left Spain to assume the government of Hispaniola, with the slender and
inexpensive armament granted to Columbus for the purpose of exploring an
unknown strait into an unknown ocean, the traversing of whose unmeasured
breadth would complete the circumnavigation of the globe. Ovando’s fleet
consisted of thirty sail, five of them from ninety to one hundred and
fifty tons burden, twenty-four caravels of from thirty to ninety tons,
and one bark of twenty-five tons; and the number of souls amounted to
about two thousand five hundred. The heroic and injured man, to whose
unparalleled combination of noble qualities, the very dignity which
called for all this state was indebted for its existence, had now in
the decline of his years and strength, and stripped both of honour and
emolument, to venture forth with four caravels,—the largest of seventy,
and the smallest of fifty tons burthen—accompanied by one hundred and
fifty men, on one of the most toilsome and perilous enterprises of which
the mind can form a conception.
On the 20th of May he reached the Grand Canary, and starting from thence
on the 25th, took his departure for the west. Favoured by the trade
winds, he made’a gentle and easy passage, and reached one of the Caribbee
Islands, called by the natives Matinino (Martinique), on the 15th of
June. After staying three days at this island, he steered northwards,
and touched at Dominica, and from thence directed his course, contrary
to his own original intention and the commands of the sovereigns, to
St. Domingo. His reason was that his principal vessel sailed so ill
as to delay the progress of the fleet, which he feared might be an
obstacle to the safety and success of the enterprise, and he held this
as a sufficient motive for infringing the orders he had received. On
his arrival at San Domingo, he found the ships which had brought out
Ovando ready to put to sea on their return to Spain. He immediately
sent to the governor to explain that his intention in calling at the
island was to procure a vessel in exchange for one of his caravels,
which was very defective; and further begged permission for his squadron
to take shelter in the harbour, from a hurricane, which, from his
acquaintance with the prognostics of the weather, he had foreseen was
rapidly approaching. This request was ungraciously refused; upon which
Columbus, though denied shelter for himself, endeavoured to avert the
danger of the fleet, which was about to sail, and sent back immediately
to the governor to entreat that he would not allow it to put to sea
for some days. His predictions and requests were treated with equal
contempt, and Columbus had not only to suffer these insulting refusals
and the risk of life for himself and squadron, but the loud murmurings
of his own crew that they had sailed with a commander whose position
exposed them to such treatment. All he could do was to draw his ships
up as close as possible to the shore, and seek the securest anchorage
that chance might present him with. Meanwhile the weather appeared fair
and tranquil, and the fleet of Bobadilla put boldly out to sea. The
predicted storm came on the next night with terrific fury, and all the
ships belonging to the governor’s fleet, with the exception of one,
were either lost, or put back to San Domingo in a shattered condition.
The only vessel that escaped was the one which had been freighted with
some four thousand gold pieces, rescued from the pillage of Columbus’s
fortune. Bobadilla, Roldan, and a number of the most inveterate enemies
of the admiral, perished in this tremendous hurricane, while his own
fleet, though separated and considerably damaged by the storm, all
arrived safe at last at Port Hermoso, on the south of San Domingo. He
repaired his vessels at Port Hermoso, but had scarcely left the harbour
before another storm drove him into Port Brazil, more to the westward.
On the 14th of July he left this port, steering for terra firma, and
on the 30th discovered the small island of Guanaga or Bonacca, a few
leagues east of the bay of Honduras. He continued an eastern course,
and discovered the cape now known as Cape Honduras. While moving along
this coast, he experienced one of those frightful tempests to which the
tropics are liable, and of which he gives so impressive a description in
the letter we have translated. At length, after forty days’ struggle to
make as much as seventy leagues from the cape of Honduras, he reached a
cape, by doubling which he found a direct southward course open, offering
at the same time an unobstructed navigation and a favourable wind. To
commemorate this sudden relief from toil and danger, Columbus named this
point Cape _Gracias a Dios_, or “Thanks to God.” A melancholy occurrence
took place on the 16th of September, while they were anchored off this
coast. The boats had been sent up a large river to procure supplies of
wood and water, when, on returning, the encounter of the sea with the
rapid current of the river caused so violent and sudden a commotion, that
one of the boats was swallowed up, and all on board perished. On the
25th of September he reached Cariay, or Cariari, where he stayed till
the 5th of October. The next point was the Bay of Carumbaru, which was
the first place on that coast where he met with specimens of pure gold.
