In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, looking for a new route to Asia, and by accident, ended up discovering America. At least, that’s the story we’ve been told… But what if I told you the evidence from that very voyage says something different?
The story that they don’t teach you in school is full of hidden maps, backroom deals, secret societies, and ancient legends of lost worlds we once knew how to reach… until we forgot the way.
There is now credible evidence that Columbus did not discover the new world by accident. The evidence shows that he knew where he was going. This is the story of Columbus’ secret map to America. Let’s get into it.
I want to start two months into Columbus’ voyage. He is somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, still eleven days from land. And something is happening on his ship that you have probably never heard about. Columbus is lying to his crew about how far they have traveled.
On October 1st, 1492, he tells his men that they have sailed 584 leagues since they last saw land. But on that same day, in his private journal, he wrote down the real distance traveled as 707 leagues.
By Columbus’ own calculation, these men are about 450 miles further from home than he is telling them. And he’s been doing this for weeks. Three weeks earlier, he privately records 60 leagues of travel, but tells his crew only 48.
His son later writes that he did this to keep the crew calm so they wouldn’t revolt. You have to remember that the wind was pushing them west, so the further they got from home, the harder it would be to return and the more likely it would be that they would die.
All of this makes sense. I get why Columbus was lying to his crew. But what doesn’t make sense is why Columbus was so sure that they would reach land when no one had traveled that far west.
We know from Columbus’s own journal that he carried a map with him that showed islands drawn in the western ocean. This is accepted history. It’s the map Columbus used to convince the Spanish crown to fund his voyage.
But there’s an ancient map, only discovered in the last century, that gives us more information. In 1929, museum workers at a Palace in Istanbul found a map showing coastlines that should not have been known to anyone in the year 1513. It’s called the Piri Reis map. It was drawn just 21 years after Columbus’s first voyage, by an admiral of the Ottoman navy named Piri Reis.
In the margins, Piri Reis says that the map that he drew was based on ancient maps from the time of Alexander the Great. He also claims it was based on routes from a secret book that Columbus had. And that he had learned about this book from one of Columbus’s crew members. This mysterious book told Columbus how to reach the fabled western continent, and what to expect when he got there.
So what did Columbus know before he set sail? And if he was following an older route, who had made that journey before them?
To answer that question, we need to go forward in time…because it gives us a clue about what happened in the past. Decades after Columbus’s voyage, Spanish chroniclers and conquistadors began colonizing these new American lands, and they recorded stories from the native tribes they found there. And, strangely, they kept hearing the same story.
They heard it in Mexico, the Yucatán, Guatemala, Colombia, and as far south as Peru. What makes that interesting is that these people are separated by thousands of miles of mountain, jungle and ocean. The peoples of the Andes and the peoples of Mexico left no record of ever meeting but they tell the same story. They all say that someone came out of the sea, taught them valuable skills, and left promising to come back. Sometimes this visitor was a bearded man in a long robe. Other times he is a man that somehow is also a feathered serpent.
And all of these tribes remembered these ancient visitors as teachers, and even gods, who brought knowledge of science and farming. And according to their memory, these mystical bearded strangers spent years with them before leaving and promising to return.
In Peru, the natives called him Viracocha. Sometimes Viracocha was one man, and sometimes he was many. Viracocha was said to have traveled through the mountains in a long robe, teaching people to build terraces for farming and channels to carry water. Eventually, he reached the Pacific coast, walked out into the waves and disappeared.
In Mexico, they called him Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent. He was a teacher from the east who brought writing and knowledge of the calendar. The Maya remembered him as Kukulkan.
So the native tribes of these newly discovered lands all remember visitors who came from across the sea and taught them valuable skills but were there sailors in the ancient world who could have made that journey? To answer that, we have to go back in time almost 3,000 years.
The Bible tells us that King Solomon was one of the richest kings in history. But much of his wealth didn’t come from Israel. It came from across the sea. Solomon built a fleet of ships, and hired the best sailors in the ancient world, the Phoenicians, to crew them. Together, they sailed to a mysterious place called Ophir.
