Class ±JJ_L MkMlS- 33p Justin glMinsor. NARRATIVE AND CRITICAL HISTORY OF AMER- ICA. With Bibliographical and Descriptive Essays on its Historical Sources and Authorities. Profusely illus- trated with portraits, maps, facsimiles, etc. Edited by Justin VVinsor, Librarian of Harvard University, with the cooperation of a Committee from the Massachusetts Historical Society, and with the aid of other learned Societies. In eight royal 8vo volumes. Each volume, net, $5.50; sheep, net, $6.50; half morocco, net, $7.50. (Sold o>rfy by subscription for the entire set.) READER'S HANDBOOK OF THE AMERICAN REV- OLUTION. i6mo, $1.25. WAS SHAKESPEARE SHAPLEIGH? i6mo, rubri- cated parchment paper, 75 cents. CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. With portrait and maps. Svo, gilt top, $4.00. HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & COMPANY, Boston and New York. 1 1 .. —J- /^^0?^\ i>~ 0?\ \P ■•-■■% ^ hT\V\ BEHAIM, 1492. AMERICA 1892. CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS AND HOW HE RECEIVED AND IMPARTED THE SPIRIT OF DISCOVERY BY JUSTIN WINS Vera pro grati FIFTH EDITION, REVISED BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY (3tte ffitoer$'i&e #re0'tf, Cambridge. 1892 '-- Hi f W^ Copyright, 1891, By JUSTIN WINSOE. All rights reserved. ^Transfer FIFTH EDITION. The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Oo. To FRANCIS PARKM AN, LL. D., The Historian of New France. Dear Parkman : — You and I have not followed the maritime peoples of western Europe in planting and defending their flags on the American shores without observing the strange fortunes of the Italians, in that they have provided pioneers for those Atlantic nations without having once secured in the New World a foothold for themselves. When Venice gave her Cabot to England and Florence bestowed Verrazano upon France, these explorers established the territorial claims of their respective and foster motherlands, leading to those con- trasts and conflicts which it has been your fortune to illustrate as no one else has. When Genoa gave Columbus to Spain and Florence accredited her Vespucius to Portugal, these adjacent powers, whom the Bull of De- marcation would have kept asunder in the new hemisphere, established their rival races in middle and southern America, neighboring as in the Old World ; but their contrasts and conflicts have never had so worthy a historian as you have been for those of the north. The beginnings of their commingled history I have tried to relate in the present work, and I turn naturally to associate in it the name of the brilliant historian of France and England in North America with that of your obliged friend. Cambridge, June, 1890. 2S\ 0\ CONTENTS AND ILLUSTRATIONS. CHAPTER I. PAGE Sources, and the Gatherers of them 1 Illustrations : Manuscript of Columbus, 2 ; the Genoa Custo- dia, 5 ; Columbus's Letter to the Bank of St. George, 6 ; Co- lumbus's Annotations on the Imago Mundi, 8 ; First Page, Columbus's First Letter, Latin edition (1493), 16 ; Archivo de Simancas, 24. CHAPTER II. Biographers and Portraitists 30 Illustrations : Page of the Giustiniani Psalter, 31 ; Notes of Ferdinand Columbus on his Books, 42 ; Las Casas, 48 ; Roselly de Lorgues, 53 ; St. Christopher, a Vignette on La Cosa's Map (1500), 62 ; Earliest Engraved Likeness of Columbus in Jovius, 63 ; the Florence Columbus, 65 ; the Yanez Columbus, 66 ; a Reproduction of the Capriolo Cut of Columbus, 67 ; De Bry's Engraving of Columbus, 68 ; the Bust on the Tomb at Havana, 69. CHAPTER III. The Ancestry and Home of Columbus 71 CHAPTER IV. The Uncertainties of the Early Life of Columbus .... 79 Illustrations : Drawing ascribed to Columbus, 80 ; Benincasa's Map (1476), 81 ; Ship of the Fifteenth Century, 82. CHAPTER V. The Allurements of Portugal 85 Illustrations : Part of the Laurentian Portolano, 87 ; Map of Andrea Bianco, 89 ; Prince Henry, the Navigator, 93 ; Astro- vm CONTENTS AND ILLUSTRATIONS. labes of Regiomontanus, 95, 96 ; Sketch Map of African Dis- covery, 98 ; Fra Mauro's World-Map, 99 ; Tomb of Prince Henry at Batalha, 100 ; Statue of Prince Henry at Belem, 101. CHAPTER VI. Columbus in Portugal 103 Illustrations : Toscanelli's Map restored, 110 ; Map of Eastern Asia, with Old and New Names, 113 ; Catalan Map of Eastern Asia (1375), 114 ; Marco Polo, 115 ; Albertus Magnus, 120 ; the Laon Globe, 123 ; Oceanic Currents, 130 ; Tables of Regio- montanus (1474-1506), 132 ; Map of the African Coast (1478), 133 ; Martin Behaim, 134. CHAPTER VII. Was Columbus in the North ? 135 Illustrations : Map of Olaus Magnus (1539), 136 ; Map of Claudius Clavus (1427), 141 ; Bordone's Map (1528), 142 ; Map of Sigurd Stephanus (1570), 145. CHAPTER VIII. Columbus leaves Portugal for Spain 149 Illustrations : Portuguese Mappemonde (1490), 152 ; Pere Juan Perez de Marchena, 155 ; University of Salamanca, 162 ; Monument to Columbus at Genoa, 163 ; Ptolemy's Map of Spain (1482), 165 ; Cathedral of Seville, 171 ; Cathedral of Cordoba, 172. CHAPTER IX. The Final Agreement and the First Voyage, 1492 . . . .178 Illustrations : Behaim 's Globe (1492), 186, 187 ; Doppelmayer's Reproduction of this Globe, 188, 189 ; the actual America in Re- lation to Bebaim's Geography, 190 ; Ships of Columbus's Time, 192, 193 ; Map of the Canary Islands, 194 ; Map of the Routes of Columbus, 196 ; of his track in 1492,197 ; Map of the Agonic Line, 199 ; Lapis Polaris Magnes, 200 ; Map of Polar Regions by Mercator (1569), 202 ; Map of the Landfall of Columbus, 210 ; Columbus's Armor, 211 ; Maps of the Bahamas (1601 and modern), 212, 213. CHAPTER X. Among the Islands and the Return Voyage ....... 218 Illustration : Indian Beds, 222. CONTENTS AND ILLUSTRATIONS. bt CHAPTER XI. Columbus in Spain again ; March to September, 1493 . . . 243 Illustrations : The Arras of Columbus, 250 ; Pope Alexander VI., 253 ; Crossbow-Maker, 258 ; Clock-Maker, 200. CHAPTER XII. The Second Voyage, 1493-1494 264 Illustrations : Map of Guadaloupe, Marie Galante, and Domi- nica, 207 ; Cannibal Islands, 269. CHAPTER XIII. The Second Voyage, continued, 1494 284 Illustration : Mass on Shore, 298. CHAPTER XIV. The Second Voyage, continued, 1494-1490 303 Illustrations : Map of the Native Divisions of Espanola, 306 ; Map of Spanish Settlements in Espanola, 321. CHAPTER XV. In Spain, 1496-1498. Da Gama, Vespucius, Cabot 325 Illustrations : Ferdinand of Aragon, 328 ; Bartholomew Co- lumbus, 329 ; Vasco Da Gama, 334 ; Map of South Afriqa (1513), 335 ; Earliest Representation of South American Na- tives, 336. CHAPTER XVI. The Third Voyage, 1498-1500 347 Illustrations : Map of the Gulf of Paria, 353 ; Pre-Columbian Mappemonde, restored, 357 ; Ramusio's Map of Espanola, 369 ; La Cosa's Map (1500), 380, 381 ; Ribero's Map of the Antilles (1529), 383 ; Wytfliet's Cuba, 384, 385. CHAPTER XVII. The Degradation and Disheartenment of Columbus (1500) . 388 Illustration : Santo Domingo, 391. CONTENTS AND ILLUSTRATIONS. CHAPTER XVIII. Columbus again in Spain, 1500-1502 407 Illustrations : First Page of the Mundus Novus, 411 ; Map of the Straits of Belle Isle, 413 ; Manuscript of Gaspar Cortereal, 414 ; of Miguel Cortereal, 416 ; the Cautiiio Map, 419. CHAPTER XIX. The Fourth Voyage, 1502-1504 437 Illustrations : Bellin's Map of Honduras, 443 ; of Veragua, 446. CHAPTER XX. Columbus's Last Years. Death and Character 477 Illustrations : House where Columbus died, 490 ; Cathedral at Santo Domingo, 493 ; Statue of Columbus at Santo Domingo, 495. CHAPTER XXI. The Descent of Columbus's Honors 513 Illustrations : Pope Julius II., 517 ; Charles the Fifth, 519 ; Ruins of Diego Colon's House, 521. APPENDIX. The Geographical Results 529 Illustrations: Ptolemy, 530; Map by Donis (1482), 531; Ruysch's Map (1508), 532; the so-called Admiral's Map (1513), 534; Mini- ster's Map (1532), 535 ; Title-Page of the Globus Mundi, 352 ; of Eden's Treatyse of the Newe India, 537 ; Vespucius, 539 ; Title of the Cosmographies Introductio, 541 ; Map in Ptolemy (1513), 544, 545 ; the Tross Gores, 547 ; the Hauslab Globe, 548 ; the Nordenskiold Gores, 549 ; Map by Apianus (1520), 550 ; Schoner's Globe (1515), 551 ; Frisius's Map (1522), 552 ; Peter Martyr's Map (1511), 557 ; Ponce de Leon, 558 ; his tracks on the Florida Coast, 559 ; Ayllon's Map, 561 ; Balboa, 563 ; Grijalva, 566 ; Globe in Schoner's Opuscidum, 567 ; Ga- ray's Map of the Gulf of Mexico, 568 ; Cortes's Map of the Gulf of Mexico, 569 ; the Maiollo Map (1527), 570 ; the Lenox Globe, 571 ; Schoner's Globe (1520), 572 ; Magellan, 573 ; Ma- gellan's Straits by Pizafetta, 575 ; Modern Map of the Straits, 576 ; Freire's Map (1546), 578 ; Sylvanus's Map in Ptolemy (1511), 579; Stobnicza's Map, 580; the Alleged Da Vinci CONTENTS AND ILLUSTRATIONS. xi Sketch-Map, 582 ; Reisch's Map (1515), 583 ; Pomponius Me- la's World-Map, 584 ; Yadianus, 585 ; Apianus, 586 ; Schoner, 588 ; Rosenthal or Nuremberg Gores, 590 ; the Martyr-Oviedo Map (1534), 592, 593 ; the Verrazauo Map, 594 ; Sketch of Ag- nese's Map (1536), 595 ; Minister's Map (1540), 596, 597 ; Mi- chael Lok's Map (1582), 598 ; John White's Map, 599 ; Robert Thome's Map (1527), 600 ; Sebastian Minister, 602 ; House and Library of Ferdinand Columbus, 604 ; Spanish Map (1527), 605 ; the Nancy Globe, 606, 607 ; Map of Orontius Finreus (1532), 608 ; the same, reduced to Mereator's projection, 609 ; Cortes, 610 ; Castillo's California, 611 ; Extract from an old Portolano of the northeast Coast of North America, 613 ; Homem's Map (1558), 614 ; Ziegler's Schondia, 615 ; Kuscelli's Map (1544), 616 ; Carta Marina (1548), 617 ; Myritius's Map (1590), 618 ; Zaltiere's Map (15(56), 619 ; Porcacchi's Map (1572), 620 ; Mereator's Globe (1538), 622, 623 ; Minister's America (1545), 624 ; Mereator's Gores (1541), reduced to a plane projection, 625 ; Sebastian Cabot's Mappemonde (1544), 626 ; Medina's Map (1544), 628, 629 ; Wytfliet's America (1597), 630, 631 ; the Cross-Staff, 632 ; the Zeni Map, 634, 635 ; the Map in the Warsaw Codex (1467), 636, 637 ; Mereator's America (1569), 638 ; Portrait of Mercator, 639 ; of Ortelius, 640 ; Map by Or- telius (1570), 641 ; Sebastian Cabot, 642 ; Frobisher, 643 ; Frobisher's Chart (1578), 644 ; Francis Drake, 645 ; Gilbert's Map (1576), 647 ; the Back-Staff, 648 ; Luke Fox's Map of the Arctic Regions (1635), 651 ; Hennepin's Map of Jesso, 653 ; Domina Farrer's Map (1651), 654, 655 ; Buache's Theory of North American Geography (1752), 656 ; Map of Bering's Straits, 657 ; Map of the Northwest Passage, 659. Index ........<........•••••• 661 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. CHAPTER I. SOURCES, AND THE GATHERERS OF THEM. In considering the sources of information, which are original, as distinct from those which are derivative, we must place first in importance the writings of Columbus himself. We may place next the documentary proofs belonging to private and public archives. Harrisse points out that Columbus, in his time, acquired such a popular reputation for prolixity that a court fool of Charles the Fifth linked the discoverer of the Indies with His Ptolemy as twins in the art of blotting. He wrote P roUxit y- as easily as people of rapid impulses usually do, when they are not restrained by habits of orderly deliberation. He has left us a mass of jumbled thoughts and experiences, which, unfortu- nately, often perplex the historian, while they of necessity aid him. * Ninety-seven distinct pieces of writing by the hand of Colum- bus either exist or are known to have existed. ' Of His such, whether memoirs, relations, or letters, sixty- wntm s s - four are preserved in their entirety. These include twenty-four which are wholly or in part in his own hand. All of them have been printed entire, except one which is in the Biblioteca Co- lombina, in Seville, the Libro de las Projicias, written appar- ently between 1501 and 1504, of which only part is in Colum- bus's own hand. A second document, a memoir addressed to Ferdinand and Isabella, before June, 1497, is now in the col- lection of the Marquis of San Roman at Madrid, and was printed for the first time by Harrisse in his Christophe Co- lomb. A third and fourth are in the public archives in Ma- drid, being letters addressed to the Spanish monarchs ; one with- out date in 1496 or 1497, or perhaps earlier, in 1493, and the CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. other February 6, 1502 ; and both have been printed and given in facsimile in the Cartas de Indias, a collection published by B A C MANUSCRIPT OF COLUMBUS. [From a MS. iu the Biblioteca Colonibina, given in Harrisse's Notes on Columbus.] the Spanish government in 1877. The majority of the existing private papers of Columbus are preserved in Spain, in the hands of the present representative of Columbus, the Duke of Veragua, and these have all been printed in the great collec- tion of Navarrete. They consist, as enumerated by Harrisse in his Columbus and the Bank of Saint George, of the following pieces : a single letter addressed about the year 1500 to Ferdi- nand and Isabella ; four letters addressed to Father Gaspar Gorricio, — one from San Lucar, April 4, 1502 ; a second from the Grand Canaria, May, 1502 ; a third from Jamaica, July 7, 1503 ; and the last from Seville, January 4, 1505 ; — a memo- rial addressed to his son, Diego, written either in December, 1504, or in January, 1505 ; and eleven letters addressed also to Diego, all from Seville, late in 1504 or early in 1505. Without exception, the letters of Columbus of which we have Allin knowledge were written in Spanish. Harrisse has Spanish. conjectured that his stay in Spain made him a better master of that language than the poor advantages of his early life had made him of his mother tongue. SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 3 Columbus was more careful of the documentary proofs of his titles and privileges, granted in consequence of his His discoveries, than of his own writings. He had more P rmle s es - solicitude to protect, by such records, the pecuniary and titular rights of his descendants than to preserve those personal papers which, in the eyes of the historian, are far more valuable. These attested evidences of his rights were for a while in- closed in an iron chest, kept at his tomb in the monastery of Las Cuevas, near Seville, and they remained down to 1609 in the custody of the Carthusian friars of that convent. At this date, Nuiio de Portugallo having been declared the heir to the estate and titles of Columbus, the papers were transferred to his keeping ; and in the end, by legal decision, they passed to that Duke of Veragiia who was the grandfather of the present duke, who in due time inherited these public memorials, and now pre- serves them in Madrid. In 1502 there were copies made in book form, known as the Codex Diplomaticus, of these and other pertinent Codex documents, raising the number from thirty - six to pipiomati- forty-four. These copies were attested at Seville, by order of the Admiral, who then aimed to place them so that the record of his deeds and rights should not be lost. Two copies seem to have been sent by him through different chan- nels to Nicolo Oderigo, the Genoese ambassador in Madrid ; and in 1670 both of these copies came from a descendant of that ambassador as a gift to the Republic of Genoa. Both of these later disappeared from its archives. A third copy was sent to Alonso Sanchez de Carvajal, the factor of Colum- bus in Espanola, and this copy is not now known. A fourth copy was deposited in the monastery of Las Cuevas, near Seville, to be later sent to Father Gorricio. It is very likely this last copy which is mentioned by Edward Everett in a note to his oration at Plymouth (Boston, 1825, p. 64), where, referring to the two copies sent to Oderigo as the only ones made by the order of Columbus, as then understood, he adds : " Whether the two manuscripts thus mentioned be the only ones in existence may admit of doubt. When I was in Flor- ence, in 1818, a small folio manuscript was brought to me, written on parchment, apparently two or three centuries old, in binding once very rich, but now worn, containing a series of 4 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. documents in Latin and Spanish, with the following title on the first blank page : ' Treslado de las Bullas del Papa Alex- andra VI., de la concession de las Indias y los titulos, privile- ges y cedulas reales, que se dieron a Christoval Colon.' I was led by this title to purchase the book." After referring to the Cod ice, then just published, he adds : " I was surprised to find my manuscript, as far as it goes, nearly identical in its contents with that of Genoa, supposed to be one of the only two in existence. My manuscript consists of almost eighty closely written folio pages, which coincide precisely with the text of the first thirty-seven documents, contained in two hun- dred and forty pages of the Genoese volume." Caleb Cushing says of the Everett manuscript, which he had examined before he wrote of it in the North American Review, October, 1825, that, " so far as it goes, it is a much more per- fect one than the Oderigo manuscript, as several passages which Spotorno was unable to decipher in the latter are very plain and legible in the former, which indeed is in most complete preservation." I am sorry to learn from Dr. William Everett that this manuscript is not at present easily accessible. Of the two copies named above as having disappeared from the archives of Genoa, Harrisse at a late day found one in the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris. It had been taken to Paris in 1811, when Napoleon I. caused the archives of Genoa to be sent to that city, and it was not returned when the chief part of the documents was recovered by Genoa in 1815. The other copy was in 1816 among the papers of Count Cambiaso, and was bought by the Sardinian government, and given to the city of Genoa, where it is now deposited in a marble custodia, which, surmounted by a bust of Columbus, stands at present in the main hall of the palace of the municipality. This " custodia " is a pillar, in which a door of gilded bronze closes the receptacle that contains the relics, which are themselves inclosed in a bag of Spanish leather, richly embossed. A copy of this last document was made and placed in the archives at Turin. These papers, as selected by Columbus for preservation, were edited by Father Spotorno at Genoa, in 1823, in a cation by volume called Codice diplomatico Colombo- Ameri- cano, and published by authority of the state. There SOURCES OF INFORMATION. was an English edition at London, in 1823 ; and a Spanish at Havana, in 1867. Spotorno was re- printed, with additional matter, at Genoa, in 1857, as La Tavola di Bronzo, il pattio di seta, ed il Codice Colomboamericano, nuo- vamente illustrati per cura di Giuseppe Banchero. This Spotorno volume in- cluded two additional let- ters of Columbus, not yet mentioned, and addressed, March 21, 1502, and De- cember 27, 1504, to Ode- rigo. They were found pasted in the duplicate copy of the papers given to Genoa, and are now pre- served in a glass case, in the same custodia. A third letter, April 2, 1502, ad- dressed to the governors of the bank of St. George, was omitted by Spotorno ; but it is given by Harrisse in his Columbus 7 7 t» 7 /. Letters to ana the Bank of the Bank of ry . sy St. George. oamt (jreorge (New York, 1888). This last was one of two letters, which Columbus sent, as he says, to the bank, but the other has not been found. The history of the one preserved is traced by Harrisse in the work last mentioned, and there are IENOA CUSTODll. CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. ^^. 'M Si *fSy~* * ^^ "^ ^^ V'fv-T* fcl^tjp^&f \S7U ^^^A^J^^'^^^* 1 ^"^^ ^/fe^ ■s- A * xa y „*, m --sa-vssr TO IBE B4HK OT 8T [Reduced in size by photographic process.] SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 7 lithographic and photographic reproductions of it. Harrisse's work just referred to was undertaken to prove the forgery of a manuscript which has within a few years been offered for sale, either as a duplicate of the one at Genoa, or as the original. When represented as the original, the one at Genoa is pro- nounced a facsimile of it. Harrisse seems to have proved the forgery of the one which is seeking a purchaser. Some manuscript marginalia found in three different books, used by Columbus and preserved in the Biblioteca Colombina at Seville, are also remnants of the auto- graphs of Columbus. These marginal notes are in copies of ^Eneas Sylvius's Historia Rerum uhique gestarum (Venice, 1477) of a Latin version of Marco Polo (Antwerp, 1485?), and of Pierre d'Ailly's De Imagine Mundi (perhaps 1490), though there is some suspicion that these last-mentioned notes may be those of Bartholomew, and not of Christopher, Colum- bus. These books have been particularly described in Jose Silverio Jorrin's Varios Autografts ineditos de Cristobal Colon, published at Havana in 1888. In May, 1860, Jose Maria Fernandez y Velasco, the librarian of the Biblioteca Colombina, discovered a Latin text of the letter of Toscanelli, written by Columbus in this same copy of iEneas Toscaneiii'a Sylvius. He believed it a Latin version of a letter letten originally written in Italian ; but it was left for Harrisse to discover that the Latin was the original draft. A facsimile of this script is in Harrisse's Fernando Colon (Seville, 1871), and specimens of the marginalia were first given by Harrisse in his Notes on Columbus, whence they are reproduced in part in the Narrative and Critical History of America (vol. ii.). It is understood that, under the auspices of the Italian gov- ernment, an editorial committee is at present engaged with preparing; a national memorial issue of the writings ° Italiau of Columbus, somewhat in accordance with a proposi- memorial of r . __. . i> -n i t t Columbus. tion made by Harrisse to the Minister or Public In- struction at Rome in his Le Quatrieme Centenaire de la De- couverte du Nouveau Monde (Genoa, 1887). There are references to other works of Columbus which I have not seen, as a Declaracion de Tablet Nauiqatoria, 17 Columbus's. annexed to a treatise, Del Uso de la Carta de Na- printed vegar, by Dr. Grajales ; a Tratado de las Cinco Zo- nas Habitablcs, which Humboldt found it very difficult to find. 8 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. Of the manuscripts of Columbus which are lost, there are Huiost traces still to be discovered. One letter, which he writings. date( j Q £f tue Canaries, February 15, 1493, and which £ >rcferta Crtfam rlrgtreffl au ^4?^^*^ r.nfolaennn^carcnamba *j£;**^ -—«•**•• tiinfb-ancea -fnooa * c3"erra taU - >' ijmcar fruges mce byemis Hp homines . depbances in ^ujqaoq?«ignn.ipUi ,U 4 .~u^4v^+W* / :& prtaofbs plonmos "Ibi A^o^a^^j^t^vj^acfi* < i dbonc8TgnflFcs ac tmmcfo j>w.,Tt«r «-♦ ~c^r **»v^ // if>*j fnota pato e magna t K)a ? < ^^p^v^ Ma eft cerna pars babltabi _ , »pf*S*mT „ ^^ .19 "jhoieoefcenoit a tropi uomonrem AOalra. a regi if nunc flrymDocacurBa eft eyene - \>na fub foini *„ T i^ r^ w rJ ; '•? ^r * «<^V~!U.?^? <& - m paruit octauo fenefcun t • 3 rr, ~~> / "°* •*•-/* '/**«£»* :amen ferpenram qut tbt. f7»-»*H>» aarobii.ru. cub ttop logi ?9^°^/>*-c»£«4»^l^.t f i M j laaqj cr ungues pferunc }S"f** f o in igne amore alter al iqui parentee cofecco* J^Z^ 1 *^^*/??*!**** pum parac iimpiuB fu ^*" ~* w '^ i <^*i?B>f. ^ ANNOTATIONS BY COLUMBUS ON THE IMAGO MUNDI. [From Harrisse's Notes on Columbus.] SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 9 must have contained some account of his first voyage, is only known to us from an intimation of Marino Sanuto that it was included in the Chronica Delphinea. It is probably from an imperfect copy of this last in the library at Brescia, that the letter in question was given in the book's third part (a. d. 1457-1500), which is now missing. We know also, from a let- ter still preserved (December 27, 1504), that there musl be a letter somewhere, if not destroyed, sent by him respecting his fourth voyage, to Messer Gian Luigi Fieschi, as is supposed, the same who led the famous conspiracy against the house of Doria. Other letters, Columbus tells us, were sent at times to the Signora Madonna Catalina, who was in some way related to Fieschi. In 1780, Francesco Pesaro, examiniug the papers of the Council of Ten, at Venice, read there a memoir of Columbus, setting forth his maritime project ; or at least Pesaro was so understood by Marin, who gives the story at a later day in the seventh volume of his history of Venetian commerce. As Har- risse remarks, this paper, if it could be discovered, would prove the most interesting of all Columbian documents, since it would probably be found to fall within a period, from 1473 to 1487, when we have little or nothing authentic respecting Columbus's life. Indeed, it might happily elucidate a stage in the develop- ment of the Admiral's cosmographical views of which v/e know nothing. We have the letter which Columbus addressed to Alexander VI., in February, 1502, as preserved in a copy made by his son Ferdinand ; but no historical student has ever seen the Com- mentary, which he is said to have written after the manner of Caesar, recounting the haps and mishaps of the first voyage, and which he is thought to have sent to the ruling Pontiff. This act of duty, if done after his return from his last voyage, must have been made to Julius the Second, not to Alexander. Irving and others seem to have considered that this Caesarian performance was in fact, the well-known iournal of the first vovaere ; but there is a good deal of dim- of his first -,.... . , • voyage. culty in identifying that which we only know in an abridged form, as made by Las Casas, with the narrative sent or intended to be sent to the Pope. Ferdinand, or the writer of the Historic, later to be men- 10 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. tioned, it seems clear, had Columbus's journal before him, though he excuses himself from quoting much from it, in order to avoid wearying the reader. The original " journal " seems to have been in 1554 still in the possession of Luis Colon. It had not, accordingly, at that date been put among the treasures of the Biblioteca Colombina. Thus it may have fallen, with Luis's other papers, to his nephew and heir, Diego Colon y Pravia, who in 1578 entrusted them to Luis de Cardona. Here we lose sight of them. Las Casas's abridgment in his own handwriting, however, has come down to us, and some entries in it would seem to Abridged . by Las indicate that Las Casas abridged a copy, and not the original. It was, up to 1886, in the library of the Duke of Orsuna, in Madrid, and was at that date bought by the Spanish government. While it was in the possession of Orsuna, it was printed by Varnhagen, in his Verdadera Guanahani (1864). It was clearly used by Las Casas in his own Historia, and was also in the hands of Ferdinand, when he wrote, or out- lined, perhaps, what now passes for the life of his father, and Ferdinand's statements can sometimes correct or qualify the text in Las Casas. There is some reason to suppose that Herrera may have used the original. Las Casas tells us that in some parts, and particularly in describing the landfall and the events immediately succeeding, he did not vary the words of the origi- nal. This Las Casas abridgment was in the archives of the Duke del Infantado, when Navarrete discovered its importance, and edited it as early as 1791, though it was not given to the public till Navarrete published his Coleccion in 1825. When this journal is read, even as we have it, it is hard to imagine that Columbus could have intended so disjointed a performance to be an imitation of the method of Caesar's Commentaries. The American public was early given an oppoi-tunity to judge of this, and of its importance. It was by the instigation of George Ticknor that Samuel Kettell made a toanslation of the text as given by Navarrete, and published it in Boston in 1827, as a Personal Narrative of the first Voyage of Columbus to America, from a Manuscript recently discovered in Sjiain. We also know that Columbus wrote other concise accounts of his discovery. On his return voyage, during a gale, on Feb- SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 11 ruary 14, 1493, fearing his ship would founder, he prepared a statement on parchment, which was incased in wax, put in a barrel, and thrown overboard, to take the tionsofius chance of washing ashore. A similar account, protect- ed in like manner, he placed on his vessel's poop, to be washed off in case of disaster. Neither of these came, as far as is known, to the notice of anybody. They very likely simply duplicated the letters which he wrote on the voyage, intended to be dispatched to their destination on reaching port. The dates and places of these letters are not reconcilable with his journal. He was ap- parently approaching the Azores, when, on February 15, he dated a letter " off the Canaries," directed to Luis de Sant- angel. So false a record as " the Canaries " has never been satisfactorily explained. It may be imagined, perhaps, that the letter had been written when Columbus supposed he would make those islands instead of the Azores, and that the place of writing was not changed. It is quite enough, however, to rest satisfied with the fact that Columbus was always careless, and easily erred in such things, as Navarrete has shown. . The post- script which is added is dated March 14, which seems hardly probable, or even possible, so that March 4 has been suggested. He professes to write it on the day of his entering the Tagus, and this was March 4. It is possible that he altered the date when he reached Palos, as is Major's opinion. Columbus calls this a second letter. Perhaps a former letter was the One which, as already stated, we have lost in the missing part of the Chron- ica Delphinea. The original of this letter to Santangel, the treasurer of Ara- gon, and intended for the eyes of Ferdinand and Isa- Letter t0 bella, was in Spanish, and is known in what is thought Santan s el - to be a contemporary copy, found by Navarrete at Simancas ; and it is printed by him in his Coleccion, and is given by Ket- tell in English, to make no other mention of places where it is accessible. Harrisse denies that this Simancas manuscript rep- resents the original, as Navarrete had contended. A letter dated off the island of Santa Maria, the southernmost of the Azores, three days after the letter to Santangel, February 18, essentially the same, and addressed to Gabriel Sanchez, Letter t0 was found in what seemed to be an early copy, among Sanchez - the papers of the Colegio Mayor de Cuenca. This text was 12 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. printed by Varnhagen at Valencia, in 1858, as Primera Epistola del Almirante Don Cristobal Colon, and it is claimed by him that it probably much more nearly represents the original of Columbus's own drafting. There was placed in 1852 in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana at Printed Milan, from the library of Baron Pietro Custodi, a edition. printed edition of this Spanish letter, issued in 1493, perhaps somewhere in Spain or Portugal, for Barcelona and Lisbon have been named. Harrisse conjectures that Sanchez gave his copy to some printer in Barcelona. Others have con- tended that it was not printed in Spain at all. No other copy of this edition has ever been discovered. It was edited by Cesare Correnti at Milan in 1863, in a volume called Lettere autogrqfe di Cristoforo Colombo, nuovamente stampate, and was again issued in facsimile in 1866 at Milan, under the care of Girolamo d'Adda, as Lettera in lingua Sp>agnuola diretta da Cristoforo Colombo a Luis de Sant-Angel. Major and Becher, among others, have given versions of it to the English reader, and Harrisse gives it side by side with a French version in his Christophe Colomb (i. 420), and with an English one in his Notes on Columbus. This text in Spanish print had been thought the only avenue of approach to the actual manuscript draft of Columbus, till very recently two other editions, slightly varying, are said to have been discovered, one or both of which are held by some, but on no satisfactory showing, to have preceded in issue, prob- ably by a short interval, the Ambrosian copy. One of these newly alleged editions is on four leaves in quarto, and represents the letter as dated on February 15 and March 14, and its cut of type has been held to be evidence of having been printed at Burgos, or possibly at Salamanca. That this and the Ambrosian letter were printed one from the other, or independently from some unknown anterior edition, has been held to be clear from the fact that they correspond throughout in the division of lines and pages. It is not easily determined which was the earlier of the two, since there are errors in each corrected in the other. This unique four-leaf quarto was a few months since offered for sale in London, by Ellis and Elvey, who have published (1889) an English translation of it, with annotations by Julia E. S. Rae. It is now understood to be in SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 13 fche possession of a New York collector. It is but fair to say that suspicions of its genuineness have been entertained ; indeed, there can be scarce a doubt that it is a modern fabrication. The other of these newly discovered editions is in folio of two leaves, and was the last discovered, and was very recently held by Maisonneuve of Paris at 65,000 francs, and has since been offered by Quaritch in London for ,£1,600. It is said to have been discovered in Spain, and to have been printed at Barce- lona ; and this last fact is thought to be apparent from the Cat- alan form of some of the Spanish, which has disappeared in the Ambrosian text. It also gives the dates February 15 and March 14. A facsimile edition has been issued under the title La Lettre de Christophe Colomb, annoncant la Decouverte du Nouveau Monde. Caleb dishing, in the North American Review in October, 1825, refers to newspaper stories then current of a recent sale of a copy of the Spanish text in London, for £33 12s. to the Duke of Buckingham. It cannot now be traced. Harrisse finds in Ferdinand's catalogue of the Biblioteca Colombina what was probably a Catalan text of this Catalan Spanish letter ; but it has disappeared from the col- text " lection. Bergenroth found at Simancas, some years ago, the text of another letter by Columbus, with the identical dates already given, and -addressed to a friend; but it con- found b y veyed nothing not known in the printed Spanish texts. He, however, gave a full abstract of it in the Calendar of State Papers relating to England and Spain. Columbus is known, after his return from the second voyage, to have been the guest of Andres Bernaldez, the Cura Columbus de los Palacios, and he is also known to have placed to V Bernai- ers papers in this friend's hands ; and so it has been held dez- probable by Munoz that another Spanish text of Columbus's first account is embodied in Bernaldez's Historla de los Reyes Catolicos. The manuscript of this work, which gives thirteen chapters to Columbus, long remained imprinted in the royal library at Madrid, and Irving, Prescott, and Humboldt all used it in that form. It was finally printed at Granada in 1856, as edited by Miguel Lafuente y Alcantara, and was reprinted at Seville in 1870. Harrisse, in his Notes on Columbus, gives an English version of this section on the Columbus voyage. U CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. These, then, are all the varieties of the Spanish text of Co- lumbus's first announcement of his discovery which Varieties of - -1x7-1 i * 1 the Spanish are at present known. When the Ambrosian text text. was thought to be the only printed form of it, Varn- hagen, in his Carta de Cristobal Colon enviada de Lisboa a, Barcelona en Marzo de 1493 (Vienna, 1869 ; and Paris, 1870), collated the different texts to try to reconstruct a possible original text, as Columbus wrote it. In the opinion of Major no one of these texts can be considered an accurate transcript of the original. There is a difference of opinion among these critics as to the origin of the origin of the Latin text which scholars generally cite Latin text. ag t j lis firgt i etter f Columbus. Major thinks this Latin text was not taken from the Spanish, though similar to it ; while Varnhagen thinks that the particular Spanish text found in the Colegio Mayor de Cuenca was the original of the Latin version. There is nothing more striking in the history of the years immediately following the discovery of America than Transient •/ . o ** fame of the the transient character of the fame which Columbus acquired by it. It was another and later generation that fixed his name in the world's regard. Harrisse points out how some of the standard chroniclers of the world's history, like Ferrebouc, Regnault, Galliot du Pre, and Fabian, failed during the early half of the sixteenth cen- tury to make any note of the acts of Columbus ; and he could find no earlier mention among the German chroniclers than that of Heinrich Steinhowel, some time after 1531. There was even great reticence among the chroniclers of the Low Counti'ies ; and in England we need to look into the dispatches sent thence by the Spanish ambassadors to find the merest mention mentions of Columbus so early as 1498. Perhaps the refer- ence to him made eleven years later (1509), in an English version of Brandt's Shyppe of Fools, and another still ten years later in a little native comedy called The New Interlude, may have been not wholly unintelligible. It was not till about 1550 that, so far as England is concerned, Columbus really became a historical character, in Edward Hall's Chron- icle. Speaking of the fewness of the autographs of Columbus SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 15 which are preserved, Harrisse adds : " The fact is that Co- lumbus was very far from being in his lifetime the important personage he now is ; and his writings, which then commanded neither respect nor attention, were probably thrown into the waste-basket as soon as received." Nevertheless, substantial proof seems to exist in the several editions of the Latin version of this first letter, which . i'i 1 • i • i /• ii ■ i Editions of were issued in the months immediately following the the Latin return of Columbus from his first voyage, as well as in the popular versification of its text by Dati in two editions, both in October, 1493, besides another at Florence in 1495, to show that for a brief interval, at least, the news was more or less engrossing to the public mind in certain confined areas of Europe. Before the discovery of the printed editions of the Spanish text, there existed an impression that either the in- terest in Spain was less than in Italy, or some effort was made by the Spanish government to prevent a wide dissemination of the details of the news. The two Genoese ambassadors who left Barcelona some time after the return of Columbus, perhaps in August, 1493, may possibly have taken to Italy with them some Spanish edition of the letter. The news, however, had in some form reached Rome in season to be the subject of a papal bull on May 3d. We know that Aliander or Leander de Cosco, who made the Latin ver- sion, very likely from the Sanchez copy, finished it probably at Barcelona, on the 29th of April, not on the 25th as is sometimes said. Cosco sent it at once to Rome to be printed, and his manu- script possibly conveyed the first tidings, to Italy, — such is Harrisse's theory, — where it reached first the hands of the Bishop of Monte Peloso, who added to it a Latin epigram. It was he who is supposed to have committed it to the printer in Rome, and in that city, during the rest of 1493, four editions at least of Cosco's Latin appeared. Two of these editions are supposed to be printed by Plannck, a famous Roman printer ; one is known to have come from the press of Franck Silber. All but one were little quartos, of the familiar old style, of three or four black-letter leaves ; while the exception was a small oc- tavo with woodcuts. It is Harrisse's opinion that this pictorial edition was really printed at Basle. In Paris, during the same time or shortly after, there were three editions of a similar ap- lb* CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. pearance, all from one press. The latest of all, brought to light but recently, seems to have been printed by a distinguished ©£pf &ota £brf ffofbrf €ohm % cat efttanofrm m&m dckfc de Jnfulte *Jndie fop^s cccoxcft /♦ ^on^ficamsBkicandn Bextt Bnno piimo. Qtf onfam fufcepte piottfntf e rem perfectam mc c5fcciifiint fttifTc grarom ribi fbzc fcio: baa conftitui cjrarare: qoj re tmiufcuiufqjrri in bocnoftro irmere gefte inucnrjqj ad/ ftiorif ant: 20iceftmorcrtto die pofttp ©adibue difceffi in mare 3ndicu periienirrbi plurimaa infulae innumerie babitataa bor tvAhibas rtpperitquarum omnium pio foelidflfhno "Rege noftro pieconio cclebiaro i rcrilTie ejcfenfreeonrradicenrencminc pof/ fcfTioncmaccqji.primrcp carom diui 0a!uaroM9nomcn fwpo* fui:euiU9fmu9 aunlio ram ad banc-qj ad cereras aJiaeperuc/ nimu9»<£am *o *]nd\ ©uanabanin rocanr-Bliarametia warn quancp nouo nomine nuncupaui' longe adrnodum pzogreflra nibil noui emergebat:? bmoi via no9 ad Seprenrrionem deferebar:q» ipfcfugerecj:opraba:rerm crcnim regnabarbjuma: ad SuftrmncgeratiB voro cotendcres FIRST PAGE, COLUMBUS'S FIRST LETTER, LATIN EDITION, 1493. [From the Barlow copy, now iu the Boston Public Library.] Flemish printer, Thierry Martens, probably at Antwerp. It SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 17 is not improbable that other editions printed in all these or other cities may yet be found. It is noteworthy that nothing was issued in Germany, as far as we know, before a German version of the letter appeared at Strassburg in 1497. The text in all these Latin editions is intended to be the same. But a very few copies of any edition, and only a single copy of two or three of them, are known. The Lenox, the Car- ter-Brown, and the Ives libraries in this country are the chief ones possessing any of them, and the collections of the late Henry C. Murphy and Samuel L. M. Barlow also possessed a copy or two, the edition owned by Barlow passing in February, 1890, to the Boston Public Library. This scarcity and the rivalry of collectors would probably, in case any one of them should be brought upon the market, raise the price to fifteen hundred dollars or more. The student is not so restricted as this might imply, for in several cases there have been modern facsimiles and reprints, and there is an early reprint by Ve- radus, annexed to his poem (1494) on the capture of Granada. The text usually quoted by the older writers, however, is that embodied in the Bellum Christ ianorum Principum of Ro- bertus Monarchus (Basle, 1533). In these original small quartos and octavos, there is just enough uncertainty and obscurity as to dates and printers, to lure bibliographers and critics of typography into research and controversy ; and hardly any two of them agree in assigning the same order of publication to these several issues, order of The present writer has in the second volume of the P ubllcatlon - Narrative and Critical History of America grouped the varied views, so far as they had in 1885 been made known. The bib- liography to which Harrisse refers as being at the end of his work on Columbus was crowded out of its place and has not ap- peared ; but he enters into a long examination of the question of priority in the second chapter of his last volume. The ear- liest English translation of this Latin text appeared in the Edinburgh Review in 1816, and other issues have been va- riously made since that date. We get some details of this first voyage in Oviedo, which we do not find in the journal, and Vicente Yanez Pinzon and Her- nan Perez Matheos, who were companions of Columbus, are 18 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. said to be the source of this additional matter. The testimony ..„. , in the lawsuit of 1515, particularly that of Garcia Additional 1 *■ J sources re- Hernandez, who was in the " Pinta," and of a sailor speetmg the first voyage, named Francisco Garcia Vallejo, adds other details. There is no existing account by Columbus himself of his ex- seeond voy- perieiices during his second voyage, and of that cruise age ' along the Cuban coast in which he supposed himself to have come in sight of the Golden Chersonesus. The Historle tells us that during this cruise he kept a journal, Libro del Segundo Viage, till he was prostrated by sickness, and this itinerary is cited both in the Hlstorie and by Las Casas. We also get at second-hand from Columbus, what was derived from him in conversation after his return to Spain, in the account of these explorations which Bernaldez has embodied in his Reyes Catolicos. Irving says that he found these descriptions of Ber- naldez by far the most useful of the sources for this period, as giving him the details for a picturesque narrative. On disem- barking at Cadiz in June, 1495, Columbus sent to his sover- eigns two dispatches, neither of which is now known. It was in the collection of the Duke of Veragua that Navar- coiumbus's re ^ e discovered fifteen autograph letters of Columbus, letters. £ our Q £ £ nem addressed to his friend, the Father Gas- par Gorricio, and the rest to his son Diego. Navarrete speaks of them when found as in a very deplorable and in parts al- most unreadable condition, and severely taxing, for deciphering them, the practiced skill of Tomas Gonzalez, which had been acquired in the care which he had bestowed on the archives of Simancas. It is known that two letters addressed to Gor- ricio in 1498, and four in 1501, beside a single letter addressed in the last year to Diego Colon, which were in the iron chest at Las Cuevas, are not now in the archives of the Duke of Vera- gua ; and it is further known that during the great lawsuit of Columbus's heirs, Cristoval de Cardona tampered with that chest, and was brought to account for the act in 1580. What- ever he removed may possibly some day be found, as Harrisse thinks, among the notarial records of Valencia. Two letters of Columbus respecting his third voyage are only Third voy- known in early copies ; one in Las Casas's hand be- age * longed to the Duke of Orsuna, and the other ad- dressed to the nurse of Prince Juan is in the Custodia collection at Genoa. Both are printed by Navarrete. SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 19 Columbus, in a letter dated December 27, 1504, mentions a re- lation of his fourth voyage with a supplement, which he Fourth had sent from Seville to Oderigo ; but it is not known. age- We are without trace also of other letters, which he wrote at Dominica and at other points during this voyage. We do know, however, a letter addressed by Columbus to Ferdinand and Isabella, giving some account of his voyage to July 7, 1503. The lost Spanish original is represented in an early copy, which is printed by Navarrete. Though no contemporary Spanish edition is known, an Italian version was issued at Venice in 1505, as Copia de la Lettera per Colombo mandata. This was reprinted with comments by Morelli, at Bassano, in 1810, and the title which this librarian gave it of Lettera Rarissima has clung to it, in most of the citations which refer to it. Peter Martyr, writing in January, 1494, mentions just having received a letter from Columbus, but it is not known to exist. Las Casas is said to have once possessed a treatise by Co- lumbus on the information obtained from Portuguese and Spanish pilots, concerning western lands ; and he usescoium- also refers to Libros de Memorias del Almirante. He is also known by his own statements to have had numerous autograph letters of Columbus. What has become of them is not known. If they were left in the monastery of San Gregorio at Valladolid, where Las Casas used them, they have disap- peared with papers of the convent, since they were not among the archives of the suppressed convents, as Harrisse tells us, which were entrusted in 1850 to the Academy of History at Madrid. In his letter to Doila Juana, Columbus says that he has de- posited a work in the Convent de la Mejorada, in work on the which he has predicted the discovery of the Arctic Arctic P° le - pole. It has not been found. Harrisse also tells us of the unsuccessful search which he has made for an alleged letter of Columbus, said in Gun- m s&ne ther and Schultz's handbook of autographs (Leipzig, letters - 1856) to have been bought in England by the Duke of Buck- ingham ; and it was learned from Tross, the Paris bookseller, ' that about 1850 some autograph letters of Columbus, seen by him, were sent to England for sale. 20 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. After his return from bis first voyage, Columbus prepared a Columbus's ma P an d an accompanying table of longitudes and lati- maps> tudes for the new discoveries. They are known to have been the subject of correspondence between him and the queen. There are various other references to maps which Columbus had constructed, to embody his views or show his discoveries. Not one, certainly to be attributed to him, is known, though Ojeda, Nino, and others are recorded as having used, in their explorations, maps made by Columbus. Peter Martyr's lan- guage does not indicate that Columbus ever completed any chart, though he had, with the help of his brother Bartholomew, begun one. The map in the Ptolemy of 1513 is said by San- tarem to have been drawn by Columbus, or to have been based on his memoranda, but the explanation on the map seems rather to imply that information derived from an admiral in the ser- vice of Portugal was used in correcting it, and since Harrisse has brought to light what is usually called the Cantino map, there is strong ground for supposing that the two had one pro- totype. Let us pass from records by Columbus to those about him. We owe to an ancient custom of Italy that so much tariai rec- has been preserved, to throw in the aggregate no small ords. ' . . . amount of light on the domestic life of the family in which Columbus was the oldest born. During the fourteen years in which his father lived at Savona, every little business act and legal transaction was attested before notaries, whose records have been preserved filed in flzas in the archives of the town. These Jilzas were simply a file of documents tied together by a string passed through each, and a filza generally embraced a year's accumulation. The photographic facsimile which Har- risse gives in his Columbus and the Bank of Saint George, of the letter of Columbus preserved by the bank, shows how the sheet was folded once lengthwise, and then the hole was made midway in each fold. We learn in this way that, as early as 1470 and later, Colum- bus stood security for his father. We find him in 1472 the witness of another's will. As under the Justinian procedure SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 21 the notary's declaration sufficed, such documents in Italy are not rendered additionally interesting by the autograph of the witness, as they would be in England. This notarial resource is no new discovery. As early as 1602, thirteen documents drawn from similar depositaries were printed at Genoa, in some anno- tations by Giulio Salinerio upon Cornelius Tacitus. Other similar papers were discovered by the archivists of Savona, Gian Tommaso and Giambattista Belloro, in 1810 (reprinted, 1821) and 1839 respectively, and proving the general correct- ness of the earlier accounts of Columbus's younger days given in Gallo, Senarega, and Giustiniani. It is to be regretted that the original entries of some of these notarial acts are not now to be found, but patient search may yet discover them, and even do something more to elucidate the life of the Columbus family in Savona. There has been brought into prominence and published lately a memoir of the illustrious natives of Savona, written by a lawyer, Giovanni Vincenzo Verzellino, who died in that town in 1638. This document was printed at Savona in 1885, under the editorial care of Andrea Astengo; but Harrisse has given greater currency to its elucidations for our purpose in his Christophe Colomb et Savone (Genoa, 1877). Harrisse is not unwisely confident that the nineteen docu- ments — if no more have been added — throwing light Genoa nota _ on minor points of the obscure parts of the life of Co- nal records - lumbus and his kindred, which during recent years have been discovered in the notarial files of Genoa by the Marquis Mar- cello Staglieno, may be only the precursors of others yet to be unearthed, and that the pages of the Giomale Ligustico may continue to record such discoveries as it has in the past. The records of the Bank of Saint George in Genoa have yielded something, but not much. In the state archives of Genoa, preserved since 1817 in the Palazzetto, we the Bank of might hope to find some report of the great discovery, of which the Genoese ambassadors, Francesco Marchesio and Gian Antonio Grimaldi, were informed, just as they were taking leave of Ferdinand and Isabella for returning to Italy; but nothing of that kind has yet been brought to light there ; nor was it ever there, unless the account which Senarega gives in the i 22 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. narrative printed in Muratori was borrowed thence. We may hope, but probably in vain, to have these public archives deter- mine if Columbus really offered to serve his native country in a voyage of discovery. The inquirer is more fortunate if he explores what there is left of the archives of the old abbey of St. Stephen, which, since the suppression of the convents in 1797, have been a part of the public papers, for he can find in them some help in solving some pertinent questions. Harrisse tells us in 1887 that he had been waiting two years Vatican ar- f° r permission to search the archives of the Vatican. xhives. What may yet be revealed in that repository, the world waits anxiously to learn. It may be that some one shall yet discover there the communication in which Ferdinand and Isabella announced to the Pope the consummation of the hopes of Columbus. It may be that the diplomatic correspondence cov- ering the claims of Spain by virtue of the discovery of Colum- bus, and leading to the bull of demarcation of May, 1493, may yet be found, accompanied by maps, of the highest interest in interpreting the relations of the new geography. There is no assurance that the end of manuscript disclosures has yet come. Some new bit of documentary proof has been found manu- at times in places quite unexpected. The number of Italian observers in those days of maritime excitement living in the seaports and trading places of Spain and Portugal, kept their home friends alert in expectation by reason of such appetizing news. Such are the letters sent to Italy about Co- by Hanibal Januarius, and by Luca, the Florentine engineer, concerning the first voyage. There are similar transient summaries of the second voyage. Some have been found in the papers of Macchiavelli, and others had been arranged by Zorzi for a new edition of his documentary collec- tion. These have all been recovered of recent years, and Har- risse himself, Gargiolli, Guerrini, and others, have been instru- mental in their publication. It was thirty-seven years after the death of Columbus before, Spanish under an order of Charles the Fifth, February 19, archives. 1543, the archives of Spain were placed in some sort of order and security at Simancas. The great masses of papers filed by the crown secretaries and the Councils of the SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 23 Indies ami of Seville, were gradually gathered there, but not until many had been lost. Others apparently disappeared at a later day, for we are now aware that many to which Herrera refers cannot be found. New efforts to secure the preservation and systematize the accumulation of manuscripts were made by order of Philip the Second in 1567, but it would seem with- out all the success that might have been desired. Towards the end of the last century, it was the wish of Charles the Third that all the public papers relating to the New World Simaiicas should be selected from Simancas and all other places andSeviUe - of deposit and carried to Seville. The act was accomplished in 1788, when they were placed in a new building which had been provided for them. Thus it is that to-day the student of Co- lumbus must rather search Seville than Simancas for new doc- uments, though a few papers of some interest in connection with the contests of his heirs with the crown of Castile may still exist at Simancas. Thirty years ago, if not now, as Bergen- roth tells us, there was little comfort for the student of history in working at Simancas. The papers are preserved in an old castle, formerly belonging to the admirals of Castile, which had been confiscated and devoted to the uses of such a repository. The one large room which was assigned for the accommodation of readers had a northern aspect, and as no fires were allowed, the note-taker found not infrequently in winter the ink partially congealed in his pen. There was no imaginable warmth even in the landscape as seen from the windows, since, amid a treeless waste, the whistle of cold blasts in winter and a blinding African heat in summer characterize the climate of this part of Old Castile. Of the early career of Columbus, it is very certain that something may be gained at Simancas, for when Bergenroth, sent by the English government, made search there to illustrate the relations of Spain with England, and published his results, with the assistance of Gayangos, in 1862-1879, as a Calendar of Letters, Despatches, and State Papers relating to Negotia- tions between England and Spain, one of the earliest entries of his first printed volume, under 1485, was a complaint of Ferdi- nand and Isabella against a Columbus — some have supposed it our Christopher — for his participancy in the piratical service of the French. CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 25 Harrisse complains that we have as yet but scant knowledge of what the archives of the Indies at Seville may con- tain, but they probably throw light rather upon the successors of Columbus than upon the career of the Admiral himself. The notarial archives of Seville are of recent construction, the gathering of scattered material having been first o o o Seville ordered so late as 1869. The partial examination notarial which has since been made of them has revealed some slight evidences of the life of some of Columbus's kindred, and it is quite possible some future inquirer will be rewarded for his diligent search among them. It is also not unlikely that something of interest may be brought to light respecting the descendants of Columbus who have lived in Seville, like the Counts of Gelves ; but little can be expected regarding the life of the Admiral himself. The personal fame of Columbus is much more intimately con- nected with the monastery of Santa Maria de las Cue- vas. Here his remains were transported in 1509 ; and de las Cue- at a later time, his brother and son, each Diego by name, were laid beside him, as was his grandson Luis. Here in an iron chest the family muniments and jewels were kept, as has been said. It is affirmed that all the documents which might have grown out of these transactions of duty and precau- tion, and which might incidentally have yielded some biograph- ical information, are nowhere to be found in the records of the monastery. A century ago or so, when Muiioz was working in these records, there seems to have been enough to repay his exertions, as we know by his citations made between 1781 and 1792. The national archives of the Torre do Tombo, at Lisbon, begun so far back as 1390, are well known to have p 0l . t uguese been explored by Santarem, then their keeper, pri- Toledo marily for traces of the career of Vespucius ; but so Tombo - intelligent an antiquary could not have forgotten, as a second- ary aim, the acts of Columbus. The search yielded him, how- ever, nothing in this last direction ; nor was Varnhagen more fortunate. Harrisse had hopes to discover there the corre- spondence of Columbus with John the Second, in 1488 ; but the 26 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. search was futile in this respect, though it yielded not a little respecting the Perestrello family, out of which Columbus took his wife, the mother of the heir of his titles. There is even hope that the notarial acts of Lisbon might serve a similar pur- pose to those which have been so fruitful in Genoa and Savona. There are documents of great interest which may be yet ob- scurely hidden away, somewhere in Portugal, like the letter from the mouth of the Tagus, which Columbus on his return in March, 1493, addressed to the Portuguese king, and the diplo= matic correspondence of John the Second and Ferdinand of Aragon, which the project of a second voyage occasioned, as well as the preliminaries of the treaty of Tordesillas. There may be yet some hope from the archives of Santo Domingo itself, and from those of its Cathedral, to mingo trace in some of their lines the descendants of the Admiral through his son Diego. The mishaps of na- ture and war have, however, much impaired the records. Of Columbus himself there is scarce a chance to learn anything Lawsuit here. The papers of the famous lawsuit of Diego papers. Colon with the crown seem to have escaped the at- tention of all the historians before the time of Muiioz and Navarrete. The direct line of male descendants of the Ad- miral ended in 1578, when his great-grandson, Diego Colon y Pravia, died on the 27th January, a childless man. Then began another contest for the heritage and titles, and it lasted for thirty years, till in 1608 the Council of the Indies judged the rights to descend by a turn back to Diego's aunt Isabel, and thence to her grandson, Nuno de Portugallo, Count of Gelves. The excluded heirs, represented by the children of a sister of Diego, Francisca, who had married Diego Ortegon, were naturally not content ; and out of the contest which fol- lowed we get a large mass of printed statements and counter statements, which used with caution, offer a study perhaps of some of the transmitted traits of Columbus. Harrisse names and describes nineteen of these documentary memorials, the last of which bears date in 1792. The most important of them all, however, is one printed at Madrid in 1606, known as Me- morial del Pleyto, in which we find the descent of the true and spurious lines, and learn something too much of the scandalous life of Luis, the grandson of the Admiral, to say nothing of the SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 27 illegitimate taints of various other branches. Harrisse finds assistance in working out some of the lines of the Admiral's de- scendants, in Antonio Caetano de Sousa's Historia Genealogica da Casa Meal Portugueza (Lisbon, 1735-49, in 14 vols.). The most important collection of documents gathered by in- dividual efforts in Spain, to illustrate the early his- TheMufioz tory of the New World, was that made by Juan Bau- coUection - tista Munoz, in pursuance of royal orders issued to him in 1781 and 1788, to examine all Spanish archives, for the purpose of collecting material for a comprehensive History of the Indies. Munoz has given in the introduction of his history a clear statement of the condition of the different depositories of archives in Spain, as he found them towai-ds the end of the last century, when a royal order opened them all to his search. A first volume of Munoz's elaborate and judicious work was issued in 1793, and Muiloz died in 1799, without venturing on a second volume to carry the story beyond 1500, where he had left it. He was attacked for his views, and there was more or less of a pamphlet war over the book before death took him from the strife ; but he left a fragment of the second volume in manuscript, and of this there is a copy in the Lenox Library in New York. Another copy was sold in the Brinley sale. The Munoz collection of copies came in part, at least, at some time after the collector's death into the hands of Antonio de Uguina, who placed them at the disposal of Irving ; and Ternaux seems also to have used them. They were finally deposited by the Spanish government in the Academy of History at Madrid. Here Alfred Demersey saw them in 1862-63, and described them in the Bulletin of the French Geographical Society in June, 1864, and it is on this description as well as on one in Fuster's Biblioteea Valenciana, that Harrisse depends, not having himself examined the documents. Martin Fernandez de Navarrete was guided in his career as a collector of documents, when Charles the Fourth The N&vax- made an order, October 15, 1789. that there should be retecoiiec- such a work begun to constitute the nucleus of a library and museum. The troublous times which succeeded in- terrupted the work, and it was not till 1825 that Navarrete brought out the first volume of his Coleccion de los Viages y Desrvbrimientos que hicieron por Mar los J?$panoles desde 28 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. Fines del Siglo XV., a publication which a fifth volume com- pleted in 1837, when he was over seventy years of age. Any life of Columbus written from documentary sources must reflect much light from this collection of Navarrete, of which the first two volumes are entirely given to the career of the Admiral, and indeed bear the distinctive title of Relaciones, Cartas y otros Documentos, relating to him. Navarrete was engaged thirty years on his work in the ar- chives of Spain, and was aided part of the time by searches of Munoz the historian, and by Gonzales the keeper of the archives at Simancas. His researches extended to all the public repositories, and to such private ones as could be thought to illustrate the period of discovery. Navarrete has told the story of his searches in the various archives of Spain, in the introduction to his Coleccion, and how it was while searching for the evidences of the alleged voyage of Maldonado on the Pacific coast of North America, in 1588, that he stum- bled upon Las Casas's copies of the relations of Columbus, for his first and third voyages, then hid away in the archives of the Due del Infantado ; and he was happy to have first brought them to the attention of Munoz. There are some advantages for the student in the use of the French edition of Navarrete's delations des Quatre Voyages entrepris par Colomb, since the version was revised by Navar- rete himself, and it is elucidated, not so much as one would wish, with notes b}^ Kemusat, Balbi, Cuvier, Jomai-d, Letronne, St. Martin, Walckenaer, and others. It was published at Paris in three volumes in 1828. The work contains Navarrete's ac- counts of Spanish pre-Columbian voyages, of the later literature on Columbus, and of the voyages of discovery made by other efforts of the Spaniards, beside the documentary material re- specting Columbus and his voyages, the result of his continued labors. Caleb dishing, in his Reminiscences of Spain in 1833, while commending the general purposes of Navarrete, complains of his attempts to divert the indignation of posterity from the selfish conduct of Ferdinand, and to vindicate him from the charge of injustice towards Columbus. This plea does not find to-day the same sympathy in students that it did sixty years ago. Father Antonio de Aspa of the monastery of the Mejorada, SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 29 formed a collection of documents relating to the discovery of the New World, and it was in this collection, now pre- served in the Academy of History at Madrid, that Academy of Navarrete discovered that curious narration of the second voyage of Columbus by Dr. Chanca, which had been sent to the chapter of the Cathedral, and which Navarrete included in his collection. It- is thought that Bernaldez had used this Chanca narrative in his Reyes Catolicos. Navarrete's name is also connected, as one of its editors, with the extensive Coleccion de Documentos Ineditos para la Historia de Espana, the publication of which was Documentos begun in Madrid in 1847, two years before Navarrete's death. This collection yields something in elucidation of the story to be here told ; but not much, except that in it, at a late day, the Historia of Las Casas was first printed. In 1864, there was still another series begun at Madrid, Coleccion de Documentos Ineditos relativos cd Descubrimiento, Conquista y Colonizacion de las Posesiones Espafiolas en America y Oceania, under the editing of Joaquin Pacheco and Francisco de Cardenas, who have not always satisfied students by the way in which they have done their work. Beyond the papers which Navarrete had earlier given, and which are here re- printed, there is not much in this collection to repay the student of Columbus, except some long accounts of the Repartimiento in Espanola. The latest documentary contribution is the large folio, with an appendix of facsimile writings of Columbus, Ves- Cai . tas(le pucius, and others, published at Madrid in 1877, by Indias- the government, and called Cartas de Indias, in which it has been hinted some use has been made of the matter accumulated by Navarrete for additional volumes of his Coleccion. In reference to the Declaracion de Tabla Navigatoria (ante, p. 7) Harrisse has recently reexamined the manuscript in the King's library at Madrid, and finds it to contain Columbus's well-kuown account of his third voyage, and a copy of the marginal legends attached to the Paris copy of the Cabot map of 1544. as written by a Dr. Grajales, which is the " carta de nave- gar " referred to. Therefore, Humboldt and others have erred in calling it another writing by Columbus. 30 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. " C a *■* -sj a t"i c d— . 75 >— « vi 7: ^;jn , tn w a us «5 ta a a o sag w^ •^ =f U K CL,77S CD g a o a sy D a « « B..& ** £ IH- r— 2 •pi. h Pi 2" **• rP *3' C — *=• ** n y »^' fcv ^* n •?- ?* „ *. is 1 - 43- 4^, X 45' % ri" ft: ^ r §' ^ Si *"Y » 1 X- ». j:» r.:v H'^^^i V p. o « 02 J3 r- CHAPTER II. BIOGRAPHERS AND PORTRAITISTS. We may most readily divide by the nationalities of the writers our enumeration of those who have used the material which has been considered in the previous chapter. We begin, naturally, with the Italians, the countrymen of Columbus. We may look first to three Genoese, and it has been shown that while they Contempo- uset ^ documents apparently now lost, they took nothing rary notices. f rom them which we cannot get from other sources ; and they all borrowed from common originals, or from each other. Two of these writers are Antonio Gallo, the official chronicler of the Genoese Republic, on the first and second voy- ages of Columbus, and so presumably writing before the third was made, and Bartholomew Senarega on the affairs of Genoa, both of which recitals were published by Muratori, in his great Italian collection. The third is Giustiuiani, the Bishop of Nebbio, who, publishing in 1516, at Genoa, a polyglot Psalter, added, as one of his elucidations of the nineteenth psalm, on the plea that Columbus had often boasted he was chosen to fulfill its prophecy, a brief life of Columbus, in which the story of the humble origin of the navigator has in the past been supposed to have first been told. The other accounts, it now appears, had given that condition an equal prominence. Giu= stiniani was but a child when Columbus left Genoa, and could not have known him ; and taking, very likely, much from hearsay, he might have made some errors, which were re- peated or only partly corrected in his Annals of Genoa, pub- lished in 1537, the year following his own death. It is not found, however, that the sketch is in any essential particular far from correct, and it has been confirmed by recent investigations. The English of it is given in Harrisse's Notes on Columbus (pp. 74-79). The statements of the Psalter respecting Columbus were reckoned with other things so false that the Senate of 32 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. Genoa prohibited its perusal and allowed no one to possess it, — at least so it is claimed in the Historie of 1571 ; but no one has ever found such a decree, nor is it mentioned by any who would have been likely to revert to it, had it ever existed. The account in the Collectanea of Battista Fulgoso (some- times written Fregoso), printed at Milan in 1509, is of scarcely any original value, though of interest as the work of another Genoese. Allegetto degli Allegetti, whose JEphemerides is also published in Muratori, deserves scarcely more credit, though he seems to have got his information from the letters of Italian merchants living in Spain, who communicated current news to their home correspondents. Bergomas, who had pub- lished a chronicle as early as 1483, made additions to his work from time to time, and in an edition printed at Venice, in 1503, he paraphrased Columbus's own account of his first voyage, which was reprinted in the subsequent edition of 1506. In this latter year Maffei de Volterra published a commentary at Rome, of much the same importance. Such was the filtering- process by which Italy, through her own writers, acquired con- temporary knowledge of her adventurous son. The method was scarcely improved in the condensation of Jovius (1551), or in the travelers tales of Benzoni (1565). Harrisse affirms that it is not till we come down to the casoni Annals of Genoa, published by Filippo Casoni, in no8. 1708, that we get any new material in an Italian writer, and on a few points this last writer has adduced docu- mentary evidence, not earlier made known. It is only when we pass into the present century that we find any of the country- men of Columbus undertaking in a sustained way to tell the whole story of Columbus's life. Leon had noted that at some time in Spain, without giving place and date, Columbus had printed a little tract, Declaration de Tabla Namgatoria ; but no one before Luigi Bossi had undertaken to investigate the writings of Columbus. He is precursor of all the modern biographers of Columbus, and his book was published at Milan, in 1818. He claimed in his appendix to have added rare and unpublished documents, but Harrisse points out how they had all been printed earlier. Bossi expresses opinions respecting the Spanish nation that are by no means acceptable to that people, and Navarrete not BIOGRAPHERS. 33 infrequently takes the Italian writer to task for this as for his many errors of statement, and for the confidence which he places even in the pictorial designs of De Bry as historical records. There is nothing more striking in the history of American discovery than the fact that the Italian people furnished to Spain Columbus, to England Cabot, and to France Verrazano ; and that the three leading powers of Europe, following as mari- time explorers in the lead of Portugal, who could not dispense with Vespucius, another Italian, pushed their rights through men whom they had borrowed from the central region of the Mediterranean, while Italy in its own name never possessed a rood of American soil. The adopted country of each of these Italians gave more or less of its own impress to its foster child. No one of these men was so impressible as Columbus, and no country so much as Spain was likely at this time to exercise an influence on the character of an alien. Humboldt has remarked that Columbus got his theological fervor in Andalusia and Granada, and we can scarcely imagine Columbus in the garb of a Franciscan walking the streets of free and commercial Genoa as he did those of Seville, when he returned from his second voyage. The latest of the considerable popular Italian lives of Colum- bus is G. B. Lemoyne's Colombo e l a Scon er ta d elV America, We may pass now to theymstWrians~6f fliat^ountry to which Columbus betook himself otsj^v^^VutaRJp; but about all to be found at first hand is in thV^^ironicle--o^^"5oao Tb<& Portuguese Portugal, as prepared by RuV ^^jKJitefc^ fc^ writers - of the Torre do Tombo. At the time" o'±"Tne voyage of Colum- bus Ruy was over fifty, while Garcia de Resende was a young man then living at the Portuguese court, who in his Choronica, published in 1596, did little more than borrow from his elder, Ruy ; and Resende in turn furnished to Joao de Barros the staple of the latter's narrative in his Decada da Asia, printed at Lisbon, in 1752. We find more of value when we summon the Spanish writers. Although Peter Martyr d'Anghiera was an Italian, Munoz issued at Turin, in 1873. 34 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. reckons him a Spaniard, since lie was naturalized in Spain. Spanish He was a man of thirty years, when, coming from writers. Rome, he settled in Spain, a few years before Colum- bus attracted much notice. Martyr had been borne thither Peter on a reputation of his own, which had commended Martyr. ^-g b usv young nature to the attention of the Spanish court. He took orders and entered upon a prosperous career, proceeding by steps, which successively made him the chaplain of Queen Isabella, a prior of the Cathedral of Granada, and ultimately the official chronicler of the Indies. Very soon after his arrival in Spain, he had disclosed a quick eye for the changeful life about him, and he began in 1488 the writing of those letters which, to the number of over eight hundred, exist to attest his active interest in the events of his day. These events he continued to observe till 1525. We have no more vivid source of the contemporary history, particularly as it concerned the maritime enterprise of the peninsular peoples. He wrote fluently, and, as he tells us, sometimes while waiting for dinner, and necessarily with haste. He jotted down first and uncon- firmed reports, and let them stand. He got news by hearsay, and confounded events. He had candor and sincerity enough, however, not to prize his own works above their true value. He knew Columbus, and, his letters readily reflect what in- terest there was in the exploits of Columbus, immediately on his return from his first voyage ; but the earlier preparations of the navigator for that voyage, with the problematical char- acteristics of the undertaking, do not seem to have made any impression upon Peter Martyr, and it is not till May of 1493, when the discovery had been made, and later in September, that he chronicles the divulged existence of the newly discovered islands. The three letters in which this wonderful intelligence was first communicated are printed by Harrisse in English, in his Notes on Columbus. Las Casas tells us how Peter Martyr got his accounts of the first discoveries directly from the lips of Columbus himself and from those who accompanied him ; but he does not fail to tell us also of the dangers of too implicitly trusting to all that Peter says. From May 14, 1493, to June 5, 1497, in twelve separate letters, we read what this observer has to say of the great navigator who had suddenly and temporarily stepped into the glare of notice. These and other letters of BIOGRAPHERS. 35 Peter Martyr have not escaped some serious criticism. There are contradictions and anachronisms in them that have forcibly- helped Ranke, Hallam, Gerigk, and others to count the text which we have as more or less changed from what must have been the text, if honestly written by Martyr. They have im- agined that some editor, willful or careless, has thrown this luckless accompaniment upon them. The letters, however, claimed the confidence of Prescott, and have, as regards the parts touching the new discoveries, seldom failed to impress with their importance those who have used them. It is the opinion of the last examiner of them, J. H. Mariejol, in his Peter Martyr d , A?ighera (Paris, 1887), that to read them at- tentively is the best refutation of the skeptics. Martyr ceased to refer to the affairs of the New World after 1499, and those of his earlier letters which illustrate the early voyage have appeared in a French version, made by Gaffarel and Louvot (Paris, 1885). The representations of Columbus easily convinced Martyr that there opened a subject worthy of his pen, and he set about composing a special treatise on the discoveries in the New World, and, under the title of De Orbe Novo, it occupied his attention from October, 1494, to the day of his death. For the earlier years he had, if we may believe him, not a little help from Co- lumbus himself ; and it would seem from his one hundred and thirty-five .epistles that he was not altogether prepared to go with Columbus, in accounting the new islands as lying off the coast of Asia. He is particularly valuable to us in treating of Columbus's conflicts with the natives of Espanola, and Las Casas found him as helpful as we do. These Decades, as the treatise is usually called, formed en- larged bulletins, which, in several copies, were transmitted by him to some of his noble friends in Italy, to keep them conver- sant with the passing events. A certain Angelo Trivigiano, into whose hands a copy of some of the early sections fell, translated them into easy, not to say vulgar, Italian, and sent them to Venice, in four different copies, a few months after they were written ; and in this way the first seven books of the first decade fell into the hands of a Venetian printer, who, in April, 1504, brought out a little book of sixteen leaves in the dialect of that region, 36 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. known in bibliography as the Libretto de Tutta la Navigation de Re de Spagna de le Isole et Terreni novamente trovati. This publication is known to us in a single copy lacking a title, in the Biblioteca Marciana. Here we have the first ac- count of the new discoveries, written upon report, and supple- menting the narrative of Columbus himself. We also find in this little narrative some personal details about Columbus, not contained in the same portions when embodied in the larger De Orbe Novo of Martyr, and it may be a question if some- body who acted as editor to the Venetian version may not have added them to the translation. The story of the new discover- ies attracted enough notice to make Zorzi or Montalboddo — if one or the other were its editor — include this Venetian version of Martyr bodily in the collection of voyages which, as JPaesi novamente retrovati, was published at Vicentia somewhere about November, 1507. It is, perhaps, a measure of the interest felt in the undertakings of Columbus, not easily understood at this day, that it took fourteen years for a scant recital of such events to work themselves into the context of so composite a record of discovery as the Paesi proved to be ; and still more remarkable it may be accounted that the story could be told with but few actual references to the hero of the transactions, " Columbus, the Genoese." It is not only the compiler who is so reticent, but it is the author whence he borrowed what he had to say, Martyr himself, the observer and acquaintance of Columbus, who buries the discoverer under the event. With such an augury, it is not so strange that at about the same time in the little town of St. Die, in the Vosges, a sequestered teacher could suggest a name derived from that of a follower of Co- lumbus, Americus Vespucius, for that part of the new lands then brought into prominence. If the documentary proofs of Columbus's priority had given to the Admiral's name the same prominence which the event received, the result might not, in the end, have been so discouraging to justice. Martyr, unfortunately, with all his advantages, and with his access to the archives of the Indies, did not burden his recital with documents. He was even less observant of the lighter traits that interest those eager for news than might have been expected, for the busy chaplain was a gossip by nature : he liked to retail hearsays and rumors ; he enlivened his letters with BIOGRAPHERS. 37 personal characteristics ; but in speaking of Columbus he is singularly reticent upon all that might picture the man to us as he lived. When, in 1534, these portions of Martyr's Decades were com- bined with a summary of Oviedo, in a fresh publica- oviedo. tion, there were some curious personal details added to Ram" 310 - Martyr's narrative ; but as Ramusio is supposed to have edited the compilation, these particulars are usually accredited to that author. It is not known whence this Italian compiler could have got them, and there is no confirmation of them elsewhere to be found. If these additions, as is supposed, were a foreign graft upon Martyr's recitals, the staple of his narrative still re- mains not altogether free from some suspicions that, as a writer himself, he was not wholly frank and trustworthy. At least a certain confusion in his method leads some of the critics to dis- cover something like imposture in what they charge as a habit of antedating a letter so as to appear prophetic ; while his de- fenders find in these same evidences of incongruity a sign of spontaneity that argues freshness and sincerity. The confidence which we may readily place in what is said of Columbus in the chronicle of Ferdinand and Isa- bella, written by Andres Bernaldez, is prompted by his acquaintance with Columbus, and by his being the recipient of some of the navigator's own writings from his own hands. He is also known to have had access to what Chanca and other companions of Columbus had written. This country curate, who lived in the neighborhood of Seville, was also the chaplain of the Archbishop of Seville, a personal friend of the Admiral, and from him Bernaldez received some help. He does not add much, however, to what is given us by Peter Martyr, though in respect to the second voyage and to a few personal details Bernaldez is of some confirmatory value. The manuscript of his narrative remained imprinted in the royal library at Madrid till about thirty-five years ago ; but nearly all the leading writers have made use of it in copies which have been fur- nished. In coming to Oviedo, we encounter a chronicler who, as a writer, possesses an art far from skillful. Munoz laments that 38 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. his learning was not equal to his diligence. He finds him of little service for the times of Columbus, and largely because he was neglectful of documents and pursued uncritical combinations of tales and truths. With all his vaga- ries he is a helpful guide. " It is not," says Harrisse, " that Oviedo shows so much critical sagacity, as it is that he col- lates all the sources available to him, and gives the reader the clues to a final judgment." He is generally deemed honest, though Las Casas thought him otherwise. The author of the Histone looks upon him as an enemy of Columbus, and would make it appear that he listened to the tales of the Pinzons, who were enemies of the Admiral. His administrative services in the Indies show that he could be faithful to a trust, even at the risk of popularity. This gives a presumption in favor of his historic fairness. He was intelligent if not learned, and a power of happy judgments served him in good stead, even with a somewhat loose method of taking things as he heard them. He further inspires us with a certain amount of confi- dence, because he is not always a hero-worshiper, and he does not hesitate to tell a story, which seems to have been in circu- lation, to the effect that Columbus got his geographical ideas from an old pilot. Oviedo, however, refrains from setting the tale down as a fact, as some of the later writers, using little of Oviedo's caution, and borrowing from him, did. His opportu- nities of knowing the truth were certainly exceptional, though it does not appear that he ever had direct communication with the Admiral himself. He was but a lad of fifteen when we find him jotting down notes of what he saw and heard, as a page in attendance upon Don Juan, the son of the Spanish sovereigns, when, at Barcelona, he saw them receive Columbus after his first voyage. During five years, between 1497 and 1502, he was in Italy. With that exception he was living within the Span- ish court up to 1514, when he was sent to the New World, and passed there the greater part of his remaining life. While he had been at court in his earlier years, the sons of Columbus, Diego and Ferdinand, were his companions in the pages' ante- room, and he could hardly have failed to profit by their ac- quaintance. We know that from the younger son he did derive not a little information. When he went to America, some of Columbus's companions and followers were still living, BIOGRAPHERS. 39 — Pinzon, Ponce de Leon, and Diego Velasquez, — and all these could hardly have failed to help him in his note-taking. He also tells us that he sought some of the Italian compatriots of the Admiral, though Harrisse judges that what he got from them was not altogether trustworthy. Oviedo rose naturally in due time into the position of chronicler of the Indies, and tried his skill at first in a descriptive account of the New World. A command of Charles the Fifth, with all the facilities which such an order implied, though doubtless in some degree embar- rassed by many of the documentary proofs being preserved rather in Spain than in the Indies, finally set him to work on a Historia General de las Indlas, the opening portions of which, aud those covering the career of Columbus, were printed at Seville in 1535. It is the work of a consistent though not blinded admirer of the Discoverer, and while we might wish he had helped us to more of the proofs of his narrative, his recital is, on the whole, one to be signally grateful for. Gomara, in the early part of his history, mixed up what he took from Oviedo with what else came in his way, with an avid- ity that rejected little. But it is to a biography of Columbus, written by his youngest son, Ferdinand, as was universally believed up to Histories 1871, that all the historians of the Admiral have been ££3^ mainly indebted for the personal details and other Columbus - circumstances which lend vividness to his story. As the book has to-day a good many able defenders, notwithstanding the discredit which Harrisse has sought to place upon it, it is worth while to trace the devious paths of its transmission, and to meas- ure the burden of confidence placed upon it from the days of Ferdinand to our own. The rumor goes that some of the statements in the Psalter note of 1516, particularly one respecting the low origin of the Admiral, disturbed the pride of Ferdinand to such a degree that this son of Columbus undertook to leave behind him a detailed account of his father's career, such as the Admiral, though urged to do it, had never found time to write. Ferdinand was his youngest son, and was born only three or four years before his father left Palos. There are two dates given for his birth, each apparently on good authority, but these are a year apart. 40 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. The language of Columbus's will, as well as the explicit state- ments of Oviedo and Las Casas, leaves no reasonable ground for doubting his illegitimacy. Bastardy was no bar to heirship in Spain, if a testator chose to make a natural son his heir, as Columbus did, in giving Ferdinand the right to his titles after the failure of heirs to Diego, his legitimate son. Columbus's influence early found him a place as a page at court, and during the Admiral's fourth voyage, in 1502-1504, the boy accompa- nied his father, and once or twice at a later day he again visited the Indies. When Columbus died, this son inherited many of his papers ; but if his own avowal be believed, he had Career of | x ...,.„,,,.„. Ferdinand neglected occasions in his father s lifetime to question Columbus. i a -1 • l • i • itp i • i the Admiral respecting his early lite, not having, as he says, at that time learned to have interest in such matters. His subsequent education at court, however, implanted in his mind a good deal of the scholar's taste, and as a courtier in attendance upon Charles the Fifth he had seasons of travel, visiting pretty much every part of Western Europe, during which he had opportunities to pick up in many places a large collection of books. He often noted in them the place and date of purchase, so that it is not difficult to learn in this way some- thing of his wanderings. The income of Ferdinand was large, or the equivalent of what Harrisse calls to-day 180,000 francs, which was derived from territorial rights in San Domingo, coming to him from the Admiral, increased by slave labor in the mines, assigned to him by King Ferdinand, which at one time included the service of four hundred Indians, and enlarged by pensions bestowed by Charles the Fifth. It has been said sometimes that he was in orders ; but Har- risse, his chief biographer, could find no proof of it. Oviedo describes him in 1535 as a person of " much nobility of char- acter, of an affable turn and of a sweet conversation." When he died at Seville, July 12, 1539, he had amassed a Bibiioteca collection of books, variously estimated in contempo- coiombina. rar y accoim t s a t f r0 m twelve to twenty thousand vol- umes. Harrisse, in his Grandeur et Decadence de la Colom- bine (2d ed., Paris, 1885), represents Ferdinand as having searched from 1510 to 1537 all the principal book marts of Europe. He left these books by will to his minor nephew, Luis BIOGRAPHERS. 41 Colon, son of Diego, but there was a considerable delay before Luis renounced the legacy, with the conditions attached. Legal proceedings, which accompanied the transactions of its execu- tors, so delayed the consummation of the alternative injunction of the will that the chapter of the Cathedral of Seville, which was to receive the library in case Don Luis declined it, did not get possession of it till 1552. The care of it which ensued seems to have been of a varied nature. Forty years later a scholar bitterly complains that it was inaccessible. It is known that by royal command certain books and papers were given up to enrich the national archives, which, however, no longer contain them. When, in 1684, the monks awoke to a sense of their responsibility and had a new inventory of the books made, it was found that the collection had been reduced to four or five thousand volumes. After the librarian who then had charge of it died in 1709, the collection again fell into neglect. There- are sad stories of roistering children let loose in its halls to make havoc of its treasures. There was no responsible care again taken of it till a new librarian was chosen, in 1832, who discovered what any one might have learned before, that the money which Ferdinand left for the care and increase of the library had never been applied to it, and that the principal, even, had disappeared. Other means of increasing it were availed of, and the loss of the original inestimable bibliographical treasures was forgotten in the crowd of modern books which were placed upon its shelves. Amid all this new growth, it does not appear just how many of the books which descended from Ferdinand still remain in it. Something of the old carelessness — to give it no worse name — has despoiled it, even as late as 1884 and 1885, when large numbers of the priceless treasures still remaining found a way to the Quay Voltaire and other marts for old books in Paris, while others were disposed of in London, Amsterdam, and even in Spain. This outrage was promptly exposed by Harrisse in the Revue Critique, and in two mono- graphs, Grandeur et Decadence, etc., already named, and in his Colombine et Clement Marot (Paris, 1880) ; and the story has been further recapitulated in the accounts of Ferdinand and his library, which Harrisse has also given in his Excerpta Colom- bia na: Bibliographic de Quatre Cents Pieces Gothiques 42 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. Alraa tuum facro Tritonia pccTus oli'uo FudittZC inde fcatet nectanamoma fluunr, Xe fouet Aegidium qua: poffidet Aegida Paflas In formas tribuens vcrtcre faxa nouas* Aegidos in fflices vertebat corpora terror* Infolica ex faxis coaf icxs arte v i ros . E/r* .{iPr? ropo «Hji?v*f* ¥rywT9 m»4 fn fitajfafo SPECIMENS OF THE NOTES OF FERDINAND COLUMBUS ON HIS BOOKS. [From Harrisse'a Grandeur el Decadence de la Colombine (Paris, 1885).] BIOGRAPHERS. 43 Francaises, Italiennes et Latines du Commencement du XVI Siecle (Paris, 1887), an account of book rarities found in that library. We are fortunate, nevertheless, in having a manuscript cata- logue of it in Ferdinand's own hand, though not a complete one, for he died while he was making it. This library, as well as what we know of his writings and of the reputation which he bore among his contemporaries, many of whom speak of him and of his library with approbation, shows us that a habit, careless of inquiry in his boyhood, gave place in his riper years to study and respect for learning. He is said by the inscription on his tomb to have composed an extensive work on the New World and his father's finding of it, but it has disappeared. Neither in his library nor in his catalogue do we find any trace of the life of his father which he is credited with having pre- pared. None of his friends, some of them writers on the New World, make any mention of such a book. There is in the cat- alogue a note, however, of a life of Columbus written about 1525, of which the manuscript is credited to Ferdi- p erez( ie nand Perez de Oliva, a man of some repute, who died 0Uva ' in 1530. Whether this writing bore any significant relation to the life which is associated with the owner of the library is apparently beyond discovery. It can scarcely be supposed that it could have been written other than with Ferdinand's cognizance. That there was an account of the Admiral's career, quoted in Las Casas and attributed to Ferdinand Columbus, and that it existed before 1559, seems to be nearly certain. A manuscript of the end of the sixteenth century, by Gonzalo Argote de Molina, mentions a report that Ferdinand had written a life of his father. Harrisse tells us that he has seen a printed bo^k catalogue, apparently of the time of Munoz or Navarette, in which a Spanish life of Columbus by Ferdinand Columbus is entered ; but the fact stands without any explana- tion or verification. Spotorno, in 1823, in an introduction to his collection of documents about Columbus, says that the man- uscript of what has passed for Ferdinand's memoir of his father was taken from Spain to Genoa by Luis Colon, the Duke of Veragua, son of Diego and grandson of Christopher Columbus. It is not known that Luis ever had any personal relations with Ferdinand, who died while Luis was still in Santo Domingo. 44 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. It is said that it was in 1568 that Luis took the manuscript to Genoa, but in that year he is known to have been living else- where. He had been arrested in Spain in 1558 for having three wives, when he was exiled to Oran, in Africa, for ten years, and he died in 1572. Spotorno adds that the manu- script afterwards fell into the hands of a patrician, Marini, from whom Alfonzo de Ullua received it, and translated it into Italian. It is shown, however, that Marini was not living at this time. The original Spanish, if that was the tongue of the manuscript, then disappeared, and the world has only known it in this Italian Historic, published in 1571. Whether ofthcHwi. the copy brought to Italy had been in any way changed from its original condition, or whether the version then made public fairly represented it, there does not seem any way of determining to the satisfaction of everybody. At all events, the world thought it had got something of value and of authority, and in sundry editions and retranslations, with more or less editing and augmentation, it has passed down to our time — the last edition appearing in 1867 — unques- tioned for its service to the biographers of Columbus. Mufioz hardly knew what to make of some of " its unaccountable errors," and conjectured that the Italian version had been made from "a corrupt and false copy;" and coupling with it the " miserable " Spanish rendering in Barcia's Historiadores, Muiioz adds that " a number of falsities and absurdities is dis- cernible in both." Humboldt had indeed expressed wonder at the ignorance of the book in nautical matters, considering the reputation which Ferdinand held in such affairs. It began the Admiral's story in detail when he was said to be fifty-six years of age. It has never been clear to all minds that Ferdinand's asseveration of a youthful want of curiosity respecting the Admiral's early life was sufficient to account for so much reti- cence respecting that formative period. It has been, accord- ingly, sometimes suspected that a desire to ignore the family's early insignificance rather than ignorance had most to do with this absence of information. This seems to be Irving's infer- ence from the facts. In 1871, Henry Harrisse, who in 1866 had written of the Attacked by book, " It is generally accepted with some latitude," Harrisse. ma de the first assault on its integrity, in his Fer~ BIOGRAPHERS. 45 nando Colon, published in Seville, in Spanish, which was fol- lowed the next year by his Fernand Colomb, in the original French text as it had been written, and published at Paris. Harrisse's view was reenforced in the Additions to his Biblio- theca Americana Vetustissima, and he again reverted to the subject in the first volume of his ChtHstophe Colomb, in 1884. In the interim the entire text of Las Casas's Historia had been published for the first time, rendering a comparison of the two books more easy. Harrisse availed himself of this facility of examination, and made no abatement of his confident disbe- lief . That Las Casas borrowed from the Ilistorie, or rather that the two books had a common source, Harrisse thinks satisfac- torily shown. He further throws out the hint that this source, or prototype, may have been one of the lost essays of Ferdi- nand, in which he had followed the career of his father ; or in- deed, in some way, the account written by Oliva may have formed the basis of the book. He further implies that, in the transformation to the Italian edition of 1571, there were en- grafted upon the narrative many contradictions and anachron- isms, which seriously impair its value. Hence, as he contends, it is a shame to impose its authorship in that foreign shape upon Ferdinand. He also denies in the main the story of its transmission as told by Spotorno. So much of this book as is authentic, and may be found to be corroborated by other evidence, may very likely be due to the manuscript of Oliva, transported to Italy, and used as the work of Ferdinand Columbus, to give it larger interest than the name of Oliva would carry ; while, to gratify prejudices and increase its attractions, the various interpolations were made, which Harrisse thinks — and with much reason — could not have proceeded from one so near to Columbus, so well informed, and so kindly in disposition as we know his son Ferdinand to have been. So iconoclastic an outburst was sure to elicit vindicators of the world's faith as it had long been held. In counter publica- tions, Harrisse and D'Avezac, the latter an eminent French au- thority on questions of this period, fought out their battle, not without some sharpness. Henrv Stevens, an old an- TT . . . . , , . Defended by tagonist of Harrisse, assailed the new views with his Stevens and n -i • r\ others. accustomed confidence and rasping assertion. Oscar 46 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. Peschel, the German historian, and Count Circourt, the French student, gave their opposing opinions ; and the issue has been joined by others, particularly within a few years by Prospero Peragallo, the pastor of an Italian church in Lisbon, who has pressed defensive views with some force in his U Auten- ticitd delle Historic di Fernando Colombo (1884), and later in his Cristqforo Colombo et sua Famiglia (1888). It is held by some of these later advocates of the book that parts of the original Spanish text can be identified in Las Casas. The controversy has thus had two stages. The first was marked by the strenuousness of D'Avezac fifteen years ago. The sec- ond sprang from the renewed propositions of Harrisse in his Christophe Colomb, ten years later. Sundry critics have summed up the opposing arguments with more or less tendency to oppose the iconoclast, and chief among them are two Ger- man scholars : Professor Max Biidinger, in his Aden zur Co- lumbus' Geschichte (Wien, 1886), and his Zur Columbus Lit- eratur (Wien, 1889) ; and Professor Eugen Gelcich, in the Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft fur Mrdhunde zu Berlin (1887). Harrisse's views cannot be said to have conquered a position ; but his own scrutiny and that which he has engendered in others have done good work in keeping the Historie constantly subject to critical caution. Dr. Shea still says of it : " It is based on the same documents of Christopher Columbus which Las Casas used. It is a work of authority." Reference has already been made to the tardy publication of the narrative of Las Casas. Columbus had been dead Las Casas. , . . _ something over twenty years, when this good man set about the task of describing in this work what he had seen and heard respecting the New World, — or at least this is the gen- erally accredited interval, making him begin the work in 1527 ; and yet it is best to remember that Helps could not find any positive evidence of his being at work on the manuscript be- fore 1552. Las Casas did not live to finish the task, though he labored upon it down to 1561, when he was eighty-seven years old. He died five years later. Irving, who made great use of Las Casas, professed to consult him with that caution which he deemed necessary in respect to a writer given to prejudice and overheated zeal. For the period of Columbus's public life BIOGRAPHERS. 47 (1492-1506), no other one of his contemporaries gives us so much of documentary proof. Of the thirty-one papers, falling within this interval, which he transcribed into his pages nearly in their entirety, — throwing out some preserved in the archives of the Duke of Veragua, and others found at Simancas or Sev- ille, — there remain seventeen, that would be lost to us but for this faithful chronicler. How did he command this rich re source ? As a native of Seville, Las Casas had come there to be consecrated as bishop in 1544, and again in 1547, after he had quitted the New World forever. At this time the family papers of Columbus, then held for Luis Colon, a minor, were locked up in a strong box in the custody of the monks of the neighboring monastery of Las Cuevas. There is no evidence, however, that the chest was opened for the inspection of the chronicler. He also professes to use original letters sent by Columbus to Ferdinand and Isabella, which he must have found in the archives at Valladolid before 1545, or at Simancas after that date. Again he speaks of citing as in his own collection attested copies of some of Columbus's letters. In 1550, and during his later years, Las Casas lived in the monastery of San Gregorio, at Valladolid, leaving it only for visits to Toledo or Madrid, unless it was for briefer visits to Simancas, not far off. Some of the documents, which he might have found in that repository, are not at present in those archives. It was there that he might have found numerous let- ters which he cites, but which are not otherwise known. From the use Las Casas makes of them, it would seem that they were of more importance in showing the discontent and querulousness of Columbus than as adding to details of his career. Again it appears clear that Las Casas got documents in some way from the royal archives. We know the journal of Columbus on his first voyage only from the abridgment which Las Casas made of it, and much the same is true of the record of his third voyage. In some portion, at least, of his citations from the letters of Columbus, there may be reason to think that Las Casas took them at second hand, and Harrisse, with his belief in the deriv- ative character of the Historic of Ferdinand Columbus, very easily conjectures that this primal source may have been the manuscript upon which the compiler of the Historic was eoually 48 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. dependent. One kind of reasoning which Harrisse uses is this : If Las Casas had used the original Latin of the correspondence with Toscanelli, instead of the text of this supposed Spanish LAS CASAS. prototype, it would not appear in so bad a state as it does in Las Casas's book. If this missing prototype of the Historie was among Ferdi- nand's books in his library, which had been removed from his BIOGRAPHERS. 49 house in 1544 to the convent of San Pablo in Seville, and was not removed to the cathedral till 1552, it may also have hap- pened that along with it he used there the Dc Imagine Mundi of Pierre d'Ailly, Columbus's own copy of which was, and still is, preserved in the Biblioteca Colombina, and shows the Ad- miral's own manuscript annotations. It was in the chapel of San Pablo that Las Casas had beer consecrated as bishop in 1544, and his associations with the monks could have given easy access to what they held in cus- tody, — too easy, perhaps, if Harrisse's supposition is correct, that they let him take away the map which Toscanelli sent to Columbus, and which would account for its not being in the library now. We know, also, that Las Casas had use of the famous letter respecting his third voyage, which the Admiral ad- H isoppor- dressed to the nurse of the Infant Don Juan, and tumties - which was first laid before modern students when Spotorno printed it, in 1823. We further understand that the account of the fourth voyage, which students now call, in its Italian form, the Lettera Rarissima, was also at his disposal, as were many letters of Bartholomew, the brother of Columbus, though they apparently only elucidate the African voyage of Diaz. In addition to these manuscript sources, Las Casas shows that, as a student, he was familiar with and appreciated the decades of Peter Martyr, and had read the accounts of Colum- bus in Garcia de Resende, Barros, and Castaneda, — to say nothing of what he may have derived from the supposable pro- totype of the Historic. It is certain that his personal acquaint- ance brought him into relations with the Admiral himself, — for he accompanied him on his fourth voyage, — with the Admiral's brother, son, and son's wife ; and moreover his own father and uncle had sailed with Columbus. There were, among his other acquaintances, the Archbishop of Seville, Pinzon, and other of the contemporary navigators. It has been claimed by some, not accurately, we suspect, that Las Casas had also accom- panied Columbus on his third voyage. Notwithstanding all these opportunities of acquiring a thorough intimacy with the story of Columbus, it is contended by Harrisse that the aid af- forded by Las Casas disappoints one ; and that all essential data with which his narrative is supplied can be found else- 50 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. where, nearer the primal source. This condition arises, as he Character of thinks, from the fact that the one engrossing purpose his writings. Q £ j jas Q asas — his a i m t emancipate the Indians from a cruel domination — constantly stood in the way of a critical consideration of the other aspects of the early Spanish contact with the New World. It was while at the University of Sala- manca that the father of Las Casas gave the son an Indian slave, one of those whom Columbus had sent home ; and it was taken from the young student when Isabella decreed the undo- ing of Columbus's kidnapping exploits. It was this event which set Las Casas to thinking on the miseries of the poor natives, which Columbus had planned, and which enables us to discover, in the example of Las Casas, that the customs of the time are not altogether an unanswerable defense of the time's inhumanity and greed. As is well known, all but the most recent writers on Spanish- American history have been forced to use this work of Las Casas in manuscript copies, as a license to print such an expo- sure of Spanish cruelty could not be obtained till 1875, when the Historia was first printed at Madrid. Herrera, so far as his record concerns Columbus, simply gives us what he takes from Las Casas. He was born about the time that the older writer was probably making his investigations. Herrera did not publish his results, which are slavishly chronological in their method, till half a century later (1601-15). Though then the official historiographer of the Indies, with all the chances for close investigation which that situation afforded him, Herrera failed in all ways to make the record of his Historia that comprehensive and genuine source of the story of Columbus which the reader might naturally look for. The continued obscuration of Las Casas by reason of the long delay in printing his manuscript served to give Herrera, through many generations, a prominence as an authoritative source which he could not otherwise have had. Irving, when he worked at the subject, soon discovered that Las Casas stood behind the story as Herrera told it, and accordingly the Ameri- can writer resorted by preference to such a copy of the manu- script of Las Casas as he could get. There is a manifest tendency in Herrera to turn Las Casas's qualified statements into absolute ones. BIOGRAPHERS. 51 The personal contributions of the later writers, Munoz and Navarrete, have been already considered, in speaking Later Span . of the diversified mass of documentary proofs which lshwnters - accompany or gave rise to their narratives. The Colon en Espana of Tomas Rodriguez Pinilla (Madrid, 1884) is in effect a life of the Admiral ; but it ignores much of the recent critical and controversial literature, and deals mainly with the old established outline of events. Among the Germans there was nothing published of any im- portance till the critical studies of Forster, Peschel, German and Ruge, in recent days. De Bry had, indeed, by wnters - his translations of Benzoni (1594) and Herrera (1623), famil- iarized the Germans with the main facts of the career of Colum- bus. During the present century, Humboldt, in his JExamen Critique de VHistoire et de la Geographic (hi Nouveau Continent, has borrowed the language of France to show the scope of his critical and learned inquiries into the early history of the Spanish contact in America, and has left it to another hand to give a German rendering to his labors. With this work by Humboldt, brought out in its completer shape in 1836-39, and using most happily all that had been done by Mufioz and Navarrete to make clear both the acts and environments of the Admiral, the intelligence of our own time may indeed be said to have first clearly apprehended, under the light of a critical spirit, in which Irving was deficient, the true significance of the great deeds that gave America to Europe. Humboldt has strikingly grouped the lives of Toscanelli and Las Casas, from the birth of the Florentine physician in 1397 to the death of the Apostle to the Indians in 1566, as covering the beginning and end of the great discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is also to be remarked that this service of broadly, and at the same time critically, surveying the field was the work of a German writing in French ; while it is to an American citi- zen writing in French that we owe, in more recent years, such a minute collation and examination of every original source of information as set the labors of Henry Harrisse, for Henry thoroughness and discrimination, in advance of any Harnsse - critical labor that has ever before been p-iven to the career and 52 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. character of Christopher Columbus. Without the aid of his researches, as embodied in his Christophe Colomb (Paris, 1884), it would have been quite impossible for the present writer to have reached conclusions on a good many mooted points iu the history of the Admiral and of his reputation. Of almost equal usefulness have been the various subsidiary books and tracts which Harrisse has devoted to similar fields. Harrisse's books constitute a good example of the constant change of opinion and revision of the relations of facts which ai'e going on incessantly in the mind of a vigilant student in recondite fields of research. The progress of the correction of error respecting Columbus is illustrated continually in his se- ries of books on the great navigator, beginning with the Notes on Columbus (N. Y., 1866), which have been intermittently published by him during the last twenty-five years. Harrisse himself is a good deal addicted to hypotheses ; but they fare hard at his hands if advanced by others. The only other significant essays which have been made in French French have been a series of biographies of Colum- bus, emphasizing his missionary spirit, which have been aimed to prepare the way for the canonization of the Attempted great navigator, in recognition of his instrumentality SoSE ™ in carrying the cross to the New World. That, in bus- the spirit which characterized the age of discovery, the voyage of Columbus was, at least in profession, held to be one conducted primarily for that end does not, certainly, admit of dispute. Columbus himself, in his letter to Sanchez, speaks of the rejoicing of Christ at seeing the future redemption of souls. He made a first offering of the foreign gold by convert- ing a mass of it into a cup to hold the sacred host, and he spent a wordy enthusiasm in promises of a new crusade to wrest the Holy Sepulchre from the Moslems. Ferdinand and Isabella dwelt upon the propagandist spirit of the enterprise they had sanctioned, in their appeals to the Pontiff to confirm their worldly gain in its results. Ferdinand, the son of the Admiral, referring to the family name of Colombo, speaks of his father as like Noah's dove, carrying the olive branch and oil of bap- tism over the ocean. Professions, however, were easy ; faith is always exuberant under success, and the world, and even the Catholic world, learned, as the ages went on, to look upon the BIOGRAPHERS. 