CHAPTER X

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS

The name of Christopher Columbus stands already on the roll of “Heroes of the Nations.” “Hero of two nations” we should perhaps call him,—by birth a son of Genoa, and by adoption of Castile to whom, in his own words, “he gave a new world.”

Those who would read of his voyages should turn to the pages of Washington Irving, of Thacher, and of Filson Young; for it is chiefly in his immediate connection with Castile and her Queen and not for his actual work as mariner and discoverer that his life falls within the scope of this biography.

Here is the man who has made the name of Spain ring with glory down the centuries. Here, in the background, somewhat dimmed in the sight of posterity through the radiance of a greater genius, is Isabel of Castile, she whose tireless patriotism made it possible for Spain to enter on the newly discovered heritage of wealth and empire. Between pioneer and Queen there is the link not only of mere capacity but of that greatness of vision and unfaltering determination to reach a desired goal, that finds in obstacles an incentive to renewed efforts rather than a check. It is a fitting harmony, not often granted in history, that two such spirits should act in unison. Yet in truth the proposed harmony threatened more than once to end if not in discord at least in silence; and the discoverer was to gain the sanction of his patroness to his schemes only after many vicissitudes and trials of his patience.

The son of a Genoese wool-carder, the history of his youth and early manhood is obscured by numberless conflicting statements and traditions, a confusion only increased by the information volunteered by Columbus himself. From the suburb of a busy commercial city, unknown and poor, he passed to the seats of the mighty, and, in the light of his fame, recalled half-effaced memories of the days he had put so far behind him, an autobiography sometimes more in accordance with imagination than with truth. Admirers added their embellishments, detractors their quota of sneering comments, till the information so combined is almost more baffling than complete silence.

[Illustration:

IMAGINARY PORTRAIT

THE AUTHENTIC PORTRAIT OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS ]

Even as to the date of his birth there is a divergence of opinion amongst historians varying as widely as some twenty-six years; while tradition has connected him with noble families of Italy and France, has sent him to the University of Pavia, has made him one of an expedition to place the House of Anjou on the throne of Naples, and has driven him on his journeyings as far north as Iceland. Here, some say, he heard of the voyages to Greenland and the Canadian coast of old Norse heroes of the tenth and eleventh centuries; and that, when in the island of Porto Santo many years later, the whispered tale of a shipwrecked mariner on his death-bed gave him the data, on which he based his belief that land existed beyond the Atlantic.

Of actual fact this much emerges, that, still a boy, probably about the age of fourteen, he gave up his father’s trade to which he had been apprenticed and turned to the sea for a livelihood. His voyages were not confined to the Mediterranean but took him as far north as England and to the south along the Guinea coast of Africa, till about the year 1476 they landed him either by chance or mischance on the shores of Portugal. In Lisbon he found a wife and home, living in the house of his mother-in-law, and earning a small income, it is supposed, by drawing the maps and charts demanded by the most seafaring nation of the day. It was a task that with such a temperament would be certain to draw dormant theories of nautical enterprise from the realm of dreams to that of possibilities; and from this time Columbus’s ambitions and hopes began to take definite shape.

Amongst men of science, and indeed amongst the cultured people of Europe generally, the idea that the earth was a sphere composed of land and water had been long accepted; though theologians were still found who declared that such a theory conflicted with the Gospels and statements of the early Fathers of the Church and must therefore be false. If an Antipodes existed, how could all the nations of the world see Christ at His coming?

Another popular argument had been based on the assumption that the ever-increasing warmth of the atmosphere, experienced by travellers as they journeyed southwards, culminated in a zone of unendurable heat. The ship that ventured too far in southern waters might find itself driven forward by sudden winds or unknown currents into a belt of perpetual flame and there perish miserably. That fear at least had been dispelled by the enterprise of the very nation with whom Columbus had cast in his fortunes.

Always, from the wide extent of their coast, interested in the sea and its wonders, the Portuguese had received a special stimulus in the field of discovery during the fifteenth century from the brother of their King, the famous “Prince Henry the Navigator.” Under his orders, as he sat in his castle at Sagres overlooking the great Atlantic, studying charts and records of exploration by day, the course of the stars by night, his captains had pursued their way, league by league, along the West African coast. Ever as they went, new lands, rich in possibilities of trade, were exposed, and old doubts and fears receded. Madeira and the Canary Islands were added to the dominions of Portugal; Cape Bojador, once believed the gateway to unknown horrors, was doubled; the Cape Verde Islands and the Guinea coast explored.

