APPENDIX.
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eighteen vessels dispatched by my sovereigns with the admiral Columbus, in his second voyage to the western hemisphere, twelve have returned and have brought Gossampine cotton, huge trees of dye-wood, and many other articles held with us as precious, the natural productions of that hitherto hidden world ; and besides all other things, no small quantity of gold. O wonderful, Pomponius ! Upon the surface of that earth are found rude masses of native gold, of a weight that one is afraid to mention. Some weigh two hundred and fifty ounces, and they hope to discover others of a much larger size, from what the naked natives intimate, when they extol their gold to our people. Nor are the Lestrigonians nor Polyphemi, who feed on human flesh, any longer doubtful. Attend—hut beware ! lest they rise in horror before thee ! When he proceeded from the Fortunate islands, now termed the Canaries, to Hispaniola, the island on which he first set foot, turning his prow a little toward the south, he arrived at innumerable islands of savage men, whom they call cannibals, or Caribbees ; and these, though naked, are courageous warriors. They fight skillfully with bows and clubs, and have boats hollowed from a single tree, yet very capacious, in which they makefiercedescents on neighbor ing islands, inhabited by milder people. They attack their villages, from which they carry off the men and devour them," & c * Another letter to Pomponius Laetus, on the same subject, has been cited at large in the body of this work. It is true these extracts give nothing that has not been stated more at large in the Decades of the same author, but they are curious, as the very first announcements of the dis coveries of Columbus, and as showing the first stamp of these extra ordinary events upon the mind of one of the most learned and liberal men of the age. A collection of the letters of Peter Martyr was published in 1530, under the title of Opus Epistolarum, Petri Martyris Anglerii ; it is divided into thirty-eight books, each containing the letters of one year. The same objections have been made to his letters as to his Decades, but they bear the same stamp of candor, probity, and great information. They possess peculiar value from being written at the moment, before the facts they record were distorted or discolored by prejudice or misrepresentation. His works abound in interesting particulars not to be found in any contempo rary historian. They are rich in thought, but still richer in fact, and are full of urbanity, and of thé liberal feeling of a scholar who has mingled * Opua Epist. P. Martyris Anglerii, Epist. 147.