53 spirit that put the poor heathen beyond the pale of humanity as not particularly sanctifying a pioneer of devastation. It is the world's misfortune when a great opportunity loses any of its dignity ; and it is no great satisfaction to look upon a per- son of Columbus's environments and find him but a creature of questionable grace. So his canonization has not, with all the endeavors which have been made, been brought about. The /most conspicuous of the advocates of it, with a crowd R 0SeUyde of imitators about him, has been Antoine Francois Lor s ues - Felix Valalette, Comte Roselly de Lorgues, who began in 1844 ROSELLT DE LORGUES. to devote his energies to this end. He has published several books on Columbus, part of them biographical, and all of them, including his Christojih Colomh of 1864, mere disguised sup- plications to the Pope to order a deserved sanctification. As contributions to the historical study of the life of Columbus, they are of no importance whatever. Every act and saying of the Admiral capable of subserving the purpose in view are 54 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. simply made the salient points of a career assumed to be holy. Columbus was in fact of a piece, in this respect, with the age in which he lived. The official and officious religious profession of the time belonged to a period which invented the Inquisition and extirpated a race in order to send them to heaven. None knew this better than those, like Las Casas, who mated their faith with charity of act. Columbus and Las Casas had little in common. The Histoire JPosthume de Colomb, which Roselly de Lor- gues finally published in 1885, is recognized even by Catholic writers as a work of great violence and indiscretion, in its denunciations of all who fail to see the saintly character of Columbus. Its inordinate intemperance gave a great advan- tage to Cesareo Fernandez Duro in his examination of De Lor- gues's position, made in his Colon y la Historic, Postuma. Columbus was certainly a mundane verity. De Lorgues tells us that if we cannot believe in the supernatural we cannot understand this worldly man. The writers who have followed him, like Charles Buet in his Christophe Colomb (Paris, 1886), have taken this position. The Catholic body has so far summoned enough advocates of historic truth to pi-event the re- sult which these enthusiasts have kept in view, notwithstanding the seeming acquiescence of Pius IX. The most popular of the idealizing lives of Columbus is probably that by Auguste, Mar- quis de Belloy, which is tricked out with a display of engrav- ings as idealized as the text, and has been reproduced in Eng- lish at Philadelphia (1878, 1889). It is simply an ordinary rendering of the common and conventional stories of the last four centuries. The most eminent Catholic historical student of the United States, Dr. John Gilmary Shea, in a paper on this century's estimates of Columbus, in the American Catholic Quarterly Review (1887), while referring to the " imposing array of members of the hierarchy" who have urged the beat- ification of Columbus, added, " But calm official scrutiny of the question was required before permission could be given to introduce the cause ; " and this permission has not yet been given, and the evidence in its favor has not yet been officially produced. France has taken the lead in these movements for canoniza- tion, ostensibly for the reason that she needed to make some BIOGRAPHERS. 55 reparation for snatching the honor of naming the New World from Columbus, through the printing-presses of Saint Die and Strassburg. A sketch of the literature which has followed this movement is given in Baron van Brocken's Des Vicissitudes Posthumes de Christophe Colomb, et de sa Beatification Pos- sible (Leipzig et Paris, 1865). Of the writers in English, the labors of Hakluyt and Pur- chas only incidentally touched the career of Colum- Eng i ish bus ; and it was not till Stevens issued his garbled WTlters - version of Herrera in 1725, that the English public got the rec- ord of the Spanish historian, garnished with something that did not represent the original. This book of Stevens is responsible for not a little in English opinion respecting the Spanish age of discovery, which needs in these later days to be qualified. Some of the early collections of voyages, like those of Churchill, Pinkerton, and Kerr, included the story of the Historic of 1571. It was not till Robertson, in 1777, published the beginning of a contemplated History of America that the English reader had for the first time a scholarly and justified narrative, which indeed for a long time remained the ordinary source of the English view of Columbus. It was, however, but an outline sketch, not a sixth or seventh part in extent of what Irving, when he was considering the subject, thought necessary for a reasonable presentation of the subject. Robertson's foot- notes show that his main dependence for the story of Colum- bus was upon the pages of the Historic of 1571, Peter Mar- tyr, Oviedo, and Herrera. He was debarred the help to be derived from what we now use, as conveying Columbus's own record of his story. Lord Grantham, then the British ambas- sador at Madrid, did all the service he could, and his secretary of legation worked asssiduously in complying with the wishes which Robertson preferred ; but no solicitation could at that day render easily accessible the archives at Simancas. Still, Robertson got from one source or another more than it was pleasant to the Spanish authorities to see in print, and they later contrived to prevent a publication of his work in Spanish. The earliest considerable recounting of the story of Colum- bus in America was by Dr. Jeremy Belknap, who, Jeremy ha vino- delivered a commemorative discourse in Bos- Belkna P- 56 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. ton in 1792, before the Massachusetts Historical Society, after- ward augmented his text when it became a part of his well- known American Biography, a work of respectable standing for the time, but little remembered to-day. It was in 1827 that Washington Irving published his Life Washington °f Columbus, and he produced a book that has long Irving. remained for tbe English reader a standard biography Irving's canons of historical criticism were not, however, such as the fearless and discriminating student to-day would ap- prove. He commended Herrera for " the amiable and pardon- able error of softening excesses," as if a historian sat in a con- fessional to deal out exculpations. The learning which probes long established pretenses and grateful deceits was not accep- table to Irving. " There is a certain meddlesome spirit," he says, " which, in the garb of learned research, goes prying about the traces of history, casting down its monuments, and marring and mutilating its fairest trophies. Care should be taken to vindicate great names from such pernicious erudition." Under such conditions as Irving summoned, there was little chance that a world's exemplar would be pushed from his ped- estal, no matter what the evidence. The vera pro gratis in personal characterization must not assail the traditional hero. And such was Irving's notion of the upright intelligence of a historian. Mr. Alexander H. Everett, who was then the minister of the United States at Madrid, saw a chance of making a readable book out of the journal of Columbus as preserved by Las Casas, and recommended the task of translating it to Irving, then in Europe. This proposition carried the willing writer to Madrid, where he found comfortable quarters, with quick sympathy of intercourse, under the roof of a Boston scholar then living there, Obadiah Rich. The first two volumes of the documen- tary work of Navarrete coming out opportunely, Irving was not long in determining that, with its wealth of material, there was a better opportunity for a newly studied life of Columbus than for the proposed task. So Irving settled down in Madrid to the larger endeavor, and soon found that he could have other assistance and encouragement from Navarrete himself, from the Duke of Veragua, and from the then possessor of the papers of Muiioz. The subject grew under his hands. " I had no BIOGRAPHERS. 57 idea," he says, " of what a complete labyrinth I had entangled myself in." He regretted that the third volume of Navarrete's book was not far enough advanced to be serviceable ; but he worked as best he could, and found many more facilities than Robertson's helper had discovered. He went to the Biblioteca Colombina, and he even brought the annotations of Columbus in the copy of Pierre d'Ailly, there preserved, to the attention of its custodians for the first time ; almost feeling himself the discoverer of the book, though it was known to him that Las Casas, at least, had had the advantage of using these minutes of Columbus. Irving knew that his pains were not unavailing, at any rate, for the English reader. " I have woven into my book," he says, " many curious particulars not hitherto known concerning Columbus ; and I think I have thrown light upon some points of his character which have not been brought out by his former biographers." One of the things that pleased the new biographer most was his discovery, as he felt, in the account by Bernaldez, that Columbus was born ten years earlier than had been usually reckoned ; and he supposed that this increase of the age of the discoverer at the time of his voyage added much gTeater force to the characteristics of his career. Irving's book readily made a mark. Jeffrey thought that its fame would be enduring, and at a time when no one looked for new light from Italy, he considered that Irving had done best in working, almost exclusively, the Spanish field, where alone " it was obvious " material could be found. When Alexander H. Everett, pardonably, as a godfather to the work, undertook in January, 1829, to say in the North American Review that Irving's book was a delight of readers, he anticipated the judgment of posterity; but when he added that it was, by its perfection, the despair of critics, he was for- getful of a method of critical research that is not prone to be dazed hy the prestige of demigods. In the interval between the first and second editions of the book, Irving paid a visit to Palos and the convent of La Ra- bida, and he got elsewhere some new light in the papers of the lawsuit of Columbus's heirs. The new edition which soon fol- lowed profited by all these circumstances. Irving's occupation of the field rendered it both easy and gracious for Prescott, when, ten years later (1837), he published 58 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. his Ferdinand and Isabella, to say that his predecessor had stripped the story of Columbus of the charm of novel- Prescott. ii ■ • ty ; but he was not quite sure, however, in the privacy of his correspondence, that Irving, by attempting to continue the course of Columbus's life in detail after the striking crisis of the discovery, had made so imposing a drama as he would have done by condensing the story of his later years. In this Pres- cott shared something of the spirit of Irving, in composing his- tory to be read as a pastime, rather than as a study of com- pleted truth. Prescott's own treatment of the subject is scant, as he confined his detailed record to the actions incident to the inception and perfection of the enterprise of the Admiral, to the doings in Spain or at court. He was, at the same time, far more independent than Irving had been, in his views of the individual character round which so much revolves, and the reader is not wholly blinded to the unwholesome deceit and overweening selfishness of Columbus. Within twenty years Arthur Helps approached the subject Arthur from the point of view of one who was determined, as Helps ' he thought no one of the writers on the subject of the Spanish Conquest had been, to trace the origin of, and respon- sibility for, the devastating methods of Spanish colonial gov- ernment ; " not conquest only, but the result of conquest, the mode of colonial government which ultimately prevailed, the ex- tirpation of native races, the introduction of other races, the growth of slavery, and the settlement of the encomiendas, on which all Indian society depended." It is not to Helps, there- fore, that we are to look for any extended biography of Colum- bus ; and when he finds him in chains, sent back to Spain, he says of the prisoner, " He did not know how many wretched beings would have to traverse those seas, in bonds much worse than his ; nor did he foresee, I trust, that some of his doings would further all this coming misery." It does not appear from his footnotes that Helps depended upon other than the obvious authorities, though he says that he examined the Munoz col- lection, then as now in the Royal Academy of History at Ma- drid. The last scholarly summary of Columbus's career previous to „ „ », the views incident to the criticism of Harrisse on the R. H. Major. Hintorie of 1571 was that which was given by R. H. BIOGRAPHERS. 59 Major, in the second edition of his Select Letters of Columbus (London, 1870). There have been two treatments of the subject by Americans within the last twenty years, which are characteristic. The Life and Achievements of the So-called Christopher Colum- bus (New York, 1874), by Aaron Goodrich, mixes Aaron Good . that unreasoning trust and querulous conceit which is nch- so often thrown into the scale when the merits of the discover- ers of the alleged Vinland are contrasted with those of the imagined Indies. With a craze of petulancy, he is not able to see anything that cannot be twisted into defamation, and his book is as absurdly constant in derogation as the hallucinations of De Lorgues are in the other direction. When Hubert Howe Bancroft opened the story of his Pacific States in his History of Central America (San Fran- H H Ban . cisco, 1882), he rehearsed the story of Columbus, but croft " did not attempt to follow it critically ?xcept as he tracked the Admiral along the coasts of Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. This writer's estimate of the character of Columbus con- veys a representation of what the Admiral really was, juster than national pride, religious sympathy, or kindly adulation has usually permitted. It is unfortunately, not altogether chaste in its literary presentation. His characterization of Irving and Prescott in their endeavors to draw the character of Columbus has more merit in its insight than skill in its drafting. The brief sketch of the career of Columbus, and the exami- nation of the events that culminated in his maritime risks and developments, as it was included in the Narrative and Critical History of America (vol. ii., Boston, 1885), gave the present writer an opportunity to study the sources and trace the bibliographical threads that run through an ex- tended and diversified literature, in a way, it may be, not earlier presented to the English reader. If any one desires to compass all the elucidations and guides which a thorough student of the career and fame of Columbus raphy of Co- would wish to consider, the apparatus thus referred to, and the footnotes in Harrisse's Christophe Colomb and in his other germane publications, would probably most essentially shorten his labors. Harrisse, who has prepared, but not yet 60 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. published, lists of the books devoted to Columbus exclusively, says that they number about six hundred titles. The literature which treats of him incidentally is of a vast extent. In concluding this summary of the commentaries upon the life of Columbus, the thought comes back that his mates of career has been singularly subject to the gauging of opinionated chroniclers. The figure of the man, as he lives to-day in the mind of the general reader, in whatever coun- try, comports in the main with the characterizations of Irving, De Lorgues, or Goodrich. These last two have entered upon their works with a determined purpose, the Frenchman of making a saint, and the American a scamp, of the great discoverer of America. They each, in their twists, pervert and emphasize every trait and every incident to favor their views. Their nar- ratives are each without any background of that mixture of in- congruity, inconsistency, and fatality from which no human be- ing is wholly free. Their books are absolutely worthless as historical records. That of Goodrich has probably done little to make proselytes. That of De Lorgues has infected a large body of tributary devotees of the Catholic Church. The work of Irving is much above any such level ; but it has done more harm because its charms are insidious. He recog- nized at least that human life is composite ; but he had as much of a predetermination as they, and his purpose was to create a hero. He glorified what was heroic, palliated what was un- heroic, and minimized the doubtful aspects of Columbus's char- acter. His book is, therefore, dangerously seductive to the popular sense. The genuine Columbus evaporates under the warmth of the writer's genius,- and we have nothing left but a refinement of his clay. The Life of Columbus was a sudden product of success, and it has kept its hold on the public very constantly ; but it has lost ground in these later years among scholarly inquirers. They have, by their collation of its narra- tive with the original sources, discovered its flaccid character. They have outgrown the witcheries of its graceful style. They have learned to put at their value the repetitionary changes of stock sentiment, which swell the body of the text, sometimes, provokingly. PORTRAITISTS. 61 Out of the variety of testimony respecting the person of the adult Columbus, it is not easy to draw a picture that p 0I . traitsof his contemporaries would surely recognize. Likeness Columbus - we have none that can be proved beyond a question the result of any sitting, or even of any acquaintance. If we were called upon to picture him as he stood on San Salvador, we might fig- ure a man of impressive stature with lofty, not to say Co i umbu8 ' S austere, bearing, his face longer by something more person - than its breadth, his cheek bones high, his nose aquiline, his eyes a light gray, his complexion fair with freckles spotting a ruddy glow, his hair once light, but then turned to gray. His favorite garb seems to have been the frock of a Franciscan monk. Such a figure would not conflict with the descriptions which those who knew him, and those who had questioned his associates, have transmitted to us, as we read them in the pages ascribed to Ferdinand, his son ; in those of the Spanish his- torian, Oviedo ; of the priest Las Casas ; and in the later re- citals of Gomara and Benzoni, and of the official chronicler of the Spanish Indies, Antonio Herrera. The oldest description of all is one made in 1501, in the unauthorized version of the first decade of Peter Martyr, emanating, very likely, from the translator Trivigiano, who had then recently come in contact with Columbus. Turning from these descriptions to the pictures that have been put forth as likenesses, we find not a little difficulty in reconciling the two. There is nothing that unmistakably goes back to the lifetime of Columbus except the figure of St. Christopher, which makes a vignette in colors on the . (.La Cosa's mappemonde, which was drawn in 1500, by one of st. christo- Columbus's pilots, Juan de la Cosa, and is now pre- served in Madrid. It has been fondly claimed that Cosa trans- ferred the features of his master to the lineaments of the saint ; but the assertion is wholly without proof. Paolo Giovio, or, as better known in the Latin form, Paulas Jovius, was old enough in 1492 to have, in later life, Jovius > s ga i_ remembered the thrill of expectation which ran for lery ' the moment through parts of Europe, when the letter of Co- lumbus describing his voyage was published in Italy, where Jovius was then a schoolboy. He was but an infant, or per- haps not born when Columbus left Italy. So the interest of 62 CHRIS TOPHER COL UMB US. ST. CHRISTOPHER. [The vignette of La Cosa's mao.l PORTRAITISTS. 63 Jovius in the Discoverer could hardly have arisen from any other associations than those easily suggestive to one who, like Jovius, was a student of his own times. Columbus had been dead ten years when Jovius, as a historian, attracted the notice of Pope Leo X., and entered upon such a career of prosperity JOVIUS'S COLUMBUS, THE EARLIEST ENGRAVED LIKENESS. that he could build a villa on Lake Como, and adorn it with a gallery of portraits of those who had made his age famous. That he included a likeness of Columbus among his heroes there seems to be no doubt. Whether the likeness was painted from life, and by whom, or modeled after an ideal, more or less accordant with the reports of those who may have known the Genoese, is entirely beyond our knowledge. As a historian 64 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. Jovius professed the right to distort the truth for any purpose that suited him, and his conceptions of the truth of portraiture may quite as well have been equally loose. Just a year before his own death, Jovius gave a sketch of Columbus's career in his Elogia Virorum IUustrium, published at Florence in 1551 ; but it was not till twenty-four years later, in 1575, that a new edition of the book gave wood-cuts of the portraits in the gal- lery of the Como villa, to illustrate the sketches, and that of Columbus appeared among them. This engi*aving, then, is the oldest likeness of Columbus presenting any claims to considera- tion. It found place also, within a year or two, in what pur. ported to be a collection of portraits from the Jovian gallery ; and the engraver of them was Tobias Stimmer, a Swiss designer, who stands in the biographical dictionaries of artists as born in 1534, and of course could not have assisted his skill by any knowledge of Columbus, on his own part. This picture, to which a large part of the very various likenesses called those of Columbus can be traced, is done in the bold, easy handling common in the wood-cuts of that day, and with a precision of skill that might well make one believe that it preserves a dash- ing verisimilitude to the original picture. It represents a full- face, shaven, curly-haired man, with a thoughtful and somewhat sad countenance, his hands gathering about the waist a priest's robe, of which the hood has fallen about his neck. If there is any picture to be judged authentic, this is best entitled to that estimation. Connection with the Como gallery is held to be so significant of the authenticity of any portrait of Columbus that it is claimed for two other pictures, which are near enough alike to have fol- lowed the same prototype, and which are not, except in garb, very unlike the Jovian wood-cut. As copies of the Como origi- nal in features, they may easily have varied in apparel. One of these is a picture preserved in the gallery at Florence, — a well-moulded, intellectual head, full-faced, above a closely but- toned tunic, or frock, seen within drapery that falls off the The Fior- shoulders. It is ii ot claimed to be the Como portrait, encepictnre. ^ J t ma y jj ave \- )een p am £ et l f rom it, perhaps by Christofano dell' Altissimo, some time before 1568. A copy of it was made for Thomas Jefferson, which, having hung for a while at Monticello, came at last to Boston, and passed into the gallery of the Massachusetts Historical Society. PORTRAITISTS. 65 The picture resembling this, and which may have had equal claims of association with the Jovian gallery, is one now pre- THE FLORENCE COLUMBUS. _ved in Madrid, and the oldest canvas representing Columbus that is known in Spain. It takes the name of the Yanez por- ser 66 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. trait from that of the owner of it, from whom it was bought in TheYanez Granada, in 1763. Representing, when brought to picture. notice, a garment trimmed with fur, there has been disclosed upon it, and underlying this later paint, an original, THE YANEZ close-fitting tunic, much like the Florence picture ; while a fur- ther removal of the superposed pigment has revealed an inscrip- tion, supposed to authenticate it as Columbus, the discoverer of the New World. It is said that the Duke of Veragua holds it to be the most authentic likeness of his ancestor. Another conspicuous porti'ait is that given by De Bry in the DeBry's larger series of his Collection of Early Voyages. De picture. g r y c i a j ms that it was painted by order of King Ferdinand, and that it was purloined from the offices of the Council of the Indies in Spain, and brought to the Netherlands, and in this way fell into the hands of that engraver and editor. It bears little resemblance to the pictures already mentioned •, nor does it appear to conform to the descriptions of Columbus's PORTRAITISTS. 67 person. It has a more rugged and shorter face, with a profu- sion of closely waved hair falling beneath an ugly, angular cap. De Bry engraved it, or rather published it, in 1595, twenty COLUMBUS. [A reproduction of the so-called Capriolo cut given in Giuseppe Banchero's La Taitola di Bronzo, (Genoa, 1857), and based on the Jovian type.] years after the Jovian wood-cut appeared, and eleven years after Thevet had given one. No one of the generation that was old enough to have known the navigator could then have survived, 68 CHRIS TOP HER COL UMB US. and the picture has no other voucher than the professions of the engraver of it. These are but a few of the many pictures that have been other por- made to pass, first and last, for Columbus, and the traits. only ones meriting serious study for their claims. The American public was long taught to regard the effigy of Co- lumbus as that of a bedizened courtier, because Prescott se- DE BRY'S COLUMBUS. lected for an engraving to adorn his Ferdinand and Isabella a picture of such a person, which is ascribed to Parmigiano, and is preserved in the Museo Borbonico, at Naples. Its claims long ago ceased to be considered. The traveler in Cuba sees in the Cathedral at Havana, 'a monumental effigy, of which there is no evidence of authenticity worthy of consideration. The traveler in Italy can see in Genoa, placed on the cabinet which was made to hold the manuscript titles Havana monument PORTRAITISTS. >;-enealo<>ical information as can be acquired of this earliest Peresti*ello is against the sup- position of his being the father of Felipa Moniz, but rather indicates that by a second wife, Isabel Moniz by name, he had the second Bartolomet), who in turn became the father of our Felipa Moniz. The testimony of Las Casas seems to favor this view. If this is the Bartolomeo who, having attained his ma- jority, was assigned to the captaincy of Porto Santo in 1473, it could hardly be that a daughter would have been old enough to marry in 1474-75. 106 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. The first Bartolomeo, if he was the father-in-law of Colum. bus, seems to have died in 1457, and was succeeded in 1458, in command of the island of Porto Santo, by another son-in-law, Pedro Correa da Cunha, who married a daughter of his first marriage, — or at least that is one version of this genealogical complication, — and who was later succeeded in 1473 by the second Bartolomeo. The Count Bernardo Pallastrelli, a modern member of the family, has of late years, in his H Suocero e la Moglie di Cris- tqforo Colombo (2d ed., Piacenza, 1876), attempted to identify the kindred of the wife of Columbus. He has examined the views of Harrisse, who is on the whole inclined to believe that the wife of Columbus was a daughter of one Vasco Gill Moniz, whose sister had married the Perestrello of the Ilistorie story. The successive wills of Diego Columbus, it mav be observed, call her in one (1509) Philippa Moniz, and in the other (1523) Philippa Muniz, without the addition of Perestrello. The gen- ealogical table of the count's monograph, on the other hand, makes Felipa to be the child of Isabella Moniz, who was the second wife of Bartolomeo Pallastrelli, the son of Felipo, who came to Portugal some time after 1371, from Plaisance, in Italy. Bartolomeo had been one of the household of Prince Heniy, and had been charged by him with founding a colony at Porto Santo, in 1425, over which island he was long afterward (1446) made governor. We must leave it as a question involved in much doubt. The issue of this marriage was one son, Diego, but there is no distinct evidence as to the date of his birth. Sun- Columbus's n i i • li son Diego dry incidents go to show that it was somewhere be- born. tween 1475 and 1479. Columbus's marriage to Dona Felipa had probably taken place at Lisbon, and not before 1474 at the earliest, a date not difficult to reconcile with the year (1473-74) now held to be that of his arrival in Portu- gal. It is supposed that it was while Columbus was living at Porto Santo, where his wife had some property, that Diego was born, though Harrisse doubts if anv evidence cau be adduced to support such a statement beyond a sort of conjecture on Las Casas's part, derived from something he thought he remem- bered Diego to have told him. The story of Columbus's marriage, as given in the Historie COLUMBUS IN PORTUGAL. 107 and followed by Oviedo, couples with it the belief that it was among the papers of his dead father-in-law, Perestrel- p erestr eiio'8 lo, that Columbus found documents and maps which MSS- prompted him to the conception of a western passage to Asia. In that case, this may perhaps have been the motive which in- duced him to draw from Paolo Toscanelli that famous letter, which is usually held to have had an important influence on the mind of Columbus. The fact of such relationship of Columbus with Perestrello is called in question, and so is another incident often st of a related by the biographers of Columbus. This is that ufcoium" g an old seaman who had returned from an adventur- bus ' shouse - ous voyage westward had found shelter in the house of Colum- bus, and had died there, but not before he had disclosed to him a discovery he had made of land to the west. This story is not told in any writer that is now known before Gomara (1552), and we are warned by Benzoni that in Gomara's hands this pilot story was simply an invention " to diminish the immortal fame of Christopher Columbus, as there were many who could not endure that a foreigner and Italian should have acquired so much honor and so much glory, not only for the Spanish kingdom, but also for the other nations of the world." It is certain, however, that under the impulse of the young art of printing men's minds had at this time become more alive than they had been for centuries to the search for cosmograph- ical views. The old geographers, just at this time, were one by one finding their way into print, mainly in Italy, while the in- tercourse of that country with Portugal was quickened by the attractions of the Portuguese discoveries. While Columbus was still in Italy, the great popularity of Pomponius Mela began with the first edition in Latin, which was printed at Milan in 1471, followed soon by other editions in Meia, Venice. The De Situ Orbis of Strabo had already been given to the world in Latin as early as 1469, and during the next few years this text was several times reprinted at Rome and Venice. The teaching of the sphericity of the earth in the astronomical poem of Manilius, long a favorite with the monks of the Middle Ages, who repeated it in soimus, ' j.1 • 1 i i -i • T4.T Ptolemy. their labored script, appeared in type at .Nuremberg at the same time. The Polyhistor of Solinus did not long delay 108 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. to follow. A Latin version of Ptolemy had existed since 1409, but it was later than the rest in appearing in print, and bears the date of 1475. These were the newer issues of the Italian and German presses, which were attracting the notice of the learned in this country of the new activities when Columbus came among them, and they were having their palpable effect. Just when we know not, but some time earlier than this, Al- Toscaneiu's fo nso V- of Portugal had sought, through the medium theory. Q £ tne monk Fernando Martinez (Fernam Martins), to know precisely what was meant by the bruit of Toscanelli's theory of a westward way to India. To an inquiry thus vouched Toscanelli had replied to Fernando Martinez (June 25, 1474), some time before a similar inquiry addressed to Toscanelli reached Florence, from Columbus himself, and through the agency of an aged Florentine merchant settled in Lisbon. It seems probable that no knowledge of Martinez's correspon- dence with Toscanelli had come to the notice of Columbus ; and that the message which the Genoese sent to the Florentine was due simply to the same current rumors of Toscanelli's views which had attracted the attention of the king. So in replying His letter to *° Columbus Toscanelli simply shortened his task by Columbus. inclosing, with a brief introduction, a copy of the let- ter, which he says he had sent " some days before " to Mar- tinez. This letter outlined a plan of western discovery ; but it is difficult to establish beyond doubt the exact position which the letter of Toscanelli should hold in the growth of Colum- bus's views. If Columbus reached Portugal as late as 1473—74, as seems likely, it is rendered less certain that Columbus had grasped his idea anterior to the spread of Toscanelli's theory. In any event, the letter of the Florentine physician would strengthen the growing notions of the Genoese. As Toscanelli was at this time a man of seventy-seven, and as a belief in the sphericity of the earth was then not unpreva- lent, and as the theory of a westward way to the East was a necessary concomitant of such views in the minds of thinking men, it can hardly be denied that the latent faith in a westward passage only needed a vigilant mind to develop the theory, and an adventurous spirit to prove its correctness. The develop- ment had been found in Toscanelli and the proof was waiting for Columbus, — both Italians ; but Humboldt points out how COLUMBUS IN PORTUGAL. 109 the Florentine very likely thought he was communicating with a Portuguese, when he wrote to Columbus. This letter has been known since 1571 in the Italian text as given in the Historie, which, as it turns out, was inexact and overladen with additions. At least such is the inference when we compare this Italian text with a Latin text, supposed to be the original tongue of the letter, which has been discovered of late years in the handwriting of Columbus himself, on the fly- leaf of an iEneas Sylvius (1477), once belonging to Columbus, and still preserved in the Biblioteca Colombina at Seville. The letter which is given in the Historie is accompanied by an antescript, which says that the copy had been sent to Colum- bus at his request, and that it had been originally addressed to Martinez, some time " before the wars of Castile." How much later than the date June 25, 1474, this copy was sent to Colum- bus, and when it was received by him, there is no sure means of determining, and it may yet be in itself one of the factors for limiting the range of months during which Columbus must have arrived in Portugal. The extravagances of the letter of Toscanelli, in his opulent descriptions of a marvelous Asiatic region, were safelv made in that age without incurring" the charge visions of frl a "Fief of credulity. Travelers could tell tales then that were as secure from detection as the revealed arcana of the Zufii have been in our own days. Two hundred towns, whose marble bridges spanned a single river, and whose commerce could in- cite the cupidity of the world, was a tale easily to stir numer- ous circles of listeners in the maritime towns of the Mediterra- nean, wherever wandering mongers of marvels came and went. There were such travelers whose recitals Toscanelli had read, and others whose tales he had heard from their own lips, and these last were pretty sure to augment the wonders of the elder talebearers. Columbus had felt this influence with the rest, and the tales lost nothing of their vividness in coming to him freshened, as it were, by the curious mind of the Florentine physician. The map which accompanied Toscanelli's letter, and which depicted his notions of the Asiatic coast lying over against that of Spain, is lost to us, but various attempts have been made to restore it, as is done in the sketch annexed. It will be a precious COLUMBUS IN PORTUGAL. Ill memorial, if ever recovered, worthy of study as a reflex, in more concise representation than is found in the text of the letter, of the ideas which one of the most learned cosmographers of his day had imbibed from mingled demonstrations of science and imagination. It is said that in our own day, in the first stages of a belief in the practicability of an Atlantic telegraphic cable, The passage it was seriously claimed that the vast stretch of its ex- westward - tension could be broken by a halfway station on Jacquet Island, one of those relics of the Middle Ages, which has disappeared from our ocean charts only in recent years. Just in the same way all the beliefs which men had had in the island of Antillia, and in the existence of many . . . l-f-ii i • p Antillia. another visionary bit of land, came to the assistance or these theoretical discoverers in planning the chances of a des- perate voyage far out into a sea of gorgons and chimeras dire. Toscanelli's map sought to direct the course of any one who dared to make the passage, in a way that, in case of disaster to his ships, a secure harbor could be found in Antillia, and in such other havens as no lack of islands would supply. Ferdinand claimed to have found in his father's papers some statements which he had drawn from Aristotle of Carthaginian voyages to Antillia, on the strength of which the Portuguese had laid that island down in their charts in the latitude of Lis- bon, as one occupied by their people in 714, when Spain was conquered by the Moors. Even so recently as the time of Prince Henry it had been visited by Portuguese ships, if records were to be believed. It also stands in the Bianco map of 1436. There are few more curious investigations than those which concern these fantastic and fabulous islands of the Sea of Darkness. They are connected with views which islands of . , . . - , , . 1 the Atlantic. were an inheritance in part from the classic times, with involved notions of the abodes of the blessed and of demoniacal spirits. In part they were the aerial creation of popular mythol- ogies, going back to a remoteness of which it is impossible to trace the beginning, and which got a variable color from the popular fancies of succeeding generations. The whole subject is curiously without the field of geography, though entering into all surveys of mediaeval knowledge of the earth, and depending very largely for its elucidation on the maps of the fourteenth 112 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. and fifteenth centuries, whose mythical traces are not beyond recognition in some of the best maps which have instructed a generation still living. To place the island of the Irish St. Brandan — whose coming st. Bran- there with his monks is spoken of as taking place in \*\)L\^\xr$ |zo t'vl M "?3 |z^ zof I 9||Q \o\z finally took in the cause of Columbus may have with Deza. i iac j ^ s beginning; but the extent of our positive knowledge regarding the meeting is the deposition of Rodri- guez de Maldonado, who simply says that several learned men and mariners, hearing the arguments of Columbus, decided they could not be true, or at least a majority so decided, and that this testimony against Columbus had no effect to convince him of his errors. This is all that the " Junta of Salamanca " meant. A minority of unknown size favored the advocate. When the spring of 1487 came, and the court departed to Cordoba, and bea,an to make preparations for the 1487. The . \ V f court at campaign against Malaga, there was no hope that the considerations which had begun in the learned ses- sions at Salamanca would be followed up. Columbus seems to have journeyed after the Court in its migrations : sometimes lured by pittances doled out to him by the royal Malaga sur- . . . . „ renders, treasurer ; sometimes getting pecuniary assistance from his new friend, Diego de Deza ; selling now and then a map that he had made, it may be ; and accepting hospitality COLUMBUS LEAVES PORTUGAL FOR SPAIN. 165 where he could get it, from such as Alonso de Quintanilla. In these wandering days, he was for a while, at least, in attendance on the Court, then surrounded with military parade, before the SPAIN, 1482. [From the Ptolemy of 1482.] Moorish stronghold at Malaga. The town surrendered on Au- gust 18, 1487, and the Court then returned to Cordoba. 16G CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. It was in the autumn of 1487, at Cordoba, that Columbus fell into such an intimacy as spousehoocl only can sanc- 1487. Inti- . p* 7 , 1 ,.. i-i, macy of Co- tion with a person or good condition as to birth, but lurubus with . - ... . Beatrix poor in the world s goods. W nether this relation had the sanction of the Church or not has been a subject of much inquiry and opinion. The class of French writers, who are aiming to secure the canonization of Columbus, have found it essential to clear the moral character of Columbus from every taint, and they confidently assert, and doubtless think they show, that nothing but conjugal right is manifest in this con- nection, — a question which the Church will in due time have to decide, if it ever brings itself to the recognition of the saintly character of the great discoverer. Even the ardent supporters of the cause of beatification are forced to admit that there is no record of such a marriage. No contemporary recognition of such a relation is evinced by any family ceremonies of baptism or the like, and there is no mention of a wife in all the transac- tions of the crowning endeavors of his life. As viceroy, at a later day, he constantly appears with no attendant vice-queen. She is absolutely out of sight until Columbus makes a signifi- cant reference to her in his last will, when he recommends this Beatrix Enriquez to his lawful son Diego ; saying that she is a person to whom the testator had been under great obligations, and that his conscience is burdened respecting her, for a rea- son which he does not then think fitting to exjjlain. This testa- mentary behest and acknowledgment, in connection with other manifestations, and the absence of proof to the contrary, has caused the belief to be general among his biographers, early and late, that the fruit of this intimacy, Ferdinand Columbus, was an illegitimate offspring. He was born, as near Ferdinand i- in the promise which Pinzon now made to bear the expenses of a renewed suit to Ferdinand and Isabella. A conclusion to the deliberation of this little circle in the convent was soon reached. Columbus threw his cause into the hands of his friends, and agreed to rest quietly in the convent while they pressed his claims. Perez wrote a letter of supplica- tion to the Queen, and it was dispatched by a respectable navi- gator of the neighborhood, Sebastian Rodriguez. He and R 0dri - found the Queen in the city of Santa Fe, which had & B Fense in fitting out vessels to sail on this enterprise, and receive an eighth part of the profits. These capitulations were followed on the 30th of April by a commission which the sovereigns signed at Granada, 1492. April b & . '30. Colum- in which it was further granted that the Admiral and allowed to use the pre- his heirs should use the prefix Don. fix Don. It is supposed he now gave some heed to his domestic con- cerns. We know nothing, however, of any provision for the lonely Beatrix, but it is said that he placed his boy Ferdinand, then but four years of age, at school in Cordoba near , . Arranges his his mother. He left his lawful son, Diego, well pro- domestic . ° _ x affairs. vided for through an appointment by the Queen, on May 8, which made him page to Prince Juan, the heir apparent. Columbus himself tells us that he then left Granada on the 12th of May, 1492, and went direct to Palos ; stop- J ' ' , r 1492. May. ping, however, on the way at Rabida, to exchange con- Reaches gratulations with its friar, Juan Perez, if indeed he did not lodge at the convent during his stay in the seaport. 182 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. Palos to-day consists of a double street of lowly, whitened Palos houses, in a depression among the hills. The guides described. point out the ruins of a larger house, which was the home of the Pinzons. The Moorish mosque, converted into St. George's church in Columbus's day, still stands on the hill, just outside the village, with an image of St. George and the dragon over its high altar, just as Columbus saw it, while above the church are existing ruins of an old Moorish castle. The story which Las Casas has told of the fitting but of the ships fitted vessels does not agree in some leading particulars with that which Navarrete holds to be more safely drawn from the documents which he has published. The fact seems to be that two of the vessels of Columbus were not constructed by the Duke of Medina-Sidonia, and later bought by the Queen, as Las Casas says ; but, it happening that the town of Palos, in consequence of some offense to the royal dignity, had been mulcted in the service of two armed caravels for twelve months, the opportunity was now taken by royal order, dated April 30, 1492, of assigning this service of crews and vessels to Colum- bus's fateful expedition. The royal command had also provided that Columbus might The Pmzons ac ld a third vessel, which he did with the aid, it is sup- posed, of the Pinzons, though there is no documentary proof to show whence he acquired the necessary means. Las Casas and Herrera, however, favor the supposition, and it is of course sustained in the evidence adduced in the famous trial which was intended to magnify the service of the Pinzons. It was also directed that the seamen of the little fleet should receive the usual wages of those serving in armed vessels, and be paid four months in advance. All maritime towns were enjoined to furnish supplies at a reasonable price. All criminal processes against anybody engaged for the voyage were to be suspended, and this suspension was to last for two months after the return. It was on the 23d of May that, accompanied by Juan Perez, 1492. May Columbus met the people of Palos assembled in the 23. De- * l mandatwo church of St. George, while a notary read the royal ships of . . . Paios. commands laid upon the town. It took a little time for the simple people to divine the full extent of such an order, — its consignment of fellow-creatures to the dreaded evils of THE FINAL AGREEMENT AND FIRST VOYAGE. 183 the great unknown ocean. The reluctance to enter upon the undertaking - proved so great, except among a few prisoners taken from the jails, that it became necessary to report the obstacle to the Court, when a new peremptory order was issued on June 20 to impress the vessels and crews. Juan U92 June de Peiialosa, an officer of the royal household, ap- ^° ld J e ^ s 8 eIs peared in Palos to enforce this demand. Even such un P ressed - imperative measures availed little, and it was not till Martin Alonso Pinzon came forward, and either by an agreement to divide with Columbus the profits, or through some other under- standing, — for the testimony on the point is doubtful, ThePin _ and Las Casas disbelieves any such division of profits, zons * — exerted his influence, in which he was aided by his brother, also a navigator, Vicente Yafiez Pinzon. There is a story trace- able to a son of the elder Pinzon, who testified in the Columbus lawsuit that Martin Alonso had at one time become convinced of the existence of western lands from some documents and charts which he had seen at Rome. The story, like that of his companionship with Cousin, already referred to, has in it, how- ever, many elements of suspicion. This help of the Pinzons proved opportune and did much to save the cause, for it had up to this time seemed impossible to get vessels or crews. The standing of these navigators as men and their promise to embark personally put a new complexion on the undertaking, and within a month the armament was made up. Harrisse has examined the evidence in the matter to see if there is any proof that the Pinzons contributed more than their personal influence, but there is no apparent ground for be- lieving they did, unless they stood behind Columbus in his share of the expenses, which are computed at 500,000 maravedis, while those of the Queen, arranged through Santangel, are reck- oned at 1,140,000 of that money. The fleet consisted, as Peter Martyr tells us, of two open caravels, " Nina " and " Pinta " — the latter, with its crew, being pressed into the service, — decked only at the extremities, where high prows and poops gave quarters for the crews and their officers. A large-decked vessel of the register known as a carack, and renamed by Co- lumbus the " Santa Maria," which proved " a dull sailer and unfit for discovery," was taken by Columbus as his flagship. There is some confusion in the testimony relating to the name 184 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. of this ship. The Uistorie alone calls her by this name. Las Casas simply st}des her " The Captain." One of the pilots speaks of her as the " Mari Galante." Her owner was one Juan de la Cosa, presumed to be the same person as the naviga- tor and cosmographer later to be met, and he had command of her, while Pero Alonso Nino and Sancho Ruis served as pilots. Captain G. V. Fox has made an estimate of her dimensions character of ^ vom ner reputed tonnage by the scale of that time, the shipa. an( j thinks she was sixty-three feet over all in length, fifty-one feet along her keel, twenty feet beam, and ten and a half in depth. The two Pinzons were assigned to the command of the other caravels, — Martin Alonso to the " Pinta," the larger of the two, with a third brother of his as pilot, and Vicente Yanez to the " Nina." Many obstacles and the natural repugnances of sail- ors to embark in so hazardous a service still delayed the prepa- rations, but by the beginning of August the arrangements were complete, and a hundred and twenty persons, as Peter Martyr and Oviedo tell us, but perhaps the Uistorie and Las Casas are more correct in saying ninety in all, were ready to be committed to what many of them felt were most des- perate fortunes. Duro has of late published in his Colon y Pin- zon what purports to be a list of their names. It shows in Tal- lerte de Lajes a native of England who has been thought to be one named in his vernacular Arthur Lake ; and Guillemio Ires, called of Galway, has sometimes been fancied to have borne in his own land the name perhaps of Rice, Herries, or Harris. There was no lack of the formal assignments usual in such important undertakings. There was a notary to record the pro- ceedings and a historian to array the story ; an interpreter to be prepared with Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Coptic, and Armenian, in the hopes that one of these tongues might serve in' intercourse with the great Asiatic potentates, and a metallurgist to pronounce upon precious ores. They were not without a physician and a surgeon. It does not appear if their hazards should require the last solemn rites that there was any priest to shri ,e them ; but Columbus determined to start with all the solemnity that a confession and the communion could impart, and this service was performed by Juan Perez, both for him and for his entire company. THE FINAL AGREEMENT AND FIRST VOYAGE. 185 The directions of the Crown also provided that Columbus should avoid the Guinea coast and all other posses- Sailing di _ sions of the Portuguese, which seems to be little more Jromthe than a striking manifestation of a certain kind of in- Crown - credulity respecting what Columbus, after all, meant by sailing west. Indeed, there was necessarily more or less vagueness in everybody's mind as to what a western passage would reveal, or how far a westerly course might of necessity be swung one way or the other. The Historic tells us distinctly that Columbus hoped to find some intermediate land before reaching India, to be i sland8first used, as the modern phrase goes, as a sort of base of tobesou g ht - operations. This hope rested on the belief, then common, that there was more land than sea on the earth, and consequently that no wide stretch of ocean could exist without interlying lands. There was, moreover, no confidence that such things as float- ing islands might not be encountered. Pliny and Seneca had described them, and Columbus was inclined to believe that St. Brandan and the Seven Cities, and such isles as the dwellers at the Azores had claimed to see in the offing, might be of this character. There seems, in fact, to be ground for believing that Colum- bus thought his course to the Asiatic shores could hardly fail to bring him in view of other regions or islands lying in the west- tern ocean. Mufioz holds that " the glory of such discoveries inflamed him still more, perhaps, than his chief design." That a vast archipelago would be the first land encountered was not without confident believers. The Catalan Asiatic map of 1374 had shown such islands in vast numbers, arch 'P eIa s°- amounting to 7,548 in all ; Marco Polo had made them 12,700, or was thought to do so ; and Behaim was yet to cite the latter on his globe. It was, indeed, at this very season that Behaim, having re- turned from Lisbon to his home in Nuremberg, had Behaim > 8 imparted to the burghers of that inland town those globe- great cosmographical conceptions, which he was accustomed to hear discussed in the Atlantic seaports. Such views were exem- plified in a large globe which Behaim had spent the summer in constructing in Nuremberg. It was made of pasteboard cov- 186 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. BEHAIM'S GLOBE, 1492. Note. The curved sides of these cuts divide the Globe in the mid Atlantic. THE FINAL AGREEMENT AND FIRST VOYAGE. 187 BEHAIM'S GLOBE, 1492. [Taken from Ernest Mayer's Die Hilfsmitlel der Schiffahrlskunde (Wein, 1879).] 188 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. 4- *S0&£anein7^7>u4 ddj 3faligfl to. W^fA?!/"ui _' iT^tU^oI /in^drrutn JiAcrvipelr ' "~ Jefef. we? VtAtUr and at undJerj&lokeJi . 3a y? «y/J Xajer dot 'Si deuC tJiri fuu/iir ^i~r tftdos ZonO dds Ptnfrfi. j*!*n/~c?U!7i l/en. SoJaArtn thru* JbfuiTL'arit u*id on fre.lcs/taA ?*n SarrJrfiA-A. d*n rru Jh m Jnftfahj-en . _ ay'.y,^ /n/u/ atnannt- ~ %aaa$ascaf~, a. vvfinucA jv7 zs 7jj?en . un2 itmnjSi * uae~ ttsrtiebanj daj Zand Suit }'JT JXsruf unO t^tunUr den X+ider ^4Luij>> .^ifj'trrmr n^f tn\- &• irux-u-f ?t >../■ {•<- l \-hs~it-liri. ub-er v .• j 4 bb~/uu~ def XJr. aJI dufi Jn/uJn •Ae/u:Xc denx d^f*CU dern daJun QffuJu-t.4>-*fr&* Jrt-ru/ berttinfbefurt iwdRt fist metn lif&er Schi^eJiar 'j^lich crtJuGt&ur-tsfs i am Jtuui ' br^n^^n tmcJanenSeJu^ ^vj^W , bf/\h Wi'"'Jw ?. y.v dampen wU3sr in Jexn, Z, and ka.m . 0/m man ZeJf natfi Cp/kjtbu- 7}+Jwalijantf Ji^pama *■£ rtfn . -H^u-d* btmltkt ./; cbbe /t-/wtben*Ja/u/a ^innha , Septeruade yen f-flen & Jehetfrcn JtrrlfjJtn~eu. Je.. su Sdufw 3f#e*u*n tm BEHAIM'S GLOBE, MUCH REDUCED. 190 CHRIS TOPHER COL UMB US. ered with parchment, and is twenty-one inches in diameter. It shows the equator, the tropics, the polar circle, in a latitudi- nal way ; but the first meridian, passing through Madeira, is the only one of the longitudinal sectors which it represents. HAJA so ^v > — > Qb h*0 '*1 a DC ^ w / THE ACTUAL AMERICA IN RELATION TO BEHAIM'S GEOGRAPHY. Behaim had in this work the help of Holtzschner, and the globe has come down to our day, preserved in the Egydienplatz, Nuremberg, one of the sights and honors of that city. It shares the credit, however, with another, called the Laon globe, as the only well - authenticated geographical spheres which date back of the discovery of America. This Laon globe is much smaller, being only six inches in diameter ; and though it is dated 1493, it is thought to have been made a few years earlier, — as D' Avezac thinks, in 148G. Laon globe. THE FINAL AGREEMENT AND FIRST VOYAGE. 191 Clements R. Markham, in a recent edition of Robert Hues' Tractatus de Globis, cites Nordenskiold as considering Behaim's globe, without comparison, the most important geographical document since the atlas of Ptolemy, in a. d. 150. " He points out that it is the first which um*eservedly adopts the existence of antipodes ; the first which clearly shows that there is a passage from Eui-ope to India ; the first which attempts to deal with the discoveries of Marco Polo. It is an exact representation of geo- graphical knowledge immediately previous to the first voyage of Columbus." The Behaim globe has become familiar by many published drawings. It has been claimed that Columbus probably took with him, on his voyage, the map which he had received from Togcanelu . 8 Toscanelli, with its delineation of the interjacent and map- island-studded ocean, which washed alike the shores of Europe and Asia, and that it was the subject of study by him and Pin- zon at a time when Columbus refers in his journal to the use they made of a chart. That Toscanelli's map long survived the voyage is known, and Las Casas used it. Humboldt has not the same confidence which Sprengel had, that at this time it crossed the sea in the " Santa Maria ; " and he is inclined rather to suppose that the details of Toscanelli's chart, added to all others which Columbus had gathered from the maps of Bianco and Benincasa — for it is not possible he could have seen the work of Behaim, unless indeed, in fragmentary preconceptions — must have served him better as laid down on a chart of his own drafting. There is good reason to suppose that, more than once, with the skill which he is known to have possessed, he must have made such charts, to enforce and demonstrate his belief, which, though in the main like that of Toscanelli, were in matters of distance quite different. So, everything being ready, on the third of August, 1492, a half hour before sunrise, he unmoored his little fleet in the stream and, spreading his sails, the vessels passed guat'3, co- out of the little river roadstead of Palos, gazed after, perhaps, in the increasing light, as the little crafts reached the ocean, by the friar of Rabida, from its distant promontory of rock. 192 CHRISTOPHER COL UMBUS. The day was Friday, and the advocates of Columbus's canon- ization have not failed to see a purpose in its choice, as the day of our Redemption, and as that of the de- liverance of the Holy Sepulchre by Geoffrey de Bouillon, and SHIPS OF COLUMBUS'S TIME. (From Medina's Arte (If Naregar, 154."). i of the rendition of Granada, with the fall of the Moslem power in Spain. We must resort to the books of such advocates, if we would enliven the picture with a multitude of rites and THE FINAL AGREEMENT AND FIRST VOYAGE. 193 devotional feelings that they gather in the meshes of the story of the departure. They supply to the embarkation a variety of detail that their holy purposes readily imagine, and place Columbus at last on his poop, with the standard of the Cross, the image of the Saviour nailed to the holy wood, waving in the early breezes that heralded the day. The embellishments may be pleasing, but they are not of the strictest authenticity. SHIP, I486. In order that his performance of an embassy to the princes of the East might be duly chronicled, Columbus deter- K eepsa mined, as his journal says, to keep an account of the J° umaL voyage by the west, " by which course," he says, " unto the present time, we do not know, for certain, that any one has passed." It was his purpose to write down, as he proceeded, everything he saw and all that he did, and to make a chart of his discoveries, and to show the directions of his track. Nothing occurred during those early August days to mar his 194 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. THE FINAL AGREEMENT AND FIRST VOYAGE. 195 run to the Canaries, except the apprehension which he felt that an accident, happening to the rudder of the " Pin- ta," — a steering gear now for some time in use, in ta" dis- n place of the old lateral paddles, — was a trick of two men, her owners, Gomez Rascon and Christopher Quintero, to impede a voyage in which they had no heart. The Admiral knew the disposition of these men well enough not to be sur- prised at the mishap, but he tried to feel secure in the prompt energy of Pinzon, who commanded the " Pinta." As he passed (August 24-25, 1492) the peak of Teneriffe, it was the time of an eruption, of which he makes bare Reaches the mention in his journal. It is to the corresponding Canaries - passages of the Historie, that we owe the somewhat sensational stories of the terrors of the sailors, some of whom certainly must long have been accustomed to like displays in the volcanoes of the Mediterranean. At the Gran Canaria the " Nina " was left to have her lateen sails changed to square ones ; and the " Pinta," it being found impossible to find a better vessel to take her place, was also left to be overhauled for her leaks, and to have her rud- der again repaired, while Columbus visited Gomera, another of the islands. The fleet was reunited at Gomera on Septem- ber 2. Here he fell in with some residents of Ferro, the wes- ternmost of the group, who repeated the old stories of land occasionally seen from its heights, lying towards the setting- sun. Having taken on board wood, water, and provisions, Columbus finally sailed from Gomera on the morning of Thurs- day, September 6. He seems to have soon spoken 1492 . Sep . a vessel from Ferro, and from this he learned that feavesGo- mera. three Portuguese caravels were lying in wait for him in the neighborhood of that island, with a purpose as he thought of visiting in some way upon him, for having gone over to the interests of Spain, the indignation of the Portuguese king. He escaped encountering them. Up to Sunday, September 9, they had exjjerienced so much calm weather, that their progress had been slow. This tediousness soon raised an apprehension in the mind temberb, of Columbus that the voyage might prove too long for the constancy of his men. He accordingly determined to falsify his reckoning. This deceit was a large con- Falsifieshis fession of his own timidity in dealing with his crew, reckouill g- ■5 3 R f && A <"> 'life f 1 c £ ! ft 'If "' J M If j| i! fc£ 4 X f \ o i%« S » 3 e o o a g k 1 a a CO H to * t I 1 J Jf * S G /is ! hi ' It a, tx ^iflSEn w. ... dP«*<^, ■sauBu " ,4 n i I__U 198 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. and it marked the beginning of a long struggle with deceived and mutinous subordinates, which forms so large a part of the record of his subsequent career. The result of Monday's sail, which he knew to be sixty leagues, he noted as forty-eight, so that the distance from home might appear less than it was. He continued to practice this deceit. The distances given by Columbus are those of dead reckon- His dead * n g beyond any question. Lieutenant Murdock, of the reckoning. United States navy, who has commented on this voy- age, makes his league the equivalent of three modern nautical miles, and his mile about three quarters of our present estimate for that distance. Navarrete says that Columbus reckoned in Italian miles, which are a quarter less than a Spanish mile. The Admiral had expected to make land after sailing about seven hundred leagues from Ferro ; and in ordering his vessels in case of separation to proceed westward, he warned them when they sailed that distance to come to the wind at night, and only to proceed by day. The log as at present understood in navigation had not yet been devised. Columbus depended in judging of his speed on the eye alone, basing his calculations on the passage of objects or bubbles past the ship, while the running out of his hour glasses afforded the multiple for long distances. On Thursday, the 13th of September, he notes that the ships 1492. Sep- were encountering adverse currents. He was now temberi3. three degrees west of Flores, and the needle of the compass pointed as it had never been observed before, directly Reaches *° ^ ne ^ vue north. His observation of this fact marks variation n of a significant point in the history of navigation. The the needle, polarity of the magnet, an ancient possession of the Chinese, had been known perhaps for three hundred years, when this new spirit of discovery awoke in the fifteenth cen- tury. The Indian Ocean and its traditions were to impart, per- haps through the Arabs, perhaps through the returning Cru- saders, a knowledge of the magnet to the dwellers on of the mag- the shores of the Mediterranean, and to the hardier mariners who pushed beyond the Pillars of Hercules, so that the new route to that same Indian Ocean was made possible in the fifteenth century. The way was prepared for it THE FINAL AGREEMENT AND FIRST VOYAGE. 199 gradually. The Catalans from the port of Barcelona pushed out into the great Sea of Darkness under the direction of their needles, as early at least as the twelfth century. The pilots of Genoa and Venice, the hardy Majorcans and the adventurous Moors, were followers of almost equal temerity. A knowledge of the variation of the needle came more slowly to be known to the mariners of the Mediterranean, variation of It had been observed by Peregrini as early as 1269, the needle ' but that knowledge of it which rendered it greatly serviceable 200 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. in voyages does not seem to be plainly indicated in any of the charts of these transition centuries, till we find it laid down on the maps of Andrea Bianco in 1436. [From Hirth's Bilderbuch, vol. iii.] It was no new thing- then when Columbus, as he sailed west- ward, marked the variation, proceeding from the northeast more and more westerly ; but it was a revelation when he came to a position where the magnetic north and the north star stood in conjunction, as they did on this 13th of September, 1492. THE FINAL AGREEMENT AND FIRST VOYAGE. 201 As he still moved westerly the magnetic line was found to move farther and farther away from the pole as it had before the 13th approached it. To an observer of Columbus's quick perceptions, there was a ready guess to possess his • i mi • ■ * i i • t i- • Columbus's mind, lhis inference was that this line or no vana- misconcep- tion was a meridian line, and that divergences from it line of no east and west might have a regularity which would be found to furnish a method of ascertaining longitude far easier and surer than tables or water clocks. We know that four years later he tried to sail his ship on observations of this kind. The same idea seems to have occurred to Sebastian Sebastian Cabot, when a little afterwards he approached and fervationsof passed in a higher latitude, what he supposed to be determining the meridian of no variation. Humboldt is inclined lon s itude - to believe that the possibility of such a method of ascertaining longitude was that uncommunicable secret, which Sebastian Cabot many years later hinted at on his death-bed. The claim was made near a century later by Livio Sanuto in his Geographia, published at Venice, in 1588, that Sebastian Cabot had been the first to observe this variation, and had ex- plained it to Edward VI., and that he had on a chart placed the line of no variation at a point one hundred and ten miles west of the island of Flores in the Azores. These observations of Columbus and Cabot were not wholly accepted during the sixteenth century. Robert Hues, in 1592, a hundred years later, tells us that Medina, the Span- various ish grand pilot, was not disinclined to believe that views ' mariners saw more in it than really existed, and that they found it a convenient way to excuse their own blunders. Nonius was credited with saying that it simply meant that worn-out mag- nets were used, which had lost their power to point correctly to the pole. Others had contended that it was through insufficient application of the loadstone to the iron that it was so devious in its work. What was thought possible by the early navigators possessed the minds of all seamen in varying experiments for two cen- turies and a half. Though not reaching such satisfactory re- sults as were hoped for, the expectation did not prove so chimer- ical as was sometimes imagined when it was discovered that the lines of variation were neither parallel, nor straight, nor con- 202 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. THE FINAL AGREEMENT AND FIRST VOYAGE. 203 stant. The line of no variation which Columbus found near the Azores has moved westward with erratic inclinations, Better un _ until to-day it is not far from a straight line from derstood - Carolina to Guiana. Science, beginning- with its crude efforts at the hands of Alonzo de Santa Cruz, in 1530, has so mapped the surface of the globe with observations of its multifarious freaks of variation, and the changes are so slow, that a magnetic chart is not a bad guide to-day for ascertaining the longitude in any latitude for a few years neighboring to the date of its records. So science has come round in some measure to the dreams of Columbus and Cabot. But this was not the only development which came from this ominous day in the mid Atlantic in that September coiumbus of 1492. The fancy of Columbus was easily excited, changes o" and notions of a change of climate, and even aberra- an ™ abemT tions of the stars were easily imagined by him amid tl0nS0fstar8 - the strange phenomena of that untracked waste. While Columbus was suspecting that the north star was some- what willfully shifting from the magnetic pole, now to a dis- tance of 5° and then of 10°, the calculations o£ modern astrono- mers have gauged the polar distance existing in 1492 at 3° 28', as against the 1° 20' of to-day. The confusion of Columbus was very like his confounding an old world with a new, inas- much as he supposed it was the pole star and not the needle which was shifting. He argued from what he saw, or thought he saw, that the line of no variation marked the beginning of a protuber- Imaginesa auce of the earth, up which he ascended as he sailed ance U on the westerly, and that this was the reason of the cooler earth " weather which he experienced. He never got over some no- tions of this kind, and believed he found confirmation of them in his later voyages. Even as early as the reign of Edward III. of England, Nich- olas of Lynn, a voyager to the northern seas, is thought The mag . to have definitely fixed the magnetic pole in the Arctic netic pole " regions, transmitting his views to Cnoyen, the master of the later Mercator, in respect to the four circumpolar islands, which in the sixteenth century made so constant a surrounding of the northern pole. 204 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. The next day (September 14), after these magnetic observa- 1492. Sep- tions, a water wagtail was seen from the " Nina," — a temberH. \){ r {[ w hich Columbus thought unaccustomed to fly- over twenty-five leagues from land, and the ships were now, ac- cording to their reckoning, not far from two hundred leagues September from the Canaries. On Saturday, they saw a distant bolt of fire fall into the sea. On Sunday, they had a drizzling rain, followed by pleasant weather, which reminded September Columbus of the nightingales, gladdening the climate 16 ' of Andalusia in April. They found around the ships much green floatage of weeds, which led them to think some islands must be near. Navarrete thinks there was some truth in this, inasmuch as the charts of the early part of this century represent breakers as having been seen in 1802, near the spot where Columbus can be computed to have been at this time. Columbus was in fact within that extensive prairie of floating Sargasso seaweed which is known as the Sargasso Sea, whose Sea. principal longitudinal axis is found in modern times to lie along the parallel of 41° 30', and the best calculations which can be made from the rather uncertain data of Colum- bus's journal seem to point to about the same position. There is nothing in all these accounts, as we. have them abridged by Las Casas, to indicate any great surprise, and cer- tainly nothing of the overwhelming fear which, the Historie tells us, the sailors experienced when they found their ships among these floating masses of weeds, raising apprehension of a perpetual entanglement in their swashing folds. The next day (September 17) the currents became favor- 1492. Sep- able, and the weeds still floated about them. The tember 17. variation of the needle now became so great that the seamen were dismayed, as the journal says, and the observation being repeated Columbus practiced another deceit and made it appear that there had been really no variation, but only a shift- ing of the polar star ! The weeds were now judged to be river weeds, and a live crab was found among them, — a sure sign of near land, as Columbus believed, or affected to believe. They killed a tunny and saw others. They again observed a water wagtail, " which does not sleep at sea." Each ship pushed on September f° r * ne advance, for it was thought the goal was near. ia The next day the " Pinta " shot ahead and saw THE FINAL AGREEMENT AND FIRST VOYAGE. 205 great flocks of birds towards the west. Columbus conceived that the sea was growing- fresher. Heavy clouds hung on the northern horizon, a sure sign of land, it was supposed. On the next day two pelicans came on board, and Columbus records that these birds are not accustomed to go 1492> Sep _ twenty leagues from land. So he sounded with a line tember 19 - of two hundred fathoms to be sure he was not approaching land ; but no bottom was found. A drizzling rain also be- tokened land, which they could not stop to find, but would search for on their return, as the journal says. The pilots now compared their reckonings. Columbus said they were 400 leagues, while the " Pinta's " record showed 420, and the "Nina's" 440. On September 20, other pelicans came on board ; and the ships were again among the weeds. Columbus was de- 1492 Sep . termined to ascertain if these indicated shoal water and tember2 °- sounded, but could not reach bottom. The men caught a bird with feet like a gull ; but they were convinced it was a river bird. Then singing land-birds, as was fancied, hovered about as it darkened, but they disappeared before morning. Then a pelican was observed flying to the southwest, and as " these birds sleep on shore, and go to sea in the morning," the men en- couraged themselves with the belief that they could not be far from land. The next day a whale could but be another indica- tion of land ; and the weeds covered the sea all about. On Saturday, they steered west by northwest, and got clear of the weeds. This change of course so far to 22. Changes ° . his course. the north, which had begun on the previous day, was occasioned by a head wind, and Columbus says that he wel- comed it, because it had the effect of convincing the ., , , . , . . Head wind. sailors that westerly winds to return by were not im- possible. On Sunday (September 23), they found the wind still varying ; but they made more westering than before, — weeds, crabs, and birds still about them. Now there was smooth wa- ter, which again depressed the seamen ; then the sea September arose, mysteriously, for there was no wind to cause 25, it. They still kept their course westerly and continued it till the night of September 25. Columbus at this time conferred with Pinzon, as to a chart which they carried, which showed some islands, near where they 206 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. now supposed the ships to be. That they had not seen land, they believed was either due to currents which had carried them too far north, or else their reckoning was not correct. At sun- Appearances se ^ Pinzon hailed the Admiral, and said he saw land, of land. claiming the reward. The two crews were confident that such was the case, and under the lead of their commanders they all kneeled and repeated the Gloria in Excdsis. The land appeared to lie southwest, and everybody saw the appari- tion. Columbus changed the fleet's course to reach it ; changes his and as the vessels went on, in the smooth sea, the men had the heart, under their expectation, to bathe in its amber glories. On Wednesday, they were undeceived, and September found that the clouds had played them a trick. On 26- the 27th their course lay more directly west. So they went on, and still remarked upon all the birds they saw and 1492. Sep- weed-drift which they pierced. Some of the fowl tember 27. ^\ej thought to be such as were common at the Cape de Verde Islands, and were not supposed to go far to sea. On the September 30th September, they still observed the needles of ' M - their compasses to vary, but the journal records that it was the pole star which moved, and not the needle. On October 1, Columbus says they were 707 leagues from Ferro ; but he had made his crew believe they were only 584. As they went on, little new for the next few days is recorded in the journal ; but on October 3, they thought they saw among the weeds something like fruits. By the Gth, Pinzon began to urge a southwesterly course, in order to find the islands, which the signs seemed to indicate in that direction. Still the Admiral would not swerve from his purpose, and kept his course westerly. On Sunday, the " Nina " fired a bombard and hoisted a flag as a signal that she saw land, but it proved a de- lusion. Observing towards evening a flock of birds flying to swfts bis the southwest, the Admiral yielded to Pinzon's belief, follow some an( l shifted his course to follow the birds. He re- birds. cords as a further reason for it that it was by follow- ing the flight of birds that the Portuguese had been so success- ful in discovering islands in other seas. Columbus now found himself two hundred miles and more farther than the three thousand miles west of Spain, where he THE FINAL AGREEMENT AND FIRST VOYAGE. 207 supposed Cipango to lie, and he was 25J-° north of the equator, according to his astrolabe. The true distance of Ci- pango or Japan was sixty-eight hundred miles still farther, or beyond both North America and the Pacific. How much beyond that island, in its supposed geographical position, Columbus expected to find the Asiatic main we can only con- jecture from the restorations which modern scholars have made of Toscanelli's map, which makes the island about 10° east of Asia, and from Behaim's globe, which makes it 20°. It should be borne in mind that the knowledge of its position came from Marco Polo, and he does not distinctly say how far it was from the Asiatic coast. In a general way, as to these distances from Spain to China, Toscanelli and Behaim agreed, and there is no reason to believe that the views of Columbus were in any note- worthy degree different. In the trial, years afterwards, when the Fiscal contested the rights of Diego Colon, it was put in evidence by Rations of one Vallejo, a seaman, that Pinzon was induced to ^"Xinge urge the direction to be changed to the southwest, be- ofcourse - cause he had in the preceding evening observed a flight of par- rots in that direction, which could have only been seeking land. It was the main purpose of the evidence in this part of the trial to show that Pinzon had all along forced Columbus forward against his will. How pregnant this change of course in the vessels of Colum- bus was has not escaped the observation of Humboldt and many others. A day or two further on his westerly way, and the Gulf Stream would, perhaps, insensibly have borne the little fleet up the Atlantic coast of the future United States, so that the ban- ner of Castile might have been planted at Carolina. On the 7th of October, Columbus was pretty nearly in lati- tude 25° 50', — that of one of the Bahama Islands. Just where he was by longitude there is much more doubt, probably between 65° and 66°. On the next day the land birds flying along the course of the ships seemed October to confirm their hopes. On the 10th the journal re- 8 " 10- cords that the men began to lose patience ; but the Admiral re- assured them by reminding them of the profits in store for them, and of the folly of seeking to return, when they had already gone so far. 208 • CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. It is possible that, in this entry, Columbus conceals the story story of a which later came out in the recital of Oviedo, with mutiny. more detail than in the Historic and Las Casas, that the rebellion of his crew was threatening enough to oblige him to promise to turn back if land was not discovered in three days. Most commentators, however, are inclined to think that this story of a mutinous revolt was merely engrafted from hear- say or other source by Oviedo upon the more genuine recital, and that the conspiracy to throw the Admiral into the sea has no substantial basis in contemporary report. Irving, who has a dramatic tendency throughout his whole account of the voyage to heighten his recital with touches of the imagination, neverthe- less allows this, and thinks that Oviedo was misled by listening to a pilot, who was a personal enemy of the Admiral. The elucidations of the voyage which were drawn out in the famous suit of Diego with the Crown in 1513 and 1515, afford no ground for any belief in this story of the mutiny and the concession of Columbus to it. It is not, however, difficult to conceive the recurrent fears of his men and the incessant anxiety of Columbus to quiet them. From what Peter Martyr tells us, — and he may have got it directly from Columbus's lips, — the task was not an easy one to preserve subordination and to instill confidence. He repre- sents that Columbus was forced to resort in turn to argument, persuasion, and enticements, and to picture the misfortunes of the royal displeasure. The next day, notwithstanding a heavier sea than they had 1492. before encountered, certain signs sufficed to lift them October ii. Qu ^ Q £ ^eir despondency. These were floating logs, or pieces of wood, one of them apparently carved by hand, bits of cane, a green rush, a stalk of rose berries, and other drifting tokens. Their southwesterly course had now brought them down to about the twentv-fourth parallel, when after sunset on 1492. Octo- berii. steer the 11th they shifted their course to due west, while west. the crew of the Admiral's ship united, with more fervor than usual, in the Salve Regina. At about ten o'clock Columbus, Columbus peering into the night, thought he saw — if we may sesaiight. b e li eve ] imi — a moving light, and pointing out the direction to Pero Gutierrez, this companion saw it too ; but an- THE FINAL AGREEMENT AND FIRST VOYAGE. 209 other, Rodrigo Sanchez, situated apparently on another part of the vessel, was not able to see it. It was not brought to the at- tention of any others. The Admiral says that the light seemed to be moving up and down, and he claimed to have got other glimpses of its glimmer at a later moment. He ordered the Salve to be chanted, and directed a vigilant watch to be set on the forecastle. To sharpen their vision he promised a silken jacket, beside the income of ten thousand maravedis which the King and Queen had offered to the fortunate man who should first descry the coveted land. This light has been the occasion of much comment, and noth- ing will ever, it is likely, be settled about it, further than that the Admiral, with an inconsiderate rivalry of a common sailor who later saw the actual laud, and with an ungenerous assurance ill-befitting a commander, pocketed a reward which belonged to another. If Oviedo, with his prejudices, is to be believed, Co- lumbus was not even the first who claimed to have seen this du- bious light. There is a common story that the poor sailor, who was defrauded, later turaed Mohammedan, and went to live among that juster people. There is a sort of retributive justice in the fact that the pension of the Crown was made a charge upon the shambles of Seville, and thence Columbus received it till he died. Whether the light is to be considered a reality or a fiction will depend much on the theory each may hold regarding the position of the landfall. When Columbus claimed to have dis- covered it, he was twelve or fourteen leagues away from the isl- and where, four hours later, land was indubitably found. Was the light on a canoe? Was it on some small, outlying island, as has been suggested ? Was it a torch carried from hut to hut, as Herrera avers ? Was it on either of the other vessels ? Was it on the low island on which, the next morning, he landed ? There was no elevation on that island sufficient to show even a strong light at a distance of ten leagues. Was it a fancy or a a deceit ? No one can say. It is very difficult for Navarrete, and even for Irving, to rest satisfied with what, after all, may have been only an illusion of a fevered mind, making a record of the incident in the excitement of a wonderful hour, when his intelligence was not as circumspect as it might have been. Four hours after the liffht was seen, at two o'clock in the 210 CHRIS TOPHER COL UMB US. THE FINAL AGREEMENT AND FIRST VOYAGE. 211 morning - , when the moon, near its third quarter, was in the east, the " Pinta " keeping - ahead, one of her sailors, Rod- rigo de Triana, descried the land, two leagues away, ber"i2, land and a gun communicated the joyful intelligence to the other ships. The fleet took in sail, and each vessel, under backed canvas, was pointed to the wind. Thus they waited for daybreak. It was a proud moment of painful suspense for Columbus; and brimming hopes, perhaps fears of dis- appointment, must have ac- companied that hour of wav- ering enchantment. It was Friday, October 12, of the old chronology, and the little fleet had been thirty-three days on its way from the Canaries, and we must add ten days more, to complete the period since they left Palos. The land before them was seen, as the day dawned, to be a small island, "called in the Indian tongue " /-^ i • o Guanahani. (jruanahani. borne naked uatives were descried. The Admiral and the com- manders of the other vessels prepared to land. Columbus took the royal standard and the others each a banner of the green cross, which bore the initials of the sovereign with a cross between, a crown surmounting every letter. Thus, with the emblems of their power, and accompanied by Rodrigo de Escoveda and Rodrigo Sanchez and some seamen, the boat rowed to the shore. They immediately took formal possession of the land, and the notary recorded it. The words of the prayer usually given as uttered by Columbus Columbus on taking possession of San Salvador, when l ^T S ^ d he named the island, cannot be traced farther back prayer - COLUMBUS'S ARMOR. 212 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. THE FINAL AGREEMENT AND FIRST VOYAGE. 213 r * '/J/ ^>xL l o > o m » — 214 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. than a collection of Tablas Chronologicas, got together at Va- lencia in 1689, by a Jesuit father, Clauclio Clemente. Harrisse finds no authority for the statement of the French canonizers that Columbus established a form of prayer which was long in vogue, for such occupations of new lands. Las Casas, from whom we have the best account of the cere- monies of the landing, does not mention it ; but we find pictured in his pages the grave impressiveness of the hour ; the form of Columbus, with a crimson robe over his armor, central and grand ; and the humbleness of his followers in their contrition for the hours of their faint-heartedness. Columbus now enters in his journal his impressions of the island and its inhabitants. He says of the land that it bore The island green trees, was watered by many streams, and pro- descnbed. (J uce d divers fruits. In another place he speaks of the island as flat, without lofty eminence, surrounded by reefs, with a lake in the interior. The courses and distances of his sailing both before and on leaving the island, as well as this description, are the best means we have of identifying the spot of this portentous landfall. The early maps may help in a subsidiary way, but with little pre- cision. There is just enough uncertainty and contradiction respecting the data and arguments applied in the solution of this tiouofthe question, to render it probable that men will never quite agree which of the Bahamas it was upon which these startled and exultant Europeans first stepped. Though Las Casas reports the journal of Columbus unabridged for a period after the landfall, he unfortunately condenses it for some time previous. There is apparently no chance of finding geo- graphical conditions that in every respect will agree with this record of Columbus, and we must content ourselves with what offers the fewest disagreements. An obvious method, if we could depend on Columbus's dead reckoning, would be to see for what island the actual distance from the Canaries would be nearest to his computed run ; but currents and errors of the eye necessarily throw this sort of computation out of the question, and Capt. G. A. Fox, who has tried it, finds that Cat Island is three hundred and seventeen, the Grand Turk six hundred and twenty four nautical miles, and the other supposable points at THE FINAL AGREEMENT AND FIRST VOYAGE. 215 intermediate distances out of the way as compared with his com- putation of the distance run by Columbus, three thousand four hundred and fifty-eight of such miles. The reader will remember the Bahama group as a range of islands, islets, and rocks, said to be some three thou- The sand in number, running southeast from a point part Bahamas - way up the Florida coast, and approaching at the other end the L-oast of Hispaniola. In the latitude of the lower point of Florida, and five degrees east of it, is the isl- dor, or cat and of San Salvador or Cat Island, which is the most northerly of those claimed to have been the landfall of Colum- bus. Proceeding down the group, we encounter Wat- other ling's, Samana, Acklin (with the Plana Cays), Mari- islands - guana, and the Grand Turk, — all of which have their advo- cates. The three methods of identification which have been followed are, first, by plotting the outward track ; identifica- second, by plotting the track between the landfall and Cuba, both forward and backward ; third, by applying the de- scriptions, particularly Columbus's, of the island first seen. In this last test, Harrisse prefers to apply the description of Las Casas, which is borrowed in part from that of the Jlistorie, and he reconciles Columbus's apparent discrepancy when he says in one place that the island was " pretty large," and in another " small," by supposing that he may have applied these Ack i in opposite terms, the lesser to the Plana Cays, as first Island - seen, and the other to the Crooked Group, or Acklin Island, ly- ing just westerly, on which he may have landed. Harrisse is the only one who makes this identification ; and he finds some confirmation in later maps, which show thereabout an island, Triango or Triangulo, a name said by Las Casas to have been applied to Guanahani at a later day. There is no known map earlier than 1540 bearing this alternative name of Triango. San Salvador seems to have been the island selected by the earliest of modern inquirers, in the seventeenth and San eighteenth centuries, and it has had the support of Ir- ving and Humboldt in later times. Captain Alexander Slidell Mackenzie of the United States navy worked out the problem for Irving. It is much larger than any of the other islands, and could hardly have been called by Columbus in any alternative way a " small " island, while it does not answer Columbus's de- Salvador. 216 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. scription of being level, having on it an eminence of four hun- dred feet, and no interior lagoon, as his Guanahani demands. The French canonizers stand by the old traditions, and find it meet to say that " the English Protestants not finding the name San Salvador fine enough have substituted for it that of Cat, and in their hydrographical atlases the Island of the Holy Sa- viour is nobly called Cat Island." The weight of modern testimony seems to favor "Watling's watimg's island, and it so far answers to Columbus's description island. ^.j ia £ a |j 0u t one third of its interior is water, correspond- ing to his " large lagoon." Mufioz first suggested it in 1793 ; but the arguments in its favor were first spread out by Captain Becher of the royal navy in 1856, and he seems to have in- duced Oscar Peschel in 1858 to adopt the same views in his history of the range of modern discovery. Major, the map cus- todian of the British Museum, who had previously followed Navarrete in favoring the Grand Turk, again addressed himself to the problem in 1870, and fell into line with the adherents of Watling's. No other considerable advocacy of this island, if we except the testimony of Gerard Stein in 1883, in a book on voyages of discovery, appeared till Lieut. J. B. Murdoch, an officer of the American navy, made a very careful examination of the subject in the Proceedings of the United States Naval Institute in 1884, which is accepted by Charles A. Schott in the Bidletin of the United States Coast Survey. Murdoch was the first to plot in a backward way the track between Guanahani and Cuba, and he finds more points of resemblance in Columbus's description with Watling's than with any other. The latest adherent is the eminent geographer, Clements R. Markham, in the bulletin of the Italian Geographical Society in 1889. Perhaps no cartographical argument has been so effec- tive as that of Major in comparing modern charts with the map of Herrera, in which the latter lays Guanahani down. An elaborate attempt to identify Samana as the landfall was made by the late Capt. Gustavus Vasa Fox, in an ap- pendix to the Report of the United States Coast Survey for 1880. Varnhagen, in 1864, selected Mariguana, and defended his choice in a paper. This island fails to satisfy Grand Turk * ne physical conditions in being without interior water, island. Such a qualification, however, belongs to the Grand THE FINAL AGREEMENT AND FIRST VOYAGE. 217 Turk Island, which was advocated first by Navarrete in 1826, whose views have since been supported by George Gibbs, and for a while by Major. It is rather curious to note that Caleb Cushing, who under- took to examine this question in the North American Meview. under the guidance of Navarrete's theory, tried the same back- ward method which has been later applied to the problem, but with quite different results from those reached by more recent investigators. He says, " By setting out from Nipe [which is the point where Columbus struck Cuba] and proceeding in a retrograde direction along his course, we may surely trace his path, and shall be convinced that Guanahani is no other than Turk's Island." Mr. C. R. Markham has just (September, 1892) given a reasonable inter- pretation of the name " Tallerte de Lajes " (ante, p. 184) in saying that Lajes is a small town near Coruna, and that, leaving off the T and final e, both natural additions for a Spaniard to make, we have Allert or Allart, a name common in early days among the English sailors of the Cinque Ports. CHAPTER X. AMONG THE ISLANDS AND THE RETURN VOYAGE. We learn that, after these ceremonies on the shore, the na tives began fearlessly to gather about the strangers, of Guana- Columbus, by causing red caps, strings of beads, and other trinkets to be distributed among them, made an easy conquest of their friendship. Later the men swam out to the ship to exchange their balls of thread, their javelins, and parrots for whatever they could get in return. The description which Columbus gives us in his journal of the appearance and condition of these new people is the ear- liest, of course, in our knowledge of them. His record is in- teresting for the effect which the creatures had upon him, and for the statement of their condition before the Spaniards had set an impress upon their unfortunate race. They struck Columbus as, on the whole, a very poor people, going naked, and, judging from a single girl whom he saw, this nudity was the practice of the women. They all seemed young, not over thirty, well made, with fine shapes and faces. Their hair was coarse, and combed short over the forehead ; but hung long behind. The bodies of many were differently colored with pigments of many hues, though of some only the face, the eyes, or the nose were painted. Columbus was satisfied that they had no knowledge of edged weapons, because they grasped his sword by the blade and cut themselves. Their javelins were sticks pointed with fishbones. When he observed scars on their bodies, they managed to explain to him that enemies, whom the Admiral supposed to come from the continent, some- times invaded their island, and that such wounds were received in defending themselves. They appeared to him to have no religion, which satisfied him that the task of converting them to Christianity would not be difficult. They learned readily to pronounce such words as were repeated to them. THE ISLANDS AND THE RETURN VOYAGE. 219 On the next day after landing, Saturday, Columbus describes again the throng that came to the shore, and was 1492 0ctc struck with their broad foreheads. He deemed it a ber 13- natural coincidence, being in the latitude of the Canaries, that the natives had the complexion prevalent among the natives of those islands. In this he anticipated the conclusions of the anthropologists, who have found in the skulls pre- served in caves both in the Bahamas and in the Ca- the Lu^° naries, such striking similarities as have led to the sup- y position that ocean currents may have borne across the sea some of the old Guanche stock of the Canaries, itself very likely the remnant of the people of the European river-drift. Professor W. K. Brooks, of the Johns Hopkins University, who has recently published in the Popular Science Monthly (November, 1889) a study of the bones of the Lucayans as found in caves in the Bahamas, reports that these relics indi- cate a muscular, heavy people, about the size of the average European, with protuberant square jaws, sloping eyes, and very round skulls, but artificially flattened on the forehead, — a result singularly confirming Columbus's description of broader heads than he had ever seen. " The Ceboynas," says a recent writer on these Indians, " gave us the hammock, and this one Lucayan word is their only monument," for a population larger than inhabits these islands to-day were in twelve years swept from the surface of the earth by a system devised by Columbus. The Admiral also describes their canoes, made in a wonder- ful manner of a single tree-trunk, and large enough to hold forty or forty-five men, though some were so small as to carry a single person only. Their oars are shaped like the wooden shovels with which bakers slip their loaves into ovens. If a canoe upsets, it is righted as they swim. Columbus was attracted by bits of gold dangling at the nose of some among them. By signs he soon learned that G- oldanM)ng a greater abundance of this metal could be found on tIl, "' n an island to the south ; but they seemed unable to direct him with any precision how to reach that island, or at least it was not easy so to interpret any of their signs. " Poor wretches ! " exclaims Helps, " if they had possessed the slightest gift of prophecy, they would have thrown these baubles into the deep- 220 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. est sea." They pointed in all directions, but towards the east as the way to other lands ; and implied that those enemies who came from the northwest often passed to the south after gold. He found that broken dishes and bits of glass served traffics with as well f or traffic with them as more valuable articles, and balls of threads of cotton, grown on the island, seemed their most merchantable commodity. With this rude foretaste, Columbus determined to push on 1482. octo- f° r the richer Cipango. On the next day he coasted towards^ 118 along the island in his boats, discovering two or three cipango. villages, where the inhabitants were friendly. They seemed to think that the strangers had come from heaven, — at least Columbus so interpreted their prostrations and uplifted hands. Columbus, fearful of the reefs parallel to the shore, kept outside of them, and as he moved along, saw a point of land which a ditch might convert into an island. He thought this would afford a good site for a fort, if there was need of one. It was on this Sunday that Columbus, in what he thought i4st'. octo- doubtless the spirit of the day in dealing with heathens, ber 14, gives us his first intimation of the desirability of using force to make these poor creatures serve their new masters. Columbus O n returning to the ships and setting sail, he soon euslaTethe f° unc l that he was in an archipelago. He had seized natives. some natives, who were now on board. These re- peated to him the names of more than a hundred islands. He describes those within sight as level, fertile, and populous, and he determined to steer for what seemed the largest. He stood 149 . 7 0ct0 _ off and on during the night of the 14th, and by noon bar 15. Q £ ^ e 15th ] ie na( j reached this other island, which he found at the easterly end to run five leagues north and south, and to extend east and west a distance of ten leagues. Lured by a still larger island farther west he pushed on, and skirting the shore reached its western extremity. He cast anchor there at sunset, and named the island Santa Maria de la Concepcion. The natives on board told him that the people here wore gold bracelets. Columbus thought this story might be a device of his prisoners to obtain opportunities to escape. On the next UK Oct0 . day, he repeated the forms of landing and taking pos- ter ig. session. Two of the prisoners contrived to escape. One of them jumped overboard and was rescued by a native THE ISLANDS AND THE RETURN VOYAGE. 221 canoe. The Spaniards overtook the canoe, but not till its occu- pants had escaped. A single man, coming off in another canoe, was seized and taken on board ; but Columbus thought him a good messenger of amity, and loading him with presents, " not worth four maravedis," he put him ashore. Columbus watched the liberated savage, and judged from the wonder of the crowds which surrounded him that his ruse of friendship had been well played. Another large island appeared westerly about nine leagues, famous for its gold ornaments, as his prisoners again T . . .„ t .-,.. , . Columbus declared. It is significant that in his journal, since sees a large he discovered the bits of gold at San Salvador, Co- lumbus has not a word to say of reclaiming the benighted hea- then ; but he constantly repeats his hope " with the help of our Lord," of finding gold. On the way thither he had picked up a second single man in a canoe, who had apparently followed him from San Salvador. He determined to bestow some favors upon him and let him go, as he had done with the other. This new island, which he reached October 16, and called Fernandina, he found to be about twenty-eight leagues 1492 0c . long, with a safer shore than the others. He anchored tober 16 ' near a village, where the man whom he had set free had already come, bringing good reports of the stranger, and so the Span- iards got a kind reception. Great numbers of natives came off in canoes, to whom the men gave trinkets and molasses. He took on board some water, the natives assisting the crew. Get- ting an impression that the island contained a mine of gold, he resolved to follow the coast, and find Samaot, where the gold was said to be. Columbus thought he saw some improvement in the natives over those he had seen before, remarking upon the cotton cloth with which they partly covered their persons, He was surprised to find that distinct branches of the same tree bore different leaves. A single tree, as he says, will show as many as five or six varieties, not done by grafting, but a nat- ural growth. He wondered at the brilliant fish, and found no land creatures but parrots and lizards, though a boy of the com- pany told him that he had seen a snake. On Wednesday he started to sail around the island. In a little haven, where they tarried awhile, they first entered the native houses. They found everything in them neat, with nets extended between 222 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. Hammocks. posts, which they called hamacs, — a name soon adopted by sailors for swinging-beds. The houses were shaped like tents, with high chimneys, but not more than twelve or fifteen together. Dogs were running about them, but they could not bark. Columbus endeavored to buy a bit of gold, cut or stamped, which was hanging from a man's nose ; but the savage refused his offers. INDIAN BEDS. 1492. Oc tober 19. The ships continued their course about the island, the weather not altogether favorable ; but on October 19 they veered away to another island to the west of Fernan- dina, which Columbus named Isabella, after his Queen. This he pronounced the most beautiful he had seen ; and he remarks on the interior region of it being higher than in the other islands, and the source of streams. The breezes from the shore brought him odors, and when he landed he became conscious that his botanical knowledge did not aid him in selecting such dyestuffs, medicines, and spices as would command high prices in Spain. He saw a hideous reptile, and the canonizers, after their amusing fashion, tell us that " to see and attack him were the same thing for Columbus, for he considered it of impor- tance to accustom Spanish intrepidity to such warfare." The THE ISLANDS AND THE RETURN VOYAGE. 223 reptile proved inoffensive. The signs of his prisoners were in- terpreted to repeat here the welcome tale of gold. He To find understood them to refer to a king decked with gold. Columbus's " I do not, however," he adds, " give much credit to these main objecfc- accounts, for I understand the natives but imperfectly." " I am proceeding solely in quest of gold and spices," he says 1492 . 0o _ again. tober 21 - On Sunday they went ashore, and found a house from which the occupants had recently departed. The foliage was en- chanting. Flocks of parrots obscured the sky. Specimens were gathered of wonderful trees. They killed a snake in a lake. They cajoled some timid natives with beads, and got their help in filling their water cask. They heard of a very large island named Colba, which had ships and sail- Cuba ors, as the natives were thought to say. They had heard of- little doubt that these stories referred to Cipango. They hoped the native king would bring them gold in the night ; but this not happening, and being cheered by the accounts of Colba, they made up their minds that it would be a waste of time to search longer for this backward king, and so resolved . 1492. Oc- to run for the big island. tober 24. Starting from Isabella at midnight on October 24, and passing other smaller islands, they finally, on Sunday, October 26, entered a river near the easterly end of 0ctober 2(; Cuba. The track of Columbus from San Salvador to Cuba has been as variously disputed as the landfall ; indeed, the divergent views of the landfall necessitate such later variations. They landed within the river's mouth, and discov- ered deserted houses, which from the implements within they supposed to be the houses of fishermen. Columbus observed that the grass grew down to the water's edge ; and he reasoned therefrom that the sea could never be rough. He now observed mountains, and likened them to those of Sicily. He finally supposed his prisoners to affirm by their signs that the island was too large for a canoe to sail round it in twenty days. There were the old stories of gold • but the mention Pearls. of pearls appears now for the first time in the journal, which in this place, however, we have only in Las Casas's abridgment. 224 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. When the natives pointed to the interior and said, " Cuba- nacan," meaning, it is supposed, an inland region, Columbus coiumbuB imagined it was a reference to Kublai Khan ; and himself "at * ne Cuban name of Mangon he was very ready to asso- Man s ! - ciate with the Mangi of Mandeville. As he still coasted westerly he found river and village, and made more use of his prisoners than had before been possible. They seem by this time to have settled into an acquiescent spirit. He wondered in one place at statues which looked like women. He was not quite sure whether the natives kept them for the love of the beautiful, or for worship. He found domesticated fowl ; and saw a skull, which he sup- posed was a cow's, which was probably that of the sea-calf, a denizen of these waters. He thought the temperature cooler than in the other islands, and ascribed the change to the moun- tains. He observed on one of these eminences a protuberance that looked like a mosque. Such interpretation as the Span- iards could make of their prisoners' signs convinced them that if they sailed farther west they would find some potentate, and so they pushed on. Bad weather, however, delayed them, and they again opened communication with the natives. They could hear nothing of gold, but saw a silver trinket ; and learned, as they thought, that news of their coming had been carried to the distant king. Columbus felt convinced that the people of these regions were banded enemies of the Great Khan, and supposes that he had at last struck the continent of Cathay, the coast of and was skirting the shores of the Zartun and Quinsay of Marco Polo. Taking an observation, Columbus found himself to be in 21° north latitude, and as near as he could reckon, he was 1142 leagues west of Ferro. He really was 1105. From Friday, November 2, to Monday, November 5, two 1492. No- Spaniards, whom Columbus had sent into the interior, vember2-5. accom p an i e( j by SO me Indians, had made their way Cuba unmolested in their search for a king. They had been explored. entertained here and there with ceremony, and ap- parently worshiped as celestial comers. The evidences of the early Spanish voyagers give pretty constant testimony that the whites were supposed to have come from the skies. Columbus had given to his envoys samples of cinnamon, pepper, and other THE ISLANDS AND THE RETURN VOYAGE. 225 spices, which were shown to the people. In reply, his mes- sengers learned that such things grew to the southeast of them. Columbus later, in his first letter, speaks of cinnamon as one of the spices which they found, but it turned out to be the bark of a sort of laurel. Las Casas, in mentioning this expedition, says that the Spaniards found the natives smoking small tubes of dried leaves, filled with other leaves, which they called tobacos. Sir Arthur Helps aptly remarks on this trivial discovery by the Spaniards of a great financial resource of modern statesmen, since tobacco has in the end proved more productive to the Spanish crown than the gold which Columbus sought. The Spaniards found no large villages ; but they per- ceived great stores of fine cotton of a long staple. They found the people eating what we must recognize as potatoes. The absence of gold gave Columbus an opportunity to wish more fervently than before for the conversion of some of these people. While this party was absent, Columbus found a quiet beach, and careened his ships, one at a time. In melting his tar, the wood which he used gave out a powerful odor, and he pro- nounced it the mastic gum, which Europe had always got from Chios. As this work was going on, the Spaniards got from the natives, as best they could, many intimations of larger wealth and commerce ito the southeast. Other strange stories one-eyed were told of men with one eye, and faces like dogs, f^fedmen. and of cruel, bloodthirsty man-eaters, who fought to cannibals. appease their appetite on the flesh of the slain. It was not till the 12th of November that Columbus left this hospitable haven, at daybreak, in search of a place 1492 No _ called Babeque, "where gold was collected at night vember12 - by torch-light upon the shore, and afterward ham- Babe i ue - mered into bars." He the more readily retraced his track, that the coast to the westward seemed to trend northerly, and he dreaded a colder climate. He must leave for another time the sight of men with tails, who inhabited a province in that direc- tion, as he was informed. Again the historian recognizes how a chance turned the Spaniards away from a greater goal. If Columbus had gone on westerly and discovered the insular character of Cuba, he might have sought the main of Mexico and Yucatan, and anti- 226 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. cipated the wonders of the conquest of Cortez. He never was undeceived in believing that Cuba was the Asiatic main. Columbus sailed back over his course with an inordinate idea of the riches of the country which he was leaving. He thought the people docile ; that their simple belief in a God was easily coiumbus *° be enlarged into the true faith, whereb} r Spain some 1168 might gain vassals and the church a people. He natives. managed to entice on board, and took away, six men, seven women, and three children, condoning the act of kidnap- ping — the canonizers call it " retaining on board " — by a pur- pose to teach them the Spanish language, and open a readier avenue to their benighted souls. He allowed the men to have women to share their durance, as such ways, he says, had proved useful on the coast of Guinea. The Admiral says in his first letter, referring to his captives, " that we immediately understood each other, either by words or signs." This was his message to expectant Europe. His journal is far from conveying that impression. The ships now steered east-by-south, passing mountainous 1492. No- lands, which on November 14 he tried to approach, vember 14. After a while he discovered a harbor, which he could enter, and found it filled with lofty wooded islands, some pointed and some flat at the top. He was quite sure he had now got among the islands which are made to swarm on the Asiatic coast in the early accounts and maps. He now speaks of his practice in all his landings to set up and leave a cross. He observed, also, a promontory in the bay fit for a fortress, and caught a strange fish resembling a hog. He was at this time embayed in the King's Garden, as the archipelago is called. Shortly after this, when they had been baffled in their courses, Pinzon Martin Alonso Pinzon, incited, as the record says, by deserts. His cupidity to find the stores of gold to which some of his Indian captives had directed him, disregarded the Ad- miral's signals, and sailed away in the " Pinta." The flagship kept a light for him all night, at the mast-head ; but in the morning the caravel was out of sight. The Admiral takes oc- casion in his journal to remark that this was not the first act 1492. No- °f Pinzon's insubordination. On Friday, November vember 23. 23, the vessels approached a headland, which the Indians called Bohio. The prisoners here began to manifest THE ISLANDS AND THE RETURN VOYAGE. 