Prince Henry the Navigator died; and in time his great-nephew, King John II., son of Alfonso V., “El Africano,” sat on the throne of Portugal, but the tide of maritime energy never slackened, and the west coast of Africa began to assume in maps something of its real shape. Bartholomew Columbus, brother of Christopher, was one of those who served in the famous expedition of Bartholomew Diaz in 1487, which, tempest-tossed and wholly at the mercy of the elements, unexpectedly doubled the “stormy cape,” later to be called with symbolic appropriateness the “Cape of Good Hope.”

This, while Christopher drew maps and charts in Lisbon, was yet of the future; nor had ever-widening views on African discovery cast any light across the broad Atlantic, the “sea of darkness” as mariners named it, when, hugging the Portuguese and French shores, they journeyed northwards to England and the Baltic. According to a certain Arabian writer of mediæval times

the ocean encircles the ultimate bounds of the inhabited earth, and all beyond it is unknown. No one has been able to verify anything concerning it, on account of its difficult and perilous navigation, its great obscurity, its profound depth and frequent tempests, through fear of its mighty fishes and its haughty winds.

Yet imagination did not fail to fill in the blank left by lack of knowledge, and from the days of Plato, tradition had planted the Western Ocean with mysterious lands. Here, some maintained, the lost continent of Atlantis had sunk to rest, leaving on the surface of the water a sluggish mire impassable for ships; here, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, Ulysses had found his “Isles of the Blest,” the Irish Saint Brandan discovered an earthly Paradise, and Gothic bishops, flying before the Moors, built seven cities.

Such tales stood on the ground of conjecture alone; but, where the mind is set on a project, conjecture will often assume a fictitious value. Columbus had decided, with that finality of purpose that is the hall-mark of genius, that he would sail to the west across the “sea of darkness”; and he gravely accepted all that would make his schemes less fearful in popular estimation. He himself had an underlying conviction that, the earth being round, a passage across its surface must be possible either from west to east or east to west. A study of the voyages of Marco Polo, the great Venetian traveller of the thirteenth century, had excited his fancy with its descriptions of the territories of the Great Khan and the island of Cipango, where gold and jewels, rich stuffs, spices, and perfumes, were the ordinary possession and barter of its inhabitants. To open up those lands of the Orient to easy commerce with Western Europe would be a task to bring the man who accomplished it not only wealth but that still more desirable reward, power.

Columbus’s idea of India, or “the Indies” as the territories of the far East were called in Europe, was distinctly hazy; but his own desires and his acceptance of the views of an eminent Arabian cosmographer, whose calculations had greatly reduced the circumference of the earth, inclined him to the belief that after a short stretch of ocean he would almost certainly land amid the wonders of Cathay and Cipango. Such a theory was not without biblical confirmation; since the Prophet Esdras had plainly stated that God commanded “that the waters should be gathered into the seventh part of the earth,” thus limiting the sea within the bounds of navigable channels.

To pure romance, scripture, and science, were added sailors’ tales of strange debris cast by the sea on the Azores, the westernmost point of African discovery: bits of wood carved but not with metal, canoes made of hollowed barks of trees, corpses even, whose faces bore no European nor negro semblance. All such evidence was carefully collected and, we may be sure, lost none of its significance in the telling, when Columbus rehearsed his project before King John and his Court, begging that monarch to grant him the necessary ships, and to promise him, in the event of success, the office of Admiral over all the lands he might discover, with a viceroy’s share of the spoils and power.

Perhaps King John considered this demand exorbitant, or else the scheme too hare-brained; it is more likely that he believed he had struck a mine of wealth in Western Africa and saw no reason, so long as that source of profit remained unexhausted, to risk ships and lives in a problematical voyage elsewhere. According to one tradition, he and his councillors obtained Columbus’s plans under pledge of secrecy, and then to test their worth hastily dispatched an expedition, whose mariners, quailing before their task, soon returned to pronounce the design impossible. Whether this be true or false, it is certain that, after long delays, the committee especially appointed by King John to inquire into the matter, unanimously decided against Columbus’s schemes.

