1. The very proliferation of notes suggests that in Las Casas's mind they played an important rhetorical role in underscoring the portions of the text he felt were especially significant.

2. Anthony Pagden has noted that the Historia is heavily text-dependent and argues that Las Casas fills its pages with an overwhelming number of citations in order to display his erudition and thus buttress the authority of his own eyewitness testimony about life in the Indies; see his " Ius et Factum : Text and Experience in the Writings of Bartolomé de Las Casas," Representations 33 (Winter 1991):147-62. I will argue further that the citations are not only a rhetorical element but the very stuff of Las Casas's historical discourse, which depends on the commentary of the citations and paraphrases to carry out its "reading" of the Discovery.

3. On the deconstructionist notion of the supplement, see Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), esp. 102-6.

4. On Las Casas as biographer, see Santa Arias, "Retórica e ideología en la Historia de las Indias de Bartolomé de Las Casas" (Diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1990). On the interpolated story in the Historia , see Antonio Benítez Rojo, "Bartolomé de Las Casas: Entre el infierno y la ficción," in his La isla que se repite: El Caribe y la perspectiva posmoderna (Hanover, N.H.: Ediciones del Norte, 1989), 69-104.

5. Pagden, " Ius et Factum ," 157.

6. Arias argues that Las Casas identified with Columbus and that traces of that transference can be found throughout the Historia ; see "Retórica e ideología en la Historia de las Indias ," esp. 86-99.

7. Las Casas, "Memorial de los remedios," in Obras escogidas , ed. Juan Pérez de Tudela y Bueso (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Españoles), 121.

8. I am relying to a great extent on Varela's description of the manuscripts in Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas: Obras Completas , vol. 14, p. 12, since I have only been able to consult Sanz's facsimile.

9. I do not include under my definition of "marginal commentary" the corrections to the text itself made by Las Casas. Although they are a useful indicator of how Las Casas massaged the text, they do not constitute a creative contribution.

10. The abbreviation "nõ" was acknowledged by de Lollis only the first four times it appeared.

11. Most of the major translations into other European languages follow this same pattern. On the editing history of the Diario , see Samuel Eliot Morison, "Texts and Translations of the Journal of Columbus' First Voyage," Hispanic American Historical Review 19 (1939):235-61; Robert H. Fuson, " The Diario de Colón : A Legacy of Poor Transcription, Translation, and Interpretation," in In the Wake of Columbus , ed. Louis de Vorsey, Jr., and John Parker (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1985), 51-75; and David Henige, ''Samuel Eliot Morison as Translator and Editor of Columbus's diario de a bordo," Terrae Incognitae 20 (1988):69-88.

12. Of the most recent and important translations, Cioranescu's French version presents a limited selection of Las Casas's commentary in the notes; his prevailing criterion of selection appears to have been geographical. Gaetano Ferro's Italian translation similarly omits some commentary, at times justifying the omission with pronouncements on the commentary's irrelevance. The question such pronouncements immediately raise is, of course, to whom is the commentary irrelevant? Certainly not to Las Casas.

13. In her edition of Las Casas's Colección de obras completas (Madrid: Alianza, 1989), Varela writes: "A primera vista puede que sorprenda la inclusión [del Diario y la Carta] en la Colección , inclusión que se justifica por sí misma: Las Casas no fue sólo un copista fiel de la obra colombina, como se verá más adelante, sino también un anotador del texto en cuyos márgenes dejó muchas apostillas valiosísimas" (14:11; At first glance the inclusion of the Diario and letter in the Colección may be surprising, an inclusion which justifies itself: Las Casas was not only a faithful copyist of Columbus's works, as will be seen shortly, but also an annotator of the text in whose margins he left very valuable annotations). In that case, one is tempted to ask, why weren't the notes alone published in the Colección ? Varela may feel some personal awkwardness here since in her Cristóbal Colón: Textos y documentos completos she (paradoxically, in hindsight) includes both the Diario and the "Relación" and characterizes Las Casas precisely as "un copista fiel, incluso cuando no acertaba a dar con el sentido del pasaje'' (xxiii; Las Casas was a faithful copyist, even when he did not succeed in making the passage make sense).

14. Compare, for example, the Diario entry for 30 October in Fernández de Navarrete's Colección de los viages . . . (Buenos Aires: Guaranía, 1945) and in Colección de documentos y manuscritos compilados por Fernández de Navarrete (Nendeln, Lichtenstein: Kraus-Thomson, 1971).

15. J. A. Vázquez has done a valuable preliminary study of the nature and content of the commentary itself; see his "Las Casas's Opinions in Co-

lumbus's Diary," Topic 21 (Spring 1971):45-56. Note, however, that what I am proposing here is significantly different—that the annotations and the main text be read organically. This, of course, requires that the text be published integrally, precisely as it appears in the manuscript.

