Fernando and Isabel made sure that Columbus's First Letter from America would be widely distributed and read throughout Europe. Probably at their initiative, the book went through nine editions within a year: three editions in Rome, one in Antwerp, one in Basel, three in Paris, and another in Basel in 1494. An Italian translation in poetry by Giuliano Dati had three editions in 1493 (one in Rome and two in Florence). A German edition appeared in Strassburg in 1497. A second edition in Castilian appeared in Valladolid in 1497.

This copy of the second Plannck edition in Rome is open to the final page, which describes Columbus as "Christopher Columbus, Commander of the Ocean Fleet."

In a further effort to assure Castilian sovereignty over the newly discovered islands, Fernando and Isabel appealed to the fifteenth-century's equivalent of an international arbiter, Pope Alexander VI. Their ambassador to the papacy, Bernardino Carvajal, made this speech to the pope on June 19, 1493, in which he presented Castile's claims and requested that Alexander confirm Castilian possession of the islands.

The appeal was successful. Alexander issued a papal decree, Inter caetera, confirming Castilian possession of the islands that Columbus had discovered and any other islands or continent that Castilians might discover in the future beyond an imaginary line in the Atlantic Ocean. This Line of Demarcation, according to Inter caetera, was drawn from the Arctic or North Pole to the Antarctic or South Pole, one hundred leagues south and west of the Azores and Cape Verde Islands.

Spanish appeal to the papacy had the intended effect. Portugal, worried that the papal decrees gave Castile a right to the eastward route to the Indies and to lands off the West African coast, agreed to negotiate directly with the Spanish monarchs. On June 7, 1497, Castile and Portugal signed the Treaty of Tordesillas, setting the Line of Demarcation 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. Through this compromise, Castile secured possession of Columbus's discoveries, including eventually North and South America, while Portugal retained rights to lands discovered east of this line, which included sub-Saharan Africa and the East Indies, to which, one month later, the Portuguese king would despatch Vasco da Gama.

This is the first German edition of the First Letter from America. Typical of German printed books, it bears a beautiful woodcut illustration on the frontispiece. It is the first printed work to introduce a religious motif in the American story; Christ addresses King Fernando and his courtiers.

Spanish publishers knew that the Columbus voyage was a Castilian enterprise, and that Queen Isabel of Castile was the ruler of the new islands. But publishers in other parts of Europe could not seem to understand that Columbus reported principally to the queen, not the king.

Having acquired formal recognition of Castilian sovereignty over La Española, Fernando and Isabel authorized colonization of the island. A colony would constitute effective occupation—one of the most important proofs of sovereignty. Events on La Española from 1493 through 1497, however, punctured the euphoria with which Spanish colonists had volunteered for the second voyage. The fleet made a fast safe crossing, but found the thirty-nine men left behind in La Navidad had been killed either by disease or by the local Indians. The natives that Columbus had described as meek and gentle in the First Letter from America turned out to be hostile and dangerous.

The environment also proved dangerous. More than three hundred Europeans became seriously ill after they went ashore, including Columbus, and many died. Columbus diverted his energies into conquering the Indians and exploring further west, where he still expected to find the Asian continent. He left the administration of the colony in the hands of his brothers Bartolomé and Diego Colón, who had just arrived from France and Italy, never having lived in Spain.

The Spaniards who had come to colonize the island became dissatisfied with the Columbus brothers' authoritarian and uninformed rule. Groups of colonists moved away from Columbus's headquarters city of La Isabela to form squatter settlements, but the Columbus brothers attacked them and arrested them as rebels. The colonists felt that the denial of their rights as Spanish citizens had become intolerable. The appellate judge Columbus had appointed for the whole island, Francisco Roldán, led a revolt in which almost one hundred colonists moved to the Xaraguá Peninsula and established a new town. Most of the other colonists simply gave up; they returned to Spain on the four resupply fleets that crossed between Spain and Española. The number of colonists remaining on the island fell below three hundred.

As all of this bad news trickled back with the returning fleets, the reputation of Columbus's colony deteriorated. When Columbus returned to Spain in 1497 and started organizing his third voyage, he could not recruit enough Spaniards to man his ships or settle his colonies.

In desperation, he asked the monarchs for permission to recruit condemned murderers, who would gain commutation of their death sentences after ten years of unpaid labor in the colonies. This royal provision of 1497, as well as the 1493 papal decrees establishing the Line of Demarcation, were quickly incorporated into books of Castilian laws such as this one.