In the first book of Kings it says:
Hiram sent his servants with the fleet, sailors who were familiar with the sea, together with the servants of Solomon. They went to Ophir, and imported from there four hundred and twenty talents of gold, which they delivered to King Solomon.
So where was Ophir? Unfortunately, the Bible never tells us. Over time, the location was lost, and Ophir became one of the great mysteries of the ancient world.
But thousands of years later, after Columbus returned from his voyage to America, he would claim that he had found it. He called America, Ophir. Now why would he say that? We will get to that shortly, and there are a few reasons.
But Solomon’s sailors weren’t the only ones in the ancient world who seemed to know about these distant lands. Centuries after Solomon, the Greek philosopher Plato wrote about a way across the Atlantic. In his story of Atlantis, Plato said that sailors could travel from Atlantis to a chain of other islands. And from those islands, they could reach what he called the “opposite continent.” Plato describes a continent on the other side of the ocean, and a route to get there. But in his story, that route belonged to the lost ancient world, before floods had swallowed Atlantis into the sea.
So was that route lost forever? The Greek historian Diodorus suggests it was not. And interestingly, his story also involves the Phoenicians, who were the sailors Solomon had hired almost 900 years earlier. Diodorus wrote about a Phoenician crew that was caught in a storm off the coast of Africa. This storm was so bad that the crew became deeply lost at sea. Eventually, they ended up on a large island to the west. And according to these men, the island was full of fertile farmland, huge mountains, forests, fresh water and rivers deep enough to sail in.
That does not sound like an island to me.
Word of that island got back to the Mediterranean, but the Phoenician rulers in Carthage moved to shut it down. Another group of sailors wanted to go and settle the island, and Carthage physically stopped them. The historian Diodorus gives two reasons why.
The first is that the island was simply too good. They were afraid their own people would pack up and move there.
The second reason is darker. They wanted to keep it in reserve for themselves. If Carthage ever fell, the ruling families could load up their households, sail across the ocean, and disappear into a land their enemies had never heard of.
And there is a second ancient account of this same event, attributed to Aristotle. It adds one detail. The Phoenicians didn’t only block the settlement of that colony. The Senate in Carthage banned anyone from ever visiting the island again, and ordered that the settlers who had already been there be put to death. They killed their own colonists to make sure that the route was never widely known.
This was a sea route that a trading empire was willing to kill to protect. But if that route survived, how could it have reached Columbus? There are a few ways this could have happened. One of those ways is through his marriage.
Columbus married the daughter of a Portuguese captain who had governed an island called Porto Santo. Columbus’ father-in-law had served Prince Henry the Navigator, who put him in charge of the island.
Prince Henry also governed a religious order called the Order of Christ, which was simply the Knights Templar renamed after they were outlawed by the Pope.
As a quick refresher, the Templars were warrior-monks who fought in the Crusades. The first 9 knights arrived in Jerusalem in 1119 and the king gave them the Temple Mount as their home in Jerusalem. The Temple Mount is built on top of Solomon’s destroyed temple, and they took their name from it, The Templars. For nine years, the Templars lived on the Temple Mount, above the ruins of Solomon’s Temple where ships would have been ordered to sail to Ophir. Their stated job was guarding the pilgrim roads. But nine men could not have guarded much of anything. Whatever they were doing in the temple, they came out of it and went on to accumulate enormous wealth across Europe.
Then, on Friday the 13th of October, 1307, King Philip the Fourth of France had every Templar in his kingdom arrested before dawn. Philip was deep in debt from his father’s wars, and the Templars were the one order that kept an abundance of cash in addition to land. His plan was to arrest them all, steal their money and pay off his debts.
The Templars were tortured, dozens were burned at the stake outside Paris, and within five years the Pope had dissolved the order altogether.
But Portugal did not hand over the Templars in their country. King Denis spent four years negotiating with Rome, and in the end the Pope authorized him to take everything the Templars owned in his country and sign it over to a new order that he had invented, the Order of Christ. The only real change to the Templars’ order was that they swore obedience to the king of Portugal now.
