These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

Before An Account of the Antiquities of the Indians disappeared, Columbus’s son Ferdinand, writing a biography of his father, copied it out, and even though Ferdinand Columbus’s book remained unpublished at his death in 1539, his copy of Pané’s extraordinary account had by then been copied by other scholars, including the learned and dogged Las Casas, a man who never left a page unturned. In 1570, a scholar in Venice was translating Pané’s Antiquities into Italian when he died in prison, suspected of being a spy for the French; nevertheless, his translation was published in 1571, with the result that the closest thing to the original of Pané’s account that survives is a poor Italian translation of words that had already been many times translated, from other tongues to Guatícabanú’s tongue, and from