn of 1493. The original has not been seen since 1504, the year in which the Queen died.

In 1506, on the Admiral's death, the copy passed to Columbus's eldest son Diego, and then in 1526 to Diego's son, Luis, the Third Admiral of the Indies. Luis was granted permission to publish the Journal in 1554, though it did not in fact appear. This is thought to indicate that he sold the manuscript, as he did that of his uncle Ferdinand's biography of the Admiral, in order to subsidise his legendary debauchery. Whatever the explanation, it is clear that both the original Journal, and the only copy known to have been made of it, have both disappeared.

We should have very little knowledge indeed about the conduct and events of the 1492 voyage had it not been for the intervention of the historian Bartolomé de las Casas.  Las Casas, whose father and uncle had accompanied Columbus on the second voyage in 1493, began collecting material for a history of the Indies as early as 1502. After his conversion in 1514 he dedicated himself to exposing in writing and by personal advocacy the oppression of the Indians and the illegitimacy of the Spanish presence in the New World. In 1527 he began his great Historia de las Indias. Chapters 35 to 75 of the Historia rely heavily on the evidence of Columbus's Journal. It is not clear when Las Casas consulted it, though from remarks made in the Historia about scribal errors and confusions, we may be sure that what he consulted was a copy, possibly Columbus's own copy, and not the original. The access which Las Casas had to the Journal was evidently restricted. However he came by it, he was evidently not able to take it away with him or to keep it over a period of time. He therefore made an extensive digest for his own use, summarising the majority of the text, but copying out word-for-word those parts of the original which he thought were particularly interesting or worthy of quotation in full. Failing the discovery of the full text, Las Casas's summary, preserved in the National Library in Madrid, is the closest we are likely to get to Columbus's original.

Link to a web site dedicated to Bartolomé de las Casas

FALLING OFF THE EDGE OF A FLAT WORLD? - A LOAD OF ........

Novelists and several historians who should know better, have made a play out of the supposition that the common belief in the middle ages in Europe - pushed by the church -  was that the world was flat, and even sometimes that the trial of Galileo was about whether the earth was flat (it was actually about whether the earth revolved around the sun).

The explorers of the 1400s had plenty of things to be seriously worried about (like most of them never came back), but falling off the edge of the world in the middle of the night was not one of them.  Pythagoras had shown in around 500 BC that the earth was spherical, a notion picked up later by Aristotle.  The early fathers of the church did not dispute this by then pervasive belief, despite some ambiguous statements in the bible (what's new?!).  The Northumbrian Venerable Bede went much further in terms of positive written affirmation in  the early 700s AD and was widely quoted on the subject.  On the other (flat earth) side was no authoritative voice - in fact hardly any voices at all.

Columbus' challenge was that no one knew the diameter of the earth, and thus how far he had to sail to reach the East Indies (his objective).  The diameter estimates he worked on (for example by the Florentine Toscanelli) were seriously under the real figure (24,900 miles if you are interested), but luckily for him the continents later to be known as the Americas were in the way, otherwise he pretty certainly would have disappeared from history without trace.

Then much later, in  1896, an obscure writer called Andrew Dickson White wrote a weighty tome called "The Warfare of Science with Theology" in which amongst other things he claimed that the church of the middle ages worked assiduously and successfully to propagate the flat earth theory.  Problem was that he had next to no evidence to support this.  No matter, it was a catchy "conspiracy theory" with the church as the bad boy (shades of the da Vinci Code) and achieved much more currency than it deserved, being as how it was wrong.

And as a quirky postscript a much earlier measurer, Eratosthenes, Librarian of Alexandria, wrote a treatise "On the Measurement of the Earth" (now lost) in which he gave a figure for the Earth's circumference of the equivalent of about 23,000 miles.  His method involved pacing out the distance between two points 500 miles apart, and was obviously subject to significant error limits.  Although it turned out to be 2,000 miles short of the truth, most people at the time thought that his figure was a significant overestimate.