A hundred years later, that order was handed to a Portuguese prince named Henry the Navigator who spent his entire life sending ships out to explore the Atlantic ocean. Prince Henry is the man who appointed Columbus’s father-in-law, who was a ship captain, to govern Porto Santo.
Now, the Templars were collectors. They were an incredibly rich order, known for gathering and hiding Christian relics and artifacts. So if a map to Ophir survived anywhere in Europe, the Templars almost certainly had it.
And that raises the question. When the order was destroyed, and everything they owned in Portugal passed to the Order of Christ, did the maps pass with them? Did those routes end up with Prince Henry? And from Prince Henry, did they end up with the ship captain he put in charge of Porto Santo, which was Columbus’ father in law?
Now, Columbus’s father-in-law was dead by the time Columbus joined the family. But his widow still had all of his papers. She noticed how interested her new son-in-law was in her husband’s voyages, and she gave him his writings and his sea charts.
We don’t know what was on those charts, but we do know that the Portuguese charts of that era showed land in the western ocean. It was a strange land called Antilia, the Island of the Seven Cities.
The story behind Antilia starts in the year 714. The Muslim Moors had just taken Spain, and seven Catholic bishops decided they would not live under the new rulers. They loaded their ships with their followers and sailed west into the Atlantic ocean. They found an island, and each of the seven bishops founded a city on that island. But after they arrived, they did something strange. They burned all of their ships. And the story is very specific about why. They did it so their own people would give up all thought of ever going back to Spain. This story is so preposterous that you would assume that it ends there.
But centuries later, in Prince Henry’s time, a Portuguese ship was blown to that island in a storm. The crew came ashore, and to their surprise, the islanders walked them straight to a church. Amazingly, the native islanders were Catholic and wanted to see whether these strangers were Christians who kept the Catholic rites. So, upon learning that the Portuguese visitors were Catholic, the islanders asked them to stay, just until their lord came home. They said their lord was away and he would want to meet them so that he could give them gifts.
After spending time with the islanders, the Portuguese sailors started feeling a little uneasy about their safety, remembering the story of the 7 bishops, and reasoned that these islanders may not want to be known abroad. After all, these islanders were the descendants of men who had burned their own ships to make sure nobody ever left. So the crew figured that these men may not want news of their existence getting back to Portugal, so they snuck away and sailed back home.
But the sailors did not leave empty-handed, even though they didn’t know it at the time. While the sailors were inside the church, the ship’s boys had been scooping sand off the beach for the cooking fire. Later, when somebody looked at the sand properly, they said that the sand was full of gold.
They got home and expected a reward. Instead, Prince Henry was furious that they had learned so little about the island, and he ordered them to turn around and sail back. The captain and crew were so frightened by what they saw on that island that instead of returning, they fled the country completely.
And here is the part that matters. You would expect the story of Antilia would only survive as some sort of legend or myth but this story was genuinely believed to be true. So much so that the island itself was added to maps across Europe.
The Pizzigano chart was drawn in 1424, 68 years before Columbus set sail. Europe sits on one side of it, and out in the Atlantic is the island Antilia.
So Antilia, the fabled island of the seven cities, was a publicly accepted fact at this time. That means 68 years before Columbus’s voyage, we have a map that shows a fabled island out in the western ocean. It was a “New World” to the west.
But there was another story about secret land in the west, and this one Columbus kept to himself.
A Spanish friar named Bartolomé de las Casas wrote it down about 60 years after Columbus’ voyage. Las Casas recorded it as a story the first settlers in the Caribbean all talked about and took to be true, because many of them knew Columbus. And the story goes like this.
A trading ship was blown off course and carried all the way across the Atlantic. The crew reached an island on the other side. This shipwrecked crew was able to come home but the voyage killed almost everyone aboard.
Their pilot, the man who navigated the ship, made it back to Portugal barely alive, and Columbus took him into his home. Shortly before he died, he told Columbus everything he knew.
The friar, Las Casas, records exactly what the dying man handed over. He said the man gave Columbus sailing directions, a route, and measurements taken from the sun and the stars about how to get to this fabled land.
