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Men and women seated and standing around a table, with one man standing and pointing at something unseen at left, frescoes and heavy curtains in background
An artist’s rendition of Christopher Columbus presenting the request for his first voyage at the court of King Ferdinand V and Queen Isabella I in 1486. Vaclav Brozik, “Christopher Columbus at the Royal Court of Spain,” 1884. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

Intern Spotlight: The Shifting Reputation of Christopher Columbus as Seen in the Christopher Columbus Collection at the Library of Congress

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This is a guest post by Molly Williams, a Junior Fellow in the Manuscript Division.

On May 1, 1893, hundreds of thousands of fairgoers flocked to the grand opening of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Held in celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas, the exposition boasted almost two hundred buildings filled with displays featuring the “human progress” of the United States and “eighty-six foreign nations, colonies, and principalities.” Central to the fair’s theme was the Christopher Columbus exhibit. It consisted of seventeen displays housed in a reproduction of the monastery (sometimes described as a convent) of La Rábida, the church where Columbus stayed in 1485 while on his way to the court of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. The exhibit cost fifty thousand dollars to construct and displayed more than a thousand Columbus-related artifacts gathered from Latin America and Spain.

Monochrome image showing fort-like convent on water
Photograph of the monastery of La Rábida, from The Vanishing City: A Photographic Encyclopedia of the World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago: Laird & Lee, 1893), page 25.

Columbus’s reputation has fluctuated greatly throughout history, both during his own lifetime and in the centuries since. As a junior fellow in the Library of Congress Manuscript Division this summer, I became acutely familiar with these fluctuations as I worked on identifying and listing the photographs, glass plate negatives, photostats, transcripts, and other copies that make up the bulk of the Library’s Christopher Columbus collection (known officially as the Collection Concerning Christopher Columbus). This collection centers around an original volume, or codex, known as the Book of Privileges, which Columbus first compiled in 1498. The Library’s copy, known as the Washington Codex, was made in 1502. However, the bulk of the Christopher Columbus collection is comprised of nineteenth-and twentieth-century photographic prints, glass plate negatives, transcripts, and other copies of the 1498 version, known as the Veragua Codex, which was displayed with related documents at the Columbian Exposition. The Veragua Codex consists of twenty-nine documents, many of them issued by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, providing evidence for Columbus’s claim to the titles of Admiral, Viceroy, and Governor General of the Indies. Ferdinand and Isabella had granted Columbus these titles in 1492, but by 1498, with the monarchs’ support waning, he worried that they might rescind them.

Columbus’s concerns proved legitimate when in 1500, during his third voyage to the Americas, Ferdinand and Isabella ordered his arrest, accusing him of “having misused his judicial powers.” Although he was acquitted within the year, the monarchs nonetheless rescinded his titles. Thus began Columbus’s campaign for reinstatement of his titles. In pursuit of this, in 1502 he ordered four transcripts of the Book of Privileges to be made and sent to close allies and family members. Three of these 1502 copies still exist, including the Washington Codex at the Library of Congress. The Veragua Codex, meanwhile, remained in the possession of Columbus’s direct descendants, eventually reaching the fourteenth Duke of Veragua, who offered it and related letters for display at the 1893 Columbian Exposition.

The curator of the Columbus exhibit at the Columbian Exposition, journalist and Pan-Americanist William Eleroy Curtis (1850-1911), fashioned the display to portray Columbus as an example of the American dream. His story depicted Columbus as having risen from “weary, hungry and penniless” beginnings to become the discoverer of the Americas. This romantic portrayal aimed to evoke from its audience a “reverence and admiration for the great work of discovery begun by Christopher Columbus,” and La Rábida as a “cornerstone of American history.” To this end, Curtis designed the exhibit to highlight Columbus’s successes–and to omit his failures.

One part of the display showcased the manuscripts loaned to the fair by the fourteenth Duke of Veragua. These consisted of seventy-five letters, grants, and ordinances relating to Columbus’s voyages to the Americas, along with the 1498 Veragua Codex itself. Also included were Columbus’s original will, written in 1498, and the coat of arms granted to him by the Spanish monarchs, an indicator of his high social standing. The exhibit downplayed the fact that Columbus died in relative obscurity and in debt after his protracted, and ultimately unsuccessful, campaign to have his titles restored.

