This posthumous little work by the distinguished Spanish historian Emiliano Jos (1897-1961), based on a course of lectures given at the University of Seville, appears more than forty years after its publication was interrupted by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Demetrio Ramos has edited the work with exemplary care, supplying missing names, citations, and other needed material omitted in the original text. Its publication makes available a book that compresses into a small space a remarkable amount of erudition and sound reasoning and that is notable for the skill and clarity of its exposition.
A book more than forty years old, most of whose leading ideas don Emiliano had already presented in various journal articles, cannot lay claim to great novelty. In fact, what distinguishes the essays in this book is not the novelty of their ideas, but the powerful defense they offer of the traditional or classic theory of the plan and genesis of the Columbian enterprise against the attacks of speculative revisionists. Jos’s viewpoints on the Columbus question are those generally held by modern scholars and effectively summarized in the late Samuel Eliot Morison’s widely read biography. Admiral of the Ocean Sea. Thanks above all to Morison’s influential book, perhaps, the legends that once clustered about the Columbian enterprise—the myth that Columbus was seeking not the Indies but certain fabled islands and the more ancient myth that he got the idea for his voyage from an unknown dying pilot are two examples—have recently had little currency in the English-speaking world. In Spain, however, for reasons that invite analysis, such legends as that of the unknown pilot and the prediscovery of America continue to fascinate some scholars; an example is Juan Manzano y Manzano's recent Colón y su secreto (1976). The timely appearance of Jos’s little book, with its rigorously scientific, commonsense approach, should help to combat the revival in Columbian studies of a trend toward unwarranted speculation based on weak factual foundations.