Leaving this bay on the 17th of October, he sailed along the coast of
Veragua, and here he was informed by the Indians of the wealthy country
of Ciguare, which he supposed to be some province belonging to the Grand
Khan, and also of a river ten days’ journey beyond Ciguare, which he
conceived to be the Ganges. On the 2nd of November he discovered Puerto
Bello, in which harbour he was detained till the 9th by stormy weather;
when, continuing his course eastward, he reached, near the end of the
month, a small harbour, to which he gave the name of El Retrete, or the
Cabinet. It was here that a continuance of stormy weather, in addition
to the murmurs of his crew at-being compelled to prosecute an indefinite
search, with worm-eaten ships, against opposing currents, determined
Columbus on relinquishing his eastward voyage for the present, and to
return in search of the gold mines of Veragua. But on altering his
course to the westward, he had the mortification to find the wind for
which he had long been wishing, come now, as if in direct opposition
to his adopted course, and for nine days he was exposed to so terrible
a storm that it was a marvel how his crazy vessels could outlive it.
At length, after a month’s anxiety and suffering, they anchored, on
the day of the Epiphany, at the mouth of a river called by the natives
Yebra, but which Columbus named Belem, or Bethlehem. Here a settlement
was formed, and here occurred the sad disasters and conflicts with the
natives, which he describes in his letter from Jamaica, and in which
the faithful and zealous Diego Mendez proved an eminently efficient
assistant to his much loved master. The history of this unhappy voyage,
the toils and perils of which were aggravated to Columbus by extreme
bodily suffering, closes by his reaching Jamaica, where he would in
all probability have perished, but for the devotedness and activity of
Mendez. The highly interesting description of that brave man’s exploits
on behalf of Columbus, has been quoted by Navarrete from his will, and is
here translated. When at length, through the agency of Mendez, two ships
arrived from Hispaniola to the assistance of the admiral, he was enabled,
on the 28th of June, 1504, to leave his wrecked vessels behind him, and
start with revived hopes for San Domingo, which he reached on the 13th of
August. His sojourn there was not, as may be judged, calculated to afford
him satisfaction or pleasure. The overstrained courtesy of the governor
offered but a poor alleviation to the rush of rankling feelings which the
past associations and present desolation of the place summoned up to his
mind.
On the 12th of September he set sail for Spain, and the same tempestuous
weather which had all along tended to make this his last voyage the most
disastrous, did not forsake him now. The ship in which he came home
sprung her mainmast in four places in one tempest, and in a subsequent
storm the foremast was sprung, and finally, on the 7th of November, he
arrived, in a vessel as shattered as his own broken and care-worn frame,
in the welcome harbour of San Lucar.
The two years which intervened between this period and his death
present a picture of black ingratitude on the part of the crown to this
distinguished benefactor of the kingdom, which it is truly painful to
contemplate. We behold an extraordinary man, the discoverer of a second
hemisphere, reduced by his very success to so low a state of poverty
that, in his prematurely infirm old age, he is compelled to subsist by
borrowing, and to plead, in the apologetic language of a culprit, for the
rights of which the very sovereign whom he has benefited has deprived
him. The death of the benignant and high-minded Isabella, in 1505, gave
a finishing blow to his hope of obtaining redress, and we find him thus
writing subsequently to this period to his old and faithful friend Diego
de Deza:—“It appears that his majesty does not think fit to fulfil that
which he, with the queen, who is now in glory, promised me by word and
seal. For me to contend for the contrary, would be to contend with the
wind. I have done all that I could do: I leave the rest to God, whom I
have ever found propitious to me in my necessities.” The selfish and
cold-hearted Ferdinand beheld his illustrious and loyal servant sink,
without relief, under bodily infirmity, and the palsying sickness of
hope deferred; and at length, on the 20th of May 1506, the generous
heart which had done so much without reward and suffered so much without
upbraiding, found rest in a world where neither gratitude nor justice is
either asked or withheld.