The pilot who died in Columbus’ home had reached this land by accident, but as the story goes, Columbus would try to reach it on purpose.
But a route and a good hunch doesn’t pay for ships.
Columbus needed to find someone to fund this voyage, and a new route to Asia was the perfect pitch to give to a king because it gave them access to spices and other goods that he could make money from.
At the time, a chart and letter, written by an Italian scholar named Toscanelli, had been circulating about how to reach Asia by going west. Toscanelli had sent the chart to a churchman in Portugal, and Columbus got hold of a copy. This map gave Columbus a way to sell this version of his idea to a king. A document like this would make his prospective sponsor feel good about the prospects for a successful voyage.
The chart from Toscanelli is now lost, but a letter describing it survived. And on that map Toscanelli placed Antilia, the island of the seven cities, right on the way to Japan out in the western ocean.
This is the same map that I mentioned at the start. Columbus’s own journal says he was carrying a chart with islands drawn on it out in the western ocean. This is the map he used to sell the voyage in the first place.
None of this is controversial. Columbus had a chart, it showed a western route to Asia with Antilia drawn along the way, and he used it to raise the money. That is just accepted history.
But it doesn’t explain everything that Columbus did. The missing piece is a book. This is the book mentioned by the map maker Piri Reis that he said Columbus had on board with him. And according to Piri Reis, nobody outside his own captains knew he was carrying it.
Even if Columbus had secret knowledge and secret maps to the new world, he couldn’t do anything with it on his own. He needed a sponsor. A voyage like this needed ships, supplies, and men. And that meant he needed a king. Columbus went on to pitch Portugal on his journey, and they rejected him. So he went to Spain. And after years of negotiations, the Spanish crown agreed to fund him.
But money was not his only problem. Columbus was a foreigner who had never commanded a ship. The port he was ordered to sail from was Palos, and the sailors of Palos were not about to hand their lives to a Genoese chart salesman on a voyage to nowhere.
Columbus had the ships but he couldn’t fill them. He needed a local man to sign on to his idea...and he got one.
Martín Alonso Pinzón was a Spanish shipowner from the town of Palos, and he was exactly the kind of man sailors would follow. Pinzón was one of the most respected captains on that coast, because he had fought in Castile’s war with Portugal. His brothers were sailors too. One of his brothers would captain the Niña, and the other would serve as his first mate on the Pinta. The sailors of Palos trusted this family to bring them home. And Pinzón even ended up putting his own money into the voyage.
Which raises a question nobody asks because Columbus gets all of the credit. Why did Pinzón agree to fund and captain this voyage at all? Because Pinzón does not appear to have been talked into this by Columbus. According to his own son and to sailors who sailed with him, he was already planning the same voyage on his own.
Decades after discovering America, the Spanish crown and Columbus’s heirs were suing each other over who deserved the credit for the discovery, and witnesses testified about where Pinzón’s confidence had come from. They said that in the spring of 1492, months before the ships sailed, Pinzón had been in Rome and allowed into the Pope’s library.
Pinzón’s son was with him during the visit and testified to it in court. He said a servant of the Pope, a man he called a great cosmographer, brought out the Pope’s documents and talked the two of them through the lands that were still waiting to be discovered.
According to the court records, Pinzón came home with written directions across the ocean and how to reach the land on the other side. The route that was given to him by the Pope was nearly two and a half thousand years old. The directions allegedly said sail the Mediterranean to the end of Spain, then go west and you will find a land so fertile and so abundant that its greatness will subdue Africa and Europe.
The court record says those words were written in the time of Solomon. This is sworn testimony in a royal lawsuit, not a legend somebody wrote down centuries later.
These directions supposedly came from the same Solomon whose fleet sailed to Ophir. And it is the same Solomon whose temple, the Templars, moved into during the crusades.
So both captains may have had information that convinced them that they could reach land. And in August of 1492, their ships left Spain. They stopped in the Canary Islands and then they headed west. And after 70 days at sea, they landed in the Bahamas and discovered America.
