Amazon.com description: Product Description: The writing of historical biography is properly a work of partnership, to
which public credit is awarded too often in an inverse proportion to the
labours expended. One group of historians, labouring in the obscurest
depths, dig and prepare the ground, searching and sifting the documentary
soil with infinite labour and over an area immensely wide. They are
followed by those scholars and specialists in history who give their
lives to the study of a single period, and who sow literature in the
furrows of research prepared by those who have preceded them. Last of
all comes the essayist, or writer pure and simple, who reaps the harvest
so laboriously prepared. The material lies all before him; the documents
have been arranged, the immense contemporary fields of record and
knowledge examined and searched for stray seeds of significance that may
have blown over into them; the perspective is cleared for him, the
relation of his facts to time and space and the march of human
civilisation duly established; he has nothing to do but reap the field of
harvest where it suits him, grind it in the wheels of whatever machinery
his art is equipped with, and come before the public with the finished
product. And invariably in this unequal partnership he reaps most richly
who reaps latest.

I am far from putting this narrative forward as the fine and ultimate
product of all the immense labour and research of the historians of
Columbus; but I am anxious to excuse myself for my apparent presumption
in venturing into a field which might more properly be occupied by the
expert historian. It would appear that the double work of acquiring the
facts of a piece of human history and of presenting them through the
medium of literature can hardly ever be performed by one and the same
man. A lifetime must be devoted to the one, a year or two may suffice
for the other; and an entirely different set of qualities must be
employed in the two tasks. I cannot make it too clear that I make no
claim to have added one iota of information or one fragment of original
research to the expert knowledge regarding the life of Christopher
Columbus; and when I add that the chief collection of facts and documents
relating to the subject, the 'Raccolta Columbiana,'--[Raccolta di
Documenti e Studi Publicati dalla R. Commissione Colombiana, &c. Auspice
il Ministero della Publica Istruzione. Rome, 1892-4.]--is a work
consisting of more than thirty folio volumes, the general reader will be
the more indulgent to me. But when a purely human interest led me some
time ago to look into the literature of Columbus, I was amazed to find
what seemed to me a striking disproportion between the extent of the
modern historians' work on that subject and the knowledge or interest in
it displayed by what we call the general reading public. I am surprised
to find how many well-informed people there are whose knowledge of
Columbus is comprised within two beliefs, one of them erroneous and the
other doubtful: that he discovered America, and performed a trick with
an egg. Americans, I think, are a little better informed on the subject
than the English; perhaps because the greater part of modern critical
research on the subject of Columbus has been the work of Americans.
It is to bridge the immense gap existing between the labours of the
historians and the indifference of the modern reader, between the
Raccolta Columbiana, in fact, and the story of the egg, that I have
written my narrative.

It is customary and proper to preface a work which is based entirely on
the labours of other people with an acknowledgment of the sources whence
it is drawn; and yet in the case of Columbus I do not know where to
begin. In one way I am indebted to every serious writer who has even
remotely concerned himself with the subject, from Columbus himself and
Las Casas down to the editors of the Raccolta.