The book is open to the royal permission for Columbus to recruit convicts. The text notes that this decree was announced by the public crier of the city of Granada, who read it aloud in the city's principal marketplace on October 14, 1497. Despite the inducement offered, Columbus was able to recruit only ten convicts, six of them Gypsies convicted of murder.

Columbus's third voyage was the first to carry European women to America. We know the names and identities of only four of these pioneer women: Catalina de Sevilla was accompanying her husband, noncommissioned officer Pedro de Salamanca; Gracia de Segovia appears to have been single and traveling alone; Catalina de Egipcio and María de Egipcio were Gypsy women convicted of murder who took advantage of the offer of commutation of sentence after ten years of unpaid service in the Americas.

Columbus explored the coast of Venezuela in 1498. Realizing from the volume of water pouring out of the Orinoco River delta that this was a continent, he informed the monarchs that he had taken possession of this "Other World" in their name. Fernando and Isabel sent Alonso de Ojeda and Juan de La Cosa the next year to establish colonies on the mainland of South America and explore further for a passage to Asia. The Florentine merchant, Amerigo Vespucci, went on this voyage, probably as agent of the Sevillian merchants who had invested in the costs of the voyage.

After he returned to Spain in June 1500, Vespucci sent this letter to Lorenzo Pier Francesco de' Medici, cousin of Lorenzo de' Medici the Magnificent, describing the voyage. In Florence, Giovanni Giocondo translated the letter into Latin.

In this letter, Vespucci claimed that he had made astronomic observations and measured longitude by a new method, using the conjunction of the moon with Mars on August 23, 1499, as his reference. Scholars now doubt that he made observations of lunar distances off the Venezuelan coast.

As Spanish fleets continued to explore and map the American coastline, King Fernando and Queen Isabel drew on every possible resource to publicize their sovereignty. One of the most effective publicists was an Italian humanist, Pietro Martire d'Anghiera, who had been a chaplain on Isabel's staff since 1488. Assigned responsibility for writing the history of the explorations, d'Anghiera chose to do so in the form of letters to friends and patrons in Spain and Italy. These letters shaped European impressions of the Americas.

The popularity of the letters stemmed from a paradox; using the classical style admired in intellectual circles, they narrated high adventure in exotic places. D'Anghiera never saw the Americas, though he was appointed abbot of the island of Jamaica. He acquired his information in the traditional way of Castilian royal chroniclers, by interviewing the participants (he was acquainted with Columbus, Cortés, Magellan, Cabot, and Vespucci), or reading the written reports captains submitted to the House of Trade in Seville. D'Anghiera shaped these first-hand accounts into an elegant narrative true to the norms of classical rhetoric. His first collection of letters, written between 1488 and 1525, recounts the first three voyages of Columbus. With d'Anghiera's permission, the letters were translated into the Venetian dialect by Angelo Trevisan, Venetian ambassador to Spain, with the translator's description of Columbus at the beginning of the collection.

The Libretto is the earliest known publication of Pietro Martire d'Anghiera, the first historian of the Americas. It is the first published collection of his letters; it contains the first account in printed form of the third voyage and a part of the second voyage of Columbus. This beautiful copy, another in the John Carter Brown Library, and a third lacking the title leaf in the Marciana Library in Venice are the only recorded surviving copies.

The provenance of this copy of the Libretto is faithfully and charmingly related by Douglas G. Parsonage:

On a certain visit to Budapest in 1929 Lathrop C. Harper called as usual on his old friend Gustav Ranschburg, antiquarian bookseller. Civilities were exchanged, companionable gossip started, and then the inevitable request from Harper: "Let's see some books." I was not there myself and cannot fill in the details as to what was shown and rejected, what else was looked at and set aside for further consideration. But I do know that at a certain point a nondescript, unimpressive volume in vellum lettered on the spine Opusc. Var. came to light. It was a volume containing twelve sixteenth-century pamphlets bound together with a manuscript index, with such unpromising titles as Conjectura de libris de imitatione Christi; Dissertatio de Tracala; De numismatis et nummis antiquis; and others.

Knowing Mr. Harper, I would like to imagine a certain bird-dog attitude that may suddenly have developed. On the other hand, his poker face when the stakes were high was notorious. But I only have his own version of what happened next, and that was a laconic: "I asked him the price, and said I'd take it." One has to remember that all the titles were in Latin, of which Mr. Harper had little or no real knowledge; that the first nine pamphlets could have no possible interest for Harper or his customers; that the tenth was listed in the manuscript index as Navigazione alla scoperta d'America, Venezia, 1504; and the last two were similar to the first nine. Yet I have Mr. Harper's word, which I know to be true, that this is the title that caught his eye.

