Besides these books of most fundamental importance, we have valuable accounts of some parts of the life of Columbus by his friend Andres Bernaldez, the curate of Los Palacios near Seville.[398] Peter Martyr, of Anghiera, by Lago Maggiore, was an intimate friend of Columbus, and gives a good account of his voyages, besides mentioning him in sundry epistles.[399] Columbus himself, moreover, was such a voluminous writer that his contemporaries laughed about it. "God grant," says Zuniga in a letter to the Marquis de Pescara, "God grant that Gutierrez may never come short for paper, for he writes more than Ptolemy, more than Columbus, the man who discovered the Indies."[400] These writings are in great part lost, though doubtless a good many things will yet be brought to light in Spain by persistent rummaging. We have, however, from sixty to seventy letters and reports by Columbus, of which twenty-three at least are in his own handwriting; and all these have been published.[401] [Footnote 398: _Historia de los Reyes Catolicos D. Fernando y D^a Isabel. Cronica inedita del siglo XV, escrita por el Bachiller Andres Bernaldez, cura que fue de Los Palacios_, Granada, 1856, 2 vols. small 4to. It is a book of very high authority.] [Footnote 399: _De orbe novo Decades_, Alcala, 1516; _Opus epistolarum_, Compluti (Alcala), 1530; Harrisse, _Bibliotheca Americana Vetustissima_, Nos. 88, 160.] [Footnote 400: "A Gutierrez vuestro solicitador, ruego a Dios que nunca le falte papel, porque escribe mas que Tolomeo y que Colon, el que hallo las Indias." Rivadeneyra, _Curiosidades bibliograficas_, p. 59, apud Harrisse, _Christophe Colomb_, tom. i. p. 1.] [Footnote 401: Harrisse, _loc. cit._, in 1884, gives the number at sixty-four.] [Sidenote: Defects in Ferdinand's information.]