My Master Columbus [antikvár]

note to columbists jA-word to avert rising temperatures among Columbists, that large and irritable group of scholars whose wrangles about the birth, name, early life and personality of Christopher Columbus still leave him shrouded in much mystery. The " document found in a goathouse", here presented in free but prudent translation, is held by such Spanish sages as have seen it to be a transparent forgery, otherwise, of course, it would long since have been published in Spain. While confessing my own lack of prejudice against forgeries as such, it is my duty to record that the peasant in a village near Cordoba, from whom the document was obtained, is obstinately convinced of its authenticity; likewise the only two members of his circle whose destiny it was to be taught to read. (This does not include his wife, who has not read it but describes it as " garbage ".) Their story is that it "was found in a carefully-protected cache by my peasant's many-times-great-grandfather. In the seventeenth century (they think) this uncouth fellow tried to peddle it to a professor in Cordoba, but got nothing for his pains except derision and threats. An accompanying local legend, said to have dated from long before the manuscript was discovered, was that the good Fra Diego Lucero had never turned in his report to the Inquisition but, after completing it, had suddenly lost 10