The Spanish Archive and the Remapping of US History in Washington Irving’s Columbus

Abstract

In the wake of the Panic of 1825, Washington Irving, author of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819), was nearly broke, despondent, and desperate for a lucrative writing project. After traveling for some months in Europe, Irving received an invitation from US ambassador to Spain, Alexander Everett, to undertake the English translation of Spanish antiquarian Don Martín Fernández de Navarrete’s work, which was going to press in Madrid. This highly anticipated collection of documents, long out of reach to the international scholarly community, would provide Irving with the “first whiff of good luck” he had experienced since leaving the United States.¹ After just a few weeks with the materials, though, the project took a new turn. As Irving explains, Navarrete’s archive was a hodgepodge of “disconnected paper and official documents” that might have proved “repulsive to the general reader”—hardly the stuff of an international bestseller.² The translation posed a huge economic risk, Irving hesitated over such a laborious project, and his London publisher, John Murray, rejected the proposed translation outright, causing Irving to consider employing this “hodgepodge” for a more accessible purpose: a biography of Christopher Columbus.