After returning, Columbus continued to describe his discovery as a new route to Asia. BUT, a few years later, his friend Peter Martyr wrote to a cardinal in Rome to tell him that Columbus believed he had found the mines of Ophir, Solomon’s biblical land of gold. Which perfectly maps to the idea that Columbus and Pinzón had already made this connection themselves. This also means that Columbus crossed the ocean expecting to find something new. Asia was already on the maps, and Ophir was not on any of them. And when he got to America, he said he had found Ophir.
And we don’t only have Peter Martyr’s word for it. Eleven years after the first voyage, Columbus wrote to the king and queen of Spain himself. He told them about the gold of Veragua, on the coast of what is now Panama and then he told them what he thought Veragua ACTUALLY was. Josephus, the most famous Jewish historian in history, had written that Solomon’s gold came from a place called the Aurea. Columbus tells the king, quote, “I contend that these mines of the Aurea are identical with those of Veragua.” Then Columbus continues and tells the King how David left three thousand quintals of Indian gold to Solomon to help build the Temple, and that according to Josephus, it came from these lands. To put it simply, Columbus is telling the King of Spain, in writing, that he has found the mine that paid for the Temple of Solomon.
So let’s step back and review everything we have so far. Columbus lied to his crew about how far they had traveled, because he was sure that they would find land. The ancient world left behind stories of sailors who crossed the sea and had advanced knowledge. Solomon’s fleet sailed to Ophir and came home loaded with gold. Plato wrote about a route to an opposite continent. And the Phoenicians of Carthage found an island to the west, and they killed their own citizens to keep it secret.
Then those secrets may have passed through the Templars, to the Order of Christ, and to Prince Henry. Prince Henry appointed Columbus’s father-in-law, and Columbus inherited his sea charts. Portuguese charts already showed Antilia, the Island of the Seven Cities, that was supposedly somewhere out west. A dying ship pilot handed Columbus a chart and sailing directions to land across the ocean after finding it by accident. And Pinzón found a document in the Vatican dated to the time of Solomon that showed him how to find undiscovered land out west.
That’s a lot of maps and evidence. But there’s still one piece we haven’t explained. And it might be the most interesting piece of all. Columbus’ secret book and the coastline that shouldn’t exist.
Remember the Piri Reis map that I mentioned at the beginning? It was the map drawn by an Ottoman admiral in 1513 and found in a palace in Istanbul in 1929 by accident. Piri Reis, the guy who drew the map, wrote about a secret book that Columbus had on board with him.
Piri Reis knew about this book because he had an uncle named Kemal Reis, who was a famous Turkish sea captain. His uncle captured a Spaniard who said he had sailed with Columbus three times. That captured Spaniard supposedly had a map that belonged to Columbus from that secret book.
And in 1513, 21 years after Columbus discovered America, Piri Reis drew a world map using information from several sources, including Columbus’ map. On it, Africa sits on one side, then the Atlantic, and then South America. And along the edge, Piri Reis left notes explaining where his information came from to make this map.
He said that he had used about twenty maps, including Portuguese charts, a map drawn by Columbus, and 8 maps that he connects to the time of Alexander the Great, which would have been more than 1800 years earlier.
In one of these notes, Piri says that a book came into Columbus’s hands before he sailed. In the book, it described shores and islands at the far end of the Western Sea where he could find metals and precious stones.
But the inscription says something even stranger than that. It says Columbus knew to bring glass beads, because this secret book explained that the people in this new land prized them and would trade for them. And, magically, Columbus did end up bringing glass beads to America. He hands them out on the very first morning after they land, along with red hats. Within days those beads are moving from island to island without the Spanish even trading. There is a story that a man paddles out to the ship in a canoe, and Columbus could tell where he had been by the string of beads he was carrying. So how does a man sitting in Spain know, before he leaves, what a stranger on the other side of the ocean is going to want?
Well in the late 1950s, after the map was discovered in 1929, a history professor at Keene State College named Charles Hapgood took up the map and realized that the bottom of the map actually showed a coastline that would have been completely under ice when Piri Reis drew it. The coast that he identified would not have been known to look like this to anyone alive during Columbus’ time.
