Note 412-5 — THE FOURTH VOYAGE OF COLUMBUS

Tablado. In the Italian translation tavolato, a “partition wall,” “wainscoting,” also “floor.” Tablado also means “scaffold” and “stage” or “staging.” We have here a curious series of mistakes. The Greek text of Josephus has ἐκπώματα, “cups.” The old Latin translator, perhaps having a defective text, took ἐκπώματα apparently to be equivalent to πώματα, which has as its secondary meaning, “lids,” and translated it by the uncommon word coopercula, “lids” (cf. Georges, Lateinischdeutsches Handwörterbuch, sub voce cooperculum). The meaning of this word Columbus guessed at, not having the text before him to see the connection, and from its derivation from cooperio, “to cover,” took it to be a “covering” in the sense of flooring, or perhaps ceiling, above where the shields were hung “in the house of the forest of Lebanon,” and rendered it tablado. The whole passage from the old Latin version (published in 1470 and frequently later), Columbus copied into a fly-leaf of his copy of the Historia Rerum ubique Gestarum of Pope Pius II. See Raccolta Colombiana, parte I., tomo II., pp. 366-367.