“I went to take refuge in Portugal,” wrote Christopher himself some years later, relieving his bitterness by what was probably exaggeration as to the length of his sojourn, “since the King of that country was more versed in discovery than any other; but he put to shame his sight, his hearing, and all his faculties, for in fourteen years I could not make him understand what I said.”

From Portugal Columbus passed to Spain in 1485. His wife, it is believed, had died some little time before; and it is likely he was thankful to leave a country whose associations were by this time mainly sad. He took with him his son Diego and settled in Seville, where he succeeded in interesting in his project one of the great territorial lords of the neighbourhood, the Duke of Medina-Celi.

At a first glance it is perhaps curious that Columbus did not find in some rich Castilian noble the patron he required, without being forced to sue the Crown in vain for so many years. It would have been a small matter for the Cardinal of Spain, the Duke of Medina-Sidonia, the Duke of Medina-Celi, or the Marquis of Cadiz to equip him with a squadron twice the size of that with which he finally achieved his purpose; but it is not too much to say that such an arrangement would have entirely altered the character of the expedition.

Columbus was a visionary in that he relied on the eye of faith rather than of knowledge; but his visions did not put to sleep the natural shrewdness of an Italian of his class, especially in a matter where his personal interests were so deeply involved. It was not his policy to sow a crop whose harvest he could not to some extent control; and the clue to his object in seeking royal patronage is given in a letter written in 1500, where he says,

Although I know but little, I do not think that anyone considers me so foolish as not to realize that even if the Indies were mine, I would not be able to sustain them without the aid of some Prince.

The discoverer might have succeeded in signing contracts favourable to himself with cardinal, duke, or marquis; but he could not guard against later royal encroachments turning his gains to so much waste paper. It was not only greatness of conception but a strong business instinct that made him a suppliant of the Castilian Queen.

In response to the Duke of Medina-Celi’s letter, recommending Columbus to her attention, Isabel commanded his appearance at the Court at Cordova; and thither in 1486 came Christopher to lodge in the house of the Castilian treasurer, Alonso de Quintanilla. We can picture him at this time from the descriptions of contemporaries,—an impressive figure, well above the middle height, with his long face tanned and freckled by exposure to sun and storm, his eyes a vivid blue, his hair ruddy that was soon to be bleached by cares.

The Queen, we are told, “did not consider the undertaking very certain.” Here spoke her habitual caution, prompted by a life in which the demands on her assistance perpetually outran not her interest but her resources; yet it is evident from the first the project caught her fancy, while in Ferdinand it merely aroused a cold distrust. The country was scarcely pacified from the anarchy of civil war and foreign invasion; national credit and patriotism were strained to the uttermost in what, it had become evident, must be a prolonged struggle against the Moors; the French were threatening his own loved kingdom of Aragon, and he could spare neither time nor money to regain command of the eastern Pyrenees; insidious heresy was sapping the Catholic Faith, and wide care and organization would be required for its suppression. Was this the moment to take up chimerical schemes for reaching China or discovering lands that every man of common-sense or culture had long believed to be fabulous?

His arguments, somewhat to this effect, can be imagined, uttered with a dry, logical force, not without its appeal to Isabel’s own logical brain. She could see it all from his point of view, her reason accept his conclusion; and yet deep in her nature was a power that differentiated her statesmanship from his, and that in a crisis prompted her, in the teeth of the logic that ordinarily governed her actions, to run what has been happily called a “divine risk.”

If Ferdinand lacked the visionary instinct that made Isabel recognize the Genoese sailor, not as adventurer or fool, but as a possible genius, it must be confessed that in his case faith would have made greater demands. Castile and Aragon were united into a single Spain, but it is reading history from a modern outlook to suppose the individual sympathies of King and Queen Spanish rather than distinctively Aragonese and Castilian.