At the bottom of South America, the coast turns sharply east. Hapgood identified this section as Antarctica. And set against a modern globe, you can actually see how accurate the Piri Reis map is to the coastline of Antarctica.
This means that Piri Reis drew this coastline more than 300 years before Antarctica’s recorded discovery. But on Piri’s map, that coast appears to run straight on from South America.
Hapgood ended up sending his work to the United States Air Force to make sure his work lined up with the actual landmass of Antarctica below the ice and a Lieutenant Colonel named Harold Ohlmeyer replied that the map’s southern detail “agrees very remarkably” with the survey of the land beneath the ice of Antarctica.
So how is that even possible since it shows Antarctica connecting to South America? Hapgood’s answer was that the Earth’s crust had shifted. He argued that Antarctica had not always sat on the pole, and that before that shift, most of the continent was free of ice. And he knew exactly what geologists would say about this. He says so himself in the book. The accepted view, he writes, is that the ice cap is millions of years old.
But here is the date Hapgood put on it. He argued that the voyages behind this particular stretch of coast may have been made as recently as about 1 thousand BC. Which is right around the time of Solomon.
If Hapgood is right, Piri Reis had drawn a coastline that was last free of ice 3,000 years ago, on a continent nobody would discover for another three hundred years, and his sources for it were maps from the time of Alexander the Great. Working from those ancient maps, Piri Reis drew that coast as it had looked 2,500 years before he was born.
The writer Graham Hancock ended up using Hapgood’s theory to connect this possibility with a seafaring civilization devastated at the end of the Ice Age. He suggests that its survivors carried their knowledge into the cultures that followed. Which brings us back around to the stories left behind of the strange bearded sailors who brought knowledge to the native South Americans.
So look at what that map is telling us. An Ottoman admiral in 1513 says he built it partly from charts 800 years older than himself and a map from Columbus. He says Columbus sailed with a book describing shores at the far end of the Western Sea, the metals and precious stones he would find there, and that he would need to bring glass beads so he could trade. And at the bottom of that same map sits a coastline no one alive in 1513 could have seen.
The accepted story asks us to believe that a foreigner who had never commanded a ship guessed the width of the ocean, guessed there was land on the other side, guessed there were metals and precious stones in its ground, and guessed that the people living there would trade for glass beads. That is a lot of guessing but somehow Columbus was right about all of this. Every document here points to external sources that show that he knew exactly what he was doing and where he was going.
What strikes me most is that this whole story turns on a map we didn’t know existed until 1929, when museum workers stumbled upon it. One forgotten page, in a pile of papers, in an old palace can change what we know about history. We didn’t even know the Pope had absolved the Templars before he dissolved their order until 2001, when a researcher in the Vatican archive pulled out the right record.
I have no idea if Columbus had a secret route to America. But I think the evidence is hard to ignore. We’ll never know everything that burned at Alexandria, or what is still sitting unread in the Vatican. But I think we should remember that what we call history is simply the documents that survive. Everything else gets labeled myth….until, one day, it isn’t.
Sources
Journal of Christopher Columbus (First Voyage), trans. Clements R. Markham, Hakluyt Society, 1893 — the two distance counts on 1 October 1492; the glass beads and red caps handed out on 12 October.
James E. Kelley, Jr., “The Navigation of Columbus on His First Voyage to America,” Proceedings of the First San Salvador Conference, 1986 — the league and distance figures. No free copy online; catalogued in the Columbus navigation bibliography.
Ferdinand Columbus, The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus by his Son Ferdinand, trans. Benjamin Keen — why his father kept a short count for the crew; the marriage and Porto Santo; the widow handing over her husband’s writings and sea charts (ch. 9, pp. 25–26).
Gregory C. McIntosh, The Piri Reis Map of 1513 — the map’s sources and inscriptions; the roughly twenty source maps, including the Portuguese charts and the eight from the time of Alexander; inscription no. 5 on the glass beads (p. 70).