Since most fairgoers would not have been able to appreciate the contents of the documents, which were written in Latin and in sixteenth-century Spanish, Curtis had translations made to accompany texts that emphasized Columbus’s successes. These included the 1492 commission from Ferdinand and Isabella appointing Columbus “Grand Admiral of the Ocean Seas, Vice-King and Governor-General of all the lands that he should discover” and Columbus’s will, which he wrote while still in good standing with the Spanish monarchs.

Handwritten manuscript with annotations in margins
A page from the Grenada Capitulations displayed in the Columbus exhibit. The brackets, pointers, and marginal notes emphasize passages that Columbus felt were especially important or relevant to his titles. Box 2, Collection Concerning Christopher Columbus, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

In 1902, almost a decade after his tenure at the Columbian Exposition, Curtis offered the Library of Congress a collection of glass plate negatives and prints of each document from the fair’s Veragua display. These copies were made in 1893 by photographer William H. Stalee at his studio in Washington, D.C., after which the original manuscripts returned with the Duke of Veragua to Spain. The photographic prints and glass negatives are now part of the Christopher Columbus collection in the Library’s Manuscript Division.

This was not the Library’s first encounter with Columbus’s Book of Privileges. The previous year the Library had acquired the Washington Codex, which had once been kept alongside the Veragua Codex in the monastery of Santa Maria de las Cuevas in Seville. Unlike the Veragua Codex, which remained in the possession of Columbus’s descendants, the Washington Codex changed hands, although when this occurred or who took possession of the codex after it left the monastery is unclear. Considered lost for nearly three hundred years, it was eventually acquired by a rare book dealer in Florence, Italy, where it was purchased in 1818 by clergyman, scholar, and statesman Edward Everett (1794-1865) while he was a student in Germany. In 1901, the year before Curtis’s donation, the Library purchased the Washington Codex from Everett’s son, Dr. William Everett, who discovered it in a locked cabinet in his house.

Monochrome image of heavily decorated handwritten text
The first page of the Papal Bull Inter Cetera, a declaration issued by Pope Alexander VI on May 3, 1493. This document declared Spain’s sovereignty over any newly encountered lands to the west of the Azores and Cape Verde, which included the geographic region containing the lands now known as the Americas. This transcript is the second document of the Washington Codex. Box 9, Collection Concerning Christopher Columbus, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

In addition to the Washington Codex and copies of the manuscripts displayed at the Columbian Exposition, the Christopher Columbus collection has since expanded to include copies of the other two surviving 1502 codices, the Paris and Genoa versions, copies of additional letters to and from Columbus, and Manuscript Division correspondence about the collection. Hopefully my work as a junior fellow will help improve access to this collection, which provides valuable insight into how Columbus’s reputation has changed over time as well as his role in early Atlantic history and European colonization of the Americas.

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“Eighty-six foreign nations, colonies, and principalities…” R. Reid Badger, “Chicago 1893,” in Encyclopedia of World’s Fairs and Expositions, eds. John E. Findling and Kimberly D. Pelle (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2008), 120-121.

“from Latin America and Spain…” Trumbull White and William Igleheart, The World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893 (Philadelphia and St. Louis: P. W. Ziegler & Co., 1893), 473.

“having misused his judicial powers…” Helen Nader, Rights of Discovery: Christopher Columbus’s Final Appeal to King Fernando (Cali, Columbia: Carvajal S.A. and Providence, R.I.: John Carter Brown Library, 1992), 4.

“weary, hungry and penniless…” White and Igleheart, The World’s Columbian Exposition, 475.

“cornerstone of American history…” White and Igleheart, The World’s Columbian Exposition, 493; William Eleroy Curtis, The Relics of Columbus: An Illustrated Description of the Historical Collection in the Monastery of La Rabida (Washington, D.C.: W. H. Lowdermilk Co., 1893), 5.

“Grand Admiral of the Ocean Seas, Vice-King and Governor-General of all the lands that he should discover…” Curtis, Relics of Columbus, 186.

“in the monastery of Santa Maria de las Cuevas in Seville…” Frances G. Davenport, “Texts of Columbus’s Privileges,” The American Historical Review 14, no. 4 (July 1909), 775.

“who discovered it in a locked cabinet in his house…” Frederick W. Meisnest, “The Lost ‘Book of Privileges’ of Columbus Located and Identified,” Huntington Library Quarterly 12, no. 4 (August 1949): 401-407; Herbert Putnam, “A Columbus Codex,” The Critic  42, no. 3 (March 1903), 244-251.

 

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