Diego Álvarez Chanca was a doctor who accompanied Columbus on his second voyage to the New World. On that trip Columbus discovered Puerto Rico; accordingly in 1962 the Puerto Rican Medical Society decided to render homage to the man who might be considered the island’s first scientist. Álvarez Chanca was a ship’s doctor, but not the fleet surgeon. When Columbus sent part of his fleet back to Spain, Álvarez Chanca dispatched a letter to the head of the Seville cabildo with news of the voyage. His description of the islands and their native Taino and Carib Indians engaged in inter-island and intertribal warfare, slavery, ritual cannibalism, intensive agriculture, high-quality cotton weaving and copper-gold working for ornamentation, etc., constitute his scientific contribution.
In this volume brief notes by the president and the historical committee of the Puerto Rican Medical Association and forty-six preliminary pages by Aurelio Tío precede the text of the Álvarez Chanca letter (seventeen pages). Then come 138 pages containing a hundred notes on the letter by Tío, his conclusions, and a short essay aggrandizing and citing passages from a letter and other writings of Samuel Eliot Morison.
Tío follows this “final note” with five appendices. The first discusses Taino Indian ethnology, lists common fauna and flora of Puerto Rico. The second discusses the identification of islands Columbus discovered. A third continues discussing geographic points touched. The fourth is a wide-ranging bibliographical essay in which Tío blasts Salvador de Madariaga for ignoring the “latest” documentary contributions to Columbian literature, particularly a 1931 publication by the city of Genoa. He explores “enigmas” raised in the letter, such as the identity of “rare diseases” mentioned, the time passed between the massacre of Spaniards in the Fort of the Nativity and Columbus’ return, the identity of plants and animals Álvarez Chanca mentioned, the route of the fleet and identity of that part of Puerto Rico where the Spaniards first landed. Tío follows Germán Arciniegas in viewing Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada and other conquerors as prototypes for Don Quixote.
The fifth appendix of “documentary proofs” on the belabored theme of the “truth about the identity of the land where the discoverers disembarked on the New World for the first time” actually consists of extracts from Bartolomé de las Casas and Antonio de Herrera. At last the volume ends with a three-page bibliography that does not include all works cited in the text and an exhaustive thirty-one page alphabetical index. In short, this is an often repetitive and argumentative tour de force in annotation.