227 fear, for it was a spot where the one-eyed people and the can- nibals dwelt ; but on Saturday, November 24, the 1492 . No _ ships were forced back into the gulf with the mauy vember24 islands, where Columbus found a desirable roadstead, which he had not before discovered. On Sunday, exploring in a boat, he found in a stream " cer- tain stones which shone with spots of a golden hue ; im No _ and recollecting that gold was found in the river vember25 - Tagus near the sea, he entertained no doubt that this was the metal, and directed that a collection of the stones should be made to carry to the King and Queen." It becomes notice- able, as Columbus goes on, that every new place surpasses all others ; the atmosphere is better ; the trees are more marvelous. He now found pines fit for masts, and secured some for the "Nina." As he coasted the next day along what he believed to be a continental coast, he tried in his journal to account for the absence of towns in so beautiful a country. That there were inhabitants he knew, for he found traces of them on going ashore. He had discovered that all the natives had a great dread of a people whom they called Caniba or Canima, and he argued that the towns were kept back from the coast to avoid the chances of the maritime attacks of this fierce people. There was no doubt in the mind of Columbus that these inroads were conducted by subjects of the Great Khan. While he was still stretching his course along this coast, observing its harbors, seeing more signs of habitation, and attempting to hold intercourse with the frightened natives, now anchoring in some haven, and now running up adjacent rivers in a galley, he found time to jot down in this journal for the future perusal of his sovereigns some of his suspicions, prophe- cies, and determinations. He complains of the difficulty of understanding his prisoners, and seems conscious of his fre- quent misconceptions of their meaning. He says he has lost confidence in them, and somewhat innocently imagines that they would escape if they could ! Then he speaks of a determina- tion to acquire their language, which he supposes to be the same through all the region. " In this way," he adds, " we can learn the riches of the country, and make endeavors to convert these people to our religion, for they are without even the faith of an 228 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. idolater." He descants upon the salubrity of the air ; not one of his crew had had any illness, " except an old man, all his life a sufferer from the stone." There is at times a somewhat amus- ing innocence in his conclusions, as when finding a cake of wax in one of the houses, which Las Casas thinks was brought from Yucatan, he " was of the opinion that where wax was found there must be a great many other valuable commodities." The ships were now detained in their harbor for several days, during which the men made excursions, and found a populous country ; they succeeded at times in getting into communication 1492. De- with the natives. Finally, on December 4, he left the cember4. p ue rto Santo, as he called it, and coasting along east- erly he reached the next day the extreme eastern end of what Leaves Cuba we now know to be Cuba, or Juana as he had named it, or Juana. after Prince Juan. Cruising about, he seems to have had an apprehension that the land he had been following might not after all be the main, for he appears to have looked around the southerly side of this end of Cuba and to have seen the southwesterly trend of its coast. He observed, the same day, Bohio. land in the southeast, which his Indians called Bohio, Espanoia. anc j ^jg wag SU Q Se q Uen tly named Espanola. Las Casas explains that Columbus here mistook the Indian word meaning house for the name of the island, which was really in their tongue called Haiti. It is significant of the difficulty in identifying the bays and headlands of the journal, that at this point Las Casas puts on one side, and Navarrete on the opposite side, of the passage dividing Cuba from Espanola, one of the capes which Columbus indicates. Changing his course for this lofty island, he dispatched the " Niiia " to search its shore and find a harbor. That night the Admiral's ship beat about, wait- ing for daylight. When it came, he took his observations of the coast, and espying an island separated by a wide channel from the other land, he named this island Tortuga. Finding his way into a harbor — the present St. Nich- olas — he declares that a thousand caracks could sail about in it. Here he saw, as before, large canoes, and many natives, who fled on his approach. The Spaniards soon began as they went on to observe lofty and extensive mountains, " the whole country appearing like Castile." They saw another reminder of Spain as they were rowing about a harbor, which they THE ISLANDS AND THE RETURN VOYAGE. 229 entered, and which was opposite Tortuga, when a skate leaped into their boat, and the Admiral records it as a first instance in which they had seen a fish similar to those of the Spanish waters. He says, too, that he heard on the shore nightingales " and other Spanish birds," mistaking of course their identity. He saw myrtles and other trees " like those of Castile." There was another obvious reference to the old country in the name of Espafiola, which he now bestowed upon the island. He could find few of the inhabitants, and conjectured that their towns were back from the coast. The men, however, captured a handsome young woman who wore a bit of gold at her nose ; and having bestowed upon her gifts, let her go. Soon after, the Admiral sent a party to a town of a thousand houses, thinking the luck of the woman would embolden the people to have a parley. The inhabitants fled in fear at first ; but growing bolder came in great crowds, and brought presents of parrots. It was here that Columbus took his latitude and found it to be 17°, — while in fact it was 20°. The journal gives „ , t J , s Columbus numerous instances during- all these explorations of finds his lat - & r itude. the bestowing of names upon headlands and harbors, few of which have remained to this day. It was a common cus- tom to make such use of a Saint's name on his natal day. Dr. Shea in a paper which he published in 1876, in the first volume of the American Catholic Quarterly* has emphasized the help which the Roman nomenclature of Saints' saints' days, given to rivers and headlands, affords to the names - geographical student in tracking the early explorers along the coasts of the New World. This method of tracing the progress of maritime discovery suggested itself early to Oviedo, and has been appealed to by Henry C. Murphy and other modern authorities on this subject. Finally, on Friday, December 14, they sailed out of the har- bor toward Tortuga. He found this island to be under 149 , 2 De . extensive cultivation like a plain of Cordoba. The cember 14 - wind not holding for him to take the course which he wished to run, Columbus returned to his last harbor, the Puerto de la Concepcion. Again on Saturday he left it, and standing across to Tortuga once more, he went towards the shore and proceeded up a stream in his boats. The inhab- itants fled as he approached, and burning fires in Tortuga as 230 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. well as in Espanola seemed to be signals that the Spaniards were moving. During the night, proceeding along the channel between the two islands, the Admiral met and took on board a solitary Indian in his canoe. The usual gifts were put upon him, and when the ships anchored near a village, he was sent ashore with the customary effect. The beach soon swarmed with people, gathered with their king, and some came on board. The Spaniards got from them without difficulty the bits of gold which they wore at their ears and noses. One of the captive Indians who talked with the king told this " youth of twenty- one," that the Spaniards had come from heaven and were going to Babeque to find gold ; and the king told the Admi- ral's messenger, who delivered to him a present, that if he sailed in a certain course two days he would arrive there. This is the last we hear of Babeque, a place Columbus never found, at least under that name. Humboldt remarks that Columbus mentions the name of Babeque more than fourteen times in his journal, but it cannot certainly be identified with Espanola, as the Hlstorie of 1571 declares it to be. D'Avezac has since shared Humboldt's view. Las Casas hesitatingly thought it might have referred to Jamaica. Then the journal describes the country, saying that the land is lofty, but that the highest mountains are arable, and that the trees are so luxuriant that they become black rather than green. The journal further describes this new people as stout and courageous, very different from the timid islanders of other parts, and without religion. With his usual habit of contradic- tion, Columbus goes on immediately to speak of their pusilla- nimity, saying that three Spaniards were more than a match for a thousand of them. He prefigures their fate in calling them " well-fitted to be governed and set to work to till the land and do whatsoever is necessary." It was on Monday, December 17, while lying off Espanola, 1492. De- * na ^ the Spaniards got for the first time something cembern. more than rumor respecting the people of Caniba or the cannibals. These new evidences were certain arrows which the natives showed to them, and which they said had Cannibals. . , _ , mi * . _ belonged to those man-eaters. Iney were pieces of cane, tipped with sticks which had been hardened by fire. " They were exhibited by two Indians who had lost some flesh THE ISLANDS AND THE RETURN VOYAGE. 231 from their bodies, eaten out by the cannibals. This the Admiral did not believe." It was now, too, that the Spaniards found gold in larger quantities than they had seen it before. They saw some beaten into thiu plates. The cacique — here this word appears for the first time — cut a plate as big as his hand into pieces and bartered them, promising to have more to exchange the next day. He gave the Span- iards to understand that there was more gold in Tortuga than in Espariola. It is to be remarked, also, in the Admiral's account, that while " Our Lord " is not recorded as indicating to him any method of converting the poor heathen, it was " Our Lord " who was now about to direct the Admiral to Babeque. The next day, December 18, the Admiral lay at anchor, both because wind failed him, and because he would be 1492 . De _ able to see the gold which the cacique had promised cember18 - to bring. It also gave him an opportunity to deck his ships and fire his guns in honor of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin. In due time the king appeared, borne on a sort of litter by his men, and boarding the ship, that chieftain found Columbus at table in his cabin. The cacique was placed beside the Admiral, and similar viands and drinks were placed before him, of which he partook. Two of his dusky followers, sitting at his feet, fol- lowed their master in the act. Columbus, observing that the hangings of his bed had attracted the attention of the savage, gave them to him, and added to the present some amber beads from his own neck, some red shoes, and a flask of orange-flower water. " This day," says the record, " little gold was obtained ; but an old man indicated that at a distance of a hundred leagues or more were some islands, where much gold could be found, and in some it was so plentiful that it was collected and bolted with sieves, then melted and beaten into divers forms. One of the islands was said to be all gold, and the Admiral determined to go in the direction which this man pointed." That night they tried in vain to stand out beyond Tortuga, but on the 20th of December, the record places the U02 , d 6 _ ships in a harbor between a little island, which Colum- cember2 °- bus called St. Thomas, and the main island. During the follow- ing day, December 21, he surveyed the roadstead, and Sf . Thomaa going about the region in his boats, he had a num- Islan & ° . shT l saii T f h ? m » ca P e a ^ ter ca P e - On the 12th, entering a harbor, Spain. Columbus discovered an Indian, whom he took for a January 12. Carib, as he had learned to call the cannibals which he so often heard of. His own Indians did not wholly understand this strange savage. When they sent him ashore the Spaniards found fifty-five Indians armed with bows and wooden swords. They were prevailed upon at first to hold communication ; but soon showed a less friendly spirit, and Columbus for the first time records a fight, in which several of the natives were wounded. An island to the eastward was now supposed to be the Carib region, and he desired to capture some of its natives. Navarrete supposes that Porto Rico is here referred to. He also observed, as his vessels went easterly, that he was encountering some of the same sort of seaweed which he had sailed through when steering west, and it occurred to him that perhaps these islands stretched easterly, so as really to be not far distant from the Canaries. It may be observed that this propinquity of the new islands to those of the Atlantic, longer known, was not wholly eradicated from the maps till well into the earlier years of the sixteenth century. They had secured some additional Indians near where they had had their fight, and one of them now directed Columbus towards the island of the Caribs. The leaks of the vessels in- creasing and his crews desponding, Columbus soon thought it more prudent to shift his course for Spain direct, sujmosing at the same time that it would take him near Matinino, where the THE ISLANDS AND THE RETURN VOYAGE. 237 tribe of women lived. He had gotten the story somehow, very likely by a credulous adaptation of Marco Polo, that caribsand the Caribs visited this island once a year and re- Amazons - claimed the male offspring, leaving the female young to keep up the tribe. In following the Admiral along these coasts of Cuba and Espaiiola, no attempt has here been made to identify all his bays and rivers. Navarrete and the other commentators have done so, but not always with agreement. On the 16th, they had their last look at a distant cape of Espaiiola, and were then in the broad ocean, with sea- 1493 Janu . weed and tunnies and pelicans to break its monotony. ap y 16 - The " Pinta," having an unsound mast, lagged behind, and so the " Nina " had to slacken sail. Columbus now followed a course which for a long time, owing to defects in the methods of ascertaining longitude, Homeward was the mariner's readiest recourse to reach his port. v °y a s e - This was to run up his latitudes to that of his destination, and then follow the parallel till he sighted a familiar landmark. By February 10, when they began to compare reckonings, Columbus placed his position in the latitude of Flores, 1493 Feb . while the others thought they were on a more southern ruary 10, course, and a hundred and fifty leagues nearer Spain. By the 12th it was apparent that a gale was coming on. The next day, February 13, the storm increased. During the fol- lowing night both vessels took in all sail and scudded before the wind. They lost sight of each other's lights, and never joined company. The " Pinta " with her weak mast was blown away to the north. The Admiral's ship could bear the gale better, but as his ballast was insufficient, he had to fill his water casks with sea-water. Sensible of their peril, his crew made vows, to be kept if they were saved. They drew lots to determine who should carry a wax taper of five pounds to St. Mary of Guadalupe, and the penance fell to the Admiral. A sailor by another lot was doomed to make a pilgrimage to St. Mary of Lorette in the papal territory. A third lot was drawn for a night watch at St. Clara de Mogues, and it fell upon Columbus. Then they all vowed to pay their devotions at the nearest church of Our Lady if only they got ashore alive. 238 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. There was one thought which more than another troubled Columbus at this moment, and this was that in case his ship foundered, the world might never know of his success, for he was apprehensive that the " Pinta " had already foundered. Not to alarm the crew, he kept from them the fact that a cask a narrative which they had seen him throw overboard contained tL h own°ove g r e - an account of his voyage, written on parchment, board. rolled in a waxed cloth. He trusted to the chance of some one finding it. He placed a similar cask on the poop, to be washed off in case the ship went down. He does not men- tion this in the journal. After sunset on the 15th there were signs of clearing in the west, and the waves began to fall. The next morning 1493. Feb- . ruaryis. at sunrise there was land ahead. Now came the test February ig. of their reckoning. Some thought it the rock of Cin- Laud seen. t • 1 i • i n r i • /~a i tra near .Lisbon ; others said Madeira; Columbus de- cided they were near the Azores. The land was soon made out to be an island ; but a head wind thwarted them. Other land was next seen astern. While they were saying their Salve in the evening, some of the crew discerned a light to leeward, At the which might have been on the island first seen. Then Azores. later they saw another island, but night and the clouds obscured it too much to be recognized. The journal is blank 1493. Feb- f° r * ne 17th of February, except that under the next ruaryis. ^^ f.j ie ^g^ Columbus records that after sunset of the 17th they sailed round an island to find an anchorage ; but being unsuccessful in the search they beat out to sea again. In the morning of the 18th they stood in, discovered an anchor- age, sent a boat ashore, and found it was St. Mary's of the Azores. Columbus was right ! After sunset he received some provisions, which Juan de Cas- teneda, the Portuguese governor of the island, had sent to him. Meanwhile three Spaniards whom Columbus sent ashore had failed to return, not a little to his disturbance, for he was aware that there might be among the Portuguese some jealousy of his success. To fulfill one of the vows made during the gale, he now sent one half his crew ashore in penitential garments to a hermitage near the shore, intending on their return to go him- self with the other half. The record then reads : " The men being at their devotion, they were attacked by Casteneda with THE ISLANDS AND THE RETURN VOYAGE. 239 horse and foot, and made prisoners." Not being able to see the hermitage from his anchorage, and not suspecting this event, but still anxious, he made sail and proceeded till he got a view of the spot. Now he saw the horsemen, and how presently they dismounted, and with arms in their hands, entering a boat, ap- proached the ship. Then followed a parley, in which Columbus thought he discovered a purpose of the Portuguese to capture him, and they on their part discovered it to be not quite safe to board the Admiral. To enforce his dignity and authority as a representative of the sovereigns of Castile, he held up to the boats his commission with its royal insignia ; and reminded them that his instructions had been to treat all Portuguese ships with respect, since a spirit of amity existed between the two Crowns. It behooved the Portuguese, «,s he told them, to be wary lest by any hostile act they brought upon themselves the indignation of those higher in authority. The lofty bearing of Casteiieda continuing, Columbus began to fear that hostilities might possibly have broken out between Spain and Portugal. So the interview ended with little satisfaction to either, and the Admiral returned to his old anchorage. The next day, to work off the lee shore, they sailed for St. Michael's, and the weather continuing stormy he found himself crippled in having but three experienced seamen among the crew which remained to him. So not seeing St. Michael's they again bore away, on Thursday the 21st, for St. Mary's, and again reached 1493 Feb . their former anchorage. ruary 21, The storms of these latter days, here induced Columbus in his journal to recall how placid the sea had been among those other new-found islands, and how likely it was the terrestial paradise was in that region, as theologians and learned philosophers had supposed. From these thoughts he was aroused by a boat from shore with a notary on board, and Columbus, after completing his entertainment of the visitors, was asked to show his royal commission. He records his belief that this was done to give the Portuguese an opportunity of retreating from their belliger- ent attitude. At all events it had that effect, and the Span- iards who had been restrained were at once released. It is sur- mised that the conduct of Casteiieda was in conformity with instructions from Lisbon, to detain Columbus should he find his way to any dependency of the Portuguese crown. 240 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. On Sunday, the 24th, the ship again put out to sea; on 1493 Feb- Wednesday, they encountered another gale ; and on ruary24. ^he f H 0W ing Sunday, they were again in such peril that they made new vows. At daylight the next day, some land which they had seen in the night, not without gloomy apprehension of being driven upon it, proved to be the rock of Cintra. The mouth of the Tagus was before RockofCin- them, and the people of the adjacent town, observing traseen. fao, peril of the strange ship, offered prayers for its safety. The entrance of the river was safely made and the in the Ta- multitude welcomed them. Up the Tagus they went gus - to Rastelo, and anchored at about three o'clock in the afternoon. Here Columbus learned that the wintry rough- ness which he had recently experienced was but a part of the general severity of the season. From this place he dispatched a messenger to Spain to convey the news of his arrival to his sovereigns, and at the same time he sent a letter to the Sends letter 1 . <■ -r> i i • • i to the king king oi Jrortugal, then sojourning nine leagues away. He explained in it how he had asked the hospitality of a Portuguese port, because the Spanish sovereigns had di- rected him to do so, if he needed supplies. He further informed the king that he had come from the " Indies," which he had reached by sailing west. He hoped he would be allowed to bring his caravel to Lisbon, to be more secure ; for rumors of lading of gold might incite reckless persons, in so lonely a plact as he then lay, to deeds of violence. The Historie says that Columbus had determined beforehanc Name of to call whatever land he should discover, India, be- India ' cause he thought India was a name to suggest riches, and to invite encouragement for his project. While this letter to the Portuguese king was in transit, the attempt was made by certain officers of the Portuguese navy ii the port of Rastelo to induce Columbus to leave his ship anc give an account of himself ; but he would make no compromise of the dignity of a Castilian admiral. When his resentment was known and his commission was shown, the Portuguese offi- cers changed their policy to one of courtesy. The next day, and on the one following, the news of his arrival being spread about, a vast multitude came in boats from al parts to see him and his Indians. THE ISLANDS AND THE RETURN VOYAGE. 241 On the third day, a royal messenger brought an invitation from the king- to come and visit the court, which Co- 1493 lumbus, not without apprehension, accepted. The March8 - king's steward had been sent to accompany him and provide for his entertainment on the way. On the night of the following day, he reached Val do Paraiso, where the visitiTthe 8 king was. This spot was nine leagues from Lisbon, mg ' and it was supposed that his reception was not held in that city because a pest was raging there. A royal greeting was given to him. The king affected to believe that the voyage of Columbus was made to regions which the Portuguese had been allowed to occupy by a convention agreed upon with Spain in 1479. The Admiral undeceived him, and showed the king that his ships had not been near Guinea. We have another account of this interview at Val do Paraiso, in the pages of the Portuguese historian, Barros, tinged, doubt- less, with something of pique and prejudice, because the profit of the voyage had not been for the benefit of Portugal. That historian charges Columbus with extravagance, and even inso- lence, in his language to the king. He says that Columbus chided the monarch for the faithlessness that had lost him such an empire. He is represented as launching these rebukes so vehemently that the attending nobles were provoked to a degree which prompted whispers of assassination. That Columbus found his first harbor in the Tagus has given other of the older Portuguese writers, like Faria y Sousa, in his Europa Portu- guesa, and Vasconcelles and Resende, in their lives of Joao II., occasion to represent that his entering it was not so much in- duced by stress of weather as to seek a triumph over the Por- tuguese kiug in the first flush of the news. It is also said that the resolution was formed by the king to avail himself of the knowledge of two Portuguese who were found among Colum- bus's men. With their aid he proposed to send an armed expe- dition to take possession of the new-found regions before Co- lumbus could fit out a fleet for a second voyage. Francisco de Almeida was even selected, according to the report, to command this force. We hear, however, nothing more of it, and the Bull of Demarcation put an end to all such rivalries. If, on the contrary, we may believe Columbus himself, in a letter which he subsequently wrote, he did not escape being sus- 242 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. pected in Spain of having thus put himself in the power of the Portuguese in order to surrender the Indies to them. Spending Sunday at court, Columbus departed on Monday, 1493. March March 11, having first dispatched messages to the bus leaves 11 " King and Queen of Spain. An escort of knights was the court. provided for him, and taking the monastery of Villa- franca on his way, he kissed the hand of the Portuguese queen, who was there lodging, and journeying on, arrived at his car- saiis from ave l on Tuesday night. The next day he put to sea, the Tagus. an( j on Thursday morning was off Cape St. Vincent. The next morning they were off the island of Saltes, and cross- ing bar with the flood, he anchored on March 15, 1493, Paios, March not far from noon, where he had unmoored the " Santa Maria " over seven months before. " I made the passage thither in seventy-one days," he says in his published letter ; " and back in forty-eight, during thirteen of which number I was driven about by storms." The " Pinta," which had parted company with the Admiral on the 14th of February, had been driven by the gale The " Pin- . ... ta's" ex- into Bayona, a port of Gallicia, in the northwest cor- ner of Spain, whence Pinzon, its commander, had dis- patched a messenger to give information of his arrival and of his intended visit to the Court. A royal order peremptorily stayed, however, his projected visit, and left the first announcement of the news to be proclaimed by Columbus himself. This is the story which later writers have borrowed from the Historie. Oviedo tells us that the " Pinta" put to sea again from the She reaches Grallician harbor, and entered the port of Palos on the same day with Columbus, but her commander, fearing arrest or other unpleasantness, kept himself concealed till Co- Death of lumbus had started for Barcelona. Not many days later Pinzon died in his own house in Palos. Las Casas would have us believe that his death arose from mortification at the displeasure of his sovereigns ; but Harrisse points out that when Charles V. bestowed a coat-armor on the family, he recognized his merit as the discoverer of Espafiola. There is little trustworthy information on the matter, and Mufioz, whose lack of knowledge prompts inferences on his part, represents that it was Pinzon's request to explain his desertion of Colum- bus, which was neglected by the Court, and impressed him witk the royal displeasure. CHAPTER XI. COLUMBUS IN SPAIN AGAIN ; MARCH TO SEPTEMBER, 1493. Peter Martyr tells us of the common ignorance and dread pervading the ordinary ranks of society, before and during the absence of Columbus, in respect to all that part of the earth's circumference which the sun looked upon beyond Gades, till it again cast its rays upon the Golden Chersonesus. During this absence from the known and habitable regions of the globe, that orb was thought to sweep over the ominous and foreboding Sea of Darkness. No one could tell how wide that sea was. The learned disagreed in their estimates. A conception, far under the actual condition, had played no small part in making the voyage of Columbus possible. Men possessed legends of its mysteries. Fables of its many islands were repeated ; but no one then living was credibly thought to have tested its glooms except by sailing a little beyond the outermost of the Azores. It calls for no stretch of the imagination to picture the public sentiment in little Palos during the months of anxiety Palos which many households had endured since that August aroused at .. ,. ti/-^i l l tt the return mornincr, when in its dim light Columbus, the Jrinzons, of coium- ° - bus. and all their companions had been wafted gently out to sea by the current and the breeze. The winter had been unusually savage and weird. The navigators to the Atlantic islands had reported rough passages, and the ocean had broken wildly for long intervals along the rocks and sands of the penin- sular shores. It is a natural movement of the mind to wrap the absent in the gloom of the present hour ; and while Columbus had been passing along the gentle waters of the new archi- pelago, his actual experiences had been in strange contrast to the turmoil of the sea as it washed the European shores. He had indeed suffered on his return voyage the full tumultu- ousness of the elements, and we can hardly fail to recognize the disquiet of mind and falling of heart which those savage gales 244 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. must have given to the kin and friends of the untraceable wan- derers. The stories, then, which we have of the thanksgiving and jubilation of the people of Palos, when the "Nina" was descried passing the bar of the river, fall readily among the accepted truths of history. We can imagine how despondency vanished amid the acclaims of exultation ; how multitudes hung upon the words of strange revelations ; how the gaping populace won- dered at the bedecked Indians ; and how throngs of people opened a way that Columbus might lead the votive procession to the church. The canonizers of course read between the lines of the records that it was to the Church of Rabida that Colum- bus with his men now betook themselves. It matters little. There was much to mar the delight of some in the house- holds. Comforting reports must be told of those who were left at La Navidad. No one had died, unless the gale had sub- merged the " Pinta " and her crew. She had not been seen since the " Nina " parted with her in the gale. The story of her rescue has already been told. She entered the river before the rejoicings of the day were over, and relieved the remaining anxiety. The Spanish Court was known to be at this time at Bar- The court at celona, the Catalan port on the Mediterranean. Co- Barceiona. l um bus's first impulse was to proceed thither in his caravel ; but his recent hazards made him prudent, and so dis- patching a messenger to the Court, he proceeded to Seville to wait their majesties' commands. Of the native prisoners which he had brought away, one had died at sea, three were too sick to follow him, and were left at Palos, while six accompanied him on his journey. The messenger with such startling news had sped quickly ; and Columbus did not wait long for a response to his letter. The document (Mai'ch 30) showed that the event had 1493. March 30. coium- made a deep impression on the Court. The new do- moned to main of the west dwarfed for a while the conquests from the Moors. There was great eagerness to com- plete the title, and gather its wealth. Columbus was accord- ingly instructed to set in motion at once measures for a new expedition, and then to appear at Court and explain to the mon- archs what action on their part was needful. The demand was COLUMBUS IN SPAIN AGAIN 245 promptly answered ; and having organized the necessary ar- rangements in Seville for the preparation of a fleet, he departed for Barcelona to make homage to his sovereigns. His Indians accompanied him. Porters bore his various wonders from the new islands. His story had preceded him, and town after town vied with each other in welcoming him, and passing him on to new amazements and honors. By the middle of April he approached Barcelona, and was met by throngs of people, who conducted him into the city. His Indians, arrayed in effective if not accus- iuBarce- tomed ornament of gold, led the line. Bearers of all the marvels of the Indies followed, with their forty parrots and other strange birds of liveliest plumage, with the skins of un- known animals, with priceless plants that woidd now supplant the eastern spices, and with the precious ornaments of the dusky kings and princes whom he had met. Next, on horseback, came Columbus himself, conspicuous amid the mounted chivalry of Spain. Thus the procession marched on, the sover- through crowded streets, amid the shouts of lookers- on, to the alcazar of the Moorish kings in the Calle Ancha, at this time the residence of the Bishop of Urgil, where it is supposed Ferdinand and Isabella had caused their thrones to be set up, with a canopy of brocaded gold drooping about them. Here the monarchs awaited the coming of Columbus. Ferdinand, as the accounts picture him, was a man whose moderate stature was helped by his erectness and KingFerdi- robes to a decided dignity of carriage. His expres- nand * sion in the ruddy glow of his complexion, clearness of eye, and loftiness of brow, grew gracious in any pleasurable excitement. The Queen was a very suitable companion, grave and Q Ueen Isa . graceful in her demeanor. Her blue eyes and auburn bella- tresses comported with her outwardly benign air, and one looked sharply to see anything of her firmness and courage in the pre- vailing sweetness of her manner. The heir apparent, Prince Juan, was seated by their side. The dignitaries of the Court were grouped about. Las Casas tells us how commanding Columbus looked when he entered the room, sui-rounded by a brilliant com- pany of cavaliers. When he approached the royal before the dais, both monarchs rose to receive him standing ; and 246 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. when he stooped to kiss their hands, they gently and graciously lifted him, and made him sit as they did. They then asked to be told of what he had seen. As Columbus proceeded in his narrative, he pointed out the visible objects of his speech, — the Indians, the birds, the skins, the barbaric ornaments, and the stores of gold. We are told of the prayer of the sovereigns at the close, in which all joined ; and of the chanted Te Deum from the choir of the royal chapel, which bore the thoughts of every one, says the narrator, on the wings of melody to celestial delights. This ceremony ended, Columbus was conducted like a royal guest to the lodgings which had been provided for him. It has been a question if the details of this reception, which are put by Irving in imaginative fullness, and are commonly told on such a thread of incidents as have been related, are warranted by the scant accounts which are furnished us in the Historic, in Las Casas, and in Peter Martyr, particularly since the incident does not seem to have made enough of an impres- sion at the time to have been noticed at all in the Dietaria of the city, a record of events embodying those of far inferior inter- est as we would now value them. Mr. George Sumner carefully scanned this record many years ago, and could find not the slightest reference to the festivities. He fancies that the inci- dents in the mind of the recorder may have lost their signifi- cance through an Aragonese jealousy of the supremacy of Leon and Castile. It is certainly true that in Peter Martyr, the contemporary observer of this supposed pageantry, thei*e is nothing to warrant the exuberance of later writers. Martyr simply says that Co- lumbus was allowed to sit in the sovereigns' presence. Whatever the fact as to details, it seems quite evident that this season at Barcelona made the only unalloyed days of happi- ness, freed of anxiety, which Columbus ever experienced. He was observed of all, and everybody was complacent to him. His will was apparently law to King and subject. Las Casas tells us that he passed among the admiring throngs with his face wreathed with smiles of content. An equal complacency of delight and expectation settled upon all with whom he talked of the wonders of the land which he had found. They dreamed as he did of entering into golden cities with their hundred COLUMBUS IN SPAIN AGAIN. 247 bridges, that might cause new exultations, to which the present were as nothing. It was a fatal lure to the proud Spanish na- ture, and no one was doomed to expiate the folly of the delusion more poignantly than Columbus himself. Now that India had been found by the west, as was believed, and Barcelona was very likely palpitating with the S p re adof thought, the news spread in every direction. What thenews - were the discoveries of the Phoenicians to this ? What ques= tions of ethnology, language, species, migrations, phenomena of all sorts, in man and in the natural world, were pressing upon the mind, as the results were considered ? Were not these par- rots which Columbus had exhibited such as Pliny tells us are in Asia ? The great event had fallen in the midst of geographical de- velopment, and was understood at last. Marco Polo and the others had told their marvels of the east. The navigators of Prince Henry had found new wonders on the sea. Kegiomon- tanus, Behaim, and Toscanelli had not communed in vain with cosmographical problems. Even errors had been stepping- stones ; as when the belief in the easterly over-extension of Asia had pictured it near enough in the west to convince men that the hazard of the Sea of Darkness was not so great after all. Spain was then the centre of much activity of mind. " I am here," records Peter Martyr, " at the source of this welcome intelligence from the new found lands, and tyr records as the historian of such events, I may hope to go down to posterity as their recorder." We must remember this profession when we try to account for his meagre record of the reception at Barcelona. That part of the letter of Peter Martyr, dated at Barcelona, on the ides of May, 1493, which conveyed to his correspondent the first tidings of Columbus's return, is in these words, as trans- lated by Harrisse : " A certain Christopher Colonus, a Ligurian, returned from the antipodes. He had obtained for that purpose three ships from my sovereigns, with much difficulty, because the ideas which he expressed were considered extravagant. He came back and brought specimens of many precious things, es- pecially gold, which those regions naturally produce." Martyr also tells us that when Pomponius Laetus got such news, he 248 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. could scarcely refrain " from tears of joy at so unlooked-for an event." " What more delicious food for an ingenious mind ! " said Martyr to him in return. " To talk with people who have seen all this is elevating to the mind." The confidence of Mar- tyr, however, in the belief of Columbus that the true Indies had been found was not marked. He speaks of the islands as ad- jacent to, and not themselves, the East. Sebastian Cabot remembered the time when these marvelous The news in tidings reached the court of Henry VII. in London, England. anc j j ie te n s us ^sd, y. was accoun t e d a " thing more divine than human." A letter which Columbus had written and early dispatched Columbus's to Barcelona, nearly in duplicate, to the treasurers of firstietter. ^q two crowns was promptly translated into Latin, and was sent to Italy to be issued in numerous editions, to be copied in turn by the Paris and Antwerp printers, and a little more sluggishly by those of Germany. There is, however, singularly little commenting on these events that passed into print and has come down to us; and influence of we mav we ^ doubt if the effect on the public mind, the event. beyond certain learned circles, was at all commensurate with what we may now imagine the recognition of so important an event ought to have been. Nordenskiold, studying the car- tography and literature of the early discoveries in America in his Facsimile Atlas, is forced to the conclusion that " scarcely any discovery of importance was ever received with so much indifference, even in circles where sufficient genius and states- manship ought to have prevailed to appreciate the changes they foreshadowed in the development of the economical and polit- ical conditions of mankind." It happened on June 19, 1493, but a few weeks after the Pope had made his first public recognition of the dis- 19. 'carja'- covery, that the Spanish ambassador at the Papal Court, Bernardin de Carjaval, referred in an oration to " the unknown lands, lately found, lying towards the Indies ; " and at about the same time there was but a mere reference to the event in the Los Tratados of Doctor Alonso Ortis, pub- lished at Seville. While this strange bruit was thus spreading more or less, we get some glimpses of the personal life of Columbus during these COLUMBUS IN SPAIN AGAIN. 249 days of his sojourn in Barcelona. We hear of him. riding- through the streets on horseback, on one side of the Columbus in King, with Prince Juan on the other. favor ' We find record of his being awarded the pension of thirty crowns, as the first discoverer of land, by virtue of the mysterious light, and Irving thinks that we may first seeing condone this theft from the brave sailor who unques- tionably saw land the first, by remembering that " Columbus's whole ambition was involved." It seems to others that his whole character was involved. We find him a guest at a banquet given by Cardinal Men- doza, and the well-known story of his making an egg story of the stand upright, by chipping one end of it, is associated egg- with this merriment of the table. An impertinent question of a shallow courtier had induced Columbus to show a table full of guests that it was easy enough to do anything when the way was pointed out. The story, except as belonging to a tradi- tional stock of anecdotes, dating far back of Columbus, always ready for an application, has no authority earlier than Benzoni, and loses its point in the destruction of the end on which the aim was to make it stand. This has been so palpable to some of the repeaters of the story that they have supposed that the feat was accomplished, not by cracking the end of the egg, but by using a quick motion which broke the sack which holds the yolk, so that that weightier substance settled at one end, and balanced the egg in an upright position. So passed the time with the new-made hero, in drinking, as Irving expresses it, " the honeyed draught of popularity before enmity and detraction had time to drug it with bitterness." We find the sovereigns bestowing upon him, on the 20th of May, a coat of arms, which shows a castle and a lion 1493 May in the upper quarters, and in those below, a group of ifcoatfof' 68 golden islands in a sea of waves, on the one hand, and arm3 ' the arms to which his family had been entitled, on the other. Humboldt speaks of this archipelago as the first map of Amer- ica, but he apparently knew only Oviedo's description of the arms, for the latter places the islands in a gulf formed by a main- land, and in this fashion they are grouped in a blazon of the arms which is preserved at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at Paris — a duplicate being at Genoa. Harrisse says that this 250 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. design is the original water-color, made under Columbus's eye in 1502. In this picture, — which is the earliest blazonry which has come down to us, — the other lower quarter has the five golden anchors on a blue ground, which it is claimed was ad- THE ARMS OF COLUMBUS. [From Oviedo's Coronica."] judged to Columbus as the distinctive badge of an Admiral of Spain. The personal arms are relegated to a minor overlying shield at the lower point of the escutcheon. Oviedo also says that trees and other objects should be figured on the mainland. The lion and castle of the original grant were simply re- minders of the arms of Leon and Castile ; but Columbus seems, COLUMBUS IN SPAIN AGAIN. 251 of his own motion, so far as Harrisse can discover, to have changed the blazonry of those objects in the drawing of 1502 to agree with those of the royal arms. It was by the same ar- rogant license, apparently, that he introduced later the conti- nental shore of the archipelago ; and Harrisse can find no record that the anchors were ever by any authority added to his blazon, nor that the professed family arms, borne in connection, had any warrant whatever. The earliest engraved copy of the arms is in the Historia General of Oviedo in 1535, where a profile helmet supports a crest made of a globe topped by a cross. In Oviedo's Coronica of 1547, the helmet is shown in front view. There seems to have been some wide discrepancies in the heraldic excursions of these early writers. Las Casas, for instance, puts the golden lion in a silver field, — when heraldry abhors a conjunction of metals, as much as nature abhors a vacuum. The discussion of the family arms which were added by Columbus to the escutcheon made a significant part of the arguments in the suit, many years later, of Baldassare (Balthazar) Colombo to possess the Admi- ral's dignities : and as Harrisse points out, the emblem of those Italian Colombos of any pretensions to nobility was invariably a dove of some kind, — a device quite distinct from those designa- ted by Columbus. This assumption of family arms by Columbus is held by Harrisse to be simply a concession to the prejudices of his period, and to the exigencies of his new position. The arms have been changed under the dukes of Veragua to show silver-capped waves in the sea, while a globe surmounted by a cross is placed in the midst of a gulf containing only five islands. There is another later accompaniment of the arms, of which the origin has escaped all search. It is far more familiar than the escutcheon, on which it plays the part of a motto. His a i leg ed It sometimes represents that Columbus found for the mott0- allied crowns a new world, and at other times that he gave one to them. Por Castilla 6 por Leon Nuevo Mundo halld Colon. A Castilla, y a Leon Nuevo Mundo di6 Colon. Oviedo is the earliest to mention this distich in 1535. It is 252 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. given in the Historie, not as a motto of the arms, but as an inscription placed by the king on the tomb of Columbus some years after his death. If this is true, it does away with the claims of Gomara that Columbus himself added it to his arms. But diplomacy had its part to play in these events. As the Diplomacy Christian world at that time recognized the rights of of Demar- 1 ^he Holy Father to confirm any trespass on the pos- cation. sessions of the heathen, there was a prompt effort on the part of Ferdinand to bring the matter to the attention of the Pope. As early as 1438, bulls of Martin V. and Eugene IV. had permitted the Spaniards to sail west and the Portuguese south ; and a confirmation of the same had been made by Pope Nicholas the Fifth. In 1479, the rival crowns of Portugal and Spain had agreed to respect their mutual rights under these papal decisions. The messengers whom Ferdinand sent to Rome were in- structed to intimate that the actual possession which had been made in their behalf of these new regions did not require papal sanction, as they had met there no Christian occupants : but that as dutiful children of the church it would be grateful to re- ceive such a benediction on their energies for the faith as a con- firmatory bull would imply. Ferdinand had too much of wili- ness in his own nature, and the practice of it was too much a part of the epoch, wholly to trust a man so notoriously perverse and obstinate as Alexander VI. was. Though Munos calls Alexander the friend of Ferdinand, and though the Pope was by birth an Aragonese, experience had shown that there was no certainty of his support in a matter affecting the interest of Spain. A folio printed leaf in Gothic characters, of which the single copy sold in London in 1854 is said to be the only 1493. May rj . , ., ,. , , . ,. ,, 3. The Bull one known to bibliographers, made public to the world the famous Bull of Demarcation of Alexander VI., bearing date May 3, 1493. If one would believe Hak- luyt, the Pope had been induced to do this act by his own option, rather than at the intercession of the Spanish mon- archs. Under it, and a second bull of the day following, Spain was entitled to possess, " on condition of planting the Catholic COLUMBUS IN SPAIN AGAIN. 253 POPE ALEXANDER VI. [A bust in the Berlin Museum.] 254 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. faith," all lands not already occupied by Christian powers, west of a meridian drawn one hundred leagues west of the Azores and Cape de Verde Islands, evidently on the supposition that these two groups were in the same longitude, the fact being that the most westerly of the southern, and the most easterly of the northern, group possessed neai'ly the same meridian. Though Portugal was not mentioned in describing this line, it was un- derstood that there was reserved to her the same privilege easterly. There was not as yet any consideration given to the division which this great circle meridian was likely to make on the other side of the globe, where Portugal was yet to be most interested. The Cape of Good Hope had not then been doubled, and the present effect of the division was to confine the Portuguese to an exploration of the western African coast and to adjacent islands. It will be observed that in the placing of this line the magnetic phenomena which Columbus had observed on his recent voyage were not forgotten, if the coincidence can be so interpreted. Humboldt suggests that it can. To make a physical limit serve a political one was an obvious Line of no recourse at a time when the line of no variation was variation. thought to be unique and of a true north and south direction ; but within a century the observers found three other lines, as Acosta tells us in his Hlstoria Natural de las Indias, in 1589 ; and there proved to be a persistent migration of these lines, all little suited to terrestrial demarcations. Roselly de Lor- gues and the canonizers, however, having given to Columbus the planning of the line in his cell at Rabida, think, with a surpris- ing prescience on his part, and with a very convenient oblivi- ousness on their part, that he had chosen " precisely the only point of our planet which science would choose in our day, — a mysterious demarcation made by its omnipotent Creator," in sovereign disregard, unfortunately, of the laws of his own universe ! Meanwhile there were movements in Portugal which Ferdi- nand had not failed to notice. An ambassador had Suspicious «... . . . movements come from its kins:, asking permission to buv certain hi Portugal. ...,, 6 ' A- r Ar • articles 01 prohibited exportation tor use on an Atrican expedition which the Portuguese were fitting out. Ferdinand suspected that the true purpose of this armament was to seize COLUMBUS IN SPAIN AGAIN. 255 the new islands, under a pretense as dishonorable as that which covered the ostensible voyage to the Cape de Verde Islands, by whose exposure Columbus had been driven into Spain. The Spanish monarch was alert enough to get quite beforehand with his royal brother. Before the ambassador of which mention has been made had come to the Spanish Court, Ferdinand had dispatched Lope de Herrera to Lisbon, armed with a concilia- tory and a denunciatory letter, to use one or the other, as he might find the conditions demanded. The Portuguese historian Resende tells us that Joao, in order to give a wrong scent, had openly bestowed largesses on some and had secretly suborned other members of Ferdinand's cabinet, so that he did not lack for knowledge of the Spanish intentions from the latter mem- bers. He and his ambassadors were accordingly found by Fer- dinand to be inexplicably prepared at every new turn of the negotiations. In this way Joao had been informed of the double mission of Herrera, and could avoid the issue with him, while he sent his own ambassadors to Spain, to promise that, pending their nego- tiations, no vessel should sail on any voyage of discovery for sixty days. They were also to propose that instead of the papal line, one should be drawn due west from the Canaries, giving all new discoveries north to the Spaniards, and all south to the Portuguese. This new move Ferdinand turned to his own advan- tage, for it gave him the opportunity to enter upon a course of diplomacy which he could extend long enough to allow Columbus to get off with a new armament. He then sent a fresh embassy, with instructions to move slowly and protract the discussion, but to resort, when compelled, to a proposition for arbitration. Joao was foiled and he knew it. " These ambassadors," he said, " have no feet to hurry and no head to propound." The Span- ish game was the best played, and the Portuguese king grew fretful under it, and intimated sometimes a purpose to proceed to violence, but he was restrained by a better wisdom. We de- pend mainly upon the Portuguese historians for understanding these complications, and it is to be hoped that some time the archives of the Vatican may reveal the substance of these tri- partite negotiations of the papal court and the two crowns. Before Columbus had left Barcelona, a large gratuity had 256 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. been awarded to him by his sovereigns ; an order had been issued commanding free lodgings to be given to him and his followers, wherever he went, and the original stipulations as to 1493. May. honors and authority, made by the sovereigns at coTu°m S bus Santa Fe, had been confirmed (May 28). A royal confirmed. sea j was now con fided to his keeping, to be set to let- ters patent, and to commissions that it might be found necessary to issue. It might be used even in appointing a deputy, to act in the absence of Columbus. His appointments were to hold during the royal pleasure. His own power was defined at the same time, and in particular to hold command over the entire expedition, and to conduct its future government and explora- May 28. Co- tions. He left Barcelona, after leavetakings, on May leave" Bar- 28 ; and his instructions, as printed by Navarrete, were ceiona. signed the next day. It is not unlikely they were based on suggestions of Columbus made in a letter, without June, in date, which has recently been printed in the Cartas Seville. ^ e j na \i as (1877). Early in June, he was in Seville, and soon after he was joined by Juan Rodriguez de Fonseca, archdeacon of Seville, who, as representative of the Crown, had been made the chief director of the prepa- rations. It is claimed by Harrisse that this priest has been painted by the biographers of Columbus much blacker than he really was, on the strength of the objurgations which the His- toric bestows upon him. Las Casas calls him worldly ; and he deserves the epithet if a dominating career of thirty years in controlling the affairs of the Indies is any evidence of fitness in such matters. His position placed him where he had purposes to thwart as well as projects to foster, and the record of this age of discovery is not without many proofs of selfish and dis- honorable motives, which Fonseca might be called upon to re- press. That his discrimination was not always clear-sighted may be expected ; that he was sometimes perfidious may be true, but he was dealing mainly with those who could be perfid- ious also. That he abused his authority might also go without dispute ; but so did Columbus and the rest. In the game of diamond-cut-diamond, it is not always just to single out a single victim for condemnation, as is done by Irving and the canon- izers. It was while at Seville, engaged in this work of preparation, COLUMBUS IN SPAIN AGAIN. 257 that Fonseca sought to check the demands of Columbus as re- spects the number of his personal servitors. That these de- mands were immoderate, the character of Columbus, never cau- tious under incitement, warrants us in believing* ; and that the official guardian of the royal treasury should have views of his own is not to be wondered at. The story goes that the sover- eigns forced Fonseca to yield, and that this was the offense of Columbus which could neither be forgotten nor forgiven by Fonseca, and for which severities were visited upon him and his heirs in the years to come. Irving is confident that Fonseca has escaped the condemnation which Spanish writers would willingly have put upon him, for fear of the ecclesiastical cen- sors of the press. The measures which were now taken in accordance with the instructions given to Columbus, already referred to, to regu- late the commerce of the Indies, with a custom house at Cadiz and a corresponding one in Espaliola under the control of the Admiral, ripened in time into what was known as the Counci i for Council for the Indies. It had been early determined theIudies - (May 23) to control all emigration to the new regions, and no one was allowed to trade thither except under license from the monarchs, Columbus, or Fonseca. A royal order had put all ships and appurtenances in the ports of Andalusia at the demand of Fonseca and New fleet Columbus, for a reasonable compensation, and com- e< * lu PP ed - pelled all persons required for the service to embark in it on suitable pay. Two thirds of the ecclesiastical tithes, the se- questered property of banished Jews, and other resources were set apart to meet these expenses, and the treasurer was author- ized to contract a loan, if necessary. To eke out the resources, this last was resorted to, and 5,000,000 maravedis were borrowed from the Duke of Medina-Sidonia. All the transactions relating to the procuring and dispensing of moneys had been confided to a treasurer, Francisco Pinelo ; with the aid of an accountant, Juan de Soria. Everything was hurriedly gathered for the armament, for it was of the utmost importance that the prepa- rations should move faster than the watching diplomacy. Artillery which had been in use on shipboard for more than a century and a half was speedily amassed. The arquebuse, however, had not altogether been supplanted by the matchlock, 258 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. %tt*(to$m. Beradi and Vespucius. and was yet preferred in some hands for its lightness. Mili- tary stores which had been left over from the Moorish war and were now housed in the Alhambra, at this time con- verted into an arsenal, were op- portunely drawn upon. The labor of an intermediary in much of this prep- aration fell upon Juonato Beradi, a Florentine mer- chant then settled in Seville, and it is interesting to know that Ainer- i c u s Vespucius, then a mature man of two and forty, was en- gaged under Be- ®utyxmbxQ$ttt» *»*«» ©*««W turists weie or- #©« tttC^t fctC^tflC^ t(l SUtrOltlCtl/ dered to be in rDaritllt 111011 gWt^UmgM ttMgfdlitfaf 1493 ^ne Seville &fr£unfJ©9ruett»rmrta,mwfjrn on June £ |/ &# 20, and to hold crossbow-maker. tllPmsplvPS in [From Jost Amman's Beschreibimg, 1586.] readiness to embark, it may be inferred that the sailing of some portion of the fleet may at that time have been expected at a date not much later. The interest of Isabella in the new expedition was almost COLUMBUS IN SPAIN AGAIN. 259 wholly on its emotional and intellectual side. She had been greatly engrossed with the spiritual welfare of the In- Isabe n a » s dians whom Columbus had taken to Barcelona. Their interest - baptism had taken place with great state and ceremony, the King, Queen, and Prince Juan officiating as sponsors. Indians bap _ It was intended that they should reembark with the tlzed ' new expedition. Prince Juan, however, picked out one of these Indians for his personal service, and when the fellow died, two years later, it was a source of gratification, as Herrera tells us, that at last one of his race had entered the gates of heaven ! Only four of the six ever reached their native country. We know nothing of the fate of those left sick at Palos. The Pope, to further all methods for the extension of the faith, had commissioned (June 24) a Benedictine monk, Bernardo Buil (Boyle), of Catalonia, to be his apostolic vicar in the new world, and this priest was to be ac- companied by eleven brothers of the order. The Queen in- trusted to them the sacred vessels and vestments from her own altar. The instructions which Columbus received were to deal lovingly with the poor natives. We shall see how faithful he was to the behest. Isabella's musings were not, however, all so piously confined. She wrote to Columbus from Segovia in August, requiring him to make provisions for bringing back to Spain specimens of the peculiar birds of the new regions, as indications of untried climates and seasons. Again, in writing to Columbus, September 5, she urged him not to rely wholly on his own great knowledge, but to take such a skillful astronomer on his voyage as Fray and naviga- Antonio de Marchena, — the same whom Columbus later spoke of as being one of the two persons who had never made him a laughing-stock. Munoz says the office of astron- omer was not filled. Dealing with the question of longitude was a matter in which there was at this time little insight, and no general agreement. Columbus, as we have seen, suspected the variation of the needle might afford the basis of a system ; but he grew to appre- hend, as he tells us in the narrative of his fourth voyage, that the astronomical method was the only infallible one, but whether his preference was for the opposition of planets, the occultations of 260 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. stars, the changes in the moon's declination, or the comparisons of Jupiter's altitude with the lunar position, — all of which were in some form in ^,^ -**%*• -r> vogue, - does not £)flj ^(jWlflCftf 1*. appear, The method by convey- ance of time, so well known now in the use of chro- nometers, seems to have later been suggested by Alonso de Santa Cruz, — too late for the recognition of Columbus ; but the instrumental- ity of water-clocks, sand - clocks, and other crude de- vices, like the tim- ing of b u r n i n g wicks, was too uncertain to ob- tain even tran- ^ sient sanction. 3* I™*' ** N flfenDmSB&r/ The astrolabe, @erec^tr>nt> ^faft nac{? Ccr C9?enfur/ for all the im- 9}ott ^[fCttl Otag Drtfc flam 2)f)rfattf/ provements of Be- @uf/t>af? fie fjabm fatten fofratrfcf/ haim, was still an £9?acl> flU cf? fcar$U #ti(£m fytfyuf}/ awkward instru- £arej)tt ICfc fie ffaftia, bcfdjfOlf?/ Stt&W* 9^up©ritti/©r«tt)/rott)j! Matt) £)rinn mant>ic(5(unt>Mit> w'wfjfgak ment for ascer- taining latitude, especially on a rolling Astrolabe. . . or pitch- ing ship, and we know that Vasco da Gama went on shore at the Cape de Verde Islands to take observations when the motion of the sea balked him on shipboard. THE CLOCK-MAKER. [From Jost Amman's Beschreibung, Frankfort.] COLUMBUS IN SPAIN AGAIN. 261 Whether the cross-staff or Jackstaff, a seaboard implement somewhat more convenient than the astrolabe, was known to Columbus is not very clear, — probably it was not ; but the navigators that soon followed him found it more man- ageable on rolling ships than the older instruments. amiJaek- It was simply a stick, along which, after one end of it was placed at the eye, a scaled crossbar was pushed until its two ends touched, the lower, the horizon, and the upper, the heavenly body whose altitude was to be taken. A scale on the stick then showed, at the point where the bar was left, the degree of latitude. The best of such aids, however, did not conduce to great ac- curacy, and the early maps, in comparison with modern, show sometimes several degrees of error in scaling from the equator. An error once committed was readily copied, and different carto- graphical records put in service by the professional map-makers came sometimes by a process of averages to show some sur- prising diversities, with positive errors of considerable Errors in extent. The island of Cuba, for instance, early found latltude - place in the charts seven and eight degrees too far north, with dependent islands in equally wrong positions. As the preparations went on, a fleet of seventeen vessels, large and small, three of which were called transports, had, according to the best estimates, finally been put in readiness. Scillacio tells us that some of the smallest had been constructed of light draft, especially for exploring service. Horses and domestic animals of all kinds were at last gathered on board. Every kind of seed and agricultural implement, stores vessels of commodities for barter with the Indians, and all the appurtenances of active life were accumulated. Munoz re- marks that it is evident that sugar cane, rice, and vines had not been discovered or noted by Columbus on his first voyage, or we would not have found them among the commodities provided for the second. In making up the company of the adventurers, there was lit- tle need of active measures to induce recruits. Many j^m com . an Hidalgo and cavalier took service at their own ^ anies - cost. Galvano, who must have received the reports by tradi- tion, says that such was the " desire of travel that the men were 262 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. ready to leap into the sea to swim, if it had been possible, into these new found parts." Traffic, adventure, luxury, feats of arms, — all were inducements that lured one individual or an- other. Some there were to make names for themselves in their new fields. Such was Alonso de Ojeda, a daring youth, expert in all activities, who had served his ambition in the Moorish wars, and had been particularly favored by the Duke of Medina-Celi, the friend of Columbus. We find others whose names we shall again encounter. The younger brother of Columbus, Diego Colon, had come to Spain, attracted by the success of Christopher. The father and LasCasas uncle of Las Casas, from whose conversations with Eeon^La *he Admiral that historian could profit in the future, Cosa, etc. J uan Ponce de Leon, the later discoverer of Florida, Juan de la Cosa, whose map is the first we have of the New World, and. Dr. Chanca, a physician of Seville, who was pen- sioned by the Crown, and to whom we owe one of the narratives of the voyage, were also of the company. The thousand persons to which the expedition had at first been limited became, under the pressure of eager cavaliers, nearer 1,200, and this number was eventually increased by stowaways 1500 souls anc l °t ner hangers-on, till the number embarked was embark. nQ ^ muc h s l lor t of 1,500. This is Oviedo's statement. Bernaldez and Peter Martyr make the number 1,200, or there- abouts. Perhaps these were the ordinary hands, and the 300 more were officers and the like, for the statements do not render it certain how the enumerations are made. So far as we know their names, but a single companion of Columbus in his first voyage was now with him. The twenty horsemen already men- tioned are supposed to be the only mounted soldiers that em- barked. Columbus says, in a letter addressed to their majesties, that " the number of colonists who desire to go thither amounts to two thousand," which would indicate that a large number were denied. The letter is undated, and may not be of a date near the sailing ; if it is, it probably indicates to some degree the number of persons who were denied, embarkation. As the day approached for the departure there was some uneasiness over a report of a Portuguese caravel sailing westward from Madeira, and it was proposed to send some of the fleet in advance to over- take the vessel ; but after some diplomatic fence between Ferdi- COLUMBUS IN SPAIN AGAIN. 263 nand and Joao, the disquiet ended, or at least nothing was done on either side. At one time Columbus had hoped to embark on the 15th of August; but it was six weeks later before everything was ready. While Columbus was still in Spain, but before news of his purposes and their successful issue had reached Nuremberg, a learned doctor, Jerome Miinznieister, of that city, had written, July 14, 1493, to King John of Portugal, asking him to heed the advice of the Emperor Maximilian, and send Martin Be bairn on an expedition to find land at the west. His argu- ments, deduced from Aristotle, Seneca, D'Ailly and others, and fortified by stories of drift from the west cast upon the Azores, were precisely what Toscanelli had used in 1474, and furnish further evidence of the opinions prevalent in learned circles before Columbus began his advocacy. We know that Behaim was in Nuremberg, making his globe, a little before this, and that Miinzmeister had friendly relations with him. There are two important inferences from this letter. One is, that outside of a narrow circle of local cosmographers and interested potentates, the return of Co- lumbus was little known ; and the tidings of it did not reach Germany in four months. It may be remembered that the Nuremberg Chronicle, professing to bring the world's progress down to date, had not made any entry about Columbus, down to July, 1493. The second inference is, that Behaim, a noble and courtier at the Portuguese Court, had not known of the suit to the Portuguese king, of an adventurer like Columbus. However, the failure of the mention of Columbus in the letter cannot be deemed an emphatic proof. The letter in question was printed near the date of it at Lisbon, but only a single copy — in the library at Evora, in Portugal — is now known ; and though this has been reprinted to answer local interest of late years in Portugal and the Azores, it was not till Harrisse included it in his Discovery of North America (1892) that it came to the attention of American scholars. CHAPTER XII. THE SECOND VOYAGE. 1493-1494. The last day in port was a season of solemnity and gratula- Theembar- tion. Coma, a Spaniard, who, if not an eyewitness, katwn. g £ jjjg (j escr iption from observers, thus describes the scene in a letter to Scillacio in Pavia : " The religious rites usual on such occasions were performed by the sailors ; the last embraces were given ; the ships were hung with brilliant cloths ; streamers were wound in the rigging ; and the royal standard flapped everywhere at the sterns of the vessels. The pipers and harpers held in mute astonishment the Nereids and even the Sirens with their sweet modulations. The shores reechoed the clang of trumpets and the braying of clarions. The discharge of cannon rolled over the water. Some Venetian galleys chanc- ing to enter the harbor joined in the jubilation, and the cheers of united nations went up with prayers for blessings on the ven- turing crews." Night followed, calm or broken, restful or wearisome, as the 1493. Sep- case might be, for one or another, and when the day Thffleet 5 ' dawned (September 25, 1493) the note of prepara- 8aUs ' tion was everywhere heard. It was the same on the three great caracks, on the lesser caravels, and on the light craft, which had been especially fitted for exploration. The eager and curious mass of beings which crowded their decks were certainly a motley show. There were cavalier and priest, hidalgo and artisan, soldier and sailor. The ambitious thoughts which animated them were as various as their habits. There wei*e those of the adventurer, with no purpose whatever but pastime, be it easy or severe. There was the greed of the spec- ulator, counting the values of trinkets against stores of gold. THE SECOND VOYAGE. 265 There was the brooding of the administrators, with unsolved problems of new communities in their heads. There were ears that already caught the songs of salvation from native throats. There was Columbus himself, combining all ambitions in one, looking around this harbor of Cadiz studded with his lordly fleet, spreading its creaking sails, lifting its dripping anchors. It was his to contrast it with the scene at Palos a little over a year before. This needy Genoese vested with the viceroyalty of a new world was more of an adventurer than any. Columbus's He was a speculator who overstepped them all in au- character - dacious visions and golden expectancies. He was an adminis- trator over a new government, untried and undivined. To his ears the hymns of the Church soared with a militant warning, dooming the heathen of the Indies, and appalling the Moslem hordes that imperiled the Holy Sepulchre. Under the eye of this one commanding spirit, the vessels fell into a common course, and were wafted out upon the great ocean under the lead of the escorting galleys of the Venetians. The responsibility of the captain-general of the great armament had begun. He had been instructed to steer widely clear of the Portuguese coast, and he bore away in the lead directly to the southwest. On the seventh day (October 1) they reached the Gran Canaria, where they tarried i> er i. Ca- to repair a leaky ship. On the 5th they anchored at Gomera. Two days were required here to complete some parts of their equipment, for the islands had already become the centre of great industries and produced largely. " They have enterprising merchants who carry their commerce to many shores," wrote Coma to Scillacio. There were wood and water to be taken on board. A variety of domestic animals, calves, goats, sheep, and swine ; some fowls, and the seed of many orchard and garden fruits, oranges, lemons, melons, and the like, were gathered from the inhabi- tants and stowed away in the remaining spaces of the ships. On the 7th the fleet sailed, but it was not till the 13th that the gentle winds had taken them beyond Ferro and the unbounded sea was about the great Admiral. He beri.3. At . sea. bore away much more southerly than in his first voy- age, so as to strike, if he could, the islands that were so con- stantly spoken of, the previous year, as lying southeasterly from Espanola. 266 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. His ultimate port was, of course, the harbor of La Navidad, and he had issued sealed instructions to all his commanders, to guide any one who should part company with the fleet. The winds were favorable, but the dull sailing of the Admiral's ship restrained the rest. In ten days they had overshot the lon- gitude of the Sargasso Sea without seeing it, leaving its floating weeds to the north. In a few days more they experienced heavy st. Elmo's tempests. They gathered confidence from an old be- Ught ' lief, when they saw St. Elmo waving his lambent flames about the upper rigging, while they greeted his presence with their prayers and songs. " The fact is certain," says Coma, " that two lights shone through the darkness of the night on the topmast of the Admi- ral's ship. Forthwith the tempest began to abate, the sea to remit its fury, the waves their violence, and the surface of the waves became as smooth as polished marble." This sudden gale of four hours' duration came on St. Simon's eve. The same authority represents that the protracted voyage had caused their water to run low, for the Admiral, confident of his nearness to land, and partly to reassure the timid, had caused it to be served unstintingly. " You might compare him to Moses," adds Coma, " encouraging the thirsty armies of the Israelites in the dry wastes of the wilderness." On Saturday, November 2, the leaders compared reckonings. 1493. No- Some thought they had come 780 leagues from Ferro ; others, 800. There were anxiety and weariness on board. The constant fatigue of bailing out the leaky ships had had its disheartening effect. Columbus, with a practiced eye, saw signs of land in the color of the water and the shifting winds, and he signaled every vessel to take in sail. It was a waiting night. The first light of Sunday glinted on the top of a lofty mountain ahead, descried by a watch at the Ad- miral's masthead. As the island was approached, the Admiral Dominica named it, in remembrance of the holy day, Dominica. The usual service with the Salve Regina was chanted throughout the fleet, which moved on steadily, bringing island after island into view. Columbus could find no good anchorage at Dominica, and leaving one vessel to continue the search, he passed on to another island, which he named from his ship, Marigalante. Here he landed, set up the THE SECOND VOYAGE. 267 UPE «*—. |_A DOMt ^wo/ ( Antflete 'orneduBoisDiabtey GUADALOUPE, MARIE GALANTE, AND DOMINICA. [From Henrique's Les Colonies Francoises, Paris, 1889.] royal banner in token of possession of the group, — for he had seen six islands, — and sought for inhabitants. He could find none, nor any signs of occupation. There was nothing but a tangle of wood in every direction, a sparkling mass of leafage, 268 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. trembling in luxurious beauty and giving off odors of spice. Some of the men tasted an unknown fruit, and suffered an im- mediate inflammation about the face, which it required remedies to assuage. The next morning; Columbus was attracted 1493. No- vembei-3. by the lofty volcanic peak of another island, and, sail- ing up to it, he could see cascades on the sides of this eminence. " Among those who viewed this marvelous phenomena at a distance from the ships," says Coma, " it was at first a subject of dispute whether it were light reflected from masses of com- pact snow, or the broad surface of a smooth-worn road. At last the opinion prevailed that it was a vast river." Columbus remembered that he had promised the monks of Our Lady of Guadaloupe, in Estremadura, to place some token of them in this strange world, and so he gave this isl- and the name of Guadaloupe. Landing the next day, a week of wonders followed. The exploring parties found the first village abandoned ; but this had been done so hastily that some young children had been left behind. These they decked with hawks' bells, to win their returning parents. One place showed a public square sur- rounded by rectangular houses, made of logs and intertwined branches, and thatched with palms. They went through the houses and noted what they saw. They observed at the entrance of one some serpents carved in wood. They found netted ham- mocks, beside calabashes, pottery, and even skulls used for uten- sils of household service. They discovered cloth made of cot- ton ; bows and bone-tipped arrows, said sometimes to be pointed with human shin-bones ; domesticated fowl very like geese ; tame parrots ; and pineapples, whose flavor enchanted them. They found what might possibly be relics of Europe, washed hither by the equatorial currents as they set from the African coasts, — an iron pot, as they thought it (we know this from the Historie), and the stern-timber of a vessel, which they could have less easily mistaken. They found something to Cannibals. 1 • r j i i 1 ±t • £ £ horrify them in human bones, the remains ot a teast, as they were ready enough to believe, for they were seeking con- firmation of the stories of cannibals which Columbus had heard on his first voyage. They learned that boys were fattened like capons. THE SECOND VOYAGE. 269 270 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. The next day they captured a youth and some women, but the men eluded them. Columbus was now fully convinced that he had at last discovered the cannibals, and when it was found that one of his captains and eight men had not returned to their ship, he was under great apprehensions. He sent ex- ploring parties into the woods. They hallooed and fired their arquebuses, but to no avail. As they threaded their way through the thickets, they came upon some villages, but the in- habitants fled, leaving their meals half cooked ; and they were convinced they saw human flesh on the spit and in the pots. While this party was absent, some women belonging to the neighboring islands, captives of this savage people, came off to the ships and sought protection. Columbus decked them with rings and bells, and forced them ashore, while they begged to re- main. The islanders stripped off their ornaments, and allowed them to return for more. These women said that the chief of the island and most of the warriors were absent on a predatory expedition. The party searching for the lost men returned without suc- ojeda'sex- cess > when Alonso de Ojeda offered to lead forty men pedition. m j. Q fj ie inferior for a more thorough search. This party was as unsuccessful as the other. Ojeda reported he had crossed twenty-six streams in going inland, and that the country was found everywhere abounding in odorous trees, strange and delicious fruits, and brilliant birds. While this second party was gone, the crews took aboard a supply of water, and on Ojeda's return Columbus resolved to proceed, and was on the point of sailing, when the absent men appeared on the shore and signaled to be taken off. They had got lost in a tangled and pathless forest, and all efforts to climb high enough in trees to see the stars and determine their course had been hopeless. Finally striking the sea, they had followed the shore till they opportunely espied the fleet. They brought with them some women and boys, but reported they had seen no men. Among the accounts of these early experiences of the Span- iards with the native people, the story of cannibalism is a constant theme. To circulate such stories en- hanced the wonder with which Europe was to be impressed. The cruelty of the custom was not altogether unwelcome to war- THE SECOND VOYAGE. 271 rant a retaliatory mercilessness. Historians have not wholly de- cided that this is enough to account for the most positive state- ments about man-eating" tribes. Fears and prejudices might do much to raise such a belief, or at least to magnify the habits. Irving remarks that the preservation of parts of the human body, among the natives of Espanola, was looked upon as a votive service to ancestors, and it may have needed only prejudice to convert such a custom into cannibalism when found with the Caribs. The adventurousness of the nature of this fierce people and their wanderings in wars naturally served to sharpen their intellects beyond the passive unobser- vance of the pacific tribes on which they preyed ; so they be- came more readily, for this reason, the possessors of any passion or vice that the European instinct craved to fasten somewhere upon a strange people. The contiguity of these two races, the fierce Carib and the timid tribes of the more northern islands, has long Caribsand puzzled the ethnologist. Irving indulged in some Luca y ans - rambling notions of the origin of the Carib, derived from ob- servations of the early students of the obscure relations of the American peoples. Larger inquiry and more scientific observa- tion has since Irving's time been given to the subject, still with- out bringing the question to recognizable bearings. The crani- ology of the Caribs is scantily known, and there is much yet to be divulged. The race in its purity has long been extinct. Lucien de Rosny, in an anthropological study of the Antilles published by the French Society of Ethnology in 1886, has amassed considerable data for future deductions. It is a ques- tion with some modern examiners if the distinction between these insular peoples was not one of accident and surroundings rather than of blood. When Columbus sailed from Guadaloupe on November 10, he steered northwest for Espanola, though his captives 1493. No- told him that the mainland lay to the south. He vemberio. • • i -i 1 i» i i Mil Columbus passed various islands, but did not cast anchor till the leaves Gua- 14th, when he reached the island named by him Santa Cruz, and found it still a region of Caribs. It was here the Spaniards had their first fight with this fierce people in trying to capture a canoe filled with them. The white men rammed 272 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. and overturned the hollowed log- ; but the Indians fought in the water so courageously that some of the Spanish bucklers were pierced with the native poisoned arrows, and one of the Span- iards, later, died of such a wound inflicted by one of the savage women. All the Caribs, however, were finally captured and placed in irons on board ship. One was so badly' wounded that recovery was not thought possible, and he was thrown over- board. The fellow struck for the shore, and was killed by the Spanish arrows. The accounts describe their ferocious aspect, their coarse hair, their eyes circled with red paint, and the mus- cular parts of their limbs artificially extended by tight bands below and above. Proceeding thence and passing a group of wild and craggy islets, which he named after St. Ursula and her Eleven Thousand Virgins, Columbus at last reached the island now called Porto Rico, which his captives pointed out to him as their home and the usual field of the Carib incursions. The island struck the strangers b} r its size, its beautiful woods and many harbors, in one of which, at its west end, they finally anchored. There was a village close by, which, by their accounts, was trim, and not without some pretensions to skill in laying out, with its seaside terraces. The inhabitants, however, had fled. Two days later, the fleet weighed anchor and steered for La Navidad. It was the 22d of November when the explorers made a level shore, which they later discovered to be the eastern vember 22. end of Espaiiola. They passed gently along the north- Espanola. r 1 J f H J & ern coast, and at an attractive spot sent a boat ashore with the body of the Biscayan sailor who had died of the poi- soned arrow, while two of the light caravels hovered near the beach to protect the burying party. Coming to the spot where Columbus had had his armed conflict with the natives the year before, and where one of the Indians who had been baptized at Barcelona was taken, this fellow, loaded with presents and decked in person, was sent on shore for the influence he might exert on his people. This supposable neophyte does not again appear in history. Only one of these native converts now re- mained, and the accounts say that he lived faithfully with the Spaniards. Five of the seven who embarked had died on the voyage. THE SECOND VOYAGE. 273 On the 25th, while the fleet was at anchor at Monte Christo, where Columbus had found gold in the river during his 1493 No _ first voyage, the sailors discovered some decomposed vember25 - bodies, one of them showing a beard, which raised apprehensions of the fate of the men left at La Navidad. The neighboring natives came aboard for traffic with so much readiness, however, that it did much to allay suspicion. It was the 27th 1493 No _ when, after dark, Columbus cast anchor opposite the oTLaNa- fort, about a league from land. It was too late to see Vldad " anything more than the outline of the hills. Expecting a re- sponse from the fort, he fired two cannons ; but there was no sound except the echoes. The Spaniards looked in vain for lights on the shore. The darkness was mysterious and painful. Before midnight a canoe was heard approaching, and a native twice asked for the Admiral. A boat was lowered from one of the vessels, and towed the canoe to the flag-ship. The natives were not willing to board her till Columbus himself appeared at the waist, and by the light of a lantern revealed his countenance to them. This reassured them. Their leader brought presents — some accounts say ewers of gold, others say masks orna- mented with gold — from the cacique, Guacanagari, whose friendly assistance had been counted upon so much to befriend the little garrison at La Navidad. These formalities over, Columbus inquired for Diego de Arana and his men. The young Lucayan, now Columbus's only interpreter, did the best he coidd with a dialect not his own to make a connected story out of the replies, which was in effect that sickness and dissension, together with the withdrawal of some to other parts of the island, had reduced the ranks of the garrison, when the fort as well as the neighboring village of Guacanagari was suddenly attacked by a mountain chieftain, Caonabo, who burned both fort and village. Those of the Span- iards who were not driven into the sea to perish had Its garr i SO n been put to death. In this fight the friendly cacique kllled ' had been wounded. The visitors said that this chieftain's hurt had prevented his coming with them to greet the Admiral ; but that he would come in the morning. Coma, in his account of this midnight interview, is not so explicit, and leaves the reader to infer that Columbus did not get quite so clear an apprehen- sion of the fate of his colony. 274 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. When the dawn came, the harbor appeared desolate. Not a canoe was seen where so many sped about in the previous year. A boat was sent ashore, and found every sign that the fort had been sacked as well as destroyed. Fragments of cloth- ing and bits of merchandise were scattered amid its blackened ruins. There were Indians lurking behind distant trees, but no one approached, and as the cacique had not kept the word which he had sent of coming himself in the morning, suspicions began to arise that the story of its destruction had not been honestly given. The new-comers passed a disturbed night with increas- ing mistrust, and the next morning Columbus landed and saw all for himself. He traveled farther away from the shore than those who landed on the preceding day, and gained some confir- mation of the story in finding the village of the cacique a mass of blackened ruins. Cannon were again discharged, in the hopes that their reverberating echoes might reach the ears of those who were said to have abandoned the fort before the massacre. The well and ditch were cleaned out to see if any treasure had been cast into it, as Columbus had directed in case of disaster. Nothing was found, and this seemed to confirm the tale of the suddenness of the attack. Columbus and his men went still far- ther inland to a village ; but its inmates had hurriedly fled, so that many articles of European make, stockings and a Moorish robe among them, had been left behind, spoils doubtless of the fort. Returning nearer the fort, they discovered the bodies of eleven men buried, with the grass growing above them, and enough remained of their clothing to show they were Europeans. This is Dr. Chanca's statement, who says the men had not been dead two months. Coma says that the bodies were unburied, and had lain for nearly three months in the open air ; and that they were now given Christian burial. Later in the day, a few of the natives were lured by friendly signs to come near enough to talk with the Lucayan interpreter. The story in much of its details was gradually drawn out, and Columbus finally possessed himself of a pretty clear conception of the course of the disastrous events. It was a tale of cruelty, avarice, and sensuality towards the natives on the part of the Spaniards, and of jealousy and brawls among themselves. No word of their governor had been sufficient to restrain their out- bursts of passionate encounter, and no sense of insecurity could THE SECOND VOYAGE. 275 deter them from the most foolhardy risks while away from the fort's protection. Those who had been appointed to succeed Arana, if there were an occasion, revolted against him, and, being unsuccessful in overthrowing him, they went off with their adherents in search of the mines of Cibao. This car- ried them beyond the protection of Guacanagari, and and dao- into the territory of his enemy, Caonabo, a wandering Carib who had offered himself to the interior natives as their chieftain, and who had acquired a great ascendency in the isl- and. This leader, who had learned of the dissensions among the Spaniards, was no sooner informed of the coming of these renegades within his reach than he caused them to be seized and killed. This emboldened him to join forces with another cacique, a neighbor of Guacanagari, and to attempt to drive the Spaniards from the island, since they had become a standing menace to his power, as he reasoned. The confederates mai-ched stealthily, and stole into the vicinity of the fort in the night. Arana had but ten men within the stockade, and they kept no watch. Other Spaniards were quartered in the adjacent village. The onset was sudden and effective, and the dismal ruins of the fort and village were thought to confirm the story. Other confirmations followed. A caravel was sent to explore easterly, and was soon boarded by two Indians from the shore, who invited the captain, Maldonado, to visit the cacique, who lay ill at a neighboring village. The captain went, and found Guacanagari laid up with a bandaged leg. The savage told a story which agreed with the one just related, and on its being repeated to Columbus, the Admiral himself, with an imposing train, went to see the cacique. Guacanagari seemed anxious, in repeating the story, to convince the Admiral of his own loy- alty to the Spaniards, and pointed to his wounds and to those of some of his people as proof. There was the usual inter- change of presents, hawks' bells for gold, and similar reckonings. Before leaving, Columbus asked to have his surgeon examine the wound, which the cacique said had been occasioned by a stone striking the leg. To get more light, the chieftain went out- of-doors, leaning upon the Admiral's arm. When the bandage was removed, there was no external sign of hurt ; but the cacique winced if the flesh was touched. Father Boyle, who was in the Admiral's train, thought the wound a pretense, and the story 276 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. fabricated to conceal the perfidy of the cacique, and urged Co- lumbus to make an instant example of the traitor. The Admi- ral was not so confident as the priest, and at all events he thought a course of pacification and procrastination was the bet- ter policy. The interview did not end, according to Coma, with- out some strange manifestations on the part of the cacique, which led the Spaniards for a moment to fear that a trial of arms was to come. The chief was not indisposed to try his legs enough to return with the Admiral to his ship that very evening. Here he saw the Carib prisoners, and the accounts tell us how he shuddered at the sight of them. He wondered at the horses and other strange creatures which were shown to him. Coma tells us that the Indians thought that the horses were fed on human flesh. The women who had been rescued from the Caribs attracted, perhaps, even more the attention of the sav- DonaCata- a g e > an d particularly a lofty creature among them, Una- whom the Spaniards had named Dona Catalina. Gu- acanagari was observed to talk with her more confidingly than he did with the others. Father Boyle urged upon the Admiral that a duress simi- lar to that of Catalina was none too good for the perfidious cacique, as the priest persisted in calling the savage, but Columbus hesitated. There was, however, little left of that mutual confidence which had characterized the relations of the Admiral and the chieftain during the trying days of the ship- wreck, the year before. When the Admiral offered to hang a cross on the neck of his visitor, and the cacique understood it to be the Christian emblem, he shrank from the visible con- tact of a faith of which the past months had revealed its char- acter. With this manifestation they parted, and the cacique was set ashore. Coma seems to unite the incidents of this in- terview on the ship with those of the meeting ashore. There comes in here, according to the received accounts, a little passage of Indian intrigue and gallantry. A messenger appeared the next day to inquire when the Admiral sailed, and later another to barter gold. This last held some talk with the Indian women, and particularly with Cata- The cacique . . 1 ■ 1 i l 1 and Cata- lma. About midnight a light appeared on the shore, and Catalina and her companions, while the ship's company, except a watch, were sleeping, let themselves down THE SECOND VOYAGE. 277 the vessel's side, and struck out for the shore. The watch dis- covered the escape, but not in time to prevent the women hav- ing a considerable start. Boats pursued, but the swimmers touched the beach first. Four of them, however, were caught, but Catalina and the others escaped. When, the next morning, Columbus sent a demand for the fugitives, it was found that Guacanagari had moved his house- hold and all his effects into the interior of the island. The story got its fitting climax in the suspicious minds of the Span- iards, when they supposed that the fugitive beauty was with him. Here was only a fresh instance of the savage's perfidy. Columbus had before this made up his mind that the vicinity of his hapless fort was not a s'ood site for the town x ° Columbus which he intended to build. The ground was low, abandons & . . La Navidad. moist, and unhealthy. There were no building stones near at hand. There was need of haste in a decision. The men were weary of their confinement on shipboard. The horses and other animals suffered from a like restraint. Accordingly expeditions were sent to explore the coast, and it soon became evident that they must move beyond the limits of Guacanagari's territory, if they would find the conditions demanded. Melchior Maldonado, in command of one of these expeditions, had gone eastward until he coasted the country of another cacique. This chief at first showed hostility, but was won at last by amicable signs. From him they learned that Guacanagari had gone to the mountains. From another they got the story of the massacre of the fort, almost entirely accordant with what they had already discovered. Not one of the reports from these minor explorations was satisfactory, and December 7, the entire fleet weighed anchor to proceed farther east. Stress of weather caused them to put into a harbor, which on examination seemed favorable for their building project. The roadstead was wide. A rocky point offered a site for a citadel. There were two rivers i sabe iia winding close by in an attractive country, and capable oun ec of running mills. Nature, as they saw it, was variegated and alluring. Flowers, and fruits were in abundance. " Garden seeds came up in five days after they were sown," says Coma of their trial of the soil, " and the gardens were speedily clothed 278 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. in green, producing plentifully onions and pumpkins, radishes and beets." " Vegetables," wrote Dr. Chanca, " attain a more luxuriant growth here in eight days than they would in Spain in twenty." It was also learned that the gold mines of the cibaogoid Cibao mountains were inland from the spot, at no mines. great distance. The disembarkation began. Days of busy exertion followed. Horses, livestock, provisions, munitions, and the varied mer- chandise were the centre of a lively scene about their encamp- ment. This they established near a sheet of water. Artificers, herdsmen, cavaliers, priests, laborers, and placemen made up the motley groups which were seen on all sides. In later years, the Spaniards regulated all the formalities and prescribed with precision the proceedings in the laying- out of towns in the New World, but Columbus had no such directions. The planting of a settlement was a novel and un- tried method. It was a natural thought to commemorate in the new Christian city the great patroness of his undertaking, and the settlement bore from the first the name of Isabella. His engineers laid out square and street. A site for the church was marked, another for a public storehouse, another for the house of the Admiral, — all of stone. The ruins of these three buildings are the most conspicuous relics in the present soli- tary waste. The great mass of tenements, which were stretched along the streets back from the public square, where the main edifice stood, were as hastily run up as possible, to cover in the colony. It was time enough for solider structures later to take their places. Parties were occupied in clearing fields and set- ting out orchards. There were landing piers to be made at the shore. So everybody tasked bodily strength in rival en- deavors. The natural results followed in so incongruous a crowd. Those not accustomed to labor broke down from its hardships. The seekers for pleasure, not finding it in the com- mon toil, rushed into excesses, and imperiled all. The little lake, so attractive to the inexperienced, was soon, with its night sickness in vapors, the source of disease. Few knew how to pro- the colony. ^ QQ ^. themselves from the insidious malaria. Discom- fort induced discouragement, and the mental firmness so neces- sary in facing strange and exacting circumstances gave way. Forebodings added greater energy to the disease. It was not THE SECOND VOYAGE. 279 long before the colony was a camp of hospitals, about one half the people being incapacitated for labor. In the midst of all this downheartedness Columbus himself succumbed, C oiumbus and for some weeks was unable to direct the trying slck- state of affairs, except as he could do so in the intervals of his lassitude. But as the weeks went on a better condition was apparent. Work took a more steady aspect. The ships had discharged their burdens. They lay ready for the return voyage. Columbus had depended on the exertions of the little colony at La Navidad to amass a store of gold and other precious com- modities with which to laden the returning vessels. He knew the disappointment which would arise if they should carry little else than the dismal tale of disaster. Nothing lay upon his mind more weightily than this mortification and mis- fortune. There was nothing to be done but to seek to seek the the mines of Cibao, for the chance of sending more en- couraging reports. Gold had indeed been brought in to the settlement, but only scantily ; and its quantity was not suited to make real the gorgeous dreams of the East with which Spain was too familiar. So an expedition to Cibao was organized, and Ojeda was placed in command. The force assigned to him was but fifteen men in all, but each was well armed and courageous. They ex- pected perils, for they had to invade the territory of Caonabo, the destroyer of La Navidad. The march began early in January, 1494 ; perhaps just after they had celebrated their first solemn mass in a tem- porary chapel on January 6. For two days their prog- uary. First ress was slow and toilsome, through forests without a sign of human life, for the savage denizens had moved back from the vicinity of the Spaniards. The men encamped, the second night, on the top of a mountain, and when the dawn broke they looked down on its further side over a broad valley, with its scattei-ed villages. They boldly descended, and met nothing but hospitality from the villagers. Their course now lay towards and up the opposite slope of the valley. They pushed on with- out an obstacle. The rude inhabitants of the mountains were as friendly as those of the valley. They did not see nor did they hear anything of the great Caonabo. Every stream they 280 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. passed glittered with particles of gold in its sand. The natives had an expert way of separating the metal, and the Spaniards flattered them for their skill. Occasionally a nugget '. was found. Ojeda picked up a lump which weighed nine ounces, and Peter Martyr looked upon it wonderingly when it reached Spain. If all this was found on the surface, what must be the wealth in the bowels of these astounding mountains ? The obvious answer was what Ojeda hastened back to make to Gorvaian's Columbus. A similar story was got from a young cav- expeditiou. a \[ er ^ Gorvalan, who had been dispatched in another direction with another force. There was in all this the foun- dation of miracles for the glib tongue and lively imagination. One of these exuberant stories reached Coma, and Scillacio makes him say that " the most splendid thing of all (which I should be ashamed to commit to writing, if I had not received it from a trustworthy source) is that, a rock adjacent to a moun- tain being struck with a club, a large quantity of gold burst out, and particles of gold of indescribable brightness glittered all around the spot. Ojeda was loaded down by means of this out- bui*st." It was stories like these which prepared the way for the future reaction in Spain. There was material now to give spirit to the dispatch to his sovereigns, and Columbus sat down to write it. It w?i" e ™to 8 the has come down to us, and is printed in Navarrete's jvereigns. co n ec ti n, just as it was perused by the King and Queen, who entered in the margins their comments and orders. Columbus refers at the beginning to letters already written to their Highnesses, and mentions others addressed to Father Buele and to the treasurer, but they are not known. Then, speaking of the expeditions of Ojeda and Gorvalan, he begs the sovereigns to satisfy themselves of the hopeful prospects for gold by questioning Gorvalan, who was to return with the ships. He advises their Highnesses to return thanks to God for all this. Those personages write in the margin, " Their High- nesses return thanks to God ! " He then explains his embarrass- ment from the sickness of his men, — the "greater part of all,' 1 as he adds, — and says that the Indians are very familiar, ram- bling about the settlement both day and night, necessitating a constant watch. As he makes excuses and gives his reasons for not doing this or that, the compliant monarchs as constantly THE SECOND VOYAGE. 281 write against the paragraphs, " He has done well." Columbus says he is building stone bulwarks for defense, and when this is done he shall provide for accumulating gold. " Exactly as should be done," chime in the monarchs. He then asks for fresh provisions to be sent to him, and tells how much they have done in planting. " Fonseca has been ordered to send further seeds," is the comment. He complains that the wine casks had been badly coopered at Seville, and that the wine had all run out, so that wine was their prime necessity. He urges that calves, heifers, asses, working mares, be sent to them ; and that above all, to prevent discouragement, the supplies should arrive at Isabella by May, and that particularly med- icines should come, as their stock was exhausted. He then re- fers to the cannibals whom he would send back, and asks that they may be made acquainted with the true faith and taught the Spanish tongue. " His suggestions are good," is the mar- ginal royal comment. Now comes the vital point of his dispatch. We want cat- tle, he says. They can be paid for in Carib slaves. Let yearly caravels conduct this trade. It will be easy, with the C oiumbu 8 boats which are building, to capture a plenty of these S e °in S a savages. Duties can be levied on these importa- slaves " tions of slaves. On this point he urges a reply. The monarchs see the fatality of the step, and, according to the marginal com- ment, suspend judgment and ask the Admiral's further thoughts. " A more distinct suggestion for the establishment of a slave trade was never proposed," is the modern comment of Arthur Helps. Columbus then adds that he has bought for the use of the colony certain of the vessels which brought them out, and these would be retained at Isabella, and used in making further discoveries. The comment is that Fonseca will pay the own- ers. He then intimates that more care should be exercised in the selection of placemen sent to the colony, for the enterprise had suffered already from unfitness in such matters. The mon- archs promise amends. He complains that the Granada lance- men, who offered themselves in Seville mounted on fine horses, had subsequently exchanged these animals to their own personal advantage for inferior horses. He says the footmen made simi- lar exchanges to fill their own pockets. So, dating this memorial on January 30, 1494, the man who 282 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. was ambitious to become the first slave-driver of the New World i49i Jan- ^ a ^ down his quill, praising God, as he asked his s? r ns 3 uis sovereigns to do. The poor creatures who wandered letter. j n an( i a b ou t among the cabins of the Spaniards were fast forming their own comments, which were quite as astute as those of the Admiral's royal masters. Holding up a piece of gold, the natives learned to say, — and Columbus had given them their first lesson in such philosophy, — " Behold christians' the Christians' God ! " Benzoni, the first traveler who came among them with his eyes open, and daring to record the truth, heard them say this. Intrusting his memo- rial to Antonio de Torres, and putting him in command of the 1494. Feb- twelve ships that were to return to Spain, Columbus neet y re 2 tum S e saw the fleet sail away on February 2, 1494. There to spam. W ould seem to have been committed to some one on the ships two other accounts of the results of this second voyage up to this time, which have come down to us. One of these is chanca's a narrative by Dr. Chanca, the physician of the col- narrative. o\\j, whom Columbus, in his memorial to the mon- archs, credits with doing good service in his profession at a sacrifice of the larger emoluments which the practice of it had brought to him in Seville. The narrative of Chanca had been sent by him to the cathedral chapter of Seville. The original is thought to be lost ; but Navarrete used a transcript which belonged to a collection formed by Father Antonio de Aspa, a monk of the monastery of the Mejorada, where Columbus is known to have deposited some of his papers. Major has given us an English translation of it in his Select Letters of Colum- bus. Major's text will also be found in the late James Lenox's English version of the other account, which he gave to scholars in 1859. There is a curious misconception in this last document, whicl represents that Columbus had reached these new regions by tlie African route of the Portuguese, — a confusion doubtless arising from the imperfect knowledge which the Italian translator, Coma's nar- Nicholas Scillacio, had of the current geographical df rative. velopments. A Spaniard, Guglielmo Coma, seems tc have written about the new discoveries in some letters, appar- ently revived in some way from somebody's personal observs tion, which Scillacio put into a Latin dress, and published at THE SECOND VOYAGE. 283 Pavia, or possibly at Pisa. This little tract is of the utmost rarity, and Mi*. Lenox, considering the suggestion of lionchini, that the blunder of Scillacio may have caused the destruction of the edition, replies by calling attention to the fact that it is scarcely rarer than many other of the contemporary tracts of Columbus's voyage, about which there exists no such reason. We get also some reports by Torres himself on the affairs of the colony in various letters of a Florentine merchant, V erde's Simone Verde, to whom he had communicated them. letters - These letters have been recently (1875) found in the archives of Florence, and have been made better known still later by Harrisse. CHAPTER XIII. THE SECOND VOYAGE, CONTINUED. 1494. The departure of the fleet made conspicuous at last a threat- ening faction of those whose terms of service had prevented their taking passage in the ships. This organized discontent was the natural result of a depressing feeling that all the Lifemisa- dreams of ease and plenty which had sustained them beiia. m ti ien , embarkation were but delusions. Life in Isa- bella had made many of them painfully conscious of the lack of that success and comfort which had been counted upon. The failure of what in these later days is known as the commissariat was not surprising. With all our modern experience in fitting out great expeditions, we know how often the fate of such en- terprises is put in jeopardy by rascally contractors. Their arts, however, are not new ones. Fonseca was not so wary, Colum- bus was not so exacting, that such arts could not be practiced in Seville, as to-day in London and New York. This jobbery, added to the scant experience of honest endeavor, inevitably brought misfortune and suffering through spoiled provisions and wasted supplies. The faction, taking advantage of this condition, had two per- Mutinous sons f° r leaders, whose official position gave the body factions. a vantage-ground. Bernal Diaz de Pisa was the comptroller of the colony, and his office permitted him to have an oversight of the Admiral's accounts. It is said that before this time he had put himself in antagonism to authority by ques- tioning some of the doings of the Admiral. He began now to talk to the people of the Admiral's deceptive and exaggerating descriptions intended for effect in Spain, and no doubt repre- sented them to be at least as false as they were. Diaz drew pictures that produced a prevailing gloom beyond what the facts warranted, for deceit is a game of varying extremes. He THE SECOND VOYAGE. 285 was helped on by the assayer of the colony, Fermin Cado, who spoke as an authority on the poor quality of the gold, and on the Indian habit of amassing it in their families, so that the moderate extent of it which the natives had offered was not the accretions of a day, but the result of the labor of generations. With leaders acting in concert, it had been planned to seize the remaining ships, and to return to Spain. This done, the muti- neers expected to justify their conduct by charges against the Admiral, and a statement of them had already been drawn up by Bernal Diaz. The mutiny, however, was schemes dis- discovered, and Columbus had the first of his many experiences in suppressing a revolt. Bernal Diaz was impris- oned on one of the ships, and was carried to Spain for trial. Other leaders were punished in one way and another. To pre- vent the chances of success in future schemes of revolt, all munitions and implements of war were placed together in one of the ships, under a supervision which Columbus thought he could trust. The prompt action of the Admiral had not been taken with- out some question of his authority, or at least it was held that he had been injudicious in the exercise of it. The event left a rankling passion among many of the colonists against what was called Columbus's vindictiveness and presumptuous zeal. With it all was the feeling that a foreigner was oppressing them, and was weaving about them the meshes of his arbitrary am- bition. Columbus now determined to go himself to the gold regions of the interior. He arranged that Diego, his brother, — another foreigner ! — should have the command in goes to the his absence. Las Casas pictures for us this younger of the Colombos, and calls him gentle, unobtrusive, and kindly. He allows to him a priest's devotion, but does not . , i . . ,„ i • i • i t •,, Diego Colon. consider him quite worldly enough in his dealings with men to secure himself against ungenerous wiles. It was the 12th of March when Columbus set out on his march. He conducted a military contingent of about 149t March 400 well-armed men, including what lancers he could 1 mount. In his train followed an array of workmen, miners, artificers, and porters, with their burdens of merchandise and 286 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. implements. A mass of the natives hovered about the pro- cession. Their progress was as martial as it could be made. Banners were flaunted. Drums and trumpets were sounded. Their* armor was made to glisten. Crossing the low land, they came to a defile in the mountain. There was nothing before them but a tortuous native trail winding upward among the rocks and through tangled forest. It was ill suited for the passage of a heavily burdened force. Some of the younger cavaliers sprang to the front, and gathering around them woodmen and makes a pioneers, they opened the way ; and thus a road was constructed through the pass, the first made in the New World. This work of the proud cavaliers was called El jnierto de los Hidalgos. The summit of the mountain afforded afresh the grateful view of the luxuriant valley which had delighted The Vega Ojeda, — royally rich as it was in every aspect, and deserving the name which Columbus now gave it of the Vega Real. Here, on the summit of Santo Cerro, the tradition of the island goes that Columbus caused that cross to be erected which the traveler to-day looks upon in one of the side chapels of the cathedral at Santo Domingo. It stood long enough Erects a *° perform many miracles, as the believers tell us, and was miraculously saved in an earthquake. De Lorgues does not dare to connect the actual erection with the holy trophy of the cathedral. Descending to the lowlands, the little army and its followers attracted the notice of the amazed natives by clangor and parade. This display was made' more astounding whenever the horses were set to prancing, as they ap- proached and passed a native hamlet. Las Casas tells us that the first horseman who dismounted was thought by the natives to have parceled out a single creature into convenient parts. The Indians, timid at first, were enticed by a show of trinkets, and played upon by the interpreters. Thus they gradually were won over to repay all kindnesses with food and drink, while they rendered many other kindly services. The army came to a large stream, and Columbus called it the River of Reeds. It was the same which, the year before, knowing it ouly where it emptied into the sea, he had called the River of Gold, because he had been struck with the shining particles THE SECOND VOYAGE. 