e 397: "L' autorita di Las Casas e d' una suprema e
vitale importanza tanto nella storia di Cristoforo Colombo,
come nell' esame delle _Historie_ di Fernando suo figlio.... E
dal confronto tra questi due scrittori emergera una omogeneita
si perfetta, che si potrebbe coi termini del frate domenicano
ritrovare o rifare per due terzi il testo originale spagnuolo
delle _Historie_ di Fernando Colombo." Peragallo, _L'
autenticita delle Historie di Fernando Colombo_, Genoa, 1884,
p. 23.]

[Sidenote: Bernaldez and Peter Martyr.]

[Sidenote: Letters of Columbus.]

Besides these books of most fundamental importance, we have valuable
accounts of some parts of the life of Columbus by his friend Andres
Bernaldez, the curate of Los Palacios near Seville.[398] Peter Martyr,
of Anghiera, by Lago Maggiore, was an intimate friend of Columbus, and
gives a good account of his voyages, besides mentioning him in sundry
epistles.[399] Columbus himself, moreover, was such a voluminous writer
that his contemporaries laughed about it. "God grant," says Zuniga in a
letter to the Marquis de Pescara, "God grant that Gutierrez may never
come short for paper, for he writes more than Ptolemy, more than
Columbus, the man who discovered the Indies."[400] These writings are in
great part lost, though doubtless a good many things will yet be brought
to light in Spain by persistent rummaging. We have, however, from sixty
to seventy letters and reports by Columbus, of which twenty-three at
least are in his own handwriting; and all these have been
published.[401]

[Footnote 398: _Historia de los Reyes Catolicos D. Fernando y
D^a Isabel. Cronica inedita del siglo XV, escrita por el
Bachiller Andres Bernaldez, cura que fue de Los Palacios_,
Granada, 1856, 2 vols. small 4to. It is a book of very high
authority.]

[Footnote 399: _De orbe novo Decades_, Alcala, 1516; _Opus
epistolarum_, Compluti (Alcala), 1530; Harrisse, _Bibliotheca
Americana Vetustissima_, Nos. 88, 160.]

[Footnote 400: "A Gutierrez vuestro solicitador, ruego a Dios
que nunca le falte papel, porque escribe mas que Tolomeo y que
Colon, el que hallo las Indias." Rivadeneyra, _Curiosidades
bibliograficas_, p. 59, apud Harrisse, _Christophe Colomb_,
tom. i. p. 1.]

[Footnote 401: Harrisse, _loc.