The book itself, under its proper title of Libretto de Tutta la Nauigatione de Re de Spagna . . . is the first printed collection of voyages, derived from Peter Martyr and covering the first three voyages of Columbus. In his voluminous reading Harper must somewhere have encountered the title and remembered it. No copy has ever appeared for sale, and it is so rare that few bibliographers have ever seen it or referred to it, except to mention its legendary rarity. And here was a second perfect copy, nestling anonymously in the middle of a dull collection of tracts in a utilitarian vellum binding lettered Opusc. Var.!

It came to America in Harper's pocket; was separated and placed in a morocco case, and kept side by side with the parent volume in Harper's safe until he died. To my knowledge he never offered it for sale, and indeed few people knew he had it. During the thirties times were bad, and few libraries or collectors had the kind of money Harper felt it was worth—and rightly! Came the forties and his slow withdrawal from active bookselling, partly due to advancing years and partly to family inheritance matters that occupied most of his time, and at his death in 1950 it was still in the safe.

With the sale of the business after Harper's death, and the availability of a typed inventory of the books in his stock, some of the more knowledgeable dealers tried to buy the business for this one book. But only one of several collectors who saw the list was as alert as Harper had been to this outstanding rarity, which was typed out on a single line without any comment or price with the four or five thousand other books in the Harper stock. That Bernardo Mendel was the eventual successful purchaser of the business against considerable odds is evidence of the knowledge and acumen that went into forming his own library that now enriches the shelves of the Lilly Library at Indiana University. This book was a gift of Mr. Mendel on the occasion of the dedication.

The book is open to Trevisan's description of the personal appearance of Columbus:

Christopher Columbus, Genoese, a man of tall and imposing stature, ruddy-complexioned, of great intelligence, and with a long face, followed the Most Serene Sovereigns of Spain for a long time wherever they went.

Amerigo Vespucci returned from Ojeda's explorations and was summoned to Lisbon by King Manuel of Portugal. He left Seville so hastily that he did not have a chance to say goodbye or gather his belongings. The king, after receiving news of Pedro Alvares Cabral's accidental landfall on Brazil (April 23, 1500), ordered follow-up explorations. Probably, King Manuel, having learned that Amerigo had found a new system for measuring longitude, wanted him to fix the position of Brazil with respect to the Line of Demarcation to see whether it was east or west of the line. If it was west, it would belong not to Portugal but to Spain.

On May 13, 1501, Amerigo sailed with a fleet of ships in the service of Portugal. They reached the South American coast at Cape Saint Augustine (8°64'S), went south to latitude 46'S, and returned to Lisbon in July 1502. Amerigo wrote letters to his Florentine patron describing this, his second and last voyage to the Americas.

The book is open to the title page, where Amerigo calls the Americas "A New World." In this letter, as in his others, Amerigo gives the false impression that he commanded or piloted a ship, never mentioning Ojeda or any other captain.

In 1505, the German humanist Matthias Ringmann translated and published Amerigo Vespucci's second letter to Lorenzo Pier Francesco de' Medici, in which he described his voyage with the Portuguese to South America. Ringmann changed its title from New World to About the Antarctic coast long ago discovered through the king of Portugal.

The book is open to an illustration that purports to show Brazilian natives. This picture had a powerful influence on Europe's image of native Americans. In fact, the illustration was drawn by a Strasbourg artist who never saw a native American; he based his drawing on Renaissance concepts of the ideal human body.

This is the book that gave the name "America" to the newly discovered lands in the West.

In 1506, Martin Waldseemüller and several other humanists were working together at the court of Duke René, in the little town of Saint-Dié, in the Vosges Mountains of northeastern France. The humanists and their patron shared an interest in astronomy and cosmography. Together they were compiling a world atlas based on Ptolemy's Geography.

The German humanist Matthias Ringmann joined the Saint-Dié group, bringing his translation of Vespucci's second letter. In comparing Vespucci's account to the works of Ptolemy, he discovered that the lands Vespucci described related to a new world not mentioned by Ptolemy, a world apparently lying under the Antarctic pole. Excited by this discovery, the humanists decided to produce a world map to include the lands not mentioned by Ptolemy.

Waldseemüller and Ringmann wrote this small tract on cosmography to serve as an introduction to the world map as well as to their planned atlas. It was entitled An introduction to cosmography with several elements of geometry and astronomy required for this science, and the four voyages of Amerigo Vespucci. In the text the authors suggested that the new lands, which formed the fourth part of the world, should be named "Amerigo" or "America" to honor Vespucci, whom they believed had discovered them. The little volume was widely distributed.