287 which he found among its sands. Here they encamped. The men bathed. They found everything about them like the dales of Paradise, if we may believe their rehearsals. The landscape was very different from that which Bernal Diaz was to tell of, if only once he got the ears of the Court in Seville. The river was so wide and deep that the men could not ford it, so they made rafts to take over everything but the horses. These swam the current. Then the force passed on, but was confronted at last by the rugged slopes of the Cibao Cibao moun _ mountains. The soldiers clambered up the defile pain- tams - fully and slowly. The pioneers had done what they could to smooth the way, but the ascent was wearying. They could oc- casionally turn from their toil to look back over this luxuriant valley which they were leaving, and lose their vision in its vast extent. Las Casas describes it as eighty leagues one way, and twenty or thirty the other. It was a scene of bewildering beauty that they left behind ; it was one of sterile heights, scraggy pines, and rocky precipices which they entered. The leaders computed that they were eighteen leagues from Isabella, and as Columbus thought he saw signs of gold, amber, lapis lazuli, copper, and one knows not what else of wealth, all about him, he was content to establish his fortified position hereabouts, without pushing farther. He looked around, and found at the foot of one of the declivities of the interior of this mountainous region a fertile plain, with a running river, gurgling over beds of jasper and marble, and in the midst of it a little eminence, which he could Fortst . easily fortify, as the river nearly surrounded it like a Thomas - natural ditch. Here he built his fort. Recent travelers say that an overgrowth of trees now covers traces of its founda- tions. The fortress was, as he believed, so near the gold that one could see it with his eyes and touch it with his hands, and so, as Las Casas tells us, he named it St. Thomas. The Indians had already learned to recognize the Christian's god. They found the golden deity in bits in the streams. They took the idol tenderly to his militant people. For their part, the poor natives much preferred rings and hawks' bells, and so a basis of traffic was easily found. In this way Columbus got some gold, but he more readily got stories of other spots, whither the natives pointed vaguely, where nuggets, which would dwarf 288 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. all these bits, could be found. Columbus began to wonder why he never reached the best places. The Spaniards soon got to know the region better. Juan de country Luxan, who had been sent out with a party to see examined. w hat he could find, reported that the region was moun- tainous and in its upper parts sterile, to be sure, but that there were delicious valleys, and plenty of land to cultivate, and pas turing enough for herds. When he came back with these re- ports, the men put a good deal of heart in the work which they were bestowing on the citadel of St. Thomas, so that it was soon done. Pedro Margarite was placed in command returns to with fifty-six men, and then Columbus started to re- Isabella. _I turn to Isabella. When the Admiral reached the valley, he met a train of sup- plies going forward to St. Thomas, and as there were difficulties of fording and other obstacles, he spent some time in examining the country and marking out lines of communication. This Natives of brought him into contact with the villages of the yal- the vaiiey. \ey, and he grew better informed of the kind of peo- ple among whom his colonists were to live. He did not, how- ever, discern that under a usually pacific demeanor there was no lack of vigorous determination in this people, which it might not be so wise to irritate to the point of vengeance. He found, too, that they had a religion, perhaps prompting to some virtues he little suspected in his own, and that they jealously guarded their idols. He discovered that experience had given them no near acquaintance with the medicinal properties of the native herbs and trees. They associated myths with places, and would tell you that the sun and moon were but creatures of their isl- and which had escaped from one of their caverns, and that mankind had sprung from the crannies of their rocky places. The bounteousness of nature, causing little care for the future, had spread among them a love of hospitality, and Columbus found himself welcome everywhere, and continued to be so till he and his abused their privileges. On the 29th of March, Columbus was back in Isabella, to 1494. March & n & that the plantings of January were already yield - busin°is™ m g fruits, and the colony, in its agricultural aspects, beiia. a £ j eas ^ was promising, for the small areas that had already been cultivated. But the tidings from the new fort in THE SECOND VOYAGE. 289 the mountains which had just come in by messenger were not so cheering, for it seemed to be the story of La Navidad repeated. The license and exactions of the garrison had stirred up the neighboring natives, and Pedro Margarite, in his message, showed his anxiety lest Caonabo should be able to mass the savages, exasperated by their wrongs, in an attack upon the post. Columbus sent a small reinforcement to St. Thomas, and dispatched a force to make a better road thither, in order to facilitate any future operations. The Admiral's more immediate attention was demanded by the condition of Isabella. Intermittent fever and various other disturbances incident to a new turning of a reeking soil were making sad ravages in the colony. The work of Conditionof building suffered in consequence. The sick engrossed thetown - the attention of men withdrawn from their active labors, or they were left to suffer from the want of such kindly aid. The humidity of the climate and a prodigal waste had brought pro- visions so low that an allowance even of the unwholesome stock which remained was made necessary. In order to provide against impending famine, men were taken from the public works and put to labor on a mill, in order that they might get flour. No respect was paid to persons, and cavalier and priest were forced into the common service. The Admiral was obliged to meet the necessities by compulsory measures, for even an obvious need did not prevent the indifferent from shirking, and the priest and hidalgo from asserting their privileged rights. Any authority that enforced sacrifice galled the proud spirits, and the indignity of labor caused a mortification and desj)air that soon thinned the ranks of the best blood of the colony. Dying voices cursed the delusion which had brought them to the New World, the victims, as they claimed, of the avarice and deceit of a hated alien to their race. Supineness in the commander would have brought everything in the colony to a disastrous close. A steady progression of some sort might be remedial. The Admiral's active mind de- termined on the diversion of further exploration with such a force as could be equipped. He mustered a little army, consisting of 250 men armed with crossbows, tost. 100 with matchlocks, 16 mounted lancemen, and 20 officers. Ojeda was put at their head, with orders to lead them 290 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. to St. Thomas, which post he was to govern while Margarite took the expeditionary party and scoured the country. Navar- rete has preserved for us the instructions which Columbus im- parted. They counseled a considerate regard for the natives, who must, however, be made to furnish all necessaries at fair prices. Above all, every Spaniard must be prevented from en- gaging in private trade, since the profits of such bartering were reserved to the Crown, and it did not help Columbus in his deal- ings with the refractory colonists to have it known that a for- eign interloper, like himself, shared this profit with the Crown. Margarite was also told that he must capture, by force or strat- agem, the cacique Caonabo and his brothers. When Ojeda, who had started on April 9, reached the Vega 1494 Real, he learned that three Spaniards, returning from April 9. g^ Thomas, had been robbed by a party of Indians, people of a neighboring cacique. Ojeda seized the offenders, the ears of one of whom he cut off, and then capturing the cacique himself and some of his family, he sent the whole party to Isabella. Columbus took prompt revenge, or made the show of doing so ; but just as the sentence of execution was to be inflicted, he yielded to the importunities of another ca- cique, and thought to keep by it his reputation for clemency. Presently another horseman came in from St. Thomas, who, on his way, had rescued, single-handed and with the aid of the ter- ror which his animal inspired, another party of five Spaniards, whom he had found in the hands of the same tribe. Such easy conquests convinced Columbus that only proper prudence was demanded to maintain the Spanish supremacy with even a diminished force. He had not forgotten the fears of the Portuguese which were harassing the Spanish Court when he left Seville, and, to anticipate them, he was anxious to make a more thorough examination of Cuba, which was a part of the neighboring main of Cathay, as he was ready to suppose. He therefore commissioned a sort of junto to rule, while in person he should conduct such an expedition by water. His Diego and brother Diego was placed in command during his ab- the junto. S ence, and he gave him for counselors, Father Boyle, Pedro Fernandez Coronel, Alonso Sanchez Carvajal, and Juan de Luxan. He took three caravels, the smallest of his little fleet, as better suited to explore, and left the two large ones behind. THE SECOND VOYAGE. 291 It was April 24 when Columbus sailed from Isabella, and at once lie ran westerly. He stopped at his old fort, La 1494 April Navidad, but found that Guacanagari avoided him, j^ B J^"^ and no time could be lost in discovering why. On the Cuba- 29th, he left Espanola behind and struck across to the Cuban shore. Here, following the southern side of that island, he anchored first in a harbor where there were preparations for a native feast ; but the people fled when he landed, and the not overfed Spaniards enjoyed the repast that was abandoned. The Lucayan interpreter, who was of the party, managed after a while to allure a single Indian, more confident than the rest, to approach ; and when this Cuban learned from one of a simi- lar race the peaceful purposes of the Spaniards, he went and told others, and so in a little while Columbus was able to hold a parley with a considerable group. He caused reparation to be made for the food which his men had taken, and then ex- changed farewells with the astounded folk. On May 1, he raised anchor, and coasted still westerly, keeping near the shore. The country grew more pop- ulous. The amenities of his intercourse with the l. Onthe feast-makers had doubtless been made known along the coast, and as a result he was easily kept supplied with fresh fruits by the natives. Their canoes constantly put off from the shore as the ships glided by. He next anchored in the harbor which was probably that known to-day as St. Jago de Cuba, where he received the same hospitality, and dispensed the same store of trinkets in return. Here, as elsewhere along the route, the Lucayan had learned from the natives that a great island lay away to the south, which was the source of what cold thev had. The informa- i 1494. May tion was too frequently repeated to be casual, and 3. steers for so, on May 3, Columbus boldly stood off shore, and brought his ships to a course due south. It was not long before thin blue films appeared on the horizon. They deepened and grew into peaks. It was two days before the ships were near enough to their massive forms to see the signs of habitations everywhere scattered along the shore. The vessels stood in close to the land. A native flotilla hovered about, at first with menaces, but their occupants were soon won to friendliness by kindly signs. Not so, however, 292 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. in the harbor, where, on the next day, he sought shelter and an opportunity to careen a leaky ship. Here the shore swarmed Natives of w i* n painted men, and some canoes with feathered Jamaica. warriors advanced to oppose a landing. They hurled their javelins without effect, and filled the air with their screams and whoops. Columbus then sent in his boats nearer the shore than his ships could go, and under cover of a dis- charge from his bombards a party landed,*and with their cross- a dog set bows put the Indians to flight. Bernaldez tells that upon them. a fog wag ^ \ oose upon the savages, and this is the earliest mention of that canine warfare which the Spaniards later made so sanguinary. Columbus now landed and took pos- santiago or session of the island under the name of Santiago, but Jamaica. ^] ie name ( |j t | no £ SU pplant the native Jamaica. The warning lesson had its effect, and the next day some envoys of the cacique of the region made offers of amity, which were readily accepted. For three days this friendly intercourse was kept up, with the customary exchange of gifts. The Spaniards character of could but observe a marked difference in the character natives. Q £ ^jg new p eo pl e- They were more martial and better sailors than any they had seen since they left the Carib islands. The enormous mahogany-trees of the islands furnished them with trunks, out of which they constructed the largest canoes. Columbus saw one which was ninety-six feet long and eight broad. There was also in these people a degree of merriment such as the Spaniards had not noticed before, more docility and quick apprehension, and Peter Martyr gathered from those with whom he had talked that in almost all ways they seemed a manlier and experter race. Their cloth, utensils, and imple- ments were of a character not differing from others the explorers had seen, but of better handiwork. As soon as he floated his ship, Columbus again stretched his course to the west, finding no further show of resistance. The native dugout sallied forth to trade from every little inlet which was passed. Finally, a youth came off and begged to be taken to the Spaniards' home, and the Historic tells us that it was not without a scene of distress that he bade his kinsfolk good-by, in spite of all their endeavors to reclaim him. Columbus was struck with the courage and confidence of the youth, and ordered special kindnesses to be shown to him. We hear nothing more of the lad. THE SECOND VOYAGE. 293 Reaching now the extreme westerly end of Jamaica, and find- ing the wind setting right for Cuba, Columbus shifted ColumbU6 his course thither, and bore away to the north. On c e X,.'' st ° the 18th of May, he was once more on its coast. The um. May people were everywhere friendly. They told him that 18 ' Cuba was an island, but of such extent that they had never seen the end of it. This did not convince Columbus that it was other than the mainland. So he went on towards the west, in full confidence that he would come to Cathay, or at least, such seemed his expectation. He presently rounded a point, and saw before him a large archipelago. He was now at that point where the Cabo de la Cruz on the south and this archipelago in the northwest embay a broad gulf. The islands seemed almost without number, and they studded the sea with verdant spots. He called them the Queen's Gardens. He could get The Q Ueen i g better seaway by standing further south, and so pass Gardens - beyond the islands ; but suspecting that they were the very islands which lay in masses along the coast of Cathay, as Marco Polo and Mandeville had said, he was prompted to risk the in- tricacies of their navigation ; so he clung to the shore, and felt that without doubt he was verging on the territories of the Great Khan. He began soon to apprehend his risks. The channels were devious. The shoals perplexed him. There was often no room to wear ship, and the boats had to tow the caravels at intervals to clearer water. They could not proceed at all with- out throwing the lead. The wind was capricious, and whirled round the compass with the sun. Sudden tempests threatened danger. With all this anxiety, there was much to beguile. Every as- pect of nature was like the descriptions of the East in the trav- elers' tales. The Spaniards looked for inhabitants, but none were to be seen. At last they espied a village on one of the islands, but on landing (May 22), not a soul could be found, — only the. spoils of the sea which a fishing people would be likely to gather. Another day, they met a canoe from which some natives were fishing. The men came on board without trepida- tion and gave the Spaniards what fish they wanted. They had a wonderful way of catching fish. They used a live fish much as a falcon is used in catching its quarry. This fish would fasten itself to its prey by suckers growing about the head. 294 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. The native fishermen let it out with a line attached to its tail, and pulled in both the catcher and the caught when the prey had been seized. These people also told the same story of the interminable extent westerly of the Cuban coast. Columbus now passed out from among these islands and steered towards a mountainous region, where he again landed 1494. an d opened intercourse with a pacific tribe on June 3. An old cacique repeated the same story of the illim- itable land, and referred to the province of Mangon as lying- farther west. This name was enough to rekindle the imagina- tion of the Admiral. Was not Mangi the richest of the prov- inces that Sir John Mandeville had spoken of? He learned Men with a ^ so * ua fc a people with tails lived there, just as that tafl8- veracious narrator had described, and they wore long garments to conceal that appendage. What a sight a proces- sion of these Asiatics would make in another reception at the Spanish Court ! There was nothing now to impede the progress of the cara- vels, and on the vessels went in their westward course. Every day the crews got fresh fruits from the friendly canoes. They paid nothing for the balmy odors from the land. They next Guif of came to the Gulf of Xagua, and passing this they again sailed into shallow waters, whitened with the floating sand, which the waves kept in suspension. The course of the ships was tortuous among the bars, and they felt relieved when at last they found a place where their anchors would hold. To make sure that a way through this labyrinth could be found, Columbus sent his smallest caravel ahearl, and then following her guidance, the little fleet, with great difficulty, and not without much danger at times, came out into clearer water. Later, he saw a deep bay on his right, and tacking across the opening he lay his course for some distant mountains. Here he anchored to replenish his water-casks. An archer straying into the forest white-robed came back on the run, saying that he had seen white- robed people. Here, then, thought Columbus, were the people who were concealing their tails ! He sent out two parties to reconnoitre. They found nothing but a tangled wil- derness. It has been suggested that the timorous and credu- lous archer had got half a sight of a flock of white cranes feed- ing in a savanna. Such is the interpretation of this story by THE SECOND VOYAGE. 295 Irving, and Humboldt tells us there is enough in his experience with the habits of these birds to make it certain that the inter- pretation is warranted. Still the Admiral went on westerly, opening communication occasionally with the shore, but to little advantage in gathering information, for the expedition had gone beyond the range of dialects where the Lucayan interpreter could be of service. The shore people continued to point west, and the most that could be made of their signs was that a powerful king reigned in that direction, and that he wore white robes. This is the story as Bernaldez gives it ; and Columbus very likely thought it a premonition of Prester John. The coast still stretched to the setting sun, if Columbus divined the native signs aright, but no one could tell how far. The sea again became shallow, and the keels of the caravels stirred up the bottom. The accounts speak of wonderful crowds of tortoises covering the water, pi- geons darkening the sky, and gaudy butterflies sweeping about in clouds. The shore was too low for habitation ; but they saw smoke and other signs of life in the high lands of the Columbus interior. When the coast line began to trend to the geeifthe he southwest, — it was Marco Polo who said it would, — chlrsone- there could be little doubt that the Golden Chersonesus sus ' of the ancients, which we know to-day as the Malacca penin- sula, must be beyond. What next? was the thought which passed through the fevered brain of the Admiral. He had an answer in his mind, and it would make a new sensation for his poor colony at Isa- bella to hear of him in Spain. Passing the Golden Chersone- sus, had he not the alternative of steering homeward bywhich he by way of Ceylon and the Cape of Good Hope, and tuTniJ e ' so astound the Portuguese more than he did when he Spain- entered the Tagus ? Or, abandoning the Indian Ocean and entering the Red Sea, could he not proceed to its northern ex- tremity, and there, deserting his ships, join a caravan passing through Jerusalem and Jaffa, and so embai'k again on the Mediterranean and sail into Barcelona, a more wonderful ex- plorer than before ? These were the sublimating thoughts that now buoyed the Admiral, as he looked along the far-stretching coast, — or at least his friend Bernaldez got this impression from his inter- course with Columbus after his return to Spain. 296 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. If the compliant spirit of his crew had not been exhausted, ma crew ne would perhaps have gone on, and would have been rebel. forced by developments to a revision of his geographi- cal faith. His vessels, unfortunately, were strained in all their seams. Their leaks had spoiled his provisions. Incessant la- bor had begun to tell upon the health of the crew. They much preferred the chances of a return to Isabella, with all its haz- ards, than a sight of Jaffa and the Mediterranean, with the un- told dangers of getting there. The Admiral, however, still pursued his course for a few days more to a point, as Humboldt holds, opposite the St. Philip Keys, when, finding the coast trending sharply to the southwest, and his crew becoming clamorous, he determined to go no farther. It was now the 12th of June, 1494, and if we had nothing but the Historie to guide us, we should be ignorant of the 12. He turns singular turn which affairs took. Whoever wrote that back. book had, by the time it was written, become conscious that obliviousness was sometimes necessary to preserve the rep- utation of the Admiral. The strange document which inter- ests us, however, has not been lost, and we can read it in Navarrete. It is not difficult to understand the disquietude of Columbus's mind. He had determined to find Cathay as a counterpoise to the troubled conditions at Isabella, both to assuage the gloomy forebodings of the colonists and to reassure the public mind in Spain, which might receive, as he knew, a shock by the reports which Torres's fleet had carried to Europe. He had been forced by a mutinous crew to a determination to turn back, but his dis- contented companions might be complacent enough to express an opinion, if not complacent enough to run farther hazards. So Columbus committed himself to the last resort of deluded minds, when dealing with geographical or historical problems, — that of seeking to establish the truth by building monu- ments, placing inscriptions, and certifications under oath. He caused the eighty men who constituted the crew of Enf orces an ...... .. , , n n , • x^ ? oath upon his little squadron — and we find their name m Duro s Colon y Pinzon — to swear before a notary that it was possible to go from Cuba to Spain by land, across Asia. It was solemnly affirmed by this official that if any should swerve THE SECOND VOYAGE. 297 • from this belief, the miserable skeptic, if an officer, should be fined 10,000 maravedis ; and if a sailor, he should receive a hun- dred lashes and have his tongue pulled out. Such were the scarcely 'heroic measures that Columbus thought it necessary to employ if he would dispel any belief that all these islands of the Indies were but an ocean archipelago after, all, and that the width of the unknown void between Europe and Asia, which he was so confident he had traversed, was yet undetermined. To make Cuba a continent by affidavit was easy ; to make it appear tlie identical kingdom of the Great Khan, is a con- he hoped would follow. During his first voyage, so far as he could make out an intelligible statement from what the natives indicated, he was of the opinion that Cuba was an island. It is to be feared that he had now x'eached a state of mind in which he did not dare to think it an island. If we believe the Ilistorie, — or some passages in it, at least, — written, as we know, after the geography of the New World was fairly understood, and if we accept the evidence of the copyist, Herrera, Columbus never really supposed he was in Asia. If this is true, he took marvelous pains to deceive others by appearing to be deceived himself, as this notarial exhibition and his solemn asseveration to the Pope in 1502 show. The writers just cited say that he simply juggled the world by giv- ing the name India to these regions, as better suited to allure emigration. Such testimony, if accepted, establishes the fraud- ulent character of these notarial proceedings. It is fair to say, however, that he wrote to Peter Martyr, just after the return of the caravels to Isabella, expressing a confident belief in his having come near to the region of the Ganges ; and divesting the testimony of all the jugglery with which others have invested it, there seems little doubt that in this belief, at least, Colum- bus was sincere. On the next day, Columbus, standing to the southeast, reached a large island, the present Isle of Pines, which he 14M _ June called Evangelista. In endeavoring to skirt it on the 13- south, he was entangled once more in a way that made him aban- don the hope of a directer passage to Espanola that way, and to resolve to follow the coast back as he had come. He lost ten days in these uncertain efforts, which, with his provisions rap 298 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. THE SECOND VOYAGE. 299 idly diminishing, did not conduce to reassure his crew. On June 30, trying to follow the intricacies of the channels 14U4 Jnne which had perplexed him before, the Admiral's ship 3a got a severe thump on the bottom, which for a while threatened disaster. She was pulled through, however, by main force, and after a while was speeding east in clear water. They had now sailed beyond those marshy reaches of the coast, where they were cut off from intercourse with the shore, and hoped soon to find a harbor, where food and rest might restore the strength of the crew. Their daily allowance had been reduced to a pound of mouldy bread and a swallow or two of wine. It was the 1494 Till of July when they anchored in an acceptable harbor. July 7 Here they landed, and interchanged the customary pledges of amity with a cacique who presented himself on the shore. Men having been sent to cut down some trees, a large cross was made, and erected in a grove, and on this spot, with a crowd of natives looking on, the Spaniard celebrated high mass. A ven- erable Indian, who watched all the ceremonials with close atten- tion, divining their religious nature, made known to the Admiral, through the Lucayan interpreter, something of the sustaining belief of his own people, in words that were impressive. Co- lumbus's confidence in the incapacity of the native mind for such high conceptions as this poor Indian manifested received a grateful shock when the old man, grave in his manner and un- conscious in his dignity, pictured the opposite rewards of the good and bad in another world. Then turning to the Admiral, he reminded him that wrong upon the unoffending was no pass- port to the blessings of the future. The historian who tells us this story, and recounts how it impressed the Admiral, does not say that its warnings troubled him much in the times to come, when the unoffending were grievously wronged. Perhaps there was something of this forgetful spirit in the taking of a young Indian away from his friends, as the chroniclers say he did, in this very harbor. On July 16, Columbus left the harbor, and steering off shore to escape the intricate channels of the Queen's Gar- 1494 July dens which he was now re-approaching, he soon found 16- searoom, and bore away toward Espafiola. A gale coming on, the caravels were forced in shore, and discovered an i 494 July anchorage under Cabo de Cruz. Here they remained 18 300 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. for three days, but the wind still blowing from the east, Colum- bus thought it a good opportunity to complete the circuit of on the coast Jamaica. He accordingly stood across towards that of Jamaica, island He was a month in beating to the eastward along its southern coast, for the winds were very capricious. Every night he anchored under the land, and the natives sup- plied him with provisions. At one place, a cacique presented himself in much feathered finery, accompanied by his wife and relatives, with a retinue bedizened in the native fashion, and doing homage to the Admiral. It was shown how effective the Lucayan's pictures of Spanish glory and prowess had been, when the cacique proposed to put himself and all his train in the Admiral's charge for passage to the great country of the Spanish King. The offer was rather embarrassing to the A ad- miral, with his provisions running low, and his ships not of the largest. He relieved himself by promising to conform to the wishes of the cacique at a more opportune moment. By the 19th of August, Columbus had passed the easternmost UOi extremity of Jamaica, and on the next day he was August 19. s ki r ting the long peninsula which juts from the south- western angle of Espaiiola. He was not, however, aware of EspaSoia. hi s position till on the 23d a cacique came off to the 1494. caravels, and addressed Columbus by his title, with August 23. some words of Castilian interlarded in his speech. It was now made clear that the ships had nearly reached their goal, and nothing was left but to follow the circuit of the isl- and. It was no easy task to do so with a wornout crew and crazy ships. The little fleet was separated in a gale, and when Columbus made the lofty rocky island which is now known as Alto Velo, resembling as it does in outline a tall ship under sail, he ran under its lee, and sent a boat i ashore, with orders for the men to scale its heights, to learn if the missing caravels were anywhere to be seen. This endeavor was without result, but it was not long before the fleet was re- united. Further on, the Admiral learned from the natives that some of the Spaniards had been in that part of the island, coming from the other side. Finding thus through the native reports that all was quiet at Isabella, he landed nine men to push across the island and report his coming. Somewhat fur- ther ^o the east, a storm impending, he found a harbor, where THE SECOND VOYAGE. 301 the weather forced him to remain for eight days. The Admi- ral's vessel had succeeded in entering a roadstead, but the others lay outside, buffeting the storm, — naturally a source of constant anxiety to him. It was while in this suspense that Columbus took advantage of an eclipse of the moon, to ascertain his longitude. C oiumbu8 His calculations made him five hours and a half west ecilpseof of Seville, — an hour and a quarter too much, making the moon - an error of eighteen degrees. This mistake was quite as likely owing to the rudeness of his method as to the pardonable errors of the lunar tables of Regiomontanus (Venice, 1492), then in use. These tables followed methods which had more or less controlled calculations from the time of Hipparchus. The error of Columbus is not surprising. Even a century later, when Robert Hues published his treatise on the ]\loli- neaux globe (1592), the difficulties were in large part uncon- trollable. " The most certain of all for this purpose," says this mathematician, " is confessed by all writers to be by eclipses of the moon. But now these eclipses happen but seldom, but are more seldom seen, yet most seldom and in very few places ob- served by the skillful artists in this science. So that there are but few longitudes of places designed out by this means. But this is an uncertain and ticklish way, and subject to many diffi- culties. Others have gone other ways to work, as, namely, by observing the space of the equinoctial hours betwixt the meri- dians of two places, which they conceive may be taken by the help of sundials, or clocks, or hourglasses, either with water or sand or the like. But all these conceits, long since devised, hav- ing been more strictly and accurately examined, have been dis- allowed and rejected by all learned men — at least those of riper judgments — as being altogether unable to perform that which is required of them. I shall not stand here to discover the errors and uncertainties of these instruments. Away with all such trifling, cheating rascals ! " The weather moderating, Columbus stood out of the channel of Saona on September 24, and meeting the other car- 1494 Sep . avels, which had weathered the storm, he still steered tember 24 - to the east. They reached the farthest end of Espafiola oppo- site Porto Rico, and ran out to the island of Mona, in the channel between the two larger islands. Shortly after leaving 302 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. Mona, Columbus, worn with the anxieties of a five months' voyage, in which his nervous excitement and high hopes had sustained him wonderfully, began to feel the reaction. His near approach to Isabella accelerated this recoil, till his whole system suddenly succumbed. He lay in a stupor, knowing little, remembering nothing, his eyes dim and vitality reaches oozing. Under other command, the little fleet sorrow- fully, but gladly, entered the harbor of Isabella. Our most effective source for the history of this striking cruise is the work of Bernaldez, already referred to. Harrisse has recently (1892) brought forward a contemporary manu- script account of the second voyage, lately discovered in the library of the University of Bologna. Its author, Michael de Cuneo, was one of the eighty unfortunates who took, at Columbus's bidding, the oath that they had reached the coast of Asia. Cuneo says that a " majority " thus perjured themselves under the threats of the Admiral, and that a certain learned cosmographer among them was so pronounced in his distrust that Columbus took steps to prevent his returning to Spain, lest he might prejudice the Admiral's interests. CHAPTER XIV. THE SECOND VOYAGE, CONTINUED. 1494-1496. It was the 29th of September, 1494, when the " Nina," with the senseless Admiral on board, and her frail consorts 14g4 Sep . stood into the harbor of Isabella. Taken ashore, the c "umbos' m sick man found no restorative like the presence of his IsabeUa - brother Bartholomew, who had reached Isabella during the Ad- miral's absence. Finds Bar . Several years had elapsed since the two congenial cohiTbuI brothers had parted,, We have seen that this brother there - had probably been with Bartholomew Diaz when he discov- ered the African cape. It is supposed, from the inscriptions on it, that the map delivered by Bartholomew to Henry VII. had shown the results of Diaz's discoveries. This chart had been taken to England, when Bartholomew had gone thither, to engage the interest of Henry VII. in Columbus's behalf. There is some obscurity about the movements of Bartholomew at this time, but there is thought by some to be \ . Bartholo- reason to believe that he finally Sfot sufficient en- mew's career J Y in England couragement from that Tudor prince to start for Spain with offers for his brother. The Historie tells us that the propositions of Bartholomew were speedily accepted by Henry, and this statement prevails in the earlier English writers, like Hakluyt and Bacon ; but Oviedo says the scheme was derided, and Geraldini says it was declined. Bartholomew reached Paris just at the time when word had come there of Columbus's return from his first voyage. His kinship to the Admiral, and his own expositions of the geographical problem then attracting so much attention, drew him within the influ- ence of the French court, and Charles VIII. is said to have fur- nished him the means — as Bartholomew was then low in purse 304 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. — to pursue his way to Spain. He was, however, too late to see the Admiral, who had already departed from Cadiz on this second voyage. Finding that it had been arranged for his brother's sons to be pages at Court, he sought them, and in com- pany with them he presented himself before the Spanish mon- archs at Valladolid. These sovereigns were about fit- ting out a supply fleet for Espafiola, and Bartholomew was put in command of an advance section of it. Sailing from Cadiz on April 30, 1494, with three caravels, he reached Isa- bella on St. John's Day, after the Admiral had left for his western cruise. If it was prudent for Columbus to bring another foreigner to his aid, he found in Bartholomew a fitter and more courageous spirit than Diego possessed. The Admiral was pretty sure now Hischarac- to nave an active and fearless deputy, sterner, indeed, ter- in his habitual bearing than Columbus, and with a har- dihood both of spirit and body that fitted him for command. These qualities were not suited to pacify the haughty hidalgos, but they were merits winch rendered him able to confront the discontent of all settlers, and gave him the temper to stand in no fear of them. He brought to the government of an ill- assorted community a good deal that the Admiral lacked. He was soberer in his imagination ; not so prone to let his wishes figure the future ; more practiced, if we may believe Las Casas, in the arts of composition, and able to speak and write much more directly and comprehensibly than his brother. He man- aged men better, and business proceeded more regularly under his control, and he contrived to save what was possible from the wreck of disorder into which his brother's unfitness for com- mand had thrown the colony. This is the man whom Las Casas enables us to understand, through the traits of character which created ne depicts. Columbus was now to create this brother Adeiantado. n j g representative, in certain ways, with the title of Adelantado. It was also no small satisfaction to. the Admiral, in his present weakness, to learn of the well-being of his children, and of the continued favor with which he was held at Court, little antici- pating the resentment of Ferdinand that an office of the rank of Adelantado should be created by any delegated authority. Co- lumbus had pursued his recent explorations in some measure THE SECOND VOYAGE. 305 to forestall what he feared the Portuguese might be led to attempt iu the same directiou, for he had not been unaware of the disturbance in the court at Lisbon which the papal line of demarcation had created. He was glad now to learn from his brother that his own fleet had hardly got to sea from Cadiz, in September, 1493, when the Pope, by another bull on the 26th of that month, had declared that all countries of the eastern Indies which the Spaniards might find, in case they were not already in Christian hands, should be included in the grant made to Spain. This Bull of Extension, as it was called, was Papa iBuUof a new thorn in the side of Portugal, and time would Extension - reveal its effect. Alexander had resisted all importunities to recede from his position, taken in May. Let us look now at what had happened in Espanola during the absence of Columbus ; but in the first place, we must mark out the native division of the island with EspaSoia whose history Columbus's career is so associated. Just absence of back of Isabella, and about the Vega Real, whose be- wildering beauties of grove and savanna have excited the ad- miration of modern visitors, lay the territory tributary to a cacique named Guarionex, which was bounded south by the Cibao gold mountains. South of these interior ridges and ex- tending to the southern shore of the island lay the region (Ma- guana) of the most warlike of all the native princes, Caonabo, whose wife, Anacaona, was a sister of Behechio, who governed Xaragua, as the larger part of the southern coast, westward of Caonabo's domain, including the long southwestern peninsula, was called. The northeastern part of the island (Marien) was subject to Guacanagari, the cacique neighboring to La Navi- dad. The eastern end (Higuay) of the island was under the domination of a chief named Cotabanana. It will be remembered that before starting for Cuba the Admiral had equipped an expedition, which, when it arrived at St. Thomas, was to be consigned to the charge of Pedro Mar- garite. This officer had instructions to explore the mountains of Cibao, and map out its resources. He was not to harass the natives by impositions, but he was to make them fear his power. It was also his business to avoid reducing the colony's supplies by making the natives support this exploring force. 306 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. If he could not get this support by fair means, he was to use foul means. Such instructions were hazardous enough ; but M ® Margarite was not the man to soften their application. He had even failed to grasp the spirit of the instructions which had been given by Columbus to ensnare Caonabo, which were THE SECOND VOYAGE. 307 " as thoroughly base and treacherous as could well be imag- ined," says Helps, and the reader can see them in Navarrete. This commander had spent his time mainly among the luxu- rious scenes of the Vega Real, despoiling its tribes of their pro- visions, and squandering the energies of his men in sensual diversions. The natives, who ought to have been his helpers, became irritated at his extortions and indignant at the invasion of their household happiness. The condition in the tribes which this riotous conduct had induced looked so threatening that Diego Columbus, as president of the council, wrote to Margarite in remonstrance, and reminded him of the Admiral's instruc- tions to explore the mountains. The haughty Spaniard, taking umbrage at what he deemed an interference with his independent command, read- ily lent himself to the faction inimical to Columbus. With his aid and with that of Father Boyle, a brother Catalo- nian, who had proved false to his office as a member of the ruling council and even finally disregardful of the royal wishes that he should remain in the colony, an uneasy party was soon banded together in Isabella. The modern French canonizers, in order to reconcile the choice by the Pope of this recusant priest, claim that his Holiness, or the king for him, confounded a Benedictine and Franciscan priest of the same name, and that the Benedictine was an unlucky changeling — perhaps even purposely — for the true monk of the Franciscans. In the face of Diego, this cabal found little difficulty in planning to leave the island for Spain in the ships which had come with Bartholomew Columbus. Diego had no power to meet with compulsion the defiance of these mutineers, and was subjected to the sore mortification of seeing the rebels sail out of the harbor for Spain. There was left to Diego, however, some satisfaction in feeling that such dangerous ringleaders were gone ; but it was not unaccompanied with anxiety to know what effect their representations would have at Court. A like anxiety now became poignant in the Admiral's mind, on his re- turn. The stories which Diego and Bartholomew were compelled to tell Columbus of the sequel of this violent abandonment of the colony were sad ones. The license which Pedro Margarite had permitted became more extended, when the little armed force 308 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. of the colony found itself without military restraint. It soon disbanded in large part, and lawless squads of soldiers were scattered throughout the country, wherever passion or avarice could find anything to prey upon. The long-suffering Indians soon reached the limits of endurance. A few acts of vengeance encouraged them to commit others, and everywhere small par- ties of the Spaniards were cut off as they wandered about for food and lustful conquests. The inhabitants of villages turned upon such stragglers as abused their hospitalities. Houses where they sheltered themselves were fired. Detached posts were besieged. While this condition prevailed, Caonabo planned to surprise Fort St. Thomas. Ojeda, here in control with fifty Fort st. men, commanded about the only remnant of the Span- ish forces which acknowledged the discipline of a competent leader. The vigilant Ojeda did not fail to get in- telligence of Caonabo's intentions. He made new vows to the Virgin, before an old Flemish picture of Our Lady which hung in his chamber in the fort, and which never failed to encourage him, wherever he tarried or wherever he strayed. Every man was under arms, and every eye was alert, when their commander, as great in spirit as he was diminutive in stature, marshaled his fifty men along his ramparts, as Caonabo with his horde of naked warriors advanced to surprise him. The outraged ca- cique was too late. No unclothed natives dared to come within range of the Spanish crossbows and arquebuses. Ojeda met every artful and stealthy approach by a sally that dropped the bravest of Caonabo's warriors. The cacique next tried to starve the Spaniards out. His parties infested every path, and if a foraging force came out, or one of succor endeavored to get in, multitudes of the natives foiled the'endeavor. Famine was impending in the fort. The procrastinations of the arts of beleaguering always help the white man behind his ramparts, when the savage is his enemy. The native force dwindled under the delays, and Caonabo at last abandoned the siege. The native leader now gave himself to a larger enterprise, caonabo's His spies told him of the weakened condition of Isa- league. bella, and he resolved to form a league of the princi- pal caciques of the island to attack that settlement. Wherevei THE SECOND VOYAGE. 309 the Spaniards had penetrated, they had turned the friendliest feelings into hatred, and in remote parts of the island the re- ports of the Spanish ravages served, almost as much as the ex- perience of them, to embitter the savage. It was no small success for Caonabo to make the other caciques believe that the supernatural character of the Spaniards would not protect them if a combined attack should be arranged. He persuaded all of them but Guacanagari, for that earliest friend of Columbus re- mained firm in his devotion to the Spaniards. The Admiral's confidence in him had not been misplaced. He was subjected to attacks by the other chieftains, but his constancy survived them all. In these incursions of his neighbors, his wives were killed and captured, and among them the dauntless Catalina, as is affirmed ; but his zeal for his white neighbors did not abate. When Guacanagari heard that Columbus had returned, he repaired to Isabella, and from this faithful ally the Admiral learned of the plans which were only waiting andGua- further developments for precipitate action. Columbus, thus forewarned, was eager to break any confed- eracy of the Indians before it could gather strength. He had hardly a leader disengaged whom he could send on the war- path. It was scarcely politic to place Bartholomew in any such command over the few remaining Spanish cavaliers whose spirit was so necessary to any military adventure. He sent a party, however, to relieve a small garrison near the villages of Guatiguana, a tributary chief to the great cacique Guarionex ; but the party resorted to the old excesses, and came near de- feating the purposes of Columbus. Guatiguana was prevailed upon, however, to come to the Spanish settlement, and Colum- bus, to seal his agreement of amity with him, persuaded him to let the Lucayan interpreter marry his daughter. To this dip- lomatic arrangement the Admiral added the more powerful argument of a fort, called La Concepcion, which he Fort later built where it could command the Vega Real. conception. It was not long before four ships, with Antonio Torres in command, arrived from Spain, brinoinc; a new store „ . . . . . . Torres's of provisions, another physician, and more medicines, ships ar- and, what was much needed, artificers and numerous gardeners. There was some hope now that the soil could be made to do its part in the support of the colony. 310 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. To the Admiral came a letter, dated August 16, from Ferdi- nand and Isabella, giving him notice that all the difficulties with Portugal had been amicably adjusted. The court of Lis- bon, finding that Pope Alexander was not inclined to recede from his position, and Spain not courting any difference that would lead to hostilities, both countries had easily been brought to an agreement, which was made at Tordesillas, June 7. Treaty of 7, 1494, to move the line of demarcation so much far- ther as to fall 370 leagues west of the Cape de Verde Islands. Each country then bound itself to inspect its granted rights under the bull thus modified. The historical study of this diplomatic controversy over the papal division of the world is much embarrassed by the lack of documentary records of the correspondence carried on by Spain, Portugal, and the Pope. This letter of August 16 must have been very gratifying to Thesover- Columbus. Their Majesties told him that one of the toc'oimn- er principal reasons of their rejoicing in his discoveries bus ' was that they felt it all due to his genius and perse- verance, and that the events had justified his foreknowledge and their expectations. So now, in their desire to define the new line of demarcation, and in the hope that it might be found to run through some ocean island, where a monument could be erected, they turned to him for assistance, and they expected that if he could not return to assist in these final negotiations, he would dispatch to them some one who was competent to deal with the geographical problem. Torres had also brought a general letter of counsel to the and to the colonists, commanding them to obey all the wishes and colonists. to k ow to the authority of the Admiral. Whatever his lack of responsibility, in some measure at least, for the un- doubted commercial failure of the colony, its want of a product in any degree commensurate both with expectation and outlay could not fail, as he well understood, to have a strong effect both on the spirit of the . people and on the constancy of his royal patrons, who might, under the urging of Margarite and his abettors, have already swerved from his support. Reasons of this kind made it imperative that the newly ar- rived ships should be returned without delay, and with such reassuring: messages and returns as could be furnished. The fleet departed on February 24, 1495. Himself still prostrate, THE SECOND VOYAGE. 311 and needing his brother Bartholomew to act during this season of his incapacity, there was no one he could spare so 1495 Feb . well to meet the wishes of the sovereigns as his other i"" fleet re- brother. So armed with maps and instructions, and | l pa"n t0 with the further mission of protecting the Admiral's interest at Court, Diego embarked in one of the caravels. All the gold which had been collected was consigned to Diego's care, but it was only a sorry show, after all. There had been a variety of new fruits and spices, and samples of baser metals gathered, and these helped to complete the lading. There was one resource left. He had intimated his readiness to avail him- self of it in the communication of his views to the carrying sovereigns, which Torres had already conveyed to them. slaves - He now gave the plan the full force of an experiment, and packed into the little caravels full five hundred of the unhappy natives, to be sold as slaves. " The very ship," says Helps, " which brought that admirable reply from Ferdinand and Isa- bella to Columbus, begging him to seek some other way to Christianity than through slavery, even for wild man-devouring Caribs, should go back full of slaves taken from among the mild islanders of Hispaniola." The act was a long step in the mis- erable degradation which Columbus put upon those poor crea- tures whose existence he had made known to the world. Almost in the same breath, as in his letter to Santangel, he had sug- gested the future of a slave traffic out of that very existence. It is an obvious plea in his defense that the example of the church and of kings had made such heartless conduct a common resort to meet the financial burdens of conquest. The Portu- guese had done it in Africa ; the Spaniards had done it in Spain. The contemporary history of that age may be coiumbua said to ring with the wails and moans of such negro and slaver y« and Moorish victims. A Holy Religion had unblushingly been made the sponsor for such a crime. Theologians had proved that the Word of God could ordain misery in this world, if only the recompense came — or be supposed to come — in a passport to the Christian's heaven. The merit which Columbus arrogated to himself was that he was superior to the cosmographical knowledge of his time. It was the merit of Las Casas that he threw upon the reeking pas- sions of the enslaver the light of a religion that was above 312 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. sophistry and purer than cupidity. The existence of Las Casas is the arraignment of Columbus. It may be indeed asking too much of weak humanity to be good in all things, and therein rests the pitiful plea for Colum- bus, the originator of American slavery. Events soon became ominous. A savage host began to gather in the Vega Real, and all that Columbus, now recovering his strength, could marshal in his defense was about two hundred loot and twenty horse, but they were cased in steel, and the natives were naked. In this respect, the fight was unequal, and the more so that the Spaniards were now able to take wood- into the field a pack of twenty implacable bloodhounds. The bare bodies of the Indians had no protection against their insatiate thirst. It was the 27th of March, 1495, when Columbus, at the head of this little army, marched forth from Isabella, to 1495. March 27. coium- confront a force of the natives, which, if we choose to believe the figures that are given by Las Casas, amounted to 100,000 men, massed under the command of Man- icaotex. The whites climbed the Pass of the Hidalgos, where Columbus had opened the way the year before, and descended into that lovely valley, no longer a hospitable paradise. As they approached the hostile horde, details were sent to make the attacks various and simultaneous. The Indians were sur- prised at the flashes of the arquebuses from every quarter of the woody covert, and the clang of their enemies' drums and the bray of their trumpets drowned the savage yells. The native army had already begun to stagger in their wonder and perplex- ity, when Ojeda, seizing the opportune moment, dashed the Vega with his mounted lancemen right into the centre of the dusky mass. The bloodhounds rushed to their sanguinary work on his flanks. The task was soon done. The woods were filled with flying and shrieking savages. The league of the caciques was broken, and it was only left for the conquerors to gather up their prisoners. Guacanagari, who had followed the white army with a train of his subjects, looked on with the same wonder which struck the Indians who were beaten. There was no opportunity for him to fight at all. The rout had been complete. This notable conflict taking place ou THE SECOND VOYAGE. 313 April 25. 1495, is a central point in a somewhat bewildering tangle of events, as our authorities relate them, so that 1495 April it is not easy in all cases to establish their sequence. 25, The question of dealing with Caonabo was still the most im- portant of all. It was solved by the cunning and dash of Ojeda. Presenting his plan to the Admiral, he was commanded to carry it out. Taking ten men whom he could trust, Ojeda boldly sought the village where Caonabo was quartered, and with as much intrepidity as cunning put himself in captured by the power of that cacique. The chieftain was not with- Je a out chivalry, and the confidence and audacity of Ojeda won him. Hospitality was extended, and the confidences of a mutual respect soon ensued. Ojeda proposed that Caonabo should ac- company him to Isabella, to make a compact of friendship with the Viceroy. All then would be peaceful. Caonabo, who had often wondered at the talking of the great bell in the chapel at Isabella, as he had heard it when skulking about the settle- ment, eagerly sprang to the lure, when Ojeda promised that he should have the bell. Ojeda, congratulating himself on the suc- cess of his bait, was disconcerted when he found that the cacique intended that a large force of armed followers should make the visit with him. To prevent this, Ojeda resorted to a stratagem, which is related by Las Casas, who says it was often spoken of when that priest first came to the island, six years later. Munoz was not brought to believe the tale ; but Helps sees no obstacle to giving it credence. The Spaniards and the Indians were all on the march to- gether, and had encamped by a river. Ojeda produced a set of burnished steel manacles, and told the cacique that they were ornaments such as the King of Spain wore on solemn occasions, and that he had been commanded to give them to the most dis- tinguished native prince. He first proposed a bath in the river. The swim over, Caonabo was prevailed upon to be put behind Ojeda astride the same horse. Then the shining baubles were adjusted, apparently without exciting suspicion, amid the elation of the savage at his high seat upon the wondrous beast. A few sweeping gallops of the horse, guided by Ojeda, and followed by the other mounted spearmen, scattered the amazed crowd of the cacique's attendants. Then at a convenient gap in the circle 314 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. Ojeda spurred his steed, and the whole mounted party dashed into the forest and away. The party drew up only when they had got beyond pursuit, in order to bind the cacique faster in his seat. So in due time, this little cavalcade galloped into Isa- bella with its manacled prisoner. The meeting of Columbus and his captive was one of very Meets Co- different emotions in the two, — the Admiral rejoi- lumbus. cing j.jj a |. j-jjg mos fc active foe was in his power, and the cacique abating nothing of the defiance which belonged to his freedom. Las Casas tells us that, as Caonabo lay in his shackles in an outer apartment of the Admiral's house, the people came and looked at him. He also relates that the bold Ojeda was the only one toward whom the prisoner manifested any respect, acknowledging in this way his admiration for his audacity. He would maintain only an indifferent haughtiness toward the Ad- miral, who had not, as he said, the courage to do himself what he left to the bravery of his lieutenant. Ojeda presently returned to his command at St. Thomas, only to find that a brother of Caonabo had gathered the Indians for an assault. Dauntless audacity again saved him. He had brought with him some new men, and so, leaving a garrison in the fort, he sallied forth with his horsemen and with tacks the as many foot as he could muster and attacked the ap- proaching host. A charge of the glittering horse, with the flashing of sabres, broke the dusky line. The savages fled, leaving their commander a prisoner in Ojeda's hands. Columbus followed up these triumphs by a march through the country. Every opposition needed scai'ce more than a dash of Ojeda's cavalry to break it. The Vega was once more quiet with a sullen submission. The confederated caciques all sued for peace, except Behechio, who ruled the southwestern corner of the island. The whites had not yet invaded his territory, and he retired morosely, taking with him his sister, Anacaona, the wife of the imprisoned Caonabo. The battle and the succeeding collapse had settled the fate of the poor natives. The policy of subjecting men by violence to Reparti- P a y the tribute of their lives and property to Span- encomiei£ nd ^ sn cupidity was begun in earnest, and it was shortly after made to include the labor on the Spanish farms, which, under the names of repartimientos and encomiendas, de- THE SECOND VOYAGE. 315 moralized the lives of master and slave. When prisoners were gathered in such numbers that to guard them was a burden, there could be but little delay in forcing the issue of the slave trade upon the Crown as a part of an established policy. To the mind of Columbus, there was now some chance of repelling the accusations of Margarite and Father Boyle by palpable returns of olive flesh and shining metal. A scheme of enforced contribution of gold was accordingly planned. Each native above the age of fourteen was required to pay every three months, into the Spanish coffers, his share of gold, measured by the capacity of a hawk's bell for the common person, and by that of a calabash for the cacique. In the regions distant from the gold deposits, cotton was accepted as a substitute, twenty-five pounds for each person. A copper medal was put on the neck of every Indian for each payment, and new exac- tions were levied upon those who failed to show the medals. The amount of this tribute was more than the poor natives could find, and Guarionex tried to have it commuted for grain ; but the golden greed of Columbus was inexorable. He pre- ferred to reduce the requirements rather than vary the kind. A half of a hawk's bell of gold was better than stores of grain. " It is a curious circumstance," says Irving, " that the miseries of the poor natives should thus be measured out, as it were, by the very baubles which first fascinated them." To make this payment sure, it was necessary to establish other armed posts through the country ; and there were speedily built that of Magdalena in the Vega, one called Esperanza in Cibao, another named Catalina, beside La Concepoion, which has already been mentioned. The change which ensued in the lives of the natives was pitiable. The labor of sifting the sands of the streams The native8 for gold, which they had heretofore made a mere pas- debased - time to secure bits to pound into ornaments, became a depress- ing task. To work fields under a tropical sun, where they had basked for sportive rest, converted their native joyousness into despair. They sang their grief in melancholy songs, as Peter Martyr tells us. Gradually they withdrew from their old haunts, and by hiding in the mountains, they sought to avoid the exactions, and to force the Spaniards, thus no longer sup- plied by native labor with food, to abandon their posts and re- 316 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. tire to Isabella, if not to leave the island. Scant fare for them- selves and the misery of dank lurking-places were preferable to the heavy burdens of the taskmasters. They died in their retreats rather than return to their miserable labors. Even the long-tried friend of the Spaniards, Guacanagari, was made no exception. He and his people suffered every exaction with the Guacanagari res * °f their countrymen. The cacique himself is said disappears, eventually to have buried himself in despair in the mountain fastnesses, and so passed from the sight of men. The Spaniards were not so easily to be thwarted. They hunted the poor creatures like game, and, under the goading of lashes, such as survived were in time returned to their slavery. So thoroughly was every instinct of vengeance rooted out of the naturally timid nature of the Indians that a Spaniard might, as Las Casas tells us, march solemnly like an army through the most solitary parts of the island and receive tribute at every demand. It is time to watch the effect of the representations of Mar- garite and Father Boyle at the Spanish Coui't. Columbus had been doubtless impelled, in these schemes of cruel ex- interests in action, by the fear of their influence, and with the hope of meeting their sneers at his ill success with substantial tribute to the Crown. The charges against Colum- bus and his policy and against his misrepresentation had all the immediate effect of accusations which are supported by one- sided witnesses. Every sentiment of jealousy and pride was played upon, and every circumstance of palliation and modifica- tion was ignored. The suspicious reservation which had more or less characterized the bearing of Ferdinand towards the trans- actions of the hero could become a background to the newer emotions. Fonseca and the comptroller Juan de Soria are charged with an easy acceptance of every insinuation against the Viceroy. The canonizers cannot execrate Fonseca enough. They make him alternately the creature and beguiler of the King. His subserviency, his trading in bishoprics, and his alleged hatred of Columbus are features of all their portraits of him. The case against the Admiral was thus successfully argued. Testimony like that of the receiver of the Crown taxes in re- buttal of charges seemed to weigh little. Movements having THE SECOND VOYAGE. 317 been instituted at once (April 7, 1495) to succor the colony by the immediate dispatch of supplies, it was two days later agreed with Beradi — the same with whom Vespucius had been asso- ciated, as we have seen — to furnish twelve ships for Espafiola. The resolution was .then taken to send an agent to investigate the affairs of the colony. If he should find the Admiral still absent, — for the length of his cruise to Cuba had already, at that time, begun to excite apprehension of his safety, — this same agent was to superintend the distribution of the supplies which he was to take. At this juncture, in April, 1495, Torres, arriv- ing with his fleet, reported the Admiral's safe return, and sub- mitted the notarial document, in which Columbus had made it clear to his own satisfaction that the Golden Chersonesus was in sight. Whether that freak of geographical prescience threw about his expedition a temporary splendor, and again wakened the gratitude of the sovereigns, as Irving says it did, may be left to the imagination ; but the fact remains that the sover- eigns did not swerve from their purpose to send an Aguado aent inquisitor to the colony, and the same Juan Aguado t0 Es P anola - who had come back with credentials from the Admiral himself was selected for the mission. There were some recent orders of the Crown which Aguado was to break to the Admiral, from which Columbus could not fail to discover that the exclusiveness of his powers 1495. April was seriously impaired. On the 10th of April, 1495, i»- ah . , ill -i o • Spaniards al- lt had been ordered that any native-born Spaniard lowed to ex- plore. could invade the seas which had been held to be ap- portioned to Columbus, that such navigator might discover what he could, and even settle, if he liked, in Espanola. This order was a ground of serious complaint by Columbus at a later day, for the reason that this license was availed of by unworthy interlopers. He declares that after the way had been shown even the very tailors turned explorers. It seems tolerably cer- tain that this irresponsible voyaging, which continued till Co- lumbus induced the monarchs to rescind the order in June, 1497, worked developments in the current cartography of the new regions which it is difficult to trace to their distinct sources. Gomara intimates that during this period there were Nameleas nameless voyagers, of whose exploits we have no v °y a s er3 - record by which to identify them, and Navarrete and Humboldt 318 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. find evidences of explorations which cannot otherwise be ac- counted for. How far this condition of affairs was brought about by the Enemies of importunities of the enemies of Columbus is not clear. Columbus. »pj ie surv i v i n g Pinzons are said to have been in part those who influenced the monarchs, but doubtless a share of profits, which the Crown required from all such private specu lation, was quite as strong an incentive as any importunities of eager mariners. The burdens of the official expeditions were onerous for an exhausted treasury, and any resource to replen- ish its coffers was not very narrowly scrutinized in the light of the pledges which Columbus had exacted from a Crown that was beginning to understand the impolicy of such concessions. There was also at this time a passage of words between Fon- seca and Diego Colon that was not without irritating and Diego elements. The Admiral's brother had brought some gold with him, which he claimed as his own. Fonseca withheld it, but in the end obeyed the sovereign's order and released it. It was no time to add to the complications of the Crown's relations with the distant Viceroy. Aguado bore a royal letter, which commanded Columbus to reduce the dependents of the colony to five hundred, tertoCo- as a necessary retrenchment. There had previously been a thousand. Directions were also given to con- trol the apportionment of rations. A new metallurgist and master-miner, Pablo Belvis, was sent out, and extraordinary privileges in the working of the mines were given to him. Munoz says that he introduced there the quicksilver process of separating the gold from the sand. A number of new priests were collected to take the place of those who had returned, or who desired to come back. Such were the companions and instructions that Aguado was commissioned to bear to Columbus. There was still another movement in the policy of the Crown that offered the Viceroy little ground for reassurance. The prisoners which he had sent by the ships raised a serious question. It was determined that Columbus an y transaction looking to the making slaves of them and slavery, j^ not k een , au thorized ; but the desire of Columbus so to treat them had at first been met by a royal order directing their sale in the marts of Andalusia. A few days later, under THE SECOND VOYAGE. 319 the influence of Isabella, this order had been suspended, till an inquiry could be made into the cause of the capture of the Indians, and until the theologians could decide upon the jus- tifiableness of such a sale. If we may believe Bernaldez, who pictures their misery, they were subsequently sold in Seville. Munoz, however, says that he could not find that the trouble which harassed the theologians was ever decided. Such hesi- tancy was calculated to present a cruel dilemma to the Viceroy, since the only way in which the clamor of the Court for gold could be promptly appeased camfc near being prohibited by what Columbus must have called the misapplied mercy of the Queen. He failed to see, as Munoz suggests, why vassals of the Crown, entering upon acts of resistance, should not be sub- jected to every sort of cruelty. Humboldt wonders at any kesi- tancy when the grand inquisitor, Torquemada, was burning her- etics so fiercely at this time that such expiations of the poor Moors and Jews numbered 8,800 between 1481 and 1498 ! Aguado, with four caravels, and Diego Columbus accompany- ing him, having sailed from Cadiz late in August, li95 0c _ 1495, reached the harbor of Isabella some time in Oc- Aguado at tober. The new commissioner found the Admiral ab- Isabella - sent, occupied with affairs in other parts of the island. Aguado soon made kuown his authority. It was embraced in a brief missive, dated April 9, 1495, and as Irving translates it, it read : " Cavaliers, esquires, and other persons, who by our orders are in the Indies, we send to you Juan Aguado, our groom of the chambers, who will speak to you on our part. We command you to give him faith and credit." The efficacy of such an order depended on the royal purpose that was behind it, and on the will of the commissioner, which might or might not conform to that purpose. It has been a plea of Irving and others that Aguado, elated by a transient authority, transcended the inten- tions of the monarchs. It is not easy to find a definite deter- mination of such a question. It appears that when the instru- ment was proclaimed by trumpet, the general opinion did not interpret the order as a suspension of the Viceroy's powers. The Adelantado, who was governing in Columbus's absence, saw the new commissioner order arrests, countermand direc- tions, and in various ways assume the functions of a governor. Bartholomew was in no condition to do more than mildly remon- 320 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. sti'ate. It was clearly not safe for him to provoke the great body of the discontented colonists, who professed now to find a champion sent to them by royal order. Columbus heard of Aguado's arrival, and at once returned to Isabella. Aguado, who had started to find him with an escort of horse, missed him on the road, and this delayed their meet- Meets Co- ni » a little. When the conference came, Columbus, himbus. with a dignified and courteous air, bowed to a superior authority. It has passed into history that Aguado was disap- pointed at this quiet submission, and had hoped for an alterca- tion, which might warrant some peremptory force. It is also said that later he endeavored to make it appear how Columbus had not been so complacent as was becoming. It was soon apparent that this displacement of the Admiral was restoring even the natives to hope, and their caciques were not slow in presenting complaints, not certainly without reason, to the ascendant power, and against the merciless extortions of the Admiral. The budget of accusations which Aguado had accumulated Accuses was now full enough, and he ordered the vessels to Columbus. ma k e ready to carry him back to Spain. The situa- tion for Columbus was a serious one. He had in all this trial experienced the results of the intrigues of Margarite and Father Boyle. He knew of the damaging persuasiveness of the Pin- zons. He had not much to expect from the advocacy of Diego. There was nothing for him to do but to face in person the charges as reenforced by Aguado. He resolved to return in the ships. " It is not one of the least singular traits in his his- tory," says Irving, " that after having been so many years in persuading mankind that there was a new world to be dis- covered, he had almost an equal trouble in proving to them the advantage of the discovery." He himself never did prove it. The ships were ready. They lay at anchor in the roadstead. A cloud of vapor and dust was seen in the east. It wrecked in was borne headlong before a hurricane such as the Spaniards had never seen, and the natives could not remember its equal. It cut a track through the forests. It lashed the sea until its expanse seethed and writhed and sent its harried waters tossing in a seeming fright. The uplifted surges broke the natural barriers and started inland. The THE SECOND VOYAGE. 321 ships shuddered at their anchorage ; cables snapped ; three car- avels sunk, and the rest were dashed on the beach. The tumult lasted for three hours, and then the sun shone upon the havoc. There was but one vessel left in the harbor, and she was shat- tered. It was the " Nina," which had borne Columbus in his western cruise. As soon as the little colony recovered its senses, 322 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. men were set to work repairing the solitary caravel, and con- structing another out of the remnants of the wrecks. While this was going on, a young Spaniard, Miguel Diaz by Miguel Diaz nanie i presented himself in Isabella. He had been finds gold. m j.] ie serv i ce f the Adelantado, and was not unrecosr- nized. He was one who had some time before wounded another Spaniard in a duel, and, supposing that the wound was mortal, he had, with a few friends, fled into the woods and wandered away till he came to the banks of the Ozerna, a river on the southern coast of the island, at the mouth of which the city of Santo Domingo now stands. Here, as he said, he had attracted the attention of a female cacique, there reigning, and had be- come her lover. She confided to him the fact that there were rich gold mines in her territory, and to make him more content in her company, she suggested that perhaps the Admiral, if he knew of the mines, would abandon the low site of Isabella, and find a better one on the Ozema. Acting on this suggestion, Diaz, with some guides, returned to the neighborhood of Isa- bella, and lingered in concealment till he learned that his an- tagonist had survived his wound. Then, making bold, he entered the town, as we have seen. His story was a welcome one, and the Adelantado was dispatched with a force to verify the adven- turer's statement. In due time, the party returned, and reported h. that at a ri\jer named Hayna they had found such mine8 ' stores of gold that Cibao was poor in comparison. The explorers had seen the metal in all the streams ; they observed it in the hillsides. They had discovered two deep excavations, which looked as if the mines had been worked at some time by a more enterprising people, since of these great holes the natives could give no account. Once more the Admi- soiomon's rais imagination was fired. He felt sure that he had Ophir. come upon the Ophir of Solomon. These ancient mines must have yielded the gold which covered the great Tem- ple. Had the Admiral not discovered already the course of the ships which sought it ? Did they not come from the Persian gulf, round the Golden Chersonesus, and so easterly, as he him- self had in the reverse way tracked the very course ? Here was a new splendor for the Court of Spain. If the name of India was redolent of spices, that of Ophir could but be resplendent with gold ! That was a message worth taking to Europe. THE SECOND VOYAGE. 323 The two caravels were now ready. The Adelantado was left in command, with Diego to succeed in case of his death. Fran- cisco Koldan was commissioned as chief magistrate, and the Fathers Juan Berzognon and Roman Pane remained behind to pursue missionary labors among the natives. Instructions were left that the valley of the Ozema should be occupied, and a fort built in it. Diaz, with his queenly Catalina, had become im- portant. There was a motley company of about two hundred and fifty persons, largely discontents and vagabonds, crowded into the two ships. Columbus was in one, and Aguado in the ^ * ° 14%. March. other. So thev started on their adventurous and w. coium- J . bus and wearying voyage on March 10, 1496. They carried Aguadosau about thirty Indians in confinement, and among them carrying J m . . Caonabo. the manacled Caonabo, with some of his relatives. Columbus told Berualdez that he took the chieftain over to im- press him with Spanish power, and that he intended to send him back and release him in the end. His release came otherwise. There is some disagreement of testimony on the point, some alleging that he was drowned during the hurricane in the harbor, but the better opinion seems to be that he died on the voyage, of a broken spirit. At any rate, he never reached Spain, and we hear of him only once while on shipboard. We have seen that on his return voyage in 1492 Columbus had pushed north before turning east. It does not appear how much he had learned of the experience of Torres's easterly pas- sages. Perhaps it was only to make a new trial that he now steered directly east. He met the trade winds and the calms of the tropics, and had been almost a month at sea when, 149G on April 6, he found himself still neighboring to the A P rU6 - islands of the Caribs. His crew needed rest and provisions, and he bore away to seek them. He anchored for a while at Marigalante, and then passed on to Guadaloupe. He had some difficulty in landing, as a wild, screaming mass of natives was gathered on the beach in a hostile AtGuada- manner. A discharge of the Spanish arquebuses loupe- cleared the way, and later a party scouring the woods captured some of the courageous women of the tribe. These were all released, however, except a strong, powerful woman, who, with a daughter, refused to be left, for the reason, as the story goes, 324 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. that she had conceived a passion for Caonabo. By the 20th, the ships again set sail ; but the same easterly trades baffled them, and another month was passed without much progress. By the beginning of June, provisions were so reduced that there were fears of famine, and it began to be considered whether the voyagers might not emulate the Caribs and eat the Indians. Columbus interfered, on the plea that the poor crea- tures were Christian enough to be protected from such a fate ; but as it turned out, they were not Christian enough to be saved from the slave-block in Andalusia. The alert senses of Colum- bus had convinced him that land could not be far distant, and he was confirmed in this by his reckoning. These opinions of Columbus were questioned, however, and it was not at all clear in the minds of some, even of the experienced pilots who were on board, that they were so near the latitude of Cape St. Vin- cent as the Admiral affirmed. Some of these navigators put the ships as far north as the Bay of Biscay, others even as far as the English Channel. Columbus one night ordered sail to be taken in. They were too near the land to proceed. In the 1496. June morning, they saw land in the neighborhood of Cape n. c^iz. g fc yi ncent> On June 11, they entered the harbor of Cadiz. CHAPTER XV. IN SPAIN, 1496-1498. DA GAMA, VESPUCIUS, CABOT. " The wretched men crawled forth," as Irving tells us of their debarkation, " emaciated by the diseases of the 1496 Co _ colony and the hardships of the voyage, who carried J^gat "" in their yellow countenances, says an old writer, a Cadiz ' mockery of that gold which had been the object of their search, and who had nothing to relate of the New World but tales of sickness, poverty, and disappointment." This is the key to the contrasts in the present reception of the adventurers with that which greeted Columbus on his return to Palos. When Columbus landed at Cadiz, he was clothed with the robe and girdled with the cord of the Franciscans. His face was unshaven. Whether this was in penance, or an assump- tion of piety to serve as a lure, is not clear. Oviedo says it was to express his humility ; and his humbled pride needed some such expression. He found in the harbor three caravels just about starting for Espanola with tardy supplies. It had been intended to send some in January ; but the ships which started with them suf- fered wreck on the neighboring coasts. He had only to ask Pedro Alonso Nino, the commander of this little fleet, for his dispatches, to find the condition of feeling which he was to en- .counter in Spain. They gave him a sense, more than and leamg ever before, of the urgent necessity of making the tfonoTthe colony tributary to the treasury of the Crown. It was P ublicmind - clear that discord and unproductiveness were not much longer to be endured. So he wrote a letter to the Adelantado, which was to go by the ships, urging expedition in quieting the life of the colonists, and in bringing the resources of the island under such control that it could be made to yield a steady flow of treasure. To this end, the new mines of Hayna must be fur- 326 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. ther explored, and the working of them started with diligence. A port of shipment should be found in their neiffh- 1496. June , , , , , ■. ,, r . , , . . t-.ii n. coium- borhood, he adds. W ith such instructions to Bartholo- to Barthoio- mew, the caravels sailed on June 17, 1496. It must mew. have been with some trepidation that Columbus for- warded to the Court the tidings of his arrival. If the two dis- patches which he sent could have been preserved, we might better understand his mental condition. As soon as the messages of Columbus reached their Majesties, invited to then a * Aluiazan, they sent, July 12, 1496, a letter in- Court. yiting him to Court, and reassuring him in his de- spondency by expressions of kindness. So he started to join the Court in a somewhat better frame of mind. He led some of his bedecked Indians in his train, not forgetting " in the towns " to make a cacique among them wear conspicuously a golden necklace. Bernaldez tells us that it was in this wily fashion that Co- lumbus made his journey into the country of Castile, — " the which collar," that writer adds, " I have seen and held in these hands ; " and he goes on to describe the other precious orna- ments of the natives, which Columbus took care that the gaping crowds should see on this wandering mission. It is one of the anachronisms of the Historic of 1571 that it places the Court at this time at Burgos, and makes it there to celebrate the marriage of the crown prince with Margaret of Austria. The author of that book speaks of seeing the festivi- ties himself, then in attendance as a page upon Don Juan. It was a singular lapse of memory in Ferdinand Columbus — if this statement is his — to make two events like the arrival of his father at Court, with all the incidental parade as described in the book, and the ceremonies of that wedding festival iden- tical in time. The wedding was in fact nine months later, in April, 1497. Columbus's reception, wherever it was, seems to have been gracious, and he made the most of the amenities of the Received by ° . . . thesover- occasion to picture, in his old exaggerating way, the wealth of the Ophir mines. He was encouraged by the effect which his enthusiasm had produced to ask to be sup- Makes new plied with another fleet, partly to send additional sup- demands. plies to Espanola, but mainly to enable him to dis- IN SPAIN, 1496-1498. 327 cover that continental land farther south, of which he had so constantly heard reports. It was easy for the monarchs to give fair promises, and quite as easy to forget them, for a while at least, in the busy scenes which their political ambitions were producing. Belligerent relations with France necessitated a vigilant watch about the Pyrenees. There were fleets to be maintained to resist, both in the Mediterranean and on the Atlantic coast, attacks which might unexpectedly fall. An imposing armada was preparing to go to Flanders to carry thither the Princess Juana to her espousal with Philip of Austria. The same fleet was to bring back Philip's sister Margaret to become the bride of Prince Juan, in those ceremonials to which reference has already been made. These events were too engrossing for the monarchs to give much attention to the wishes of Columbus, and it was not till the autumn of 1496 that an appropriation was made 1496 Au _ to equip another little squadron for him. The hopes n "w n expedi- it raised were soon dashed, for having some occasion tl0n0rdered - to need money promptly, at a crisis of the contest which the King was waging with France, the money which had been in- tended for Columbus was diverted to the new exigency. What was worse in the eyes of Columbus, it was to be paid out of some gold which it was supposed that Nino had brought back from the mines of Hayna. This officer on arriving at Cadiz had sent to the Court some boastful messages about his golden lading, which were not confirmed when in December the sober dispatch of the Adelantado, which Nino had kept back, came to be read. The nearest approach to gold which the caravels brought was another crowd of dusky slaves, and the dispatches of Bartholomew pictured the colony in the same conditions of destitution as before. There was no stimulant in such reports either for the Admiral or for the Court, and the New World was again dismissed from the minds of all, or consigned to their derision. When the spring months of 1497 arrived, there were new hopes. The wedding of Prince Juan at Burgos was ° 1497. over, and the Queen was left more at liberty to think spring, co- j» i p -,. . rrvi it' lumbus's ot her patronage ot the new discoveries, lhe King rights reaf- was growing more and more apathetic, and some of 328 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. the leading spirits of the Court were inimical, either actively or reservedly. By the Queen's influence, the old rights bestowed upon Columbus were reaffirmed (April 23, 1497), and he was offered a large landed estate in Espaiiola, with a new territorial title ; but he was wise enough to see that to accept it would complicate his affairs beyond their present entanglement. He was solicitous, however, to remove some of his present pecuniary embarrassments, and it was arranged that he should be relieved from bearing an eighth of the cost of the ventures of the last three years, and that he should surrender all rights to the profits ; while for the three years to come he New powers. FERDINAND OF ARAGON. [From an ancient medallion given in Buckingham Smith's Coleccion.~\ should have an eighth of the gross income, and a further tenth of the net proceeds. Later, the original agreement was to be restored. His brother Bartholomew was created Adelantado, giving thus the royal sanction to the earlier act of the AdmiraL In the letters patent made out previous to Columbus's second IN SPAIN, 1496-1498. 329 voyage, the Crown distinctly reserved the right to grant other licenses, and invested Fouseca with the power to do Fonseca al- so, allowing to Columbus nothing more than one g^ntiu eighth of the tonnage ; and in the ordinance of June censes - 2, 1497, in which they now revoked all previous licenses, the revocation was confined to such things as were repugnant to the rights of Columbus. It was also agreed that the Crown should BARTHOLOMEW COLUMBUS. [From Barcia's Herrera."] maintain for him a body of three hundred and thirty gentlemen, soldiers, and helpers, to accompany him on his new expedition, and this number could be increased, if the profits of the colony warranted the expenditm^e. Power was given to him to grant land to such as would cultivate the soil for four years ; but all brazil-wood and metals were to be reserved for the Crown. 330 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. All this seemed to indicate that the complaints which had been made against the oppressive sternness of the Admiral's rule had not as yet broken down the barriers of the Queen's protection. Indeed, we find up to this time no record of any serious question at Court of his authority, and Irving' thinks nothing indicates any symptom of the royal discontent except the reiterated injunctions, in the orders given to him respecting the natives and the colonists, that leniency should govern his conduct so far as was safe. Permission being given to him to entail his estates, he marked out in a testamentarv document (February 22, 1498) 1498. Feb- Al . „ , . " , . i i • -.i t- i- ruary 22. the succession ot his heirs, — male heirs, with r erdi- nand's rights protected, if Diego's line ran out ; then male heirs of his brothers ; and if all male heirs failed, then the estates were to descend by the female line. The title Admiral was made the paramount honor, and to be the perpetual dis- tinction of his representatives. The entail was to furnish forever a tenth of its revenues to charitable uses. Genoa was placed particularly under the patronage of his succeeding rep- resentatives, with injunctions always to do that city service, as far as the interests of the Church and the Spanish Crown would permit. Investments were to be made from time to time in the bank of St. George at Genoa, to accumulate against the opportune moment when the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre seemed feasible, either to help to that end any state expedition or to fit out a private one. He enjoined upon his heirs a con- stant, unwavering devotion to the Papal Church and to the Spanish Crown. At every season of confession, his representa- tive was commanded to lay open his heart to the confessor, who must be prompted by a perusal of the will to ask the crucial questions. It was in the same document that Columbus prescribed the signature of his representatives in succeeding generations, fol- lowing a formula which he always used himself. G Columbus's ' ' signature. . S . A S X. M. Y. Xpo Ferens. The interpretation of this has been various : Servus Supplex Altissimi Salvatoris, Christus, 3Iaria, Yoseph, Christo ferens, IN SPAIN, 1496-1498. 331 is one solution ; Servidor sus Altezas scleras, Christo, Maria Ysabel, is another ; and these are not all. The complacency of the Queen was soothing ; her appoint- ment of his son Ferdinand as her page (February 18, 1498) was gratifying, but it could not wholly compensate Columbus for the condition of the public mind, of which he was in every way forcibly reminded. There were both the ity of Co- whisper of detraction spreading abroad, and the out- spoken objurgation. The physical debility of his returned com- panions was made a strong contrast to his reiterated stories of Paradise. Fortunes wrecked, labor wasted, and lives lost had found but a pitiable compensation in a few cargoes of miserable slaves. The people had heard of his enchanting landscapes, but they had found his aloes and mastic of no value. Hidal- goes said there was nothing of the luxury they had been told to expect. The gorgeous cities of the Great Khan had not been found. Such were the kind of taunts to which he was subjected. Columbus, during this period of his sojourn in Spain, spent a considerable interval under the roof of Andres Ber- naldez, and we get in his history of the Spanish kings with Ber- the advantage of the talks which the two friends had together. The Admiral is known to have left with Bernaldez various documents which were given to him in the presence of Juan de Fonseca. From the way in which Bernaldez speaks of these papers, they would seem to have been accounts of the voyage of Columbus then already made, and it was upon these documents that Bernaldez says he based his own narratives. This ecclesiastic had known Columbus at an earlier day, when the Genoese was a vender of books in Andalu- semaidez's sia, as he says ; in characterizing him, he calls his °P lnl0ns - friend in another place a man of an ingenious turn, but not of much learning, and he leaves one to infer that the book-vender was not much suspected of great familiarity with his wares. We get as clearly from Bernaldez as from any other source the measure of the disappointment which the public shared as respects the conspicuous failure of these voyages of Columbus in their pecuniary relations. 332 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. The results are summed up by that historian to show that the cost of the voyages had beeu so great and the returns so small that it came to be believed that there was in the new turns of regions no gold to speak of. Taking the first voyage, — and the second was hardly better, considering the larger opportunities, — Harrisse has collated, for instance, all the references to what gold Columbus may have gathered ; and though there are some contradictory reports, the weight of tes- timony seems to confine the amount to an inconsiderable sum, which consisted in the main of personal ornaments. There are legends of the gold brought to Spain from this voyage being used to gild palaces and churches, to make altar ornaments for the cathedral at Toledo, to serve as gifts of homage to the Pope, but we may safely say that no reputable authority sup- ports any such statements. Notwithstanding this seeming royal content of which the signs have been given, there was, by virtue of a discontented and irritated public sentiment, a course open to Columbus in these efforts to fit out his new expedition which was far from easy. There was so much disinclination in the merchants to furnish ships that it required a royal order to seize them before the small fleet could be gathered. The enlistments to man the ships and make up the contin- Difficuities gent destined for the colony were more difficult still. the fi uew g e°x ut Tne alacrity with which everybody bounded to the peditiou. summons on his second voyage had entirely gone, and it was only by the foolish device which Columbus decided upon Criminals °f opening the doors of the prisons and of giving enhsted. pardon to criminals at lai'ge, that he was enabled to help on the registration of his company. Finding that all went slowly, and knowing that the colony at Espanola must be suffering from want of supplies, the Queen was induced to order two caravels of the fleet to sail caravels at once, early in 1498, under the command of Pedro Fernandez Coronel. This was only possible because the Queen took some money which she had laid aside as a part of a dower which was intended for her daughter Isabella, then betrothed to Emmanuel,, the King of Portugal. So much was gratifying ; but the main object of the new expedition was to make new discoveries, and there were many IN SPAIN, 1496-1498. 333 harassing delays yet in store for Columbus before he could de- part with the rest of his fleet. These delays, as we shall see, enabled another people, under the lead of another Italian, to precede him and make the first discovery of the mainland. The Queen was cordial, but an affliction came to distract her, in the death of Prince Juan. Fonseca, who was now in charge of the fitting out of the caravels, seems to have lacked heart in the enterprise ; but it serves the purpose of Colum- lack of bus's adulatory biographers to give that agent of the Crown the character of a determined enemy of Columbus. Even the prisons did not disgorge their vermin, as he had wished, and his company gathered very slowly, and never be- came full. Las Casas tells us that troubles followed him even to the dock. The accountant of Fonseca, one Ximeno de Bre- viesca, got into an altercation with the Admiral, who knocked him down and exhibited other marks of pas- altercation sion. Las Casas further tells us that this violence, ca's account- through the representations of it which Fonseca made, produced a greater effect on the monarchs than all the allega- tions of the Admiral's cruelty and vindictiveness which his accusers from Espanola had constantly brought forward, and that it was the immediate cause of the change of royal senti- ment towards him, which soon afterwards appeared. Colum- bus seems to have discovered the mistake he had made very promptly, and wrote to the monarchs to counteract its effect. It was therefore with this new anxiety upon his mind that he for the third time committed himself to his career of adventure and exploration. The canonizers would have it that their sainted hero found it necessary to prove by his energy in per- sonal violence that age had not impaired his manhood for the trials before him ! Before following Columbus on this voyage, the i*eader must take a glance at the conditions of discovery elsewhere, for these other events were intimately connected with the significance of Columbus's own voyagings. The problem which the Portuguese had undertaken to solve was, as has been seen, the passage to India by the DaGama's Stormy Cape of Africa. Even before Columbus had ^SL sailed on his first voyage, word had come in 1490 to cape- 834 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. encourage King Joao II. His emissaries in Cairo had learned from the Arab sailors that the passage of the cape was practi- cable on the side of the Indian Ocean. The success of his Spanish rivals under Columbus in due time encouraged the Portuguese king still more, or at least piqued him to new efforts. Vasco da Grama was finally put in command of a fleet spe- cially equipped. It was now some years since his pilot, Pero de Alemquer, had carried Diaz well off the cape. On Sun- day, July 8, 1497, 1 )a Grama sailed from below Lisbon, and on November '-1 he passed with full canvas the for- midable cape. It was not, however, till December 17 that he reached the point where Diaz had turned back. His further progress does not concern us here. Suffice it to say that he cast an- chor at Calicut May 20, 1498, and India was reached !£!£$% ten days before Columbus started a third time to ver- ify his own beliefs, but really to find them errors. Towards the end of August, or perhaps early in September, of the next year (1499), Da Gama arrived at Lisbon on his return voyage, anticipated, indeed, by one of his caravels, which, separated from the commander in April or May, had pushed ahead and reached home on the 10th of July. Portu- gal at once resounded with jubilation. The fleet had returned crippled with disabled crews, and half the vessels had disap- peared : but the solution of a great problem had been reached. VASCO DA GAMA. [From Stanley's Da Gama.'] IN SPAIN, 1496-U98. 335 The voyage of Da Gam a, opening a trade eagerly pursued and eagerly met, offered, as we shall see, a great contrast to the small immediate results which came from the futile efforts of Columbus to find a western way to the same regions. There have been students of these early explorers who have contended that, while Columbus was harassed in Spain with 336 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. these delays in preparing for his third voyage, the Florentine Vespncius, whom we have encountered already as voyage of helping Berardi in the equipment of Columbus's fleets, had, in a voyage of which we have some con- fused chronology, already in 1497 discovered and coursed the northern shores of the mainland south of the Caribbean Sea. Bernaldez tells us that, during the interval between the sec- ond and third voyages of Columbus, the Admiral " accorded permission to other captains to make discoveries at the west, who went and discovered various islands." Whether we can JN SPAIN, 1496-1498. 337 connect this statement with any such voyage as is now to be considered is a matter of dispute. This question of the first discovery of the mainland of South America, — we shall see that North America's mainland had al ready been discovered, — whether by Columbus or Ves- pucius, is one which has long vexed the historian and ered South " still does perplex him, though the general consensus of opinion at the present day is in favor of Columbus, while pursuing the voyage through which we are soon to follow him. The question is much complicated by the uncertainties and con- fusion of the narratives which are our only guides. The dis- covery, if not claimed by Vespucius, has been vigorously claimed for him. Its particulars are also made a part of the doubt which has clouded the recitals concerning the voyage of Pinzon and Solis to the Honduras coast, which are usually placed later ; but by Oviedo and Goinara this voyage is said to have preceded that of Columbus. The claim for Vespucius is at the best but an enforced method of clarifying the published texts concerning Claime(1 for the voyages, in the hopes of finding something like Ves P uclus - consistency in their dates. Any commentator who undertakes to get at the truth must necessarily give himself up to some sort of conjecture, not only as respects the varied inconsistencies of the narrative, but also as regards the manifold blunders of the printer of the little book which records the voyages. Munoz had it in mind, it is understood, to prove that Vespucius could not have been on the coast at the date of his alleged discovery ; but in the opinions of some the documents do not prove all that Munoz, Navarrete, and Humboldt have claimed, while the advo- cacy of Varnhagen in favor of Vespucius does not allow that writer to see what he apparently does not desire to see. The most, perhaps, that we can say is that the proof against the view of Varnhagen, who is in favor of such a voyage in 1497, is not wholly substantiated. The fact seems to be, so far as can be made out, that Vespucius passed from one commander's employ to another's, at a date when Ojeda, in 1499, had not completed his voyage, and when Pinzon started. So supposing a return to Spain in order for Vespucius to restart with Pinzon, it is also supposable that the year 1499 itself may have seen him under two different leaders. If this is the correct view, it 338 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. of course carries forward the date to a time later than the dis- covery of the mainland by Columbus. It is nothing but plau- sible conjecture, after all ; but something of the nature of con- jecture is necessary to dissipate the confusion. The belief of this sharing of service is the best working hypothesis yet de- vised upon the question. If Vespucius was thus with Pinzon, and this latter navigator did, as Oviedo claims, precede Columbus to the mainland, there is no proof of it to prevent a marked difference of opinion among all the writers, in that some ignore the Florentine nav- igator entirely, and others confidently construct the story of his discovery, which has in turn taken root and been widely believed. A voyage of 1497 does not find mention in any of the con- temporary Portuguese chroniclers. This absence of voyage of reference is serious evidence against it. It seems to be 1497. . . ... certain that within twenty years of their publication, there were doubts raised of the veracity of the narratives attrib- uted to Vespucius, and Sebastian Cabot tells us in 1505 that he does not believe them in respect to this one voyage at any rate, and Las Casas is about as well convinced as Cabot was that the story was unfounded. Las Casas's papers passed probably to Herrera, who, under the influence of them, it would seem, for- mulated a distinct allegation that Vespucius had falsified the dates, converting 1499 into 1497. To destroy all the claims associated with Pinzon and Solis, Herrera carried their voyage forward to 1506. It was in 1601 that this historian made these points, and so far as he regulated the opinions of Europe for a century and a half, including those of England as derived through Robertson, Vespucius lived in the world's regard with a clouded reputation. The attempt of Bandini in the middle of the last century to lift the shadow was not veiy fortunate, but better success followed later, when Canovai delivered an address which then and afterwards, when it was reinforced by other publications of his, was something like a gage thrown to the old-time defamatory spirit. This denunciatory view was vigorously worked, with Navarrete's help, by Santarem in the Coleccion of that Spanish scholar, whence Irving in turn got his opinions. Santarem professed to have made most extensive examinations of Portuguese and French manuscripts without finding a trace of the Florentine. IN SPAIN, 12(96-1^98. 339 Undaunted by all such negative testimony, the Portuguese Varnhagen, as early as 1839, began a series of publications aimed at rehabilitating the fame of Vespucius, against the views of all the later writers, Humboldt, Navarrete, Santarem, and the rest. Humboldt claimed to adduce evidence to show that Vespucius was all the while in Europe. Varnhagen finally brought himself to the belief that in this disputed voyage of 1497 Vespucius, acting under the orders of Vicente Yanez Pin- zon and Juan Diaz de Solis, really reached the main at Hondu- ras, whence he followed the curvatures of the coast northerly till he reached the capes of Chesapeake. Thence he steered east- erly, passed the Bermudas, and arrived at Seville. If this is so, he circumnavigated the archipelago of the Antilles, and dis- proved the continental connection of Cuba. Varnhagen even goes so far as to maintain that Vespucius had not been deceived into supposing the coast was that of Asia, but that he divined the truth. Varnhagen has remained alone in this estimate of the evidence, until of late Professor Fiske has supported him. Valentini, in our day, has even supposed that the incomplete Cuba of the Ruysch map of 1508 was really the Yucatan shore, which Vespucius had skirted. The claim which some French zealots in maritime discovery have attempted to sustain, of Norman adventurers being on the Brazil coast in 1497-98, is hardly worth consideration. We turn now to other problems. The Bull of Demarcation was far from being; acceptable as an ultimate decision . T-111 11 ••PI 1 • • The E »? lish in England, and the spirit ot her people towards it is expedition well shown in the Westeme Planting of Hakluyt. This chronicler mistrusts that its " certain secret causes " — which words he had found in the papal bull, probably by using an inaccurate version — were no other than " the feare and jel- ousie that King Henry of England, with whom Bartholomew Columbus had been to deal in this enterprise, and who even now was ready to send him into Spain to call his brother Chris- topher to England, should put a foot into this action ; " and so the Pope, " fearing that either the King of Portugal might be reconciled to Columbus, or that he might be drawn into Eng- land, thought secretly by his unlawful division to defraud Eng- land and Portugal of that benefit." So England and Portugal 340 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. had something like a common cause, and the record of how they worked that cause is told in the stories of Cabot first, and of Cortereal later. We will examine at this point the Cabot story only. Bristol had long been the seat of the English commerce with Iceland, and one of the commodities received in return for English goods was the stockfish, which Cabot was to recognize on the Newfoundland banks. These stories of the codfish noticed by Cabot recalled in the mind of Galvano in 1555, land fish- and again more forcibly to Hakluyt a half century later, when Germany was now found to be not far from the latitude of Baccalaos, that there was a tale of some strange men, in the time of Frederick Barbarossa (a. d. 1153), being driven to Lubec in a canoe. It is by no means beyond possibility that the Basque and other fishermen of Europe may have already strayed to these fish- ing grounds of Newfoundland, at some period anterior to this voyage of Cabot, and even traces of their frequenting the coast in Bradore Bay have been pointed out, but without convincing as yet the careful student. A Venetian named Zuan Caboto, settling in England, and thenceforward calling himself John Cabot, being a John Cabot. . . ° b man of experience in travel, and having seen at one time at Mecca the caravans returning from the east, was im- pressed, as Columbus had been, with a belief in the round- ness of the earth. It is not unlikely that this belief had taken for him a compelling nature from the stories which had come to England of the successful voyage of the Spaniards. Indeed, Ramusio distinctly tells us that it was the bruit of Columbus's first voyage which gave to Cabot " a great flame of desire to attempt some notable thing." When Cabot had received for himself and his three sons — one of whom was Sebastian Cabot — a patent (March 5. Cabot's 5, 1496) from Henry VII. to discover and trade with unknown countries beyond the seas, the envoy of Fer- dinand and Isabella at the English court was promptly instructed to protest against any infringement of the rights of Spain 1497. May. m t- ne western regions. Whether this protest was Cabot sails, accountable for the delay in sailing, or not, does not appear, for Cabot did not set sail from Bristol till May, 1497. IN SPAIN, 1496-1498. 341 It is inferred from what Beneventanus says in his Ptolemy of 1508 that Ruysch, who gives us the earliest engraved RuyBCh wit h map of Cabot's discoveries, was a companion of Cabot Cabot " in this initial voyage. When that editor says that he learned from Ruysch of his experiences in sailing from the south of England to a point in 53 degrees of north latitude, and thence due west, it may be referred to such participancy in this expe dition from Bristol. We know from a conversation which is reported in Ramusio — unless there is some mistake in it ■ — that Cabot apprehended the nature of what we call great circle sailing, and claimed that his course to the northwest would open India by a shorter route than the westerly run of Columbus. When Cabot had ventured westerly 700 leagues, he found land, June 24, 1497. There has been some confidence at different times, early and late, that the date of this 24. Cabot first Cabot voyage was in reality three years before this. The belief arose from the date of 1494 being given in what seem to have been early copies of a map ascribed Date of the to Sebastian Cabot, whence the date 1494 was copied voyage, 1494 or 1497 ? by Hakluyt in 1589, though eleven years later he changed it to 1497. It is sufficient to say that few of the critics of our day, except D'Avezac, hold to this date of 1494. Major supposes that the map of 1544, now in the Paris library and ascribed to Cabot, was a re-drawn draft from the lost Spanish original, in which the date in Roman letters, VII, may have been so carelessly made in joining the arms of the V that it was read IIII ; and some such inference was apparently in the mind of Henry Stevens when he published his little tract on Sebastian Cabot in 1870. The country which Cabot thus first saw was supposed by him to be a part of Asia, and to be occupied, though no inhabitants were seen. Cabot was for over three hundred years considered as having made his landfall on the coast of Labrador, or at Cabot . s least we find no record that the legend of the map of landfaU - 1544, placing it at Cape Breton, had impressed itself authorita- tively upon the minds of Cabot's contemporaries and successors. Biddle and Humboldt, in the early part of the present century, accepted the Labrador landfall with little question. So it hap- pened that when, in 1843, the Cabot mappemonde of 1544 342 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. was discovered, and it was found to place the landfall at the island of Cape Breton, a certain definiteness, where there had been so much vagueness, afforded the student some relief ; but as the novelty of the sensation wore off, confidence was again lost, inasmuch as the various uncertainties of the document give much ground for the rejection of all parts of its testimony at variance with better vouched beliefs. It is quite possible that more satisfactory proofs can be adduced of another region for the landfall, but none such have yet been presented to scholars. It is commonly held now that, sighting land at Cape Breton, Cabot coursed northerly, passed the present Prince Edward Isl- and, and then sailed out of the Strait of Belle Isle, — or at least this is as reasonable a route to make out of the scant rec- ord as any, though there is nothing like a commonly received opinion on his track. There is some ground for thinking that he could not have entered the Gulf of St. Lawrence at all. He landed nowhere and saw no inhabitants. If he struck the main- land, it was probably the coasts of New Brunswick or Labra- dor bordering on the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The two islands which he observed on his right may have been headlands of Newfoundland, seeming to be isolated. He reached Bristol in August, having been absent about three months. Raimondo de Soncino, under date of 1497. Au- gust! Cabot the 24th of that month, wrote to Italy of Cabot's re- turn, and a fortnight earlier (August 10) we find record of a gratuity of ten pounds given to Cabot in recognition of this service. It proved to be an expedition which was to create a greater sensation of its kind than the English had before known. Bristol had nurtured for some years a race of hardy seamen. They had risked the dangers of the great un- known ocean in efforts to find the fabulous island of Brazil, and they had pushed adventurously westward at times, but always to return without success. The intercourse of England with the northern nations and with Iceland may have given them tidings of Greenland ; but there is no reason to believe that they ever supposed that country to be other than an extended peninsula of Europe, enfolding the North Atlantic. Cabot's telling of a new land, his supposing it the empire of the Great Khan, his tales of the wonderful fishing ground thereabouts, where the water was so dense with fish that his vessels were IN SPAIN, 1J96-U98. 343 impeded, and his expectation of finding the land of spices if he went southward from the region of his landfall, were all stories calculated to incite wonder and speculation. It was not strange, then, that England found she had her new sea-hero, as Spain had hers in Columbus ; that the king gave him money C abotin and a pension ; and that, conscious of a certain dig- En s land nity, Cabot went about the city, drawing the attention of the eurious by reason of the fine silks in which he arrayed himself. Cabot had no sooner returned than Pedro de Ayala, the Spanish envoy in London, again entered a protest, and gave notice to the English king that the land which had S p a i n jeai uB been discovered belonged to his master. There is ofEn s land some evidence that Spain kept close watch on the counti-y at the north through succeeding years, and even intended settlement. This Spanish ambassador wrote home from London, July 25, 1498, that after his first voyage, Cabot had been in Cabotin Seville and Lisbon. This renders somewhat probable SeviUe? the suspicion that he may have had conferences with La Cosa and Columbus. That John Cabot, on returning from his first voyage, pro- duced a chart which he had made, and that on this and on a solid globe, also of his construction, he had laid down what he considered to be the region he had reached, now admit Cabot's of no doubt. Foreign residents at the English court charts - reported such facts to the courts of Italy and of Spain. In the map of La Cosa (1500), we find what is considered a reflex of this Cabot chart, in the words running along a stretch of the northeast coast of Asia, which announce the waters adjacent as those visited by the English, and a neighboring headland as the Cape of the English. Even La Cosa's use of the Cabot map was lost sight of before long, and this record of La Cosa re- mained unknown till Humboldt discovered the map in Paris, in 1832, in the library of Baron Walckenaer, whence it passed in 1853 into the royal museum at Madrid. The views of Cabot respecting this region seem to have been soon obscured by the more current charts showing the voyages of the Cortereals, when the Cape of the English readily disappeared in the "Cabo de Portogesi," a forerunner, very likely, of what we know to- day as Cape Race. Such an appetizing tale as that of the first Cabot expedition 344 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. was not likely to rest without a sequel. Ou the 3d of Febru- ary, 1497-98, nearly four months before Columbus 1497-98. February. sailed on his third voyage, the English king granted The second T1 /-i i •• i • i • i Cabot voy- a new patent to John Cabot, giving him the right to man six ships if he could, and in May he was at sea. Though his sons were not mentioned in the patent, it is sup- posed that Sebastian Cabot accompanied his father. One vessel putting back to Ireland, five others went on, carrying John Cabot westward somewhere and to oblivion, for we never hear of him again. Stevens ventures the suggestion that John Cabot may have died on the voyage of 1498, whereby Sebastian came into command, and so into a prominence in his own recollections of the voyage, which may account for the obscuration of his father's participancy in the enterprise. One of the ships would seem to have been commanded by Lanslot Thirkill, of London. What we know of this second voyage are mentions in later years, vague in character, and apparently traceable to what Sebastian had said of it, and not always clearly, for there is an evident commingling of events of this and of the earlier voyage. We get what we know mainly from Peter Martyr, who tells us that Cabot called the region Baccalaos, and from Ramusio, who reports at second hand Sebastian's account, made forty years after the event. From such indefinite sources we can make out that the little fleet steered northwesterly, and got into water packed with ice, and found itself in a latitude where there was little night. Thence turning south they ran down to 36° north latitude. The crews landed here and there, and saw people dressed in skins, who used copper implements. When they reached England we do not know, but it was after Octo- ber, 1498. The question of this voyage having extended down the Atlan- Extent of tic seaboard of the present United States to the region tins voyage. f yi 01 ^i c X a? as } ias been urged, seems to be set at rest in Stevens's opinion, from the fact that, had Cabot gone so far, he would scarcely have acquiesced in the claims of Ponce de Leon, Ayllon, and Gomez to have first tracked parts of this coast, when Sebastian Cabot as pilot major of Spain (1518), and as president of the Congress of Badajoz (1524), had to adjudicate on such pretensions. There are some objections to this view, in that the results of unofficial explorers as shown in IN SPAIN, 1496-1498. 