Account of the Antiquities of the Indians
A short treatise on the beliefs and rites of the people of Hispaniola, written at Columbus’s order by a Hieronymite friar who lived among them. It also records the first baptisms on the island.
Ramón Pané calls himself “a poor hermit of the Order of St Jerome” and says he wrote at the command of the admiral. He lived first in the province of Macorix and then for about two years with the cacique Guarionex, learned a local language, and set down what he was told about the origin of the sea and of mankind, the spirits or images called cemis (zemis), and the healers. The last part tells of his own work as a missionary.
The Spanish original is lost. The text survives because Ferdinand Columbus copied it into his life of his father, which is itself known only in an Italian translation printed at Venice in 1571; names in it are often garbled, as Bourne’s notes show. Pané wrote as a missionary who thought the beliefs he recorded were idolatry, and for part of the time he depended on a convert who knew both languages. See Christianity Crosses the Atlantic.
Cited in
- 1493, firm date