Excerpt from The Journal of His First Voyage to America The so-called Journal of Columbus is one of those bare, spare, essential documents that form the skeleton of the corpus of history. It is a simple sailor's record, but like the staff of Colum bus 's patron saint it has grown with time into a palm-tree, covered with fruits and foliage. The narrative is an abstract of the original journal (made by the Admiral's companion Las Casas.) It is as direct and outwardly severe as such a work would necessarily be; and yet from this seed have sprung histories, biographies, novels, plays and poems innumerable. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.