345 the Portuguese map of Cantino — if that proposition is tenable — and the rival English discoverers, of whom Cabot had been one, might easily have been held to be beyond the Spanish jurisdiction. It is not difficult to demonstrate in these matters the Spanish constant unrecognition of other national explora- tions. It has also sometimes been held that the wild character of the coast along which Cabot sailed must have convinced him that he was bordering some continental region intervening be- tween him and the true coast of Asia ; that with the " great displeasure " he had felt in finding the land running north, Cabot, in fact, must have comprehended the geographical prob- lem of America long before it was comprehended by the Span- iards. The testimony of the La Cosa and Ruysch maps is not favorable to such a belief. It seems pretty certain that the success of the Cabot voyage in any worldly gain was not sufficient to move the English again for a long period. Still, the political effect was to raise a claim for England to a region not then known to be a new continent, but of an appreciable acquisition, and Eng- land never afterwards failed to rest her rights upon rests her this claim of discovery ; and even her successors, the American people, have not been without cause to rest valuable privileges upon the same. The geographical effect was seen in the earliest map which we possess of the new lands as discov- ered by Spain and England, the great oxhide map of Juan de la Cosa, the companion of Columbus on his second voyage, and the cartographer of his discoveries, which has already been men- tioned, and of which a further description will be given later. Why is it that we know no more of these voyages of the Cabots ? There seems to be some ground for the suspicion that the " maps and discourses " which Sebastian Cabot left behind him in the hands of William Worthington may have fallen, through the subornation by Spain of the latter, into the hands of the rivals of England at a period just after the publication (1582) of Hakluyt's Divers Voyages, wherein the possession of them by Worthington was made known ; at least, Scant kno „ .. Biddle has advanced such a theory, and it has some cabot° f the support in what may be conjectured of the history of y °y^ es - the famous Cabot map of 1544, only brought to light three hun- 346 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. dred years later. Here was a map evidently based in part on such information as was known in Spain. It was engraved, as seems likely, though purporting to be the work of Cabot, in the Low Countries, and was issued without name of pub- mappe- lislier or place, as if to elude responsibility. Not- withstanding it was an engraved map, implying many copies, it entirely disappeared, and would not have been known to exist except that there are references to such a map as having hung in the gallery at Whitehall, as used by Ortelius before 1570, and as noted by Sanuto in 1588. So thorough a suppression would seem to imply an effort on the part of the Spanish authorities to prevent the world's profiting by the pub- lication of maritime knowledge which in some clandestine way had escaped from the Spanish hydrographical office. That this suppression was in effect nearly successful may be inferred from the fact that but a single copy of the map has come down to us, the one now in the great library at Paris, which was found in Germany by Von Martius iu 1843. There has been a good deal done of late years — beginning writers on with Biddle's Sebastian Cabot in 1831, a noteworthy Cabot. book, showing how much the critical spirit can do to unravel confusion, and ending with the chapter on Cabot by the late Dr. Charles Deane in the Narrative and Critical History of America, and with the Jean et Sebastien Cabot of Harrisse (Paris, 1882) — to clear up the great obscurity regarding the two voyages of John Cabot in 1497 and 1498, an obscurity so dense that for two hundred years after the events there was no suspicion among writers that there had been more than a single voyage. It would appear that this obscurity had mainly arisen from the way in which Sebastian Cabot himself spoke of his explorations, or rather from the way in which he is reported to have spoken. Harrisse, in a recent examination of the Cabot problems, allows Sebastian Cabot's connection with the Cabot map of 1544 ; but thinks he purposely placed John Cabot's landfall at Cape Breton, to preclude any claim to the region which the French might seek to establish through the Cartier voyages, while his true landfall was ten degrees farther north, as he had himself, by implication, earlier acknowledged. CHAPTER XVI. THE THIRD VOYAGE. 1498-1500. In following the events of the third voyage, we have to depend mainly on two letters written by Columbus Sources . himself. One is addressed to the Spanish monarchs, ^tte^and 8 and is preserved in a copy made by Las Casas. J ournaL What Peter Martyr tells us seems to have been borrowed from this letter. The other is addressed to the " nurse " of Prince Juan, of which there are copies in the Columbus Custodia at Genoa, and in the Munoz collection of the Royal Academy of History at Madrid. They are both printed in Navarrete and elsewhere, and Major in his Select Letters of Columbus gives English versions. There are also some evidences that the account of this voy- age given in the Itinerarium Portugalensium was based on Columbus's journal, which Las Casas is known to have had, and to have used in his Historia, adding thereto some details which he got from a recital by Bernaldo de Ibarra, one of Co- lumbus's companions, — indeed, his secretary. The map which accompanied these accounts by Columbus is lost. We only know its existence through the use of it made by Ojeda and others. Las Casas interspersed among the details which he recorded from Columbus's journal some particulars which he got from Alonso de Vallejo. One of the pilots, Hernan Perez Matheos, enabled Oviedo to add still something more to the other sources ; and then we have additional light from the mouths of various witnesses in the Columbus lawsuit. There is a little at second hand, but of small importance, in a letter of Simon Verde printed by Harrisse. 348 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. Before setting sail, Columbus prepared some directions for his Columbus's son Diego, of which we have only recently had notes, sou Diego, such appearing in the bulletin of the Italian Geo- graphical Society for December, 1889. He commands in these injunctions that Diego shall have an affectionate regard for the mother of his half-brother Ferdinand, adds some rules for the guidance of his bearing towards his sovereigns and his fel- low-men, and recommends him to resort to Father Gaspar Gor- ricio whenever he might feel in- need of advice. Columbus lifted anchor in the port of San Lucar de Barra- meda on May 30, 1498. He was physically far from 30. Coium- being in a good condition for so adventurous an under- taking. He had hoped, he says to his sovereigns, " to find repose in Spain ; whereas on the contrary I have expe- rienced nothing but opposition and vexation.' 1 His six vessels stood off to the southwest, to avoid a French — some say a Por- tuguese — fleet which was said to be cruising near Cape St. Vincent. His plan was a definite one, to keep in a southerly course till he reached the equatorial regions, and then to pro- ceed west. By this course, he hoped to strike in that direction the continental mass of which he had intimation both from the reports of the natives in Espaiiola and from the trend which he had found in his last voyage the Cuban coast to have. Herrera tells us that the Portuguese king professed to have some know- ledge of a continent in this direction, and we may con- Rutnors of a ..„ t • i 1 • t» southern nect it, it. we choose, with the stories respecting ±>e- haim and others, who had already sailed thitherward, as some reports go ; but it is hard to comprehend that any belief of that kind was other than a guess at a compensating scheme of geography beyond the Atlantic, to correspond with the balance of Africa against Europe in the eastern hemisphere. It is barely possible, though there is no positive evidence of it, that the reports from England of the Cabot discoveries at the north may have given a hint of like prolongation to the south. But a more impelling instinct was the prevalent one of his time, which accompanied what Michelet calls that terrible malady breaking out in this age of Europe, the hunger and thirst for gold and other precious things, and which associated the pos- session of them with the warmer regions of the globe. " To the south," said Peter Martyr. " He who would find riches must avoid the cold north ! " THE THIRD VOYAGE. 349 Navarrete preserves a letter which was written to Columbus by Jayme Ferrer, a lapidary of distinction. This jew- Jayme Fer . eler confirmed the prevalent notion, and said that in rer ' all his intercourse with distant marts, whence Europe derived its gold and jewels, he had learned from their vendors how such objects of commerce usually came in greatest abundance from near the equator, while black races were those that pre- dominated near such sources. Therefore, as Ferrer told Colum- bus, steer south and find a black race, if you would get at such opulent abundance. The Admiral remembered he had heard in Espaiiola of blacks that had come from the south to that island in the past, and he had taken to Spain some of the metal which had been given to him as of the kind with which their javelins had been pointed. The Spanish assayers had found it a composition of gold, copper, and silver. Sc it was with expectations like these that Columbus now worked his way south. He touched for wood and n •» r i Columbus water at Porto Santo and Madeira, and thence pro- steers south- erly. ceeded to Gomera. Here, on June 16, he found a T- 1 • -1 O • 1 1 11 1498 - JU,ie trench cruiser with two Spanish prizes, but the three 16. AtGo- mera. ships eluded his grasp and got to sea. He sent three caravels in pursuit, and the Spanish prisoners rising on the crew of one of the prizes, she was easily captured and brought into port. The Spanish fleet sailed again on June 21. The Admiral had detailed three of his ships to proceed direct to Espa- 1 . x x Sends three nola to find the new port on its southern side near the ships direct 1 . to Espanola. mines of Hayna. Their respective captains were to command the little squadron successively a week at a time. These men were : Alonso Sanchez de Carvajal, a man of good reputation ; Pedro de Arona, a brother of Beatrix de Henriquez, who had borne Ferdinand to the Admiral ; and Juan Antonio Colombo, a Genoese and distant kinsman of the Admiral. Parting with these vessels off Ferro, Columbus, with the three others, — one of which, the flagship, being decked, of a hun- dred tons burthen, and requiring three fathoms of water, — steered for the Cape de Verde Islands. His stay here coiumbua was not inspiring. A depressing climate of vapor and deVerde Pe an arid landscape told upon his health and upon that Islands - of his crew. Encountering difficulties in getting fresh pro- 350 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. visions and cattle, he sailed again on July 5, standing to the southwest. Calms and the currents among the islands baffled him, however, and it was the 7th before the high peak of Del 1498. July Fuego sank astern. By the 15th of July be had 15- reached the latitude of 5° north. He was now within the verge of the equatorial calms. The air soon burned every- thing distressingly ; the rigging oozed with the running tar ; caims and the seams of the vessels opened ; provisions grew tomd heats. p U trid, and the wine casks shrank and leaked. The fiery ordeal called for all the constancy of the crew, and the Admiral himself needed all the fortitude he could command to bear a brave face amid the twinges of gout which were prostrat- ing him. He changed his course to see if he could not run out of the intolerable heat, and after a tedious interval, with no cessation of the humid and enervating air, the ships gradually drew into a fresher atmosphere. A breeze rippled the water, and the sun shone the more refreshing for its clearness. He now steered due west, hoping to find land before his water and provisions failed. He did not discover land as soon as he ex- pected, and so bore away to the north, thinking to see 1498. July x ' . J ° 31. Trinidad some of the Carib Islands. On July 31 relief came, none too soon, for their water was nearly exhausted. A mariner, about midday, peering about from the masthead, saw three peaks just rising above the horizon. The cry of land was like a benison. The Salve Regina was intoned in every part of the ship. Columbus now headed the fleet for the land. As the ships went on and the three peaks grew into a triple mountain, he gave the island the name of Trinidad, a reminder in its peak of the Trinity, which he had determined at the start to commemorate by bestowing that appellation on the first land he saw. He coasted the shore of this island for some distance before he could find a harbor to careen his ships and replenish his water casks. On August 1 he anchored to get August 1. water, and was surprised at the fresh luxuriance of the country. He could see habitations in the interior, but no- where along the shore were any signs of occupation. His men, while filling the casks, discovered footprints and other traces of human life, but those who made them kept out of sight. He was now on the southern side of the island, and in that channel which separates Trinidad from the low country about THE THIRD VOYAGE. 351 the mouths of the Orinoco. Before long he could see the oppo- site coast stretching away for twenty leagues, but he Firs t S e es did not suspect it to be other than an island, which ^" he named La Isla Santa. coast - It was indeed strange but not surprising that Columbus found an island of a new continent, and supposed it the mainland of the Old World, as happened during his earlier voyages ; and equally striking it was that now when he had actually seen the mainland of a new world he did not know it. By the 2d of August the Admiral had approached that nar- row channel where the southwest corner of Trinidad 1498 Au _ comes nearest to the mainland, and here he anchored. gust2 ' A large canoe, containing five and twenty Indians, put off to- wards his ships, but finally its occupants lay upon their paddles a bowshot away. Columbus describes them as comely in shape, naked but for breech-cloths, and wearing variegated scarfs about their heads. They were lighter in skin than any Indians he had seen before. This fact was not very promising in view of the belief that precious products would be found in a country in- habited by blacks. The men had bucklers, too, a defense he had never seen before among these new tribes. He tried to lure them on board by showing trinkets, and by improvising some music and dances among his crew. The last expedient was evidently looked upon as a challenge, and was met by a flight of arrows. Two crossbows were discharged in return, and the canoe fled. The natives seemed to have less fear of the smaller caravels, and approached near enough for the captain of one of them to throw some presents to them, a cap, and a mautle, and the like ; but when the Indians saw that a boat was sent to the Admiral's ship, they again fled. While here at anchor, the crew were permitted to go ashore and refresh themselves. They found much delight in the cool air of the morning and evening, coming after their experiences of the torrid suffocation of the calm latitudes. Nature had appeared to them never so fresh. Columbus grew uneasy in his insecure anchorage, for he had discovered as yet no roadstead. He saw the current flowing by with a strength that alarmed him. The waters seemed to tumble in commotion as they were jammed together in the nar- row pass before him. It was his first experience of that 352 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. African current which, setting across the ocean, plunges here- TheGuif abouts into the Caribbean Sea, and, sweeping around stream. ^q great gulf, passes north in what we know as the Gulf Stream. Columbus was as yet ignorant, too, of the great masses of water which the many mouths of the Orinoco dis- charge along this shore ; and when at night a great roaring billow of water came across the channel, — very likely an un- usual volume of the river water poured out of a sudden, — and he found his own ship lifting at her anchor and one of his cara- vels snapping her cable, he felt himself in the face of new dan- gers, and of forces of nature to which he was not accustomed. To a seaman's senses not used to such phenomena, the situation of the ships was alarming. Before him was the surging flow of the current through the narrow pass, which he had already Boca del named the Mouth of the Serpent (Boca del Sierpe). Sierpe. To attempt its passage was almost foolhardy. To re- turn along the coast stemming such a current seemed nearly im- possible. He then sent his boats to examine the pass, and they found more water than was supposed, and on the assurances of the pilot, and the wind favoring, he headed his ships for the boiling eddies, passed safely through, and soon reached the placid water beyond. The shore of Trinidad stretched north- erly, and he turned to follow it, but somebody getting a taste of the water found it to be fresh. Here was a new surprise. He Gulf of na d n °t yet comprehended that he was within a land- Pana. locked gulf, where the rush of the Orinoco sweetens the tide throughout. As he approached the northwestern limit of Trinidad, he found that a loft} 7 cape jutted out opposite a similar headland to the west, and that between them lay a second surging channel, beset with rocks and seeming to be more dangerous than the last. So he gave it a more ferocious Boca del name, the Mouth of the Dragon (Boca del Drago). Drago. rp o f rj ow t h e pp 0S it e coast presented an alternative that did not require so much risk, and, still ignorant of the way in which his fleet was embayed in this marvelous water, he ran across on Sunday, August 5, to the opposite shore. He now coasted it to find a better opening to the north, for he had sup- posed this slender peninsula to be another island. The water grew fresher as he went on. The shore attracted him, with its harbors and salubrious, restful air, but he was anxious to get THE THIRD VOYAGE. 353 into the open sea. He saw no inhabitants. The liveliest crea- tures which he observed were the chattering- monkeys. At length, the country becoming more level, he ran into the mouth m i iiig ii ii i iii u ii i iiii iu i i i i ii i i iii i ■Mgni ii jii p jaagjiii;M_ _ jii M™i™ imM iii i ™ i n ; «m» mm— ■5 — "iron* \ a f ias jC~ c ^ T ■■<•■■-, } Mansard WgEx*.nr ;»J4 ! -j t _ ■ — ^aifl,.,,. ,ca^i## t • :^ .^_ j = GULF OF PARIA. of a river and cast anchor. It was perhaps here that the Spaniards first set foot on the continent. The accounts are somewhat confused, and need some license in reconciling them. They had, possibly, landed earlier. 354 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. A canoe with three natives now came out to the caravel near- est shore. The Spanish captain secured the men by a clever trick. After a parley, he gave them to understand he would go on shore in their boat, and jumping violently on its gunwale, he overturned it. The occupants were easily captured in the water. Being taken on board the flagship, the inevitable hawks' bells captivated them, and they were set on shore to delight their fellows. Other parleys and interchanges of gifts fol- lowed. Columbus now ascertained, as well as he could by signs, that the word " Paria," which he heard, was the name of the country. The Indians pointed westerly, and indicated that men were much more numerous that way. The Spaniards were struck with the tall statui-e of the men, and noted the absence of braids in their hair. It was curious to see them smell of everything that was new to them, — a piece of brass, for instance. It seemed to be their sense of inquiry and recognition. It is not certain if Columbus participated in this intercourse on shore. He was suffering from a severe eruption of the eyes, and one of the witnesses said that the formal tak- ing possession of the country was done by deputy on that ac- count. This statement is contradicted by others. As he went on, the country became even more attractive, with its limpid streams, its open and luxuriant woods, its clambering vines, all enlivened with the flitting of brilliant birds. So he called the place The Gardens. The natives appeared to him to partake of the excellence of the country. They were, as he thought, manlier in bearing, shapelier in frame, with greater intelligence in their eyes, than any he had earlier discovered. Their arts were evidently superior to anything he had yet seen. Their canoes were handier, lighter, and had covered pavilions in the waist. There were strings of pearls upon the women which raised in the Spaniards an increased sense of cupidity. The men found oysters clinging to the boughs that drooped along the shore. Columbus recalled how he had read in Pliny of the habit of the pearl oyster to open the mouth to catch the dew, which was converted within into pearls. The people were as hospitable as they were gracious, and gave the strangers feasts as they passed from cabin to cabin. They pointed beyond the hills, and signified that another coast lay there, where a greater store of pearls could be found. THE THIRD VOYAGE. 355 To leave this paradise was necessary, and on August 10 the ships went further on, soon to find the water growing 1498 Au _ still fresher and more shallow. At last, thinking it s ustl °- dangerous to push his flagship into such shoals, Columbus sent his lightest caravel ahead, and waited her coming back. On the next day she returned, and reported that there was an inner bay beyond the islands which were seen, into which large volumes of fresh water poured, as if a huge continent were drained. Here were conditions for examination under more favorable circum- stances, and on August 11 Columbus turned his prow toward the Dragon's Mouth. His stewards declared the provisions growing bad, and even the large stores intended for the colony were beginning to spoil. It was necessary to reach his destination. Columbus's own health was sinking. His gout had little cessa- tion. His eyes had almost closed with a weariness that he had before experienced on the Cuban cruise, and he could but think of the way in which he had been taken prostrate into Isabella on returning from that expedition. Near the Dragon's Mouth he found a harbor in which to pre- pare for the passage of the tumultuous strait. There seemed no escape from the trial. The passage lay before him, wide enough in itself, but two islands parted its currents and forced the boil- ing waters into narrower confines. Columbus studied their motion, and finally made up his mind that the turmoil of the waters might after all come from the meeting of the tide and the fresh currents seeking the open sea, and not from rocks or shoals. At all events, the passage must be made. The wind veering round to the right quarter, he set sail and Boca del entered the boisterous currents. As Ions: as the wind lasted there was a good chance of keeping his steering way. Un- fortunately, the wind died away, and so he trusted to luck and the sweeping currents. They carried him safely beyond. Once without, he was brought within sight of two islands to the north- east. They were apparently those we to-day call Tobago Tobago and and Grenada. It was now the 15th of August, and Grenada - Columbus turned westward to track the coast. He came to the islands of Cubagua and Margarita, and surprised some native canoes fishing for pearls. His crews soon got into par- Cubaguaand ley with the natives, and breaking up some Valentia Mar e arit »- ware into bits, the Spaniards bartered them so successfully that 356 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. they secured three pounds, as Columbus tells us, of the coveted iewels. He had satisfied himself that here was a new Pearls. field for the wealth which could alone restore his credit in Spain ; but lie could not tarry. As he wore ship, he left behind a mountainous reach of the coast that stretched westerly, and he would fain think that India lay that way, as it had from Cuba. At that island and here, he had touched, as he thought, the confines of Asia, two protuberant peninsulas, or perhaps masses of the continent, sepai'ated by a strait, which possibly lay ahead of him. There was much that had been novel in all these experiences. Columbus felt that the New World was throwing wider open the gates of its sublime secrets. Lying on his couch, almost helpless from the cruel agonies of the gout, and sight- geographicai less from the malady of his eyes, the active mind of the Admiral worked at the old problems anew. We know it all from the letter which a few weeks later he drafted for the perusal of his sovereigns, and from his reports to Peter Martyr, which that chronicler has preserved for us. We know from this letter that his thoughts were still dwelling on the Mount Sopora of Solomon, " which mountain your Highnesses now possess in the island of Espafiola," — a convenient step- ping-stone to other credulous fancies, as we shall see. The sweetness and volume of the water which had met him in the Gulf of Paria were significant to him of a great watershed be- hind. He reverted to the statement in Esdras of the vast pre- ponderance on the globe of land, six parts to one of water, and thought he saw a confirmation of it in the immense flow that argued a corresponding expansion of land. He recalled all that he recollected of Aristotle and the other sages. He went back to his experiences in mid-ocean, when he was startled at the coin- cidence of the needle and the pole star. He remembered how he had found all the conditions of temperature and the other physical aspects to be changed as he passed that line, and it seemed as if he was sweeping into regions more ethereal. He had found the same difference when he passed, a few weeks before, out of the baleful heats of the tropical calms. He grew to think that this line of no variation of magnetism with corre- sponding marvels of nature marked but the beginning of a new section of the earth that no one had dreamed of, St. Augus- THE THIRD VOYAGE. 357 tine, St. Basil, and St. Ambrose had placed the Garden of Eden far in the Old World's east, apart from the common vicinage of men, high up above the baser parts of the earth, in a region PRE-COLUMBIAN MAPPEMONDE, PRESERVED AT RAVENNA, RESTORED BY GRA- VIER AFTER D'AVEZAC IN BULLETIN llE LA SOCIETE NORMANDE, 1888. bathed in the purest ether, and so high that the deluge had not reached it. All the stories of the Middle Ages, absorbed in the speculative philosophy of his own time, had pointed to the dis- tant east as the seat of Paradise, and was he not now coming to it by the western passage ? If the scant riches of the soil could not restore the enthusiasm which his earlier discoveries aroused in the dull spirits of Europe, would not a glimpse of the ecstatic pleasures of Eden open their eyes anew ? He had endeavored 358 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. to make his contemporaries feel that the earth was round, and he had proved it, as he thought, by almost touching, in a west- ward passage, the Golden Chersonesus. It is significant that the later Historie of 1571 omits this vagary of Paradise. The world had moved, and geographical discovery had made some records in the interim, awkward for the biographer of Co- lumbus. There was a newer belief linked with this hope of Paradise. Paradise All this wondrous life and salubrity which Columbus saw and felt, if it had not been able to restore his health, could only come from his progress up a swelling apex of the earth, which buttressed the Garden of Eden. It was clear to his mind that instead of being round the earth was pear-shaped, and that this great eminence, up which he had been going, was constantly lifting him into purer air. The great fountain which watered the spacious garden of the early race had discharged its currents down these ethereal slopes, and sweetened all this gulf that had held him so close within its embaying girth. If such were the wonders of these outposts of the celestial life, what must be the products to be seen as one journeyed up, along the courses of such celestial streams ? As he steered for Espanola, he found the currents still helped him, or he imagined they did. Was it not that he was slipping easily down this wonderful de- clivity ? That he had again discovered the mainland he was convinced by such speculations. He had no conception of the physical truth. The vagaries of his time found in him the creature of their most rampant hallucinations. This aberration was a potent cause in depriving him of the chance to place his own name on this goal of his ambition. It accounts much for the greater im- pression which Americus Vespucius, with his clearer instincts, was soon to make on the expectant and learned world. The voyage of that Florentine merchant, one of those trespassers that Columbus complained of, was, before the Admiral should see Spain again, to instigate the publication of a narrative, which took from its true discoverer the rightful baptism of the world he had unwittingly found. The wild imaginings of Co- lumbus, gathered from every resource of the superstitious past, moulded by him into beliefs that appealed but little to the soberer intelligence of his time, made known in tumultuous THE THIRD VOYAGE. 359 writings, and presently to be expressed with every symptom of mental wandering in more elaborate treatises, offered to his time an obvious contrast to the steadier head of Ves- mi i 5 e ' Columbus pucius. lhe latter s tar more graphic description andVes- gained for him, as we shall see, the position of a rec- ognized authority. While Columbus was puzzling over the aberration of the pole star and misshaping the earth, Vespucius was comprehending the law of gravitation upon our floating sphere, and ultimately representing it in the diagram which illustrated his narrative. We shall need to return on a later page to these causes which led to the naming of America. For four days Columbus had sailed away to the northwest, coming to the wind every night as a precaution, before he sighted Espailola on August 19, being then, as he gust'io. made out, about fifty leagues west of the spot where sees Espa- he supposed the port had been established for the mines of Hayna. He thought that he had been steering nearer that point, but the currents had probably carried him uncon- sciously west by night, as they were at that moment doing with the relief ships that he had parted with off Ferro. As Colum- bus speculated on this steady flow of waters with that keenness of observation upon natural phenomena which attracted the ad- miration of Humboldt, and which is really striking, if we sep- arate it from his turbulent fancies, he accounted by its attrition for the predominating shape of the islands tionsof which he had seen, which had their greatest length in the direction of the current. He knew that its force would, perhaps, long delay him in his efforts to work eastward, and so he opened communication with the shore in hopes to find a mes- senger by whom to dispatch a letter to the Adelantado. This was easily done, and the letter reached its destination, where- upon Bartholomew started out in a caravel to meet the little fleet. It was with some misgiving that Columbus resumed his course, for he had seen a crossbow in the hands of a native. It was not an article of commerce, and it might signify another dis- aster like that of La Navidad. He was accordingly relieved when he shortly afterwards saw a Spanish caravel Meets the approaching, and, hailing the vessel, found that the Adelantad * Adelantado had come to greet him. 360 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. There was much interchange of news and thought to occupy the two in their first conference ; and Columbus's anxiety to know the condition of the colony elicited a wearisome story, little calculated to make any better record in Spain than the reports of his own rule in the island. The chief points of it were these : Bartholomew had early carried out the Admiral's behests to occupy the Hayna EspaSoia country. He had built there a fortress which he absence of had named St. Cristoval, but the workmen, finding par- ticles of gold in the stones and sands which they used, had nicknamed it the Golden Tower. While this was doing, there was difficulty in supporting the workmen. Pro- Domingo visions were scarce, and the Indians were not inclined to part with what they had. The Adelantado could go to the Vega and exact the quarterly tribute under compulsion ; but that hardly sufficed to keep famine from the door at St. Cristoval. Nothing had as yet been done to plant the ground near the fort, nor had herds been moved there. The settlement of Isabella was too far away for support. Meanwhile Nino had arrived with his caravels, but he had not brought all the ex- pected help, for the passage had spoiled much of the lading. It was by Nino that Bartholomew received that dispatch from his brother which he had written in the harbor of Cadiz when, on his arrival from his second voyage, he had discerned the con- dition of public opinion. It was at this time, too, that he re- peated to Bartholomew the decision of the theologians, that to be taken in war, or to be guilty of slaying any of their Majesties' liege subjects, was quite enough to render the Indians fit sub- coiumbus jects for the slave-block. The Admiral's directions, and slavery, therefore, were to be sure that this test kept up the sup- ply of slaves; and as there was nobody to dispute the judg- ment of his deputy, Niiio had taken back to Spain those three hundred, which were, as we have seen, so readily converted into reputed gold on his arrival. Bartholomew had selected the site for a new town near the mouth of the Ozema, convenient for the shipment of the Hayna treasure, and, naming it at first the New Isabella, it Domhigo soon received the more permanent appellation of Santo Domingo, which it still bears. Bartholomew had a pleasing story to tell of the way in which THE THIRD VOYAGE. 361 he had brought Behechio and his province of Xaragua into subjection. This territory was the region westward xaragua from about the point where Columbus had touched the cont i uered island a few days before. Anacaona, the wife of Caonabo, — now indeed his widow, — had taken refuge with Be- hechio, her brother, after the fall of her husband, aud 01 • . -\ p n Anacaona. bne is represented as a woman ot fane appearance, and more delicate and susceptible in her thoughts than was usual among her people ; and perhaps Bartholomew told his brother what has since been surmised by Spanish writers, that she had managed to get word to him of her friendly sentiments for celestial visitors. Bartholomew found, as he was marching thither with such forces as he could spare for the expedition, that the cacique who met him in battle array was easily dis- posed, for some reason or other, perhaps through Anacaona's in- fluence, to dismiss his armed warriors, and to escort his visitor through his country with great parade of hospitality. When they reached the cacique's chief town, a sort of fete was pre- pared in the Adelantado's honor, and a mock battle, not with- out sacrifice of life, was fought for his delectation. Peter Martyr tells us that when the comely young Indian maidens advanced with their palm branches and saluted the Adelantado, it seemed as if the beautiful dryads of the olden tales had slipped out of the vernal woods. Then Anacaona appeared on a litter, with no apparel but garlands, the most beautiful dryad of them all. Everybody feasted, and Bartholomew, to ingratiate himself with his host, eat and praised their rarest delicacy, the guana lizard, which had been offered to them many times before, but which they never as yet had tasted. It became after this a fashion with the Spaniards to dote on lizard flesh. Every- thing within the next two or three days served to cement this new friendship, when the Adelantado put it to a test, as indeed had been his purpose from the beginning. He told the cacique of the great power of his master and of the Spanish sovereigns ; of their gracious regard for all their distant subjects, and of the poor recompense of a tribute which was expected for their pro- tection. " Gold ! " exclaimed the cacique, " we have no gold here." " Oh, whatever you have, cotton, hemp, cassava bread, — anything will be acceptable." So the details were arranged. The cacique was gratified at being let off so easy, and the Span- iards went their way. 362 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. This and the subsequent visit of Bartholomew to Xaragua to receive the tribute were about the only cheery incidents in the dreary retrospect to which the Admiral listened. The rest was trouble and despair. A line of military posts had been built connecting the two Spanish settlements, and the manning of them, with their dependent villages, enabled the Adelantado to scatter a part of the too numerous colony at Isabella, so that it might be relieved of so many mouths to feed. This done, Native con- there was a conspiracy of the natives to be crushed spiracy. Two of the priests had made some converts in the Vega, and had built a chapel for the use of the neophytes. One of the Spaniards had outraged a wife of the cacique. Either for this cause, or for the audacious propagandism of the priests, some natives broke into the Spanish chapel, destroyed its shrine, and buried some of its holy vessels in a field. Plants grew up there in the form of a cross, say the veracious narra- tors. This, nevertheless, did not satisfy the Spaniards. They seized such Indians as they considered to have been engaged in the desecration, and gave them the fire and fagots, as they would have done to Moor or Jew. The horrible punishment aroused the cacique Guarionex with a new fury. He leagued the neighboring caciques into a conspiracy. Their combined forces were threatening Fort Conception when the Adelantado arrived with succor. By an adroit movement, Bartholomew ensnared by night every one of the leaders in their villages, and executed two of them. The others he ostentatiously pardoned, and he could tell Columbus of the great renown he got for his clemency. There was nothing in all the bad tidings which Bartholomew Rowan's nac ^ *° rehearse quite so disheartening as the revolt of Roldan, the chief judge of the island, — a man who had been lifted from obscurity to a position of such importance that Columbus had placed the administration of justice in his hands. The reports of the unpopularity of Columbus in Spain, and the growing antipathy in Isabella to the rule of Bartholo- mew as a foreigner, had served to consolidate the growing number of the discontented, and Roldan saw the opportunity of easily raising himself in the popular estimate by organizing the latent spirit of rebellion. It was even planned to assassinate the Adelantado, under cover of a tumult, which was to be raised THE THIRD VOYAGE. 363 at an execution ordered by him ; but as the Adelantado had par- doned the offender, the occasion slipped by. Bartholomew's absence in Xaragua gave another opportunity. He had sent back from that country a caravel loaded with cotton, as a trib- ute, and Diego, then in command at Isabella, after unlading the vessel, drew her up on the beach. The story was busily circu- lated that this act was done simply to prevent any one seizing the ship and carrying to Spain intelligence of the misery to which the rule of the Columbuses was subjecting the people. The populace made an issue on that act, and asked that the vessel be sent to Cadiz for supplies. Diego objected, and to divert the minds of the rebellious, as well as to remove Roldan from their counsels, he sent him with a force into the Vega, to overawe some caciques who had been dilatory in their tribute. This mission, however, only helped Roldan to consolidate his faction, and gave him the chance to encourage the caciques to join re- sistance. Roldan had seventy well-armed men in his party when he returned to Isabella to confront Bartholomew, who had by this time got back from Xaragua. The Adelantado was not so eas- ily frightened as Roldan had hoped, and finding it not safe to risk an open revolt, this mutinous leader withdrew to the Vega with the expectation of surprising Fort Con- ception. That post, however, as well as an outlying neersmtue « • /» 1 1 1T->1 Vega Real " fortified house, was under loyal command, and Rol- dan was for a while thwarted. Bartholomew was not at all sure of any of the principal Spaniards, but how far the disaf- fection had gone he was unable to determine. Although he knew that certain leading men were friendly to Roldan, he was not prepared to be passive. His safety depended on resolution, and so he marched at once to the Vega. Roldan was in the neighborhood, and was invited to a parley. It led to nothing. The mutineers, making up their minds to fly to the delightful pleasures of Xaragua, suddenly marched back to Isa- . T , „ * -i i At Isabella. bella, plundered the arsenal and storehouses, and tried to launch the caravel. The vessel was too firmly imbed- ded to move, and Roldan was forced to undertake the journey to Xaragua by land. To leave the Adelantado behind was a sure way to bring an enemy in his rear, and he accordingly thought it safer to reduce the garrison at Conception, and per- 364 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. haps capture the Aclelantado. This movement failed ; but it resulted in Roldan's ingratiating himself with the tributary caciques, and intercepting the garrison's supplies. It was at this juncture, when everything looked desperate for Barthol- omew, shut up in the Vega fort, that news reached him of the arrival (February 3, 1498) at the new port of Santo Domingo Coroneiar- °f the advance section of the Admiral's fleet, sent thither, as we have seen, by the Queen's assiduity, under the command of Pedro Fernandez Coronel. Bartholomew could tell the Admiral of the jjood effect which the intelligence received through Coronel had on the colony. His own title of Adelantado, it was learned, was legitimated by the act of the sovereigns ; and Columbus himself had been powerful enough to secure confirmation of his old honors, and to obtain new pledges for the future. The mutineers soon saw that the aspects of their revolt were changed. They could not, it would seem, place that dependence on the unpopulai'ity of the Admiral at Court which had been a good part of their encour- agement. Proceeding to Santo Domingo, Bartholomew proclaimed his new honors, and, anxious to pacificate the island be- mew'snew fore the arrival of Columbus, he dispatched Coronel to communicate with Roldan, who had sulkily followed the Adelantado in his march from the Vega. Roldan refused all intercourse, and, shielding himself behind a pass in the mountains, he warned off the pacificator. He would yield to no one but the Admiral. There was nothing for the Adelantado to do but to outlaw the rebels, who, in turn, sped away to what Irving calls the an d readily engaged their sympathies. Among vlot - those who joined in his plot was Pedro Riquelme, whom Roldan had made assistant alcalde. The old spii-it of revolt was rampant. The confederates were ready for any excess, either upon Roldan or upon the Admiral. Columbus was at Conception in the midst of the aroused district, when a deserter from the plotters informed him of their plan. With a small party the Admiral at once sped in the night to the un- Moxica guarded quarters of the leaders, and Moxica and sev- eral of his chief advisers were suddenly captured and carried to the fort. The execution of the ringleader was at once ordered. Impatient at the way in which the condemned man dallied in his confessions to a priest, Columbus ordered him pushed headloug from the battlements. The French canonists screen Columbus for this act by making Roldan the perpetrator of it. The other confederates were ironed in confinement at Conception, except Riquelme, who was taken later and conveyed to Santo Dominofo. The revolt was thus summarily crushed. Those who had escaped fled to Xaragua, whither the Adelantado and Roldan pursued them without mercy. Columbus had perhaps never got his colony under better con> trol than existed after this vigorous exhibition of his and his coi- authority. Such a show of prompt and audacious energy was needed to restore the moral supremacy which his recusancy under the threats of Roldan had lost. The fair weather was not to last long. Early in the morning of August 23, 1500, two caravels were 1500. Au- descried off the harbor of Santo Domingo. The Ad- badiij^ar^ " miral's brother Diego was in authority, Columbus nves. being still at Conception, and Bartholomew absem with Roldan. Diego sent out a canoe to learn the purpose o; the visitors. It returned, and brought word that a commii sioner was come to inquire into the late rebellion of Roldai Diego's messengers had at the same time informed the ne comer of the most recent defection of Moxica, and that the: were still other executions to take place, particularly those o1 Riquelme and Guevara, who were confined in the town. As fl»» M ^ I 392 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. the ships entered the river, the gibbets on either bank, with their dangling Spaniards, showed the commissioner that there were other troublous times to inquire into than those named in his warrant. While the commissioner remained on board his ship, receiving the court of those who early sought to propiti- ate him, and while he was getting his first information of the condition of the island, mainly from those who had something to gain by the excess of their denunciations, it is necessary to go back a little in time, and ascertain who this important per- sonage was, and what was the mission on which he had been sent. The arrangements for sending him had been made slowly. They were even outlined when Oieda had started on Growth of J . . . J . .it. the royai his voyage, for he had, in his interviews with Roldan, dissatisfac- ,,.,,?,. , tiouwith blindly indicated that some astonishment of this sort Columbus. . was in store. .Evidently -bonseca had not allowed Ojeda to depart without some intimations. Notwithstanding Columbus professed to believe that nothing but the lack of pecuniary return for the great outlays Charges against Co- of his expeditions could be alleged against them, he was well aware, and he had constantly acted as if well aware, of the great array of accusations which had been made against him in Spain, with a principal purpose of undermining the indulgent regard of the Queen for him. He had known it with sorrow during his last visit to Spain, and had found, as we have seen, that he could not secure men to accompany him and put themselves under his control unless he unshackled crim- inals in the jails. He little thought that such utter disregard of the morals and self-respect of those whom he had settled in the New World would, by a sort of retributive justice, open the way, however unjustly, to put the displaced gyves on himself, amid the exultant feelings of these same criminals. Such reit- erated criminations were like the water-drops that wear the stone, and he had, as we have noted, felt the certainty of direful results. How much the disappointment at the lack of gold had to do with increasing the force of these charges, it is not difficult to imagine. Columbus was certainly not responsible for that; but he was responsible for the inordinate growth of the belief in the profuse wealth of the new-found Indies. His constantly DEGRADATION AND DISHEARTENMENT. 393 repeated stories of the wonderful richness of the region had done their work. His professions of a purpose to enrich the His exagger . world with noble benefactions, and to spend his treas- wealth^/ 1 ' 6 ure on the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre, were the the Indies - vain boastings of a man who thought thereby to enroll his name among the benefactors of the Church. He did not per- ceive that the populace would wonder whence these Columbus resources were to come, unless it was by defrauding: deceives the Crown the Crown of its share, and by amassing gold while they could not get any. There is something ludicrous in the excuse which he later gave for concealing from the sovereigns his accumulation of pearls. He felt it sufficient to say that he thought he would wait till he could make as good a show of gold ! There were some things that even fifteenth-century Christians held to be more sacred than wresting Jerusalem from the Moslem, and these were money in hand when they had earned it, and food to eat when their misfortunes had beg- gared their lives. It was not an uncalled-for strain on their loyalty to the Crown, when the notion prevailed that the sov- ereigns and their favorite were gathering riches out of their despair. There was little to be wondered at, in the crowd of these hungry and debilitated victims, wandering about the courts of the Alhambra, under the royal windows, and Columbus's clamoring for their pay. There was nothing to be at'iuthe ted surprised at in the hootings that followed the Ad- Alhambra - miral's sons, pages of the Queen, if they passed within sight of these embittered throngs. It was quite evident that Ferdinand, who had never warmed to the Admiral's enthusiasm, had long been conscious that in the exclusive and extended powers which had been given to Columbus a serious administrative blunder confessed had been made. He said as much at a later day to Ponce de Leon. The Queen had been faithful, but the recurrent charges had given of late a wrench to her constancy. Was it not certain that something must be wrong, or these accusations would not go on increasing ? Had not the great discoverer fulfilled his mis- sion when he unveiled a new world ? Was it quite sure that the ability to govern it went along with the genius to find it ? These were the questions which Isabella began to put to her- 394 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. self. She was not a person to hesitate at anything, when con- viction came. She had shown this in the treatment gins to of the Jews, of the Moors, and of other heretics. The conviction that Columbus was not equal to his trust was now coining to her. The news of the serious outbreak of Uoldaii's conspiracy brought the matter to a test, and Columbus . . e h a t\n i i to be super- m the spring ot 14yy the purpose to send out some one with almost unlimited powers for any emergency was decided upon. Still the details were not worked out, and there were occurrences in the internal and external affairs of Spain that required the prior attention of the sovereigns. Very likely the news of Columbus's success in finding a new source of wealth in the pearls of Paria may have had some- thing to do with the delay. When the ships wdiich carried to Spain a crowd of Roldan's followers arrived, the question took a fresh interest. Columbus's friends, Ballester and Barrantes, now found their testimony could make little head- againstco- way again st the crowd of embittered witnesses on the other side. Isabella, besides, was forced to see in the slaves that Columbus had sent by the same ships some- thing of an obstinate opposition to her own wishes. Las Casas tells us that so great was the Queen's displeasure that it was only the remembrance of Columbus's services that saved him from prompt disgrace. To be sure, the slaves had been sent in part by virtue of the capitulation which Columbus had made with the rebels, but should the Viceroy of the Indies be forced to such capitulations ? Had he kept the colony in a condition worthy of her queenly patronage, when it could be reported to her that the daughters of caciques were found among these natives bearing their hybrid babes? " What authority had my viceroy to give my vassals to such ends ? " she asked. There were two things in recent letters of Columbus whbh damaged his cause iust at this iuncture. One was his Columbus . . j, , p 1 1 i „., and the slave petition for a new lease of the slave trade. This Isa- trade. bella answered by ordering all slaves which he had sent home to be sought out and returned. Her agents found a Bobadiiia ^ ew « The other was the request of Columbus for a com°iSs- d j u< % e to examine the dispute between himself and sioner. Roldan. This Ferdinand answered by appointing the commissioner whose arrival at Santo Domingo we have chron- DEGRADATION AND DISHEARTENMENT. 395 iclecl. lie- was Francisco de Bobadilla, an officer of the royal household. Before disclosing what Bobadilla did in Santo Domingo, it is best to try to find out what he was expected to do. There is no person connected with the career of Columbus — hardly excepting Fonseca — more generally defamed than this man, who was, nevertheless, if we may believe H ischarac- Oviedo, a very honest and a very religious man. The ter ' historians of Columbus need to mete out to Bobadilla what very few have done, the same measure of palliation which they are more willing to bestow on Columbus. With this parallel justice, it may be that he will not bear with discredit a com- parison with Columbus himself, in all that makes a man's actions excusable under provocation and responsibility. An indecency of haste may come from an excess of zeal quite as well as from an unbridled virulence. It may be in some ways a question if the conditions this man was sent to correct were the result of the weakness or inadapta- bility of Columbus, or merely the outcome of circumstances, enough beyond his control to allow of excuses. There is, how- ever, no question that the Spanish government had duties to perform towards itself and its subjects which made it prop- erly disinclined to jeopardize the interests which accompany such duties. Bobadilla was, to be sure, invested with dangerous powers, but not with more dangerous ones than Columbus Bobadilla > s himself had possessed. When two such personations P° wers - of unbridled authority come in antagonism, the possessor of the greater authority is sure to confirm himself by commensurate exactions upon the other. BobadiUa's commission was an im- plied warrant to that end. He might have been more prudent of his own state, and should have remembered that a trust of the nature of that with which he was invested was sure to be made accountable to those who imparted to him the power, and per- haps at a time when they chose to abandon their own instruc- tions. He ought to have known that such an abandonment comes very easy to all governments in emergencies. He might have been more considerate of the man whom Spain had so re- cently flattered. He should not have forgotten, if almost every- body else had, that the Admiral had given a new world to Spain. 396 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. He should not have been unmindful, if almost every one else was, that this new world was a delusion now, but might dissolve into a beatific vision. But all this was rather more than human nature was capable of in an age like that. It is to be said of Bobadilla that when he summoned Columbus to Santo Domingo and prejudged him guilty, he had shown no more disregard of a rival power, which he was sent to regulate, than Columbus had manifested for a deluded colony, when he selfishly infected it with the poison of the prisons. It must not, indeed, be for- gotten that the strongest support of the new envoy came from the very elements of vice which Columbus had implanted in the island. He grew to understand this, and later he Columbus ^ . ' and the was forced to give a condemnation of his own act criminals. when he urged the sending of such as are honorably known, " that the country may be peopled with honest men." Las Casas tells us of Bobadilla that his probity and disinter- estedness were such that no one could attack them. If it be left for posterity to decide between the word of Las Casas and Columbus, in estimates of virtue and honesty, there is no ques- tion of the result. When Bobadilla was selected to be sent to Bobaduia's Espanola, there was every reason to choose the most character. upright of persons. There was every reason, also, to instruct him with a care that should consider every probable attendant circumstance. After this was done, the discretion of the man was to determine all. We can read in the records the formal instructions ; but there were beside, as is expressly stated, verbal directions which can only be surmised. Bobadilla was accused of exceeding the wishes of the Queen. Are we sure that he did ? It is no sign of it that the monarchs ceedhis subsequently found it politic to disclaim the act of their agent. Such a desertion of a subordinate was -lot unusual in those times, nor indeed would it be now. If Isabella, " for the love of Christ and the Virgin Mary," could depopulate towns, as she said she did, by the ravages of the inquisition, and fill her coffers by the attendant sequestra- tions, it is not difficult to conceive that, with a similar and con- venient conviction of duty, she would give no narrow range to her vindictiveness and religious zeal when she came to deal with an Admiral whom she had created, and who was not very deferential to her wishes. DEGRADATION AND DISHEARTENMENT. 397 A synopsis of the powers confided to Bobadilla in writing needs to be presented. They begin with a letter of Bobadilla . a March 21, 1499, referring to reports of the Roldan *° weva - insurrection, and directing him, if on inquiry he finds any per- sons culpable, to arrest them and sequestrate their effects, and to call upon the Admiral for assistance in carrying out these orders. Two months later, May 21, a circular letter was framed and addressed to the magistrates of the islands, which seems to have been intended to accredit Bobadilla to them, if the Admiral should be no longer in command. This order gave notice to these magistrates of the full powers which had been given to Bobadilla in civil and criminal jurisdiction. Another order of the same date, addressed to the " Admiral of the ocean sea," orders him to surrender all royal property, whether forts, arms, or otherwise, into Bobadilla's hands, — evidently intended to have an accompanying effect with the other. Of a date five days later another letter addressed to the Admiral reads to this effect : — " We have directed Francisco de Bobadilla, the bearer of this, to tell you for us of certain things to be mentioned by him. We ask you to give faith and credence to what he says, and to obey him. May 26, 1499/' This is an explicit avowal on the sovereigns' part of having given verbal orders. In addition to these instructions, His verbill a royal order required the commissioner to ascertain orders - what was due from the Crown for unpaid salaries, and to compel the Admiral to join in liquidating such obligations so far as he was bound for them, " that there may be no more complaints." If one may believe Columbus's own statements as made in his subsequent letter to the nurse of Prince Juan, it had been neg- lect, and not inability, on his part which had allowed these arrears to accrue. Bobadilla was also furnished with blanks signed by the sovereigns, to be used to further their purposes in any way and at his discretion. With these extraordinary docu- ments, and possessed of such verbal and confidential directions as we may imagine rather than prove, Bobadilla had sailed in July, 1500, more than a year after the let- Bobadiiu ' ters were dated. His two caravels brought back to Espafiola a number of natives, who were in charge of some Franciscan friars. 398 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. We left Bobadilla on board his ship, receiving court from all Bobaduia wno desired thus early to get his ear. It was not till sTnto Do- * ne next C ^ a y tnat ne landed, attended by a guard of mnigo. • twenty-five men, when he proceeded to the church to mass. This over, the crowd gathered before the church. Bobadilla ordered a herald to read his original commission of March 21, Hisde . 1499, and then he demanded of the acting governor, mands. Diego, who was present, that Guevara, Riquelme, and the other prisoners should be delivered to him, together with all the evidence in their cases, and that the accusers and magis- trates should appear before him. Diego referred him to the Admiral as alone having power in such matters, and asked for a copy of the document just read to send to Columbus. This Bobadilla declined to give, and retired, intimating, however, that there were reserved powers which he had, before which even the Admiral must bow. The peremptoriness of this movement was, it would seem, uncalled for, and there could have been little misfortune in waiting the coming of the Admiral, compared with the natural results of such sudden overturning of established authority in the absence of the holder of it. Urgency may not, neverthe- less, have been without its claims. It was desirable to stay the intended executions; and we know not what exaggerations had already filled the ears of Bobadilla. At this time there would seem to have been the occasion to deliver the letter to Columbus which had commanded his obedience to the verbal instructions of the sovereigns; and such a delivery might have turned the current of these hurrying events, for Columbus had shown, in the case of Agueda, that he was graciously inclined to authority. Instead of this, however, Bobadilla, the next day, again appeared at mass, and caused his other commissions to be read, which in effect made him supersede the Admiral. This superiority Diego and his councilors still unadvisedly de- clined to recognize. The other mandates were read in succes- sion ; and the gradual rise to power, which the documents seemed to imply, as the progress of the investigations demanded support, was thus reached at a bound. This is the view of the case which has been taken by Columbus's biographers, as nat- urally drawn from the succession of the powers which were DEGRADATION AND DISHEARTENMENT. 399 given to Bobadilla. It is merely an inference, and we know not the directions for their proclamations, which had been verbally imparted to Bobadilla. It is this uncertainty which surrounds the case with doubt. It is apparent that the reading of these papers had begun to impress the rabble, if not those in author- ity. That order which commanded the payment of arrears of salaries had a very gratifying effect on those who had suffered from delays. Nothing, however, moved the representatives of the Viceroy, who would not believe that anything could surpass his long-conceded authority. There is nothing strange in the excitement of an officer who finds his undoubted supremacy thus obstinately spurned, and we must trace to such excitement the somewhat overstrained conduct which made a show of carrying by assault the fortress in which Guevara and the other prisoners assaults the were confined. Miguel Diaz, who commanded the fort, — the same who had disclosed the Hayna mines, — when summoned to surrender had referred Bobadilla to the Admiral from whom his orders came, and asked for copies of the let- ters patent and orders, for more considerate attention. It was hardly to be expected that Bobadilla was to be beguiled by any such device, when he had a force of armed men at his back, aided by his crew and the aroused rabble, and when there was nothing before him but a weak citadel with few defenders. There was nothing to withstand the somewhat ridiculous shock of the assault but a few frail bars, and no need of the scaling ladders which were ostentatiously set up. Diaz and one com- panion, with sword in hand, stood passively representing the outraged dignity of command. Bobadilla was victorious, and the manacled Guevara and the rest passed over to new and less stringent keepers. Bobadilla was now in possession of every channel of author- ity. He domiciled himself in the house of Columbus, took possession of all his effects, including his papers, in full pos- making no distinction between public and private ones, and used what money he could find to pay the debts of the Admiral as they were presented to him. This proceeding was well calculated to increase his popularity, and it was still more enhanced when he proclaimed liberty to all to gather gold for twenty years, with only the payment of one seventh instead of a third to the Crown. 400 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. Let us turn to Columbus himself. The reports which reached him at Fort Conception did not at first con- hears of vey to him an adequate notion of what he was to en- counter. He associated the proceedings with such unwarranted acts as Ojeda's and Pinzon's in coming with their ships within his prescribed dominion. The greater au- dacity, however, alarmed him, and the threats which Bobadilla had made of sending him to Spain in irons, and the known success of his usurpation within the town, were little calculated to make Columbus confident in the temporary character of the outburst. He moved his quarters to Bonao to be nearer the confusion, and here he met an officer bearing to him a copy of the letters under which the government had been assumed by Bobadilla. Still the one addressed to Columbus, commanding him to acquiesce, was held back. It showed palpably that Bobadilla conceived he had passed beyond the judicial aim of his commission. Columbus, on his part, was loath to reach that conclusion, and tried to gain time. He wrote to Bobadilla an exculpating and temporizing letter, saying that he was about to leave for Spain, when everything would pass regularly into Bobadilla's control. He sent other letters, calculated to create delays, to the Franciscans who had come with ancuiie him. He had himself affiliated with that order, and perhaps thought his influence might not be unheeded. He got no replies, and perhaps never knew what the spirit of these friars was. They evidently reflected the kind of testi- mony which Bobadilla had been accumulating. We find somewhat later, in a report of one of them, Nicholas Glass- berger., — who speaks of the 1,500 natives whom they had made haste to baptize in Santo Domingo, — some of the cruel insinuations which were rife, when he speaks of "a certain admiral, captain, and chief, who had ill treated these natives, taking their goods and wives, and capturing their virgin daugh- ters, and had been sent to Spain in chains." Columbus as yet could hardly have looked forward to auy such indignity as manacles on his limbs. Nor did he probably suspect that Bobadilla was using the signed blanks, entrusted to him by the sovereigns, to engage the interests of Roldan and other deputies of the Viceroy scattered through the island. Columbus, in these uncertainties, caused it to be known that DEGRADATION AND DISHEaRTENMENT. 401 he considered his perpetual powers still unrevoked, if indeed they were revocable at all. This state of his mind was rudely jarred by receiving- a little later, at the hands of Francisco Velasquez, the deputy treasurer, and of Juan de Trasierra, one of the Franciscans, the letter addressed to him bv the ,. , . , t» i t-1-i Bobadilla sovereigns, commanding him to respect what Bobadilla sends the ii • tt • i i i • i sovereigns' should tell him. Here was tangible authority ; and letter to -, • i i c -r> -i Columbus. when it was accompanied by a summons from JBoba- dilla to appear before him, he hesitated no longer, and, with the little state befitting his disgrace, proceeded at once to Santo Domingo. The Admiral's brother Diego had already been confined in irons on one of the caravels ; and Bobadilla, affecting to believe, as Irving holds, that Columbus would not come in any compli- ant mood, made a bustle of armed preparation. There was, however, no such intention on Columbus's part, nor Columbus had been, since the royal mandate of implicit obe- gantoDo- 3 dience had been received. He came as quietly as the min s°- circumstances would permit, and when the new governor heard he was within his grasp, his orders to seize him and throw him into prison were promptly executed (August 23, 1500). In the southeastern part of the town, the tower still gust 23. co- .,,.,. (- better way of commending Bobadilla's action to the Queen, ap- parently, than by making the most of Columbus's unfortunate relations to the slave trade. As the accusations were piled up, Bobadilla saw the inquest leading, in his mind, to but one conclusion, the unnatural char- acter of the Viceroy and his unfitness for command, — a phrase not far from the truth, but hardly requiring the extraordinary proceedings which had brought the governor to a l-ecognition of it. There is little question that the public sentiment of the colony, so far at least as it dare manifest itself, commended the governor. Columbus in his dungeon might not see this with his own eyes, but if the reports are true, his ears carried it to his spirit, for howls and taunts against him came from beyond the walls, as the expression of the hordes which felt relieved by his fate. Columbus himself confessed that Bobadilla had " suc- ceeded to the full " in making him hated of the people. All this was matter to brood upon in his loneliness. He magnified slight hints. He more than suspected he was doomed to a vio- lent fate. When Alonso de Villejo, who was to conduct him to Spain, in charge of the returning ships, came to the dungeon, Columbus saw for the first time some recognition of his unfor- tunate condition. Las Casas, in recounting the interview, says that Villejo was " an hidalgo of honorable character and my particular friend," and he doubtless got his account of what took place from that important participant. " Villejo,'' said the prisoner, " whither do you take me ? ' ' ; To embark on the ship, your excellency." " To embark, Villejo ? Is that the truth ? " " It is true," said the captain. For the first time the poor Admiral felt that he yet might see Spain and her sovereigns. The caravels set sail in October, 1500, and soon passed out of earshot of the hootings that were sent after the ]500 0ct( ,_ miserable prisoners. The new keepers of Columbus {£*" £$%? were not of the same sort as those who cast such Spain ' farewell taunts. If the Historie is to be believed, Bobadilla had ordered the chains to be kept on throughout the voyage, 404 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. since, as the writer of that book grimly suggests, Columbus might at any time swim back, if not secured. Villejo was kind. So was the master of the caravel, Andreas Martin. They sug- gested that they could remove the manacles during the voyage ; but the Admiral, with that cherished constancy which persons feel, not always wisely, in such predicaments, thinking to mag- nify martyrdom, refused. " No," he said ; " my sovereigns or- dered me to submit, and Bobadilla has chained me. I will wear these irons until by royal order they are re- moved, and I shall keep them as relics and memorials of my services." The relations of Columbus and Bobadilla bring before us the most startling of the many combinations of events in the history of a career which is sadder, perhaps, notwithstanding its glory, than any other mortal presents in profane history, of Coium- The degradation of such a man appeals more forcibly to human sympathy than almost any other event in the record of humanity. That sympathy has obscured the im- His letter to P 01 ^ °^ n ^ s degradation, and that mournful explana- Prince r juan f ti° n °f tne events, which, either on his voyage or analyzed. shortly after his return, Columbus wrote and sent to the nurse of Prince Juan, has long worked upon the sensibili- ties of a world tender for his misfortunes. We cannot indeed read this letter without compassion, nor can we read it dispas- sionately without perceiving that the feelings of the man who wrote it had been despoiled of a judicial temper by his errors as well as by his miseries. His statements of the case are wholly one-sided. He never sees what it pains him to see. He for- gets everything that an enemy would remember. He finds it difficult to tell the truth, and trusts to iterated professions to be taken for truths. He claims to have no conception why he was imprisoned, when he knew perfectly well, as he says himself, that he had endeavored to create an opposition to con- stituted authority " by verbal and written declarations ; " and he reiterates this statement after he had bowed to royal commands that were as explicit as his own treatment of them agahXr had been recalcitrant. Indeed, he puts himself in the rather ridiculous posture of answering a long series of charges, of which at the same time he professes to be ignorant. DEGRADATION AND DISHEARTENMENT. 405 In the course of this letter, Columbus set up a claim that he had been seriously misjudged in trying to measure his accounta- bility by the laws that govern established governments rather than by those which grant indulgences to the conqueror of a numerous and warlike nation. The position is curiously incon- sistent with his professed intentions, as the sole ruler of a col- ony, to be just in the eyes of God and men. The Crown had given him its authority to establish precisely what he claims had not been established, a government of laws kindly disposed to protect both Spaniard and native, and yet he did not under- stand why his doings were called in question. He had boasted repeatedly how far from warlike aud dangerous the natives were, so that a score of Spaniards could put seven thousand to rout, as he was eager to report in one case. The chief of the accusations against him did not pertain to his malfeasance in regard to the natives, but towards the Spaniards themselves, and it was begging the question to consider his companions a conquered nation. If there were no established government as respects them, he would be the last to admit it ; aud if it were proved against him, there was no one so responsible for the absence of it as himself. Again he says : " I ought to be judged by cavaliers who have gained victories themselves, — by gentlemen, and not by lawyers." The fact was that the case had been judged by hidalgoes without number, and to his dis- grace, and it was taken from them to give him the protection of the law, such as it was ; and, as he himself acknowledges, there is in the Indies " neither civil right nor judgment seat." As he was the source of all the bulwarks of life and liberty in these same Indies, he thus acknowledges the deficiencies of his own protective agencies. There is something childishly immature in the proposition which he advances that he should be judged by persons in his own pay. It is of course necessary to allow the writer of this letter all the palliation that a man in his distressed and dis- ordered condition might claim. Columbus had in fact been perceptibly drifting into a state of delusion and ab- erration of mind ever since the sustaining power of a great cause had been lifted from him. From the moment when he turned his mule back at the instance of Isabella's message, the lofty purpose had degenerated to a besetting cupidity, in which 406 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. he made even the Divinity a constant abettor. In this same letter he tells of a vision of the previous Christmas, when the Lord confronted him miraculously, and reminded him of his vow to amass treasure enough in seven years to undertake his crusade to Jerusalem. This visible Godhead then comforted him with the assurance that his divine power would see that it came to pass. "The seven years you were to await have not yet passed. Trust in me and all will be right." It is easy to point to numerous such instances in Columbus's career, and the canon- izers do not neglect to do so, as evincing the sublime confidence of the devoted servant of the Lord ; but one can hardly put out of mind the concomitants of all such confidence. The most that we can allow is the unaccountableness of a much-vexed conscience. CHAPTER XVIII. COLUMBUS AGAIN IN SPAIN. 1500-1502. It was in October, 1500, after a voyage of less discomfort than usual, that the ships of Villejo, carrying his 1500 1 manacled prisoners, entered the harbor of Cadiz. If {^^h™* Bobadilla had precipitately prejudged his chief pris- Cadiz- oner, public sentiment, when it became known that Columbus had arrived in chains, was not less headlong in its sympathetic revulsion. Bobadilla would at this moment have stood a small chance for a dispassionate examination. The discoverer of the New World coming back from it a degraded prisoner Public was a discordant spectacle in the public mind, filled SisXgrada' with recollections of those days of the first return to tl0n- Palos, when a new range had been given to man's conceptions of the physical world. This common outburst of indignation showed, as many times before and since, how the world's sense of justice has in it more of spirit than of steady discernment. The hectic flush was sure to pass, — as it did. It was while on his voyage, or shortly after his return, that Columbus wrote the letter to the lady of the Court usually spoken of as the nurse of Prince Juan, which bus's letter 111 • T» 1 1 t0 *" e nurse has been already considered. Before the proceed- of Prince ings of the inquest which Bobadilla had forwarded by the ship were sent to the Court, then in the Alhainbra, Colum- bus, with the connivance of Martin, the captain of his caravel, had got this exculpatory letter off by a special messenger. The lady to whom it was addressed was, it will be remembered, Doiia Juana de la Torre, an intimate companion of the Queen, with whom the Admiral's two sons, as pages of the Queen, had been for some months in daily relations. The text of this letter has long been known. Las Casas copied it in his Ilistoria. 408 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. Navarrete gives it from another copy, but corrected by the text preserved at Genoa ; while Harrisse tells us that the text in Paris contains an important passage not in that at Genoa. While its ejaculatory arguments are not well calculated to impose on the sober historian, there was enough of fervor laid against its background of distressing humility to work on the sympathies of its recipient, and of the Queen, to whom it was early and naturally revealed. " I have now reached that point that there is no man so vile, but thinks it his right to insult me," was the language, almost at its opening, which met their eyes. The further reading of the letter brought up a picture of the manacled Admiral. Very likely the rumor of the rising indignation spreading from Cadiz to Seville, and from Seville elsewhere, as well as the letters of the alcalde of Cadiz, into whose hands Columbus had been delivered, and of Villejo, who had had him in custody, added to the tumult of sensations mutually shared in that little circle of the monarchs and the Tbesover- Dolla Juana. If we take the prompt action of the Columbus to sovereigns in ordering the immediate release of Co- be released. i umDU g 5 their letter of sympathy at the baseness of his treatment, the two thousand ducats put at his disposal to prepare for a visit to the Court, and the cordial royal sum- mons for him to come, — if all these be taken at their apparent value, the candid observer finds himself growing distrustful of Bobadilla's justification through his secret instructions. As the observer goes on in the story and notes the sequel, he is more inclined to believe that the sovereigns, borne on the rising tide of indignant sympathy, had defended themselves at the expense of their commissioner. We may never know the truth. That was a striking scene when Columbus, delivered from his i5oo. De- irons on the 17th of December, 1500, held his first coTumbuI' interview with the Spanish monarchs. Oviedo was at court. an evew it ness f ^ ; but we find more of its ac- companiments in the story as told by Herrera than in the scant narrative of the Historie. Humboldt fancies that it was the Admiral's son who wi^ote it. The author of that book had no heart to record at much length the professions of regret on the part of the King, since they were not easily reconcil- able with what, in that writer's judgment, would have been the honorable reception of Bobadilla and Roldan, had they COLUMBUS AGAIN IN SPAIN. 409 escaped the fate of the tempests which later overwhelmed them. When the first warmth of Columbus's reception had subsided, there would have been no reason to suspect that those absent servants of the Crown would have been denied a suitable welcome. Herrera tells us of the touching character of this interview of December 17 ; how the Queen burst into tears, and the emo- tional Admiral cast himself on the ground at her feet. When Columbus could speak, he began to recall the reasons for which he had been imprisoned, and rehearsed them with humble and exculpatory professions. He forgot that in the letter which so excited their sympathy he had denied that he knew any such reasons, and the sovereigns forgot it too. The meeting had awakened the tenderer parts of their natures, and their hearts went out to him. They made verbal ■ promises of largesses and professions of restitution, but Harrisse could find no written expressions of this kind, till in the instructions of March 14, 1502, when they expressed their directions for his guidance during his next voyage. The Admiral grew confident, as of old, in their presence. He had always reached a coign of vantage in his personal intercourse with the Queen. He had evidently not lost that power. He began to picture his return to Santo Domingo with the triumph that he now enjoyed. It was a hol- low hope. He was never again to be Viceroy of the Indies. The disorders in Espanola were but a part of the reasons why it was now decided to suspend the patented ., ciai'i'p i -i i Columbus rights or the Admiral, it not permanently to deny the suspended further exercise of them. We have seen how the government had committed itself to other discoveries, profiting, as it did, by the maps which Columbus had sent back to Spain. These discoveries were a new source of tribute which could not be neglected. Rival nations too were alert, and ships of the Portuguese and of the English had been found prowling about within the unquestioned limits allowed to Spain by the new treaty line of Tordesillas. At the north and at other ex- the south these same powers were pushing their search, American to see if perchance portions of the new regions could waters - not be found to project so far east as to bring them on the Portuguese side of that same line. Portugal had al- p or t U guese ready claimed that Cabral had found such territory claims ' 410 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. f under the equator and south of it. An eastward projection of Brazil at the south, twenty degrees and more, is very common in the contemporary Portuguese maps. On the 13th of May, 1501, a new Portuguese fleet of three ships, under the command of Goncalo Coelho, sailed 1501. May p T • , , i i ,i ^i , 13. coeiho's from Lisbon to develop the coast of the southern Vera Cruz, as South America was now called, and to see if a way could be found through it to the Moluccas. In June, the fleet, while at the Cape de Verde Islands, met Cabral with his vessels on their return from India. Here it was that Cabral's interpreter, Gasparo, communicated the particulars of Cabral's discovery to Vespucius, who was, as seems pretty clear, though by no means certain, on board this outward-bound fleet. A letter exists, brought to light bv Count WasVespu- , ° ° J cms on this Baldelli 13oiu, not, however, in the hand of Vespucius, voyage ? . . , m which the writer, under date of June 4, gave the results of his note-takings with Cabral to Pier Francisco de Medici. Varnhagen is in some doubt about the genuineness of this document. Indeed, the historian, if he weighs all the testi- mony that has been adduced for and against the participancy of Vespucius in this voyage, can hardly be quite sure that the Florentine was aboard at all, and Santarem is confident he was not. Navarrete thinks he was perhaps there in some subordi- nate capacit}^. Humboldt is staggered at the profession of Ves- pucius in still keeping the Great Bear above the horizon at 32° south, since it is lost after reaching 26°. With all this doubt, we have got to make something out of another letter, which in the published copy purports to have been written in- 1503 about this voyage by Vespucius himself, and from it we learn that his ship had struck the coast at Cape St. Roque, on August 17, 1501. The discoverers reached and named Cape St. Augustine on August 28. On November 1, they were at Bahia. By the 3d of April, 1502, they had reached the latitude of 52° south, when, driven off the coast in a severe gale, they made apparently the island of Georgia, whence they stood over to Africa, and reached Lisbon on Sep- tember, 7, 1502. By what name Vespucius called this South American coast we do not know, for his original Italian text is lost, but the Mundus Novtis of the Latin paraphrase or version raised a feeling of expectancy that something new had really COLUMBUS AGAIN IN SPAIN 411 3Bt!ffi>U0^OtM0 SXpcrmo vdpurino Xmnrftto pctrtocmeMdo SalutfplurlmS Mcit 1 Upcriowb'Mcbuc fatto ampl* nbi fcnpft tareoitu mcoah no |Uisilli0rcgionib*quao tclafTc/zimpcnfis.7mant>ato iftiu« Tercni^rtmipoxtugaUicrcgispqiicfiatirais tinmlmns quafqs »oufimutt5flappd(areip fte fualtbablracognfriotauMcntibP onib 9 fttnoutffima rco.itcmtee cpttUongnoftro^anngito^ cpccMt.cityUopmntoj pars Mcarvltralinc imt6Tuinoctiat2.«valusincri^cmn5dkprittcntc« fe& m.ircrinquo> atlanti(fiwca2trtqutcotDpMtcnr2ibic(rcflffirmaturrCtcaco banc cop opinion? rife falfaj averitari omo^trarlanubecnieapltimanaiiigatlo Mxlaroulr:cBiiipti toiaUltsma , l5>tania:ptlnattfmuiuaimm.frequato;ib (, popiU»8*7aui lib* babitatS.$n$ilram Curopam feu Zlfiam vcl ZWrtc5.?in fug aeri niagts tpatum? amcnfl.q^tn quauls aliaregtonca nob?cognita p:ont Infia-msintclJlgce.vbifuccinctetantftre^.capjta foibcmus.ctreeMgj tiiojec annotations? monojlaqueaim vcl vifcpelauMfc ui boencuo «mnOofiw^\Jtinfrapatd?JU Wptfoctttfn quarto&edmo mSfisXDa^ Xbillcftnto «5ngflt ^fV tenmopilmorcccfnmnsab (Dlpftppo mSo3tep7ato rcgecfi trib 9 nawib^ ao tnquirotfcafc nouao f cgtoncs #f? auftrti Ui gintUttflifib 9 ptincntcr iiauigauimue ao rorriotS Culuo nauigatSto ex ©•taliodtTlauigationoftrafulte infuIasfo:tunatalctuq5 nQcanoftneappcIlafCTaptitviri^c.tabctbioplbucS^cgbicc.-rrcgJo ilia mauMnga graMb? quarmoxdaimmrra rojrtoan^onam a Uncae: qnlnocrtaUvirrfuoSt'ptcmonc^anlgrajgcnb 5 '^ popute baDiiatiir 3bircfumptloplrib 9 2n ficinccrta qncrcre.?q* an fi fmttgjiozanrco inudtigarc? vt vno 1>b6 vnmafapfthn^amfciC3q5c)cbld? 9 fQcagintarq)tem quib ? nautganfc ittusptinuos QuafciagkaquatuotbabUinfcS pUuiua.tonttruis too rBfcuiQn# 9 ,iiqobfatro 1 • -i r-n • -I • c /^i 1 Maps of the .rtolemy, in 1511, did any signs of these Cortereal cortereai \ J <=> discoveries. expeditions appear on an engraved map. Only a few years have passed since students of these carto- graphical fields were first allowed free study of this The Cantill0 Cantino map. It is, after La Cosa, the most inter- map ' 150 "' 420 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. esting - of all the early maps of the American coast as its con- figuration had grown to be comprehended in the ten years which followed the first voyage of Columbus. There are three special points of interest in this chart. The Tbe corte- ^ rs ^ * s ^ ie evident purpose of the maker, when sending erf^elTof i* (1502) to his correspondent in Italy, to render it i • • ■ allows other tie to stay r erdinand s ambition in sending out other expeditious. . TT . . , - 1 i ■ n explorers. Mis experience had taught him to allow no stipulations on which explorers could found exorbitant de- mands upon the booty and profit of the ventures. Anybody could sail westward now, and there was no longer the courage of conviction required to face an unknown sea and find an oppo- site shore. Columbus, who had shown the way, was now easily cast off as a useless pilot. It was not difficult for the King to frame excuses when Co- lumbus urged his reinstatement. Thei"e was no use in sending back an unpopular viceroy before the people of the colony had been quieted. Give them time. It might be seasonable enough to send to them their old master when -they had forgot- ten their misfortunes under him. Perhaps a better man than Bobadilla could be found to still the commotions, and if so he might be sent. In the face of all this and the King's deter- mination, Columbus could do nothing but acquiesce, and so he gradually made up his mind to bide his time once more. It was not a new discipline for him. It was clear from the intelligence which was reaching Spain that Bobadilla would have to be superseded. Freed rule in from the restraints which had created so much com- plaint during the rule of Columbus, and even courted with offers of indulgence, the miserable colony at Espaiiola readily degenerated from bad to worse. The new governor had hoped to find that a lack of constraint would do for the people what an excess of it had failed to do. He erred in his judg- ment, and let the colony slip beyond his control. Licentious- ness was everywhere. The only exaction he required was the tribute of gold. He reduced the proportion which must be surrendered to the Crown from a third to an eleventh, but he so apportioned the labor of the natives to the colonists that COLUMBUS AGAIN IN SPAIN. 429 the yield of gold grew rapidly, and became more with the tax an eleventh than it had been when it was a third. This inhuman degradation of the poor natives had become an organized mis- ery when, a little later, Las Casas arrived in the colony, and he depicts the baleful contrasts of the Indians and their attractive island. Gold was potent, but it was not potent enough to keep Bobadilla in his place. The representations of the agony of life among the natives were so harrowing that it was decided to send a new governor at once. The person selected was Nicholas de Ovando, a man of whom Las Casas, who went out with him, gives a high char- acter for justice, sobriety, and graciousness. Perhaps sent to he deserved it. The sympathizers with Columbus find it hard to believe such praise. Ovando was commissioned as governor over all the continental and insular domains, then acquired or thereafter to be added to the Crown in the New World. He was to have his capital at Santo Domingo. He was deputed, with about as much authority as Bobadilla had had, to correct abuses and punish delinquents, and was to take one third of all gold so far stored up, and one half of what was yet to be gathered. He was to monopolize all trade for the Crown. He was to segregate the colonists as much as pos- sible in settlements. No supplies were to be allowed to the peo- ple unless they got them through the royal factor. New efforts were to be made through some Franciscans, who accompanied Ovando, to convert the Indians. The natives were to be made to work in the mines as hired servants, paid by the Crown. It had already become evident that such labor as the mining of gold required was too exhausting for the natives, and the death-rate among them was such that eyes were already opened to the danger of extermination. By a sophistry which suited a sixteenth-century Christian, the existence of this poor race was to be prolonged by introducing the negro race from .. . r , P f J - . , ° ,. , mi ^8*° 8laveg Alrica, to take the heavier burden ot the toil, because to be intro- it was believed they would die more slowly under the trial. So it was royally ordered that slaves, born of Africans, in Spain, might be carried to Espanola. The promise of Colum- bus's letter to Sanchez was beginning to prove delusive. It was going to require the degradation of two races instead of one. That was all ! 430 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. To assuage the smart of all this forcible deprivation of his i50i. Co- power, Columbus was apprised that under a royal jZ^eTty order of September 27, 1501, Ovando would see to restored. £] ie restitution of any property of his which Bobadilla had appropriated, and that the Admiral was to be allowed to send a factor in the fleet to look after his interests under the articles which divided the gold and treasure between him and the Crown. To this office of factor Colum= bus appointed Alonso Sanchez de Carvajal. The pomp and circumstance of the fleet were like a biting Ovando's sarcasm to the poor Admiral. One might expect he fleet ' could have no high opinions of its pilots, for we find him writing to the sovereigns, on February 6, a letter laying before them certain observations on the art of navigation, in which he says : " There will be many who will desire to sail to the discovered islands ; and if the way is known those who have had experience of it may safest traverse it." Perhaps he meant to imply that better pilots were more important than much parade. He in his most favored time had never been fitted out with a fleet of thirty sail, so many of them large ships. He had never carried out so many cavaliers, nor so large a proportion of such persons of rank, as made a shining part of the 2,500 souls now embarked. He could contrast his Franciscan gown and girdle of rope with Ovando's brilliant silks and brocades which the sovereigns authorized him to wear. There was more state in the new governor's bodyguard of twenty-two esquires, mounted and foot, than Columbus had ever dreamed of in Santo Domingo. Instead of vile convicts there were respectable married men with their families, the guaranty of honorable living. So that when the fleet went to sea, Febru- ary 13, 1502, there were hopes that a right method mary 3. it of founding a colony on family life had at last found sails. c favor. The vessels very soon encountered a gale, in which one 1502. April. sn ^P foundered, and from the deck-loads which were fanto do- thrown over from the rest and floated to the shore mingo> it was for a long time apprehended that the fleet had suffered much more severely. A single ship was all that failed finally to reach Santo Domingo about the middle of April, 1502. COLUMBUS AGAIN IN SPAIN. 431 Let us turn now to Columbus himself. He had not failed, as we have said, to reach something like mental quiet in the conviction that he could expect nothing but neglect for the present. So his active mind engaged in those visionary and speculative trains of thought wherein, when his body was weary and his spirits harried, he was prone to find relief. He set himself to the composition of a maundering and erratic paper, which, under the title of Libros de las proficiaS; is preserved in the Biblioteca Colombina at Libros de lot Seville. The manuscript, however, is not in the P ™ "' handwriting of Columbus, and no one has thought it worth while to print the whole of it. In it there is evidence of his study, with the assistance of a Carthusian friar, of the Bible and of the early fathers of the Church, and it shows, as his letter to Juan's nurse had shown, how he had at last worked himself into the belief that all his early arguments for the westward passage were vain ; that he had simply been impelled by something that he had not then suspected ; and that his was but a predestined mission to make good what he imagined was the prophecy of Isaiah in Isaiah > s the Apocalypse. This having been done, there was P r °P hec y- something yet left to be accomplished before the anticipated eclipse of all earthly things came on, and that was the conquest of the Holy Land, for which he was the ap- the Holy pointed leader. He addressed this driveling exposi- tion, together with an urgent appeal for the undertaking of the crusade, to Ferdinand and Isabella, but without convincing them that such a self-appointed instrument of God was quite worthy of their employment. The great catastrophe of the world's end was, as Columbus calculated, about 155 years away. He based his esti- Endof tUe mate upon an opinion of St. Augustine that the world ' world would endure for 7,000 years ; and upon King Alfonso's reckoning that nearly 5,344 years had passed when Christ appeared. The 1,501 years since made the sum 6,845, leav- ing out of the 7,000 the 155 years of his belief. He also fancied, or professed to believe, in a letter which he subsequently wrote to the Pope, that the present de- De f e ated by privation of his titles and rights was the work of Satan, Satan- who came to see that the success of Columbus in the Indies 432 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. would be only a preparation for the Admiral's long-vaunted recovery of the Holy Land. The Spanish government mean- while knew, and they had reason to know, that their denial of his prerogatives liad quite as much to do with other things as with a legion of diabolical powers. Unfortunately for Colum- bus, neither they nor the Pope were inclined to act on any inter- pretation of fate that did not include a civil policy of justice and prosperity. These visions of Columbus were harmless, and served to be- guile him with pious whimsies. But the mood did not last. He next turned to his old geographical problems. The graphical Portuguese were searching north and south for the pas- sage that would lead to some indefinite land of spices, and afford a new way to reach the trade with Calicut and the Moluccas, which at this time, by the African route, was pouring wealth into the Portuguese treasury in splendid contrast to the scant return from the Spanish Indies. He harbored a belief that a better passage might yet be found beyond the Caribbean Sea. La Cosa, in placing that vignette of St. Christopher and the infant Christ athwart the supposed juncture of Asia and would seek South America, had eluded the question, not solved it. westerly 6 Columbus would now go and attack the problem on Caribbean 16 * ne s P°t- His expectation to find a desired opening in Sea- that direction was based on physical phenomena, but in fact on only partial knowledge of them. He had been aware of the strong currents which set westward through the Carib- bean Sea, and he had found them still flowing west when he had reached the limit of his exploration of the southern coast of Cuba. Bastidas, who had just pushed farther west on the main coast, had turned back while the currents were still flowing on, along what seemed an endless coast beyond. Bastidas did not arrive in Spain till some months after Columbus had sailed, for he was detained a prisoner in Espanola at this time. Some tidings of his experiences may have reached Spain, however, or the Admiral may not have got his confirmation of these views Columbus till he found that voyager at Santo Domingo, later. stanli^the Columbus had believed Cuba to be another main, con- currents, fining this onward waste of waters to the south of it. It was clear to him that such currents must find an outlet to the west, and if found, such a passage would carry him on to COLUMBUS AGAIN IN SPAIN. 433 the sea that washed the Golden Chersonesus. He indeed died without knowing- the truth. This same current, deflected about Honduras and Yucatan, sweeps by a northerly circuit round the great Gulf of Mexico, and, passing out by the Cape Gulf of Florida, flows northward in what we now call the stream - Gulf Stream. There is nothing in all the efforts of the canonizers more ab= surdly puerile than De Lorgues's version of the way in which Columbus came to believe in this strait. He had a vision, and saw it ! The only difficulty in the matter was that the poor Admiral was so ecstatic in his hallucination that he mistook the narrowness of an isthmus for the narrowness of a strait ! The proposition of such a search was not inopportune in the eyes of Ferdinand. There were those about the Court who thought it unwise to give further employment to a nient relief man who was degraded from his honors ; but to the to send c'o- T7 -. . . » . . lumbus on King it was a convenient way of removing a persistent such a and active-minded complainant from the vicinity of the Court, to send him on some quest or other, and no one could tell but there was some truth in his new views. It was worth while to let him try. So once again, by the royal per- mission, Columbus set himself to work equipping a little fleet. It was the autumn of 1501 when he ap- lumbus pre- peared in Seville with the sovereign's commands, equip Ms He varied his work of preparing the ships with spend- ing some part of his time on his treatise on the prophecies, while a friar named Gaspar Gorricio helped him in the laboi\ Early in 1502 he had got it into shape to present to the sovereigns, and in February he wrote the letter ruary. co- i . lumbus to Pope Alexander VII. which has already been men- writes to the , J Pope. tioned. As the preparations went on, he began to think of Espaiiola, and how he might perhaps be allowed to touch there ; i , . , . p , . -,,. .. ., Forbidden to but orders were given to him forbidding it on the touchat outward passage, though suffering it on the return, for it was hoped by that time that the disorders of the island would be suppressed. It was arranged that the Adelantado and his own son Ferdinand should accompany him, and some interpret- ers learned in Arabic were put on board, in case his success put him in contact with the people of the Great Khan. 434 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. The suspension of his rights lay heavily on his mind, and early in March, 1502, he ventured to refer to the subject once more in a letter to the sovereigns. They replied, March 14, in some instructions which they sent from Valencia de Torre, advising him to keep his mind at ease, and leave such things to the care of his son Diego. They assured him that in due time the proper restitution of all would be made, and that he must abide the time. He had already taken steps to secure a perpetuity of the 1502. janu- record of his honors and deeds, if nothing else could lumbus's " be permanent. It was at Seville, January 5, 1502, serTOhlT 8 " ^ iat Columbus, appearing before a notary in his own titles, etc. house, attested that series of documents respecting his titles and prerogatives which are so religiously preserved at Genoa. These papers, as we have seen, were copies which Co- lumbus had lately secured from the documents in the Spanish Admiralty, among which he was careful to include the revo- cation of June 2, 1497, of the licenses which, much to Colum- bus's annoyance, had been granted in 1495, to allow others than himself to explore in the new regions. We may not wonder at this, but we can hardly conjecture why a transaction of his which had caused as much as anything his wrongs, mortifica- tion, and the loss of his dignities should have been as assidu- ously preserved. These are the royal orders which enabled Columbus, at his request, to fill up his colony with unshackled convicts. This he might as well have let the world forget. The royal order requiring Bobadilla or his successor to restore all the sequestered property of Columbus, and the new decla- ration of his rights, he might well have been anxious to preserve. There was one other act to be done which lay upon his mind, now that the time of sailing approached. He wished to make provision that his heirs should be able to confer some favor on his native city, and he directed that investments should be made Columbus f° r tna ^ purpose in the Bank of St. George at Genoa. Bank h o e fst. ^ e ^en notified the managers of that bank of his George. intention in a letter which is so characteristic of his moods of dementation that it is here copied as Harrisse tran& lates it : — COLUMBUS AGAIN IN SPAIN. 435 High Noble Lords : — Although the body walks about here, the heart is constantly over there. Our Lord has con- ferred on me the greatest favor to any one since David. The results of my undertaking already appear, and would shine greatly were they not concealed by the blindness of the govern- ment. I am going again to the Indies under the auspices of the Holy Trinity, soon to return ; and since I am mortal, I leave it with my son Diego that you receive every year, forever, one tenth of the entire revenue, such as it may be, for the purpose of reducing the tax upon corn, wine, and other provisions. If that tenth amounts to something, collect it. If not, take at least the will for the deed. I beg of you to entertain regard for the son I have recommended to you. Nicolo de Oderigo knows more about my own affairs than I do myself, and I have sent him the transcripts of any privileges and letters for safe-keeping. I should be glad if you could see them. My lords, the King and Queen endeavor to honor me more than ever. May the Holy Trinity preserve your noble persons and increase your most magnificent House. Done in Sevilla, on the second day of April, 1502. The chief Admiral of the ocean, Viceroy and Governor-Gen- eral of the islands and continent of Asia and the Indies, of my lords, the King and Queen, their Captain-General of the sea, and of their Council. S. . S . A . S . X M Y Xpo Ferens. The letter was handed by Columbus to a Genoese banker, then in Spain, Francisco de Rivarolla, who forwarded it to Oderigo ; but as this ambassador was then on his way to Spain, Harrisse conjectures that he did not receive the letter till his return to Genoa, for the reply of the bank is dated De- 1502 . De . cember 8, 1502, long after Columbus had sailed. This ^tank's response was addressed to Diego, and inclosed a letter reply * to the Admiral. The great affection and good will of Colum- bus towards " his first country " gratified them inexpressibly, as they said to the son ; and to the father they acknowledged the act of his intentions to be " as great and extraordinary as that 436 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. which has been recorded about any man in the world, consider- ing that by your own skill, energy, and prudence, you have dis- covered such a considerable portion of this earth and sphere of the lower world, which during so many years past and centuries had remained unknown to its inhabitants." The letter of Columbus to the bank remained on the files of that institution — a single sheet of paper, written on one side only, and pierced in the centre for the thread of the file — undis- covered till the archivist of the bank, attracted by the indorse- ment, M D II, Epla D. Admirati Don Xrophoki Columbi, identified it in 1829, when, at the request of the authorities of Genoa, it was transferred to the keeping of its archivists. It is to be seen at the city hall, to-day, placed between two glass plates, so that either side of the paper can be read. CHAPTER XIX. THE FOURTH VOYAGE. 1502-1504. Their Majesties, in March, 1502, were evidently disturbed at Columbus's delays in sailing, since such detentions 1502- March , brought to them nothing but the Admiral's continued commanded importunities. They now instructed him to sail with- to saiL out the least delay. Nevertheless, Columbus, who had given out, as Trivigiano reports, that he expected his discoveries on this voyage to be more surprising and helpful than any yet made, his purpose being, in fact, to circumnavigate the globe, May9 _n. did not sail from Cadiz till May 9 or 11, 1502, — the Sailed - accounts vary. He had four caravels, from fifty to seventy tons each, and they carried in all not over one hundred and fifty men. Apparently not forgetting the Admiral's convenient reserva- tion respecting the pearls in his third voyage, their H isinstruc Majesties in their instructions particularly enjoined tl0ns ' upon him that all gold and other precious commodities which he might find should be committed at once to the keeping of Francois de Porras, who was sent with him to the end that the sovereigns might have trustworthy evidence in his accounts of the amount received. Equally mindful of earlier defections, their further instructions also forbade the taking of any slaves. Years bad begun to rest heavily on the frame of Columbus. His constitution had been strained by long exposures, The phys i ca i and his spirits had little elasticity left. Hope, to be cowuuon of sure, had not altogether departed from his ardent Columbus - nature ; but it was a hope that had experienced many reverses, and its pinions were clipped. There was still in him no lack of mental vitality ; but his reason had lost equipoise, and his discernment was clouded with illusory visions. 438 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. There was the utmost desire at this time on the part of their Majesties that no rupture should break the friendly relations which were sustained with the Portuguese court, and it had been arranged that, in case Columbus should fall in with any Portuguese fleet, there should be the most civil interchange of courtesies. The Spanish monarchs had also given orders, since word had come of the Moors besieging a Portuguese post on the African coast, that Columbus should first go thither and afford the garrison relief. It was found, on reaching that African harbor on the 15th, Columbus ^ ia t the Moors had departed. So, with no longer de- African the l a y than to exchange civilities, he lifted anchor on the coast. same day and put to sea. It was while he was at the Canaries, May 20-25, taking in wood and water, that Columbus wrote to his devoted Gorricio a letter, which Navar- At the cana- rete preserves. " Now my voyage will be made in the name of the Holy Trinity," he says, " and I hope for success." There is little to note on the voyage, which had been a pros- perous one, and on June 15 he reached Martinino 1502. June _ . . __ . is. Reaches (Martmico). He himsell professes to have been but twenty days between Cadiz and Martinino, but the statement seems to have been confused, with his usual inac- curacy. He thence pushed leisurely along over much the same track which he had pursued on his second voyage, till he steered finally for Santo Domingo. It will be recollected that the royal orders issued to him before leaving Spain were so far at variance with Columbus's wishes that he was denied the satisfaction of touching at Espanola. There can be little question as to the wisdom of an in- Determines . . 1 • 1 i a -i • l t • ^ i« to go to Es- junction which the Admiral now determined to disre- gard. His excuse was that his principal caravel was : poor sailer, and he thought he could commit no mistake in in- suring greater success for his voyage by exchanging at that port this vessel for a better one. He forgot his own treatment of Ojeda when he drove that adventurer from the island, where, to provision a vessel whose crew was starving, Ojeda dared to trench on his government. When we view this pretense for thrusting himself upon an unwilling community in the light of his unusually quick and prosperous voyage and his failure to THE FOURTH VOYAGE. 439 make any mention of his vessel's defects when he wrote from the Canaries, we can hardly avoid the conclusion that his deter- mination to call at Espailola was suddenly taken. His whole conduct in the matter looks like an obstinate purpose to carry his own point against the royal commands, just as he had tried to carry it against the injunctions respecting- the making of slaves. We must remember this when we come to consider the later neglect on the part of the King. We must remember, also, the considerate language with which the sovereigns had conveyed this injunction: "It is not fit that you should lose so much time ; it is much fitter that you should go another way ; though if it appears necessary, and God is willing, you may stay there a little while on your return." Roselly de Lorgues, with his customary disingenuousness, merely says that Columbus came to Santo Domingo, to deliver letters with which he was charged, and to exchange one of his caravels. It was the 29th of June when the little fleet of Columbus arrived off the port. He sent in one of his command- ers to ask permission to shelter his ships, and the 29. Coium- . .-. [. . ,. P ,, , bus arrives privilege ot negotiating tor another caravel, since, as otrsanto he says, " one of his ships had become unseaworthy and could no longer carry sail." His request came to Ovando, who was now in command. This governor had left Spain in February, only a month before Columbus received his final in- structions, and there can be little doubt that he had learned from Fonseca that those instructions would enjoin Columbus not to complicate in any way Ovando' s assumption of command by ap- proaching his capital. Las Casas seems to imply this. How- ever it may be, Ovando was amply qualified by his own instruc- tions to do what he thought the circumstances required. Co- lumbus represented that a storm was coming on, or rather the Historie tells us that he did. It is to be remarked that Colum- bus himself makes no such statement. At all events, word was sent back to Columbus by his boat that he could not coiumbua enter the harbor. Irving calls this an " ungracious enter'tu" to refusal," and it turned out that later events have op- harbor - portunely afforded the apologists for the Admiral the occasion to point a moral to his advantage, particularly since Columbus, if we may believe the doubtful story, confident of his prognosti- 440 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. cations, had again sent word that the fleet tying in the harbor, ready to sail, would go out at great peril in view of an impend- ing storm. It seems to be quite uncertain if at the time his crew had any knowledge of his reasons for nearing Espanola, or of his being denied admittance to the port. At least Porras, from the way he describes the events, leaves one to make such an inference. This fleet iu the harbor was that which had brought Ovando, Ovando's an d was now laden for the return. There was on fleetl board of it, as Columbus might have learned from his messengers, the man of all men whom he most hated, Bobadilla, Bobadnia, wno nac l gracefully yielded the power to Ovando two othm a s n on and months before, and of whom Las Casas, who was then the fleet. f re sh in his inquisitive seeking after knowledge re- specting the Indies and on the spot, could not find that any one spoke ill. On the same ship was Columbus's old rebellious and tergiversating companion, Roldan, whose conduct had been in these two months examined, and who was now to be sent to Spain for further investigations. There was also embarked, but in chains, the unfortunate cacique of the Vega, Guarionex, to be made a show of in Seville. The lading of the ships was the most wonderful for wealth that had ever been sent from the island. There was the gold which Bobadilla had collected, including a remarkable nugget which an Indian woman had picked up in a brook, and a large quantity which Roldan and his friends were taking on their own account, as the profit of their separate enterprises. Carvajal, whom Columbus factor had had sent out with Ovando as his factor, to look after gold on one his pecuniary interests under the provisions which the royal commands had made, had also placed in one of the caravels four thousand pieces of the same precious metal, the result of the settlement of Ovando with Bobadilla, and the accretions of the Admiral's share of the Crown's profits. Undismayed by the warnings of Columbus, this fleet at once ovando's P ut to sea > the Admiral's little caravels having mean- Malndu* while crept under the shore at a distance to find such wrecked ; s h e lter as they could. The larger fleet stood home- ward, and was scarcely off the easterly end of Espanola when a furious hurricane burst upon it. The ship which carried Bobadilla, Roldan, and Guarionex succumbed and went down. THE FOURTH VOYAGE. 