eemed most dead and unreal to me I have found
courage from the entertainment of some deep or absurd reflection; such as
that he did once undoubtedly, like other mortals, blink and cough and
blow his nose. And if my readers could realise that fact throughout
every page of this book, I should say that I had succeeded in my task.

To be more particular in my acknowledgments. In common with every modern
writer on Columbus--and modern research on the history of Columbus is
only thirty years old--I owe to the labours of Mr. Henry Harrisse, the
chief of modern Columbian historians, the indebtedness of the gold-miner
to the gold-mine. In the matters of the Toscanelli correspondence and
the early years of Columbus I have followed more closely Mr. Henry
Vignaud, whose work may be regarded as a continuation and reexamination
--in some cases destructive--of that of Mr. Harrisse. Mr. Vignaud's work
is happily not yet completed; we all look forward eagerly to the
completion of that part of his 'Etudes Critiques' dealing with the second
half of the Admiral's life; and Mr. Vignaud seems to me to stand higher
than all modern workers in this field in the patient and fearless
discovery of the truth regarding certain very controversial matters,
and also in ability to give a sound and reasonable interpretation to
those obscurer facts or deductions in Columbus's life that seem doomed
never to be settled by the aid of documents alone. It may be unseemly in
me not to acknowledge indebtedness to Washington Irving, but I cannot
conscientiously do so. If I had been writing ten or fifteen years ago I
might have taken his work seriously; but it is impossible that anything
so one-sided, so inaccurate, so untrue to life, and so profoundly dull
could continue to exist save in the absence of any critical knowledge or
light on the subject. All that can be said for him is that he kept the
lamp of interest in Columbus alive for English readers during the period
that preceded the advent of modern critical research. Mr. Major's
edition' of Columbus's letters has been freely consulted by me, as it
must be by any one interested in the subject. Professor Justin Winsor's
work has provided an invaluable store of ripe scholarship in matters of
cosmography and geographical detail; Sir Clements Markham's book, by far
the most trustworthy of modern English works on the subject, and a
valuable record of the established facts in Columbus's life, has proved a