Fare you well.  From Granada, the ninth of the calends of May of the year 1500.

[Note 1:  Frederick III., of Aragon, succeeded his nephew Frederick II., as King of Naples in 1496.  Five years later, when dispossessed by Ferdinand the Catholic, he took refuge in France, where Louis XII. granted him the duchy of Anjou and a suitable pension.  He died in 1504.]

[Note 2:  Upon the death of Innocent VIII., four members of the Sacred College were conspicuous papabili:  Raffaele Riario and Giuliano della Rovere, nephews of Sixtus IV., and Roderigo Borgia and Ascanio Sforza.  Borgia was elected and took the title of Alexander VI.  He rewarded Cardinal Sforza for his timely assistance in securing his elevation, by giving him the Vice-Chancellorship he had himself occupied as Cardinal, the town of Nepi and the Borgia Palace in Rome.  Dissensions between Alexander and the Sforza family soon became acute; Giovanni Sforza, Lord of Pesaro and sometime husband of Lucrezia Borgia, was expelled, and his brother, Cardinal Ascanio was included in the papal disfavour.  He sought refuge in Lombardy, where he was taken prisoner by Louis XII., of France.  Peter Martyr had foreseen, in a measure, the turbulent events of Alexander’s pontificate; the Spanish sovereigns charged him to express to Cardinal Sforza their disapproval of his action in supporting the Borgia party, that Cardinal, though a Spaniard, being persona non grata to them; and in so doing he wrote to his friend the dubious augury, “God grant he may be grateful to you.”  Ep. 119.]

I have narrated in a preceding book how the Admiral Columbus, after having visited the cannibal islands, landed at Hispaniola on the fourth day of the nones of February, 1493, without having lost a single vessel.  I shall now recount what he discovered while exploring that island and another neighbouring one, which he believed to be a continent.

According to Columbus, Hispaniola is the island of Ophir mentioned in the third book of Kings.[3] Its width covers five degrees of south latitude, for its north coast extends to the twenty-seventh degree and the south coast to the twenty-second; its length extends 780 miles, though some of the companions of Columbus give greater dimensions.[4] Some declare that it extends to within forty-nine degrees of Cadiz, and others to an even greater distance.  The calculation concerning this has not been made with precision.

[Note 3:  Ortelius, in his Geographia Sacra, gives the name of Ophir to Hayti; and it was a commonly held opinion that Solomon’s mines of Ophir were situated in America.  Columbus shared this belief, and he later wrote of Veragua, when he discovered the coasts of Darien, that he was positive the gold mines there were those of Ophir.]

[Note 4:  Hayti is 600 kilometres long from east to west, and 230 broad, from north to south, with a superficial area of 74,000 square kilometres.]