441 Others foundered later. Some of the vessels managed to re- turn to Santo Domingo in a shattered condition. A single caravel, it is usually stated, survived the shock, so that it alone could proceed on the voyage ; and if the testimony is to be be- lieved, this was the weakest of them all, but she car- but Bhip ried the gold of Columbus. Among the caravels which bu^goidu" put back to Santo Domingo for repairs was one on saved> which Bastidas was going to Spain for trial. This one arrived at Cadiz in September, 1502. The ships of Columbus had weathered the gale. That of the Admiral, by keeping close in to land, had fared best. Columbus's The others, seeking sea-room, had suffered more. They the^the*" lost sight of each other, however, during the height of the gale< gale ; but when it was over, they met together at Port Hermoso, at the westerly end of the island. The gale is a picture over which the glow of a retributive justice, under the favoring dis- pensation of chance, is so easily thrown by sympathetic writers that the effusions of the sentimentalists have got to stand at last for historic verity. De Lorgues does not lose the opportu- nity to make the most of it. Columbus, having lingered about the island to repair his ships and refresh his crews, and also to avoid a second storm, did not finally get away till July 14, when he steered 1502 Jul directly for Terra Firma. The currents perplexed bus sSis Um ~ him, and, as there was little wind, he was swept west away- further than he expected. He first touched at some islands near Jamaica. Thence he proceeded west a quarter southwest, for four days, without seeing land, as Porras tells us, when, be- wildered, he turned to the northwest, and then north. But finding himself (July 24) in the archipelago near Cuba, which on his second voyage he had called The Gardens, he soon after getting a fair wind (July 27) stood southwest, and on July30 . At July 30 made a small island, off the northern coast of Guana i a - Honduras, called Guanaja by the natives, and Isla de Pinos by himself. He was now in sight of the mountains of the main- land. The natives struck him as of a physical type different from all others whom he had seen. A large canoe, eight feet beam, and of great length, though made of strange a single log, approached with still stranger people in it. They had apparently come from a region further north ; 442 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. and under a canopy in the waist of the canoe sat a cacique with his dependents. The boat was propelled by five and twenty men with paddles. It carried various articles to convince Columbus that he had found a people more advanced in arts than those of the regions earlier discovered. They had with them copper implements, including hatchets, bells, and the like. He saw something like a crucible in which metal had been melted. Their wooden swords were jagged with sharp flints, their clothes were carefully made, their utensils were polished and handy. Columbus traded off some trinkets for such speci- mens as he wanted. If he now had gone in the direction from which this marvelous canoe had come, he might have thus early opened the wondrous world of Yucatan and Mexico, and closed his career with more marvels yet. His beatific visions, which he supposed were leading him under the will of the Deity, led him, however, south. The delusive strait was there. He found an old man among the Indians, whom he kept as a guide, since the savage could draw a sort of chart of the coast. He dismissed the rest with presents, after he had wrested from them what he wanted. Approaching the mainland, near the present Cape of Honduras, the Adelantado landed on Sunday, on the August 14, and mass was celebrated in a grove near foa"t uras _the_beach. Again, on the 17th, Bartholomew landed some distance eastward of the first spot, and here, by a river (Rio de la Posesion, now Rio Tinto), he planted the Cas- tilian banner and formally took possession of the country. The Indians were friendly, and there was an interchange of provisions and trinkets. The natives were tattooed, and they had other customs, such as the wearing of cotton jackets, and the distend- ing of their ears by rings, which were new to the Spaniards. Tracking the coast still eastward, Columbus struggled against the current, apparently without reasoning that he might be thus sailing away from the strait, so engrossed was he with the thought that such a channel must be looked for farther south. Seeking a His visions had not helped him to comprehend the strait. sweep of waters that would disprove his mock oaths of the Cuban coast. So he wore ship constantly against the tempest and current, and crawled with bewildered expectation along the shoi*e. All this tacking tore his sails, racked his caravels, and wore out his seamen. The men were in despair, and confessed THE FOURTH VOYAGE. 443 one another. Some made vows of penance, if their lives were preserved. Columbus was himself wrenched with the coiumbus gout, and from a sort of pavilion, which covered his °™u e the d couch on the quarter deck, he kept a good eye on all gout " Port S.Ji % C:dc Veragua. His ships were badly bored by the worms, and they had become, from this cause and by reason of the heavy wea- ther which had so mercilessly followed them, more and more unseaworthy. So on December 5, 1502, when he 1502 . De . passed out of the little harbor of El Retrete, he be- cember5 - gan a backward course. Pretty soon the wind, which had all along faced him from the east, blew strongly from the west, checking him as much going backward as it had in his onward course. It seemed as if the elements were turned against him. The gale was making sport of him, as it veered in all direc- tions. It was indeed a Coast of Contrasts (La Costa de los Contrastes), as Columbus called it. The lightning streaked the skies continually. The thunder was appalling. For nine days the little ships, strained at every seam, leaking at every point where the tropical sea worm had pierced them, writhed in a struggle of death. At one time a gigantic waterspout formed within sight. The sea surged around its base. The clouds stooped to give it force. It came staggering and lunging towards the fragile barks. The crews exorcised the watery spirit by repeating the Gospel of St. John the Evangel- ist, and the crazy column passed on the other side of them. Added to their peril through it all were the horrors of an impending famine. Their biscuit were revolting because of the worms. They caught sharks for food. At last, on December 17, the fleet reunited, — for they had, during the gales, lost sight of each other, — and entered 1502- De _ a harbor, where they found the native cabins built in cember u - the tree tops, to be out of the way of griffins, or some other beasts. After further buffeting of the tempests, they finally B ethiehem made a harbor on the coast of Veragua, in a river Rlver- which Columbus named Santa Maria de Belen (Bethlehem), 450 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. it being Epiphany Day ; and here at last they anchored two of the caravels on January 9, and the other two on the 10th (1503). Columbus had been nearly a month in passing thirty leagues of coast. The Indians were at first quieted in the usual way, and some gold was obtained by barter. The Span- 1503. jau- iards had not been here long, however, when they uary24. found themselves (Jauuary 24, 1503) in as much danger by the sudden swelling of the river as they had been at sea. It was evidently occasioned by continued falls of rain in distant mountains, which they could see. The caravels were knocked about like cockboats. The Admiral's ship snapped a mast. " It rained without ceasing," says the Admiral, re- cording his miseries, " until the 14th of February ; " and dur- ing the continuance of the storm the Adelantado was sent on a boat expedition to ascend the Veragua River, three miles along the coast, where he was to search for mines. The party proceeded on February 6 as far as they could in the boats, and then, leaving part of the men for a guard, and taking guides, which the Quibian — that being the name, as he says, which they gave to the lord of the country — had provided, they reached a country where the soil to their eyes seemed full of particles of gold. Columbus says that he afterwards learned that it was a device of the crafty Quibian to conduct them to the mines of a rival chief, while his own were richer and nearer, all of which, nevertheless, did not escape the mew seeks keen Spanish scent for gold. Bartholomew made other excursions along the coast ; but nowhere did it seem to him that gold was as plenty as at Veragua. Columbus now reverted to his old fancies. He remembered that Josephus has described the getting of gold for the Temple of Jerusalem from the Golden Chersonesus, and was not this the very spot ? " Josephus thinks that this gold of the Chron- Mines of icles and the Book of Kings was found in the Aurea," Aurea. ^q says. " If it were so, I contend that these mines of the Aurea are identical with those of Veragua. David in his will left 3,000 quintals of Indian gold to Solomon, to assist in building the Temple, and according to Josephus it came from these lands." He had seen, as he says, more promise of gold here in two days than in Espailola in four years. It was very easy now to dwarf his Ophir at Hayna ! Those other THE FOURTH VOYAGE. 451 riches were left to those who had wronged him. The pearls of the Paria coast might be the game of the common adventurer. Here was the princely domain of the divinely led discoverer, who was rewarded at last ! A plan was soon made of founding a settlement to hold the region and gain information, while Columbus returned C oiumbus to Spain for supplies. Eighty men were to stay. ^kelTset- They began to build houses. They divided the stock tlement - of provisions and munitions, and transferred that intended for the colony to one of the caravels, which was to be left with them. Particular pains were taken to propitiate the natives by presents, and the Quibian was regaled with delicacies and gifts. When this was done, it was found that a dry season had come on, and there was not water enough on the bar to float the returning caravels. Meanwhile the Quibian had formed a league to exterminate the intruders. Columbus sent a brave fellow, Diego Mendez, to see what he could learn. He found a dez's ex- force of savages advancing to the attack ; but this single Spaniard disconcerted them, and they put off the plan. Again, with but a single companion, one Rodrigo de Escobar, Mendez boldly went into the Quibian's village, and came back alive to tell the Admiral of all the preparations for war which he had seen, or which were inferred at least. The news excited the quick spirits of the Adelantado, and, following a plan of Mendez, he at once started (March 30) with an armed force. He came with such celerity to the cacique's village that the savages were not prepared for their intrusion, and by a rapid artifice he surrounded the lodge of the Quibian, and The Q Uibian captured him with fifty of his followers. The Adelan- taken ' tado sent him, bound hand and foot, and under escort, down the river, in chai'ge of Juan Sanchez, who rather resented any inti- mation of the Adelantado to be careful of his prisoner. As the boat neared the mouth of the river, her commander yielded to the Quibian's importunities to loosen his bonds, when the chief, watching his opportunity, slipped overboard and dove to the bottom. The night was dark, and he was not seen when he came to the surface, and was not pursued. The other prisoners were delivered to the Admiral. The Ade- lantado meanwhile had sacked the cacique's cabin, and brought away its golden treasures. 452 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. Columbus, confident that the Quibian had been drowned, and that the chastisement which had been given his tribe was a wholesome lesson, began again to arrange for his departure. As the river had risen a little, he succeeded in getting his light- ened caravels over the bar, and anchored them outside, where their lading was again put on board. To offer some last in- 1303. junctions and to get water, Columbus, on April 6, sent April 6. a |) 0a ^ i n command of Diego Tristan, to the Adelan- tado, who was to be left in command. When the boat got in, Tristan found the settlement in great peril. The Quibian, who had reached the shore in safety after his adventure, had The settle- . , J ment at- quickly organized an attacking party, and had fallen upon the settlement. The savages were fast getting their revenge, for the unequal contest had lasted nearly three hours, when the Adelantado and Mendez, rallying a small force, rushed so impetuously upon them that, with the aid of a fierce bloodhound, the native host was scattered in a trice. Only one Spaniard had been killed and eight wounded, includ- ing the Adelantado ; but the rout of the Indians was complete. It was while these scenes were going on that Tristan arrived in his boat opposite the settlement. He dallied till the affair was ended, and then proceeded up the river to get some water. Those on shore warned him of the danger of ambuscade ; but he persisted. When he had got well beyond the support of Tristan the settlement, his boat was beset with a shower of murdered, javelins from the overhanging banks on both sides, while a cloud of canoes attacked him front and rear. But a single Spaniard escaped by diving, and brought the tale of disaster to his countrymen. The condition of the settlement was now alarming. The Indians, encouraged by their success in overcoming the boat, once more gathered to attack the little group of " encroaching \ Spaniards," as Columbus could but call them. The houses which sheltered them were so near the thick forest that the savages approached them on all sides under shelter. The woods rang with their yells and with the blasts of their conch-shells. The Spaniards got, in their panic, beyond the control of the Adelantado. They prepared to take the caravel and leave the river ; but it was found she would not float over the bar. They then sought to send a boat to the Admiral, lying outside, to pre- THE FOURTH VOYAGE. 453 vent his sailing without them ; but the current and tide com- mingling made such a commotion on the bar that no boat could live in the sea. The bodies of Tristan and his men came float- ing down stream, with carrion crows perched upon them at their ghastly feast. It seemed as if nature visited them with premoni- tions. At last the Adelantado brought a sufficient number of men into such a steady mood that they finally constructed out of whatever they could get some sort of a breastwork near the shore, where the ground was open. Here they could use their matchlocks and have a clear sweep about them. They placed behind this bulwark two small falconets, and prepared to de- fend themselves. They were in this condition for four days. Their provisions, however, began to run short, and every Span- iard who dared to forage was sure to be cut off. Their ammu- nition, too, was not abundant. Meanwhile Columbus was in a similar state of anxiety. " The Admiral was suffering from a severe fever," he says, " and worn with fatigue." His ships were lying: at anchor . , , , .ii • t P i • it i Columbus at outside the bar, with the risk or beino- obliged to put to anchor out- i op ! i rn • > side the bar. sea at any moment, to work oil a lee shore. Iristan s prolonged absence harassed him. Another incident was not less ominous. The companions of the Quibian were confined on board in the forecastle ; and it was the intention to take them to Spain as hostages, as it was felt they would be, for the col- ony left behind. Those in charge of them had become care- less about securing the hatchway, and one night they failed to chain it, trusting probably to the watchfulness of certain sailors who slept upon the hatch. The savages, finding a foot- ing upon some ballast which they piled up beneath, suddenly threw off the cover, casting the sleeping sailors violently aside, and before the guard could be called the greater part of the prisoners had jumped into the sea and escaped. Such as were secured were thrust back, but the next morning it was found that they all had strangled themselves. After such manifestations of ferocious determination, Colum- bus began to be further alarmed for the safety of his bro- ther's companions and of Tristan's. For days a tossing surf had made an impassable barrier between him and the shore. He had but one boat, and he did not dare to risk it in an attempt 45-4 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. to land. Finally, his Sevillian pilot, Pedro Ledesma, offered Ledesma's *° brave the dangers by swimming, if the boat would exploit. take him close to the surf. The trial was made ; the man committed himself to the surf, and by his strength and skill so surmounted wave after wave that he at length reached stiller water, and was seen to mount the shore. In due time he was again seen on the beach, and plunging in once more, was equally successful in passing the raging waters, and was picked up by the boat. He had a sad tale to tell the Admiral. It was a story of insubordination, a powerless Adelantado, and a frantic eagerness to escape somehow. Ledesma said that the men were preparing canoes to come off to the ships, since their caravel was unable to pass the bar. There was long consideration in these hours of dishearten- ment ; but the end of it was a decision to rescue the colony and abandon the coast. The winds never ceased to be high, and Columbus's ships, in their weakened condition, were abandon the onlv kept afloat bv care and vigilance. The loss of region. , , , , , , i the boat s crew threw greater burdens and strains upon those who were left. It was impossible while the surf lasted to send in his only boat, and quite as impossible for the fragile canoes of his colony to brave the dangers of the bar in coming out. There was nothing for Columbus to do but to hold to his anchor as long as he could, and wait. Our pity for the man is sometimes likely to unfit us to judge his own record. Let us try to believe what he says of himself, and watch him in his delirium. " Groaning with exhaustion," he says, " I fell asleep in the highest part of the ship, and Columbus in heard a compassionate voice address me." It bade hear S U a m him be of good cheer, and take courage in the ser- voice. v j ce £ Q & | What the God of all had done for Moses and David would be done for him ! As we read the long report of this divine utterance, as Columbus is careful to record it, we learn that the Creator was aware of his servant's name resounding marvelously throughout the earth. We find, however, that the divine belief curiously reflected the confi- dence of Columbus that it was India, and not America, that had been revealed. " Remember David," said the Voice, " how he was a shepherd, and was made a king. Remember Abraham, how he was a hundi*ed when he begat Isaac, and that there THE FOURTH VOYAGE. 455 is youth still for the aged." Columbus adds that when the Voice chided him he wept for his errors, and that he heard it all as in a trance. The obvious interpretation of all this is either that by the record Columbus intended a fable to impress the sovereigns, for whom he was writing, or that he was so moved to halluci- nations that he believed what he wrote. The hero worship of Irving* decides the question easily. " Such an idea," says Irving, referring to the argument of deceit, and forgetting the Admiral's partiality for such practices, " is inconsistent with the character of Columbus. In recalling a dream, one is uncon- sciously apt to give it a little coherency." Irving's plea is that it was a mere dream, which was mistaken by Columbus, in his feverish excitement, for a revelation. " The artless manner," adds that biographer, " in which he mingles the rhapsodies and dreams of bis imagination with simple facts and sound practical observations, pouring them forth with a kind of Scriptural solemnity and poetry of language, is one of the most striking illustrations of a character richly compounded of extraordinary and apparently contradictory elements." We may perhaps ask, Was Irving's hero a deceiver, or was he mad ? The chances seem to be that the whole vision was simply the product of one of those fits of aberration which in these later years were no strangers to Columbus's existence. His mind was not infre- quently, amid disappointments and distractions, in no fit condi- tion to ward off hallucination. Humboldt speaks of Columbus's letter describing this vision as showing the disordered mind of a proud soul weighed down with dead hopes. He has no fear that the strange mixture of force and weakness, of pride and touching humility, which accompanies these secret contortions will ever impress the world with other feelings than those of commiseration. It is a hard thing for any one, seeking to do justice to the agonies of such spirits, to measure them in the calmness of better days. " Let those who are accustomed to slander and asper- sion ask, while they sit in security at home, Why dost thou not do so and so under such circumstances ? " says Columbus himself. It is far easier to let one's self loose into the vortex and be tossed with sympathy. But if four centuries have done anything for us, they ought to have cleared the air of its mirages. What is pitiable may not be noble. 456 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. The Voice was, of course, associated in Columbus's mind with The colony the good weather which followed. During this a raft embark. wag ma( j e f t wo cano es lashed together beneath a platform, and, using this for ferrying, all the stores were floated off safely to the ships, so that in the end nothing was left be- hind but the decaying and stranded caravel. This labor was done under the direction of Diego Mendez, whom the Admiral rewarded by kissing him on the cheek, and by giving him com- mand of Tristan's caravel, which was the Admiral's flagshij). It is a strange commentary on the career and fame of Co- lumbus that the name of this disastrous coast should represent him to this day in the title of his descendant, the Duke of Veragua. Never a man turned the prow of his ship from scenes which he would sooner forget, with more sorrow and relief, than Columbus, in the latter days of April, 1503, with 1503. April. . J l Columbus his enfeebled crews and his crazy hulks, stood away, sails away. _, »i i i as he thought, for liispanola. And yet three months later, and almost in the same breath with which he had re- hearsed these miseries, with that obliviousness which so often caught his errant mind, he wrote to his sovereigns that " there is not in the world a country, whose inhabitants are more timid ; added to which there is a good harbor, a beautiful river, and the whole place is capable of being easily put into a state of defense. Your people that may come here, if they should wish to become masters of the products of other lands, will have to take them by force, or retire empty-handed. In this country they will simply have to trust their persons in the hands of a savage." The man was mad. It was easterly that Columbus steered when his ships swung round to their destined course. It was not without fear and even indignation that his crews saw what they thought a pur- pose to sail directly for Spain in the sorry plight of the ships. Mendez, indeed, who commanded the Admiral's own ship, says " they thought to reach Spain." The Admiral, however, seems to have had two purposes. He intended to run eastward far enough to allow for the currents, when he should finally head for Santo Domingo. He mtended also to disguise as much as he could the route back, for fear that others would avail them- selves of his crew's knowledge to rediscover these golden coasts. He remembered how the companions of his Paria voyage had THE FOURTH VOYAGE. 457 led other expeditions to that region of pearls. He is said also to have taken from his crew all their memoranda of the voyage, so that there would be no such aid available to guide others. " None of them can explain whither I went, nor whence I came," he says. " They do not know the way to return thither." By the time he reached Puerto Bello, one of his caravels had become so weakened by the boring worms that he had A t Puerto to abandon her and crowd his men into the two re- Bell °' raaining vessels. His crews became clamorous when he reached the Gulf of Darien, where he thought it prudent to AttheGulf abandon his easterly course and steer to the north. of Danen - It was now May 1. He hugged the wind to overcome the currents, but when he sighted some islands to the westward of Espanola, on the 10th, it was evident that the cur- 1503 May rents had been bearing him westerly all the while. l0 " They were still drifting him westerly, when he found himself, on Mav 30, among; the islands on the Cuban coast J ' ° May 30. Ou which he had called The Gardens. " I had reached," the Cuban coast. he says in his old delusion, " the province of Mago, which is contiguous to that of Cathay." Here the ships an- chored to give the men refreshment. The labor of keeping the vessels free from water had been excessive, and in a secure roadstead it could now be carried on with some respite of toil, if the weather would only hold good. This was not to be, however. A gale ensued in which they lost their anchors. The two caravels, moreover, sustained serious damage by colli- sion. All the anchors of the Admiral's ship had gone but one, and though that held, the cable nearly wore asunder. After six days of this stormy weather, he dared at last to crawl along the coast. Fortunately, he got some native provisions at one place, which enabled him to feed his famished men. The currents and adverse winds, however, pi-oved too much for the power of his ships to work to windward. They were all the while in danger of foundering. " With three pumps and the use of pots and kettles," he says, " we could scarcely clear the water that came into the ship, there being no remedy but this for the mischief done bv the ship worm." He - T . 1503 - Jl ' ne reluctantly, therefore, bore away for Jamaica, where, 23. Reaches _. Jamaica. on June 23, he put into Puerto Buono (Dry Harbor). Finding neither water nor food here, he went on the next day 458 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. to Port San Gloria, known in later days as Don Christopher's Cove. Here he found it necessary, a little later (July 23 and 1503. July, August 12), to run his sinking ships, one after the Hi^hips other, aground, but he managed to place them side by stranded. ^j^ go that tuev cou [ c \ ^ l as h e d together. They soon filled with the tide. Cabins were built on the forecastles and sterns to live in, and bulwarks of defense were reared as best they could be along the vessels' waists. Columbus now took the strictest precautions to prevent his men wandering ashore, for it was of the utmost importance that no indignity should be offered the natives while they were in such hazardous and almost defenseless straits. It became at once a serious question how to feed his men. Whatever scant provisions remained on board the stranded cara- vels were spoiled. His immediate savage neighbors supplied them with cassava bread and other food for a while, but they had no reserved stores to draw upon, and these sources were soon exhausted. Diego Mendez now offered, with three men, carrying goods Mendez to barter, to make a circuit of the island, so that for «ie°coL ne could reach different caciques, with whom he could pany- bargain for the preparation and carriage of food to the Spaniards. As he concluded his successive impromptu agreements with cacique after cacique, he sent a man back loaded with what he could cany, to acquaint the Admiral, and let him prepare for a further exchange of trinkets. Finally, Mendez, left without a companion, still went on, getting some Indian porters to help him from place to place. In this way he reached the eastern end of the island, where he ingratiated himself with a powerful cacique, and was soon on excellent terms with him. From this chieftain he got a canoe with natives to paddle, and loading it with provisions, he skirted westerly along the coast, until he reached the Spaniards' har- bor. His mission bade fair to have accomplished its purpose, and provisions came in plentifully for a while under the ar- rangements which he had made. Columbus's next thought was to get word, if possible, to Ovando, at Espanola, so that the governor could send a vessel to rescue them. Columbus proposed to Mendez that he should attempt the passage with the canoe in which he had returned THE FOURTH VOYAGE. 459 from his expedition. Mendez pictured the risks of going forty leagues in these treacherous seas in a frail canoe, and intimated that the Admiral had better make trial of the courage of the whole company first. He said that if no one else offered to go he would shame them by his courage, as he had more than once done before. So the company were assembled, and Columbus made public the proposition. Every one hung back from the hazards, and Mendez won his new triumph, pares to go as he had supposed he would. He then set to work fitting the canoe for the voyage. He put a keel to her. He built up her sides so that she could better ward off the seas, and rigged a mast and sail. She was soon loaded with the neces- sary provisions for himself, one other Spaniard, and the six Indians who were to ply the paddles. The Admiral, while the preparations were making, drew up a letter to his sovereigns, which it was intended that Mendez, after arranging with Ovando for the rescue, should t* ci • * 1503 - Jul y bear himself to opam by the first opportunity. At 7. Letter t • • i it • o it i i i i of Columbus least it is the reasonable assumption of Humboldt that to the sover- this is the letter which has come down to us dated July 7, 1503. It is not known that this epistle was printed at the time, though manuscript copies seem to have circulated. An Italian version of it was, however, printed at Venice a year before Columbus died. The original Spanish text was not known to scholars till Navarrete, having discovered in the king's library at Madrid an early transcript of it, printed it in the first volume of his Coleccion. It is the document usually referred to, from the title of Morelli's reprint (1810) of the Italian LaUera text, as the Lettera rarissima di Cristoforo Colombo. ranssima - This letter is even more than his treatise on the prophets a sor- rowful index of his wandering reason. In parts it is the merest jumble of hurrying thoughts, with no plan or steady purpose in view. It is in places well calculated to arouse the deepest pity. It was, of course, avowedly written at a venture, inasmuch as the chance of its reaching the hands of his sovereigns was a very small one. "I send this letter," he says, "by means of and by the hands of Indians ; it will be a miracle if it reaches its destination." 460 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. He not only goes back over the adventures of the present expedition, in a recital which has been not infrequently quoted in previous pages, but he reverts gloomily to the more distant past. He lingers on the discouragements of his first years in Spain. " Every one to whom the enterprise was mentioned," he says of those days, " treated it as ridiculous, but now there is not a man, down to the very tailors, who does not beg to be allowed to become a discoverer." He remembers the neglect which followed upon the first flush of indignation when he re- turned to Spain in chains. " The twenty years' service through which I have passed with so much toil and danger have profited me nothing, and at this very day I do not possess a roof in Spain that I can call my own. If I wish to eat or sleep I have nowhere to go but to a low tavern, and most times lack where- with to pay the bill. Another anxiety wrings my very heart- strings, when I think of my son Diego, whom I have left an orphan iu Spain, stripped of the house and property which is due to him on my account, although I had looked upon it as a certainty that your Majesties, as just and grateful princes, would restore it to him in all respects with increase." " I was twenty-eight years old," he says again, " when I came into your Highnesses' services, and now I have not a hair upon me that is not gray, my body is infirm, and all that was left to me, as well as to my brother, has been taken away and sold, even to the frock that I wore, to my great dishonor." And then, referring to his present condition, he adds : " Soli- tary in my trouble, sick, and in daily expectation of death, I am surrounded by millions of hostile savages, full of cruelty. Weep for me, whoever has charity, truth, and justice ! " He next works over in his mind the old geographical prob- lems. He recalls his calculation of an eclipse in 1494, when he supposed, in his error, that he had " sailed twenty-four degrees westward in nine hours." He recalls the stories that he had heard on the Veragua coast, and thinks that he had known it all before from books. Marinus had come near the truth, he gives out, and the Portuguese have proved that the Indies in Ethiopia is, as Marinus had said, four and twenty degrees from the equinoctial line. " The world is but small," he sums up ; " out of seven divisions of it, the dry part occupies six, and the seventh is entirely covered by water. I say that the world is THE FOURTH VOYAGE. 461 not so large as vulgar opinion makes it, and that one degree from the equinoctial line measures fifty-six miles and two thirds, and this may be proved to a nicety." And then, in his thoughts, he turns back to his quest for gold, just as he had done in action at Darien, when in despair he gave up the search for a strait. It was gold, to C oiumbus his mind, that could draw souls from purgatory. He on gold " exclaims: "Gold is the most precious of all commodities. Gold constitutes treasure, and he who possesses it has all he needs in this world, as also the means of rescuing souls from purgatory, and restoring them to the enjoyment of paradise." Then his hopes swell with the vision of that wealth which he thought he had found, and would yet return to. He alone had the clues to it, which he had concealed from others. " I can safely assert that to my mind my people returning to Spain are the bearers of the best news that ever was carried to Spain. ... I had certainly foreseen how things would be. I think more of this opening for commerce than of all that has been done in the Indies. This is not a child to be left to the care of a stepmother." These were some of the thoughts, in large part tumultuous, incoherent, dispirited, harrowing, weakening, and sad, penned within sound of the noise of Mendez's preparations, and dis- closing an exultant and bewildered being, singularly compounded. This script was committed to Mendez, beside one addressed to Ovando, and another to his friend in Spain, Father Gorricio, to whom he imparts some of the same frantic expectations. " If my voyage will turn out as favorable to my health," he says, " and to the tranquillity of my house, as it is likely to be for the glory of my royal masters, I shall live long." Mendez started bravely. He worked along the coast of the island towards its eastern end ; not without peril, Men< jez however, both from the sea and from the Indians. starts " Finally, his party fell captives to a startled cacique; but while the savages were disputing over a division of the spoils, Mendez succeeded in slipping back to the canoe, and, putting off alone, paddled it back to the stoanded ships. Another trial was made at once, with larger preparation. A second canoe was added to the expedition, and the charge of 462 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. this was given to Bartholomew Fiesco, a Genoese, who had Mendez commanded one of the caravels. The daring adven- starts agam. t urers started again with an armed party under the Adelantado following them along the shore. The land and boat forces reached the end of the island with- out molestation, and then, bidding each other farewell, the canoes headed boldly away from land, and were soon lost to the sight of the Adelantado in the deepening twilight. The land party returned to the Admiral without adventure. There was little now for the poor company to do but to await the return of Fiesco, who had been directed to come back at once and satisfy the Admiral that Mendez had safely accomplished his mission. Many days passed, and straining eyes were directed along the shore to catch a glimpse of Fiesco's canoe ; but it came not. There was not much left to allay fear or stifle disheartenment. The cramped quarters of the tenements on the hulks, the bad food which the men were forced to depend upon, and the vain watchings soon produced murmurs of discontent, which it needed but the captious spirit of a leader to convert into the turmoil of revolt. Such a gatherer of sedition soon appeared. The revolt There were in the company two brothers, Francisco ofPorras. fe p orra g 5 wno ]j a( j commanded one of the vessels, and Diego de Porras, who had, as we have seen, been joined to the expedition to check off the Admiral's accounts of treasures acquired. The very espionage of his office was an offense to the Admiral. It was through the caballing of these two men that the alien spirits of the colony found in one of them at last a determined actor. It is not easy to discover how far the accu- sations against the Admiral, which these men now began to dwell upon, were generally believed. It served the leaders' purposes to have it appear that Columbus was in reality ban- ished from Spain, and had no intention of returning thither till Mendez and Fiesco had succeeded in making favor for him at Court ; and that it was upon such a mission that these lieuten- ants had been sent. It was therefore necessary, if those who were thus cruelly confined in Jamaica wished to escape a linger- ing death, to put on a bold front, and demand to be led away to Espanola in such canoes as could be got of the Indians. It was on the 2d of January, 1504, that, with a crowd of THE FOURTH VOYAGE. 463 sympathizers watching within easy call, Francisco de Porras suddenly presented himself in the cabin of the weary 1504 Janu . and bedridden Admiral. An altercation ensued, in ^(J 6 " which the Admiral, propped in his couch, endeavored Porras - to assuage the bursting violence of his accuser, and to bring him to a sense of the patient duty which the conditions de- manded. It was one of the times when desperate straits seemed to restore the manhood of Columbus. It was, however, of little use. The crisis was not one that, in the present temper of the mutineers, could be avoided. Porras, finding that the Admiral could not be swayed, called out in a loud voice, " I am for Cas- tile ! Those who will may come with me ! " This signal was expected, and a shout rang in the air among those who were awaiting it. It aroused Columbus from his couch, and he stag- gered into sight ; but his presence caused no cessation of the tumult. Some of his loyal companions, fearing violence, took him back to his bed. The Adelantado braced himself with his lance for an encounter, and was pacified only by the persua- sions of the Admiral's friends. They loyally said, "Let the mutineers go. We will remain." The angry faction seized ten canoes, which the Admiral had secured from the Indians, and putting in them what they could get, they embarked for their perilous voyage. Some others who had not joined in i-ii- n it in ' i p The flotilla their plot being allured by the nattering hope ot re- of Porras lease, there were forty-eight in all, and the little flo- tilla, amid the mingled execrations and murmurs of despair among the weak and the downcast who stayed behind, paddled out of that fateful harbor. The greater part of all who were vigorous had now gone. There were a few strong souls, with some vitality left in them, among the small company which remained to the Admiral ; but the most of them were sorry objects, with dejected minds and bodies more or less prostrate from disease and privation. The conviction soon settled upon this deserted community that nothing could save them but a brotherly and confident determi- nation to help one another, and to arouse to the utmost what- ever of cheer and good will was latent in their spirits. They could hardly have met an attack of the natives, and they knew it. This made them more considerate in their treatment of their neighbors, and the supply of provisions which they could 464 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. get from those who visited the ship was plentiful for a while. But the habits of the savages were not to accumulate much beyond present needs, and when the baubles which the Span- iards could distribute began to lose their strange attractiveness, the incentive was gone to induce exertion, and supplies were brought in less and less frequently. It was soon found that hawks' bells had diminished in value. It took several to ap- pease the native cupidity where one had formerly done it. There was another difficulty. There were failures on the part of the more distant villages to send in their Porras'smeu ... . still on the customary contributions, and it soon came to be known that Porras and his crew, instead of having left the island, were wandering about, exacting provisions and committing indignities against the inhabitants wherever they went. It seems that the ten canoes had followed the coast to the nearest point to Espanola, at the eastern end of the island, and here, waiting for a calm sea, and securing some Indians to paddle, the mutineers had finally pushed off for their voyage. His voyage The boats had scarcely gone four leagues from land, a failure. w hen the wind rose and the sea began to alarm them. So they turned back. The men were little used to the manage- ment of the canoes, and they soon found themselves in great peril. It seemed necessary to lighten the canoes, which were now taking in water to a dangerous extent. They threw over much of their provisions ; but this was not enough. They then sacrificed one after another the natives. If these resisted, a swoop of the sword ended their miseries. Once in the water, the poor Indians began to seize the gunwales; but the sword chopped off their hands. So all but a few of them, who were absolutely necessary to manage the canoes, were thrown into the sea. Such were the perils through which the mutineers passed in reaching the land. A long month was now passed waiting for another calm sea; but when they tempted it once more, it rose as before, and they again sought the land. All hope of success was now abandoned. From that time Porras and his band gave them- selves up to a lawless, wandering life, during which they cre- ated new jealousies among the tribes. As we have seen, by THE FOURTH VOYAGE. 465 their exactions they began at last to tap the distant sources of supplies for the Admiral and his loyal adherents. Columbus now resorted to an expedient characteristic of the ingenious fertility of his mind. His astronomical tables en- abled him to expect the approach of a lunar eclipse 1504 Feb . (February 29, 1504), and finding it close at hand he ESJjJ^ hastily summoned some of the neighboring caciques. the m00n " He told them that the God of the Spaniards was displeased at their neglect to feed his people, and that He was about to mani- fest that displeasure by withdrawing the moon and leaving them to such baleful influences as they had provoked. When night fell and the shadow began to steal over the moon, a long howl of horror arose, and promises of supplies were made by the stricken caciques. They hurled themselves for protection at the feet of the Admiral. Columbus retired for an ostensible communion with this potent Spirit, and just as the hour came for the shadow to withdraw he appeared, and announced that their contrition had appeased the Deity, and a sign would be given of his content. Gradually the moon passed out of the shadow, and when in the clear heavens the luminary was again swimming unobstructed in her light, the work of astonishment had been done. After that, Columbus was never much in fear of famine. It is time now to see how much more successful Menclez and Fiesco had been than Porras and his crew. They Ti-i -n • e canoe had accomplished the voyage to Espaiiola, it is true, voyage of but under such perils and sufferings that Fiesco could not induce a crew sufficient to man the canoe to return with him to the Admiral. The passage had been made under the most violent conditions of tropical heat and unprotected endur- ance. Their supply of water had given out, and the tortures of thirst came on. They looked out for the little island A tNavasa of Navasa, which lay in their track, where they thought Island " that in the crevices of the rocks they might find some water. They looked in vain. The day when they had hoped to see it passed, and night came on. One of the Indians died, and was dropped overboard. Others lay panting and exhausted in the bottom of the canoes. Mendez sat watching a glimmer of light in the eastern horizon that betokened the coming of the moon. 466 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. Presently a faint glisten of the real orb grew into a segment. He could see the water line as the illumination increased. There was a black stretch of something jagging the lower edge of the segment. It was land ! Navasa had been found. By morning they had reached the island. Water was discovered among the rocks ; but some drank too freely, and paid the pen- alty of their lives. Mussels were picked up along the shore ; they built a fire and boiled them. All day long they gazed They see l° n g ni gly on the distant mountains of Espaiiola, which Espanoia. we re in full sight. Refreshed by the day's rest, they embarked again at nightfall, and on the following day arrived at Cape Tiburon, the southwestern peninsula of Espanoia, hav- ing been four days on the voyage from Jamaica. lands at They lauded among hospitable natives, and having waited two days to recuperate, Mendez took some sav- ages in a canoe, and started to go along the coast to Santo Do- mingo, one hundred and thirty leagues distant. He had gone nearly two thirds of the distance when, communicating with the shore, he learned that Ovando was not in Santo Domingo, but at Xaragua. So Mendez abandoned his canoe, and started alone through the forests to seek the governor. Ovando received him cordially, but made excuses for not ovando de- sending relief to Columbus at once. He was himself reIfef S to ldins occupied with the wars which he was conducting Columbus, against the natives. There was no ship in Santo Domingo of sufficient burden to be dispatched for such a res- cue. So excuse after excuse, and promises of attention unful- filled, kept Mendez in the camp of Ovando for seven months. The governor always had reasons for den}'ing him permission to go to Santo Domingo, where Mendez had hopes of procuring a vessel. This procrastinating conduct has natural^ given rise to the suspicion that Ovando was not over-anxious to deliver Columbus from his perils ; and there can be little question that for the Admiral to have sunk into oblivion and leave no trace would have relieved both the governor and his royal master of some embarrassments. At length Ovando consented to the departure of Mendez to Santo Domingo. There was a fleet of caravels expected there, and Mendez was anxious to see if he could not procure one of them on the Admiral's own account to undertake the voyage THE FOURTH VOYAGE. 407 of rescue. His importunities became so pressing that Ovando at last consented to bis starting for tbat port, seventy leagues distant. No sooner was Mendez gone than Ovando determined to ascertain the condition of the party at Jamaica without helping them, and so he dispatched a caravel to reconnoitre. He purposely sent a small craft, that there might be no excuse for attempting to bring off the company ; and to prevent seizure of the vessel by Columbus, her commander was instructed to lie off the harbor, and only send in a boat, to communicate with no one but Columbus ; and he was particularly enjoined to avoid being enticed on board the stranded sends Esco- caravels. The command of this little craft of espion- serve co- age was given to one of Columbus's enemies, Diego de Escobar, who had been active as Roldan's lieutenant in his revolt. When the vessel appeared off the harbor where Columbus was, eight months had passed since Mendez and Fiesco had de- parted. All hopes of hearing of them had been abandoned. A rumor had come in from the natives that a vessel, bottom upwards, had been seen near the island, drifting with the cur- rent. It is said to have been a story started by Porras that its effect might be distressing to Columbus's adherents. It seems to have had the effect to hasten further discontent in that stricken band, and a new revolt was almost ready to make itself known when Escobar's tiny caravel was descried standing in towards shore. The vessel was seen to lie to, when a boat soon left her side. As it came within hailing, the figure of Escobar was recognized. Columbus knew that he had once condemned the man to death. Bobadilia had pardoned him. The boat bumped against the side of one of the stranded caravels ; the crew brought it side- wise against the hulk, when a letter for the Admiral was handed up. Columbus's men made ready to receive a cask of wine and side of bacon, which Escobar's companions lifted on board. All at once a quick motion pushed the boat from the hulks, and Escobar stopped her when she had got out of reach. He now addressed Columbus, and gave him the assurances of Ovando's regret that he had no suitable vessel to send to him, but that he hoped before long to have such. He added that if 468 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. Columbus desired to reply to Ovando's letter, he would wait a brief interval for him to prepare an answer. The Admiral hastily made his reply in as courteous terms as possible, commending the purposes of Mendez and Fiesco to the governor's kind attention, and closed with saying that he reposed full confidence in Ovando's expressed intention to rescue his people, and that he would stay on the wrecks in patience till the ships came. Escobar received the letter, and returned to his caravel, which at once disappeared in the falling gloom of night. Columbus was not without apprehension that Escobar had come simply to make sure that the Admiral and his company still survived, and Las Casas, who was then at Santo Domingo, seems to have been of the opinion that Ovando had at this fcimi no purpose to do more. The selection of Escobar to carry a kindly message gave certainly a dubious ostentation to all ex- pressions of friendly interest. The transaction may possibly admit of other interpretations. Ovando may reasonably have desired that Columbus and his faithful adherents should not abide long in Espaiiola, as in the absence of vessels returning to Spain the Admiral might be obliged to do. There were rumors that Columbus, indignant at the wrongs which he felt he had received at the hands of his sovereigns, had determined to hold his new discoveries for Genoa, and the Admiral had referred to such reports in his recent letter to the Spanish monarchs. Such reports easily put Ovando on his guard, and he may have desired time to get instructions from Spain. At all events, it was very palpable that Ovando was cautious and perhaps inhuman, and Columbus was to be left till Escobar's report should decide what action was best. Columbus endeavored to make use of the letter which Esco- coiumbus Dar na d brought from Ovando to win Porras and his caSrwith vagabonds back to loyalty and duty. He dispatched Porras. messengers to their canrp to say that Ovando had noti- fied him of his purpose to send a vessel to take them off the island. The Admiral was ready to promise forgiveness and for- getfulness, if the mutineers would come in and submit to the requirements of the orderly life of his people. He accompanied the message with a part of the bacon which Escobar had deliv- ered as a present from the governor. The lure, however, was THE FOURTH VOYAGE. 469 not effective. Porras met the ambassadors, and declined the proffers. He said his followers were quite content with the free- dom of the island. The fact seemed to be that the mutineers were not quite sure of the Admiral's sincerity, and feared to put themselves in his power. They were ready to come in when the vessels came, if transportation would be allowed them so that their band should not be divided ; and until then they would cause the Admiral's party no trouble, unless Columbus refused to share with them his stores and trinkets, which they must have, peacefully or forcibly, since they had lost all their supplies in the gales which had driven them back. It was evident that Porras and his company were not reduced to such straits that they could be reasoned with, and the mes- sengers returned. The author of the Historie, and others who follow his state- ments, represent that the body of the mutineers was far from being as arrogant as their leaders, was much more tractable in spirit, and was inclined to catch at the chance of rescue. The leaders labored with the men to keep them steady in their revolt. Porras and his abettors did what they could to picture the cruelties of the Admiral, and even accused him of necro- mancy in summoning the ghost of a caravel by which to make his people believe that Escobar had really been there. Then, to give some activity to their courage, the whole body of the muti- neers was led towards the harbor on pretense of capturing stores. The Adelantado went out to meet them with fifty armed followers, the best he could collect from the wearied companions of the Admiral. Porras refused all of- Bart hoio- fers of conference, and led his band to the attack. ™™™ dhis There was a plan laid among them that six of the p"™X. stoutest should attack the Adelantado simultaneously, tlueers - thinking that if their leader should be overpowered the rest would flee. The Adelantado's courage rose with the exigency, as it was wont to do. He swung his sword with vigor, and one after another the assailants fell. At last Porras struck him such a blow that the Adelantado's buckler was cleft and his hand wounded. The blow was too powerful for the giver of it. His sword remained wedged in the buckler, affording his enemy a chance to close, while an attempt was made to extricate the weapon. Others came to the loyal leader's assistance, and Porras was secured and bound. 470 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. This turned the current of the right. The rebels, seeing their rorras leader a prisoner, fled in confusion, leaving the field taken. to tne p ai .ty of the Adelantado. The fight had been a fierce one. They found anions; the rebel dead Juan San- Sanchez chez, who had let slip the captured Quibian, and kllled ' among the wounded Pedro Ledesma, who had braved Ledesma * ne breakers at Veragua. Las Casas, who knew the wounded. latter at a later day, deriving some help from him in telling the story of these eventful months, speaks of the many and fearful wounds which he bore in evidence of his rebel lion and courage, and of the sturdy activity of his assailants We owe also to Ledesma and to some of his companions, who, with himself, were witnesses in the later lawsuit of Diego Colon with the Crown, certain details which the principal nar- rators fail to give us. A charm had seemed throughout the conflict to protect the Admiral's friends. None were killed outright, and but one other beside their leader was wounded. This man, the Admi- ral's steward, subsequently died. The victors returned to the ships with their prisoners ; and in the midst of the sratulations which followed on the 1504. March * 20. The next day, March 20, 1504, the fugitives sent in an pose to address to the Admiral, begging to be pardoned and received back to his care and fortunes. They acknow- ledged their errors in the most abject professions, and called upon Heaven to show no mercy, and upon man to know no sympathy, in dealing retribution, if they failed in their fidelity thereafter. The proposition of surrender was not without em- barrassment. The Admiral was fearful of the trial of their constancy when they might gather about him with all the chances of further cabaling. He also knew that his provi- sions were fast running out. Accordingly, in accepting their surrender, he placed them under officers whom he could trust, and supplying them with articles of barter, he let them wan- der about the island under suitable discipline, hoping that they would find food where they could. He promised, however, to recall them when the expected ships arrived. It was not long they had to wait. One day two ships were seen standing in towards the harbor. One of them proved to be a caravel which Mendez had bons'ht on the Admiral's account, THE FOURTH VOYAGE. 471 out of a fleet of three, just then arrived from Spain, and had victualed for the occasion. Having seen it depart from Santo Domingo, Mendez, in the other ships of this to rescue opportune fleet, sailed directly for Spain, to carry out the further instructions of the Admiral. The other of the approaching ships was in command of Diego de Salcedo, the Admiral's factor, and had been dispatched by Ovando. Las Casas tells us that the governor was really forced to this action by public sentiment, which had grown in conse- quence of the stories of the trials of Columbus which Mendez had told. It is said that even the priests did not hesitate to point a moral in their pulpits with the governor's dilatory sym- pathy. Finally, on June 28, everything was ready for departure, and Columbus turned away from the scene of so much 1504 June trouble. " Columbus informed me afterwards, in £u' s ^eT' Spain," says Mendez, recording the events, " that in Jamaica - no part of his life did he ever experience so joyful a day, for he had never hoped to have left that place alive." Four years later, under authority from the Admiral's son Diego, the town of Sevilla Nueva, later known as Sevilla d' Oro, was founded on the very spot. The Admiral now committed himself once more to the treach- erous currents and adverse winds of these seas. We have seen that Mendez urged his canoe across the gap between Jamaica and the nearest point of Espailola in four days ; but it took the ships of Columbus about seven weeks to reach the haven of Santo Domingo. There was much time during this long and vexatious voyage for Columbus to learn from Salcedo the direful history of the colony which had been Espanoia wrested from him, and which even under the enlarged absence of powers of Ovando had not been without manifold tribulations. We must rehearse rapidly the occurrences, as Columbus heard of them. He could have got but the scantiest inkling of what had happened during the earliest ovaudo's months of Ovando's rule, when he applied by messen- rule- ger, in vain, for admission to the harbor, now more than two years ago. The historian of this period must depend mainly upon Las Casas, who had come out with Ovando, and we must sketch an outline of the tale, as Columbus heard it, from that 472 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. writer's Historia. It was the old sad story of misguided aspi- rants for wealth in their first experiences with the hazards and toils of mining, — much labor, disappointed hopes, failing pro- visions, no gold, sickness, disgust, and a desponding return of the toilers from the scene of their infatuation. It took but eight days for the crowds from Ovando's fleet, who trudged off manfully to the mountains on their landing, to come trooping- back, dispirited and diseased. Columbus could hardly have listened to what was said of suffering among the natives during these two years of his ab- coiumbus sence without a vivid consciousness of the baleful sys- and slavery. j. em yy^jgij } ie h ac i introduced when he assigned crowds of the poor Indians to be put to inhuman tasks by Roldan's crew. The institution of this kind of distribution of labor had grown naturally, but it had become so appalling under Boba- dilla that, when Ovando was sent out, he was instructed to put an end to it. It was not long before the governor had to con- front the exasperated throngs coming back from the mines, de- jected and empty-handed. It was apparent that nothing of the expected revenue to the Crown was likely to be produced from half the yield of metal when there was no yield at all. So, to induce greater industry, Ovando reduced the share of the Crown to a third, and next to a fifth, but without success. It was too apparent that the Spaniards would not persist in labors which brought them so little. At a period when Columbus was flat- tering himself that he was laying claim to far richer gold fields at Veragua, Ovando was devising a renewal of the Admiral's old slave-driving methods to make the mines of Hayna yield what they could. He sent messages to the sovereigns inform- ing them that their kindness to the natives was really incon- siderate ; that the poor creatures, released from labor, were giving themselves up to mischief ; and that, to make good Chris- tians of them, there was needed the appetizing effect of health- ful work upon the native soul. The appeal and the frugal re- turns to the treasury were quite sufficient to gain the sovereigns to Ovando's views ; and while bewailing any cruelty to the poor natives, and expressing hopes for their spiritual re- cember20. lief , their Majesties were not averse, as they said of thena- (December 20, 1503), to these Indians being made to labor as much as was needful to their health. This THE FOURTH VOYAGE. 473 was sufficient. The fatal system of Columbus was revived with increased enormities. Six or eight months of unremitting labor, with insufficient food, were cruelly exacted of every native. They were torn from their families, carried to distant parts of the island, kept to their work by the lash, and, if they dared to escape, almost surely recaptured, to work out their period under the burden of chains. At last, when they were dismissed till their labor was again required, Las Casas tells us that the pas- sage through the island of these miserable creatures could be traced by their fallen and decaying bodies. This was a story that, if Columbus possessed any of the tendernesses that glowed in the heart of Las Casas, could not have been a pleasant one for his contemplation. There was another story to which Columbus may have lis- tened. It is very likely that Salcedo may have got all the par- ticulars from Diego Mendez, who was a witness of the foul deeds which had indeed occurred during those seven months when Ovando, then on an expedition in Xaragua, kept that messenger of Columbus waiting his pleasure. Anacaona, the Aliacaoua sister of Behechio, had succeeded to that cacique in ouX her the rule of Xaragua. The licentious conduct and the treated - capricious demands of the Spaniards settled in this region had increased the natural distrust and indignation of the Indians, and some signs of discontent which they manifested had been re- counted to Ovando as indications of a revolt which it was neces- sary to nip in the bud. So the governor had marched into the country with three hundred foot and seventy horse. The chief- tainess, Anacaona, came forth to meet him with much native parade, and gave all the honor which her savage ceremonials could signify to her distinguished guest. She lodged him as well as she could, and caused many games to be played for his divertisement. In return, Ovando prepared a tournament cal- culated to raise the expectation of his simple hosts, and horse- man and foot came to the lists in full armor and adornment for the heralded show. On a signal from Ovando, the innocent parade was converted in an instant into a fanatical onslaught. The assembled caciques were hedged about with armed The Indian8 men, and all were burned in their cabins. The gen- sla »g htered - eral populace were transfixed and trampled by the charging mounted spearmen, and only those who could elude the obsti- 474 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. nate and headlong dashes of the cavalry escaped. Anacaona was seized and conveyed in chains to Santo Domingo, where, with the merest pretense of a trial for conspiracy, she was soon hanged. And this was the pacification of Xaragua. That of Higuey, the most eastern of the provinces, and which had not iiiguey over- yet acknowledged the sway of the Spaniards, followed, with the same resorts to cruelty. A cacique of this region had been slain by a fierce Spanish dog which had been set upon him. This impelled some of the natives living on the coast to seize a canoe having eight Spaniards in it, and to Esquibei's slaughter them ; whereupon Jnan de Esquibel was campaign. gen {. ^^ f om , ] lulK i rec | meil on a campaign against Cotabanama, the chief cacique of Higuey. The invaders met more heroism in the defenders of this country than they had been accustomed to, but the Spanish armor and weapons ena- bled Esquibel to raid through the land with almost constant suc- cess. The Indians at last sued for peace, and agreed to furnish a tribute of provisions. Esquibel built a small fortress, and putting some men in it, he returned to Santo Domingo ; not, however, until he had received Cotabanama in his camp. The Spanish leader brought back to Ovando a story of the splendid physical power of this native chief, whose stature, proportions, and strength excited the admiration of the Spaniards. The peace was not of long duration. The reckless habits of the garrison had once more aroused the courage of the Indians, and some of the latest occurrences which Salcedo could tell of as New revolt having been reported at Santo Domingo just before in Higuey. j^g sa iii ng r f r Jamaica were the events of a new re- volt in Higuey. Such were the stories which Columbus may have listened to during the tedious voyage which was now, on August 3, 1504. An- approaching an end. On that day his ships sailed himbus at C °" under the lea of the little island of Beata, which lies Beata. midway of the southern coast of Espanola. Here he landed a messenger, and ordered him to convey a letter to Ovando, warning the governor of his approach. Salcedo had told Columbus that the governor was not without apprehension that his coming might raise some factious disturbances among the people, and in this letter the Admiral sought to disabuse THE FOURTH VOYAGE. 475 Ovando's mind of such suspicions, and to express his own pur- pose to avoid every act of irritation which might possibly em- barrass the administration of the island. The letter dispatched, Columbus again set sail, and on August 15 his ship 1504 Au . entered the harbor of Santo Domingo. Ovando re- f^toDo-^ ceived him with every outward token of respect, and mm %°- lodged him in his own house. Columbus, however, never be- lieved that this officious kindness was other than a cloak to Ovando's dislike, if not hatred. There was no little popular sympathy for the misfortunes which Columbus had experienced, but his relations with the governor were not such as to lighten the anxieties of his sojourn. It is known that Cortes was at this time only recently arrived at Santo Domingo ; but we can only conjecture what may have been his interest in Columbus's recitals. There soon arose questions of jurisdiction. Ovando ordered the release of Porras, and arranged for sending him to Spain for trial. The governor also attempted to interfere with the Admiral's control of his own crew, on the ground that his com- mission gave him command over all the regions of the new islands and the main. Columbus cited the instructions, which gave him power to rule and judge his own followers. Ovando did not push his claims to extremities, but the irritation never subsided ; and Columbus seems to have lost no opportunity, if we may judge from his later letters, to pick up every scan- dalous story and tale of maladministration of which Co i umbus he could learn, and which could be charged against and0vando - Ovando in later appeals to the sovereigns for a restitution of his own rights. The Admiral also inquired into his pecuniary interests in the island, and found, as he thought, that Ovando had obstructed his factor in the gathering of his share. Indeed, there may have been some truth in this ; for Carvajal, Colum- bus's first factor, had complained of such acts to the sovereigns, which elicited an admonishment from them to Ovando. Such money as Columbus could now collect he used in refit- ting the ship which had brought him from Jamaica, and he put her under the order of the Adelantado. Securing also another caravel for his own conveyance, he embarked on her with his son, and on September 12 both ships started on their homeward voyage. They were scarcely at sea, when the ship 476 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. which bore the Admiral lost her mast in a gale. He trans- ferred himself and his immediate dependents to the temberi2. other vessel, and sent the disabled caravel back to Columbus _, „. sails for banto Domingo. His solitary vessel now went for- ward, amid all the adversities that seemed to cling inevitably to this last of Columbus's expeditions. Tempest after tempest pursued him. The masts were sprung, and again 1504. No- sprung ; and in a forlorn and disabled condition the ReTcheVsan little hapless bark finally entered the port of San Lucar. Lucar on November 7, 1504. He had been absent from Spain for two years and a half. CHAPTER XX. columbus's last years. — death and character. 1504-1506. From San Lucar, Columbus, a sick man in search of quiet and rest, was conveyed to Seville. Unhappily, there . , « . , . f. , . Columbus in was neither repose nor peace ot mind in store tor him. Seville tm He remained in that city till May, 1505, broken in spirits and almost helpless of limb. Fortunately, we can trace his varying mental moods during these few months in a series of letters, most of which are addressed by him to his Letters t0 son Diego, then closely attached to the Court. These hlS80n - writings have fortunately come down to us, and they constitute the only series of Columbus's letters which we have, showing the habits of his mind consecutively for a confined period, so that we get a close watch upon his thoughts. They are the wails of a neglected soul, and the cries of one whose hope is cruelly de- ferred. They have in their entirety a good deal of that hap- hazard jerkiness tiresome to read, and not easily made evident in abstract. They are, however, not so deficient in mental equi- poise as, for instance, the letter sent from Jamaica. This is perhaps owing to the one absorbing burden of them, his hope of recovering possession of his suspended authority. He writes on November 21, 1504, a fortnight after his land- ing at San Lucar, telling his son how he has engaged 1504 No . his old friend, the Dominican Deza, now the Bishop of vember21 - Palencia, to intercede with the sovereigns, that justice may be done to him with respect to his income, the payment of which Ovando had all along, as he contends, obstructed at Espaiiola. He tries to argue that if their Highnesses but knew it, they would, in ordering restitution to him, increase their own share. He hopes they have no doubt that his zeal for their interests has been quite as much as he could manifest if he had par- 478 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. adise to gain, and hopes they will remember, respecting any errors he may have committed, that the Lord of all judges such things by the intention rather than by the outcome. He seems to have a suspicion that Porras, now at liberty and about the Court, might be insidiously at work to his old commander's dis- advantage, and he represents that neither Porras nor his brother had been suitable persons for their offices, and that what had been done respecting them would be approved on inquiry. " Their revolt," he says, " surprised me, considering all that I had done for them, as much as the sun would have alarmed me if it had shot shadows instead of light." He complains of Ovando's taking the prisoners, who had been companions of Porras, from his hands, and that, made free, they had even dared to present themselves at Com't. " I have written," he adds, " to their Highnesses about it, and I have told them that it can't be possible that they would tolerate such an offense." He says further that he has written to the royal treasurer, beg- ging him to come to no decision of the representations of such detractors until the other side could be heard, and he adds that he has sent to the treasurer a copy of the oath which the muti- neers sent in after Porras had been taken. " Recall to all these people," he writes to his son, "my infirmities, and the recompense due to me for my services." Diego was naturally, from his residence at Court, a conven- ient medium to bring all Columbus's wishes to the notice of those about the sovereigns. The Admiral writes to Diego again that he hopes their Highnesses will see to the paying of his men who had come home. " They are poor, and have been gone three years," he says. " They bring home evidences of the greatest of expectations in the new gold fields of Veragua ; " and then he advises his son to bring this fact to the attention of all who are concerned, and to urge the colonizing of the new country as the best way to profit from its gold mines. For a while he harbored the hope that he might at once go on to the Court, and a litter which had served in the obsequies of Cardinal Mendoza was put at his disposal ; but this plan was soon given up. A week later, having in the interim received a letter of the 1504. No- 15th, from Diego, Columbus writes again, under date vember28. Q f November 28. In this epistle he speaks of the COLUMBUS'S LAST YEARS. 479 severity of his disease, which keeps him in Seville, from which, however, he hopes to depart the coming week, and of his dis- appointment that the sovereigns had not replied to his inqui- ries. He sends his love to Diego Mendez, hoping that his friend's zeal and love of truth will enable him to overcome the deceits and intrigues of Porras. Columbus was not at this time aware that the impending death of the Queen had something to do with the delays in his own affairs at Court. Two days (November 26) before the Admiral wrote this note, Isabella had died, worn out 1504 No . by her labors, and depressed by the afflictions which Q^eenVsa- she had experienced in her domestic circle. She was belladies - an unlovely woman at the best, an obstructor of Christian charity, but in her wiles she had allured Columbus to a belief in her countenance of him. The conventional estimate of her character, which is enforced in the rather cloying de- Isabe ii a ' S scriptions of Prescott, is such as her flatterers drew character - in her own times ; but the revelations of historical research hardly confirm it. It was with her much as with Columbus, — she was too largely a creature of her own age to be solely judged by the criteria of all ages, as lofty characters can be. The loss of her influence on the king removed, as it proved, even the chance of a flattering delusiveness in the hopes of Columbus. As the compiler of the Historic expresses it, " Co- lumbus had always enjoyed her favor and protection, while the King had always been indifferent, or rather inimical." She had indeed, during the Admiral's absence on his last voyage, manifested some new appreciation of his services, which cost her little, however, when she made his eldest son one of her bodyguard and naturalized his brother Diego, to fit him for ecclesiastical preferment. On December 1, ignorant of the sad occurrences at Court, Columbus writes again, chiding Diego that he had not 1504 De _ in his dutif ulness written to his poor father. " You cember L ought to know," he says, " that I have no pleasure now but in a letter from you." Columbus by this time had become, by the constant arrival of couriers, aware of the anxiety at Court over the Queen's health, and he prays that the Holy Trinity will restore her to health, to the end that all that has been begun may be happily finished. He reiterates what he 480 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. had previously written about the increasing- severity of his mal- ady, his inability to travel, his want of money, and. how he had used all he could get in Espaiiola to bring home his poor com- panions. He commends anew to Diego his brother Ferdinand, and speaks of this younger son's character as beyond his years. "Ten brothers would not be too many for you," he adds; "in good as in bad fortune, I have never found better friends than my brothers." Nothing troubles him more than the delays in hearing from Court. A rumor had reached him that it was intended to send some bishops to the Indies, and that the Bishop of Palen- cia was charged with the matter. He begs Diego to say to the bishop that it was worth while, in the interests of all, "to con- fer with the Admiral first. In explaining why he does not write to Diego Mendez, he says that he is obliged to write by night, since by day his hands are weak and painful. He adds that the vessel which put back to Santo Domingo had arrived, bringing the papers in Porras's case, the result of the inquest which had been taken at Jamaica, so that he could now be able to present an indictment to the Council of the Indies. His indignation is aroused at the mention of it. " What can be so foul and brutal ! If their Highnesses pass it by, who is going again to lead men upon their service ! " Two days later (December 3), he writes again to Diego 1504. De- about the neglect which he is experiencing from him sember3. an( j f rom others at Court. " Everybody except my- self is receiving letters," he says. He incloses a memoir ex- pressing what he thought it was necessary to do in the pres- ent conjunction of his affairs. This document opens with call- ing upon Diego zealously to pray to God for the soul of the Queen. " One must believe she is now clothed with a sainted glory, no longer regretting the bitterness and weariness of this life." The King, he adds, " deserves all our sympathy and de- votion." He then informs Diego that he has directed his brother, his uncle, and Carvajal to add all their importunities to his son's, and to the written prayers which he himself has sent, that consideration should be given to the affairs of the Indies. Nothing, he says, can be more urgent than to remedy the abuses there. In all this he curiously takes on the tone of his own accusers a few years before. He represents that pecuniary COLUMBUS'S LAST YEARS. 481 returns from Espanola are delayed ; that the governor is de- tested by all ; that a suitable person sent there could restore harmony in less than three months ; and that other fortresses, which are much needed, should be built, " all of which I can do in his Highness's service," lie exclaims, " and any other, not having my personal interests at stake, could not do it so well ! " Then he repeats how, immediately after his arrival at San Lu- car, he had written to the King a very long letter, advising action in the matter, to which no reply had been returned. It was during Columbus's absence on this last voyage that, by an ordinance made at Alcala, January 20, 1503, the famous Casa de Contratacion was established, with ar y 20. The authority over the affairs of the Indies, having the tratacion es- power to grant licenses, to dispatch fleets, to dispose of the results of trade or exploration, and to exercise certain judicial prerogatives. This council was to consist of a treasurer, a factor, and a comptroller, to whom two persons learned in the law were given as advisers. Alexander VI. had already, by a bull of November 16, 1501, authorized the payment to the con- stituted Spanish officials of all the tithes of the colonies, which went a long way in giving Spain ecclesiastical supremacy in the Indies, in addition to her political control. It was to this council that Columbus refers, when he says he had told the gentlemen of the Contratacion that they ought to abide by the verbal and written orders which the King had given, and that, above all, they should watch lest people should sail to the Indies without permission. He reminded them of the sorry character of the people already in the New World, and of the way in which treasure was stored there without pro- tection. Ten days later (December 13), he writes again to Diego, re- curring to his bitter memories of Ovando, charging 1504 De _ him with diverting the revenues, and with bearing cember13 - himself so haughtily that no one dared remonstrate. " Every- body says that I have as much as 11,000 or 12,000 castellanos in Espanola, and I have not received a quarter. Since I came away he must have received 5,000." He then urges Diego to sue the King for a mandatory letter to be sent to Ovando, for- cing immediate payment. " Carvajal knows very well that this ought to be done. Show him this letter," he adds. Then re- 4^2 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. ferring to his denied rights, and to the best way to make the King sensible of his earlier promises, he next advises Diego to lessen his expenses ; to treat his uncle with the respect which is due to him ; and to bear himself towards his younger brother as an older brother should. " You have no other brother," he says ; " and thank God this one is all you could desire. He was born with a good nature." Then he reverts to the Queen's death. " People tell me," he writes, " that on her death-bed she expressed a wish that my possession of the Indies should be restored to me." A week later (December 21), he once more bewails the way 1504. De- m which he is left without tidings. He recounts the cember2i. exertions he had made to send money to his advocates at Court, and tells Diego how he must somehow continue to get on as best he can till their Highnesses are content to give them back their power. He repeats that to bring his companions home from Santo Domingo he had spent twelve hundred cas- tellanos, and that he had represented to the King the royal in- debtedness for this, but it produced no reimbursement. He asks Diego to find out if the Queen, " now with God, no doubt," had spoken of him in her will ; and perhaps the Bishop of Palen- cia, " who was the cause of their Majesties' acquiring the Indies, and of my returning to the Court when I had departed," or the chamberlain of the King could find this out. Columbus may have lived to learn that the only item of the Queen's will in which he could possibly have been in mind was the one in which she showed that she was aroused to the enormities which Columbus had imposed on the Indians, and which had come to such results that, as Las Casas says, it had been endeavored to keep the knowledge of it from the Queen's ears. She ear- nestly enjoined upon her successors a change of attitude to- wards the poor Indians. Columbus further says that the Pope had complained that no account of his voyage had been sent to Rome, and that accord- ingly he had prepared one, and he dosired Diego to writes to read it, and to let the King and the bishop also peruse it before it was forwarded to Rome. It is possible that the Adelantado was dispatched with the letter. The canonizers say that the mission to Rome had also a secret -pur- pose, which was to counteract the schemes of Fonseca to create COLUMBUS'S LAST YEARS. 483 bishoprics in Espaiiola, and that the advice of Columbus in the end prevailed over the " cunning- of diplomacy." There had been some time before, owing- to the difficulty which had been experienced in mounting the royal cavalry, an order promulgated forbidding the use of mules in travel, since it was thought that the preference for this animal had brought about the deterioration and scarcity of horses. It was to this injunction that Columbus now referred when he asked Diego to get a dispensation from the King to allow him to enjoy the easier seat of a mule when he should venture on his journey towards the Court, which, with this help, he ruary23. hoped to be able to begin within a few weeks. Such allowed to an order was in due time issued on February 23, 1505. On December 29, Columbus wrote again. The letter was full of the same pitiful suspense. He had received no let- 1504 De _ ters. He could but repeat the old story of the letters cember29 - of credit which he had sent and which had not been acknow- ledged. No one of his people had been paid, he said, neither the faithful nor the mutineers. " They are all poor. They are going to Court," he adds, " to press their claims. Aid them in it." He excepts, however, from the kind interest of his friends two fellows who had been with him on his last voyage, one Camacho and Master Bernal, the latter the physician of the flagship. Bernal was the instigator of the revolt of Porras, he says, " and I pardoned him at the prayer of my brother." It will be remembered that, previous to starting on his last voyage, Columbus had written to the Bank of St. ColumbU3 George in Genoa, proposing a gift of a tenth of his Bank'of st. income for the benefit of his native town. The letter Geor e e - was long in reaching its destination, but a reply was duly sent through his son Diego. It never reached Columbus, and this apparent spurning of his gift by Genoa caused not a small part of his present disgust with the world. On December 27, 1504, he wrote to Nicolo Oderigo, remind- ing him of the letter, and complaining that while he 1504 De _ had expected to be met on his return by some conn- cember27 - dential agent of the bank, he had not even had a letter in re- sponse. " It was uncourteous in these gentlemen of St. George not to have favored me with an answer." The intention w:is, in fact, far from being unappreciated, and at a later day the 484 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. promise became so far magnified as to be regarded as an actual gift, in which the Genoese were not without pride. The pur- pose nevei*, however, had a fulfillment. On January 4, 1505, the Admiral wrote to his friend Father 1505 janu- Gorricio, telling him that Diego Mendez had arrived ary4. from the Court, and asking the friar to encase in wax the documentary privileges of the Admiral which had been in- trusted to him, and to send them to him. " My disease grows better day by day," he adds. On January 18, 1505, he again wrote. The epistle was in 1505. Janu- some small degree cheery. He had heard at last from ary is. Diego. " Zamora the courier has arrived, and I have looked with great delight upon thy letter, thy uncle's, thy bro- ther's, and Carvajal's." Diego Mendez, he says, sets out in three or four days with an order for payment. He refers with some playfulness, even, to Fonseca, who had just been raised to the bishopric of Placentia, and had not yet returned from Flanders to take possession of the seat. " If the Bishop of Placentia has arrived, or when he comes, tell him how much pleased I am at his elevation ; and that when I come to Court I shall depend on lodging with his Grace, whether he wishes it or not, that we may renew our old fraternal bonds." His biographers have been in some little uncertainty whether he really meant here Fonseca or his old friend Deza, who had just left that bishopric vacant for the higher post of Archbishop of Seville. A strict application of dates makes the reference to Fonseca. One may imagine, however, that Columbus was not accurately informed. It is indeed hard to understand the pleas- antry, if Fonseca was the bitter enemy of Columbus that he is pictured by Irving. Some ships from Espanola had put into the Tagus. " They have not arrived here from Lisbon," he adds. " They bring much gold, but none for me." We next find Columbus in close communion with a contempo- rary with whose fame his own is sadly conjoined. Some ac- count of the events of the voyage which Vespucius with vespu- had made along the coast of South America with Coelho, from which he had returned to Lisbon in Sep- tember, 1502, has been given on an earlier page. Those events and his descriptions had already brought the name of Vespu- COLUMBUS'S LAST YEARS. 485 cius into prominence throughout Europe, but hardly before he had started on another voyage in the spring or early summer of 1503, just at the time when Columbus was endeavoring to work his way from the Veragua coast to Espanola. The au- thorities are not quite agreed whether it was on May 10, 1503, or a month later, on June 10, that the little Portuguese fleet in which Vespucius sailed left the Tagus, to find a way, if possi- ble, to the Moluccas somewhere along the same great coast. This expedition had started under the command of Coelho, but meeting with mishaps, by which the fleet was separated, Vespu- cius, with his own vessel, joined later by another with which he fell in, proceeded to Bahia, where a factory for storing Bra- zil-wood was erected ; thence, after a stay there, they sailed for Lisbon, arriving there after an absence of seventy-seven days, on June 18, 1504. It was later, on September 4, that Vespu- cius wrote, or rather dated, that account of his voyage which was to work such marvels, as we shall see, in the account of reputation of himself and of Columbus. There is no reason to suppose that Columbus ever knew of this letter of September 4, so subversive as it turned out of his just fame ; nor, judging from the account of their interview which Colum- bus records, is there any reason to suppose that Vespucius him- self had any conception of the work which that fateful letter was already accomplishing, and to which reference will be made later. On February 5, 1505, Columbus wrote to Diego : " Within two days I have talked with Americus Vespucius, who 1505 Feb . will bear this to you, and who is summoned to Court ruary 5- on matters of navigation. He has always manifested a dispo- sition to be friendly to me. Fortune has not always favored him, and in this he is not different from many others. His ventures have not always been as successful as he would wish. He left me full of the kindliest purposes towards me, and will do anything for me which is in his power. I hardly knew what to tell him would be helpful in him to do for me, because I did not know what purpose there was in calling him to Court. Find out what he can do, and he will do it ; only let it be so managed that he will not be suspected of rendering me aid. I have told him all that it is possible to tell him as to my own affairs, including what I have done and what recompense I 486 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. have had. Show this letter to the Adelantado, so that he may advise how Vespucius can be made serviceable to us." We soon after this find Vespucius installed as an agent of 1505. April the Spanish government, naturalized on April 24 as cuis natural- a Castilian, and occupied at the seaports in superin- tending the fitting out of shij:>s for the Indies, with an annual salary of thirty thousand maravedis. We can find no trace of any assistance that he afforded the cause of Columbus. Meanwhile events were taking place which Columbus might well perhaps have arrested, could he have got the royal ear. Columbus's An order had been sent in February to Espanola to effects sold. ge ]j ^\q eff ects of Columbus, and in April other prop- erty of the Admiral had been seized to satisfy his creditors. In May, 1505, Columbus, with the friendly care of his bro- 1505. May. ^her Bartholomew, set out on his journey to Segovia, goes toSe- where the Court then was. This is the statement of g0Tia " Las Casas, but Harrisse can find no evidence of his being near the Court till August, when, on the 25th, AtSs his h e attested, as will appear, his will before a notary, win. rpj ie cnan g- e bringing him into the presence of his royal master only made his mortification more poignant. His personal suit to the King was quite as ineffective as his letters had been. The sovereign was outwardly beneficent, and in- wardly uncompliant. The Admiral's recitals respecting his last voyage, both of promised wealth and of saddened toil, made lit- tle impression. Las Casas suspects that the insinuations of Porras had preoccupied the royal mind. To rid himself of the importunities of Columbus, the King proposed an ar- andFerdi- biter, and readily consented to the choice which Co- lumbus made of his old friend Deza, now Archbishop of Seville ; but Columbus was too immovably fixed upon his own rights to consent that more than the question of revenue should be considered by such an arbiter. His recorded privi- leges and the pledged word of the sovereign were not matters to be reconsidered. Such was not, however, the opinion of the King. He evaded the point in his talk with bland counte- nance, and did nothing in his acts beyond referring the ques- tion anew to a body of counselors convened to determine the fulfillment of the Queen's will. They did nothing quite as easily as the King. Las Casas tells us that the King was only COLUMBUS'S LAST YEARS. 487 restrained by motives of outward decency from a public re- jection of all the binding obligations towards the Admiral into which he had entered jointly with the Queen. Columbus found in all this nothing to comfort a sick and desponding man, and sank in despair upon his couch. He roused enough to have a will drafted August 25, which . 1505. Au- confirmed a testament made in 1502, before starting gust'25. ms on his last voyage. His disease renewed its attacks. An old wound had reopened. From a bed of pain he began again his written appeals. He now gave up all hopes for him- self, but he pleaded for his son, that upon him the honors which he himself had so laboriously won should be bestowed. Diego at the same time, in seconding the petition, pleads for promised, if the reinstatement took place, that he would count those among his counselors whom the royal will should designate. Nothing of protest or appeal came oppor- tunely to the determined King. " The more he was petitioned," says Las Casas, " the more bland he was in avoiding any con- clusion. He hoped by exhausting the patience of the Admiral to induce him to accept some estates in Castile in lieu of such powers in the Indies. Columbus rejected all such in- timations with indignation. He would have nothing ferfo/ea- but his bonded rights. " I have done all that I can do," he said in a pitiful, despairing letter to Deza. " I must leave the issue to God. He has always sustained me in ex- tremities." " It argued," says Prescott, in commenting on this, " less knowledge of character than the King usually showed, that he should have thought the man who had broken off all negotia- tions on the threshold of a dubious enterprise, rather than abate one tittle of his demands, would consent to such abate- ment, when the success of that enterprise was so gloriously es- tablished." The Admiral was, during this part of his suit, apparently at Salamanca, for Mendez speaks of him as being Co ] umbnsat there confined to his bed with the gout, while he him- Salamanca - self was doing all he could to press his master's claims to have Diego recognized in his rights. In return for this service, Mendez asked to be appointed principal Alguazil of Mendez and Espanola for life, and he says the Admiral acknow- Columbus - 488 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. ledged that such an appointment was but a trifling remuneration for his great services, but the requital never came. There broke a glimmer of hope. The death of the Queen had left the throne ox Castile to her daughter Juana, the wife of Philip of Austria, and they had arrived from Flanders to be installed in their inheritance. Columbus, who had followed Columbus the Court from Segovia to Salamanca, thence to Val- "eavevaiia- ladolid, was now unable to move further in his decrep- it Philip itude, and sent the Adelantado to propitiate the and Juana. d au ghter of Isabella, with the trust that something of her mother's sympathy might be vouchsafed to his entreaties. Bartholomew never saw his brother again, and was not privi- leged to communicate to him the gracious hopes which the be- nignity of his reception raised. A year had passed since the Admiral had come to the neigh- borhood of the Court, wherever it was, and nothing had been accomplished in respect to his personal interests. Indeed, little touching the Indies at all seems to have been done. There had Negroes sent been trial made of sending negro slaves to Espanola to Espanoia. ag j llc ]i ca tmg that the native bondage needed reinforce- ment ; but Ovando had reported that the experiment was a fail- ure, since the negroes only mixed with the Indians and taught them bad habits. Ferdinando cared little for this, and at Sego- via, September 15, 1505, he notified Ovando that he should send some more negroes. Whether Columbus was aware of this change in the methods of extracting gold from the soil we cannot find. As soon as Bartholomew had started on his mission the mal- ady of Columbus increased. He became conscious that the time had come to make his final dispositions. It was on May 4, 1506, according to the common story, that he signed 4. codicil a codicil to his will on a blank page in a breviary which had been given to him, as he says, by Alexan- der VI., and which had " comforted him in his battles, his cap- tivities, and his misfortunes." This document has been ac- cepted by some of the commentators as genuine ; Harrisse and others are convinced of its apocryphal character. It was not found till 1779. It is a strange document, if authentic. It holds that such dignities as were his under the Spanish Crown, acknowledged or not, were his of right to alienate from thtv COLUMBUS'S LAST YEARS. 489 Spanish throne. It was, if anything, a mere act of bravado, as if to flout at the authority which could dare deprive him of his possessions. He provides for the descent of his honors in the male line, and that failing - , he bequeaths them to the repub- lic of Genoa! It was a gauge of hostile demands on Spain which no one but a madman would imagine that Though tto Genoa would accept if she could. He bestowed on bes P urious - his native city, in the same reckless way, the means to erect a hospital, and designated that such resources should come from his Italian estates, whatever they were. Certainly the easiest way to dispose of the paper is to consider it a fraud. If such, it was devised by some one who entered into the spirit of the Ad- miral's madness, and made the most of rumors that had been afloat respecting Columbus's purposes to benefit Genoa at the expense of Spain. About a fortnight later (May 19), he ratified an undoubted will, which had been drafted by his own hand the year before at Segovia, and executed it with the customary 19. Ratified formalities. Its testamentary provisions were not un- natural. He made Diego his heir, and his entailed property was, in default of heirs to Diego, to pass to his illegitimate son Ferdinand, and from him, in like default, to his own brother, the Adelantado, and his male descendants \ and all such failing, to the female lines in a similar succession. He enjoined upon his representatives, of whatever generation, to serve the Span- ish King with fidelity. Upon Diego, and upon later heads of the family, he imposed the duty of relieving all distressed rela- tives and others in poverty. He imposed on his lawful son the appointment of some one of his lineage to live constantly in Genoa, to maintain the family dignity. He directed him to grant due allowances to his brother and uncle ; and when the estates yielded the means, to erect a chapel in the Vega of Espafiola, where masses might be said daily for the repose of the souls of himself and of his nearest relatives. He made the furthering of the crusade to recover the Holy Sepulchre equally contingent upon the increase of his income. He also di- rected Diego to provide for the maintenance of Donna Bea- trix Enriquez, the mother of Ferdinand, as " a person to whom I am under qreat obligations," and "let this be done for the discharge of my conscience, for it weighs heavy on my soul, — 490 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. the reasons for which I am not here permitted to give ; " and this was a behest that Diego, in his own will, acknowledges his failure to observe during the last years of the lady's life. Then, in a codicil, Columbus enumerates sundry little bequests to other persons to whom he was indebted, and whose kindness he wished to remember. He was honest enough to add that his bequests were imaginary unless his rights were acknowledgedo " Hitherto I neither have had, nor have I now, any positive in- come." He failed to express any wish respecting the spot of his interment. The documents were committed at once to a no- tary, from whose archives a copy was obtained in 1524 by his son Diego, and this copy exists to-day among the family papers in the hands of the Duke of Veragua. This making of a will was almost his last act. On the next day he partook of the sacrament, and uttering, " Into 20. coium- thy hands, O Lord, I commit my spirit," he gasped his last. It was on the 20th of May, 1506, — by some circumstances we might rather say May 21, — in the city HOUSE WHERE COLUMBUS DIED. [Prom Ruge's Geschichle des Zeitalters der Enldeckungen.'] of Valladolid, that this singular, hopeful, despondent, melan- choly life came to its end. He died at the house No. 7 Calle de Colon, which is still shown to travelers. Thei'e was a small circle of relatives and friends who COLUMBUS'S LAST YEARS. 491 mourned. The tale of his departure came like a sough of wind to a few others, who had seen no way to alleviate a misery that merited their sympathy. The King could have but found it a relief from the indiscretion of his early promises. The world at large thought no more of the mournful pro- His death cession which bore that wayworn body to the grave unnotlced - than it did of any poor creature journeying on his bier to the potter's field. It is hard to conceive how the fame of a man over whose acts in 1493 learned men cried for joy, and by whose deeds the ad- venturous spirit had been stirred in every seaport of western Europe, should have so completely passed into oblivion that a professed chronicler like Peter Martyr, busy tattler as he was, should take no notice of his illness and death. There have come down to us five long letters full of news and gossip, which Martyr wrote from Valladolid at this very time, with not a word in them of the man he had so often commemorated. Fra- canzio da Montalboddo, publishing in 1507 some correction of his early voyages, had not heard of Columbus's death ; nor had Madrignano in dating his Latin rendering of the same book in 1508. It was not till twenty-seven days after the death-bed scene that the briefest notice was made in passing, in an official document of the town, to the effect that " the said Admiral is dead!" It is not even certain where the body was first placed, though it is usually affirmed to have been deposited in the T-i • -\t n l t l xt • i His burial. Franciscan convent in Valladolid. JNor is there any evidence to support another equally prevalent story that King Ferdinand had ordered the removal of the remains to Seville seven years later, when a monument was built bearing the often-quoted distich, — X CASTILLA Y X LEON NUEVO MUNDO DIO COLON, it being pretty evident that such an inscription was never thought of till Castellanos suggested it in his Elegias in 1588. If Diego's will in 1509 can be interpreted on this matter, it seems pretty sure that within three years (1509) after the death of Columbus, instead of seven, his coffin had been conveyed to Seville and placed inside the convent carried to of Las Cuevas, in the vault of the Carthusians, where 492 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. the bodies of his son Diego and brother Bartholomew were in due time to rest beside his own. Here the remains were un- disturbed till 1536, when the records of the convent affirm that they were given up for transportation, though the royal order is given as of June 2, 1537. From that date till 1549 there is room for conjecture as to their abiding-place. It was during this interval that his family were seeking to carry out what was supposed to be the wish of the Admiral to vest finally in the island of Espanola. From 1537 to 1540 the government are known to have issued three different orders re- specting the removal of the remains, and it is conjectured the i54i. Re- transference was actually made in 1541, shortly after sTnt^Do- the completion of the cathedral at Santo Domingo. mingo. j£ an y recoi . c | was ma de at the time to designate the spot of the reentombment in that edifice, it is not now known, and it was not till 1676 that somebody placed an entry in its rec- ords that the burial had been made on the right of the altar. A few years later (1683), the recollections of aged people are quoted to substantiate such a statement. We find no other no- tice till a century afterwards, when, on the occasion of some re- pairs, a stone vault, supposed in the traditions to be that which held the remains, was found on " the gospel side " of the chan- cel, while another on " the epistle side " was thought to contain the remains of Bartholomew Columbus. This was the suspected situation of the graves when the treaty of Basle, in 1795, gave the Santo Domingo end of the island to France, and the Span- ish authorities, acting in concert with the Duke of Veragua, as the representative of the family of Columbus, determined on the removal of the remains to Havana. It is a ques- removedto tion which has been raised since 1877 whether the body of Columbus was the one then removed, and over which so much parade was made during the transportation and reinterment in Cuba. There has been a controversy on the point, in which the Bishop of Santo Domingo and his adher- ents have claimed that the remains of Columbus are still in their charge, while it was those of his son Diego which had been removed. The Academy of History at Madrid have de- nied this, and in a long report to the Spanish government have asserted that there was no mistake in the transfer, and that the additional casket found was that of Christopher Colon, the 494 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. grandson. It was represented, moreover, that those features of the inscription on the lately found leaden box which seemed to indicate it as the casket of the first Admiral of the Indies had Question of been fraudulently added or altered. The question has of e ins e "e- ty probably been thrown into the category of doubt, mams. though the case as presented in favor of Santo Do- mingo has some recognizably weak points, which the advocates of the other side have made the most of, and to the satisfaction perhaps of the more careful inquirers. The controversial liter- ature on the subject is considerable. The repairs of 1877 in the Santo Domingo cathedral revealed the empty vault from which the transported body had been taken ; but they showed also the occupied vault of the grandson Luis, and another in which was a leaden case which bore the inscriptions which are in dispute. It is the statement of the Historie that Columbus preserved Alleged bur- the chains in which he had come home from his third chahis'wlth vo y a g' e i anc ^ that he had them buried with him, or in- him ' tended to do so. The story is often repeated, but it has no other authority than the somewhat dubious one of that book ; and it finds no confirmation in Las Casas, Peter Martyr, Bernaldez, or Oviedo. Humboldt says that he made futile inquiry of those who had assisted in the reinterment at Havana, if there were any trace of these fetters or of oxide of iron in the coffin. In the ac- counts of the recent discovery of remains at Santo Domingo, it is said that there was equally no trace of fetters in the casket. The age of Columbus is almost without a parallel, presenting The age of perhaps the most striking appearances since the star coiumbus. s h one U p 011 Bethlehem. It saw Martin Luther burn the Pope's bull, and assert a new kind of independence. It added Erasmus to the broadeners of life. Ancient art was revivified in the discovery of its most significant remains. Mod- ern art stood confessed in Da Vinci, Michael Angelo, Titian, Raphael, Holbein, and Diirer. Copernicus found in the skies a wonderful development without great telescopic help. The route of the Portuguese by the African cape and the voyage of Columbus opened new worlds to thought and commerce. They made the earth seem to man, north and south, east and west, as THE AGE OF COLUMBUS. 495 STATUE OF COLUMBUS AT SANTO DOMINGO. 496 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. man never before had imagined it. It looked as if mercantile endeavor was to be constrained by no bounds. Articles of trade were multiplied amazingly. Every movement was not only new and broad, but it was rapid beyond conception. It was more like the remodeling of Japan, which we have seen in our day, than anything that had been earlier known. The long sway of the Moors was disintegrating. The Arab domination in science and seamanship was yielding to the Wes- tern genius. The Turks had in the boyhood (1453) of Colum- bus consummated their last great triumph in the capture of Constantinople, thus placing a barrier to Christian commerce with the East. This conquest drove out the learned Christians of the East, who had drunk of the Arab erudition, and they fled with their stores of learning to the western lands, coming back to the heirs of the Romans with the spirit which Rome in the past had sent to the East. But what Christian Europe was losing in the East Portugal and Prince Henry were gaining for her in the great and forbid- ding western waste of waters and along its African shores. As the hot tide of Mahometan invasion rolled over the Bosphorus, the burning equatorial zone was pierced from the north along the coasts of the Black Continent. Italy, seeing her maritime power drop away as the naval Italian dis- supremacy of the Atlantic seaboard rose, was forced coverers. ^ Q sen( j jj er experienced navigators to the oceanic ports, to maintain the supremacy of her name and genius in Cadamosto, Columbus, Vespucius, Cabot, and Verrazano. Those cosmographical views which had come down the ages, at times obscured, then for a while patent, and of which the traces had lurked in the minds of learned men by an almost continuous se- quence for many centuries, at last possessed by inheritance the mind of Columbus. By reading, by conference with others, by noting phenomena, and by reasoning, in the light of all these, upon the problem of a western passage to India, obvious as it was if once the sphericity of the earth be acknowledged, he His growing gradually grew to be confident in himself and trustful western pas- m his agency with others. He was far from being alone in his beliefs, nor was his age anything more than a reflection of long periods of like belief. There was simply needed a man with courage and constancy in his convic- THE CHARACTER OF COLUMBUS. 497 tlons, so that the theory could be demonstrated. This age pro- duced him. Enthusiasm and the contagion of palpable though shadowy truths gave Columbus, after much tribulation, the countenance in high quarters that enabled him to reach success, deceptive though it was. It would have been well for his mem- ory if he had died when his master work was done. With his great aim certified by its results, though they were far from being what he thought, he was unfortunately left in the end to be laid bare on trial, a common mortal after all, the creature of buffeting circumstances, and a weakling in every ele- De fi C i e ncies ment of command. His imagination had availed him of character - in his upward course when a serene habit in his waiting days could obscure his defects. Later, the problems he encountered were those that required an eye to command, with tact to per- suade and skill to coerce, and he had none of them. The man who becomes the conspicuous developer of any great world-movement is usually the embodiment of the ripened as- pirations of his time. Such was Columbus. It is the forerun- ner, the man who has little countenance in his age, who points the way for some hazardous after-soul to pursue. Such was Roger Bacon, the English Franciscan. It was Bacon's lot to direct into proper channels the new surging of con and the experimental sciences which was induced by the revived study of Aristotle, and was carrying dismay into the strongholds of Platonism. Standing out from the background of Arab regenerating learning, the name of Roger Bacon, linked often with that of Albertus Magnus, stood for the best know- ledge and insight of the thirteenth century. Bacon it was who gave that tendency to thought which, seized by Cardinal Pierre d'Aillv, and incorporated by him in his Imaqo Mundi Pierre d'Ail- (1410), became the link between Bacon and Colum- ly's imago bus. Humboldt has indeed expressed his belief that this encyclopaedic Survey of the World exercised a more im- portant influence upon the discovery of America than even the prompting which Columbus got from his correspondence with Toscanelli. How well Columbus pored over the pages of the Imago Mundi we know from the annotations of his own copy, which is still preserved in the Biblioteca Colombina. It seems likely that Columbus got directly from this book most that he knew of those passages in Aristotle, Strabo, and Seneca 498 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. which speak of the Asiatic shores as lying opposite to Hispa- nia. There is some evidence that this book was his companion even on his voyages, and Humboldt points out how he trans- lates a passage from it, word for word, when in 1498 he embodied it in a letter which he wrote to his sovereigns from Espanola. If we take the pains, as Humboldt did, to examine the writ- ings of Columbus, to ascertain the sources which he quaintauce cited, we find what appears to be a broad acquaintance eider writ- with books. It is to be remembered, however, that the Admiral quoted usually at second hand, and that he got his acquaintance with classic authors, at least, mainly through this Imago 3fundi of Pierre d'Ailly. Humboldt, in making his list of Columbus's authors, omits the references to the Scriptures and to the Church fathers, " in whom," as he says, " Columbus was singularly versed," and then gives the following catalogue : — Aristotle; Julius Caesar ; Strabo; Seneca; Pliny; Ptolemy; Solinus ; Julius Capitolinus ; Alf razano ; Avenruyz ; Rabbi Sam- uel de Israel ; Isidore, Bishop of Seville ; the Venerable Bede ; Strabus, Abbe of Reichenau ; Duns Scotus ; Francois Mayronis ; Abbe Joachim de Calabre ; Sacrobosco, being in fact the Eng- lish mathematician Holywood ; Nicholas de Lyra, the Norman Franciscan ; King Alfonso the Wise, and his Moorish sci'ibes ; Cardinal Pierre d'Ailly ; Gerson, Chancellor of the Univer- sity of Paris ; Pope Pius II., otherwise known as iEneas Syl- vius Piccolomini ; Regiomontanus, as the Latinized name of Johann Miiller of Konigsberg is given, though Columbus does not really name him ; Paolo Toscanelli, the Florentine physi- cian ; and Nicolas de Conti, of whom he had heard through Toscanelli, perhaps. Humboldt can find no evidence that Columbus had read the travels of Marco Polo, and does not discover why Navarrete holds that he had, though Polo's stories must have permeated much that Columbus read ; nor does he understand why Ir- ving says that Columbus took Marco Polo's book on his first voyage. We see often in the world's history a simultaneousness in the regeneration of thought. Here and there a seer works on in ignorance of some obscure brother elsewhere. Rumor COLUMBUS'S LAST YEAR. 499 and circulating manuscripts bring them into sympathy. They grow by the correlation. It is just this correspondence that confronts us in Columbus and Toscanelli, and it is not quite, but almost, perceptible that this wise Floren- andTosca- tine doctor was the first, despite Humboldt's theory, to plant in the mind of Columbus his aspirations for the truths of geography. It is meet that Columbus should not be men- tioned without the accompanying name of Toscanelli. It was the Genoese's different fortune that he could attempt as a sea- man a practical demonstration of his fellow Italian's views. Many a twin movement of the world's groping spirit thus seeks the light. Progress naturally pushes on parallel lines. Commei'ce thrusts her intercourse to remotest regions, while the Church yearns for new souls to convert, and peers longingly into the dim spaces that skirt the world's geography. Navigators improve their methods, and learned men in the arts supply them with exacter instruments. The widespread manifesta- tions of all this new life at last crystallize, and Gama and Co- lumbus appear, the reflex of every development. Thus the discovery of Columbus came in the ripeness of time. No one of the anterior accidents, suggesting a western land, granting that there was some measure of nessof his fact in all of them, had come to a world prepared to think on their developments. Vinland was practically forgotten, wherever it may have been. The tales of Fousang had never a listener in Europe. Madoc was as unknown as Elidacthon. While the new Indies were not in their turn to be forgotten, their discoverer was to bury himself in a world of conjecture. The superlatives of Columbus soon spent their influence. The pioneer was lost sight of in the new currents of thought which he had started. Not of least interest among them was the cog- nizance of new races of men, and new revelations in the animal and physical kingdoms, while the question of their origins pressed very soon on the theological and scientific sense of the age. No man craves more than Columbus to be judged with all the palliations demanded of a difference of his own Not above age and ours. No child of any age ever did less to hlsa s e - improve his contemporaries, and few ever did more to prepare 500 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. the way for such improvements. The age created him and the claims for a g e left h\m. There is no more conspicuous example paiiiatwu. j n n j s t; 0r y of a man showing- the path and losing it. It is by no means sure, with all our boast of benevolent prog- ress, that atrocities not much short of those which we ascribe to Columbus and his compeers may not at any time disgrace the coming as they have blackened the past years of the nine- teenth century. This fact gives us the right to judge the in- firmities of man in any age from the high vantage-ground of the best emotions of all the centuries. In the application of such perennial justice Columbus must inevitably suffer. The degradation of the times ceases to be an excuse when the man to be judged stands on the pinnacle of the ages. The biogra- pher cannot forget, indeed, that Columbus is a portrait set in the surroundings of his times ; but it is equally his duty at the same time to judge the paths which he trod by the scale of an eternal nobleness. The very domination of this man in the history of two hem- ispheres warrants us in estimating him by an austere sense of occasions lost and of opportunities embraced. The really great man is superior to his age, and anticipates its future ; not as a sudden apparition, but as the embodiment of a long- growth of ideas of which he is the inheritor and the capable Test of his exemplar. Humboldt makes this personal domina- ckaracter. ^ on Q £ £ WQ j^j n< | s The G ne comes from the direct influence of character ; the other from the creation of an idea, which, freed from personality, works its controlling mission by changing the face of things. It is of this last description that Humboldt makes the domination of Columbus. It is Notacrea- extremely doubtful if any instance can be found of tor of ideas. a g rea t j^ ea changing the world's history, which has been created by any single man. None such was created by Columbus. There are always forerunners whose agency is postponed because the times are not propitious. A masterful thought has often a long pedigree, starting from a remote an- tiquity, but it will be dormant till it is environed by the cir- cumstances suited to fructify it. This was just the destiny of the intuition which began with Aristotle and came down to Co- lumbus. To make his first voyage partook of foolhardiness, as many a looker-on reasonably declared. It was none the less COLUMBUS'S LAST YEAR. 501 foolhardy when it was done. If he had reached the opulent and powerful kings of the Orient, his little cockboats and their brave souls might have fared hard for their intrusion. His blunder in geography very likely saved him from annihilation. The character of Columbus has been variously drawn, almost always with a violent projection of the limner's own personality. We find Prescott contending that " what- ter differ- ever the defects of Columbus's mental constitution, the fiuger of the historian will find it difficult to point to a single blemish in his moral character." It is cer- tainly difficult to point to a more flagrant disregard of truth than when we find Prescott further saying, " Whether we con- template his character in its public or private relations, in all its features it wears the same noble aspects. It was in perfect harmony with the grandeur of his plans, and with results more stupendous than those which Heaven has permitted any other mortal to achieve." It is very striking to find Prescott, after thus speaking of his private as well as public character, and forgetting the remorse of Columbus for the social wrongs he had committed, append in a footnote to this very passage a reference to his " illegitimate " son. It seems to mark an ob- durate purpose to disguise the truth. This is also nowhere more patent than in the palliating hero-worship of Irving, with his constant effort to save a world's exem- plar for the world's admiration, and more for the world's sake than for Columbus's. Irving at one time berates the biographer who lets " perni- cious erudition " destroy a world's exemplar ; and at another time he does not know that he is criticising himself when he says that " he who paints a great man merely in great and he- roic traits, though he may produce a fine picture, will never present a faithful portrait." The commendation which he be- stows upon Herrera is for precisely what militates against the highest aims of history, since he praises that Spanish histo- rian's disregard of judicial fairness. In the being which Irving makes stand for the historic Co- lumbus, his skill in softened expression induced Humboldt to suppose that Irving's avoidance of exaggeration gave a force to his eulogy, but there was little need to exaggerate merits, if defects were blurred. 