R.H. Major - Select Letters of Christopher Columbus with other Original Documents relating to this Four Voyages to the New World

T. RICHARDS, 37, GREAT QUEEN STREET.

TO

THE HONOURED AND BELOVED MEMORY OF HIS EXCELLENCY

THE COUNT DE LAVRADIO, LATK ENVOY EXTRAORDINARY AND MINISTER PLENIPOTENTIARY OF HIS MOST FAITHFUL MAJESTY

AT THE COURT OF ST. JAMESS, ETC., ETC., ETC., A WARM APPRECIATOR OF THE EXALTED MERITS OF COLUMBUS, THE FOLLOWING PAGES ARE REVERENTLY INSCRIBED BY THE EDITOR.

I T has been thought desirable by some of the leading members of our Council that I should avail myself of the opportunity offered by this second Edition of the Select Letters of Columbus , to lay before the Society a correspondence in which I have endeavoured to vindicate the character of the Societys early productions, and especially the first edition of this work, from a most unjustifiable attack made upon them by Mr. Froude in the Westminster Review in 1852, and repeated in the second volume of that gentlemans Short Studies on Great Subjects , printed in 1867, and reprinted in a popular edition in the same year. The letters themselves will convey to the reader the whole of the facts, minus only the bitterness and ferocity of Mr. Froudes attack.

The Athenceum, July 13th , 1867.
British Museum, July 3rd, 1867.

Will you allow me to appeal against a wrong done to the Hakluyt Society in general, and to myself in particular, in a work now very extensively read?

In the second volume of Mr. Froudes Short Studies on Great Subjects , at page 102, is an article on Englands Forgotten Worthies, in which the author makes an attack on the Hakluyt Society, the bitter expressions of which need not be repeated here. It is headed by the titles of three of the Societys early publications, and the first he states to be The Observations of Sir Richard Hawkins, Knt., in his Voyage in the South Sea in 1593. Reprinted from the edition of 1622, and edited by R. H. Major, Esq., of the British Museum ; whereas I had nothing to do with the editing of that work, This done, at page 108, Mr. Fronde says: The Editor of the Letters of Columbus (which I did edit in 1847) apologizes for the rudeness of the old seamans phraseology. Columbus, he tells us, was not so great a master of the pen as of the art of navigation. We are to make excuses for him. We are put on our guard, and warned not to be offended, before we are introduced to the sublime record of sufferings under which a man of the highest order was staggering towards the end of his earthly calamities; although the inarticulate fragments in which his thought breaks out from him, are strokes of natural art, by the side of which literary pathos is poor and meaningless . I warmly deny that I apologized for Columbuss language. So far from it, I repeatedly expressed my sympathy with and admiration of his manly and touching record of his sufferings. What I did apologize for was any mischievous result which might possibly have accrued, though I do not think it did accrue, to my own diction from that occasional want of connectedness in the original which I had to contend with in translating. The two things are manifestly different, and it is not pleasant to find the readers highest sympathies appealed to in order to bring down greater condemnation on me for a fault that I had never committed. But I should not trouble you with such a personal matter, were it not that, having fabricated this handle for censure on me, Mr. Froude makes it a hook for the following criticism on the Hakluyt Society: And even in the subjects which they select, they are pursued by the same curious fatality , the selection blamed being that of Drakes Last Voyage in 1595, edited from the original MSS. Then, after magisterially condemning this elsewhere unblamed selection as a fatal sin, Mr. Froude proceeds to say, at the foot of page 109, But every bad has a worse below it, and more offensive than all these is the Editor of Hawkinss Voyage to the South Sea, and if the reader refers to the head of the article for the name of this most offensive editor , he will, as I have already said, find my name, who never had anything to do with it. It is true that on page 110 the name of the real editor, Admiral Bethune, occurs; but as Mr. Froudes article is a reprint from the Westminster Review of 1852 (not 1853, as Mr, Froude again blunders in saying), there has been time enough for that gentleman to correct the injurious errors into which he had fallen. Although naturally annoyed at this treatment of my name, I left the offence unnoticed at the time; but now that, after a lapse of fifteen years, it is reprinted, with all faults in a widely-circulated publication, I call on Mr. Froude to correct his mis-statements.