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THE AMERICAN NATURALIST [VoL.LV 



Professor Gudger has shown, beyond any possibility 

 of cavil, that all the accounts of the remora fishing in 

 America recorded after Oviedo go back to this latter 

 source, and I shall now show that Oviedo 's account goes 

 back, through Bemaldez, to an Arabic source, which is 

 itself an evolution of the second Italian version of 

 Odoric's cormorant fishing, as preserved to us in Ea- 

 musio. 



Bernaldez-i says: ''For they call it hunting, and they 

 hunt one fish with others of a particular kind," while in 

 the ''Journal of the Second Voyage "^^ we read: "The 

 fishing consists in this that they take certain fishes which 

 they call revesos, the largest of whom are not larger 

 than pilchards," from which Peter Martyr made his 

 ^'reversus fishes. "^^ In the Spanish the passage in Ber- 

 naldez runs as follows : 



It will be observed that all the Columbus accounts tell 

 of the invitation extended by the fishermen to Columbus 

 to see the peculiar kind of fishing, and the giving of the 

 catch to Columbus, according to Bemaldez, for a feast. 

 This is identical with the manner in which Odoric tells 

 of the invitation to watch the cormorant fishing. The 

 resemblance is striking. Now, in the second Italian ver- 

 sion in Eamusio the fish with which other fish are caught 

 is called marigione, "diver," while others call it sea-calf. 

 We have here, side by side, cormorant, otter and remora. 

 I have already shown in my book, "Africa and the Dis- 

 covery of America," that much of the matter in the 

 "Voyages of Columbus" is apocryphal and comes from 

 Odoric of Pordenone's "Itinerario," a name which Ber- 

 naldez uses for the book of Columbus, from which he got 

 his information. There can be little doubt that the sec- 



21 Loc. cit., p. 450. 



22 See my "Africa and the Discovery of America," Philadelphia, 1920, 



