VI

NOTICE.

impossible to complete the second and third parts, still unpublished, because the whereabouts of the missing books for both were unknown. Nevertheless, the diligent Don José Alvarez Baena, in his Illustrious Sons of Madrid Hijos ilustres de Madrid, stated that in 1775 the Marquis of Sonora, Secretary of the Indies Dispatch, had commissioned Don Francisco Cerdá y Rico, an official of the same secretariat, to expand his investigations to discover the remaining books, after some unpublished volumes were found in the possession of the Marquis of los Trujillos and in the Colombina Library. Baena declared, finally, that with the exception of Book XXVIII, the ninth of the second part, "everything was copied, verified, and ready to be printed" when he published his Historical Dictionary 2. But if this news from such a learned biographer seemed to ease the Academy’s labors, once Cerdá’s copies were requested from the Ministry of Grace and Justice of the Indies, it could only be verified that a memorandum by the aforementioned scholar stated he had arranged for the four volumes of the General History of the Indies he had collected to be delivered to the archive of said Ministry, which had either disappeared or had never been delivered. The obstacles that stood against the achievement of the Academy’s desires remained, as it had only obtained, from its painstaking inquiries, the last nine books of the second part, which were kept in the Colombina Library.

The commission in charge of these tasks did not rest, however, regarding the first part of Oviedo’s History, the additions for which had already been collected for his own use by the learned academician Don Juan Bautista Muñoz, who was committed to the plausible enterprise of writing the History of the New World. But as these notes could not, on one hand, satisfy the zealous individuals who formed the aforementioned commission, and since the resources the Academy counted on to complete these investigations were growing scarce from day to day, those relative to the publication of Oviedo had to be suspended in the end, although without in any way renouncing the hope of carrying out a project whose utility was universally recognized.

Two events finally fulfilled the Academy’s hopes to a certain extent: Don Miguel Salvá, its member and librarian of His Majesty’s patrimonial library, informed the body that the first eight books of the second part and the twelve that compose the third existed in said library in two thick volumes, which were then facilitated, by order of His Majesty, at the request of the Academy. Almost at the same time, the original codices came into its possession, which had been bequeathed at the beginning of the 17th century by the Schoolmaster Maestre-escuela

2 The basis that the authors of the Biographie Universelle ancienne et moderne could have had for asserting that in 1783 the Marquis of los Trujillos made a complete edition of Oviedo’s General and Natural History of the Indies is unknown. This news, transmitted later by Brunet, although with some reservation, could not be supported by the words of Baena, who only stated that Don Francisco Cerdá y Rico discovered the first and third volumes in the Marquis’s possession, which were old copies of the original from the House of Trade Casa de Contratacion of Seville. From them, Cerdá made the transcript of which Baena speaks; but the Marquis did not publish the History, which he did not have complete either, and although the publication of the one collected by Cerdá was ordered by royal decree, it was never even undertaken.