1828.] [ 407 ] 



MONTHLY REVIEW OF LITERATURE, DOMESTIC AND FOREIGN. 



A History of the Life and Voyages of 

 Christopher Columbus, by Washington 

 Irving. 4 vols. 8vo. ; 1828. Of Colum- 

 bus and his renown, few perhaps remember 

 the time when they had not heard some- 

 thing. The greater part of people know 

 and speak of him as the discoverer of Ame- 

 rica, and scarcely suppose more is to be 

 known, or can be worth knowing every 

 body can sketch the outline of his story, 

 that he, for instance, taking the sphericity 

 of the earth as indisputable, proposed to get 

 to the east by the west that he had great 

 difficulty in gaining credit for so paradoxi- 

 cal an excursion, and greater still in per- 

 suading royal personages to fit out a fleet 

 that at last, however, he did succeed with 

 Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain that in 

 three or four voyages he discovered the 

 New World, and laid the foundation of a 

 colony or two that, in the prosecution of 

 his toils, he encountered revolts among his 

 crews, and ingratitude at home, and died, 

 worn out with disappointment and sorrow ; 

 but few have traced, or will take the 

 trouble, with the documents hitherto within 

 reach, to trace the exact and successive 

 steps of his discoveries, and many, even of 

 reading people, will be surprised to learn 

 that, excepting the Honduras and Mosquito 

 coasts, Columbus himself never touched 

 upon the continent of America, and that he 

 died in the belief that St. Domingo was 

 Japan, and Cuba the extremity of China. 

 The truth is, that though slight and glanc- 

 ing accounts are to be met with in every 

 book of geography, we know not where any 

 thing like a detailed narrative is to be found 

 more detailed, we mean, than Robert- 

 son's for instance ; but Mr. Washington 

 Irving has had the benefit, not only of con- 

 sulting the recent and voluminous publica- 

 tion of Navarette, during his residence at 

 Madrid, but has been admitted freely to the 

 family papers of the Duke of Varaguas, the 

 descendant and representative of Columbus. 

 The history before us is far too circum- 

 stantial for us to give any thing like an 

 adequate view of it ; but we may in a page 

 or two convey to the reader some notion of 

 what he will find in this very full, and ac- 

 curate, and readable piece of biography. 

 Mr. Washington Irving could not but exe- 

 cute respectably whatever he vmdertook, but 

 we doubt if he has done wisely in thus 

 tasking and straitening his powers, which 

 plainly require a freer course for their ac- 

 tivity than history allows. 



Of the early life of Columbus, the author 

 has done little but call into doubt the few 

 points that were received as unquestionable. 

 It may be concluded that he was a native 

 of Genoa, the descendant of a family distin- 

 guished in the naval service of that state, 

 and himself early engaged in it ; and that 



wherever else he might go, he certainly 

 went with an expedition directed against 

 the pirates of the Barbary coasts, and ac- 

 companied John of Anjou, in his invasion 

 of Naples. Other events, probable or im- 

 probable, may, however, be passed by till 

 we find him in Portugal, drawn thither 

 probably by the hope of sharing in the dis- 

 coveries then undertaken in the African 

 seas. 



It was here, apparently, where nothing 

 but discoveries were talked of, that his 

 thoughts were more particularly turned to 

 the east. By whatever steps he arrived at 

 it, the conclusion was fixed in Columbus's 

 mind, that the earth was round and that, 

 therefore, the east was accessible by pur- 

 suing a westerly course. He supposed an 

 open sea to interpose between Europe and 

 Asia. Ptolemy, whose authority no scholar 

 ventured to question, had divided the equa- 

 tor into twenty -four hours, of fifteen degrees 

 each ; and of these, fifteen hours were sup- 

 posed to be known to the ancients, extend- 

 ing from Gibraltar, or the Canaries, to the 

 city of Thinae, the eastern boundary of the 

 known world. The Portuguese, by ad- 

 vancing to the Azores, had discovered one 

 more, and therefore there remained eight 

 hours, or one-third only of the globe yet 

 unexplored ; and how much of this was 

 filled up with the undiscovered parts of Asia, 

 who could tell ? The length of a degree, 

 too, had been supposed to be not more than 

 56 miles, which again lessened the inter- 

 vening space. Then again, according to 

 the narratives of Marco Paulo and Sir John 

 Mandeville, Cathay extended far beyond 

 the boundaries of ancient knowledge, and 

 islands, particularly Antille and Cipango, 

 lay still beyond so that, on the whole, the 

 probability seemed to be, that either these 

 islands, or the continent of Asia, were with- 

 in 4,000 miles of the Portuguese coast. 

 That lands really existed in the western 

 direction there were numerous indications ; 

 a pilot, for instance, sailing 450 leagues 

 to the west of St. Vincent's, had picked up 

 a piece of carved wood, evidently not la- 

 boured with an iron instrument. In Porto 

 Santo, again, a similar piece of wood had 

 been taken up, drifted from the same quar- 

 ter. Reeds of an immense size had floated 

 from the west, such as Columbus imagined 

 had been described by Ptolemy as growing 

 in India. At the Azores, again, trunks of 

 immense pines had come ashore, and two 

 dead bodies, with features differing from 

 every known race of men. The probabi- 

 lity, then, in the mind of Columbus, rose 

 to certainty, that India was approachable in 

 this direction, and, of course, by a much 

 shorter route than by circumnavigating 

 Africa, supposing it to be indeed circum- 

 navigable, which supposition, however, de- 