Throughout past centuries, as we have remarked before, the magnet of Aragonese attraction had been the Mediterranean; and Ferdinand was no less under its spell than his uncle, Alfonso V., the conqueror of Naples. It required an effort to turn his mental gaze westwards; whereas Isabel, heiress of Castilian hopes and ambitions, was imbued with the spirit of rivalry with Portugal and looked on the “sea of darkness” not with bored aloofness but with awed speculation. It might well seem that its secrets held no immediate prospects for Aragon; they were pregnant with possibilities of empire and wealth for the sister kingdom with her Galician and Andalusian seaboard. It is thus that both by character and race Isabel and not her husband was destined to be Columbus’s true patron, and that looking back over years of probation he could write later:

In all men there was disbelief; but to the Queen, my lady, God gave the spirit of understanding and great courage, and made her heiress of all as a dear and much-loved daughter.

Yet even Isabel did not understand at once; or, if she did, caution and her intense preoccupation with the Moorish war delayed and hindered the practical fulfilment of her sympathy. Juntas of learned men met at her summons, and with academic coldness discussed and condemned the discoverer’s project. Those who did not make a mock of it declared that it savoured of heresy; while others, according to Columbus, to hide their ignorance invented hindrances and obstacles. A few courtiers, and notably the Marquis of Moya and his wife Beatriz de Bobadilla, Isabel’s most trusted servants, remained his staunch friends, but the real friend of Columbus in these years of anxiety, when he vainly followed the Court from Cordova to the frontier, and from siege to siege, was, in the words of Thacher, “Columbus himself.”

This was the one man who insisted and persisted ... the man with a single thought, a powerful soul committed to one supreme purpose.... Whether he was inspired, elected, foreordained, it matters not. He thought he was all these things and the result was due to his own conception of himself.

[Illustration:

A CARAVEL UNDER SAIL

FROM COLUMBUS’S FIRST LETTER ]

In spite of his condemnation by learned men, Isabel had not forgotten him, and a quarterly salary of 3000 maravedis, small though it was, and messages, that she would herself examine his claims when she had time, kept them in touch; but such things could not satisfy an explorer, fretting to be once more on the broad seas. In 1491 he renewed his application for assistance.

The Court was then at Santa Fé, pressing Boabdil to his last surrender, and before the conquest of Moslem Granada, the attraction of unknown islands paled. For the second time a committee of the learned declared the proposed journey impracticable and contrary to the opinions of Saint Augustine and the early Fathers; though Alessandro Geraldino, tutor of the royal Infantas, ventured to urge in Cardinal Mendoza’s ear, that Saint Augustine, no doubt a good theologian, might yet prove a bad geographer.

Disgusted at his failure and the years he had wasted, Columbus with his son Diego turned his back on Santa Fé. His journey took him near the little seaside town of Palos, where at the Franciscan convent of La Rabida he sought food and shelter for the night. Its prior, Fra Juan Perez, once the Queen’s confessor, was delighted to have first-hand news from the seat of war, and eagerly welcomed his guest; with the result that all Christopher’s disappointed hopes came pouring out in a stream of eloquence that soon made a convert of his listener.

A secret letter from the prior to the Queen, full of respectful expostulations, her quick response that Columbus should return at once to Court, her gift of 20,000 maravedis to provide him with suitable clothing and a mule,—and Juan Perez could write with fervent joy:

Our Lord has listened to the prayers of His servant. The wise and virtuous Isabel, touched by the grace of Heaven, gave a favourable hearing to the words of this poor monk. All has turned out well.

“All has turned out well!” Face to face, Queen and would-be-discoverer could realize how much their minds were in tune; even more now than in the early days of his project; for, to the material benefits he hoped to reap, Columbus, inspired perhaps by the crusading character of the Moorish war, had added the burning desire to carry the light of the Catholic Faith across “the sea of darkness.” This was no mere pose. Religion to the sailor as to the Queen was an intrinsic part of daily life, something vital and overshadowing that in the hour of triumph intensified glory, in days of depression or danger spread protecting wings. In the foreword of his journal addressed to the sovereigns, he shows very clearly that he regarded himself not only as pioneer but missionary:

Your Highnesses, as Catholic sovereigns and princes, loving the Holy Christian Faith and the spreading of it, and enemies of the sect of Mahomet and of all idolatries and heresies, decided to send me, Christopher Columbus, to the said regions of India, to see the said princes and peoples and lands, and learn of their disposition and of everything, and of the measures that could be taken for their conversion to our Holy Faith.