A few years later, Waldseemüller realized that these were the same lands earlier discovered by Columbus on his third voyage. He removed the name "America" in later editions, but by then it had become generally accepted. Despite all the efforts by Columbus and the Spanish monarchs to publicize Castile's discoveries and claims, the name of the Western Hemisphere would forever belong to Vespucci, an Italian businessman who had no role in its first exploration by Europeans.

The book is open to the Saint-Dié humanists' introduction to Vespucci's letter, where the authors give their reason for the name "America":

Now, really these [three] parts [Europe, Africa, and Asia] were more widely traveled, and another fourth part was discovered by Americus Vesputius (as will be seen in the following pages), for which reason I do not see why anyone would reasonably object to calling it (after the discoverer Americus, a man of wisdom and expertise) "Amerige," that is, land of Americus, or "America," since both "Europa" and "Asia" are names derived from women.

By 1515, Spaniards had established twenty-seven cities and towns on the four major Caribbean Islands—Española, Cuba, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico. They had tried to establish cities and towns on the mainland, the east coast of which they had explored and mapped from Brazil to southern Georgia. Yet every Spanish colony on the mainland had been destroyed by epidemic, crop failure, or native attack. If they were going to secure sovereignty over the mainland, they would have to conquer the native rulers first. This means of effective occupation became the norm in the European colonization of the Americas.

Hernando Cortés led the first successful conquest of a native ruler on the American mainland. Leading an expedition of about four hundred men, Cortés sailed from Cuba in 1518 and won the support of dozens of Indian city-states that had been conquered by Moctezuma's expanding Mexica (Aztec) empire. With the assistance of about 100,000 native warriors from these allies he had conquered Moctezuma's capital city of Tenochtitlán (Mexico City) by 1522.

Cortés described his expedition's progress, defeats, and victories in five long letters he sent to the new ruler of Spain, Charles V. In his second letter, Cortés described the allied army's march from the coast at Veracruz to the valley of Mexico, Moctezuma's capitulation to the invading forces, and the allies' occupation of the capital. The Spaniards, who considered cities to be the mark of a civilized society, marveled at the sophistication and monumentality of Mexico City. They also expressed horror and disgust at some of the Mexica religious rites.

The book is open to a map of Mexico City that accompanied Cortés's second letter to Charles V. This is the first map of any American city. This map is also the first to contain the designation "La Florida." It lies to the northeast of the Yucatán, Cuba, and the Panuco River.

Within the city, we can see its canals and massive architecture, including pyramids and ball court. We can also see the skull rack, where the Aztecs displayed the heads of captives and hostages who had been sacrificed in the temple of the main pyramid. In this Latin translation, the skull rack is labeled capita sacrificatorum.

Although the Mexica succeeded in defeating and expelling the Spaniards and their allies from Tenochtitlán in 1520, Cortés retreated to the allied city of Tlascala and formed a new army with reinforcements from another Spanish expedition. This much larger force definitively conquered the Mexica's new lord Cuauhtemoc, who had led a heroic resistance.

Immediately after the conquest, the Spaniards occupied the land and buildings. In order to distribute the property according to Castilian law, Cortés carried out a survey of all the property in the city. He took the property, tribute, and other income that had belonged to the ruling dynasty and turned it over to the Spanish monarchy. The properties and income of the native temples became the property of the church. Private houses and lots in the city became the booty of the conquerors.

This manuscript is a bill of sale for a house and its lot in Mexico City. Cortés had given the lot to one of the conquerors, Juan Ximénez, in 1524, and on May 9, 1527, Ximénez sold it to another Spaniard, Ruy Pérez, for 100.5 pesos of gold.

The manuscript is open to the 1527 bill of sale containing the property description:

A lot that I have and own in this city [of Temistitan], which is adjoined on one side by the property of Alonso Galeote, on the front by the street, and in back by the property of Hernando de Xerez.

The sale included the lot, buildings, and some building stone.

In 1519, an Italian merchant from Vicenza, Antonio Pigafetta, booked passage on a fateful voyage departing from the Spanish port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda, bound for Asia. Portuguese fleets had been traveling around Africa to Asia for ten years, but this expedition was different; the Portuguese captain of this fleet of five ships, Ferdinand Magellan, was commissioned by Spain to find a route through or around South America in order to cross the Pacific and reach Asia.

