American investigators have tracked down a 500-year-old copy of a letter written by Christopher Columbus, describing his first voyage to the New World, that was stolen from the Vatican and replaced with a forgery.
It was discovered in a private collection after being bought in good faith from a rare book dealer for $875,000 in 2004, according to court documents.
The historical whodunnit raises intriguing questions about who carried out forgery and theft, and whether they got away with the perfect crime.
The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the story, said the document was eventually bought by Robert Parsons, an Atlanta actuary and collector of old travel writing.
He died in 2014 but his widow agreed to return the historic document to the Vatican once its origins were confirmed.
The letter is a copy of one written by Columbus in 1493, and sent to his royal patrons Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain recounting how he discovered the Americas.
It was subsequently copied as a four-page pamphlet to spread word of his discovery.
The Columbus Letter, or Epistola Christofori Colom, is filled with excited details of his first encounters with the natives of Hispaniola and other Caribbean islands early in 1493. He describes a bountiful land of mountains, peaks and islands, filled with flowing rivers.
“They are most beautiful, of a thousand varied forms, accessible, and full of trees of endless varieties, so high that they seem to touch the sky, and I have been told that they never lose their foliage,” he wrote, according to a translation by the Independence Hall Association.
“I saw them as green and lovely as trees are in Spain in the month of May.”
No more than 500 copies were printed and only a handful survive.
The particular document in question arrived in the Vatican’s collection in the 1920s. In 1934 it was carefully catalogued in a compendium of Fifteenth Century printing but at some point – before or after – it disappeared, replaced by a fake.
The theft only came to light this year when agents – possibly tipped off about irregularities when Mr Parsons sought to authenticate his copy - asked Mary Parsons to let a government expert examine her copy and compare it with the one held by the Vatican.
“After closely examining, among other items, the leaf dimensions, pencil foliations and sewing stations in both Columbus letters, the subject matter expert conclusively determined that Mary Parsons’ Columbus letter was in fact the original Columbus letter that belonged to the Vatican Library and that the copy presently in the Vatican Library possession was a forgery,” reads the court document, which adds that the Parsons had no idea that it had been stolen.
The letter has now been returned. But who stole it and when remains a mystery
It is the second time a stolen copy of the letter has been returned. Last year, a version found in the US Library of Congress was sent back to Italy, from where it was stolen in about 1950.