Behind and beyond “the spreading of the Catholic Faith” in the far East was another design of still bolder conception, the employment of the wealth to be found in Cathay and the territories of the great Khan towards the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre. The latter was the crowning enthusiasm of every earnest Christian in mediæval times, and Christopher believing himself “inspired, elected, foreordained,” held amongst his cherished visions the glory of a final crusade, to which he should have contributed the war fund.

Upheld by his inborn sense of power, he had returned to Court far more a conqueror, ready to grant conditions, than a petitioner oft-refused and eager to snatch the least morsel of favour. The Crown in its clemency was now, after its long apathy, willing to confer on him titles and privileges;—all in moderation of course, for Ferdinand and Isabel were never unnecessarily lavish; but Christopher, valuing himself and his task by the measure of his faith in the future, laughed at their moderation. Either he was great enough to succeed and thus prove worthy of a great reward, or he would fail and his pretensions and demands fade away with his dreams. The sovereigns, skilled in striking bargains, might argue and cajole. The Genoese, though his fate trembled in the balance, never wavered, until at last in April, 1492, caution yielded to greatness, and the terms that he demanded were signed and sealed.

Columbus and his heirs were to have the hereditary title of Admiral of all the islands and continents that he might discover, and should for ever hold the office of Viceroy and Governor-General over them. He and his heirs should receive one-tenth of all the wealth, whether metals, jewels, or spices, that should be acquired from these territories; and he and they should have a perpetual right of providing one-eighth of the expenses of every expedition sent to the West, receiving a corresponding profit from the results. These with extensive judicial and administrative privileges formed the basis of the document, in return for which Columbus promised to sail into the unknown and claim it in the name of Castile and her sovereign.

The actual cost of the expedition was, in comparison to the stakes at issue, trifling; in all less than a thousand pounds of English money, of which the Crown contributed some £850, Columbus himself the rest. Three ships formed his fleet; two provided under compulsion by the town of Palos as punishment for some public offence, and as reluctantly manned by its inhabitants who looked on the proposed voyage with horror. Columbus’s own flagship, the _Santa Maria_, was a vessel of some hundred tons burden, by modern standards ill-fitted for aught but coasting work; while the _Pinta_ and the _Niña_, commanded by Martin Alonso Pinzon and his brother Vicente Yañez, noted navigators of the neighbourhood, were mere merchant “caravels” of half its size.

The story of this first voyage to the New World has been often told: the distrust and grumbling of the crew which, beginning before they left Palos on that morning of the 3d of August, 1492, grew ever in volume as they journeyed westwards, leaving the friendly Azores far in their rear; the complaints that the wind steadily driving from the east would never change and thus make any hope of return impossible; the extraordinary variations of the compass and the expanse of sea traversed, far in excess of the Admiral’s calculations, so that, puzzled and anxious at heart himself, he must yet keep a cheerful face and, lying skilfully, hold panic at bay by scientific falsehoods and carefully doctored charts. The many cries of “land! land!” heralding nought save clouds lying low on the horizon; the ever-doomed hopes aroused by birds and floating grass; and then the Sargasso Sea with its leagues of golden gulf-weed lapping against the ship’s side. Was this the impassable ocean where Atlantis had sunk to rest? Were they indeed destined to die here for their folly?

Then, when patience and hope were alike exhausted, and only the Admiral’s faith rose triumphant above the general pessimism, unmistakable signs of land appeared at last; and, on the 12th of October the Spanish squadron came to anchor before the little island of Guanahani, one of the Bahamas.

The details of the landing, the astonishment of the natives, “naked as when their mothers gave them birth,” at the sight of mail- and silk-clad warriors and the sound of cannons; the account of various expeditions made to other islands and of the fort built in Española;—these like the actual voyages may be read at length in the pages of Washington Irving. It is with the triumphant home-coming of the hero not with his adventures that we are here concerned.

Attention you two most wise and venerable men and hear of a new discovery [wrote Peter Martyr to the Archbishop of Granada and Count of Tendilla]. You remember Columbus the Ligurian, who persisted, when in the camps with the sovereigns, that one could pass over by way of the Western Antipodes to a new hemisphere of the globe.... He is returned safe and declares he has found wonderful things.

