In 1915, the year this volume was published, it had been little more than 30 years since critical research into the life of Christopher Columbus had been underway. Authors had delved into the archives of Spain and Genoa for material instead of merely repeating the long accepted story whose outline had been ingeniously sketched by the navigator himself. The many inaccuracies had not escaped historians, yet very few put new materials in their work. Moreover, those who did were Italian scholars. Thus of all the learned and painstaking investigation very little apppeared in English. This volume, one of the first written in English, attempts to show how errorneous and inconsistent some of the old legends about Columbus are.
