to a seat in the India Council, he had official cognisance of all correspondence relating to American affairs.  Prior to the appearance in Spain of the celebrated Letters of Cortes, Peter Martyr’s narrative stood alone.  Heidenheimer rightly describes him:  Als echter Kind seiner Zeit, war Peter Martyr Lehrer und Gelehrter, Soldat und Priester, Schriftsteller und Diplomat.  It was characteristic of the epoch of the Renaissance that a man of culture should embrace all branches of learning, thus Martyr’s observation extended over the broadest field of human knowledge.  Diligent, discriminating, and conscientious, he was keen, clever, and tactful, not without touches of dry humour, but rarely brilliant.  Scientific questions, the variations of the magnetic pole, calculations of latitude and longitude, the newly discovered Gulf Stream and the mare sargassum, and the whereabouts of a possible strait uniting the Atlantic with the Pacific Ocean, occupied his speculations.  Likewise are the flora and the fauna of the New World described to his readers, as they were described to him by the home-coming explorers.  Pages of his writings are devoted to the inhabitants of the islands and of the mainland, their customs and superstitions, their religions and forms of government.  He has tales of giants, harpies, mermaids, and sea-serpents.  Wild men living in trees, Amazons dwelling on lonely islands, cannibals scouring seas and forests in search of human prey, figure in his narrative.  Erroneous facts, mistaken judgments due to a credulity that may seem to us ingenuous, are frequent, but it must be borne in mind that he worked without a pre-established plan, his chronicle developing as fresh material reached him; also that he wrote at a time when the world seemed each day to expand before the astonished eyes of men, revealing magic isles floating on unknown seas, vaster horizons in whose heavens novel constellations gleamed; mysterious ocean currents, flowing whence no man knew, to break upon the shores of immense continents inhabited by strange races, living amidst conditions of fabulous wealth and incredible barbarism.  The limits of the possible receded, discrimination between truth and fiction became purely speculative, since new data, uninterruptedly supplied, contradicted former experience and invalidated accepted theories.  The Decades were compiled from verbal and written reports from sources the writer was warranted in trusting.

Since geographical surprises are now exhausted, and the division of land and water on the earth’s surface has passed from the sphere of navigation into that of politics, no writer will ever again have such material at his disposition.  The arrival of his letters in Italy was eagerly awaited and constituted a literary event of the first magnitude.  Popes sent him messages urging him to continue, the King of Naples borrowed copies from Cardinal Sforza, and the contents of these romantic chronicles furnished