Transcriber’s Notes
“Æt.” is an abbreviation for the Latin “aetatis”, which means “At the age of”. In the original book, this was printed with Columbus’ age as running headers on the left-hand pages, and the corresponding years were printed as running headers on the right-hand pages. In this eBook, they have been combined, aligned on the right margin, and included at the beginning of each chapter, as well as whenever they change. Consecutive duplicates within chapters have been deleted. Apparent inconsistencies between the ages and the years have not been changed.
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.
The index was not checked for proper alphabetization or correct page references, but a few errors were corrected.
Page 3: “Kolompo” was printed in Fraktur.
Page 239: The phrase “Panama Canal” is in the original book, even though the year was 1502 and the book was published in 1881.