Spaniards had no illusions that this would be an easy voyage. In 1515, Castile had sent an expedition with this same objective under the command of the royal pilot Juan Díaz de Solís. The Solís expedition, after carefully exploring the coast of South America from Brazil to Argentina, entered the Río de la Plata, where Solís was killed by natives, and the expedition fell apart. Where Solís had failed, Magellan succeeded, though he too was killed by natives, in the Philippines, before completing his voyage

At the end, a Spanish seaman named Juan Sebastián de Elcano brought the fleet back from Asia. In the Spice Islands they sold the leaking Concepción to buy a cargo of cloves, but Trinidad's captain and crew chose to go back across the Pacific rather than continue west. Elcano navigated the lone surviving ship Victoria around Africa, and arrived home in September 1522, three years after the expedition had departed. Victoria's cargo of cloves fetched such a high price on the market that it paid for all the expedition's expenses and turned a handsome profit for the expedition's stockholders.

The news of this first circumnavigation of the globe spread rapidly. Hernando Cortés heard it the same year from the captain of a Spanish colonizing expedition he ran into on the coast of Honduras; he immediately wrote a note of congratulations to Emperor Charles V. Yet for all the significance of this, Spain's first voyage to the Spice Islands, we would know very little were it not for the Italian passenger. Pigafetta wrote an account of the voyage in which he chronicled the terrors of the violent passage through the Straits of Magellan, the horrors of starvation and lack of drinking water during the Pacific crossing, and the many intrigues and betrayals once the fleet reached Asia.

This is the first Italian translation of Pigafetta's narrative. The book is open to the final pages, which give a brief Brazilian vocabulary.

As Spanish explorers penetrated the interior of Mexico and moved farther north, the monarchy delegated to the viceroy of New Spain the power to draw up contracts, or capitulations, between the crown and the explorer. The first viceroy of New Spain, Antonio de Mendoza, arrived at his post in Mexico City in 1535 and immediately began regularizing the government and extending Spain's effective occupation of the North American continent.

A couple of years later, Emperor Charles V sent him this letter recommending Francisco Vásquez Coronado (1510-1554). The king reminded his viceroy that Coronado's father and brother had both served the Spanish monarchy and suggested that Coronado be given important assignments that would benefit the monarchy.

Clearly, the king was approving an appointment that Mendoza had already suggested. In 1539, the viceroy commissioned Coronado as commander of an expedition that was being assembled to explore the present southwest United States. The Coronado expedition, comprising 336 Spaniards, hundreds of Indian guides and bearers, and more than 1,500 horses, mules, and livestock, began moving north from Culiacán on April 22, 1540.

During the next two years, the Coronado expedition explored Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. Without being aware of it, the expedition at one time was within seven hundred miles of the De Soto expedition, which was exploring westward from Florida and Georgia to the Mississippi. The Coronado expedition began its return march to Mexico City in early April 1542, after Coronado had been seriously injured in a riding accident. For Europeans, his explorations transformed North America from an imaginary island into another new continent for colonization.

The laws that had traditionally governed Spain soon proved to be inadequate to deal with the many new situations that arose as Spaniards and native Americans struggled to live together. On the recommendation of many colonists and royal officials, Emperor Charles V issued new laws for the Americas. These laws were designed to improve the administration of the colonies and provide a more effective judicial system.

The most controversial parts of the New Laws attempted to improve the situation of the native Americans and eliminate colonists' control over Indian labor. Colonists who had the most to lose objected vehemently, so the viceroys implemented the laws gradually and piecemeal, compromising in some situations and discarding ordinances in others. By about 1570, three-quarters of the grants of Indian labor to private individuals had been converted to taxes and service paid to the royal treasury. By the end of the century, the old system of Indian labor was effectively ended. Indians in most of Spanish America had become, like Spaniards themselves, taxpayers to the royal government rather than forced laborers.

From the beginning of the American enterprise, many Spaniards were troubled by the moral and legal questions posed in the Americas. Particularly vexing was the question of whether native Americans should be allowed to continue their own life style or should be integrated into the mores of Europeans.

Dr. Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, eminent humanist at the University of Salamanca and translator of Aristotle, used the reasoning of the ancient Greek philosopher to address this question. Employing Aristotle's theory of natural slavery, Sepúlveda argued that the natives' political inferiority, idolatries, and other sins were in their very nature. They were not capable of change by their own volition or by the example of Europeans. Only by war and consequent enslavement could barbarous customs such as idolatry, cannibalism, and human sacrifice be ended.

Sepúlveda also based his argument on the papal decree of 1493 that divided the Spanish and Portuguese spheres of exploration. Because the pope had granted sovereignty over the Western Hemisphere to Spain and charged the Spanish monarchy with responsibility for converting the natives to Christianity, Spain should end these practices abhorrent to Christians. Conquest of the Indians was necessary, and therefore constituted a just war.

