Note 905 — Chapter VI
Reading edition
He calls it, in his letter to the Emperor, at the end of the “Sumario” in 1525, “La General y Natural Historia de las Indias, que de mi mano tengo escrita”;—in the Introduction to Lib. XXXIII. he says, “En treinta y quatro años que ha que estoy en estas partes”;—and in the ninth chapter, which ends Lib. XXXIV., we have an event recorded with the date of 1548;—so that, for these three-and-twenty years, he was certainly employed, more or less, on this great work. But at the end of Book XXXVII. he says, “Y esto baste quanto a este breve libro del numero treinta y siete, hasta que el tiempo nos avise de otras cosas que en el se acrescientan”; from which I infer that he kept each book, or each large division of his work, open for additions, as long as he lived, and therefore that parts of it may have been written as late as 1557.