502 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. The learned German adds, in the opening of the third vol- ume of his E'xamen Critique, his own sense of the Humboldt. . . £ /^i 1 l mi , • impressiveness or Columbus. lhat nnpressiveness stands confessed ; but it is like a gyrating storm that knows no law but the vagrancy of destruction. One need not look long to discover the secret of Humboldt's estimate of Columbus. Without having that grasp of the pic- turesque which appeals so effectively to the popular mind in the letters of Vespucius, the Admiral was certainly not desti- tute of keen observation of nature, but unfortunately this quality was not infrequently prostituted to ignoble purposes. To a student of Humboldt's proclivities, these traits of obser- vation touched closely his sympathy. He speaks in his Cos- mos of the development of this exact scrutiny in manifold directions, notwithstanding Columbus's previous ignorance of natural history, and tells us that this capacity for noting natural phenomena arose from his contact with such. It would have been better for the fame of Columbus if he had kept this scien- tific survey in its purity. It was simply, for instance, a vitiated desire to astound that made him mingle theological and physi- cal theories about the land of Paradise. Such jugglery was promptly weighed in Spain and Italy by Peter Martyr and others as the wild, disjointed effusions of an overwrought mind, and "the reflex of a false erudition," as Humboldt expresses it. It was palpably by another effort, of a like kind, that he seized upon the views of the fathers of the Church that the earthly Paradise lay in the extreme Orient, and he was quite as audacious when he exacted the oath on the Cuban coast, to make it appear by it that he had really reached the outermost parts of Asia. Humboldt seeks to explain this errant habit by calling it " the sudden movement of his ardent and passionate soul ; the disarrangement of ideas which were the effect of an incoherent method and of the extreme rapidity of his reading ; while all was increased by his misfortunes and religious mysticism." Such an explanation hardly relieves the subject of it from blunter imputations. This urgency for some responsive wonder- ment at every experience appears constantly in the journal of Columbus's first voyage, as, for instance, when he makes every harbor exceed in beauty the last he had seen. This was the COLUMBUS'S LAST YEAR. 503 commonplace exaggeration which in our day is confined to the calls of speculating land companies. The fact was that Hum- boldt transferred to his hero something of the superlative love of nature that he himself had experienced in the same regions ; but there was all the difference between him and Columbus that there is between a genuine love of nature and a commer- cial use of it. Whenever Columbus could divert his mind from a purpose to make the Indies a paying investment, we find some signs of an insight that shows either observation of his own or the garnering of it from others, as, for tions of na- example, when he remarks on the decrease of rain in the Canaries and the Azores which followed upon the felling of trees, and when he conjectures that the elongated shape of the islands of the Antilles on the lines of the parallels was due to the strength of the equatorial current. Since Irving, Prescott, and Humboldt did their work, there has sprung up the unreasoning and ecstatic French school under the lead of Roselly de Lorgues, who Lorgues and seek to ascribe to Columbus all the virtues of a saint. " Columbus had no defect of character and no worldly quality," they say. The antiquarian and searching spirit of Harrisse, and of those writers who have mainly been led into the closest study of the events of the life of Columbus, has not done so much to mould opinion as regards the es- timate in which the Admiral should be held as to eliminate confusing statements and put in order corroborating facts. The reaction from the laudation of the canonizers has not pro- duced any writer of consideration to array such derogatory esti- mates as effectually as a plain recital of established facts would do it. Hubert Bancroft, in the incidental mention which he makes of Columbus, has touched his character not inaptly, and with a consistent recognition of its infirmities. Even Prescott, who verges constantly on the ecstatic elements of the adulatory biographer, is forced to entertain at times " a suspicion of a temporary alienation of mind," and in regard to the letter which Columbus wrote from Jamaica to the sovereigns, is obliged to recognize " sober narrative and sound reasoning strangely blended with crazy dreams and doleful lamentations." "Vagaries like these," he adds, "which came occasionally like clouds over his sold to shut out the light of reason, cannot fail 504 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. to fill the mind of the reader, as they doubtless did those of the sovereigns, with mingled sentiments of wonder and com- passion." An unstinted denunciatory purpose, much weak- AaronOood- ened by an inconsiderate rush of disdain, character- nch ' izes an American writer, Aaron Goodrich, in his Life of the so-called Christopher Columbus (New York, 1875) ; but the critic's temper is too peevish and his opinions are too unreservedly biased to make his results of any value. The mental hallucinations of Columbus, so patent in his last years, were not beyond recognition at a much earlier age, and those who would get the true import of his character must trace these sorrowful manifestations to their beginnings, and distin- guish accurately between Columbus when his purpose was lofty and unselfish and himself again when he became mercenary and erratic. So much does the verdict of history lodge occasionally more in the narrator of events than in the character of them that, in Humboldt's balancing of the baser with the nobler symptoms of Columbus's nature, he does not find even the most degraded of his actions other than power- ful in will, and sometimes, at least, clear in intelligence. There were certainly curiously transparent, but transient gleams of wisdom to the last. Humboldt further says that the faith of Columbus soothed his dreary and weary adversities by the charm of ascetic reveries. So a handsome euphuism tries to save his fame from harsher epithets. It was a faith, says the same delineator, which justified at need, under the pretext of a religious object, the employment of deceit and the excess of a despotic power ; a tenderer form, doubtless, of the vulgar expression that the end sanctifies the means. It is not, however, within the practice of the better his- torical criticism of our day to let such elegant wariness beguile the reader's mind. If the different, not to say more advanced, condition of the critical mind is to be of avail to a new age through the advantage gained from all the ages, it is in pre- cisely this emancipation from the trammels of traditionary bond- age that the historian asserts his own, and dispels the glamour of a conventionalized hero-worship. Dr. Shea, our most distinguished Catholic scholar, who has Dr. j. o. dealt with the character of Columbus, says : " He shea. accomplished less than some adventurers with poor COLUMBUS'S LAST YEAR. 505 equipped vessels. He seems to have succeeded in attaching but few men to him who adhered loyally to his cause. Those under him were constantly rebellious and mutinous ; those over him found him impracticable. To array all these as enemies, in- spired by- a satanic hostility to a great servant of God, is to ask too much for our belief ; " and yet this is precisely what Irving by constant modifications, and De Lorgues in a monstrous de- cree feel themselves justified in doing. There is nothing in Columbus's career that these French can- onizers do not find convertible to their purpose, The French whether it be his wild vow to raise 4,000 horse and canouizers - 50,000 foot in seven years, wherewith to snatch the Holy Sepul- chre from the infidel, or the most commonplace of his canting ejaculations. That Columbus was a devout Catholic, according to the Catholicism of his epoch, does not admit of question, but when tried by any test that finds the perennial in holy acts, Columbus fails to bear the examination. He had nothing of the generous and noble spirit of a conjoint lover of man and of God, as the higher spirits of all times have developed it. There was no all-loving Deity in his conception. His Lord was one in whose name it was convenient to practice enormities. He shared this subterfuge with Isabella and the rest. We need to think on what Las Casas could be among his contemporaries, if we hesitate to apply the conceptions of an everlasting humanity. The mines which Columbus went to seek were hard to find. The people he went to save to Christ were easy to exterminate. He mourned bitterly that his own efforts were ill requited. He had no pity for the misery of others, except they be his depen- dents and co-sharers of his purposes. He found a policy worth commemorating in slitting the noses and tearing off the ears of a naked heathen. He vindicates his excess by impressing upon the world that a man setting out to conquer the Indies must not be judged by the amenities of life which belong to a quiet rule in established countries. Yet, with a chance to establish a humane life among peoples ready to be moulded to good pur- poses, he sought from the very first to organize among them the inherited evils of " established countries." He converts talked a great deal about making converts of the poor andslaves - souls, while the very first sight which he had of them prompted 506 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. him to consign them to the slave-mart, just as if the first step to Christianize was the step which unmans. The first vicar apostolic sent to teach the faith in Santo Do- mingo returned to Spain, no longer able to remain, powerless, in sight of the cruelties practiced by Columbus. Isabella pre- vented the selling of the natives as slaves in Spain, when Co= lumbus had dispatched thither five shiploads. Las Casas tells us that in 1494-96 Columbus was generally hated in Espanola for his odiousness and injustice, and that the Admiral's policy with the natives killed a third of them in those two years. The Franciscans, when they arrived at the island, found the colonists exuberant that they had been relieved of the rule which Colum- bus had instituted ; and the Benedictines and Dominicans added their testimony to the same effect. The very first words, as has been said, that he used, in con- He urges en- ve y m & *° expectant Europe the wonders of his dis- natives from co very, suggested a scheme of enslaving the strange the first. people. He had already made the voyage that of a kidnapper, by entrapping nine of the unsuspecting natives. On his second voyage he sent home a vessel-load of slaves, on the pretense of converting them, but his sovereigns intimated to him that it would cost less to convei't them in their own homes. Then he thought of the righteous alternative of sending some to Spain to be sold to buy provisions to support those who would convert others in their homes. The monarchs were perhaps dazed at this sophistry ; and Columbus again sent home four vessels laden with reeking cargoes of flesh. When he re- turned to Spain, in 1496, to circumvent his enemies, he once more sought in his turn, and by his reasoning, to cheat the devil of heathen souls by sending other cargoes. At last the line was drawn. It was not to save their souls, but to punish them for daring to war against the Spaniards, that they should be made to endure such horrors. It is to Columbus, also, that we trace the beginning of that monstrous guilt which Spanish law sanctioned under the name of repartimientos, and by which to every colonist, and even to the vilest, absolute power was given over as many natives as his means and rank entitled him to hold. Las Casas tells us that Ferdinand could hardly have had a conception of the enormi- ties of the system. If so, it was because he winked out of sight COLUMBUS'S LAST YEAR. 507 the testimony of observers, while he listened to the tales prompted of greed, rapine, and cruelty. The value of the sys- tem to force heathen out of hell, and at the same time to re- plenish his treasury, was the side of it presented to Ferdinand's mind by such as had access to his person. In 1501, we find the Dominicans entering their protest, and by this Ferdinand was moved to take the counsel of men learned in the law and in what passed in those days for Christian ethics. This court of appeal approved these necessary efforts, as was claimed, to in- crease those who were new to the faith, and to reward those who supported it. Peter Martyr expressed the comforting sentiments of the age : " National right and that of the Church concede personal lib- erty to man. State policy, however, demurs. Custom repels the idea. Long experience shows that slavery is necessary to pre- vent those returning to their idolatry and error whom the Church has once gained." All professed servants of the Church, with a few exceptions like Las Casas, ranged themselves with Colum- bus on the side of such specious thoughts ; and Las Casas, in rec- ognizing this fact, asks what we could expect of an old sailor and fighter like Columbus, when the wisest and most respectable of the priesthood backed him in his views. It was indeed the misery of Columbus to miss the opportunity of being wiser than his fellows, the occasion always sought by a commanding spirit, and it was offered to him almost as to no other. There was no restraining the evil. The cupidity of the colo- nists overcame all obstacles. The Queen was beguiled into giv- ing equivocal instructions to Ovando, who succeeded Progress of to Bobadilla, and out of them by interpretation grew thTwestni an increase of the monstrous evil. In 1503, every dies- atrocity had reached a legal recognition. Labor was forced ; the slaves were carried whither the colonists willed ; and for eight months at least in every year, families were at pleasure disrupted without mercy. One feels some satisfaction in see- ing Columbus himself at last, in a letter to Diego, December 1, 1504, shudder at the atrocities of Ovando. When one sees the utter annihilation of the whole race of the Antilles, a thing clearly assured at the date of the death of Columbus, one wishes that that dismal death-bed in Valladolid could have had its gloom illumined by a consciousness that the hand which lifted 508 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. the banner of Spain and of Christ at San Salvador had done something to stay the misery which cupidity and perverted piety had put in course. AVhen a man seeks to find and parades reasons for committing a crime, it is to stifle his conscience. Columbus passed years in doing it. Back of Isabella in this spasmodic interest in the Indians was the celebrated Archbishop of Granada, Fernando de Talavera, whom we have earlier known as the prior of Prado. He had been since 1478 the confessor of the Queen, and when the time came for sending missionaries to the An- tilles it was natural that they were of the order of St. Jerome, of which Talavera was himself a member. Columbus, through a policy which induced him to make as apparent as possible his The Francis- mingling of interests with the Church, had before this adopted the garb of the Franciscans, and this order was the second in time to be seen in Espanola in 1502. They were the least tolerant of the leading orders, and had already shown a disposition to harass the Indians, and were known to treat haughtily the Queen's intercessions for the poor souls. It was not till after the death of Columbus that the Dominicans, coming in 1510, reinforced the kindly spirit of the priests of St. Jerome. Still later they too abandoned their humanity. The downfall of Columbus began when he wrested from the reluctant monarchs what he called his privileges, and when he insisted upon riches as the accompaniment of such state and consequence as those privileges might entail. The terms were granted, so far as the King was concerned, simply to put a stop to importunities, for he never anticipated being called ujion to confirm them. The insistency of Columbus in this respect is in strange contrast to the satisfaction which the captains of Prince Henry, Da Gama and the rest, were content to find in the unpolluted triumphs of science. The mercenary Columbus's /-. • mercenary Columbus was forced to the utterance of Solomon : impulses. " I looked upon the labor that I had labored to do, and behold all was vanity and vexation of spirit/' The Preacher never had a better example. Columbus was wont to say that gold gave the soul its flight to paradise. Perhaps he His praise of referred to the masses which could be bought, or to the alms which could propitiate Heaven. He might COLUMBUS'S LAST YEAR. 509 better have remembered the words of warning aiven to Barueh : " Seekest thou great things for thyself ? Seek them not. For, saith the Lord, thy life will I give unto them for a prey in all places whither thou goest." And a prey in all places he became. Humboldt seeks to palliate this cupidity by making him the conscious inheritor of the pecuniary chances which every free son of Genoa expected to find within his grasp by commercial enterprise. Such prominence was sought because it carried with it power and influence in the republic. If Columbus had found riches in the New World as easily as he anticipated, it is possible that such affluence would have moulded his character in other ways for good or for evil. He soon found himself confronting a difficult task, to satisfy with insufficient means a craving which his exaggerations had estab- lished. This led him to spare no device, at whatever sacrifice of the natives, to produce the coveted gold, and it was an ingen- ious mockery that induced him to deck his captives with golden chains and parade them through the Spanish towns. After Da Gama had opened the route to Cathay by the Cape of Good Hope, and Columbus had, as he supposed, touched the eastern confines of the same country, the wonder- Nico i asde ful stories of Asiatic glories told by Nicolas de Conti Cont1, were translated, by order of King Emanuel (in 1500), into Portuguese. It is no wonder that the interest in the develop- ment of 1492 soon waned when the world began to compare the descriptions of the region beyond the Ganges, as made known by Marco Polo, and so recently by Conti, and the ap- parent confirmation of them established by the Portuguese, with the meagre resources which Columbus had associated The w0rld . 3 with the same country, in all that he could say about dls g ust the Antilles or bring from them. An adventurous voyage across the Sea of Darkness begat little satisfaction, if all there was to show for it consisted of men with tails or a single eye, or races of Amazons and cannibals. When we view the character of Columbus in its influence upon the minds of men, we find some strange anomalies. Be- fore his passion was tainted with the ambition of wealth and its consequence, and while he was urging the acceptance of his views for their own sake, it is very evident that he impressed 510 ' CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. others in a way that never happened after he had secured his privileges. It is after this turning-point of his life that we begin to see his falsities and indiscretions, or at least to find record of them. The incident of the moving lijjht in the nigrht before his first landfall is a striking instance of his daring disregard of all the qualities that help a commander in his dominance over his men. It needs little discrimination to dis- cern the utter deceitfulness of that pretense. A noble desire to win the loftiest honors of the discovery did not satisfy a mean, insatiable greed. He blunted every sentiment Columbus's ., . 11-i-T m <• i • lack of or generosity when he deprived a poor sailor of his pecuniary reward. That there was no actual light to be seen is apparent from the distance that the discoverers sailed before they saw land, since if the light had. been ahead they would not have gone on, and if it had been abeam they would not have left it. The evidence is that of himself and a thrall, and he kept it secret at the time. The author of the Hls- torle sees the difficulty, and attempts to vaporize the whole story by saying that the light was spiritual, and not physical. Navar- rete passes it by as a thing necessary, for the fame of Colum- bus, to be ignored. A second instance of Columbus's luckless impotence, at a time when an honorable man would have relied upon his charac- ter, was the attempt to make it appear that he had reached the His enforced coast of Asia by imposing an oath on his men to that oathatcuba. e £f ec t 7 in penalty of having their tongues wrenched out if they recanted. One can hardly conceive a more debasing exercise of power. His insistence upon territorial power was the serious mistake His ambi- °f ^ s li^e. He thought, in making an agreement territorial with his sovereigns to become a viceroy, that he was securing an honor ; he was in truth pledging his hap- piness and beggaring his life. He sought to attain that which the fates had unfitted him for, and the Spanish monarchs, in an evil day, which was in due time their regret, submitted to his hallucinated dictation. No man ever evinced less capacity for ruling a colony. The most sorrowful of all the phases of Columbus's fessedin- character is that hapless collapse, when he abandoned all faith in the natural world, and his premonitions COLUMBUS'S LAST YEAR. 511 of it, and threw himself headlong into the vortex of what he called inspiration. Everything in his scientific argument had been logical. It produced the reliance which comes of wisdom. It was a manly show of an incisive reason. If he had rested here his claims for honor, he would have ranked with the great seers of the universe, with Copernicus and the rest. His successful suit with the Spanish sovereigns turned his head, and his degra- dation began when he debased a noble purpose to the level of mercenary claims. He relied, during his first voyage, more on chicanery in controlling his crew than upon the dignity of his aim and the natural command inherent in a lofty spirit. This deceit was the beginning of his decadence, which ended in a sad self-aggrandizement, when he felt himself no longer an instrument of intuition to probe the secrets of the earth, but a possessor of miraculous inspiration. The man who had been self-contained became a thrall to a fevered hallucination. The earnest mental study which had sustained his inquisitive spirit through long years of dealings with the great physical problems of the earth was forgotten. He hopelessly began to accredit to Divinity the measure of his own fallibility. " God made me," he says, " the messenger of the new heaven and the new earth, of which He spoke in the Apocalypse by St. John, after having spoken of it by the mouth of Isaiah, and He showed me the spot where to find it." He no longer thought it the views of Aristotle which guided him. The Greek might be pardoned for his ignorance of the intervening America. It was mere sacrilege to impute such ignorance to the Divine wisdom. There is no excuse but the plea of insanity. He naturally lost his friends with losing his manly devotion to a Lost hi8 cause. I do not find the beginning of this sur- fnends - render of his manhood earlier than in the will which he signed February 22, 1498, when he credits the Holy Trinity with hav- ing inspired him with the idea that one could go to the Indies by passing westward. In his letter to the nurse of Don Juan, he says that the pro- phecy of Isaiah in the Apocalypse had found its interpreter in him, the messenger to disclose a new part of the world. " Hu- man reason," he wrote in the Proficias, " mathematics, and 512 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. maps have served me in no wise. What I have accomplished is simply the fulfillment of the prophecy of David." We have seen a pitiable man meet a pitiable death. Hardly His pitiable a name in profane history is more august than his. Hardly another character in the world's record has made so little of its opportunities. His discovery was a blun- der ; his blunder was a new world ; the New World is his monument ! Its discoverer might have been its father ; he proved to be its despoiler. He might have given its young days such a benignity as the world likes to associate with a maker ; he left it a legacy of devastation and crime. He might have been an unselfish promoter of geographical science ; he proved a rabid seeker for gold and a viceroyalty. He might have won converts to the fold of Christ by the kindness of his spirit ; he gained the execrations of the good angels. He might, like Las Casas, have rebuked the fiendishness of his contemporaries ; he set them an example of perverted belief. The triumph of Barcelona led down to the ignominy of Valladolid, with every step in the degradation palpable and resultant. CHAPTER XXI. THE DESCENT OF COLUMBUS'S HONORS. Columbus had left behind him, as the natural guardians of his name and honors, the following relatives : his His ^ brother Bartholomew, who in December, 1508, had folk ' issue of an illegitimate daughter, his only child so far as known ; his brother Diego, who, as a priest, was precluded from hav- ing lawful issue ; his son Diego, uow become the first inher- itor of his honors ; his natural son, Ferdinand, the most con- siderable in intellectual habit of all Columbus's immediate kin. The descent of his titles depended in the first instance on such a marriage as Diego might contract. Within a Hissou year or two Diego had had by different women two Dieg0 " bastard children, Francisco and Cristoval, shut off from heir- ship by the manner of their birth. Diego was at this time not far from four and twenty years of age. Ten or twelve days after Diego succeeded to his inheritance, Philip the Handsome, now sharing the throne of Castile as husband of Juana, daughter of Isabella, ordered that what was due to Columbus should be paid to his successor. This order reached Espafiola in June, 1506, but was not obeyed promptly ; and when Ferdinand of Aragon returned from Italy in August, 1507, and succeeded to the Castilian throne, he repeated the order oft August 24. It would seem that in due time Diego was in receipt of 450,000 ounces of gold annually from the four foun- Dieg0 dries in Espafiola. This, with whatever else there may have been, was by no means satisfactory to the young aspirant, and he began to press Ferdinand for a restitution of his inherited honors and powers with all the perti- presses for a nacity which had characterized his father's urgency, ofcoium- Upon the return of Ferdinand from Naples, Diego determined to push the matter to an issue, but Ferdinand still i's in- come. 514 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. evaded it. Diego now asked, according to Las Casas and Herrera, to be allowed to bring a suit against the Crown before the Council of the Indies, and the King yielded to the request, confident, very likely, in his ability to control the verdict in the public interests. The suit at once began (1508), and 1508. Suit , » •, l <• n against the continued tor several years before all was accom plished, and in December of that same year (1508), we find Diego empowering an attorney of the Duke of Alva to represent his case. The defense of the Crown was that a transmission of the viceroyalty to the Admiral's son was against public policy, and at variance with a law of 1480, which forbade any judicial office under the Crown being held in perpetuity. It was further ar- gued in the Crown's behalf that Columbus had not been the chief instrument of the first discovery and had not discovered the mainland, but that other voyagers had anticipated him. In response to all allegations, Diego rested his case on the con- tracts of the Crown with his father, which assured him the powers he asked for. Further than this, the Crown had already recognized, he claimed, a part of the contract in its orders of June 2, 1506, and August 24, 1507, whereby the revenues due under the contracts had been restored to him. It was also charged by the defense that Columbus had been relieved of his powers because he had abused them, and the answer to this was that the sovereigns' letter of 1502 had acknowledged that Bobadilla acted without authority. A number of navigators in the western seas were put on the stand to rebut the allegation of existing knowledge of the coast before the voyages of Co- lumbus, particularly in substantiating the priority of the voyage of Columbus to the coast of Paria, and the evidence was suf- ficient to show that> all the alleged claims were simply per- verted notions of the really later voyage of Ojeda in 1499. It is from the testimony at this time, as given in Navarrete, that the biographers of Columbus derive considerable information, not otherwise attainable, respecting the voyages of Colum- bus, — testimony, however, which the historian is obliged to weigh with caution in many respects. The case was promptly disposed of in Diego's favor, but not without suspicions of the Crown's influence to that end. The suit is, indeed, one of the puzzles in the THE DESCENT OF COLUMBUS'S HONORS. 515 history of Columbus and his fame. If it was a suit to secure a verdict against the Crown in order to protect the Crown's rights under the bull of demarcation, we can understand why much that would have helped the position of the fiscal was not brought forward. If it was what it purported to be, an effort to relieve the Crown of obligations fastened upon it under mis- conceptions or deceits, we may well marvel at such omission of evidence. It was left for the King to act on the decision for restitution. This might have been by his studied procrastination indefinitely delayed but for a shrewd movement on the part of Diego, who opportunely aspired to the hand of Dona Maria de Toledo, the daughter of Fernando de Toledo. This nobleman was brother of the Duke of Alva, one of the proudest grandees of Spain, and he was also cousin of Ferdinand, the King. The ,,. „„ , . Diego inar- alhance, soon eftected, brought the young suitor a nesMaria powerful friend in his uncle, and the bride's family were not averse to a connection with the heir to the viceroyalty of the Indies, now that it was confirmed by the Council of the Indies. Harrisse cannot find that the promised dower ever came with the wife ; but, on the contrary, Diego seems to have become the financial agent of his wife's family. A demand for the royal acquiescence in the orders of the Council could now be more easily made, and Ferdinand readily conceded Dj egowa ives all but the title of Viceroy. Diego waived that for It "me of the time, and he was accordingly accredited as gov- Vlcer °y- ernor of Espanola, in the place of Ovando. Isabella had indeed, while on her death-bed, importuned the King to recall Ovando, because of the appalling stories of his cruelty to the Indians. Ferdinand had found that the gov- ernor's vigilance conduced to heavy remittances of gold, and had shown no eagerness to carry out the Queen's wishes. He had even ordered Ovando to begin that transference of the poor Lucayan Indians from their own islands to work in the Espanola mines which soon resulted in the depopulation of the Bahamas. Now that he was forced to withdraw 0vando Ovando he made it as agreeable for him as possible, recalled - and in the end there was no lack of commendation of his ad- ministration. Indeed, as Spaniards went in those days, Ovando was good enough to gain the love of Las Casas, " except for some errors of moral blindness." 516 "CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. It was on May 3, 1509, that Ferdinand gave Diego his in- 1509. June structions ; and on June 9, the new governor with saiis D for° ^ s noD l e wife sailed from San Lucar. There went Espanoia. w ith Diego, beside a large number of noble Span- iards who introduced, as Oviedo says, an infusion of the best Spanish blood into the colony, his brother Ferdinand, who was specially charged, as Oviedo further tells us, to found monasteries and churches. His two uncles also accompanied him. Bartholomew had gone to Rome after Columbus's death, with the intention of inducing Pope Julius II. to urge upon the King a new voyage of discovery ; and Harrisse thinks that this is proved by some memoranda attached to an account of the coasts of Veragua, which it is supposed that Bartholomew gave at this time to a canon of the Laterau, which is now preserved in the Megliavecchian library, and has been printed by Har- risse in his Bibliotheca Americana Vetustissima. It was per- haps on this visit that the Adelantado took to Rome that map of Columbus's voyage to those coasts which it is usually said was carried there in 1505, when he may possibly have borne thither the letter of Columbus to the Pope. The position which Bartholomew now went with Diego to as- sume, that of the Chief Alguazil of Santo Domingo, caused much complaint from Diego Mendez, who claimed the credit of Barthoio- bringing about the restitution of Diego's power, and busTandD?-* wno nac ^ as ne sa y s 5 been promised both by Columbus ego Mendez. anc j ^y j^ g gon ^as O fft oe as recompense for his many services. The fleet arrived at its destination July 10, 1509. The wife 1509. July °f the governor had taken a retinue, which for splen- reacheS dor na -d never before been equaled in the New World, government. an( j -j. enaD i ec | ner to maintain a kind of viceregal state in the little capital. It all helped Diego to begin his rule with no inconsiderable consequence. There was needed some- thing of such attraction to beguile the spirits of the settlers, for, as Benzoni learned years afterwards, when he visited the region, the coming of the son of Columbus had not failed to engender jealousies, which attached to the imposition of another for- eigner upon the colony. The King was determined that Diego's rule should be con- fined to Espaiiola, and, much to the governor's annoyance, he THE DESCENT OF COLUMBUS'S HONORS. 517 parceled out the coasts which Columbus had tracked near the Isthmus of Panama into two governments, and installed Ojeda in command of the eastern one, which was called New 0jeda and Andalusia, while the one beyond the Gulf of Uraba, Nicuessa - which included Veragua, he gave to Diego de Nicuessa, and called it Castilla del Oro. a IVUVS II PAPA SWONENSIS LTGVR ^L POPE JULIUS II. This action of the King, as well as his effort to put Porto Rico under an independent governor, incited new ex- postulations from Diego, and served to make his rule P ° rt ° Rk '°" 518 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. in the island quite as uncomfortable as its management had been to his father. There also grew up the same discourage- Faction of ment f rom faction. The King's treasurer, Miguel Pas- Passamonte. samon t e , became the head of the rebellious party, not without suspicion that he was prompted to much denunciations in his confidential communications with the King. Reports of Diego's misdeeds and ambitions, threatening the royal power even, were assiduously conveyed to the King. The sovereign devised a sort of corrective, as he thought, of this, by institut- ing later, October 5, 1511, a court of appeals, or Aucli- 1511. Octo- ° . i-ii • i - . bers. An- encia* to which the aggrieved colonists could go in diencia. . , °° . ° their defense against oppression or extortion. Its natural effect was to undermine the governor's authority and to weaken his influence. He found himself thwarted in all efforts to relieve the Indians of their burdens, as nothing of that sort could be done without disturbing the revenues of leading colonists. There was no great inducement to undo measures by which no one profited in receipts more than himself, and the cruel devas- tation of the native population ran on as it had done. He cer- tainly did not show himself averse to continuing the system of repartimientos for the benefit of himself and his friends. Diego, who had been for a while in Spain, returned in 1512 to Espanola, and later new orders were sent out by the King, and these included commands to reduce the labor of the Indians one third, to import negro slaves from Guinea as a measure of further relief to the natives, and to brand Carib slaves, so as to protect other Indians from harsh treatment intended for the Caribs alone. Diego was again in Spain in 1513, and the attempts of Ojeda and Nicuessa having failed, later orders in 1514 so far rein- stated Diego in his viceregal power as to permit him to send his uncle Bartholomew to take possession of the Veragua Bartholo- _ » i •■ pi a -i i i i • . mew coium- coast. But the lire of the Adelantado was drawing to bus died. , . .. , . . . , a close, and his death soon occurring nothing was done. Affairs had come to such a pass that Diego again felt it necessary to repair to Court to counteract his enemies' intrigues, and once more getting permission from the King, he sailed for 1515. Diego Spain, April 9, 1515, leaving the Vice-Queen with a in Spain. council in authority. Diego found the King open and kindly, and not averse to ac- THE DESCENT OF COLUMBUS'S HONORS. 519 knowledging the merits of his government. He again pressed his bonded rights with the old fervency. " I would bestow them willingly on you," said the King ; " but I cannot do so without V3ar rCaroloer Cbnfterilicb'Rctfer vtiDTRSmg/ £rt$bcrt?og'ju 0fterracbl ^rrqogju£'urgiin&i/t3?artge(>o*riju^>«"6t-i4-5'^"oani.ifw>. g'f rlm.ii..® ciotmo.i 91 o.JUiliKbtT Xnfci.M JibnxW f i °. ^icUi^oa wu mil frovbu 3(ib>'lti &&iigui !U poiav 9*rfui.apntlfl4fx6.(5rp«ia^m3Pti^PP0'n.ii.tntfVJ5 , *>. CKni.tc'{<;0(l>CTguftgt?cri®otX>ia0a4/&7g/t>n9Cal0npb. CHARLES THE FIFTH. intrusting them also to your son and to his successors." " Is it just," said Diego, " that I should suffer for a son which I may never have ? " Las Casas tells us that Diego repeated this col- loquy to him. 520 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. The King found it reasonable to question if Columbus had really sailed along; all the coasts in which Diego 1516. Janu- J ° & ary23. Fer- claimed a share, and ordered an examination of the dinand died. , . matter to be made. While these claims were in abey- ance, the King died, January 23, 1516. This event much retarded the settlement of the difficulties. Cardinal Ximenes, who held power for a while, was not willing to act, and nothing was done for four years, during part of Diego again which period Diego was certainly in Espanola. We m Espanoia. k now a } so ^hat h e was p rese nt at the convocation of Barcelona, presided over by the Emperor, when Las Casas made his urgent appeals for the Indians and pictured their hardships. Finally, in 1520, when Charles V. was about to em- 1520. Diego bark for Flanders, Diego was in a position to advance m spam. ^ ^ ie Emperor so large a sum as ten thousand ducats, which was, as it appears, about a fifth of his annual income from Espanola at this time. This financial succor tiaiiy rein- seemed to open the way for the Emperor to dismiss stated. all charges against Diego, and to reinstate him in qualified authority as Viceroy over the Indies. This seeming restitution was not without a disagreeable ac- companiment in the appointment of a supervisor to reside at his viceregal court and report on the Viceroy's doings. In Sep- 1520. Sep- tember, 1520, Diego sailed once more for his govern- eg^retunw 1 ment, and on November 14 we find him in Santo to Espanoia. j) om j U g 0? an( j shortly afterwards engaged in the con- struction of a lordly palace, which he was to occupy, and which is seen there to-day. The substantialness of its structure gave rise to rumors that he was preparing a fortress for ulterior aims. Diego soon found that various administrative measures had not gone well in his absence. Commanders of some of the prov- inces had exceeded their powers, and it became necessary to su- persede them. This made them enemies as a matter of course. The raising of sugar-cane had rapidly developed under the im- ported African labor, and the revenues now came for the most part from the plantations rather than from the mines. slaves in- The negroes so increased that it was not long before crease. some of them dared to rise in revolt, but the mis- chief was stopped by a rapid swoop of armed horsemen. The 9 :m$\ H if f a 5 ■•,;•'»»«% --T- 522 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. jealousies and revengeful accusations of Diego's enemies were not so easily quelled, and before long he was summoned to Spain to render an account of his doings, for Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon had presented charges against him. On September 16, 1523, Diego embarked, and lauded at St. Lucar November 5. He presented himself before the Emperor at Vittoria in January, 1524, and reviewed his conduct. This he succeeded in doing in a manner to disarm his foes ; and this success encouraged him to press anew for his inherited rights. The demand ended in the 1523. Diego questions in dispute being referred to a board ; and m Spam. Diego for two years followed the Court in its migrations, to be in attendance on the sessions of this commission. His .-™ ^ , health gave way under the strain, so that, with every- 1526. Febru- . & . J . J ary23. Diego thing still unsettled, he died at Montalvan, February dies. . . . 23, 1526, having survived his father for twenty troub- lous years. His remains were laid in the monastery of Las Cuevas by the side of Columbus. Being later conveyed to the cathedral at Santo Domingo, they were, if one may credit the quite unproved statements of the priests of the cathedral, mis- taken for those of his father, and taken to Havana in 1795. The Vice-Queen and her family were still in Santo Domingo, and her children were seven in number, four daugh- ters and three sons. The descent of the honors came eventually to the descendants of one of these daughters, Isabel, who married George of Portugal, Count of Gelves. Of the Luis colon three sons, Luis succeeded his father, and was in turn succeeds. succeeded by Diego, a son of Luis's brother Cristoval. The Vice-Queen, after making an ineffectual attempt to colo- nize Veragua, in which she was thwarted by the royal Audi- encia at Espanola, returned to Spain in 1529. Her son Luis, the heir, was still a child, having been born in 1521 or 1522. For fourteen years his mother pressed his claims upon the Em- peror, Charles V., and she was during a part of the time in such distress that she borrowed money of Ferdinand Columbus and pledged her jewels. She lived till 1549, and died at Santo Domingo. Early in 1536 the Cardinal Garcia de Loyasa, in behalf of 153C. The the Council of the Indies, rendered a decision in which compromise ne an( l Ferdinand Columbus had acted as arbiters, with Luis. w hi cn was confirmed by the Emperor in September of THE DESCENT OF COLUMBUS'S HONORS. 523 the same year. This was that, upon the abandonment by Luis of all claims upon the revenues of the Indies, of the title of Vice- roy, and of the right to appoint the officers of the New World, he should be given the island of Jamaica in fief, a perpetual annuity of ten thousand ducats, and the title of Duke Duke of of Veragua, with an estate twenty-five leagues square Vera ^ ua - in that province, to support the title and functions of Admiral of the Indies. In 1540 Luis returned to Espanola 1540 Luis with the title of Captain-General, and in 1542 mar- in EspaSola - ried at Santo Domingo, much against his mother's wish, Maria de Orozco, who later lived in Honduras and married another. While she was still living, Luis again espoused at Santo Do- mingo Maria de Mosquera. In 1551 he returned to Spain. Whatever remained of the rights which Columbus had sought to transmit to his heirs had already been modified to Co i umbus > s their detriment by Charles, under decrees in 1540, g^dulffy 1541, and 1542 ; and when Charles was succeeded by abrid g ed - Philip II., early in 1556, one of the first acts of the latter was to force Luis to abandon his fief of Veragua and to throw up his power as Admiral. The Council of the Indies took cogni- zance of the case in July, 1556, and on September 28 following, Philip II., at Ghent, recompensed the grandson of Columbus, for his submission to the inevitable, by decreeing to Luis the honorary title of Admiral of the Indies and Duke of Veragua, with an income of seven thousand ducats. So in fifty years the dreams of Columbus for territorial magnifi- Columbus's . - , .. . . . territorial cence came to naught, and the confident injunctions rights aban- of his will were dissipated in the air. Immediately after this, Luis furtively married, while his other wives were still living, Ana de Castro Ossorio. Luisapo . The authorities found in these polygamous acts a con- ty^™ 18 *- venient opportunity to get another troublesome Colon out of the way, and arrested Luis in 1559. He was held in prison for nearly five years, and when in 1563 judgment was got against him, he was sentenced to ten years of exile, half of which was to be passed in Oran, in Africa. While his appeal was pend- ing, his scandalous life added crime to crime, and finally, in November, 1565, his sentence being confirmed, he i 572 Luis was conducted to Oran, and there he died February dies - 3, 1572. THE COLUMBUS PEDIGREE. Note. Dotted lines mark illegitimate descents ; the dash-and-dot lines mark pretended de- scents. The heavy face numerals show the successful holders of the honors of Columbus. The lines aa,b b, and c c join respectively. Fadrique Enrigues, Adm. of Castile. Alvarez de Toledo 1 = Maria. 1 Juana =r Juan II. 1 of Aragon. I Duke of 1 Fernando. Maria de = Toledo Ferdinand 1 = Isabella of of Aragon \ Castile. Alba. r = DIE i < GO, J. 1526. ( Filipe = CRISTOFORO = Beatrix Moniz I 1 • Henriquez, ; living in 1513. Fernando, b. 1488, d. 1539. Felipa, I Maria = Sancho Ide Cardona, Adm. of Aragon. Juana = Luis de la Cueva. Isabel = Jorge de Carvajal Portogallo. Luisa de = LUIS = Maria de 3 I Mosquira. Cristoval, Luis, d. s. p. d. s. p. 1583. ) Maria, Maria = Carlos de Alvaro. =rFr. de Men- doza, d. 1G05. Arellano, d. bef . 1600. | Jorge Alberti, d. 1581. Maria Juana d. s. p. = Fr. Pacheco, I d. 1605. James II. England. = Arabella Churchill. Duke of Berwick. James Stuart, Duke of Liria, d. 1738. Carlos. Various lines. Catarina Ventura, d. 1740. Jacobo Eduardo. I 10 Nuno DE 5 Portogallo, established in 1608. Alvaro 6 Jacinto. Pedro Nuno. 7 Pedro Manuel. S I Oris- Maria, toval. of the Convent of San Quirce. Filipa, ( d. 1577. Pedro Nuno, 9 d. 1733, without legitimate issue. Carlos Fernando. I " Jacobo Fildpe, V& dispossessed in 1790; the decree of 1664 reversed. Continued to our day. DOMENICO : Susanna : Fontanarosa. Domiuico Colombo, of Cuecaro. Maria, nun, b. 150S. Giovanni Giacomo Blanchinetta Pelegrino, or Diego, = Giacomo d. s. p. priest. Paravello. Ana = Cristoval = '. de I de Pravia I Guzman. 1 Diego = Isabel Justenian. C= DIEGO, 4 d. s. p. 1578. Francesca = Diego I Ortegon. Josefa = De Paz de la Serra. Josefa Martin de Larreategui. Maria =z Luis de Avila. Luis de AVTLA, d. 1633. Bernardo Balthazar Colombo, Colombo, of Cogoleto. of Cuecaro. Diego. Francisco. I Pedro Isidore Maniano (1790). 13 Pedro. 14 Cristoval. 15 Sonb. 1878. 526 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. Luis left two illegitimate children, one a son ; but his lawful heirs were adjudged to be the children of Maria de Mosquera, two daughters, one a nun and the other Filipa. This last presented a claim for the titles in opposition to the demands of Diego, the nephew of her father. She de- clared this cousin to be the natural, and not the lawful, ter marries son of Luis's brother. It was easy enough to forget her cousin _ . .. . 1 r> 1 i Diego, the such imputations in coming to the final conclusion, when Filipa and Diego took each other in marriage (May 15, 1573) to compose their diffei*ences, the husband be- coming Duke of Veragua. Filipa died in November, male line 1577, and her husband January 27, 1578. As they had no children, the male line of Columbus became extinct seventy years after his death. The lawsuit which followed for the settlement of the suc- The long cession was a famous one. It lasted thirty years. The its V many nd claimants were at first eight in number, but they were contestants. re( j uce( j to five by deaths during the progress of the trials. The first was Francesca, own sister of Diego, the late Duke. Her claim was- rejected ; but five generations later the digni- ties returned to her descendants. The second was the representative of Maria, the daughter of Luis, and sister-in-law of Diego. The claim made by her heir, the convent of San Quirce, was discarded. The third was Cristoval, the bastard son of Luis, who claimed to be the fruit of a marriage of Luis, concluded while he was in prison accused of polygamy. Cristoval died in 1601, before the cause was decided. The fourth was Alvaro de Portogallo, Count of Gelves, a son of Isabel, the sister of Luis. He had unsuccessfully claimed the titles when Luis died, in 1572, and again put forth his claims in 1578, when Diego died, but he himself died, pending a decision, in 1581. His son, Jorge Alberto, inherited his rights, but died in 1589, before a decision was reached, when his younger brother, Nuno de Portogallo, became the claimant, and his rights were established by the tribunal in 1608, when he became Duke of Veragua. His enjoyment of the title was not without unrest, but the attempts to dispossess him failed. The fifth was Cristoval de Cardona, Admiral of Aragon, son THE DESCENT OF COLUMBUS'S HONORS. 527 of Maria, elder sister of Luis. This claimant died in 1583, while his claim, having once been allowed, was held in abey- ance by an appeal of his rivals. His sister, Maria, was then adjudged inheritor of the honors, but she died in 1605, before the final decree. The sixth was Maria de la Cueva, daughter of Juana, sister of Luis, who died before December, 1600, while her daughter died in 1605, leaving Carlos Pacheco a claimant, whose rights were disallowed. The seventh was Balthazar Colombo, a descendant of a Do- menico Colombo, who was, according to the claim, the same Domenico who was the father of Columbus. His genealogical record was not accepted. The eighth was Bernardo Colombo, who claimed to be a de- scendant of Bartholomew Columbus, the Adelantado, a claim not made good. These last two contestants rested their title in part on the fact that their ancestors had always borne the name of Co- lombo, and this was required by Columbus to belong to the inhei'itors of his honors. The lineal ancestors of the other claim- ants had borne the names of Cardona, Portogallo, or Avila. From Nuno de Portogallo the titles descended to his son Alvaro Jacinto, and then to the latter's son, Pedro Nugo de Nuno. His rights were contested by Luis de Avila TuJceeds! (grandson of Cristoval, brother of Luis Colon), who ^ t d er the line tried in 1620 to reverse the verdict of 1608, and it changes - was not till 1664 that Pedro Nuno defeated his adversaries. He was succeeded by his son, Pedro Manuel, and he by his son, Pedro Nuiio, who died in 1733, when this male line became extinct. The titles were now illegally assumed by Pedro Nuno's sister, Catarina Ventura, who by marriage gave them to her husband, James Fitz-James Stuart, son of the famous Duke of Berwick, and by inheritance in his own right, Duke of Liria. When he died, in 1738, the titles passed to his son, Jacobo Eduardo ; thence to the latter's son, Cai'los Fernando, who transmitted them to his son, Jacobo Filipe. This last was obliged, by a verdict in 1790, which reversed the decree of 1664, to yield the titles to the line of Francesca, sister of Diego, the fourth 528 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. holder of them. This Francesca married Diego Ortegon, and their grandchild, Josefa, married Martin Larreategui, whose great-great-grandson, Mariano (by decrees 1790-96), became Duke of Veragua, from whom the title descended to his son, Pedro, and then to his grandson, Cristoval, the present Duke, born in 1837, whose heir, the next Duke, was born in 1878. The value of the titles is said to-day to represent about eight or ten thousand dollars, and this income is chargeable upon the revenues of Cuba and Porto Rico. In concluding this rapid sketch of the descent of the blood and honors of Columbus, two striking thoughts are presented. The Larreateguis are a Basque family. The blood of Colum- bus, the Genoese, now mingles with that of the hardiest race of navigators of western Europe, and of whom it may be ex- pected that if ever earlier contact of Europe with the New World is proved, these Basques will be found the forerunners of Columbus. The blood of the supposed discoverer of the west- ern passage to Asia flows with that of the earliest stock which is left to us of that Oriental wave of population which inun- dated Europe, in the far-away times when the races which make our modern Christian histories were being disposed in valleys and on the coasts of what was then the Western World. APPENDIX THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. There was a struggling effort of the geographical sense of the world for thirty years and more after the death of Columhus, before the fact began to be grasped that a great continent was in- Pro resg f terposed as a substantial and independent barrier in the discovery. track to India. It took nearly a half century more before men gener- ally recognized that fact, and then in most cases it was accepted with the reservation of a possible Asiatic connection at the extreme north. It was something more than two hundred and twenty years from the death of Columbus before that severance at the north was incontestably established by the voyage of Bering, and a hundred and thirty years longer before at last the contour of the northern coast of the con- tinent was established by the proof of the long-sought northwest pas- sage in 1850. We must now, to complete the story of the influence of Columbus, rehearse somewhat concisely the narrative of this pro- gressive outcome of that wonderful voyage of 1492. The spirit of western discovery, which Columbus imparted, was of long continu- ance. " If we wish to make ourselves thoroughly acquainted," says Dr. Kold, " with the history of discovery in the New World, we must not only follow the navigators on their ships, but we must look into the cabinets of princes and into the counting-houses of merchants, and likewise watch the scholars in their speculative studies." There was no rallying point for the scholar of cosmography enceof Ptoi- in those early days of discovery like the text and influence career""* hw of Ptolemy. We know little of this ancient geographer beyond the fact of his living in the early portion of the second century, and mainly at Alex- andria, the fittest home of a geographer at that time, since this Egyp- tian city was peerless for commerce and learning. Here he could do best what he advises all geographers to do, consult the journals of travelers, and get information of eclipses, as the same phenomena were 530 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. observed at different places ; such, for instance, as that of the moon noted at Arbela in the fifth, and seen at Carthage in the second hour. The precision of Ptolemy was covered out of sight by graphic fancies among the cosmographers of succeeding ages, till about the be- ginning of the fourteenth century Italy and the western Mediterra- nean islands began to produce those atlases of sea-charts, which have come down to us under the name of " portolanos ; " and still Portolanos. . . . later a new impetus was given to geographical study by the manuscripts of Ptolemy, with his maps, which began to be common in PTOLEMY. [From Reusner's Icones.~\ western Europe in the beginning of the fifteenth century, largely through the influence of communications with the Byzantine peoples. The portolanos, however, never lost their importance. Nordenskiold says that, from the great number of them still extant in Italy, we may deduce that they had a greater circulation during the sixteenth cen THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 531 tury than printed cartographical works. About five hundred of these sea-charts are known in Italian libraries, and the greater proportion of them are of Italian origin. It is a composite Latin text, brought into final shape by Jacobus Angelus not far from 1400-1410, which was the basis of the early printed editions of Ptolemy. This version was for a while circulated in manuscript, sometimes with copies of the maps of the Old World hav- ing a Latinized nomenclature ; and the public libraries of Europe con- tain here and there specimens of these early copies, one of which it is thought was known to Pierre d'Ailly. It is a question if Angelus supplied the maps which accompanied these early manuscripts, and which got into the Bologna edition of 1462 (wrongly dated for 1472), and into the metrical version of Berlingieri. These maps, whether always the same in the early manuscripts or not, were later superseded by a new set of maps made by a German cartographer, Nicolaus Donis, which he added to a revision of Angelus's Latin text, i^tinte^of These later maps were close copies of the original Greek Ptolemy. iattnnb' > uifol}$ mnmk-fft per i«Umd>a THE SO-CALLED ADMIRAL'S MAP. Razo," a name preserved to us to-day in the Cape Race of Newfound- land. There is abundant evidence of the non-communicative policy of Spain. Spain and Portugal conceal their geo- graphical secrets. This secretiveness was understood at the time Robert Thorne, in 1527, complained, as well as Sir Humphrey Gilbert in his Discoverie, that a similar injunction was later laid by Por- tugal. In Veitia Linage's Norte we read of the cabinets in which these maps were preserved, and how the Spanish THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 535 pilot major and royal cosmographer alone kept the keys. There exists a document by which one of the companions of Magellan was put under a penalty of two thousand ducats not to disclose the route he traversed in that famous voyage. We know how Columbus endeavored to conceal the route of his final voyage, in which he reached the coast of Veragua. MUNSTER, 1532. In the two maps of nearly equal date, being the earliest engraved charts which we have, the Ruysch map of 1508 and the so-called Ad- miral's map of 1507 (1513), the question of a strait leading A 8 t raitto to the Asiatic seas, which Columbus had spent so much en- India - ergy in trying to find during his last voyage, is treated differently. We have seen that La Cosa confessed his uncertain knowledge by covering 536 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. ** bafhan ^imftcr in bitf bofce of bnt= uerfall Cofmograpbiertx^enntbe Diligent rraDcr map fee rije aooD CucceflTeant* retoarDe of noble an& tjonefte enrerpjpfes, Op the tpbtffy,/u>t onlp raculo* i (ptpdica areobtapneo, butalCo&oDtsgio* nfteD,$t&e£fct- ftian faptjjm; UcgfD. STtanflateo out of ffatfn into &n§iitt)( . )|0p IftpcfcarOe £Drn. ^Prato* fpcmfubfp** and lingered even beyond the time when Cortes showed there was no ground for it. We find it in Schemer's globes, in the Tross gores, and even so late as 1532, in the belated map of Minister. The map of the Globus Mundi (Strassburg, 1509) has some sig- nificance as being the earliest issued north of the Alps, re- cording both the Portuguese and Spanish discoveries; t E o a 8 r how map though it merely gives the projecting angle of the South madenorti. American coast as representing the developments of the of the Alps - west. It is doubtful if any reference to the new discoveries had appeared in English literature before Alexander Barclay produced in 1509 a 538 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. translation of Brant's Ship of Fools, and for a few years there were only chance references which made no impression on the ences to literary instincts of the time. It was not till after the mid- dle of the century, in 1553, that Richard Eden, translating a section of Sebastian Minister's Cosmographia, published it in London as a Treatyse of the neiue India, and English-reading people first saw a considerable account of what the rest of Europe had been doing in Richard contrast with the English maritime apathy. Two years later Eden. (1555), Eden, drawing this time upon Peter Martyr, did much in his Decades of the Newe World to enlarge the English con- ceptions. But the most striking and significant of all the literary movements Thenamin which grew out of the new oceanic developments was that of America. w hich gave a name to the New World, and has left a conti- nent, which Columbus unwittingly found, the monument of another's fame. It was in September, 1504, that Vespucius, remembering an old schoolmate in Florence, Piero Soderini, who was then the tember. ep " perpetual Gonfaloniere of that city, took what it is sup- Vespucius. posed he had written out at length concerning his experi- ences in the New World, and made an abstract of it in Italian. Dating this on the 4th of that month, he dispatched it to Italy. It is a question whether the original of this abridged text of Vespucius is now known, though Varnhagen, with a confidence few scholars have shared, has claimed such authenticity for a text which he has printed. It concerns us chiefly to know that somehow a copy of this con- densed narrative of Vespucius came into the hands of his fellow- townsman, Fra Giovanni Giocondo, then in Paris at work as an archi- tect constructing a bridge over the Seine. It is to be allowed that R. H. Major, in tracing the origin of the French text, assumes some- thing to complete his story, and that this precise genesis of the narra- tive which was received by Duke Rene" of Lorraine is open to some question. The supposition that a young Alsatian, then in Paris, Ma- thias Ringmann, had been a friend of Giocondo, and had been the bearer of this new version to Rene", is likewise a conjecture. Whether Ringmann was such a messenger or not matters little, but the time was fast approaching when this young man was to be associated with a proposition made in the little village of St. Did, in the Vosges, which was one of those obscure but far-reaching mental premonitions so often affecting the world's history, without the backing of great names or great events. This almost unknown place was within the domain of this same Duke Rend, a wise man, who THE (GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 539 liked scholars and scholarly tomes. His patronage had fostered there a small college and a printing-press. There had been grouped around these agencies a number of learned men, or those D " ke ****" VESPUCIUS. ambitious of knowledge. Scholars in other parts of Europe, when they heard of this little coterie, wondered how its members had conwl- gated there. One Walter Lud, or Gualterus Ludovicus, as they lik«I 540 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. to Latinize his name, a dependent and secretary of Duke Rend, was now a man not much under sixty, and he had heen the grouper and manager of this body of scholars. There had lately been brought to join them this same Mathias Ringmann, who came from Paris with all the learning that he had tried to imbibe under the tutoring of Dr. John Faber. If we believe the story as Major has worked it out, Ringmann had come to this sparse community with all the fervor for the exploits of Vespucius which he got in the French capital from associating with that Florentine's admirer, the architect Giocondo. Coming to St. Did, Ringmann had been made a professor of Latin, and with the usual nominal alternation had become known as Phi- lesius ; and as such he appears a little later in connection with a Latin version of the French of Giocondo, which was soon made by another of the St. Die scholars, a canon of the cathedral there, Jean Bassin de Sandacourt. Still another young man, Walter Waldseemuller, had not long before been made a teacher of geography in the college, and his name, as was the wont, had been classicized into Hylacomylus. There have now been brought before the reader all the actors in this little St. Did drama, upon which we, as Americans, must gaze back through the centuries as upon the baptismal scene of a continent. The Duke had emphasized the cosmographical studies of the age by this appointment of an energetic young student of geography, who waidsee- seems to have had a deft hand at map-making. Waldsee- muller. muller had some hand, at least, in fashioning a map of the new discoveries at the west, and the Duke had caused the map to be engraved, and we find a stray note of sales of it singly as early as 1507, though it was not till 1513 that it fairly got before the world in the Ptolemy of that year. Waldseemuller had also developed out of these studies a little cosmographical treatise, which the college press was set to work upon, and to swell it to the dignity of a book, thin as it still was, the diminutive quarto was made to include Bassin's Latin version of the Vespucius narrative, set out with some Latin verses by Rinmnann. The little book called Cosmonraphioe Intro- Cosmo- & . , . „ • o urnphice (liictio was brought out at this obscure college press in ot Did, in April and August, 1507. There were some varieties in each of these issues, while that part which constituted the Vespucius narrative was further issued in a separate publication. It was in this form that Vespucius's narrative was for the first time, unless Varnhagen's judgment to the contrary be accepted by the reader, brought before the world. The most significant quality of the little book, however, was the proposition which Waldseemuller, with his anonymous views on cosmography, advanced in the introductory parts. Tt is assumed by writers on the subject that it was not Waldseemuller THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 541 alone who was responsible for the plan there given to name that part of the New World which Americus Vespucius had described after the voyager who had so graphically told his experiences on its shores. The plan, it is supposed, met with the approval of, or was the outcome COSMOGRAPHIAE INTRODVCTIO CVM QVIBVS DAM GEOME TRIAE AC ASTRONO MIAEPRINCIPHSAD E AM REM NECESSARUS Infuper ejuattuor Amend Veipucij nauigatione& Vniuerfalfs Cofmographfae defcrfptfo f ant infolido cpplano/eisetiam infem's quarPtholomcp ignotaanu peris reperca funk DISTHYCON Cum deus aftra fegat/8t teroe climata Caefar Nee tellus/nec eis fydera maius habenu TITLE OF THE COSMOGRAPHIES INTRODUCTIO. of the counsels of, this little band of St. Did scholars collectively. It is not the belief of students generally that this coterie, any more than Vespucius himself, ever imagined that the new regions were really dis- joined from the Asiatic main, though Varnhagen contends that Ves- pucius knew they were. One thing is certainly true : that there was 542 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. no intention to apply the name which was now proposed to anything more than the continental mass of the Brazilian shore which Vespucius had coasted, and which was looked upon as a distinct region from the islands which Columbus had traversed. It had come to be believed that the archipelago of Columbus was far from the paradise of luxury and wealth that his extravagant terms called for, and which the de- scriptions of Marco Polo had led the world to expect, supposing the regions of the overland and oceanic discoverers to be the same. Fur- ther than this, a new expectation had been aroused by the reports which had come to Europe of the vaster proportions and of the bril- liant paroquets — for such trivial aspects gave emphasis — of the more southern regions. It was an instance of the eagerness with which deluded minds, to atone for their first disappointment, grasp at the Mundus chances of a newer satisfaction. This was the hope which Novus. was entertained of this Mundus Novus of Vespucius, — not a new world in the sense of a new continent. The Espanola and its neighboring regions of Columbus, and the Baccalaos of Cabot and Cortereal, clothed in imagination with the de- scriptions of Marco Polo, were nothing but the Old World approached from the east instead of from the west. It was different with the Mundtis Novus of Vespucius. Here was in reality a new life and habitation, doubtless connected, but how it was not known, with the great eastern world of the merchants. It corresponded with nothing, so far as understood, in the Asiatic chorography. It was ready for a new name, and it was alone associated with the man who had, in the autumn of 1502, so described it, and from no one else could its name be so acceptably taken. Europe and Asia were geographically con- tiguous, and so might be Asia and the new "America." The sudden eclipse which the name of Columbus underwent, as the fame of Vespucius ran through the popular mind, was no Columbus's unusual thing in the vicissitudes of reputations. Factitious prominence is gained without great difficulty by one or for one, if popular issues of the press are worked in his interest, and if a great variety of favoring circumstances unite in giving currency to rumors and reports which tend to invest him with exclusive interest. The curious public willingly lends itself to any end that taxes nothing but its credulity and good nature. We have associated with Vespucius just the elements of such a suc- Fame of cess, while the fame of Columbus was waning to the death, Vespucius. namely : a stretch of continental coast, promising something more than the scattered trifles of an insalubrious archipelago ; a new southern heavens, offering other glimpses of immensity ; descriptions that were calculated to replace in new variety and mystery the stale THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 54o stories of Cipango and Cathay: the busy yearnings of a group of young and ardent spirits, having all the apparatus of a press to apply to the making of a public sentiment ; and the enthusiasm of narrators who sought to season their marvels of discovery with new delights and honors. The hold which Vespucius had seized upon the imagination of Eu- rope, and which doubtless served to give him prominence in the popu- lar appreciation, as it has served many a ready and picturesque writer since, was that glowing redundancy of description, both of the earth and the southern constellations, which forms so conspicuous a feature of his narratives. It was the Liter voyage of Vespucius, and not his alleged voyage of 1497, which raised, as Humboldt has pointed out, the great interest which his name suggested. Just what the notion prevailing at the time was of the respective exploits of Columbus and Vespucius is easily gathered from a letter dated May 20, 1506, which appears in a Dyalogus and Vespu- Johannis Stamler de diversarum geiicium sectis, et mundi regionibus, published in 1508. In this treatise a reference is made to the letters of Columbus (1493) and Vespucius (1503) as concerning an insular and continental space respectively. It speaks of " Cris- tofer Colom, the discoverer of neiv islands, and of Albericus Vespu- cius concerning the new discovered world, to both of whom our age is most largely indebted." It will be remembered that an early misnam- ing of Vespucius by calling him Albericus instead of Americus, which took place in one of the early editions of his narrative, remained for some time to confuse the copiers of them. If we may judge from a diagram which Vespucius gives of a globe with two standing men on it ninety degrees apart, each dropping a line to the centre of the earth, this navigator had grasped, together with the idea of the sphericity of the globe, the essential conditions of gravitation. There could be no up-hill sailing on gravita- when the zenith was always overhead. Curiously enough, the supposition of Columbus, when as he sailed on his third voyage he found the air grow colder, was that he was actually sailing up-hill, as- cending a protuberance of the earth which was like the stem end of a pear, with the crowning region of the earthly paradise atop of all ! Such contrasts show the lesser navigator to be the greater physicist, and they go not a small way in accounting for the levelness of head which gained the suffrages of the wise. When Duke Rene", upon whom so much had depended in the little community at St. Die", died, in 1508, the geographical print- 1508 Duke ing schemes of Waldseemuller and his fellows received a Ren6 die- the earliest of the Ptolemies in which we find the name accepted on its maps. FRIESS (Frisius), IN THE PTOLEMY OF 1522. THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 553 There is one significant fact concerning the conflict of the Crown with the heirs of Columbus, which followed upon the Admiral's death, and in which the advocates of the government sought to prove that the claim of Columbus to have discovered the continental shore about the Gulf of Paria in 1498 was not to be sustained in view of visits by others at an earlier date. This significant fact is that Vespucius is not once mentioned during the litigation. It is of course possible, and perhaps probable, that it was for the interests of both parties to keep out of view a servant of Portugal trenching upon what was believed to be Spanish territories. The same impulse could hardly have influ- enced Ferdinand Columbus in the silent acquiescence which, as a con- temporary informs us, was his attitude towards the action of the St. Die - professors. There seems little doubt of his acceptance of a view, then undoubtedly common, that there was no conflict of the claims of the respective navigators, because their different fields of exploration had not brought such claims in juxtaposition. Following, however, upon the assertion of Waldseemuller, that Ves- pucius had "found" this continental tract needing a name, there grew up a belief in some quarters, and deducible from the very obscure chronology of his narrative, which formulated itself in a statement that Vespucius had really been the first to set foot on any part of this extended main. It was here that very soon the landed on jealousy of those who had the good name of Columbus in maiu? utl ' era their keeping began to manifest itself, and some time after 1527, — if we accept that year as the date of his beginning work on the Historia, — Las Casas, who had had some intimate relations with Columbus, tells us that the report was rife of Vespucius himself being privy to such pretensions. Unless Las Casas, or the reporters to whom he referred, had material of which no one now has knowledge, it is certain that there is no evidence connecting Vespucius with the St. Die' proposition, and it is equally certain that evidence fails to estab- lish beyond doubt the publication of any map bearing the name Amer- ica while Vespucius lived. He had been made pilot major of Spain March 22, 1508, and had died February 22, 1512. We have no chart made by Vespucius himself, though it is known that in 1518 such a chart was in the possession of Ferdinand, brother of Charles vespucius's the Fifth. The recovery of this chart would doubtless ren- ma P s - der a signal service in illuminating this and other questions of early American cartography. It might show us how far, if at all, Vespu- cius " sinfully failed towards the Admiral," as Las Casas i*eports of him, and adds : " If Vespucius purposely gave not privy to currency to this belief of his first setting foot on the main, it was a great wickedness ; and if it was not done intentionally, it looks 554 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. like it." With all this predisposition, however, towards an implication of Vespucius, Las Casas was cautious enough to consider that, after all, it may have been the St. Die* coterie who were alone responsible for starting the rumor. It is very clear that in Spain there had been no recognition of the name " America," nor was it ever officially recognized by not used in the Spanish government. Las Casas understood that it had been applied by " foreigners," who had, as he says, " called America what ought to be called Columba." Just what date should 1511 Mer- & ttach to this protest of Las Casas is not determinable. If it cator first -y Tas later than the gore-map of Mercator in 1541, which applied the ° _ x name to was the first, so far as is known, to apply the name to both both North „ , ' . , . . , and South JNorth and South America, there is certainly good reason for the disquietude of Las Casas. If it was before that, it was because, with the progress of discovery, it had become more and more clear that all parts of the new regions were component parts of an absolutely new continent, upon which the name of the first discov- erer of any part of it, main or insular, ought to have been bestowed. That it should be left to " foreign writers," as Las Casas said, to give a name representing a rival interest to a world that Spanish enter- prise had made known was no less an indignity to Spain than to her great though adopted Admiral. [See Note on p. 660.] It happens that the suggestion which sprang up in the Vosges worked steadily onward through the whole of central Europe. That it had so successful a propagation is owing, beyond a doubt, as much to the exclusive spirit of the Spanish government in keeping to itself its hydrographical progress as to any other cause. We themme in have seen how the name spread through Germany and Aus- rope™ 1 Eu tr i a - It was taken up by Stobnicza in Poland in 1512, in a Cracow introduction to Ptolemy ; and many other of the geographical writers of central and southern Europe adopted the des- ignation. The Neiv Interlude, published in England in 1519, had used it, and towards the middle of the century the fame of Ves- pucius had occupied England, so far as Sir Thomas More and William Cunningham represent it, to the almost total obscuration of Columbus. It was but a question of time when Vespucius would be charged with promoting his own glory by borrowing the plumes of Columbus. Whether Las Casas, in what has been quoted, initiated such accusa- tions or not, the account of that writer was in manuscript and could have had but small currency. The first accusation in print, so far as has been discovered, came from the German geographer, Johann Schoner. who, having already in his earlier globes adopted the name America, now in a tract called THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 555 Opusculum Geographicum, which he printed at Nuremberg in 1533, openly charged Vespucius with attaching his own name to 1533. scho- a region of India Superior. Two years later, Servetus, vespucius 8 while he repeated in his Ptolemy of 1535 the earlier maps £u> ^/the a ~ bearing the name America, entered in his text a protest injustice. against its use by alleging distinctly that Columbus was earlier than Vespucius in finding the new main. Within a little more than a year from the death of Vespucius, and while the maps assigned to Waldseemuller were pressed on the atten- tion of scholars, the integralness of the great southern continent, to which a name commemorating Americus had been given, was made manifest, or at least probable, by the discovery of Balboa. Let us now see how the course of discovery was finding record dur- ing these early years of the sixteenth century in respect to . . the great but unsuspected barrier which actually interposed suspected. in the way of those who sought Asia over against Spain. In the north, the discoveries of the English under Cabot, and of the Portuguese under the Corte reals, soon led the Normans and D isc0Teries Bretons from Dieppe and Saint Malo to follow in the wake in the north, of such predecessors. As early as 1504 the fishermen of these latter peoples seem to have been on the northern coasts, and we owe to them the name of Cape Breton, which is thought to mans and be the oldest French name in our American geography. It is the " Gran Capitano " of Ramusio who credits the Bretons with these early visits at the north, though we get no positive cartograph- ical record of such visits till 1520, in a map which is given by Kunst- raann in his Atlas. Again, in 1505, some Portuguese appear to have been on the New- foundland coast under the royal patronage of Henry VII. 1505 Por of England, and by 1506 the Portuguese fishermen were tu e ues e- regular frequenters of the Newfoundland banks. We find in the old maps Portuguese names somewhat widely scattered on the neighboring coast lines, for the frequenting of the region by the fishermen of that nation continued well towards the close of tbe century. There are also stories of one Velasco, a Spaniard, visiting the St. Lawrence in 1506, and Juan de Agramonte in 1511 entered 150( . g into an agreement with the Spanish King to pursue discov- iards - ery in these parts more actively, but we have no definite knowledge of results. The death of Ferdinand, January 23, 1516, would seem to have put a stop to a voyage which had already been planned for Spain by Se- bastian Cabot, to find a northwest passage ; but the next year (1517) 556 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. Cabot, in behalf of England, had sailed to Hudson's Strait, and thence 1517 Sebas noi 'th t° 67° 30', finding " no night there," and observing tian Cabot, extraordinary variations of the compass. Somewhat later 15^1 p there are the very doubtful claims of the Portuguese to ex- guese. plorations under Fagundes about the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 1521. By 1506 also there is something like certainty respecting the Nor- mans, and under the influence of a notable Dieppese, Jean go's cap- Ango, we soon meet a class of adventurous mariners tempt- ing distant and marvelous seas. We read of Pierre Cri- gnon, and Thomas Aubert, both of Dieppe, Jean Denys of Honfleur, and Jean Parmentier, all of whom have come down to us through the pages of Ramusio. It is of Jean Denys in 1506, and of Thomas Au- bert a little later, that we find the fullest recitals. To Denys there Den s's ^as Deen ascribed a mysterious chart of the Gulf of St. Law- map, rence ; but if the copy which is preserved represents it, there can be no hesitation in discarding it as a much later cartographical record. The original is said to have been found in the archives of the ministry of war in Paris so late as 1854, but no such map is found there now. The copy which was made for the Canadian archives is at Ot- tawa, and I have been favored by the authorities there with a tracing of it. No one of authority will be inclined to dispute the judgment of Harrisse that it is apocryphal. We are accordingly left in uncertainty just how far at this time the contour of the Golfo Quadrago, as the Gulf of St. Lawrence was called, was made out. Aubert is said to have brought to France seven of the natives of the region in 1509. Ten years or more later (1519, etc.), the Baron de Lery is thought to have attempted a French settlement thereabouts, of which perhaps the only traces were some European cattle, the de- scendants of his small herd landed there in 1528, which were found on Sable Island many years later. We know from Herrera that in 1526 Nicholas Don. a Breton, was 1596 Nich fishing off Baccalaos, and Rut tells us that in 1527 Nor- oias Don. man and Breton vessels were pulling fish on the shores of Newfoundland. Such mentions mark the early French knowledge of these northern coasts, but there is little in it all to show any contribu- tion to geographical developments. Before this, however, the first serious attempt of which we have Attempts to incontrovertible evidence was made to connect these dis- northem coveries in the north with those of the Spanish in the An- wM°thoseof tilles. As early as 1511 the map given by Peter Martyr the Spanish. had shown that, from the native reports or otherwise, a 1511. Peter notion had arisen of lands lying north of Cuba. In 1512 Martyr's •> ° map. Ponce de Leon was seeking a commission to authorize him THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 557 \i I & 1 MM CM&Btil^l 9* f £*W-^ V^vibfT. — tv PETER MARTYR, 1511. 558 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. to go and see what this reported land was like, with its fountain of 1512. Pouce youth. He got it February 23, 1512, when Ferdinand com- deLecm. missioned him "to find and settle the island of Bimini," if none had already been there, or if Portugal had not already acquired PONCE DE LEON. [From Barcia's Herrera.~\ possession in any part that he sought. Delays in preparation post- poned the actual departure of his expedition from Porto Rico till March, 1513. On the 23d of that month, Easter Sunday, he struck the mainland somewhere opposite the Bahamas, and named the country Florida, from the day of the calendar. He tracked the coast northward to a little above 30° north latitude. Then he retraced his way, and rounding the southern cape, 1513. March THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 559 560 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. went well up the western side of the peninsula. Whether any stray explorers had been before along this shore may be a question. Pri- vate Spanish or Portuguese adventurers, or even Englishmen, had not been unknown in neighboring waters some years earlier, as we have evidence. We find certainly in this voyage of Ponce de Leon for the first time an unmistakable official undertaking, which we might expect would soon have produced its cartographical record. The interdicts of the Council of the Indies were, however, too powerful, and the old lines of the Cantino map still lingered in the maps for some years., though by 1520 the Floridian peninsula began to take recognizable shape in certain Spanish maps. Just what stood for Bimini in the reports of this expedition is not clear ; but there seems to have been a vague notion of its not being the same as Florida, for when Ponce de Leon got a new patent in September, 1514, he was authorized to settle both " islands," Bimini and Florida, and Diego Colon as viceroy was di- rected to help on the expedition. Seven years, however, passed in delays, so that it was not till 1521 that he attempted to make a settle- ment, but just at what point is not known. Sickness and loss in en- counters with the Indians soon discouraged him, and he returned to Cuba to die of an arrow wound received in one of the forays of the natives. It was still a question if Florida connected with any adjacent lands. Several minor expeditions had added something to the stretch of coast, 1519 Pi- Du t *he maui problem still stood unsolved. In 1519 Pineda neda. had made the circuit of the northern shores of the Gulf of Mexico, and at the river Panuco he had been challenged by Cortes as trenching on his government. Turning again eastward, Pineda found the mouth of the river named by him Del Espiritu Santo, which passes with many modern students as the first indication in history of the great Mississippi, while others trace the first signs of that river to Cabeca de Vaca in 1528, or to the passage higher up its current by De Soto in 1541. Believing it at first the long-looked-for strait to pass to the Indies, Pineda entered it, only to be satisfied that it must gather the watershed of a continent, which in this part was now named Ami- chel. It seemed accordingly certain that no passage to the west was to be found in this part of the gulf, and that Florida must be more than an island. While these explorations were going on in the gulf, others were con- ducted on the Atlantic side of Florida. If the Pompey Stone which lias been found in New York State, to the confusion of historical stu- dents, be accepted as genuine, it is evidence that the Spaniard had in 1520 penetrated frOm some point on the coast to that region. In THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 561 1520 we get demonstrable proof, when Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon sent a caravel under Gordillo, which joined company on the way 15QQ with another vessel bound on a slave-hunting expedition, Ayllon. and the two, proceeding northward, sigbted the main coast at a river which they found to be in thirty-three and a half degrees of north lati- tude, on the South Carolina coast. They returned without further ex- ploration. Ayllon, without great success, attempted further explorations in 1525 ; but in 1526 he went again with greater preparations, and made his landfall a little farther north, near the mouth of the Wateree River, which he called the Jordan, and sailed on to the Chesapeake, THE AYLLON MAP. where, with the help of negro slaves, then first introduced into this re- gion, he began the building of a town at or near the spot s pail j ar( j s j„ where the English in the next century founded Jamestown ; Virginia. or at least this is the conjecture of Dr. Shea. Here Ayllon died of a pestilential fever October 18, 1526, when the disheartened colonists, one hundred and fifty out of the original five hundred, returned to Santo Domingo. While these unfortunate experiences were in progress, Estevan Gomez, sent by the Spanish government, after the close of 15<>4 the conference at Badajos, to make sure that there was no Gomez - passage to the Moluccas anywhere along this Atlantic coast, started in the autumn of 1524, if the data we have admit of that conclusion as to the time, from Corunna, in the north of Spain. He proceeded at once, as Charles V. had directed him, to the Baccalaos region, striking the mainland possibly at Labrador, and then turned south, carefully examining all inlets. We have no authoritative narrative sanctioned by his name, or by that of any one accompanying the expe- Chave8 . 8 dition ; nor has the map which Alonso Chaves made to con- ma P- 562 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. form to what was reported by Gomez been preserved, but the essen- tial features of the exploi'ation are apparently embodied in the great 15-x) Ri _ map of Ribero (1529), and we have sundry stray references bero's map. j n ^he later chroniclers. From all this it would seem that Gomez followed the coast southward to the point of Florida, and made it certain to most minds that no such passage to India existed, though there was a lingering suspicion that the Gulf of St. Lawrence had not been sufficiently explored. Let us turn now to the southern shores of the Caribbean Sea. New efforts at colonizing here were undertaken in 1508-9. By Shores of . . . . the Carib- this time the coast had been pretty caretully made out as far as Honduras, largely through the explorations of Ojeda and Juan de la Cosa. The scheme was a dual one, and introduces us to two new designations of the regions separated by that indentation Ojeda and °^ * ne coas * ; known as the Gulf of Uraba. Here Ojeda and Nicuessa. Nicuessa were sent to organize governments, and rule their respective provinces of Nueva Andalusia and Castilla del Oro for the period of four years. Mention has already been made of this in the preceding chapter. They delayed getting to their governments, quar- reled for a while about their bounds on each other, fought the natives with desperation but not with much profit, lost La Cosa in one of the encounters, and were thwarted in their purpose of holding Jamaica as a granary and in getting settlers from Espanola by the alertness of Diego Colon, who preferred to be tributary to no one. All this had driven Ojeda to great stress in the little colony of San Sebastian which he had founded. He attempted to return for aid to Espanola, and was wrecked on the voyage. This caused him to miss his lieutenant Enciso, who was on his way to him with recruits. So Ojeda passes out of history, except so far as he tells his story in the tes- timony he gave in the suit of the heirs of Columbus in 1513-15. New heroes were coming on. A certain Pizarro had been left in command by Ojeda, — not many years afterwards to be heard of. One Vasco Nunez de Balboa, a poor and debt- burdened fugitive, was on board of Enciso' s ship, and had wit enough to suggest that a region like San Sebastian, inhabited by tribes which used poisoned arrows, was not the place for a colony struggling for existence and dependent on foraging. So they removed the remnants of the colony, which Enciso had turned back as they were escaping, to the other side of the bay, and in this way the new settlement came within the jurisdiction of Nicuessa, whom a combination soon deposed and shipped to sea, never to be heard of. It was in these commotions that Vasco Nunez de Balboa brought himself into a prominence that THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 563 ended in his being commissioned by Diego Colon as governor of the new colony. He had, meanwhile, got more knowledge of a great sea at the westward than Columbus had acquired on the coast of Veragua El AdcLoArtndo BAS CO NUNES da ocere $ ; - qnt dts-cubrzo la -mar dUl Siif, BALBOA. [From Barcia's Herrera."] in 1503. Balboa rightly divined that its discovery, if he could effect it, would serve him a good purpose in quieting any jealousies of his rule, of which he was beginning to observe symptoms. So on the 1st of September, 1513, he set out in the direction which the natives had indicated, and by the 24th he had reached a mountain from the top 564 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. of which his guides told him he would behold the sea. On the 25th his party ascended, himself in front, and it was not boa and the long before he stood gazing upon the distant ocean, the first South Sea. ^ Europeans to discern the long-coveted sea. Down the other slope the Spaniards went. The path was a difficult one, and it was three days before one of his advanced squads reached the beach. Not till the next day, the 29th, did Vasco Nunez himself join those in advance, when, striding into the tide, he took possession of the sea and its bordering lands in the name of his sovereigns. It was on Saint Miguel's Day, and the Bay of Saint Miguel marks the spot to-day. Towards the end of January, 1514, he was again with the colony at Antigua del Darien. Thence, in March, he dispatched a messenger to Spain with news of the great discovery. This courier did not reach Europe till after a new expedition had been dispatched under Pedrarias, and with him went a number of followers, who did in due time their part in thrid- ding and designating these new paths of exploration. We recognize among them Hernando de Soto, BernaJ Diaz, the chronicler of the ex- ploits of Cortes, and Oviedo, the historian. It was from April till June, 1514, that Pedrarias was on his way, and it was not long before the new governor with his imposing array of strength brought the re- cusant Balboa to trial, out of which he emerged burdened with heavy fines. The new governor planned at once to reap the fruits of Bal- boa's discovery. An expedition was sent along his track, which em- barked on the new sea and gathered spoils where it could. Pedrarias soon grew jealous of Balboa, for it was not without justice that the state of the augmented colony was held to compare unfavorably with the conditions which Balboa had maintained during his rule. But con- stancy was never of much prevalence in these days, and Balboa's chains, lately imposed, were stricken off to give him charge of an exploration of the sea which he had discovered. Once hei*e, Balboa planned new conquests and a new independency. Pedrarias, hearing of it through a false friend of Balboa, enticed the latter into his neigh- boa exe- borhood. and a trial was soon set on foot, which ended in the execution of Balboa and his abettors. This was in 1517. It was not long before Pedrarias removed his capital to Panama, and in 1519 and during the few following years his captains pushed their explorations northerly along the shores of the South Sea, as the new ocean had been at once called. As early as 1515 Pizarro and Morales had wandered down the coast southward to a region called Biru by the natives, and this was as far as adventure had carried any Spaniard, dur» THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 565 ing the ten years since Balboa's discovery. They had learned here of a rich region farther on, and it got to be spoken of by the same name, or by a perversion of it, as Peru. In this interval the town 1519 Pana of Panama had been founded (1519), and Pizarro and »»» founded. Almagro, with the priest Luque, were among those to whom allot- ments were made. It was by these three associates, in 1524 and 1526, that the expedi- tions were organized which led to the exploration of the coasts of Peru and the conquest of the region. The equa- tor was crossed in 1526 ; in 1527 they reached 9° south. It was not till 1535 that, in the progress of events, a knowledge of the coast was extended south to the neighborhood of Lima, which was founded in that year. In the autumn of 1535, Almagro started south to make conquest of Chili, and the bay of Valparaiso was occupied in September, 1536. Eight years later, in 1544, explorations were pushed south to 41°. It was only in 1557 that expeditions reached the archipelago of Chiloe, and the whole coast of South America on the Pacific was made out with some de- tail down to the region which Magellan had skirted, as will be shortly shown. It will be remembered that in 1503 Columbus had struck the coast of Honduras west of Cape Gracias a Dios. He learned then of lands to the northwest from some Indians whom he met in a canoe, but his eagerness to find the strait of his dreams led him south. It was four- teen years before the promise of that canoe was revealed. 1 508 In 1508 Ocampo had found the western extremity of Cuba, Ocaiiipo and made the oath of Columbus ridiculous. In 1517 a slave-hunting expedition, having steered towards the west from Cuba, discovered the shores of Yucatan ; and the next 1517 Yu - year (1518) the real exploration of that region began when catan. Juan de Grijalva, a nephew of the governor of Cuba, led thither an expedition which explored the coast of Yucatan and Mexico. When Grijalva returned to Cuba in 1518, it was to find an expedi- tion already planned to follow up his discoveries, and Her- igig nando Cortes, who had been in the New World since 1504, Cort es- had been chosen to lead it, with instructions to make further explora- tions of the coast, — a purpose veiy soon to become obscured in other objects. He sailed on the 17th of November, and stopped along the coast of Cuba for recruits, so it was not till February 18, . 1519. 1519, that he sunk the shores of Cuba behind him, and in March he was skirting the Yucatan shore and sailed on to San Juan de Uloa. In due time, forgetting his instructions, and caring for other 566 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. conquests than those of discovery, he began his march inland. The story of the conquest of Mexico does not help us in the aim now in view, and we leave it untold. de &RI J^iVA etc- GRIJALVA. [Prom Barcia's Herrera.'] It was not long after this conquest before belated apostles of the belief of Columbus appeared, urging that the capital of Mon- tezuma was in reality the Quinsay of Marco Polo, with its great commercial interests, as was maintained by Schoner in his Opus- culum Geographicum in 1533. We have seen how Pineda's expedition to the northern parts of the ]5 . )0 Gulf of Mexico in 1519 had improved the knowledge of Garay. that shore, and we have a map embodying these explora- tions, which was sent to Spain in 1520 by Garay, then governor of THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 567 Jamaica. It was now pretty clear that the blank spaces of earlier maps, leaving it uncertain if there was a passage westerly Gu i fo f- somewhere in the northwest corner of the gulf, should be MexlC0 - GLOBE GIVEN IN SCHONERS OPUSCULUM GEOGRAPHICUM, 1533. filled compactly. Still, a belief that such a passage existed some- where in the western contour of the gulf was not readily abandoned. Cortes, when he sent to Spain his sketch of the gulf, which was published there in 1524, was dwelling on the hope that tes'sGuif of some such channel existed near Yucatan, and his insular 568 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. delineation of that peninsula, with a shadowy strait at its hase, was eagerly grasped by the cartographers. Such a severance finds a place in the map of Maiollo of 1527, which is preserved in the Am- brosian library at Milan. Grijalva, some years earlier, had been sent, as we have seen, to sail round Yucatan ; and though there are various theories about the origin of that name, it seems likely enough that the tendency to give it an insular form arose from a misconception of the Indian appellation. At all events, the island of Yucatan lingered long in the early maps. / UL Yucatan as an island. TltRRA GULF OF MEXICO, 1520. In 1523 Coi'tes had sent expeditions up the Pacific, and one up the 1523. Atlantic side of North America, to find the wished-for pas- sage ; but in vain. Cortes. Meanwhile, important movements were making by the Portuguese beyond that great sea of the south which Balboa had dis- Portuguese covered- These movements were little suspected by the rivalries. Sp an i ar ds till the development of them brought into con- tact these two great oceanic rivals. The Portuguese, year after year, had extended farther and farther their conquests by the African route. Arabia, India, Malacca, Suma- THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 569 tra, fell under their sway, and their course was still eastward, until in 1511 the -coveted land of spices, the clove and the nutmeg, 1511 Mo was reached in the Molucca Islands. This progress of the luccas - Portuguese had been watched with a jealous eye by Spain. It was a question if, in passing to these islands, the Portuguese had not crossed the line of demarcation as carried to the antipodes. If they had, territory neighboring to the Spanish American discoveries had been GULF OF MEXICO, BY CORTES. appropriated by that rival power wholly unconfronted. This was simply because the Spanish navigators had not as yet succeeded in finding a passage through the opposing barrier of what they were be- ginning to suspect was after all an intervening land. Meanwhile, Co- lumbus and all since his day having failed to find such a passage by way of the Caribbean Sea, and no one yet discovering any a western at the north, nothing was left but to seek it at the south, soughtat This was the only chance of contesting with the Portuguese the south - the rights which occupation was establishing for them at the Moluccas. 570 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. On the 29th of June, 1508, a new expedition left San Lucar under Pinzon and Solis. They made their landfall near Cape St. zonand Augustine, and, passing south along the coast of what had now come to be commonly called Brazil, they traversed the opening of the broad estuary of the La Plata without knowing it, and MAKE INDiCOM MAIOLLO MAP, 1527. went five degrees beyond (40° south latitude) without finding the sought-for passage. There is some reason to suppose that as early as 1511 the Portu- guese had become in some degree familiar with the coast gues'e at Rio about Rio de Janeiro, and there is a story of one Juan de de Janeiro. Braza set tling near this striking bay at this early day. It THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 571 was during: the same year (1511) that Ferdinand Columbus ° . • J v . . . Ferdinand prepared his Colon de Concordia, and in this he main- Columbus tained the theory of a passage to be found somewhere be- western pa»- yond the point towards the south which the explorers had sage- thus far reached. DE COSTA'S DRAWING FROM THE LENOX GLOBE A few years later (1516) the Spanish King sent Juan Diaz de Solis to search anew for a passage. He found the La Plata, and for a while hoped he had discovered the looked-for strait. Magellan, who had taken some umbrage during his Portuguese ser- vice, came finally to the Spanish King, and, on the plea that the Moluc- 572 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. cas fell within the Spanish range under the line of demarcation, sug- 1519 Ma- g este d an expedition to occupy them. He professed to be able geUan t re ach them by a strait which he could find somewhere to the south of the La Plata. It has long been a question if Magellan's SCHONER'S GLOBE, 1520. anticipation was based simply on a conjecture that, as Africa had been found to end in a southern point, America would likewise be discovered to have a similar southern cape. It has also been a question if Ma- gellan actually had any tidings from earlier voyages to afford a ground THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 573 for believing in such a geographical fact. It is possible that other early discoverers had been less careful than Solis, and had been misled by the broad estuary of the La Plata to think that it was really an in- teroceanic passage. Some such intelligence would seem to have insti- gated the conditions portrayed in one early map, but the general notion of cartographers at the time terminates the known coast at Cape MAGELLAN. Frio, near Rio de Janeiro, as is seen to be the case in the Ptolemy map of 1513. There is a story, originating with Pigafetta, his historian, that Magellan had seen a map of Martin Behaim, showing a southern cape ; but if this map existed, it revealed probably nothing more than a conjectural termination, as shown in the Lenox and earliest Schoner globes of 1515 and 1520. Still, Wieser and Nordenskiold are far from being confident that some definite knowledge of such a cape had not been attained, probably, as it is thought, from private commercial voyage of which we may have a record in the Newe Zei- 574 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. tung and in the Luculentissima Descriptio. It is to be feared that the fact, whatever it may have been, must remain shadowy. Magellan's fleet was ready in August, 1519. His preparation had been watched with jealousy by Portugal, and it was even hinted that if the expedition sailed a matrimonial alliance of Spain and Portugal which was contemplated must be broken off. Magellan was appealed to by the Portuguese ambassador to abandon his purpose, as one likely to embroil the two countries. The stubborn navigator was not to be persuaded, and the Spanish King made him governor of all countries he might discover on the " back side " of the New World. In the late days of 1519, Magellan touched the coast at Rio de Ja- neiro, where, remaining awhile, he enjoyed the fruits of its equable climate. Then, passing on, he crossed the mouth of the La Plata, and soon found that he had reached a colder climate and was sailing along a different coast. The verdure which had followed the warm currents from the equatorial north gave way to the concomitants of an icy flow from the Antarctic regions which made the landscape sterile. So on he went along this inhospitable region, seeking the expected strait. His search in every inlet was so faithful that he neared the southern goal but slowly. The sternness of winter caught his little barks in a harbor near 50° south latitude, and his Spanish crews, restless under the command of a Portuguese, revolted. The rebels were soon more numerous than the faithful. The position was more threatening than any Columbus had encountered, but the Portuguese had a hardy cour- age and majesty of command that the Genoese never could summon. Magellan confronted the rebels so boldly that they soon quailed. He was in unquestioned command of his own vessels from that time for- ward. The fate of the conquered rioters, Juan de Carthagena and Sanchez de la Reina, cast on the inhospitable shore of Patagonia in expiation of their offense, is in strong contrast to the easy victory which Columbus too often yielded to those who questioned his author- ity. The story of Magellan's pushing his fleet southward and through the strait with a reluctant crew is that of one of the royally courageous acts of the age of discovery. On October 21, 1520, the ships entered the longed-for strait, and on 1520 Octo- tne 28th of November they sailed into the new sea ; then lanenterf 61 stretching their course nearly north, keeping well in sight of the strait. th e CO ast till the Chiloe Archipelago was passed, the ships steered west of Juan Fernandez without seeing it, and subsequently gradually turned their prows towards the west. It is not necessary for our present purpose to follow the incidents of the rest of this wondrous voyage, — the reaching the Ladrones and the Asiatic islands, Magellan's own life sacrificed, all his ships but one THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 575 MAGELLANS STRAITS BY PIZAFETTA. [The north is at the bottom.] 576 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. abandoned or lost, the passing of the Cape of Good Hope by the " Vic- toria," and her arrival on September 6, 1522, under Del Cano, at the Spanish harbor from which the fleet had sailed. The Emperor bestowed on this lucky first of circumnavigators the proud motto, in- «ay dis- scribed on a globe, " Primus circumdedisti me," The Span- iards' western way to the Moluccas was now disclosed. The South Sea of Balboa, as soon as Magellan had established its Pacific extension farther south, took from Magellan's company the Ocean. name Pacific, though the original name which Balboa had MAGELLAN'S STRAIT. applied to it did not entirely go out of vogue for a long time in those portions contiguous to the waters bounding the isthmus and its adja- cent lands. For a long time after it was known that South America was severed. North Amer- as Magellan proved, from Asia, the belief was still com- heid to be' a mon b T ne ^ c ^ tnat North America and Asia were one and con- one - tinuous. While no one ventures to suspect that Columbus had any prescience of these later developments, there are those like Varnhagen who claim a distinct insight for Vespucius ; but it is by no means clear, in the passages which are cited, that Vespucius thought the continental mass of South America more distinct from Asia than Columbus did, when the volume of water poured out by the Orinoco convinced the Admiral that he was skirting a continent, and not an isl- and. That Columbus thought to place there the region of the Biblical paradise shows that its continental features did not dissociate it from Asia. The New World of Vespucius was established by his own testi- mony as hardly more than a new part of Asia. In 1525 Loyasa was sent to make further examination of Magellan's 1525 Strait. It was at this time that one of his ships, com- Loyasa. mancled by Francisco de Hoces, was driven south in Febru- THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 577 ary, 1526, and discovered Cape Horn, rendering the insular character of Tierra del Fuego all but certain. The fact was kept secret, and the map-makers were not generally made aware discovers of this terminal cape till Drake saw it, fifty-two years later. ape orn " It was not till 1615-17 that Schouten and Lemaire made clear the eastern limits of Tierra del Fuego when they discovered the passage between that island and Staten Island, and during the same interval Schouten doubled Cape Horn for the first time. It was in 1618-19 that the observations of Nodal first gave the easterly bend to the south- ern extremity of the continent. The last stretch of the main coast of South America to be made out was that on the Pacific side from the point where Magellan turned away from it up to the bounds of Peru, where Pizarro and his follow- ers had mapped it. This trend of the coast began to be understood about 1535 ; but it was some years before its details got into maps. The final definition of it came from Camargo's voyage in 1540, and was first embodied with something like accuracy in Juan Freire's map of 1546, and was later helped by explorations from the north. But this proximate precision gave way in 1569 to a protuberant angle of the Chili coast, as drawn by Mercator, which in turn lingered on the chart till the next century. We need now to turn from these records of the voyagers to see what impression their discoveries had been making upon cartograpii- the cartographers and geographers of Europe. ical views - Bernardus Sylvanus Ebolensis, in a new edition of Ptolemy which was issued at Venice in 1511, paid great attention to the , i -p. , , i Sylvanus's changes necessary to make .rtolemy s descriptions corre- Ptolemy. spond to later explorations in the Old World, but less atten- tion to the more important developments of the New World. Nor- denskiold thinks that this condition of Sylvanus's mind shows how little had been the impression yet made at Venice by the discoveries of Columbus and Da Gama. The maps of this Ptolemy are wood- cuts, with type let in for the names, which are printed in red. in con- trast with the black impressed from the block. Sylvanus's map is the second engraved map showing the new dis- coveries, and the earliest of the heart-shaped projections. It has in " Re- galis Domus " the earliest allusion to the Cortereal voyage in a printed map. Sylvanus follows Ruysch in making Greenland a part of Asia. The rude map gores of about the same date which Norden- jj or( j en _ skiold has brought to the attention of scholars, and which skioid gores. he considers to have been made at Ingolstadt, agree mainly with this map of Sylvanus, and in respect to the western world both of these 578 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. maps, as well as the Schoner globe of 1515, seem to have been based on much the same material. We find in 1512, where we might least expect it, one of the most remarkable of the early maps, which was made for an introduction 1512 stob- ^° Ptolemy, published at this date at Cracow, in Poland, niczamap. by Stobnicza. This cartographer was the earliest to in- BOqUElRAON 0° MAGALHAIS FREIRE'S MAP, 1546. troduce into the plane delineation of the globe the now palpable divi- sion of its surface into an eastern and western hemisphere. His map, for some reason, is rarely found in the book to which it be- longs. Nordenskiold says he has examined many copies of the book in the libraries of Scandinavia, Russia, and Poland, without finding a copy with it ; but it is found in other copies in the great libraries at Vienna and Munich. He thinks the map may have been excluded OCCIDENS SYLVANUS'S PTOLEMY OF 1511. 