The book is open to Sepúlveda's discussion of the papal decree and its logical consequence, war against barbarous Indian practices in the Americas.

The greatest opponent of Sepúlveda's conclusions, though not of his reasoning, was Bartolomé de Las Casas, a Dominican friar who had lived in the Indies, where he had inherited from his father a grant of Indian labor on the island of Cuba. Horrified by the consequences of the Indian labor grants, Las Casas devoted most of his life to saving the Indians from the Europeans. In order to develop his power of argument, he studied logic and philosophy at the University of Salamanca.

Vehemently opposed to forced conversion, and therefore to conquest, Las Casas argued that the Indians were in an early stage of development, just as Europeans had been millennia before. They were capable of acquiring European culture by example and therefore should live in settled communities in the presence of priests and other good Europeans.

In 1550 Emperor Charles V summoned jurists, including Sepúlveda and Las Casas to debate the issue. The famous debate before the emperor in Valladolid produced no resolution. It is important to remember that Las Casas and Sepúlveda both wanted to achieve the same objective—conversion of the Indians to Christianity and the end of their barbarous practices—and that they both used Aristotelian logic to make their arguments.

The volume contains a collection of nine tracts by Las Casas. Here, it is open to the first tract, where, in order to lay the basis for the reforms he was demanding, Las Casas presents proofs that Spain has legitimate sovereignty by virtue of the papal decree of 1493.

As the conquest generation aged and passed away, the lines between Indian and Spaniard became blurred. Spaniards and Indians married; their children were legally considered Spaniards, regardless of race or language. Spanish colonists and American Indians became bilingual, using both Spanish and the dominant local Indian language. Government policy integrated Indian communities into the Spanish political system.

Some Indian communities were particularly eager to obtain the benefits of full political integration. Hernando Cortés had been able to conquer the Aztec capital largely because he persuaded dozens of Indian towns to become his allies. Among the first and most important of these allies was the Indian town of Tlascala. After the conquest, the Spanish government tended to treat all Indian towns alike, despite their varying roles in the conquest. This, of course, offended and worried the Tlascalans. They sued, protesting that their original agreement had been violated.

In 1556, King Philip II granted this charter of liberty to the town of Tlascala. He assured the Tlascalans that they would forever enjoy all the freedoms, tax exemptions, and privileges of a Spanish town.

The document is open to the text issued by the royal chancery and its translator, with matching texts in Spanish and the Aztec language, Nahuatl.

Both Spaniards and Indians made full use of the judicial system to press their claims and ask for redress of grievances. In property disputes, the litigants submitted testimony and legal documents in both languages and also in the pictorial tradition of Nahuatl manuscripts.

This bill of sale is written in both Spanish and Nahuatl, and the property is sketched showing the Indian owners in residence. The owner of one house is don Diego de San Francisco and the other is doña María Francisca.

The original intention of Fernando and Isabel had been to find a western route to Asia and its spices. In the mid-sixteenth century, the Spanish monarchs were still trying to enter the spice trade. In Francisco de Mendoza they thought they had found the ideal spice producer. Mendoza had gone to New Spain (modern Mexico) as a teenager with his father, Antonio de Mendoza, the first viceroy. For twenty years, Francisco assisted his father and engaged in business.

After his father's death, Francisco returned to Spain. He was looking for a profitable investment for the silver he had brought back, both for himself and for other colonists who had made their fortunes in the Americas. The American investors thought that Francisco would be the ideal investment manager in Spain; his relatives were among the most powerful nobles at court.

In this royal concession, Princess Juana granted Francisco a monopoly on the planting and marketing of Asian spices—Chinese ginger and sandalwood—in New Spain. In return for land, a sufficient number of Indian laborers, and start- up tax exemptions, Francisco agreed to pay the monarchy one-half of all the profits on his spice sales.

All of this came to nothing, however. A few weeks later, the princess commissioned Francisco to inspect all the mines in Spain and recommend which ones the monarchy should develop. Once Francisco had completed this assignment, the king appointed him director of the royal mines, and he spent the rest of his life in the royal service in Spain. He never went back to New Spain. Other Spaniards took up the project, however, and a century later ginger had become one of the leading cash crops of the town of Coamo in Puerto Rico.

The last page of the manuscript displays the signatures and rubrics of all the officials who signed off on this contract, including the princess and the king.

While the Spanish monarchy sponsored dozens of expeditions of exploration by sea and land and Spanish colonists founded and settled more than a hundred cities and towns in the Americas, the English made no effort to establish their presence in the New World. English fishing fleets, along with ships from Portugal, Spain, France, and Scandinavia, made seasonal trips to the fishing banks of North America, drying and salting their catch onshore and then carrying their cargo back to Europe in time for the Lenten season. The French king Francis I made several unsuccessful attempts to claim and settle parts of North America and Brazil, but in England neither the queen nor Parliament regarded the Americas as an important objective of royal policy; they were busy conquering and colonizing Ireland.

