bottles. Yet there is no great
unlikeness between the two tasks: it is all a matter of bottling; the
vintage is the same, infinite, inexhaustible, and as punctual as the sun
and the seasons. It was Columbus's weakness as an administrator that he
thought the bottle was everything; it is your strength that you care for
the vintage, and labour to preserve its flavour and soft fire.

Yours,
FILSON YOUNG.
RUAN MINOR, September 1906.

PREFACE

The writing of historical biography is properly a work of partnership, to
which public credit is awarded too often in an inverse proportion to the
labours expended. One group of historians, labouring in the obscurest
depths, dig and prepare the ground, searching and sifting the documentary
soil with infinite labour and over an area immensely wide. They are
followed by those scholars and specialists in history who give their
lives to the study of a single period, and who sow literature in the
furrows of research prepared by those who have preceded them. Last of
all comes the essayist, or writer pure and simple, who reaps the harvest
so laboriously prepared. The material lies all before him; the documents
have been arranged, the immense contemporary fields of record and
knowledge examined and searched for stray seeds of significance that may
have blown over into them; the perspective is cleared for him, the
relation of his facts to time and space and the march of human
civilisation duly established; he has nothing to do but reap the field of
harvest where it suits him, grind it in the wheels of whatever machinery
his art is equipped with, and come before the public with the finished
product. And invariably in this unequal partnership he reaps most richly
who reaps latest.

I am far from putting this narrative forward as the fine and ultimate
product of all the immense labour and research of the historians of
Columbus; but I am anxious to excuse myself for my apparent presumption
in venturing into a field which might more properly be occupied by the
expert historian. It would appear that the double work of acquiring the
facts of a piece of human history and of presenting them through the
medium of literature can hardly ever be performed by one and the same
man. A lifetime must be devoted to the one, a year or two may suffice
for the other; and an entirely