The US has returned a rare 15th-century original edition of a letter written by Christopher Columbus to Italy, the federal US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agency has announced.
The letter, valued at over $1.3m, was revealed to have been stolen some time between 1985 and 1988, likely from the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, the historic public library in Venice.
The letter was recovered by US federal investigators in 2020 in Wilmington, Delaware, with assistance from the Delaware US attorney’s office. It was in the possession of a private collector from Texas, who said he obtained it in 2003 from a rare book dealer. The collector voluntarily relinquished the letter.
The Ice deputy director and senior official performing the duties of the director, Patrick J Lechleitner, traveled to Rome on 19 July to deliver the original letter to Italian officials.
Lechleitner said: “It is my pleasure to be here to celebrate the return of this important artifact to its rightful owners – the people of Italy – and I want to commend our [homeland security investigations] attaché Rome office for their excellent cooperation with our international colleagues, as well as HSI Wilmington for their extraordinary work in identifying, tracking down, recovering and returning the collection of Columbus letters.”
The letter, formally referred to as the Plannck I Columbus letter, named after printer Stephan Plannck, who published some of his letters, is one of 30 surviving first editions of Columbus’s letter announcing his “discovery” of the Americas to members of the Spanish royal family – an assertion many scholars argue is not accurate.
The National Museum of the American Indian in New York said: “Many students learn the phrase ‘In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.’ But Columbus was not the first foreign explorer to land in the Americas.
“Neither he nor those that came before him discovered America – because Indigenous peoples have populated the western hemisphere for tens of thousands of years. European contact resulted in devastating loss of life, disruption of tradition and enormous loss of lands for Indigenous peoples in the Americas.”
In this version of the letter printed in Latin, Columbus wrote about his findings from the Americas in March 1493 to King Ferdinand, who along with Queen Isabella helped finance his voyage.
It is the fourth original edition of this letter stolen over the past few decades.
Paul Needham, a rare book expert and former librarian at Princeton University, approached US officials when he tracked down the whereabouts of the missing letter.
Needham said he came across this exact letter once before, 21 years ago when a dealer in the book trade showed it to him.
“I always take notes on the copies of the Columbus letters, so I went back to my notes,” Needham said. “Right away, I knew that this one copy in Texas had the exact dimensions of the copy that had been stolen from the Marciana.”
Needham said he was able to confirm this was one of the original printed letters after identifying the unique position of the sewing holes from when it was originally bound in a book.
Another rare copy of a letter written by Columbus in 1493 was found in the US Library of Congress, also inspected by Needham. That letter was stolen from the Biblioteca Riccardiana in Florence, which unknowingly displayed a forged copy until the US returned the original in 2016.
“It’s really great that it’s back where it was stolen from,” Needham said. “That was absolutely the right thing.”