One Englishman and his son, both named Richard Hakluyt, had very different ideas. They had the mentality of the space race in modern times and began publicizing their views with Parliament and the royal court. They convinced Sir Humphrey Gilbert and, after Sir Humphrey's death, his half-brother Sir Walter Raleigh that England should challenge Spanish sovereignty over North America by establishing effective occupation. Sir Walter organized and financed a colonizing voyage, which established a short-lived settlement on Roanoke Island, Virginia.

Despite the failure of the Roanoke venture, Hakluyt remained convinced that the English should colonize North America. In order to publicize this idea and bring pressure on the royal government and Parliament, Hakluyt began publishing narratives of early voyages to North America. For the foreign voyages, he commissioned translations into English, but his principal objective was to use the early English voyages as a legal basis for English sovereignty in North America. Hakluyt's efforts bore fruit in the seventeenth century, when England was devastated by religious persecution and civil war. Hundreds of thousands of English people fleeing the turmoil and dangers of their own country turned to Hakluyt's narratives and, believing his rosy picture of America, emigrated to Virginia and New England.

Publication of these narratives of exploration in English translation continues to the present day, under the title Hakluyt's Voyages.

With English settlers moving into Virginia and Georgia and making incursions into Florida, the Spanish government wanted to encourage Spanish colonies in North America. Those in Florida were particularly important because they secured the coast along the major route for the return voyage of the annual silver fleets.

The government decided to use a method that had developed in other frontier colonizations. Traditionally, Spaniards and Indians from already-colonized regions went to settle the northern frontier. The colonists who settled New Mexico in the late sixteenth century, for example, came mostly from the silver mining towns of northern Mexico.

This time, the viceroy of New Spain, the duke of Albuquerque, found Indians from New Spain who were willing to emigrate to Florida. The manuscript is open to the first page of the viceroy's decree authorizing twelve Tlascalan families to colonize Florida. The signature reads "Duque de Albuquerque."

With the Atlantic transformed from obstacle to conduit, people, plants, and animals moved back and forth between Europe and America for the first time. Species that had existed only on one side of the Atlantic now became common on both sides, a process we now call the Columbian Exchange.

One of the negative effects of the Columbian Exchange devastated native American cultures; disease-bearing microorganisms from Europe infected hundreds of thousands of American Indians. Diseases such as measles, typhus, and small pox had not existed in the Americas, and when the indigenous population was first exposed, they all got sick at once. When most of a community is seriously ill at the same time, there is no one to care for the sick. People who might have survived with adequate drinking water, food, and clean conditions died of dehydration and secondary infections.

Only one disease, syphilis, traveled in the opposite direction. There now seems little doubt that syphilis was in the Americas prior to 1492 and came to Europe on Columbus's return in 1493. Most Europeans called it the "French disease," because the first cases appeared in the French army that invaded Italy in 1494.

By 1500, syphilis had become an epidemic, spreading rapidly throughout Europe in a pattern characteristic of a new venereal disease in a population having no prior immunity.

Diagnoses and treatments were suggested by many physicians, including the Italian Girolamo Fracastoro and the Spaniard Pedro Mexía (who called it the "Indies disease"). The afflicted desperately sought any concoction that might give relief from the painful and disfiguring symptoms, even when the treatment was as bad as the disease. A German knight who was infected with the disease, Ulrich von Hutten, published this treatise advocating the use of guaiacum, the extract of an American wood. The book was immediately popular throughout Europe and appeared in English translation in 1540.

This Antwerp edition of Monardes's book on the medicinal uses of American plants is open to his discussion of tobacco as a medicine.

In the first century of colonization, Europeans who stayed at home wanted to know the ways that native American societies were different from their own. Consequently, colonial writers filled their books with descriptions and illustrations of every aspect of native America that was unknown in Europe. When colonial writers did not describe some aspect of Indian society, we can safely assume that it was considered too similar to Europe to warrant mention.

Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo spent most of his life in the Americas as a royal inspector of mines and as commander of the fortress at Santo Domingo. Fascinated by the local customs and the exploits of the Spanish conquerors, Oviedo recorded his observations of native customs, artifacts, flora, fauna, and language, and he interviewed participants in Spanish expeditions to the American mainlands.