Wonderful things indeed! Brown-skinned Indians, green and scarlet parrots, golden nuggets and ornaments, cotton fibre and strange roots and seeds; these that he brought with him were but proofs and trophies of the still more wonderful adventures he hastened to relate before the sovereigns and their Court. In his disembarkation at Palos on the 15th of March, 1493, and still more in his “solemn and very beautiful reception” by the sovereigns at Barcelona graphically described by the historian Las Casas, he was to reap at last the meed of honour and enthusiasm so long denied him. Kneeling before his King and Queen to kiss the hands that afterwards raised him in gracious condescension to sit with royalty upon the dais, flattered and fêted by courtiers who had before patronized or mocked, riding through the crowded streets by Ferdinand’s side amid cries of admiration and applause;—in these moments he reached the climax of worldly glory.

Long years stretched before him, when circumstances, his own failings, and the envy and spite of others, were to rob him of ease, popularity, and even royal confidence; but for the time being he was “Don,” “Admiral,” the honoured of Kings, the most discussed and admired man in Spain, perhaps in all Europe. In one country at least, the kingdom of Portugal, the result of his voyage was a subject for poignant regret; and Ferdinand and Isabel, having obtained from Alexander VI. papal recognition of their right to the newly discovered territories, were driven to demand a series of bulls, that would provide them with a definition of their empire, lest Portuguese rivals, too slow to forestall them in the discovery, should now rob them of their gains.

By a bull of May 4, 1493, an imaginary line was drawn through the north and south poles, cutting the Atlantic at one hundred leagues distance from the Cape Verde Islands and Azores. To the east of this line was henceforth to stretch the zone of Portuguese dominion, to the west that of Castile. Later, by the Treaty of Tordesillas, signed by the Spanish sovereigns and King John in June, 1494, the boundary was fixed at three hundred and seventy instead of one hundred leagues distance; and there for the moment national rivalry was checked.

In the meanwhile Columbus, having organized a second expedition, had on September 23, 1493, set sail once more for the west. Very different in size and character was his new fleet from the former vessels of Palos with their pressed crews; for more than twice the number of men required for his fourteen caravels had applied for leave to sail with him, and not a few of those refused had chosen to embark as stowaways rather than be left behind. It was a case of unbalanced enthusiasm succeeding to unbalanced hostility, and, as often happens, the second state was to prove more dangerous than the first.

Not patriotism, nor a healthy love of adventure, nor even a cool-headed trading instinct, animated the majority of that idle, quarrelsome throng who were destined to turn the lands their discoverer at first believed the “Earthly Paradise” into a hell of human misery and wrong. It was lust of gold, no hardly-won reward of toil and sweat, but the fabulous wealth of Cipango and Cathay, to be picked in nuggets out of the flowing river, found in the turned surface of the earth, wrung by brutality if necessary from unwilling natives, that brought a wastrel nobility disgusted with orderly government at home, to serve under the standard of a man whom they secretly despised as an ill-bred foreigner. Not all were of this type. Amid the fourteen crews were some earnest souls, inspired like their Admiral by a sense of responsibility; but the prevailing element was selfish, vicious, and insubordinate.

For this Columbus himself was partly to blame. Blinded to the limits of his achievement by his faith in the glory and wealth yet to come, and, anxious at all costs to maintain the support of the Spanish sovereigns, his eloquence had painted a highly-coloured picture very likely to deceive those who listened. The small quantity of gold so far obtained was merged in the glittering accounts given by natives of kingdoms to the south, where precious metals were to be had for the asking. These, like Amazon islands and lands whose tribes had tails, proved ever beyond the distant horizon, vanishing at the Spanish approach. As they melted into thin air so also did Christopher’s inflated reputation; and those who had looked on him as a kind of magician, able to conjure up vast quantities of gold, saw him instead only as a lying adventurer, who had lured them from civilization and luxury on a false plea.

“Why hast thou taken us out into the wilderness to die?” It is the cry that from the time of Moses onwards has assailed the ears of the pioneer enthusiast. The wilderness may prove a paradise; but in that it falls short of human desires it will be condemned and despised. Not all the glory of sunshine and colour, of rich soil, luxurious vegetation, and flowing river, speaking to honest toilers of a possible kingdom of God on earth, can compensate with an idle rabble for shattered dreams of gold mines, of jewels, and of spices.

