The Haskins Archive
Documents from the archive
More than 100,000 pages of research copied from the archives of Spain and England, most of it in the handwriting of colonial scribes, annotated by the man who used it to find shipwrecks. We are transcribing and translating it, page by page, and publishing it here as it is done.
First Documents
Read them as Haskins read them
Each document is shown as the scan, an English translation, the original text, a line-by-line transcription, and Haskins’ own notes, kept separate from the original.
How this is done
Machine first, expert last
The archive is written in the scripts of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, which few living people can read fluently. We produce a first transcription and translation with AI assistance, mark every uncertain reading, and then put the page in front of a paleographer, who corrects it and signs off. Until that happens the page is labeled under review, and it stays labeled.
We publish the uncertainty on purpose. A marked gap is honest; a confident guess is a corruption of the record.
Fund the next thousand pages
The machine pass costs cents a page. The expert review is what costs money, and it is what makes the archive citable. Gifts at the Explorer level and above are directed to archive review, and donors receive the pages they helped finish.