Hesper appearing to Columbus in prison / drawn by Smirke : engraved by Anker Smith.

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Here the prisoner is not the stern navigator of familiar portraits but a man visited by a radiant spirit, Hesper, whose name evokes the evening star and the western lands Columbus sought. The scene recalls his arrest and imprisonment in Spain around 1500, after he had lost his governorship of Hispaniola amid quarrels with colonists and the crown. Robert Smirke, a London painter known for book illustrations, drew the design, and Anker Smith engraved it. The print reflects the late-eighteenth-century taste for allegorical visions of America's destiny, likely drawn from Joel Barlow's epic *The Vision of Columbus*. Worth noticing is the contrast between the cramped cell and the luminous figure, which sets worldly defeat against a promise of future glory.

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