580 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. 1 &&££ STOBNICZA'S MAP. THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 581 from most of the editions because of its rudeness, or " on account of its being contrary to the old doctrines of the Church." Its importance in the growth of the ideas respecting the new discoveries in the west- ern hemisphere is, however, very great, since for the first time it gives a north and south continent connected by an isthmus, and represents as never before in an engraved map the western hemisphere as an en- tirety. This is remarkable, as it was published a year before Balboa made his discovery of the Pacific Ocean. It is not difficult to see the truth of Nordenskiold's statement that the map divides the waters of the globe into two almost equal oceans, " communicating only in the extreme south and in the extreme north," but the south communica- tion which is unmistakable is by the Cape of Good Hope. The ex- tremity of South America is not reached because of the marginal scale, and because of the same scale it is not apparent that there is any con- nection between the Pacific and Indian oceans, and for similar reasons connection is not always clear at the north. There must have been in- formation at hand to the maker of this map of which modern scholars can find no other trace, or else there was a wild speculative spirit which directed the pencil in some singular though crude correspond- ence to actual fact. This is apparent in its straight conjectural lines on the west coast of South America, which prefigure the discoveries following upon the enterprise of Balboa and the voyage of Magellan. If Stobnicza, apparently, had not dared to carry the southern ex- tremity of South America to a point, there had been no such hesitancy in the makers of two globes of about the same date, — the little copper sphere picked up by Richard M. Hunt, the architect, in an The Lenox old shop in Paris, and now in the Lenox Library in New g lobe - York, and the rude sketch, giving quartered hemispheres separated on the line of the equator, which is preserved in the cabinet of Queen Victoria, at Windsor, among the papers of Leonardo da D a vmci Vinci. This little draft has a singular interest both from g lQ be. its association with so great a name as Da Vinci's, and because it bears at what is, perhaps, the earliest date to be connected with such carto- graphical use the name America lettered on the South American continent. Major has contended for its being the work of Da Vinci himself, but Nordenskiold demurs. This Swedish geographer is rather inclined to think it the work of a not very well informed copier work- ing on some Portuguese prototype. It is worthy of remark that, in the same year with the discovery of the South Sea by Balboa, an edition of Ptolemy made popular a map which had indeed been cut in its first state as early as 1507, but which still preserved the contiguity of the Antilles to the region of the Ganges and its three mouths. This was the well-known " Admiral's 582 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. map, usually associated with the name of Waldseemuller, and if this same cartographer, as Franz Wieser conjectures, is resjion- Admirai's sible for the map in Reisch's Margarita philosophic a (1515), a sort of cyclopaedia, he had in the interim awaked to the significance of the discovery of Balboa, for the Ganges has dis- appeared, and Cipango is made to lie in an ocean beyond Reisch's the continental Zoana Mela (America), which has an unde- fined western limit, as it had already been depicted in the Stobnicza map of 1512. THE ALLEGED DA VINCI SKETCH. [Covtbinalion.] It was in this Strassburg Ptolemy of 1513 that Ringmann, who had been concerned in inventing the name of America, revised the Latin of Angelus, using a Greek manuscript of Ptolemy for the purpose. First mod- Nordenskiold speaks of this edition as the first modern atlas em atlas. f t] ie W orld, extended so as to give in two of its maps — that known as the " Admiral's map," and another of Africa — the results following upon the discoveries of Columbus and Da Gama. This " Admiral's map," which has been so often associated with Co- lumbus, is hardly a fair rejjresentation of the knowledge that Colum- bus had attained, and seems rather to be the embodiment of the dis- coveries of many, as the description of it, indeed, would leave us to THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 583 infer ; while the other American chart of the volume is clearly of Portuguese rather than of Spanish origin, as may be inferred by the lavish display of the coast connected with the descriptions by Vespu- TVPvSVNTVERSA&S TERREIVXrAMO REISCH, 1515. cius. On the other hand, nothing but the islands of Espanola and Cuba stand in it for the explorations of Columbus. Both of these maps are given elsewhere in this Appendix. We could hardly expect, indeed, to find in these maps of the Ptolemy 584 CHRISTOPHER COL UMB US. of 1513 the results of Balboa's discovery at the isthmus ; but that the maps were left to do service in the edition of 1520 indicates that the discovery of the South Sea had by no means unsettled the public mind as to the Asiatic connection of the regions both north and south / s o w H B /^>%- fc*M a- \ i- 2. s w o r if w * r Asiatic con- °f the Antilles. Within the next few years several maps North" ° f indicate the enduring strength of this conviction. A Por- America. tuguese portolano of 1516-20, in the Royal Library at Mu- nich, shows Moslem flags on the coasts of Venezuela and Nicaragua. A map of Ayllon's discoveries on the Atlantic coast in 1520, pre- THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 585 served in the British Museum, has a Chinaman and an elephant delin- eated on the empty spaces of the continent. Still, geographical opin- ions had become divided, and the independent continental masses of Stobnicza were having some ready advocates. IOACHIMVS Y'ADIANVS" MEDX. cns;&P.oeta, fjjotbi'cultor ' erAm.medkdfludioJki & Attis» AcjneliCA: (jalliciortjidin vrbe l' Mr T>. LI. VADIANUS. There was at this time a circle of geographers working at Vienna, reediting the ancient cosmographers. and bringing them into V iennage- relations with the new results of discovery. Two of these ographers. 586 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. early writers thus attracting attention were Pomponius Mela, whose Pomponius Cosmographia dated back to the first century, and Solinus, whose Polyhistor was of the third. The Mela fell to the care of Johann Camers, who published it as De Situ Orb is at Vienna in 1512, at the press of Singrein ; and this was followed in 1518 by another issue, taken in hand by Joachim Watt, better known under the Latinized name of Vadianus, who had been born in Switzerland, and who was one of the earlier helpers in popularizing the name of America. The Solinus, the care of which Mela. Solinus, Vadianus. APIANUS. [From Reusner's Icones.] was undertaken by Camers, the teacher of Watt, was produced under these new auspices at the same time. Two years later (1520) both of 1520 these old writers attained new currency while issued to- Apianus. gether and accompanied by a map of Apianus, — as the German Bienewitz classicized his name, — in which further iteration THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 587 was given to the name of America by attaching it to the southern continent of the west. In this niap Apianus, in 1520, was combining views of the western hemisphere, which had within the few antecedent years found advo- cacy among a new school of cartographers. These students repre- sented the northern and southern continents as independent entities, disconnected at the isthmus, where Columbus had hoped to find his strait. This is shown in the earliest of the Schoner the isthmus globes, the three copies of which known to us are preserved, one at Frankfort and two at Weimar. It is in the Luculentissima Descrlptio, which was written to accompany this Schoner 1515 globe of 1515, where we find that statement already re- Sch o ner - ferred to, which chronicles, as Wieser thinks, an earlier voyage than Magellan's to the southern strait, which separated the " America " of Vespucius from that great Antarctic continent which did Antarctic not entirely disappear from our maps till after the voyage continent. of Cook. It is a striking instance of careless contemporary observation, which the student of this early cartography has often to confront, that while Reisch, in his popular cyclopaedia of the Margarita Philosophica which he published first in 1503, gave not the slightest intimation of the discoveries of Columbus, he did not much improve matters in 1515, when he ignored the discoveries of Balboa, and reproduced in the main the so-called ''Admiral's map " of the Ptolemy of 1513. It is to be observed, however, that Reisch was in this repro- 1515 duced map of 1515 the first of map-makers to offer in the R eis ch. word " Prisilia " on the coast of Vespucius the prototype of the mod- ern Brazil. It will be remembered that Cabral had sup- posed it an island, and had named it the Isla de Santa Cruz. The change of name induced a pious Portuguese to believe it an insti- gation of the devil to supplant the remembrance of the holy and sacred wood of the great martyr by the worldly wood, which was com- monly used to give a red color to cloth ! In 1519, in the Sitvia de Geographia of Fernandez d'Enciso, pub- lished later at Seville, in 1530, we have the experience of one of Ojeda's companions in 1509. This little folio, now a scarce book, is of interest as first formulating for practical use some of the Theorieg of new theories of seamanship as developed under the long seamanship, voyages at this time becoming common. It has also a marked interest as being the earliest book of the Spanish press which had given con- sideration at any length to the new possessions of Spain. We again find a similar indisposition to keep abreast of discovery, so perplexing to later scholars, in the new-cast edition of Ptolemy in 588 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. 1522. Frisius. 1522, which contains the well-known map of Laurentius Frisius. It is called by Nordenskiiild, in subjecting it to analysis in his Facsimile Atlas, " an original work, but bad beyond all criticism, as well from a geographical as from a xylographical point of view." One sees, indeed, in the maps of this edition, no knowledge of the increase of geographical knowledge during later years. We observe, too, that they go back to Behaim's interpretation of Marco Polo's India, for the eastern shores of Asia. The publisher, Thomas Ancuparius, seems never to have heard of Columbus, or at least fails to mention him, while he awards the discovery of the New World to Vespucius. The maps, reduced in the main from those of the edition of 1513, were repeated in those of 1525, 1535, and 1541, without change and from the same blocks. The results of the voyage of Magellan and Del Cano promptly THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 589 attained a more authentic record than usually fell to the lot of these early ocean experiences. The company which reached Spain in the " Victoria " went at once to Valladolid to report to the Emperor, and while there a pupil and secretary of Peter Martyr, then at Court, Maximilianus Transylvanus hy name, got from these men the particulars of their discoveries, and, writing them out in Latin, he sent the missive to his father, the Arch bishop of Salzburg, — the young man was a natural son of this prelate, — and in some way the narrative efot into lan's voyage * described. print at Cologne and Rome in 1523. Schoner printed in 1523 a little tract, De nuper . . . repertis insidis ac regionibus to elucidate a globe which he had at that time 1593 constructed. It was published at Timiripae, as the imprint Schoner. reads, which has been identified by Coote as the Grecized form of the name of a small village not far from Bamberg, where Schoner was at that time a parochial vicar. When a new set of engraved gores were first brought to light by Ludwig Rosenthal, in Munich, Rosenthal in 1885, they were considered by Wieser, who published an g° res - account of them in 1888, as the lost globe of Schoner. Stevens, in a posthumous book on Johann Schoner, expressed a similar belief. This was a view which Stevens's editor, C. H. Coote, accepted. The opinion, however, is open to question, and Nordenskiold finds that the Rosenthal gores have nothing to do with the lost globe of Schoner, and puts them much later, as having been printed at Nuremberg about 1540. The voyage of Magellan had reopened the controversy of Spain with Portugal, stayed but not settled bv the treaty of Tor- i -r^ /-t • p -»«■ n 5 Political as- desillas. Estevan Gomez, a recusant captain of Magellan s pectsof Ma- fleet, who had deserted him just as he' was entering the voyage! straits, had arrived in Spain May 6, 1521, and had his own way for some time in making representation of the fool- hardiness of Magellan's undertaking. On March 27, 1523, Gomez received a concession from the Em- peror to go on a small armed vessel for a year's cruise in the north- west, to make farther search for a passage, but he was not to trespass on any Portuguese possession. The disputes between Portugal and Spain intensifying, Gomez's voyage was in the mean time put off for a while. Gomara tells us that, in the opinion of his time, the Spaniards had gained the Moluccas, at the conference at Tordesillas, by ipit-» i i Dispute over yielding to the demands of the Portuguese, so that what the Moiuc- Portugal gained in Brazil and Newfoundland she lost in Asia and adjacent parts. The Portuguese historian, Osorius, viewed Gomez. 590 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. it differently ; he counted in the American gain for his country, but he denied the Spanish rights at the antipodes. So the longitude of the Moluccas became a sharp political dispute, which there was an at- ROSENTHAL OR NUREMBERG GORES. Congress at tempt to settle in 1524 in a congress of the two nations that Badajos. was convened alternately at Badajos and Elvas, situated on opposite sides of the Caya, a stream which separates the two countries. THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 591 Ferdinand Columbus, by a decree of February 19, 1524. had been made one of the arbiters. After two months of wrangling, each side stood stiff in its own opinions, and it was found best to break up the congress. Following upon the dissolution of this body, the Spanish government was impelled to make the management of the Indies more effective than it had been under the commissions Councilof which had existed, and on August 18, 1524, the Council the Indies, of the Indies was reorganized in more permanent form. An immediate result of the interchange of views at Badajos was a renewal of the Gomez project, to examine more carefully the eastern coast of what is now the United States, in the hopes of yet discovering a western passage. Of that voyage, which is first mentioned in the Sumario of Oviedo in 1526, and of the failure of its chief Gomez i s aim, enough has already been said in the early part of this voyage- appendix. It has been supposed by Harrisse that the results of this voyage were embodied in the earliest printed Spanish map which we have showing lines of latitude and longitude, — that found in a joint edi- tion of Martyr and Oviedo (1534), and which is only known in a copy now in the Lenox Library. The purpose which followed upon the congress of Badajos, to pene- trate the Atlantic coast line and find a passage to the western sea, was communicated to Cortes, then in Mexico, some time before the date of his fourth letter, October 15, 1524. The news found him already convinced of the desirableness of establishing a port on the great sea of the west, and he selected Zucatuki as a station for the fleets which he undertook to build. Other projects delayed the preparations which were planned, and it was not till September 3, 1526, that Cortes signified to the 152G Cortea Emperor his readiness to send his ships to the Moluccas, ^nds ships After a brief experimental trip up the coast from Zucatula, luccas. three of his vessels were finally dispatched, in October, 1527, on a dis- astrous voyage to those islands, where the purpose was to confront the Portuguese pretensions. It so happened, meanwhile, that Charles V. needed money for his projects in Italy, and he called Ferdinand Co- lumbus to Court to consult with him about a sale of his rights in the Moluccas to Portugal. Ferdinand made a report, which has not come down to us, but a decision to sell was reached, and the Por- T _. i , ... i t on The Moluc- tuguese King agreed to the price of purchase on June Z\), eassoidto 1530. Thus the Moluccas, which had been so long the goal of Spanish ambition, pass out of view in connection with American discovery. There is some ground for the suspicion, if not belief, that the Por- 592 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. tuguese from the Moluccas had before this pushed eastward across the Pacific, and had even struck the western verge of that continent which separated them from the Spanish explorers on the Atlantic side. m 61 lit*io * 3 j» I -a i '3 3 MARTYR-OVIEDO We come next to some further developments on the eastern coast of North America. A certain French corsair, known from his Florentine birth as Juan Florin, had become a terror by preying on the Spanish commerce in the Indies. In January, 1524, North America, 3ast coast THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 593 he was on his way, under the name of Verrazano, in the expedition which has given him fame, and has supplied not a little ° . x A Verrazano. Ground for contention, and even for total distrust of the MAP, 1534. voyage as a fact. He struck the coast of North Carolina, turned south, but, finding no harbor, retraced his course, and, making several landings farther north, finally entered, as it would seem from his de- scription, the harbor of New York. The only point that he names THE VERRAZANO MAP. THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 595 is a triangular island which he saw as he went still farther to the east, and which has been supposed to be Block Island, or possibly Mar- tha's Vineyard. At all events, the name Luisa which he gave to it after the mother of Francis I. clung to an island in this neighborhood in the maps for some time longer. So he went on, and, if his land- ings have been rightly identified, he touched at Newport, then at some place evidently near Portsmouth in New Hampshire, and then, skirt- ing the islands of the Maine coast, he reached the country which he recognized as that where the Bretons had been. He now ended what he considered the exploration of seven hundred leagues of an unknown AGNESE, 153G. land, and bore away for France, reaching Dieppe in July, whence, on the 9th, he wrote the letter to the King which is the source of our information. Attempts have been made, especially by the late Henry C Murphy, to prove this letter a forgery, but in the opinion of most scholars without success. Fortunately for the student, Hieronimo da Verrazano made, in 1529, a map, still preserved in the college of the Propaganda at The Verra . Rome, in which the discoveries of his brother, Giovanni, « Mm * are laid down. In this the name of Nova Gallia supplants that of Francesca, which had been used in the map of Maiollo (1527), Sup-= posed, also, to have some relation to the Verrazano voyage. The most distinguishing feature of the Verrazano map is a great til fef, * f ^ ^'^^^14 ra Mr-iKk r r I t » J ft'.:. MUNSTEK. THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 597 Tt © * \ (it* A," a4 ^M' till MM ttfflliSM mmfrn '4'fi «'',! w * MAI 1540. inland expanse of water, which was taken to he a part of some western ocean, and which remained for a long while in some form or other in the maps. It was made to approach so near the Atlantic that at one point there was nothing but a slender isthmus connecting the discoveries of the north with the country of Ponce de Leon and Ayllon at the south. It is in the Sumario (1526) of Oviedo that we get the first idea of this sea of Verrazano, as Brevoort contends, and we see it in the Maiollo map of the next year, called The sea of " Mare Indicum," as if it were an Verrazano. indentation of the great western ocean of Bal- boa. It was a favorite fancy of Baptista Agnese, in the series of portolanos associated with his name during the middle of the cen- tury, and in which he usually indicated sup- posable ocean routes to Asia. As time went on, the idea was so far modified that this in- dentation took the shape of a loop of the Arc- tic seas, or of that stretch of water which at the north connected the Atlantic and Pacific, as shown in the Minister map in the Ptolemy of 1540, — a map apparently based on the portolanos of Agnese, — though the older form of the sea seems to be adopted in the globe of Ulpius (1542). This idea of a Carolinian isthmus prevailed for some years, and may have grown out of a misconception of the Car- olina sounds, though it is sometimes carried far enough north, as in the Lok map of 1582, to seem as if Buzzard's Bay were in some way thought to stretch westerly into its depths. The last trace of this mysterious inner ocean, so far as I have discovered, is in a map made by one of Ralegh's colonists in 1585, and pre- served among the drawings of John White in the De Bry collection of the British Museum, and brought to light by Dr. Edward Eggleston. This drawing makes for the only time that I have observed it, an actual channel at " Port Royal," leading to this oceanic expanse, which 598 CHRIS TOPHER COL UMB US. MICHAEL LOK. 1582. THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 599 was later interpreted as an inland lake. Thus it was that this geo- graphical blander lived more or less constantly in a succession of maps for about sixty years, until sometimes it vanished in a large lake in Carolina, or in the north it dwindled until it began to take a new lease of life in an incipient Hudson's Bay, as in the great Lake of Tade- nac, figured in the Molineaux map of 1600, and in the Lago Dago- lesme in the Botero map of 1603. of^^^s^VV^^' Kala-TAsk. . It was apparently during the voyage of Verrazano that an Indian name which was understood as " Aranbega " was picked up along the northern coasts as designating the region, and which a little later was reported by others as " Norumbega," and so passed into the mysterious and fabled nomenclature of the coast with a good deal of the unstableness that attended the fabulous islands of the At- lantic in the fancy of the geographers of the Middle Ages. As a defi- nition of territory it gradually grew to have a more and more restricted .3* FT** — "_ ^ £ W- ; 1-^Sr &^afi ROBERT THORNE, 1527. THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 601 application, coming down mainly after a while to the limits of the later New England, and at last finding, as Dr. Dee (1580), Molineaux (1600), and Champlain (1604) understood it, a home on the Penobscot. Still the region it represented contracted and expanded in people's notions, and on maps the name seemed to have a license to wander. During this period the English also were up and down the coast, but they contributed little to our geographical knowledge. Slave- The Fn lish catching on the coast of Guinea, and lucrative sales of the on the coast. human plunder in the Spanish West Indies and neighboring regions, seem to have taken William Hawkins and others of his w .„, William countrymen to these coasts not infrequently between 1525 Hawkins - and 1540. There is some reason to believe that John Rut, an Englishman, may have explored the northeast coasts of the present United States in 1527, a proposition, however, open to argument, as the counter reasonings of Dr. Kohl and Dr. De Costa show. It is certain that at this time Robert Thorne, an English merchant living in Seville, was gaining what knowledge he could to promote English en- terprise in the north, and there has come down to us the map which in 1527 he gave to the English ambassador in Spain, Edward Leigh, to be transmitted to Henry VIII. It was in 1526 when the Spanish authorities thought that the time was fitting for making a sort of register of the progress of Progress of discovery and of the attendant cartographical advances, maritime Nordenskiold says that " from the beginning of the print- ing of maps the graduations of latitude and longitude were marked down in most printed maps, at least in the margin ; " the most conspic- uous example of omitting these being, perhaps, in the work of Sebas- tian Minister, at a period a little later than the one we have now reached. In 1503 Reisch for the first time settled upon something like the modern methods of indicating latitude and longitude in the , . , , , . t, r • 7-7 7 • Latitude map which he annexed to his Margarita p/idosophica at andiougi- Freiburg, though so far as climatic lines could stand for latitudinal notions, Pierre d'Ailly had set an example of scaling the zones from the equator in his map of 1410. The Spaniards, how- ever, did not fall into the method of Reisch, so far as published maps are concerned, till long afterwards (1534). Up to the time when the Strassburg Ptolemy was issued, in 1513, the chief activity in map-making had been in Italy. The Italiau cartographers of that country got what they could from ma P 8 - 602 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. Spain, but the main dependence was on Portuguese sources, though the rivals of Spain were not always free in imparting the know- ledge of their hydrographical offices, since we find Robert Thome, in 1527, charging the Portuguese with having falsified their records. It is worthy of remark that no official map of the Indies was pub- lished in Spain till 1790. SEBASTIAN MOTSTER. [From Reusner's Icones, 1590.] After 1513, and so on to the middle of the century, it was to the Cartography north of the Alps that the cosmographical students turned cai activity f r tne } a t es t light upon all oceanic movements. The ques- north of the & r 1 • 1 1 i • A1 P S - tion of longitude was the serious one which both naviga- tors and map-makers encountered. The cartographers were trying all Ma ro- sorts °^ ex P ei 'i mexits m representing the converging meri- jections. • dians on a plane surface, so as not to distort the geography, and in order to afford some manifest method for the guidance of ships. THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 603 These experiments resulted, as Nordenskiold counts, in something like twenty different projections being devised before 1600. For the sea- man the difficulty was no less burdensome in trying to place his ship at sea, or to map the contours of the coasts he was following. The navigator's main dependence was the course he was steering and an estimate of his progress. He made such allowance as he could for his drift in the currents. We have seen how the imperfection of his in- struments and the defects of his lunar tables misled Colum- Luuar ob _ bus egregiously in the attempts which he made to define servations. the longitude of the Antilles. He placed Espailola at 70° west of Seville, and La Cosa came near him in counting it about 68°, so far as one can interpret his map. The Dutch at this time were begin- ning to grasp the idea of a chronometer, which was the de- Chronome . vice finally to prove the most satisfactory in these efforts. ters - Reinerus Gemma of Friesland, known better as Gemma Frisius, be- gan to make the Dutch nautical views better known when he suggested, a few years later, the carrying of time in running off the longitudes, and something of his impress on the epoch was shown in the stand which a pupil, Mercator, took in geographical science. The Spieghel der Zeevaardt of Lucas Wagenaer, in 1584 (Leyden), was Earliest gea _ the first sea-atlas ever printed, and showed again the Dutch atlas - advance. There were also other requirements of sea service that were not for- gotten, among which was a knowledge of prevalent winds and ocean currents, and this was so satisfactorily acquired that the return voyage from the Antilles came, within thirty years after Columbur, to be made with remarkable ease. Oviedo tells us that in 1525 t\\ o cara- vels were but twenty-five days in passing from San Domingo to the river of Seville. Two of the duties imposed by the Spanish government upon the Casa de la Contratacion, soon after the discovery of the New World, were to patronize invention to the end of discovering a process for making freshwater out of salt, and to improve ships' pumps, — the last a conception not to take effective shape till Ribero, the royal cos- mographer, secured a royal pension for such an invention in 1526. It was in the midst of these developments, both of the practical parts of seamanship and of the progress of oceanic discovery, that in 1526 there was held at Seville a convention of pilots and cosmographers, called by royal order, to consolidate and pilots at correlate all the cartographical data which had accumulated up to that time respecting the new discoveries. Ferdinand Columbus was at this time in Seville, engaged in com 604 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. pleting a house and library for himself, and in planting the park about „ ,. ., them with trees brought from the New World, a single one Columbus. f w hich, a West Indian sapodilla, was still standing in 1871. It was in this house that the convention sat, and Ferdmand ect»» HOUSE AND LIBRARY OF FERDINAND COLUMBUS. Columbus presided over it, while the examinations of the pilots were conducted by Diego Ribero and Alonso de Chaves. There have come down to us two monumental maps, the outgrowth THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 605 of this convention. One of these is dated at Seville, in 1527, purporting to be the work of the royal cosmographer, and has been ]5 o 7 _ 2< j usually known by the name of Ferdinand Columbus ; and Ma P s - the other, dated 1529, is known to have been made by Diego Ribero, also a royal cosmographer. These maps closely resemble each other. SPANISH MAP, 1527. L After sketch in E. Mayer's Die Entwicklung der Seekarten (Wien, 1877).] The Weimar chart of 1527, which Kohl, Stevens, and others have assigned to Ferdinand Columbus, has been ascribed by Harrisse to Nuno Garcia de Toreno, but by Coote, in editing Stevens on Schoner, it is assigned to Ribero, as a precursor of his undoubted produc- tion of 1529. 606 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. We have seen how, succeeding to the belief of Columbus that the new regions were Asia, there had grown up, a few years after his death, in spite of his audacious notarial act at Cuba, a strong presumption idea of a among geographical students that a new continent had been newconti- f oull( J. "We have seen this conception taking form with uent spread- r ° in s- more or less uncertainty as to its western confines immedi- ately upon, and even an- ticipating, the discovery of the actual South Sea by Balboa, and can fol- low it down in the maps or globes of Stobnicza and Da Vinci, in that known as the Lenox globe, in those called the Tross and Nordenskiold gores, the Schbner and Hauslab globes, the Ptol- emy map of 1513, and in those of Reisch, Apianus, Laurentius Frisius, Mai- ollo, Bordone, Homem, and Miinster, — not to name some others. In twenty years it had come to be a prevalent belief, and men's minds were turned to a consideration of the possibility of this revealed continent hav- ing been, after all, known to the ancients, as Glare- anus, quoting Virgil, was the earliest to assert in 1527. About 1525 there came a partial reaction, as if the discovery of Balboa had been pushed too far in its supposed results. THE NANCY Reaction in the monk Franoiscus. We find this taking form in 1526, in an identification of North America with eastern Asia in a map ascribed to the monk Franciscus, while South America is laid down as a THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 607 continental island, separated from India by a strait only. The strait is soon succeeded by an isthmus, and in this way we get a solution of the problem which had some currency for half a century or more. Orontius Finseus was one of these later compromisers in cartog- raphy, in a map which he is supposed to have made in 0rontius 1531, but which appeared the next year in the Novus Orbis Finaeus. (1532) of Simon Gry- nseus, and was used in some later publications also. We find in this map, about the Gulf of Mexico, the names which Cortes had applied in his map of 1520 min- gled with those of the Asiatic coast of Marco Polo. We annex a sketch of this map as reduced by Brevoort to Mercator's projection. A map very similar to this and of about the same date is preserved in the British Museum among the Sloane manu- scripts, and the same bold solution of the diffi- culty is found in the Nancy globe of about 1540, and in the globe of GasparVopelof 1543. There is a good in- stance of the instability of geographical know- ledge at this time in the conversion of Johann Schoner from Johann a belief in an Schoner. insular North America, GLOBE - to which he had clung in his globes of 1515 and 1520, to a position which he took in 1533, in his Opusculum Geograjihicum, where he maintains that the city of Mexico is the Qninsay of Marco Polo. ORONTIUS FIN.^US, [After Cimelinus'e Copperplate of 15GG.] 610 CHR IS TOPHER COL UMB US. Previous to Cortes's departure for Spain in 1528, he had, as we have seen, dispatched vessels from Tehuantepec to the Moluccas, but The Pacific nothing was done to explore the Pacific coast northward till explored. j t j s return to Mexico. In the spring or early summer of 1532 he sent Hurtado de Mendoza up the coast ; but little success at- tending the exploration, Cortes himself proceeded to Tehuantepec and constructed other vessels, which sailed in October, 1533. A gale drove them to the west, and when they succeeded in working back and CORTES. California. making the coast, they found themselves well up what proved to be the California peninsula. They now coasted south and developed its shape, which was further brought out in detail by an expedition led by Cortes himself in 1535, and by a later one sent by him under Francisco de Ulloa in 1539. Cortes had supposed THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. Gil the peninsula an island, but this expedition of 1539 demonstrated the fact that no passage to the outer sea existed at the head of the gulf, which these earliest navigators had called the Sea of Cortes. The conqueror of Mexico had now made his last expedition on the Pacific, and his name was not destined to be long connected with this new field of discovery, unless, indeed, it was a prompting of Cortes — hardly proved, however — which attached to this peninsular region the euphonious name of California, and which, after an interval when the gulf was called the Red Sea, was applied to that water also. The views of Ulloa were confirmed in part, at least, by Castillo in 1540, who has left us a map of the gulf. CASTILLO'S CALIFORNIA. The outer coast of the peninsula as far north as 28° 30' had been established in 1533. It was ten years later, in 1543, that Cabrillo, making his landfall in the neighborhood of 33°, just within the south- 612 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. em bounds of the present State of California, coasted up to Cape Mendocino, and perhaps to 44°, or nearly, to that spot, in the present State of Oregon. If Cabrillo, who had died January 3, 1543, did not himself go so high, the credit belongs to Ferrelo, his chief pilot Late in 1542 Mendoza sent an expedition under Ruy Lopez de Villalobos, across the Pacific, and if a map of Juan Freire, made in 1546, is an indication of his route, he seems to have gone higher up the coast than any previous explorer. While this development of the northwest coast of North America The Atlantic was g om g on > there were other discoverers still endeavor- North 01 m S on tne Atlantic side to connect the waters of the two America. oceans. In April, 1534, Jacques Cartier, a jovial and roistering fellow, as 1534 Father Jouon des Longrais, his latest biographer, makes Cartier. n ; m ou t (Jacques Cartier, Paris, 1888), and who had led the roving life of a corsair in the recent wars of France, was now turning his energy to solve the great problem of this western passage. He sailed from St. Malo, and for the first time laid open, by an offi- cial examination, the inner spaces of the St. Lawrence Gulf, which might have been, indeed, and probably were, known earlier to the hardy Breton and Norman fishermen. We are deficient in a know- ledge of the early frequenting of these coasts because the charts of such fishermen, and of those who visited the region for trade in peltries, have not come down to us, though Kohl thinks there is some likelihood of such records being preserved in a portolano of the British Museum. The track of Cartier about the Gulf of St. Lawrence has caused some discussion and difference of opinion in the publications of Kohl, De Costa, Laverdiere, and W. F. Ganong, the latter writer claiming, in a careful paper in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada for 1889, that in the correct interpretation of Cartier's first voyage we find a key to the cartography of the gulf for almost a century. The Rotz map of 1542 seems to be the earliest map which we know to show a knowledge of Cartier's first voyage. The Henri II. map of 1542 still more develops his work of exploration. The chance of further discovery in this direction induced the French king once more to commission Cartier, October 30, 1534, and early in 1535 his little fleet sailed, and by August, after soml discourage- ments, not lessened when he found the water freshening, he began to ascend the St. Lawrence River, reaching the site of Montreal. No map by Cartier himself is preserved, though it is known that he made such. Thenceforward the cartography of this northeastern region showed the St. Lawrence Gulf in a better development of the earlier THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 613 so-called Square Gulf and of the great river of Canada. It is of rec- ord that Francis I., in commissioning Cartier, considered that he was dispatching him to ascend an Asiatic river, and the name of Lachine even to-day is preserved as evidence of the belief which Cartier en- tertained that he was within the bounds of China. John Rotz's Boke of Idiography — a manuscript of 1542, preserved in the British Museum — shows, in his drawing of the re- John Rotz , s gion about the Gulf of St. Lawrence, certain signs, as Kohl ma P- thinks, of having had access to the charts of Cartier, and Harrisse traces in them the combined influence of the Portuguese and Dieppe navigators. The Cartier voyages seem to have made little impression outside of France, and we find for some years few traces of his discoveries 614 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. in the portolanos of Italy and in the maps of the rest of Europe. It was only when the expedition of Roberval, in 1540-41, excited at- tention that the rest of Europe seemed to recognize these French efforts. 30R^V The later voyages of Cartier, in 1541 and 1543, revealed nothing more of general geographical interest. Indeed, the hope of a western passage in this direction had been abandoned in effect after Cartier's second voyage, although the pilot Allefonsce, who accompanied a later expedition, had been detailed to explore the Labrador coast to that end, and had been turned back by ice. After this he seems to have gone south into a great bay, under 42°, the end of which he did not reach. This may have been the large expanse partly shut in by Cape Sable (Nova Cartier's later voyages. Allefonsce. THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 615 360 T— < I I I ' 1 ■ r-T— 1— I ■ , , ■ 4 ,■ . , < ZIEGLER'S SCHONDIA. 616 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. Scotia) and Cape Cod, now called in the coast survey charts the Gulf of Maine ; or perhaps it may conform, taking into account his regis- tered latitude, to the inner hight of it called Massachusetts Bay. At all events, Allefonsce helieved himself on coasts contiguous to Tar- tary, through which he had hopes to find access to the more hospitable orient (Occident) farther south. He apparently had something of the same notion regarding the westerly stretch of water which he found below Cape Cod, extending he knew not where, along the inclosure of the present Long Island Sound. In the years both before and after the middle of the century, French vessels were on this coast in considerable numbers for purposes of trade or for protecting French interests, but we know nothing of any accessions to geographical knowledge which they made. Allefonsce speaks of the Saguenay as widening, when he went up, till it seemed to be an arm of the sea, and " I think the same," he adds, " runs into the Sea of Cathay ;" and so he draws it on one of his maps, — an idea made more general in the map of Homem in 1558, where the St. Lawrence really becomes a channel, locked by islands, border- ing an Arctic Sea. Ramusio, in 1553, has inferred from such reports as he could get of Cartier's explorations, that his track had lain in channels bounded by islands, and a similar view had already been ex- pressed in a portolano of 1536, preserved in the Bodleian, which Kohl associates with Homem or Agnese. The oceanic expansion of the Saguenay is preserved as late as the Molineaux map of 1600. It is to the work of Allefonsce that we probably owe another con- fusion of this northern cartography in the sixteenth centuiy. What River of we now know as Penobscot Bay and River was called by Norumbega. him the River of Norumbega, and he seems to have given some ground for believing that this river connected the waters of the Atlantic with the great river of Canada, just as we find it later shown upon Gastaldi's map in Ramusio, by Ruscelli in 1561, by Martines in 1578, by Lok in 1582, and by Jacques de Vaulx in 1584. While this idea of the north was developing, there came in another that made the peninsular Greenland of the ante-Columbian maps grow into a link of land connecting Europe with the Americo-Asiatic RUSCELLI, 1544. THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 617 main, so that one might in truth perambulate the globe Greenland dryshod. We find this conception in the maps of the Bava- ££™ and E "" rian Ziegler (1532), and in the Italians Ruscelli (1544) and America. C A BJT A_ MA R.I CARTA MARINA, ll>48. Gastaldi (1548), — the last two represented in the Ptolemies of those years published in Italy. But these Italian cosmographers were by no means constant in their belief, as Ruscelli showed in his Ptolemy of 1561, and Gastaldi in his Ramusio map of 1550. C18 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. As the Pacific explorations were stretched northward from Mexico, and the peninsula of California was brought into promi- Asia and . , ,, . . .. , . America nence, there remained tor some time a suspicion that the higher lati- western ocean made a great northerly bend, so as to sever North America from Asia except along the higher latitudes. MYRITIUS, 1590. We find this northerly extension of the Pacific in a map of copper pre- served in the Carter-Brown library, which seems to have been the work of a Florentine goldsmith somewhere about 1535 ; in the Carta Marina of Gastaldi in 1548 ; and it even exists in maps of a later date, THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 619 like that of Paolo de Furlani (1560) and that of Myritius (1587). This map of Myritius, which appeared in his Opusculum Geographicum, published at Ingolstadt in 1590, is the work of, perhaps, the last of fS/\*: the geographers who did not leave more or less doubt about the con- nection of North America with Asia. So it took about a full century for the entanglement of the coasts of Asia and America, which Columbus had imagined, to be practically eradicated ment of the from the maps. Not that there were not doubters, even and Asiatic very early, but the faith in a new continent grew slowly coasts - and had many set-backs ; nor did the Asiatic connection fade entirely out, as among the possibilities of geography, for considerably more than a century yet to come. The uncertainties of the higher latitudes 620 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. kept knowledge in suspense, and even the English settlers on the northerly coasts of the United States were not quite sure. Thomas Morton, the chronicler of a colony on the Massachusetts shores, felt it necessary, so late as 1636, to make a reservation that possibly the mainland of America bordered on the land of the Tartars. In- deed, no one could say positively, though much was conjectured, that there was not a terrestrial connection in the extreme northwest, 1728 under arctic latitudes, till Bering in 1728, two hundred Bering. an( j thirty-six years after Columbus offered his prayer at San Salvador, passed from the Pacific into the polar waters. This became the solution of the fabled straits of Anian, an inheritance from the very earliest days of northern exploration, which, after the THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 621 middle of the sixteenth century, was revived in the maps of Martines, Zaltiere, Mercator, Porcacchi, Furlani, and Wytfliet, prefiguring the channel which Bering passed. Much in the same way as the southern apex of South America was a vision in men's minds long before Ma- gellan found his way to the Pacific. But we have anticipated a little. Coincident with the efforts of Cartier to discover this northern passage we mark other navigators working at the same problem. The Spaniard Alonso de 1536 Chaves made a chart of this eastern coast in 1536 ; but we Chaves, only know of its existence from the description of it written by Oviedo in 1537. In the earliest map which we have from the hand 1538 of Gerard Mercator, and of which the only copy known was Mercator. discovered some years ago by the late James Carson Brevoort, of New York, we find the northern passage well defined in 1538, and a broad channel separating the western coast of America from a parallel coast of Asia, — a kind of delineation which is followed in some globe-gores of about 1540, which Nordenskiold thinks may have been 1&10 Hart the work of George Hartmann, of Nuremberg. This map mann g° res - is evidently based on Portuguese information, and that Swedish scholar finds no ground for associating it with the lost globe of Scho- ner, as Stevens has done. A facsimile of part of it has already been given. Sebastian Miinster, in his maps in the Ptolemy of 1540-45, makes a clear seaway to the Moluccas somewhere in the latitude of 15 4 _45 the Strait of Belle Isle. Miinster was in many ways anti- Munster. quated in his notions. He often resorted to the old device of the Middle Ages by supplying the place of geographical details with fig- ures of savages and monsters. We come now to two significant maps in the early history of Amer- ican cartography. Columbus had been dead five and thirty years when a natural result grew out of those circumstances which conspired to name the largest part of the new discoveries after a secondary pathfinder. We have seen that there seemed at first no injustice in the name of America being applied to a region in the main external to the range of Columbus's own explorations, and how it took nearly a half cen- tury before public opinion, as expressed in the protest of Schoner in 1533, recognized the injustice of using another's name. Whether that protest was prompted by a tendency, already shown, to give the name to the whole western hemisphere is not clear ; but certainly within eight years such a general application was publicly made, when Mercator, in drafting in 1541 some gores for a globe, divided the 622 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. name AME — RICA so that it covered both North and South Amer- 1541 ica, and qualified its application by a legend which says Mercator. fjraj. the continent is " called to-day by many, New India." Thus a name that in the beginning was given to a part in distinction MERCATOR'S merely and without any reference to the entire field of the new explo- rations, was now become, by implication, an injustice to the great first discoverer of all. The mischief, aided by accident and by a not unao THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 623 countable evolution, was not to be undone, and, in the singular muta- tions of fate, a people inhabiting a region of which neither Columbus nor Vespucius had any conception are now distinctively known in the world's history as Americans. GLOBE OF 153S. These 1541 gores of Mercator were first made known to scholars a few years ago, when the Belgian government issued a facsimile edi- tion of the only copy then known, which the Royal Library at Brus- 624 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. sels had just acquired ; but since there have been two other copies brought to light, — one at St. Nicholas in Belgium, and the other in the Imperial library at Vienna. There are some indications on Spanish globes of about 1540, and Henry ii. m tne Desceliers or Henry II. map of 1546, that the Span- ma P- ish government had sent explorers to the region of Canada not long after Cartier's earliest explorations, and it is significant that the earliest published map to show these Cartier discoveries is the 1544. Cabot otner °f the two maps already referred to, namely, the ma P- Cabot mappemonde of 1544, which has been supposed a Spanish cartographical waif. Early publications of southern and mid- dle Europe showed little recognition of the same knowledge. MUNSTER, 1545. The Cabot map has been an enigma to scholars ever since it was discovered in Germany, in 1843, by Von Martius. It was deposited the next year in the great library at Paris. It is a large elliptical world-map, struck from an engraved plate, and it bears sundry eluci- dating inscriptions, some of which must needs have come from Se- bastian Cabot, others seem hardly to merit his authorship, and one acknowledges him as the maker of the map. There is, accordingly, a composite character to the production, not easily to be analyzed so as to show the credible and the incredible by clear lines of demarcation. We learn from it how it proclaimed for the first time the real agency of John Cabot in the discovery of North America, confirmed when Hakluyt, in 1582, printed the patent from Henry VII. There is an unaccountable year given for that discovery, namely, 1494, but we seem to get the true date when Michael Lok, in 1582, puts down " J. Cabot, 1497," against Cape Breton in his map of that year. As this last map appeared in Hakluyt's Divers Voyages, and as Hakluyt tells us of the existence of Cabot's maps and of his seeing them, we may Z7 .V^fM'UI PArHA&OIMlCUM Sivl NAdt iiANlCUH'l MERCATOR, 1541. [Sketched from his gores.] THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 627 presume that we have in this date of 1497 an authoritative statement. We learn also from this map of 1544 that the land first seen was the point of the island now called Cape Breton. Without the aid of this map, Biddle, who wrote before its discovery, had contended for Lab- rador as the landfall. We know, on the testimony of Robert Thorne in 1527, if from no other source, that it was a settled policy of the Spanish government to allow no one but proper cartographical designers to make Scarcity of its maps, " for that peradventure it would not sound well to & ^ t ^ them that a stranger should know or discover their secrets." ma P s - This doubtless accounts for the fact that, in the two hundred maps mentioned by Ortelius in 1570 as used by him in compiling his atlas, not one was published in Spain ; and every bibliographer knows that not a single edition of Ptolemy, the best known channel of communi- cating geographical knowledge in this age of discovery, bears a Span- ish imprint. The two general maps of America during the sixteenth century, which Dr. Kohl could trace to Spanish presses, were that of Medina in 1545 and that of Gomara in 1554, and these were not of a scale to be of any service in navigating. There seem to be insuperable objections to considering that Se- bastian Cabot had direct influence in the production of the map now under consideration. It is full of a lack of knowledge cabot'scon- which it is not possible to ascribe to him. That it is based ■ a , ection wi * h 1 the map 01 upon some drafts of Cabot is most probably true ; but they 1544 - are clearly drafts, confused and in some ways perverted, and eked out by whatever could be picked up from other sources. That the Cabot map was issued in more than one edition is inferred partly from the fact that the legends which Chytraeus quotes from it differ somewhat from those now in the copy preserved in Paris ; and indeed Harrisse finds reason to suppose that there may have been four different editions. That in some form or other it was better known in England than elsewhere is deduced from certain relations sustained with that country on the part of those who have mentioned the map, — Livio Sanuto, Ortelius, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Richard AVilles, Hakluyt, and Purchas. Whoever its author and whatever its minor defects, this so-called Cabot map of 1544 may reasonably be accepted as the earliest really honest, unimaginative exhibition of the American continent which had been made. There was in it no attempt to fancy a northwest pas- sage ; no confidence in the marine or terrestrial actuality of the region now known to be covered by the north Pacific ; no certainty about the entire western coast line of South America, though this might have been decided upon if the maker of the map had been posted to date 628 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. for that region. The maker of it further showed nothing of that pre- sumption, which soon became prevalent, of making Tierra del Fuego merely but one of the various promontories of an immense Antarctic continent, which later stood in the planispheres of Ortelius and Wytfliet. MEDINA, 1544. This map of Cabot was the last of the principal cartographical mon- Geo ra hi- uments made north of the Alps in this early half of the six- cai study teenth century. The centre of geographical study was now transferred J . . . » to Italy. transferred to Italy, where it had begun with the opening of THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 629 the interest in oceanic discovery. For the next score years and more we must look mainly to Venice for the newer development. In the Venice Ptolemy of 1548, we have for the first time a series of maps of the New World hy Gastaldi, which were simply enlarged MEDINA, 1544. by Ruscelli in the edition of 1561, except in a few instances, 1548) Gae , where new details were added, like the making of Yucatan taldl - a peninsula instead of the island which Gastaldi had drawn. They were repeated in the edition of 1562. 630 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. Meanwhile the most popular sea manuals of this period were Span- ish ; hut they studiously avoided throwing much light on Sea manuals. , . , ° the new geography. WYTFLIET, 1597. That of Martin Cortes was the first to suggest a magnetic pole as distinct from the terrestrial pole. Its rival, the Arte de Navegar of Pedro de Medina, published at Valladolid in 1545, never reached the same degree of popularity, nor did it deserve to, for his notions were in some respects erratic. THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 631 The English in their theories of navigation had long depended on the teachings of the Spaniards, and Eden had translated the chief Span- ish manual in his Arte of Navigation of 1561. WYTFLIET, 1597. A great advance was possible now, for a new principle had been de- vised, and an estimate of the progress of a ship was no longer depen- dent on visual observation. The log had made it possible to put dead reckoning on a pretty firm basis. This was the ip 3 og ' great new feature of the Regiment of the Sea, which the Englishman, 632 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. William Bourne, published in 1573 ; and sixteen years later, in 1589, another Englishman, Blunderville, made popularly known the new in- strument for taking meridian altitudes at sea, the cross-staff, which had very early superseded the astrolabe on shipboard. The inclination or dip of the needle, showing by its increase an approach to a magnetic pole, was not scaled till 1576, when Robert Norman made his observations, and it is not without some service to-day in that combination of phenomena of which Columbus noted the earliest traces in his first voyage of 1492. Italian dis coverers. THE CROSS-STAFF It is significant how large a part in the cardinal discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was taken by Italian navigators, sea- men, shipwrights, mathematicians, and merchants, whether in Portugal or Spain, France or England. It is curious, too, to observe how, when the theoretical work and confirmatory explora- tions were finished, and the commercial spirit succeeded to that of sci- ence, England embarked with her adventurous spirit. The death of English dia- Q ueen Mary in 1558 was the signal for English exertion, coverers. anc { ^ na ^ exertion became ominous to all Europe in the reign of Elizabeth, accompanied by an intellectual movement, typified in Bacon and Shakespeare, similar to that which stirred the age of Co- lumbus and the Italian renaissance. John Hawkins and African marauders of his English kind were selling negro slaves in Espanola in 1562 and subsequent years, and from them we get our first English accounts of the Florida coast, which on their return voyages they skirted. John Haw kins. THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 633 America had at this time been abandoned for a long while to Spain and France, and the latter power had only entered into competition with Charles V., when Francis L, as we have seen, had sent out Verra- zano in 1521 to take possession of the north Atlantic coasts. Out of this grew upon the maps the designation of New France, N which was attached to the main portion of the North Amer- France, ican continent. And this French claim is recognized in the maps, painted about 1562, on the walls of the geographical gallery in the Vatican. So the French stole upon the possession of Spain in the West Indies ; and the English followed in their wake, when the death of Mary rendered it easier for the English to smother their inherited antipathy to France. This done, the English in due time joined the French in efforts to gain an ascendency over Spain in the Indies, to compensate for the loss of such power in Italy. The Span- Spanigh ^^ iards, though they had attempted to make settlements along dements fail the Chesapeake at different times between 1566 and 1573, never succeeded in making any impression on the history of this north- ern region. The cartography of the north was at this period subject to two new influences ; and both of them make large demands upon the credulity of scholarship in these latter days. Attempts have been made to trace some portion of the development of the coasts of the northeastern parts of the United States Andr( s to the publications of a mendacious monk, Andre Thevet. Th evet, He had been sent out to the French colony of Rio de Janeiro in 1555, where he remained prostrated with illness till he was able to reem- bark for France, January 31, 1556. In 1558 he published his Singu- la, ritez de la France Antarctiqtie, a descriptive and conglomerate work, patched together from all such sources as he could pillage, professing to follow more or less his experiences on this voyage. He says noth- ing in it of his tracking along the east coast of the present United States. Seeking notoriety and prestige for his country, he pretends, however, in his Cosmographie published in 1575, to recount the ex- periences of the same voyage, and now he professes to have followed this same eastern coast to the region of Norumbega. Well-equipped scholars find no occasion to believe that these later statements were other than boldly conceived falsehoods, which he had endeavored to make plausible by the commingling of what he could filch from the narratives of others. It was at this time also (1558) that there was published at Venice the strange and riddle-like narrative which purports to give the expe- 634 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. riences of the brothers Zeni in the north Atlantic waters in the four- teenth century. The publication came at a time when, with story. the transfer of cartographical interest from over the Alps to the home of its earliest growth, the countrymen of Columbus were seeking to reinstate their credit as explorers, which during the fifteenth CAKTA I>A NAVIGAR. DI HI COLO IT AHTONIO Z£NI TVRONO I Z4 , , Z£— , , , , , Jlfm , 1 1 .ji i , r— , , : , , : , 1 1 ■— I r—r- THE ZENI MAP. century and the early part of the sixteenth they had lost to the peoples of the Iberian peninsula. Anything, therefore, which could empha- size their claims was a welcome solace. This accounts both for the bringing forward at this time of the long-concealed Zeni narrative, — granting its genuineness, — and for the influence which its accompa« THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 635 The Zeni map. nying map had upon contemporary cartography. This map professed to be based upon the discoveries made by the Zeni brothers, and upon the knowledge acquired by them at the north in the fourteenth century. It accordingly indicated the existence of countries called Es- totiland and Drogeo, lying to the west, which it was now easy to iden- tify with the Baccalaos of the Cabots, and with the New France of the later French. " If this remarkable map," says Norden- skiold, " had not re- ceived extensive circu- lation under the sanc- tion of Ptole- my's name," for it was copied in the edition of 1561 of that geographer, "it would probably have been soon foi'gotten. During nearly a whole century it had exercised an in- fluence on the mapping of the northern coun- tries to which there are few parallels to be found in the history of cartography.' It is Nordenskibld's further opinion that the Zeni map was drawn from an old map of the north made in the thirteenth century, from which the map found in the War- saw Codex of Ptolemy of 1467 was also drawn. He further infers that some changes and additions were imposed to make it correspond with the text of the Zeni narrative. The year 1569 is marked by a stride in cartographical science, of which we have not yet outgrown the necessity. THE ZENI MAP. 636 CHRIS TOPHER COL UMB US. The plotting of courses and distances, as practiced by the early explorers, was subject to all the errors which necessarily catoi-'s pro- accompany the lack of well-established principles, in repre- jection. senting the curved surface of the globe on a plane chart. nocnolf hor-n - lni$ diem h?raip*4 . cjn utdeltcet f \ fu «ir area ftnem 5 Qmno2f.&^i •tmb* THE WARSAW CODEX, 1467; Cumbrous and rude globes were made to do duty as best they could ; but they were ill adapted to use at sea. Nordenskiold {Facsimile Atlas, p. 22) has pointed out that Pirckheimer, in the Ptolemy of 1525, had seemingly anticipated the theory which Mercator now with some sort of prevision developed into a principle, which was applied in his great plane chart of 1569. The principle, however, was not definite THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 637 enough in his mind for the clear exposition of formulae, and he seems not to have attempted to do more than rough-hew the idea. The hint was a good one, and it was left for the Englishman Edward Wright to put its principles into a formulated problem in 1599, a century and after Nordenskiold. more after Columbus had dared to track the ocean by following lati- tudinal lines in the simplest manner. It has been supposed that Wright had the fashioning of the large map which, on this same Mercator projection, Hakluyt had included in his Principall Navigations in 1599. Hondius had also adopted a like method in his mappevwnde of the same year. 638 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. In 1570 the publication of the great atlas of Abraham Ortelius showed that the centre of map-making had again passed The'atrwm of from Italy, and had found a lodgment in the Netherlands. The Theatrum of Ortelius was the signal for the downfall of the Ptolemy series as the leading exemplar of geographical ideas. .J"-'"'-^:^ MERCATOR, 1569. The editions of that old cartographer, with their newer revisions, never again attained the influence with which they had been invested since the invention of printing. This influence had been so great that Nor- DecMne of denskiold finds that between 1520 and 1550 the Ptolemy Ptolemy. maps had been five times as numerous as any other. They had now passed away ; and it is curious to observe that Ortelius seems to have been ignorant of some of the typical maps anterior to his time, and which we now look to in tracing the history of American cartography, like those of Ruysch, Stobnicza, Agnese, Apianus, Vadi- anus, and Girava. THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 639 It has already been mentioned that when Ortelius published his Theatrum, and gave a list of ninety-nine makers of maps ° J r Ortelius. whom he had consulted, not a solitary one of Spanish make was to be found among them. It shows how effectually the Council of the Indies had concealed the cartographical records of their office. MERCATOR. It was eighty years since the English under John Cabot had under- taken a voyage of discovery in the New World. The inter- 157 _ Eng _ val passed not without preparation for new efforts, which iuh explora- had for a time, however, been extended to the northwest rather than to the northeast. In 1548 Sebastian Cabot had i648. Sebas- , „ , i i tian Cabot. returned to his native land to assume the nrst place in lier maritime world. His influence in directing, and that of Richard Eden in informing, the English mind prepared the way for the advent of Frobisber, the younger Hawkins, and Drake. 640 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. Frobisher's voyage of 1576 was the true beginning of the arctic 1576. Fro- seai ' c h for a northwest passage, all earlier efforts having been in lower latitudes. He had sought, by leaving Greenland bisher. ORTELIUS. on the right, to pass north of the great American barrier, and thus reach tbe land of spices. He congratulated himself on having found the long-desired strait, when, naming it for himself, he returned to THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 641 England. Frobisher attempted to add to these earlier discoveries by a voyage the next year, 1577, but he made exploration 1577 _ 78 secondary to mining for gold, and not much was done. A Frobisher. ORTELIUS, 1570. third voyage in 1578 brought him into Hudson's Straits, which he entered with the hope of finding it the channel to Cathay. But in all his voyages Frobisher only crossed the threshold of the arctic north. It was one of the results of Frobisher's voyages that they served to 642 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. The Zeni in- i m pl an t m the minds of the cartographers of the northern fluence. waters the notions of the Zeni geography, and aided to SEBASTIAN CABOT. give those notions a new lease of farvor. It is conjectured that Fro- bisher had the Zeni map with him, or its counterpart in one of the re- THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 643 cent Ptolemies. This map had placed the point of Greenland under 66° instead of 61°, and under the last latitude this map had shown the southern coast of its insular Frisland. Therefore, when Frobisher saw land under 61°, which was in fact Greenland, he supposed it to be Frisland, and thus the maps after him became confused. A like FROBISHER. mischance befell Davis, a little later. When this navigator found Greenland in 61°, he supposed it an island south of Greenland, which he called " Desolation," and the fancy grew up that Frobisher's route must have gone north of this island and between it and Greenland, and so we have in later maps this other misplacement of discoveries. While Frobisher was absent, Drake developed his great 1577 -praxi- scheme of following in the southerly track of Magellan. cis Drake - 644 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. Four years before (1573), being at Panama, he had seen from a tree- top the great Pacific, and had resolved to be the first of the English to furrow its depths. In 1577, starting on his great voyage of circum- navigation, he soon added a new stretch of the Pacific coast to the better knowledge of the world. When he returned to England, he proved to be the first commander who had taken his ship, the " Peli- can," later called the " Golden Hind " wholly round the globe, for Ma- gellan had died on the way. Passing through Magellan's Strait and Drake sees entering the Pacific, Drake's ship was separated from its Cape Horn, companions and driven south. It was then he saw the Cape sgffr ~CTg x%/£ • Sev^Mt ,qftf 5 ^?i TTjt % lji £!R3Ci CctnacL xccce ^^smsJSgiC ■Z*"? FROBISHER, 1578. Horn of a later Dutch navigator, and proved the non-existence of that neighboring antarctic continent, which was still persistently to cling to the maps. Bereft of his other ships, which the storm had driven apart, Drake, during the early months of 1579, made havoc among the Span- ish galleons which were on the South American coasts. In March, 1579, surfeited with plunder, he started north from the coast of Mexico, to find a passage to the Atlantic in the upper lati- tudes. In June he had reached 42° north, though some have supposed that in the north ne went several degrees higher. He had met, however, a Pacific rigorous season, and his ropes crackled with the ice. The change was such a contrast to the allurements of his experiences farther to the south that he gave up his search for the strait that would carry him, as he had hoped, to the Atlantic, and, turning south, he reached a bay somewhere in the neighborhood of San Francisco, THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 645 where he tarried for a while. Having placed the name of New Al- bion on the upper California coast, and fearing to run the hazards of the southern seas, where his plundering had made the Spaniards alert. FRANCIS DRAKE. he sailed westerly, and, rounding the Cape of Good Hope, reached England in due time, and was acknowledged to be the earliest of Eng- lish circumnavigators. It is one of the results of Drake's explorations in 1579-80 that we get in subsequent maps a more northerly trend to the California coast. 646 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. Shortly after this, a great confusion in the maps of this Pacific region Confusion in came m ' From what it arose is not very apparent, except the Pacific that absence of direct knowledge in geography opens a wide raphy. field for discursiveness. The Michael Lok map of 1582 in- dicates this uncertainty. It seemed to be the notion that the Arctic Sea was one and the same with that of Verrazano ; also, that it came down to about the latitude of Puget Sound, and that the Gulf of Cali- fornia stretched nearly up to meet it. Francisco Gali, a Spanish commander, returning to Acapulco from Francisco China in 1583, tried the experiment of steering northward Gali - to about 38°, when he turned west and sighted the Ameri- can coast in that latitude. At this point he steered south, and showed the practicability of following this circuitous route with less time than was required to buffet the easterly trades by a direct eastern passage. His experiment established one other fact, namely, the great width of water separating the two continents in those upper latitudes ; for he had Proves the f° un d it to be 1200 leagues across instead of there being a great width narrow strait, as the theorizing geographers had supposed, fie Gali seems also to have shown that the distance south from Cape Mendocino to the point of the California peninsula was not more than half as great as the maps had made it. His voyage was a signifi- cant source of enlightenment to the cartographers. Eastern ^0 return to the eastern coasts. An English vessel under coast of Simon Ferdinando spent a short season in 1579 somewhere North Amer- r ica - about the Gulf of Maine, and was followed the next year by I 579 ,'- i. The another under John Walker, and in 1593 by still a third English on J the coast. under Richard Strong. For eighty years England might have rested her claim to North America on the discoveries of the Cabots ; but Queen Elizabeth first gave prominence to these pretensions when she granted to Sir Hum- phrey Gilbert in 1578 the right to make a settlement somewhere in these more northerly regions. Gilbert's first voyage accomplished nothing, and there was an interdict to prevent a second, since Eng- land might have use for daring seamen nearer home. " First," says Robert Hues, " Sir Humphrey Gilbert, with great courage and forces, attempted to make discovery of those parts of America which wei'e „. „ vet unknown to the Spaniards ; but the success was not Sir Hum- J l phrey Gil- answerable." The effort was not renewed till lo83, when Gilbert took possession of Newfoundland and attempted to make settlements farther south ; but disaster followed him, and his ship foundered off the Azores on his return voyage. THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 647 It was at this time that Sir Walter Ralegh came into prominence in pushing English colonization in America. He had been gir Walter associated with his half-brother, Gilbert, in the earlier move- Rale 8 h - ments, but now he was alone. In 1584 he got his new charter, partly SO# a^r GILBERT'S MAP, 1576. by reason of the urgency of Hakluyt in his Westerns Planting. Ra- legh had his eye upon a more southern coast than Gilbert had aimed for, — upon one better fitted to develop self-dependent colonization. He knew that north of what was called Florida the Spaniards had but scantily tracked the country, and that they probably maintained no settlements. Therefore to reach a region somewhere south of the 648 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. Chesapeake was the aim of the first company sent out under Ralegh's inspiration. These adventurers made their landfall where they could find no good inlet, and so sailed north, searching, until at last they reached the sounds on the North Carolina coast, and tarried awhile. Satisfied with the quality of the country, they returned to England ; and their recitals so pleased Ralegh and the Queen that the country was named Virginia, and preparations were made to dispatch a colony. It went the next year, but its history is of no farther importance to our present purj>ose than that it marks the commencement of English colonization, disastrous though it Avas, on the North American conti- nent, and the beginning of detailed English cartography of its coast, in the map, already referred to, which seems to open a passage, some- where near Port Royal, to an interior sea. SoCeit In 1585-86 John Davis had been buffeting among the icebergs of 1585-86 Greenland and the north in hopes to find a passage by the John Davis, northwest ; on June 30, 1587, he reached 72° 12' on the Greenland coast, and discovered the strait known by his name, and in 1595 when he published his World's Hydrographical Description* he maintained that he had touched the threshold of the northwest pas- sage. He tells us that the globe of Molineaux shows how far he went. Seamanship owes more to Davis than to any other Englishman. In English sea- 1^90, or thereabout, he improved the cross-staff, and giving mauship. somewhat more of complexity to it, he produced the back- staff. This instrument gave the observer the opportunity of avoiding the glare of the sun, since it was used with his back to that lumi- nary ; and when Flamsteed, the first astronomer royal at Green- wich, used a glass lens to throw reflected light, the first approach to the great principle of taking angles by reflection was made, which was later, in 1731, to be carried to a practical result in Hadley's quadrant. The art of finding longitude was still in an uncertain state. Gemma Frisius, as we have noted, had as early as 1530 divined the method of carrying time by a watch ; but it was not till 1726 back-stajff. that anything really practicable THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 649 came of it, in a timekeeper constructed by Harrison. This watch was continually improved by him up to 1761, when the method of ascertaining longitude by chronometer became well established ; and a few years later (1767) the first nautical almanac was published, affording a reasonably good guide in lunar distances, as a means in the computations of longitude. In 1676 the Greenwich observatory had been founded to attempt the rectification of lunar tables, then so erroneous that the calculations for longitude were still uncertain. In 1701 Ed- mund Halley had published his great variation charts. These dates will fix in the reader's mind the advance of scientific skill as applied to navigation and discovery. It will be well also to remember that in 1594 Davis published his Seaman's Secrets, the first manual in the English tongue, written by a practical sailor, in which the principles of great circle sailing were explained. The first marine atlas had been printed at Leyden in 1583-84 ; but the Dutch had not at that time taken any active part in 1583 _ g4 the development of discovery in the New World. Their Earliest ma- x » rme atlas. longing for a share in it, mated with a certain hostile inten- tion towards the Spaniards, instigated the formation of the west India West India Company, which had first been conceived in the Com P an y- mind of William Usselinx in 1592, though it was not put into execu- tion till twenty-five years later. It was claimed by the Dutch that in 1598 the ships of their Greenland Company had discovered 1598 the Hudson River, though there can be little doubt that the French, Spanish, and perhaps English had been there much ear- lier. It is also claimed that the straits shown in Lok's map in 1582 had instigated Heinrich Hudson to his later search. But the truth in all these questions which involve national rights is very much per- plexed with claim and counter-claim, invention and perversion, in which historical data are at the beck of political objects. By the end of the sixteenth century the Dutch began to appear on the coasts of the Middle and New England States, and the 1598 The cartography of those regions developed rapidly under their ^^^ observation ; but it was through the boating; explorations of American /-< • t i o • • -i -« i coasts. Captain John Smith in 1614 that it took a shape nearer the truth. It is to him that the northerly parts owe the name TheEn g hsh - of New England, which Prince Charles confirmed for it. The reports from Hudson, May, and others instigated a plan marked out in 1618, but not directly ordered by the States General till 1621, which led to the Dutch occupation of Manhattan and the neighboring regions, intro- ducing more strongly than before a Dutch element into the maps. 650 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. When the seventeenth century opened, the English had come well to The English the front in maritime explorations. A large-minded and maritime" patriotic man, Sir Thomas Smith, did much in his capacity discovery. as g 0verno r of the " merchants trading into the East In- dies " to direct contemporary knowledge into better channels. Dr„ Richard Thomas Hood gave public lectures in London on the im- Hakiuyt. provements in methods of navigation. Richard Hakluyt, the historiographer of the new company, had already shown that he had inherited the spirit of helpful patronage which had characterized the labors of Eden. We find the peninsula made by the St. Lawrence and the Atlantic insularized from the beGfinninp; of the seventeenth century, the transverse channel being now on the line of the Hudson, The search then of the Penobscot, then of the St. Croix, and when the em passage seventeenth century came in, it was not wholly determined at the north. fa&t the longed-for western passage might not yet be found somewhere in this region. On July 24, 1601, George Waymouth, a navigator, as he was called, applied to the London East India Com- 1601. George P an y *° ^ e assisted m making an attempt to discover a Waymouth. northwest passage to India, and the company agreed to his proposition. The Muscovy Company protested in vain against such an infringement of its own rights ; but it found a way to smother its grief and join with its rival in the enterprise. Through such joint action Waymouth was sent by the northwest " towards Cataya or China, or the back side of America," bearing with him a letter from Queen Elizabeth to the Emperor of " China or Kathia." The attempt failed, and Waymouth returned almost ignominiously. In 1602, under instructions from the East India Company, he again sailed, and now pushed a little farther into Hudson's Strait than Hudson at an y one ^ ac ^ been before. In 1609 Hudson had made some the north. explorations, defining a little more clearly the northern coasts of the present United States ; and in 1610 he sailed again from England to attempt the discovery of the northwest passage, in a small craft of fifty-five tons, with twenty-three souls on board. Following the tracks of Davis and Waymouth, he went farther than they, and revealed to the world the great inland sea which is known by his name, and in which he probably perished. In 1612-13 Sir Thomas Button developed more exactly the outline Hudson's m P art °f tms g Teat Da y> and in 1614 the Discovery, under Bav - Robert Bylot and William Baffin, passed along the coasts of Hudson's Strait, making most careful observation, and Baffin took for the first time at sea a lunar observation for longitude, according to a method which had been suggested as early as 1514. It was on a THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 651 voyage undertaken in the next year, 1615, that Baffin, exceeding the northing of Davis, found lying before him the great expanse 1615 Baf of Baffin's Bay, through which he proceeded till he found a &a ' a Ba y- northern exit in Sir Thomas Smith's Sound, under 78°. Baffin did all this with an accuracy which surprised Sir John Ross, who was the next to enter the bay, two centuries later. It was in these years of Hudson and Baffin that Napier invented logarithms and simplified the processes of nautical calculations. LUKE FOX, 1G35. The voyage of Luke Fox in 1631 developed some portions of the western shores of Hudson's Bay, and he returned confident, ]r>31 Luke from his observation of the tides farther north, that they Fox - indicated a western passage ; and in the same year Thomas Thomas James searched the more southern limits of the great bay ame8 ' with no more success. These voyages put a stay for more than a hundred years to efforts in this direction to find the passage so long sought. 652 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. Up to 1602 the explorations of our northern coasts seem to have been ordinarily made either by a sweep northerly from Europe, strik- ing Newfoundland and then proceeding south, or by a southerly sweep 1602 G s following the Spanish tracks and ooasting north from Flor- nold - ida. In this year, 1602, the Englishman Gosnold, without any earlier example that we know of since the time of Verrazano, stood directly to the New England coast, and in the accounts of his voyage we begin to find some particular knowledge of the contour of this coast, which opens the way to identifications of landmarks. The explorations of Pring (1603), Champlain (1604), Waymouth (1605), Popham (1607), Hudson (1609), Smith (1614), Dermer (1619), and others which followed are of no more importance in our present sur- vey than as marking further stages of detailed geography. Even Dermer was dreaming of a western passage yet to be found in this region. We must now turn to follow the development during the seventeenth century of the discoveries on the Pacific coast, ou the Pa- Sebastian Viscaino, in his voyage up the coast from Aca- pulco in 1602, sought the hidden straits as high as 42°. and 1602. Vis- one of his captains reporting the coast to trend easterly at 43°, his story confused the geography of this region for many years. This supposed trend was held to indicate another pas- sage to the Gulf of California, making the peninsula of that name an island, and so it long remained on the maps, after once getting pos- session, some years later (1622), of the cartographical fancy. Some explorations of the Dutch under De Vries, in 1643, were the 1643 De source of a notion later prevailing, that there was an inter- Vnes. jacent land in the north Pacific, which they called " Jesso," and which was supposed to be separated by passages both from Amer- ica and from Asia ; and for half a century or more the supposition, con- nected more or less with a land seen by Joao da Gama, was accepted in some quarters. Indeed, this notion may be said to have not wholly disappeared till the maps of Cook's voyage came out in 1777-78, when the Aleutian Islands got something like their proper delineation. In fact, so vague was the conception of what might be the easterly Confused ge- extension of the northern sea in the latitudinal forties that notionsofa tne n °ti° u °f a sea something like the old one of Verrazano western sea. was even thought in 1625 by Briggs in Purchas, and again in 1651 in Farrer's map of Virginia, to bathe the western slope of the Alleghanies. Early in the eighteenth century, even the best cartographers ran 1700. wild in their delineations of the Pacific coast. A series of THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 653 multifarious notions, arising from more or less faith in the alleged explorations of Maldonado, Da Fuca, and De Fonte, some of them assumed to have heen made more than a century Da Fuca, De earlier, filled the maps with seas and straits, identified some- Fonte - times with the old strait of Anian, and converting the northwestern parts of North America into a network of surmises, that look strangely to our present eyes. Some of these wild configurations prevailed even after the middle of the century, but they were finally eliminated from the maps by the expedition of that James Cook who first saw the light in a Yorkshire cabin in 1728. JESSO. [After Hennepin.] In 1724 Peter the Great equipped Vitus Bering's first expedition, and in December, 1724, five weeks before his death, the 1724 Ber . Czar gave the commanding officer his instruction to coast In s- northward and find if the Asiatic and American coasts were continu- ous, as they were supposed to be. There were, however, among the Siberians, some reports of the dividing waters and of a great land be- yond, and these rumors had been prevailing since 1711. Peter the Great died January 28, 1725 (old style), just as Bering was beginning his journey, and not till March, 1728, did that navigator reach the neighborhood of the sea. In July he spread his sails on a vessel which he had built. By the middle of August he had 654 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. 3)9 , 5[^ i 3|7 O^ci ,dei The Sea of Cliiiu $ncl the Indies, ^x^" ^ ^ s Travis! ©rafo Tojftjsiaju in, the •name of.Qb'- ^f^CeSwa if UsyrMbioa.. '&Z& a && / /
, .: ri l y w . . ,i. p irn ninni m; IIIMI— s? 5« OrTXcB DOMLNA FARRER'S THE GEOGRAPHICAL RESULTS. 655 p- — La m '■'«" '"»' ' m 3\9 __ 4K> ■i nun -iinr— Ijrn I'Min i 24, 626, 627; returns to England, 639 ; portrait, (342. Cabral, Pedro Alvarez, on the South American coast, 377. Cabrero, Juan, 161. Cabrillo, (ill. Cacique, 231. Cadamosto, his voyage, 98. Cado, Fermin. 285. California, peninsula of, 610 ; its name, 611 ; map, 611 ; mapped as an island, 052 ; Drake on the coast, 644, 645. Cam, Diogo. 134. Camargo on the coast of Chili, 577. Camers, Johann, 585. Canaries, their history, 86 ; map of, 194. Cannibals, 225, 227, 230, 268, 270, 281. Canoes, 219. Cantino, Alberto, 417 ; Cantino map, 387 ; sketched, 419 ; its traits ex- amined, 420 ; its relation with Colum- bus. 421. Caonabo. 305 : attacks La Navidad, 273, 275 ; attacks St. Thomas, 308 ; forms a league, 308 ; captured, 313 ; dies, 323. Cape Blanco, 98. Cape Bojador. 07. Cape Breton, 627. Cape of Good Hope discovered, 151. Cape Horn discovered, 577; seen by Drake, 644. Cape Race, 534. Cape Verde Island discovered, 199, Cardenas, Alonso de, 101. Cardona, Cristoval de, Admiral of Ara- gon, 524, 526, 527. Caribs. 230, 271.323. Carpini, Piano, 90. Carthaginians as voyagers, 127. Cartier, Jacques, his explorations, 612, 624. INDEX. 603 Carvajal, Alonso Sanchez de, factor of Columbus, 430. Carvajal, Bernardin de, 248. Casa de Contratacion, 481. Casaneuve. See Colombo the Corsair. Casanove, 71. Casoni, F., annals of Genoa, 32, 154. Casteileda, Juan de. 238. Castellanos, Elegias, 491. Castillo, 611. Catalan seamanship, 94. Catalina, Dona, 9, 270. Cathay, 224, 457 ; early name of China, 90; map of, 113, 114; as found by the Portuguese, 509. Cazadilla, 150. Chanca, Dr., his narrative, 29; goes to the new world, 202, 2S2. Charles V., portrait, 519. Chaves, Alonso, his map, 561, 621 ; at the Seville Conference, 604. Chesapeake Bay. Spaniards in the, 633. Chili discovered, 565, 577. China, early known, 90. See Cathay. Chronica Delphi nea, 9, 11. Chronometers, 260, 603. Chytraeus, 627. Cibao, 232 ; its mines visited by Ojeda, 279. Ciguare, 447. Cipango, 125 ; map, 113. Circourt, Count, 46. Clavus, Claudius, 140, 141. Clemente, Claudio, Tablets, 214. Climatic lines, 601. Codex Flatoyensis, 146. Coelho's voyage, 410. Colombo, Balthazar, 525, 527. Colombo, Bernardo, 525, 527. Colombo, Corsair, 71, 72. 83, 84. Colon, Cristoval (bastard son of Luis, grandson of Columbus), 526. Colon, Diego (brother of Columbus), born. 77 ; in Spain and in Colum- bus's second expedition, 202 ; his character. 285 ; placed by Columbus in command at Isabella. 290 ; goes to Spain, 311 ; quarrels with Fonseca, 318. Colon, Diego (son of Columbus), 106 ; page to the Queen, 181 ; at Court. 47*. 47!* ; receives letter from Colum- bus. 478 ; his illegitimate children, 513 ; receives what was due to his fa- ther. 513 ; urges the King to restore his father's privileges, 513 ; his suit against the Crown, 514, 553 ; wins, 515 ; marriage, 515 ; denied the title of Viceroy, 515 ; Governor of Espa- iiola, 515, 516; in Spain, 519; lends money to Charles V., 520; his in- come, 520 ; Viceroy, 520 ; builds a palace, 520 ; its ruins, 520 ; in Spain pressing his claims, 522 ; dies, 522 ; his children, 522. Colon, Diego (great-grandson of Co- lumbus), marries and becomes Duke of Veragua, 525, 526 ; his connection with the Historie of 1571, 44. Colon, Luis (grandson of Columbus), succeeds his father, 522 ; makes com- promise with the Crown. 522 ; holds Jamaica, 523 ; made Duke of Vera- gua, 523 ; governs Espaiiola, 523 ; bis marriages, 523 ; imprisoned and dies, 523 ; his children, 526. Colon. See Columbus. Columbia River, 658. Columbus, Bartholomew (brother of Columbus), born, 77 ; in Portugal, 104; affects Columbus's views, 117; with Diaz on the African coast, 151, 303; sent to England, 167,303,339; in France, 168, 303 ; reaches Espa- iiola, 303 ; made Adelantado, 304 ; left in command by Columbus, 323 ; con- firmed by the Crown as Adelantado, 328 ; portrait, 329 ; attacks the Qui- bian, 451 ; sees Columbus for the last time, 488 ; survives him, 513 ; goes to Borne, 516 ; takes a map, 516, 533 ; goes to Espaiiola, 516 ; dies, 518 ; re- puted descendant, 527. Columbus, Christopher, sources of information, 1 ; biographers, 30 ; his prolixity and confusion, 1 ; his writ- ings, 1 ; Libro ele las Prqficias, 1 ; facsimile of his handwriting, 2 ; his private papers, 2 ; letters, 2, 5 ; writ- ten in Spanish, 2 ; his privileges, 3 ; Codex Diplomaticus, 3 ; the Custodia at Genoa, 4, 5 ; Bank of St. George, 5 ; marginalia, 7 ; Declaration de Ta- bla navigatoria, 7, 32 ; Cinco Zonas, 7 ; lost manuscripts, S ; MS. annotations, 8; missing letters, 9, 18,19; missing commentary, 9 ; journal of his first voy- age, 9, 193 ; printed in English, 10 ; letters on his discovery, 10 ; printed editions, 12 ; Catalan text, 13 ; Latin text, 14; his transient fame, 14; in England, 14 ; autographs, 14 ; edition of the Latin first letter, 15; facsimile of a page, 16; libraries possessing copies, 17 ; bibliography of first let- ter, 17 ; other accounts of first voyage, 17; lawsuits of heirs, 18, 26, 514: account of his second voyage, 18, 264 ; Libro del Segundo Viage, 18, 264 ; let- ters owned by the Duke de Veragua, 18; accounts of his third voyage. L8, 347 ; of his fourth voyage, 19 ; Let- tera rarissima, 19 ; Libros de memo- rias, 19 ; work on the Arctic Pole, 19; his maps. 20; Memorial del Pleyto, 664 INDEX. 26 ; Italian accounts of, 30 ; influenced by his Spanish life, 33 ; Portuguese accounts, 33 ; Spanish accounts, 33 ; documents preserved by Las Casas, 47 ; canonization, 52 ; English ac- counts, 55 ; life by Irving, 56 ; bibli- ography, 59 ; his portraits, 61-70 ; his person, 6l ; tomb at Havana, 69 ; his promise to the Bank of St. George, 5, 70 ; ancestry, 71 ; early home, 71 ; name of Colombo, 71 ; the French family, 71 ; professes he was not the first admiral of his name, 72 ; spurious genealogies, 73, 74 ; prevalence of the name Colombo, 73 ; his grandfather, 74 ; Ins father, 74 ; life at Savona, 75 ; Genoa, 75 ; his birth, 76 ; dis- puted date, 76 ; his mother, 77 ; her offspring, 77 ; place of his birth, 77 ; many claimants, 78 ; uncertainties of his early life, 79 ; his early education, 79 ; his penmanship and drawing, 79 ; specimen of it, 80 ; said to have been at Pavia, 79 ; at Genoa, 81 ; in An- jou's expedition, 83 ; his youth at sea, 83 ; drawn to Portugal, 86, 102 ; liv- ing there, 103 ; alleged swimming with an oar, 103 ; marries, 105 ; sup- posed interview with a sailor who had sailed west, 107 ; knew Marco Polo's book, 116; Mandeville's book, 116; the ground of his belief in a western passage, 117; inherits his views of the sphericity of the earth, 1 1 ! > ; of its size, 123 ; his ignorance of the Atlantis story, etc. , 126, 148 ; learns of western lands, 129 ; in Portugal, 131 ; in Iceland, 135 ; Tratado de las Cinco Zonas, 137 ; and the Sagas, 146 ; his first gratuity in Spain, 149 ; diffi- culty in following his movements, 149 ; interviews the Portuguese king, 150; abandons Portugal, 149, 153; did he lay his project before the au- thorities of Genoa ? 153 ; did he pro- pose to those of Venice ? 154 ; did he leave a wife in Portugal ? 154 ; enters Spain. 154, 157, 169 ; at Rabida, 154, 17-'!; calls himself Colon, 157; re- ceives gratuities, 157, 168; sells books and maps, 158 ; writes out his proofs of a new world, 158 ; interview with Ferdinand of Spain, 159 ; his monu- ment at Genoa, 163 ; at Malaga, 165 ; connection with Beatrix Enriquez, 166 ; his son Ferdinand born, 166 ; his views in England, 167 ; invited back to Portugal, 168 ; lived in Spain witli the Duke of Medina-Celi, 169; at Cordova, 109 ; at Baza, 16!) ; his views again rejected, 170; at Santa l'V. 176; his arrogant demands, 177 ; starts for France, 177 ; recalled and agreed with, 179; his passport, 180; the capitulations, 181 ; allowed to use Don, 181 ; at Palos, 181 ; his fleet fitted out, 182 ; expenses of the first voyage, 183 ; his flag-ship, 183 ; her size, 184 ; hopes to find mid-ocean islands, 185 ; sails, 191 ; keeps a jour- nal, 193; the "Pinta" disabled, 195; sees Teneriffe, 195 ; at the Canaries, 195 ; falsifies his l'eckoning, 195 ; map of the routes of his four voyages, L96; of the first voyage, 197; his dead reckoning, 198 ; his judgment of his speed, 198 ; observes no varia- tion of his needle, 198 ; watches the stars, 203 ; believed the earth pear- shaped, 203 ; meets a west wind, 205 ; thinks he sees land, 206 ; follows the flight of birds, 206 ; pacifies his crew, 207 ; alleged mutiny, 208 ; claims to see a light, 208 ; receives a reward for first seeing land, 209, 249 ; map of the landfall, 210 ; land actually seen, 211 ; land taken possession of, 211 ; his armor, 211; question of his land- fall, 214 ; trades with the natives, 218, 220 ; first intimates his intention to enslave them, 220; finds other isl- lands, 220 ; eager to find gold, 221 ; reaches Cviba, 223 ; mentions pearls for the first time, 223 ; thought him- self on the coast of Cathay, 224 ; takes an observation, 224 ; meets with tobacco, 225 ; with potatoes, 225 ; hears of cannibals, 225 ; seeks Ba- beque, 225 ; difficult communication with the natives, 226, 227 ; in the King's Garden, 226 ; deserted by Pin- zon, 226 ; at Espanola, 228 ; takes his latitude, 229 ; entertains a cacique, 231 ; meets with a new language, 232 ; seeks gold, 232 ; shipwrecked, 232 ; builds a fort, 233 ; names it La Na- vidad, 235 ; hears of Jamaica, 235 ; of Amazons, 235 ; fears the Pinzons, 235 ; sees mermaids, 236 ; sails for Spain, 230 ; meets a gale, 237 ; sepa- rates from the " Pinta," 237 ; throws overboard an accoimt of his discov- eries, 238 ; makes land at the Azores, 238 ; gets provisions, 238 ; his men captured on shore, 139 ; again at sea, 240 ; enters the Tagus, 240 ; reason for using the name Indies, 240 ; goes to the Portuguese Court, 241 ; leaves the Tagus, having sent a letter to the Spanish Court, 242 ; reaches Palos, 242; the iC Pinta " arrives the same day, 242, 244 ; his Indians, 244, 259, 272; summoned to Court, 244; at Barcelona, 245 ; reception, 245 ; his life there, 246, 247, 249, 256; his first letter, 248 ; scant impression INDEX. 665 made by the announcement, 248 ; the egg story, 249 : receives a eoat-of- arms, 249, 550; his family arms, 251 ; his motto. 25J ; receives the royal seal. 256 ; leaves the Court, 256; in Seville. 256 ; relations with Fonseca begin, 256 ; fits out the sec- ond expedition, 257, 258, 261 ; em- barks, 263 ; sails, 264 ; his character, 265; at the Canaries, 265; at Domi- nica, 266 ; at Marigalante, 266 ; at Guadaloupe, 268; rights the Caribs, at Santa Cruz, 271 ; reaches Espanola, 272 ; arrives at La Navidad, 273 ; finds it destroyed and abandons it, 275, 277 ; disembarks at another harbor, 278 ; founds Isabella. 278 ; grows ill, 27'.'; expeditions to seek gold. 279, 281 > ; writes to the sovereigns, 281 > ; the fleet leaves him, 282 ; harassed by factions, 284 ; leads an expedition inland, 2S5 ; builds Fort St. Thomas, 287 ; returns to Isabella, 288 ; sends Ojeda to St. Thomas, 289 ; sails to explore Cuba, 290 ; discovers Jamaica, 291 ; returns to Cuba, 293 ; imagines his approach to the Golden Chersone- sns, 295 ; exacts an oath from his men that they were in Asia, 296 ; doubts as to his own belief, 297 ; return voyage, 299 ; on the Jamaica coast, 800 ; cal- culates his longitude on the Espanola coast, 301 ; falls into a stupor, 302 ; reaches Isabella, 302 ; finds his brother Bartholomew there, 303 ; learns what had happened in his absence, 304 ; receives supplies. 309 ; sends the fleet back, 310 ; sends Diego to Spain, 311 ; sends natives as slaves, 311 ; battle of the Vega Real, 312 ; oppresses the natives, 315 ; his enemies in Spain, 81K ; receives a royal letter by Agua- do, 319; the fleet wrecked, 321; thinks the mines of Hayna the Ophir of Solomon. 322 ; sails for Spain, 323 ; reaches Cadiz, 324 ; lands in the garb of a Franciscan, 325 ; proceeds to Court, 326 ; asks for a new fleet, 326 ; delays, 327 ; his rights reaf- firmed, 328 ; new proportion of prof- its, 328 ; his will, 330; his signature, 330 ; lives with Andres Deniable/.. .'!.".! ; his character drawn by Bernal- dez, 331 ; enlists criminals, 332 ; his altercation with Fonseca' s agent, '■'•'■'>'■'• ; had authorized voyages, 336 ; the third voyage and its sources. 847 ; leaves directions for his son Diego, 348; sails from San Lucar, 348 ; his course, 348 ; letter to him from Jayme Ferrer, 349; captures a French prize, 349 ; at the Cape de Verde Islands, 349 ; at Trinidad, 350 ; first sees main- land, 351 ; touches the Gulf .Stream, 352 : grows ill, 355, 356 ; his geo- graphical delusions, 356 ; compared with Vespucius, 358 ; observations of nature, 359 ; meets the Adelantado. 359; reaches Santo Domingo, 365; his experience with convict settlers, 366, 392, 396, 434; sends letters to Spain, 367 ; treats with Roldan, 80S, 370 ; institutes repartimientos, 371 ; sends other ships to Spain, 371 ; his prerogatives as Admiral infringed, 372 ; sends Roldan against Ojeda. 874 ; did he know of Cabot's voyage ? 386 ; his wrongs from furtive voyagers, 372—387 ; opposition to his rule in the Antilles, 388 ; his new relations with Roldan, 389 ; quells Moxica's plot, 800; Bobadilla arrives, 390 ; charges against the Admiral, 8,92, 402, 404 ; his deceiving the Crown. 393 ; re- ceives copies of Bobadilla's instruc- tions, 400 ; reaches Santo Domingo, 401; imprisoned and fettered, 401; sent to Spain in chains, 403 ; his let- ter to Prince Juan's nurse, 404, 405, 407 ; his alienation of mind, 4( 15 ; reaches Cadiz, 407 ; his reception, 408, 409 ; suspended from power, 400; his connection with the Cantino map, 420,421; his destitution, 420; his vested rights invaded, 428 ; his demands unheeded, 42S ; sends a fac- tor to Espanola, 430 ; Libros do las Projicias, 431 ; his projected con- quest of the Holy Land, 481 ; de- feated by Satan, 431 ; dreams on a hidden channel through the new world, 432 ; still seeking the Great Khan, 433 ; his purposed gift to Ge- noa, 434 ; writes to the Bank of St. George, 435 ; his fourth voyage, 437 ; his mental and physical condition, 487; at Martinico, 488; touches at the forbidden Santo Domingo, 438 ; but is denied the port, 489; his ships ride out a gale, 441 ; on the Hondu- ras coast, 441 ; meets a large canoe, 442 ; says mass on the land, 442 ; on the Veragua coast. 115; touches the region tracked by Bastidas, 448; sees a waterspout, 440; returns to Vera- gua. 45( I ; finds the gold mines of Solomon, 451 >; plans settlement at Veragua. 451 ; dangers, 451; has a fever. 458 ; hears a voice, 454 ; the colony rescued, 450; sails away. 150; abandons one caravel, 457 ; on the Cuban coast. 457; goes to Jamaica, 457; strands his ships, 458 ; sends Mendez to Ovando, 458,461; writes a letter to his sovereigns, 150; Lettera rarissima, 459; Ids worship of gold, 666 INDEX. 401 ; the revolt of Porras, 462 ; Por- ras sails away, 464 ; but returns to the island and wanders about, 464 ; predicts an eclipse of the moon. 465 ; Escobar arrives, 467 ; and leaves, 468 ; negotiations with Porras, 468 ; fight between the rebels and the Adelan- tado, 469; Porras captured, 46!); the rebels surrender, 470 ; Mendez sends to rescue him, 470 ; leaves Jamaica, 471 ; learns of events in Espanola during- his absence, 472 ; reaches Santo Domingo, 475 ; relations with Ovan- do, 475 ; sails for Spain. 475 ; arrives, 470 ; in Seville, 477 ; his letters at this time, 477 ; his appeals. 477 : fears Porras, 478, 479 ; appeals to Mendez, 470; his increasing malady, 480; sends a narrative to Rome, 482 ; suf- fered to ride on a mule, 483 ; relations with the Bank of St. George in Ge- noa, 483 ; his privileges, 484 ; doubt- ful reference to Fonseca, 484 ; later relations with Vespucrus, 484 ; his property sold, 486 ; goes to Segovia, 486 ; Deza asked to arbitrate, 486 ; makes a will, 487 ; at Salamanca, 487 ; at Valladolid, 488 ; seeks to propi- tiate Juana, 488 ; makes a codicil to his will, 488 ; its doubtful character, 488 ; ratifies his will, 489 ; its pro- visions, 489 ; dies, 490 ; his death unnoticed, 491 ; later distich pro- posed for his tomb, 491 ; successive places of interment, 491 ; his bones removed to Santo Domingo, 492 ; to Havana, 492 ; controversy over their present position, 492 ; his chains, 494 ; the age of Columbus, 494 ; statue at Santo Domingo, 495 ; his character, his dependence on the Imago Mundi, 497; on other authors, 498; relations with Toscanelli, 499 ; different delin- eations of his character, 501 ; his ob- servations of nature, 502; his over- wrought mind, 502; hallucinations, 503, 504 ; arguments for his canoniza- tion, 505 ; purpose to gain the Holy Sepulchre, 505; his Catholicism, 505 ; his urgency to enslave the Indians, 5l 15, 506 ; his scheme of repartimientos 506; adopts garb of the Franciscans, 508; mercenary, 508, 509; the mov- ing light of his first voyage, 510 ; in- sistence on territorial power, 510 ; claims inspiration, 511 ; his heirs, 513 ; his discoveries denied after his death, 514, 520 ; his territorial power lost by his descendants, 523 ; table of his descendants, 524, 525 ; his male line becomes extinct, 526 ; lawsuit to es- tablish the succession, 526; female line through the Portogallos fails, 527 ; now represented by the Lar- reategui family, 528; present value of the estates, 528; the geographi- cal results of his discoveries, 529; connection with early maps, 533, 534 ; his errors in longitude, 603 ; his observations of magnetic influence. 632. Columbus, Ferdinand (bastard son of Columbus), 480, 482 ; his Historie, 39 ; doubts respecting it, 39 ; his career, 40; his income, 40; his library. 40; its catalogue 42 ; English editions of the Historie, 55 ; his birth. 166 ; at school, 181 ; made page of the Queen, 331 ; his ability, 513 ; goes with Di- ego to Espanola, 515 ; aids his bro- ther's widow, 522 ; an arbiter, 522 ; owns Ptolemy (1513), 545; his disre- gard of the claims urged for Vespu- cius, 553 ; his Colon de Concordia, 571 ; arbiter at the Congress of Bada- jos, 591 ; advises the King, 591 ; his house at Seville, 603 ; at the Seville Conference, 604; map inscribed to him, 605. Coma, Guglielmo, 282. Conti, Nicolo di, 116, 509. Cook, James, voyage, 633, 658. Cordova, Cathedral of, 172. Coronel, Pedro Fernandez, 332, 364. Correa da Cunha, Pedro, 106, 131. Correnti, C, 12. Corsairs, 71. Corsica, claim for Columbus's birth in, 77. Cortereal discoveries. 577. Cortereal, Gaspar, manuscript, facsimile, 414; his voyage to Labrador, 415. Cortereal, Joao Vaz, 129. Cortereal, Miguel, his handwriting, fac- simile. 416 ; his voyages, 417. Cortes, Hernando, in Santo Domingo, 475 ; sails for Mexico, 565 ; his map of the Gulf of Mexico, 567, 569, 607 ; his exploring expeditions, 568 ; plan- ning to explore the Pacific, 591 : his Pacific explorations, 610 ; his portrait. 610. Cortes, Martin, 630. Cosa, Juan de la, 426 ; goes to the new world, 262; his charts, 34:',, 345, 380- 382 ; with Ojeda, 373. Cosco, Leander de, 15. Costa Rica, map, 443. Cotabanama, 305, 474. Coulomp, 71. Cousin, Jean, on the Brazil coast, 174. Crignon, Pierre, 556. Criminals enlisted by Columbus, 332. Crossbows, 258. Cross-staff. 26 1 . 632, 048. See Back-staff INDEX. 667 Cuba, reached by Columbus. 223 ; be- lieved to be Asia, 226 ; named Juana, 228 ; its southern coast explored, 201 ; insularity of, 384 ; Wytrliet's map, 384-85 ; its cartography, 424 ; Co- lumbus's views, 425 ; circumnavi- gated, 565. Cubagua, 355. Gushing, Caleb, on the Everett MS., 4 ; on Navarrete, 28 ; on Columbus's landfall, 217. Darien, isthmus, map, 446. D.iti, versifies Columbus's first letter, 15. D'Avezae on the Historic, 45. Davis, John, in the north, 043, 048 ; his Seaman's Secrets, 040. Dead reckoning, 94. De Bry, 51 ; his engraving of Colum- bus, 66, 68. Degree, length of, 124. Del Cano, 576. Demarcation. See Bull of. Demersey, A., on the Murioz MSS., 27. Denys, Jean, 550. Desceliers (or Henri II.) map, 612, 624. Deza, Diego de, 161, 164, 170 ; asked to arbitrate between Columbus and the King, 486. Diaz, Bart., on the African coast, 151. Diaz, Miguel, 322, 399. Diaz de Pisa, Bernal, 284. Dogs used against the natives, 292, 312. Dominica, 266. Dominicans in Espanola, 508. Don, Nicholas, 556. Donis, Nicholas, his map, 140, 531. Drake, Francis, sees Cape Horn, 577 ; his voyages, 643 ; portrait, 645, 654. Drogeo. 6 15. Duro, C. F., Colon, etc., 54. Dutch, the, their American explora- tions, 649. Earth, sphericity of, 118 ; size of, 121 ; how far known before Columbus, 122. East India Company, 050. Eden, R. , Treatyse of the Newe I ml in. 537,538; Decades, 538 ; Arte of Navi- gation, 631 ; influence in England, 639. Eden (paradise), situation of, 357. Eggleston, Edward. 597, 599. Enciso, Fernandes d', Geoyraphia, 587. Encomiendas, 314. England, reception of Columbus's news in, 167 ; earliest mention of the Span- ish discoveries, 537 ; ser-manuals in. 631 ; effects on discovery of her com- mercial spirit, 632 ; her explorations. 639; beginning of her colonization, 048 ; her later explorations, 650 ; her seamen in the Caribbean Sea. 373, 420, 427 ; on the eastern coast of North America, 601. Enriquez, Beatrix, connection with Co- lumbus. 100 ; noticed in Columbus's will, 489. Equator, crossed by the Portuguese, 134 ; first crossed on the American side, 371',. Eric the Red, 139, 140, 144, 140. Escobar, Diego de, sent to Jamaica by Ovando, 407. Escobar, Roderigo de, 451. Escoveda, Rodrigo de, 235. Espanola, discovered and named, 228, 220; its divisions, 305; Charlevoix's map, 300 ; Ramusio's map of, 369 ; Ovando recalled, 515 ; Diego Colon governor, 515 ; sugar cane raised, 520. Esquibel, Juan de, 474. Estotiland, 635. Evangelista, 297. Everett, A. H., on Irving's Columbus, 50. Everett, Edward, possessed a copy of Columbus's privileges, 3. Faber, Jacobus, Meteoroloyia, 540. Faber, Dr. John, 540. Fagundes, 566. Faria y Sousa, Europa Portuyuesa, 241. Farrer, Domina, her map. 052, 054. 055. Ferdinand of Spain, his character, 159 ; his unwillingness to embark in Co- lumbus's plans, 178; his appearance, 245 ; grows apathetic, 327 ; his por- trait. 328 ; his distrust of Columbus, 393, 427. 479, 4st; ; sends Bobadilla to Santo Domingo, 394 ; dies 520, 555. Ferdinando, Simon, 646. Fernandina, 221. Ferrelo, 012. Ferrer. Jayme, letter to Columbus, 349. Fieschi, G. L., 0. Fiesco, B.. 462. Finaeus, Orontins, his map, 607-609. Flamsteed, 648. Floating islands. 190. Flores discovered. 88. Florida coast early known, 424 ; dis- covered, 55S ; English on the coast, 632. Fonseca. Juan Rodriguez de, relations with Columbus begin. 250 ; his char- acter, 256, 257. 310; quarrel with Diego Colon, 318; allowed to grant licenses. 320; lukewarm towards the third voyage of Coluinhus, 333 ; made bishop of Placentia. 4S4. Fontanarossa, G. de, 77. Fonte, de. 05.".. Fort Concepcion, 300. 068 INDEX. Fox, G. A., on Columbus's landfall, 214. 216. Fox, Luke, his map, 65 1 . France, her share in American explora- tions, 6< '•'■'>. Franciscus, monk, his map, 606. Franciscans in Espaiiola, 508. Freire. Juan, his map, 577, 578, 612. Friess. See' Frisius. Frisius, Laurentius, his map (1522), 552. 5SS. Frisland, 137, 145. Frobisher, his voyages, 640 ; portrait, 643 ; his map, 644. Fuca, Da, 653. Fulgoso, B., Collectanea, 32. Furlani, Paolo de, 619. Fuster, Bibl. Valencianu, 27. Gali, Francisco, 646. Gallo, Ant., on Columbus, 30. Gama, Joao da, 652. Gama, Vasco da, portrait, 334 ; his voy- age, 334. Ganong. W. F., 612. Garay, 566 ; his map, 568. Gastaldi, his map, 616-618, 629. Gelcich, E., on the Historie, 40. Gemma Frisius, nautical improvements, 603, 648. Genoa, records, 21 ; Columbus's early life in, 75, 77 ; citizens of, in Spain, 158; Columbus"s monument, 163; favored in Columbus's will, 330 ; Bank of St. George, 435, 483; her citizens in Portugal, 86 ; on the At- lantic. 128. Geraldini, Antonio, 158. Gilbert, Sir Humphrey, his voyages, 646 ; his map, 647. Giocondo, 538. Giovio. See Jovius. Giustiniani, his Psalter, 30, 83 ; his An- nals of Genoa, 30. Glareanus on the ancients' knowledge of America, 606. Glassberger, Nicholas, 400. Globus Mundi, 53(1, 537, 540. Gold mines, 232 ; scant returns, 332. Gomara, the historian, 39. Gomera (Canaries), 195. Gomez, Estevan, on the Atlantic coast, 501, 589, 51)1 ; cartographical results, 591-593. Gonzales, keeper of the Spanish archives, 28. Goodrich, Aaron, Columbus, 59, 60, 504. Gorricio, Gaspar. 433, 484; friend of Columbus, 18; adviser of Diego Colon, 34S. Gorvalan, 280. Gosnold on the New England coast, 652 Granada, siege of, 175. Grand Turk Island, 216. Great circle sailing, 341, 649. Great Khan, letter to, ISO. Greenland, 139. 140 ; held to be a part of Europe, 140, 145, 152; part of Asia, 143 ; a link between Europe and Asia, 610 ; delineated on maps (Zeni),634, 643; (1467), 036 ; (1482), 531, 532; (1508), 532; (1511), 577; (1513), 544 ; (1527), 600 ; (1576), 647 ; (1582), 598. Grenada, £55. Grimaldi, G. A., 21. Grijalva, 505 ; portrait, 566. Gronlandia, 145. 4 ; on Columbus, 501, 505. Isabella of Spain, her character, 159, 479; yields to Columbus's views, 178; her appearance, 245 ; her interest in Columbus's second voyage, 258 ; her faith in Columbus shaken, 393, 396, 409 ; dies, 479 ; her will about the Indians, 4S2. Isabella (island), 222. Isabella (town) founded, 278. Italy, her relations to American discov- ery, 33 ; her conspicuous mariners, 104, 632 ; and the new age, 496 ; car- tographers of, 601,628. Jack-staff, 201. Jacquet Island, 111. Jamaica, possibly Babeque, 230 ; called Yamaye, 235; discovered by Colum- bus, 291 ; again visited, 300; Colum- bus at. during his last voyage, 457. Januarius, Hanibal, 22. Japan, supposed position, 207. See Ci- pango. Jayme, 92. .Tesso. 052. 653. John of Anjou, 82, 84. Jorrin. J. S. . Varios Autografts, 7. Jovius (Giovio) Paulus, his biography. 32 ; bis picture of Columbus, 61, 63; E log ia. 04. Juana. See Cuba. Julius II., Pope, portrait, 517. Kettell, Samuel, 10. Khan, tli.' Great, 90, 224. King's Garden, 226. Kolno (Skolno), 138. Kublai Khan, 90, 224. Labrador coast, Normanf on, 413 ; Por- tuguese on, 415. Lachine, 613. Lafuente y Alcantara, 13. Lake, Arthur, 184. Lamartine on Columbus, 75. La mina (Gold coast), 101. Laon globe, 123, 190. Larreategui family, representatives of Columbus, 528. Las Casas, B., his abridgment of Colum- bus's journal, 10 ; his papers of Co- lumbus, 19, 47 ; his Historia, 45, 46 ; his career, 47 ; his portrait, 48 ; his pity for the Indians, 50 ; his father goes to the new world, 202 ; at Santo Domingo, 429 ; appeals for the In- dians, 520; on the respective merits of Columbus and Vespucius, 553. Latitude, errors in observing, 261. Latitude and longitude on maps, 601, 602. Laurentian portolano (1351), 87. Ledesma, Pedro, 454, 470. Leibnitz, Codex, 71. Leigh, Edward, 001. Lemoyne, G. B., Colombo, 33. Lenox globe, 571. Lepe, Diego de, on the South American coast, 377. Lery, Baron de, 556. Liria, Duke of 527. Lisbon, naval battle near, 103 ; Genoese in, 104. Loadstone, its history, 93. See Magnet. Log, ship's, 95, 96, 631. Lok, Michael, map (1582), 597, 598, 616. 624, 1146. Long Island Sound, 616. Longitude, methods of ascertaining, 259 ; difficulties in computing, 602, 648, 650. See Latitude. Longrais, Jouon des, Cartier, 612. Lorgues, Rosellv de, on Columbus, 53, r,i). 503, 505. Loyasa. 570. Luca, the Florentine engineer, 22. Lucayans, 218, 219, 271; destroyed, 210. 515. Lud, Walter. 439. Lully. Raymond, ArU d< \avegar, l M. Luxan. Juan de, 2ss. 670 INDEX. Machin, Robert, at Madeira, 87. McClure, K. L., 660. Madeira discovered, 86, 88. Madoc, 138. Magellan's voyage, 571, 589 ; his por- trait, 572 ; compared with Columbus, 574 ; maps of his straits, 575, 576. Magnet, its history, 93 ; use of, 198 ; needle, 632 ; pole, 203, 630. See Needle. Magnus, Bishop, 139. Maguana, 305. Maine, Gidf of, 616, 646. Maiollo map (1527), 570, 595, 597. Major, R. H., on Columbus, 5S ; on the naming of America, 538. Malaga, Columbus at the siege of, 165. Maldonado, Melchior, 277, 653. Mandeville, Sir John, his travels, 116. Mangon, 224, 294. Manhattan, 649. Manicaotex, 312. Manilius, 1U7. Mappemonde, Portuguese (1490), 152. Maps, fifteenth century, 128 ; projections of, 603. See Portolano. Marchena, Antonio de, 259. Marchena, Juan Perez de, 155 ; por- trait, 155 ; intercedes for Columbus, . 175. Marchesio, F., 21. Margarita, 355. Margarite, Pedro, at St. Thomas, 288 ; his career, 307. Mari^jol, J. H., Peter Martyr, 35. Marien, 305. Marigalante, 266. Mariguana, 216. Marin, on Venetian commerce, 9. Marine atlases, 649. Markham, Clements R., his Hues, 191. Markland, 145. Martens, T., printer, 16. Martines, his map, 616. Martinez, Fernando, 108. Martyr, Peter, has letters from Colum- bus, 19 ; account of, 34 ; knew Colum- bus, 35 ; his letters, 34 ; De Orbe Novo, or Decades, 35 ; on Isabella, 160 ; on Columbus's discovery, 247 ; his map, (1511), 422, 556, 557; fails to notice the death of Columbus, 491. Massachusetts Bay, 610. Mastic, 225. Matheos, Hernan Perez, 347. Mayobanex, 364. Mauro, Fra, his world map, 99, 101, 116. Medina, Pedro de, Arte de Navegar, 630; map, 628, 629. Mc