Dr. Chanca of Seville volunteered to go to the Indies, and on May 23, 1493, the King and Queen appointed him surgeon (Navarrete, Viages, II. 54). This letter was written to the cabildo or town council of Seville and is the first narrative of one of Columbus’s voyages that we have exactly as it was written by a private observer. It is also the first description of the natives that we have from an observer of scientific training. The original text was first printed by Navarrete in his Viages in 1825. The original manuscript or a copy came into the possession of the historian Bernaldez, who embodied it with a few trifling changes and omissions in his Historia de Los Reyes Catolicos, chs. CXIX., CXX. (Seville ed., 1870), Vol. II., pp. 5-36.

Columbus kept a journal on this voyage which is no longer extant. Abridgments of it are preserved to us in the Historie of Ferdinand Columbus and in the Historia de las Indias of Las Casas. There are other contemporary narratives of the voyage from private hands, but they are either made up from conversations with those who went on the voyage, like the letters of Simone Verde, printed in Harrisse, Christophe Colomb, II. 68-78, or the account in Books II. and III. of the first decade of Peter Martyr’s De Rebus Oceanicis, or a literary embellishment of some private letters like the translation into Latin by Nicolo Syllacio of some letters he received from Guillelmo Coma who went on the voyage. The Syllacio-Coma letter and Peter Martyr’s account in its earliest published form, the Venetian Libretto de tutta la Navigatione de Re de Spagna de le Isole et Terreni novamente Trovati, are accessible in English in Thacher, Christopher Columbus, II. 243-262, 489-502. These two narratives gave the European public its first knowledge of the second voyage. The Syllacio-Coma letter was published late in 1494 or early in 1495, and the Libretto in Venice in 1504.

The translation of Dr. Chanca’s letter given here is that of R.H. Major. It has been carefully revised to bring it into closer conformity to the original. Any noteworthy changes will be indicated. Attention may be called to a somewhat important correction of the text on p. 304.

Of Dr. Chanca personally little or nothing is known beyond what has been mentioned except that he devoted himself with zeal and self-sacrifice to his duties. In the report of the Second Voyage which Columbus prepared January 30, 1494, and sent off by Antonio de Torres February 2, he charged Torres as follows in regard to Dr. Chanca. “You will inform their Highnesses of the labor that Dr. Chanca is performing on account of the many that are ill and the lack of supplies and that with all this he is conducting himself with great diligence and kindness in everything that concerns his duties,” etc. Major, Select Letters of Columbus, pp. 93, 94.

E.G.B.