His body was in the first instance buried at Valladolid, in the parish
church of Santa Maria de la Antigua, but was transferred, in 1513, to
the Cartuja de las Cuevas, near Seville, where a monument was erected
over his grave with the memorable inscription,—
A CASTILLA Y A LEON
NUEVO MUNDO DIÓ COLON.
In the year 1536, both his body, and that of his son Diego, who had been
likewise buried in the Cartuja, were transported to St. Domingo, and
deposited in the cathedral of that city. From hence they were removed to
Havannah in 1795, on the cession of Hispaniola to the French, and the
ashes of the immortal discoverer now quietly repose in the cathedral
church of that city.[19]
But injustice, unhappily, was not buried with Columbus in the tomb. It
was but one twelvemonth after his death that an attempt was made, and
only too successfully, to name the new world which he had discovered,
after another, who was not only his inferior, but his pupil in the
school of maritime enterprise. In an obscure corner of Lorraine, at the
little cathedral town of St. Dié, a cluster of learned priests, who had
there established a printing-press under the auspices of René II, Duke
of Lorraine, suggested to give to the newly discovered continent the
name of the Florentine, Amerigo Vespucci, whose nautical career did not
commence till after Columbus had returned from his second voyage to the
western hemisphere. The first time that the name of Amerigo came into
notice was in the year 1504, when Johann Ottmar published at Augsburg the
_Mundus Novus_, a description of Vespucci’s third voyage, now extremely
rare, embodied in a letter addressed by Vespucci himself to Lorenzo di
Pier Francesco de’ Medici. In this voyage, which occupied from May 1501
to September 1502, he was in the service of Portugal, and explored the
coasts of South America as far as beyond the fifty-second degree. But
it was not till May, 1507, when Columbus had been a twelvemonth dead,
that the world was informed of four voyages professed to have been made
by Vespucci, of which the one just mentioned was only the third, the
two former having been made, as he states, in the service of Spain. As
the first of these was asserted to have taken place between May 20th,
1497, and October, 1499 [say 1498], and, if correct, would involve the
discovery by him not only of the north coasts of South America, but a
large extent of the coast of North America also, and that in priority of
the claims both of Cabot and Columbus as regards the discovery of the
American continent, it has been a matter of keen interest to many to
examine minutely the correctness of Vespucci’s claim to having made this
voyage.
It would be out of place here to enter into the complicated arguments
in which this question is involved; but I have elsewhere shown[20] on
how frail a tenure the claim in question is founded. In the same place
I have also traced in detail the mode adopted for giving to the New
World the name of Vespucci instead of that of Columbus, who, by the
exercise of such transcendently superior qualities had earned for himself
that honour. I will here sketch it in brief. Vespucci was an intimate
friend of the Giocondi family, one of whom, the celebrated architect,
Fra Giovanni Giocondi, who built the bridge of Nôtre Dame at Paris,
was the translator into Latin of Vespucci’s letter to Lorenzo di Pier
Francesco de’ Medici describing his third voyage. A young Alsatian,
named Mathias Ringmann, who was at this time pursuing his studies in
Paris, appears to have made the acquaintance of this Giocondi and to
have carried back with him into Alsace an admiration for Vespucci and
his achievements, which showed itself in his editing at Strasbourg in
1505, Giocondi’s translation of Vespucci’s letter, accompanied by some
laudatory verses in Latin by himself. Now in the neighbouring province of
Lorraine, one of the canons of the cathedral at St. Dié, Walter Lud, who
was secretary to René II, Duke of Lorraine, had already for many years
established a gymnasium or college under the duke’s auspices, and also a
printing-press. Ringmann, better known in literature by the pseudonym of
Philesius, became professor of Latin at the college and corrector of the
press in the printing-office. On the 25th of April, 1507, _a year after
the death of Columbus_, one of the members of this little clique, named
Martin Waldseemüller, otherwise known as Hylacomylus, produced from this
press a small work entitled _Cosmographiæ Introductio_, to which was
appended a Latin translation of Vespucci’s four voyages, as described by
himself and addressed to Duke René II, although it can be shown by the
contents to have been really intended for Pietro Soderini, Gonfaloniere
of Florence, who had been Vespucci’s schoolfellow. In my _Life of
Prince Henry the Navigator_, I have ventured to suggest the process
by which these letters, intended for another, came to be addressed to
Duke René, and that suggestion supplies the solution of some riddles,
there treated of, which it would be out of place to speak of here. We
have seen the connection of the Giocondi with Vespucci. We have seen,
also, the connection of Ringmann with the work of Fra Giovanni Giocondi
and his interest in the glory of Vespucci. This interest he infuses
into the little circle of St. Dié, and we can imagine their pleasure at
having the opportunity of blazoning forth to the world, from their own
printing-press, a story which would throw so bright a reflection on the
obscurity of their secluded valley. But in the little book thus issued,
not only were printed for the first time four voyages of Vespucci, but
also a suggestion was made that from his name, Amerigo, should be given
the name of “Amerige” or “America” to the newly-discovered western world.
