Note 352-2 — NARRATIVE OF THE THIRD VOYAGE OF COLUMBUS AS CONTAINED IN LAS CASAS’S HISTORY

Cf. Columbus’s letter to the sovereigns, “Your Highnesses have here another world.” Major, Select Letters of Columbus, p. 148, and the letter to the nurse of Prince John, p. 381, post. “I have placed under the dominion of the King and Queen our sovereigns another world.” These passages clearly show that Columbus during and after this voyage realized that he accomplished something quite different from merely reaching Asia by a western route. He had found a hitherto unknown portion of the world, unknown to the ancients or to Marco Polo, but not for that reason necessarily physically detached from the known Asia. For a fuller discussion of the meaning of the phrase “another world,” “New World,” and of Columbus’s ideas of what he had done, see Bourne, Spain in America, pp. 94-98, and the facsimile of the Bartholomew Columbus map, opposite p. 96.