Murmurings, complaints, secret disobedience, open defiance: these were the fruits of Columbus’s autocracy. When he landed for the second time in Española, he found the fort which he had left well-stored with provisions and ammunition burnt to the ground, its garrison dead, the Indians, once his trusted allies, fleeing before him afraid into the woods. Inquiry elicited an all too circumstantial tale of Spanish profligacy, cruelty, and carelessness, once his governing hand had been removed. Then had come retribution in the form of an avenging massacre by a warlike tribe from the interior of the island. The Indians of the coast denied their participation, even swore on oath that they had helped the garrison to the best of their ability; and Columbus, anxious to believe them, tried to restore the old relations. Mutual suspicion, however, had come to reign. His followers, angry at the fate of their countrymen, accepted it as a legitimate excuse for intimidating and oppressing all natives. The hospitality and gifts once so generously lavished were now withheld or, proving totally inadequate to meet ever-growing Spanish necessities, were replaced by an enforced tribute, until the link of willing service was forged into an iron chain of bondage.

Some form of submission of native to European, of the weaker many to the stronger and more civilized few, was an inevitable solution of the racial problem. That it developed into absolute slavery was due, partly to the custom of the day, partly to the difficulties in which Columbus and his colonists soon found themselves involved. They had laid the foundations of the system in the New World when they carried off their first ten Indians in triumph to parade them through the streets of Barcelona, though the individuals in question could boast of generous treatment and a baptism with royal sponsors.

The principle of personal liberty abandoned, Columbus could declare, not without truth, that as slaves the natives would have a better chance of learning the doctrines of the Catholic Faith than in their own wild freedom. Even on the grounds of mercy and good government he could at first justify his attitude; since he and his followers contented themselves for the most part with seizing “Caribs,” a fierce cannibal tribe that preyed upon their weaker neighbours.

Among the people who are not cannibals [he wrote home] we shall gain great credit by their seeing that we can seize and take captive those from whom they are accustomed to receive injuries, and of whom they are in such terror that they are frightened by one man alone.

Alas for either pious or kindly intentions! Not these but economic considerations were really to sink the scales. Columbus had promised to find precious metals in abundance, and yet seven years after his discovery Bernaldez, the Curate of Los Palacios, made a note that the expenses of the various expeditions still continued to exceed the profits.

“Since everything passed through the Admiral’s hands,” he adds, “there was much murmuring against him, and he made greater hindrances and delays than he ought in sending back gold to the King.”

Gold there was little in these early years of exploration; and demands for precious metals at home were echoed by demands in his own colony for horses, cattle, and sheep to stock the new settlement. In this dilemma the Admiral fell back on the wealth of human life, for which he could reap a handsome profit in the labour-markets of the Old World besides pacifying some of the grumbling in the New. It was no longer the conversion of the heathen nor the civilization of cannibals, that took the first place in his thoughts, but a momentary respite from increasing financial strain.

A gift of an Indian apiece to each of his greedy crew; a gang of some five hundred captives of either sex shipped to Europe, huddled together “with no more care taken of them than of animals destined for the slaughter-house.”

These, or tales of a like nature, came to the Queen’s ears. “By what right does the Admiral give away my vassals?” she demanded indignantly, and ordered the Indians to be released and re-shipped to their own land.

It must be remembered to her credit [says Filson Young, referring to her attitude towards this question,] that in after years, when slavery and an intolerable bloody and brutish oppression had turned the Paradise of Española into a shambles, she fought almost single-handed and with an ethical sense far in advance of her day against the system of slavery practiced in Spain upon the inhabitants of the New World.

Ferdinand cared little for the sufferings of Indians, but their sale would not bring him the profits he had been led to expect from his new dominions, and he was therefore more than willing to listen to the many complaints of tyranny, favouritism, and deceit, brought against the Governor by those returning from the West. Here the crowning offence had been in reality the employment of all able-bodied Europeans, priests as well as laymen, in the construction of a city in Española to which Columbus gave the name of “Isabella,” “in remembrance,” says Las Casas, “of the Queen Doña Isabel whom he above all held in great reverence; and he was more desirous of serving and pleasing her than any other person in the world.”