An incurable reviser of his own work, even after publication, he composed, expanded, and rewrote his books on board ship during his thirteen transatlantic voyages. To him we owe much of what we know of Indian words, customs, and skills.

In his second book, On the general and natural history of the Indies, Oviedo described how the islanders made their dugout canoes, even though they had no metal tools to work with:

On this island of Española and in all other coasts and rivers of the Indies that Christians have seen up to now, there is one type of boat, which the Indians call 'canoe.' With these they navigate the great rivers as well as the oceans for purposes of war and raid, for conducting commerce between one island and another, or for fishing and other purposes. Without these canoes, we Christians who live here could not benefit from our property on the coasts and riverbanks.

Each canoe is a single branch or tree trunk, which the Indians hollow with blows of stone-headed axes, like the one illustrated here. With these they cut or scrape the wood to hollow it. Then they burn what has been beaten and cut little by little. When the fire goes out, they again cut and beat it, alternating these two processes until the boat is formed to the limits of the width and length of the tree trunk.

I've seen them large enough to carry forty-five men, wide enough to hold a wine cask easily between the Carib Indian archers. The Caribs use them as large as I have mentioned and call them pirogues, navigating with cotton sails and by oar, as well as with their paddles, as they call their oars. Sometimes they paddle standing, at times sitting, and kneeling when they feel like it.

Some of these canoes are so small that they hold no more than two or three Indians, others hold six, others ten, and on up. But no matter what size, they are very light and dangerous, for they overturn frequently. But they don't sink even when they are immersed. And because these Indians are great swimmers, they turn them upright and smartly empty them .... They are safer than our ships in case of capsizing. Even though ours capsize less often because they are more flexible and buoyant, once they are immersed they sink to the bottom.

Oviedo was fascinated by the techniques American Indians had developed for familiar tasks, such as preparing food, building houses, and manufacturing tools and equipment. Here he illustrates the Indian method of starting a fire without the flint and steel that Europeans required. The native Americans rotated a stick poised on a piece of wood by rubbing the stick between their hands to create heat.

In 1539, the first printing press arrived in the Americas. It was established in Mexico City as a branch of the Seville press owned by the Cromberger family. Juan Cromberger in Mexico followed the same policies he had learned in the family firm in Seville. In Europe, printing had been a business from the beginning. Most printers were motivated by profit and they tended to reproduce those texts that had already been most in demand before the advent of printing.

Denis the Carthusian's little book on how to lead a Christian life had been a Latin classic for two centuries when the new bishop of Mexico, Juan de Zumárraga, commissioned this printing of Denis's section on processions, in Spanish translation.

Clearly, the good bishop thought that Spanish colonists in America were behaving no better than their medieval predecessors in Europe. The section that he commissioned from Cromberger points out the behaviors that are not suitable for holy processions: foolishness, pompous attire, drinks inappropriate to the time and place, and above all buffoonery and other lewd acts that provoke carnal sins.

The secretary of Hernando Cortés, Francisco López de Gómara, never saw America, yet he made excellent use of reports and descriptions from members of the Cortés expedition. Gómara devotes three chapters to Aztec women, focusing on practices that surely would arouse the curiosity of Europeans; how women are buried, the practice of polygamy, and marriage rites.

The book is open to a description of the Aztec writing and number systems and the names of the months and days in the Aztec calendar.

In contrast to the earlier Cromberger book in Mexico City, which was aimed at laymen, this little book was intended as a manual for priests. The Spanish priests in Peru already knew how to speak the native languages. In 1583, they came from all over Peru, meeting in the Spanish capital, Ciudad de los Reyes [Lima]. They translated the Catholic catechism into the two principal native languages of Peru, Kechua, and Aymara, and commissioned this printing from the press of Antonio Ricardo.

The catechism had been invented by Martin Luther, but Catholics soon compiled their own. In Europe, children were required to memorize the fundamentals of the Christian faith, in the form of prayers, the creed, and question-and-answer sequences. The book is open to the first prayers that every Catholic child learned, the "Lord's Prayer" and "Hail Mary." Here the prayers in Spanish are followed by their translations into Kechua in the left column and Aymara in the right column.

Jean de Léry recorded the history of an attempted French settlement in Brazil in the mid-sixteenth century. The settlement failed largely because of conflict among the colonists and hostility of the native Americans. Léry found much to comment on in the exotic flora and fauna. He provided careful drawings of Indian customs and regalia, and the publisher's woodblock cutter transformed the Indians into classic beauties in the poses of Greek gods. Here, he illustrates Indians dancing in feather headdress, using a gourd shaker, with a monkey in the foreground and a parrot in the background. On the facing page, Léry provides an example of an Indian chant.