16. Rumeu de Armas has argued that Las Casas was working with an already-summarized version of the Columbian text, to which he then added his own commentary and corrections. This, of course, would make the Las Casas text at least twice removed from the original. See Rumeu, "El Diario de a bordo de Cristóbal Colón: El problema de la paternidad del extracto," Revista de Indias 36 (1976):7-17.

17. An assimilated version of the Columbian texts, apparently derived from a somewhat different source than the one used by Las Casas, appears in Ferdinand Columbus's Vida del Almirante , which survived only in an Italian translation; the Spanish original was lost.

18. The generous margins probably served to facilitate annotation as well as to highlight the notes themselves. A possible model or antecedent for Las Casas's treatment of the marginal commentary is the sixteenth-century Spanish practice of annotating official correspondence from the colonies to facilitate reading when the documents circulated through the Council of the Indies. The Council was apparently increasingly concerned precisely with the size of the margins of the documents it received, and legislation was passed at the end of the sixteenth century to ensure they be of generous proportions with respect to the main text; see Antonia M. Heredia, "Las cartas de los virreyes de Nueva España a la corona española en el siglo XVI," Anuario de Estudios Americanos 31 (1974):441-596, and "La carta como tipo diplomático indiano," Anuario de Estudios Americanos 34 (1977):65-95. Las Casas himself appeared at various times before the Council and was undoubtedly familiar with documents similarly annotated. While the purpose of annotating documents at the Council was typically to summarize or record responses to specific petitions contained in the text, Las Casas adds evaluative and critical annotations to Columbus's texts.

19. Varela transcribes "entenderse" in contrast to Sanz's "estenderse." Comparison with the facsimile text leaves little doubt that Sanz was correct.

20. For a striking contrast to Las Casas's reading, see Peter Martyr d' Anghiera's bucolic reading of Columbus in De Orbe Novo decades .

21. Soon after composing this letter Columbus was returned to Spain from Española in shackles by Bobadilla, chief justice and royal commissioner of Ferdinand and Isabella; see Samuel Eliot Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea (Boston: Little, Brown, 1942), 562-72.

22. Varela includes the fragments of this lost diario that were excerpted by Las Casas in her Textos y documentos completos (220-42) and considers them part of the "Relación," a text she believes to have been summarized by Las Casas in his edition. Rumeu's recent publication of El Libro Copiador de Cristóbal Colón , containing a copy of the "Relación" that is essentially coeval to Las Casas's transcription, supports my conviction that Las Casas

must also have consulted and extracted passages from a separate account of the third navigation in composing the Historia .

23. The encomienda placed a group of Indians under the control of a Spanish colonist. In exchange for religious instruction and tutoring in Spanish customs and language, the Indians were forced to work the mines and fields. Such was the remuneration Columbus himself claimed he would give to the captives he took during the first voyage.

24. I am working from Las Casas's copy of "Carta a doña Juana de la Torre, ama del príncipe don Juan" as edited by Varela (269-70). The letter is transcribed verbatim, with the marginal notes, in the Historia de las Indias (482-87). A translation of the complete version of the letter, based on the Raccolta edition, appears in Morison (289-98).

25. I am paraphrasing Anthony Pagden's lucid assessment of Las Casas's contributions to the debate on the nature of the Amerindians; see his The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 119.

26. Antonio Gómez Moriana has done an illuminating comparative analysis of Las Casas's and Ferdinand Columbus's treatment of the same passage from the Diario in their respective histories of the Discovery. He argues that Ferdinand does an economic reading of the Columbian text, in contrast to Las Casas's missionary reading—an analysis that supports my argument here that Las Casas's rewriting of the Columbian texts subordinates the commercial dimension of Columbus's discourse in favor of its Christian dimension. See Gómez Moriana, "Narration and Argumentation in the Chronicles of the New World," in 1492-1992: Re/Discovering Colonial Writing , ed. René Jara and Nicholas Spadaccini (Minneapolis: Prisma Institute, 1989), 97-120.

27. Quoted by Alejandro Cioranescu, "La 'Historia de las Indias' y la prohibición de editarla," Anuario de Estudios Americanos 23 (1966):363-76. Cioranescu suggests that Las Casas's intended audience may have been only his fellow Dominicans at the convent in Santo Domingo. Given the scope, tone, and tenor of the text, this possibility seems highly improbable. Since Las Casas entrusted to the Dominicans the preservation of the manuscript and its publication, there is good reason to believe, as Cioranescu also suggests, that he hoped they would come to advocate his positions after his death.