“Columbus,” wrote Peter Martyr, “has begun the building of a city and the planting of our seeds and the raising of cattle.” His words call up a picture of peaceful and slow-rewarded toil, little to the taste of the majority pressed to take their share, their natural dislike of manual labour stimulated by the ennervating climate and habits of self-indulgence. The crops grew apace, but so also did fever and disease; and for all that went wrong the people held their foreign Admiral responsible.

Indeed there was often sufficient foundation to make the reports brought home plausible. Columbus was a born leader of men in action, where a strong personality will always dominate; but he had few gifts as a governor, and least of all that invaluable instinct for selecting trustworthy subordinates. His choice of officials was often betrayed; his government, as a rule too kindly towards the cut-throat ruffians he commanded, on occasions varied by excessive severity. Whatever its quality he reaped odium, not only amongst the colonists, but with their relations and friends in Castile.

Enough was obviously at fault to require inspection; and in 1500, when Columbus who had sailed from Spain on a third voyage in 1498 was occupied in exploring fresh islands, Francisco de Bobadilla, an official of the royal household, arrived in Española, charged with the duty of inquiring into the Admiral’s conduct. His high-handed action, in immediately arresting Columbus and his brothers Bartholomew and Diego on their return to headquarters, is one of the most dramatic episodes in history; and its appeal was felt throughout the length and breadth of Spain.

Villejo, the officer in command of the prisoners on the voyage home, offered to remove the fetters in which they had been sent on board, but Columbus sternly refused. He would wear them, he declared, until he knelt before his sovereigns, keep them by him till his dying day. Crippled by gout, his hair whitened by care, he disembarked at Cadiz, the irons clanking on his wrists and ankles; and at the sight horror and shame spread from cottage and shop to castle and palace. Was this the discoverer’s reward for a New World?

“Be assured that your imprisonment weighed heavily upon us,” wrote the sovereigns some years later, still mindful of the shock the news had given them; and when Columbus knelt before his Queen the sobs of pent-up bitterness with which he recounted his troubles awoke answering tears of regret and understanding in her eyes. “After they had listened to him,” says Oviedo, “they consoled him with much kindliness and spake such words that he remained somewhat comforted.”

Confidence was temporarily restored, but the Admiral’s hour of glory and triumph had passed never to return. His bad treatment was acknowledged, but so also was his bad government; for though he might not have deliberately tyrannized and deceived, yet he had failed to keep order or fulfil his promises. The Queen was growing old, and, broken by ill-health and private griefs, took less share than she was wont in public business. Ferdinand had never liked the Genoese sailor; moreover he was no longer necessary to royal schemes and that to the astute King was ever sufficient excuse for discarding a tool.

Columbus sailed for the fourth time to the lands of his discovery in 1502; but it was to find that Nicholas de Ovando, another royal protégé, had succeeded Bobadilla in command at Española, while treachery and ill-luck dogged his own efforts. Bitterness and suspicion had begun to eat like a canker in his mind, and his letters are full of querulous reproaches that the bargain he had made was ill-kept and his due share of the commercial profits denied him. In 1504, he returned home suffering in body and spirit, but no longer to meet with the sympathy for which he craved. Three weeks after he arrived at Seville Isabel died and her will, that contained a special petition for the kindly treatment of the natives, made no mention of his name.

Writing to his son Diego the Admiral says:

The principal thing is affectionately and with great devotion to commend the soul of the Queen, Our Lady, to God. Her life was always catholic and holy and ready for all things of His holy service, and for this reason it may be believed that she is in His holy glory and beyond the desires of this rough and wearisome world.

In these words lie the confession of his own disillusionment. His world, once so fair a place of material visions and dreams, had proved in its essence wearisome; and, clad in the Franciscan habit of renunciation, he himself, on the 20th of May, 1506, passed thankfully into the rest of God’s “holy glory.”

“His life,” says Filson Young, “flickered out in the completest obscurity.” No Peter Martyr eulogized his memory in letters to his courtly patrons. No grateful country of adoption bestowed on him a gorgeous funeral. Even the lands he had discovered were destined to receive their name from another, the Florentine sailor Amerigo Vespucci, whom he himself had helped on the road to fame.

Posterity is the audience that can alone judge truly the drama of history, and in the thunder of its applause Columbus has long come to his own.

“The world,” says Thacher, “did not observe his final exit from the stage. Yet he was a great character, one of the greatest ever passing before the eyes of men.”

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