“The oldest available edition of the letter from Christopher Columbus”, according to the company Christie’s which will organize the sale during the month of October, is estimated at nearly 1.4 million euros.
“I sailed to the Indies with the fleet given to me by the illustrious king and queen, our sovereigns, where I discovered a large number of islands, inhabited by innumerable peoples”, wrote in 1493 Christopher Columbus in a letter to King Ferdinand and the Queen. Isabelle after her trip to the American coast.
The Latin translation of this letter will be auctioned by Christie’s during the month of October, reports The Guardian. Its sale is estimated at 1.2 million pounds sterling, or nearly 1.4 million euros.
The document has been in a private Swiss collection for almost a century and is described by Christie’s as “the oldest available edition of Christopher Columbus’s letter.”
In it, the explorer touts his discoveries and portrays the natives as “extraordinarily timid”, “so unsuspecting and so generous” that they are “like fools”, notes The Guardian. Even if Christopher Columbus revolutionized the relationship with travel, he was also at the origin of the slavery of indigenous peoples and the spread of deadly diseases on the new continent. In 2020, several of his statues were torn down in the United States.
A “propaganda” letter
For historians, this letter was nothing more than propaganda proclaiming the start of European colonization.
“It was self-promotion and propaganda,” an example of 15th-century “fake news,” Professor Teo Ruiz, a Cuban-American medievalist historian, told the British media outlet.
“The importance of this letter lies in its wide distribution, thanks to the printing press,” explains Professor Geoffrey Symcox of the University of California at Los Angeles. The Spanish crown was able to spread these writings, translated into Latin, across Europe to assert its rights to these lands. “This document sparked one of the first media frenzies,” reads the website of the auction company Christie’s.
Christopher Columbus embarked on this adventure thinking of finding a new maritime route to Asia in order to compete with Portugal, which then held a monopoly on the spice trade. When he arrived in the Bahamas, he thought he had arrived in India.
During his successive travels, he then discovered Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
“He came across these islands by chance. He didn’t know and couldn’t even imagine that they were there,” says Teo Ruiz.
Convinced of having gone to Asia, he died in 1506, unaware of having approached a new continent, America.
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