Charles H. Hapgood, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, 1966 — the thesis and the Antarctic coastline (pp. 1–2); Antarctica first sighted in 1820 (p. 62); crustal displacement and the ice-free coast; the geologists’ view that the ice cap is millions of years old; the ca. 1000 BC dating of the voyages behind that stretch of coast; the Afet İnan translation of Piri Reis inscription no. 5, reprinted pp. 207–209; and the Ohlmeyer letter, reproduced in full.
Lt. Col. Harold Z. Ohlmeyer to Charles Hapgood, 6 July 1960 — 8th Reconnaissance Technical Squadron (SAC), USAF, Westover Air Force Base, Massachusetts. The reply that the southern detail “agrees very remarkably” with the survey of the land beneath the ice.
Michael Haag, The Templars: History and Myth — the founding of the order and the Temple Mount; the arrests of 13 October 1307; the burnings and the dissolution (pp. 192–193, chronology p. 332); the Order of Christ founded in 1319 by King Dinis (p. 202); Prince Henry the Navigator taking the order (pp. 203, 255–256).
Graham Hancock, Fingerprints of the Gods — the seafaring civilization devastated at the end of the Ice Age, and the survivors who carried its knowledge into the cultures that followed.
Graham Hancock, The Sign and the Seal, pp. 207–209 — the Order of Christ swearing obedience to the king of Portugal.
Las Casas, Historia de las Indias — the bearded strangers remembered across the Americas (book I, chs. IV and XXII); how Las Casas gathered the settlers’ accounts (Advertencia preliminar and Prólogo, Madrid 1875 ed.); Columbus obtaining a copy of the Toscanelli letter (book I, ch. XII); the unknown pilot who died in Columbus’s house (book I, ch. XIV).
Henry Vignaud, Toscanelli and Columbus, 1902 — Columbus obtaining the copy (pp. 22, 31); the lost chart and the letter that survived it (pp. 26–27, 239, and Appendix A note 40).
Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, De Orbe Novo, trans. Francis Augustus MacNutt, 1912, vol. 1 — Columbus believed he had found the mines of Ophir.
Plato, Timaeus 24e–25a, Jowett translation — the chain of islands and the opposite continent.
Diodorus Siculus, Library of History V.19.1–3 and V.20.4, Oldfather, Loeb Classical Library vol. III — the Phoenician island out in the Atlantic, and Carthage moving to block the settlement.
Pseudo-Aristotle, De Mirabilibus Auscultationibus 84 (Bekker 836b–837a), trans. Launcelot D. Dowdall, Oxford 1909 — the second account, with the settlers put to death.
1 Kings 9:26–28 — Solomon’s fleet sails to Ophir and returns with 420 talents of gold.
The Pizzigano chart of 1424, James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota — Antilia drawn out in the Atlantic 68 years before the voyage.
Real Provisión de los Reyes Católicos, Granada, 30 April 1492 — Archivo General de Indias, PATRONATO, 295, N.3. The crown orders Columbus to sail from Palos.
Martín Alonso Pinzón, citing Pulido Rubio (1952) and the pleitos colombinos — his standing at Palos, his brothers, and his part in funding the voyage.
M.ª Consuelo Villacorta Macho, “Retórica de la Carta de Cristóbal Colón a la reina Isabel la Católica,” ELIES vol. 42, note 36 — citing Muro Orejón & Morales Padrón, Pleitos colombinos, Tomo IV, CSIC 1989, pp. XXXVI–XXXVII. The sworn testimony about the Pope’s library, and the directions the court record dates to the time of Solomon.
Edward T. Stone, “The Man Behind Columbus,” American Heritage, Oct 1976 — the sardine voyage to Italy and the interrogatory of 15 October 1515.
Columbus, Letter on the First Voyage (1493) and the “Lettera Rarissima” from Jamaica, 7 July 1503, in R. H. Major, Select Letters of Christopher Columbus, 1847 — the mines of the Aurea and those of Veragua, and David’s three thousand quintals.
The Chinon Parchment, found in the Vatican archive in 2001 by Barbara Frale — Clement V absolved the Templar leadership at Chinon, 17–20 August 1308, before dissolving the order.