Original letter from Columbus announcing 'discovery' of America goes on sale for first time

Donna Ferguson
Sat 30 Sep 2023 09.00 EDT

The explorer is widely thought of as an exploiter today, and didn’t know east from west. But a version of his boastful missive is expected to fetch up to £1.2m at auction

Donna Ferguson
Sat 30 Sep 2023 09.00 EDT

In 1493, Christopher Columbus wrote a letter that would change the landscape of the modern world. “I sailed to the Indies with the fleet that the illustrious King and Queen, our sovereigns, gave me, where I discovered a great many islands, inhabited by numberless people,” he wrote after his return to Europe to royal treasurer Luis de Santángel. “Of all, I have taken possession for their Highnesses.”

The events relayed in the letter were “the first report of a voyage that really did change the world”, says Columbus biographer Professor Felipe Fernández-Armesto.

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“[In current times] Columbus has lost his former status as an honorary all-American hero and quasi-founding father, but notoriety rarely hurts one’s market value, especially in the US. Witness Donald Trump,” says Fernández-Armesto.

Columbus had no idea that, at the time, he was the first European since the Vikings to encounter North America – he thought he had travelled to islands near Japan. But his voyage created, for the first time, “a viable, commercially exploitable route” across the Atlantic and opened up communications between long-sundered cultures on either side of the ocean, Fernández-Armesto says.

The letter praises the rich natural assets of the islands Columbus encountered, and he portrays the “extraordinarily timid” native people he met there as “so unsuspicious and so generous” they are “like fools”. It is now seen by historians as a piece of propaganda that heralds the start of the European colonisation of the New World.

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/30/original-letter-from-columbus-announcing-discovery-of-america-goes-on-sale-for-first-time