ould be consulted only with
allowance, for to the best of them the Italian saying "Traduttore,
tradittore" is applicable. With the greatest sincerity and honesty on
the part of the translator, he is liable to an imperfect interpretation
of an original text. There are of course instances when the original has
disappeared and translations alone are available. Such is the case, for
instance, with the Life of Columbus, written by his son Fernando and
published in Italian in 1571; and the highly important report on the
voyage of Cabral to Brazil in 1500, written by his pilot Vas da Cominho
and others. These are known only through translations.

Words from Indian languages are subject to very faulty rendering in the
older documents. In the first place, sound alone guided the writers, and
Indian pronunciation is frequently indistinct in the vowels and
variable according to the individual--hence the frequent interchange in
the Spanish sources of _a_ and _o_, _o_ and _u_, _e_ and _i_. For many
sounds even the alphabets of civilized speech have not adequate phonetic
signs. I may refer, as an example, to the Indian name in the Tigua
language for the pueblo of Sandia. The Spanish attempt to render it by
the word "Napeya" is utterly inadequate, and even by means of the
complicated alphabets for writing Indian tongues I would not attempt to
record the native term. In endeavoring to identify localities from names
given to them in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by European
authors, this difficulty should always be taken into account. No blame
can be attached to the writers for such defects; it should always be
remembered that they did not know, still less understand, the idioms
they heard. Still less should we be surprised if the same site is
sometimes mentioned under various names. Every Pueblo language has its
own geographical vocabulary, and when, as sometimes happened, several
tribes met in council with the whites, the latter heard and unwittingly
recorded several names for one and the same locality, thus apparently
increasing the number of villages. Moreover, interpreters were not
always at hand, and when they could be had both their competency and
their sincerity were open to question.

It is not unusual to read in modern works that such and such a source is
the reliable one _par excellence_, and the principal basis upon which to
establish conclusions. No source, however seemingly insignificant,
should be neglected. A b