1492 – 1530 (Ethnohistory): The primary written record of Columbus’s first voyage is a transcription of his lost original journal (diario) made by Bartolomé …

1492 – 1530 (Ethnohistory): The primary written record of Columbus’s first voyage is a transcription of his lost original journal (diario) made by Bartolomé de las Casas in 1530. This manuscript consists of seventy-six large paper folios featuring a small, cursive shorthand that provides a day-by-day account of the voyage and initial observations of Caribbean life. Modern scholars rely on exact transcriptions and translations, such as the one by Dunn and Kelley, to reconstruct the details of these early encounters. These documents serve as the foundational, though biased, texts for understanding the first interactions between Europeans and the peoples of the Greater Antilles.