Note 96 — Chapter I

The Italian text of Toscanelli’s letter has been long known in Ferdinand Columbus’ Life of his father; but Harrisse calls it “très-inexact et interpolée;” and, in his Bibl. Am. Vet. Additions (1872), p. xvi, Harrisse gives the Latin text, which he had already printed, in 1871, in his Don Fernando Colon, published at Seville, from a copy made of it which had been discovered by the librarian of the Colombina, transcribed by Columbus himself in a copy of Æneas Sylvius’ (Pius II.’s) Historia rerum ubique gestarum, Venice, 1477, preserved in that library. Harrisse also gives a photographic fac-simile of this memorial of Columbus. Cf. D’Avezac, in the Bulletin de la Société de Géographie de Paris, October, 1873, p. 46; and Harrisse, Les Cortereal, p. 41. The form of the letter, as given in Navarrete, is translated into English in Kettell’s Journal of Columbus, p. 268, and in Becher’s Landfall of Columbus, p. 183. Cf. Lelewel, Géographie du moyen âge, ii. 130; Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, 1872, p. 49; Ruge, Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, p. 225. H. Grothe, in his Leonardo da Vinci, Berlin, 1874, says that Da Vinci in 1473 had written to Columbus respecting a western passage to the Indies.