In September of the same year, 1507, appeared a re-issue of the same
book; and in 1509 a new edition of it was issued from the printing-press
of Johann Grüninger of Strasburg. In this same year, 1509, three years
before the death of Vespucci, the name of America appears, as if it were
already accepted as a well-known denomination, in an anonymous work
entitled _Globus Mundi_, printed also at Strasburg. But although this
work is anonymous, it was my good fortune to detect from the colophon,
in which occur the words “Adelpho Castigatore,” that the source of the
suggestion of the name of America in the one case, and of the adoption of
the suggestion in the other, are either identical or in close proximity,
inasmuch as the already mentioned re-issue of the _Cosmographiæ
Introductio_ in 1509, has in the colophon, “Johanne Adelpho Mulicho
Argentinensi Castigatore.” Now, Mulicho merely means native of Muhlingen,
near Strasburg, and this Adelphus, so named, was a physician established
in that city, and reviser of both the one work and the other.
The first place in which we find the name of America used a little
further a-field, is in a letter dated Vienna, 1512, from Joachim Vadianus
to Rudolphus Agricola, and inserted in the _Pomponius Mela_ of 1518,
edited by the former. The expression used is “America discovered by
Vesputius.”[21] But although this Vadianus, whose real name was Joachim
Watt, writes from Vienna in 1512, I find that he was a native of St.
Gall, whence in 1508, being then twenty-four years old, he went to the
High School of Vienna. His learned disputations and verses gained him
the chair of the professorship of the liberal arts at that school, and
he subsequently studied medicine, of which faculty he obtained the
doctorate. This attachment to the study of medicine recalls to my mind a
fact which awakens a suspicion that he may have been a personal friend of
John Adelphus, just referred to, and if so, of the little confraternity
of St. Dié. Before Adelphus established himself in Strasburg, he had
practised as a physician at Schaffhausen, and this at the time when
Joachim Watt was a young man, still resident at St. Gall, which is
distant from Schaffhausen seventy English miles, a distance which would
offer very little hindrance to Swiss intercommunication. Whether this
suspicion be worth anything or no, I advance it as a possible clue to
yet further researches which may show the process by which this spurious
appellation of America became adopted, through the efforts of a small
cluster of men in an obscure corner of France.
The earliest engraved map of the new world yet known as bearing the name
of America, is a mappe-monde by Appianus, bearing the date of 1520,
annexed to the edition by Camers of the Polyhistoria of Julius Solinus
(_Viennæ Austr._, 1520), and a second time to the edition of _Pomponius
Mela_ by Vadianus, printed at Basle in 1522. The earliest manuscript
map hitherto found bearing that name, is in a most precious collection
of drawings by the hand of Leonardo da Vinci, now in Her Majesty’s
collections at Windsor, to which, from an examination of its contents, I
have assigned the date of 1513-14.[22]
I have thus endeavoured to unravel the intricate story of a great
and irreparable injustice. No one can deny to Vespucci the credit of
possessing courage, perseverance, and a practical acquaintance with the
art of navigation; but he had never been the commander of an expedition,
and had it not been for the great initiatory achievement of Columbus, we
have no reason to suppose that we should ever have heard his name.
“To say the truth,” as has been well remarked by the illustrious Baron
von Humboldt, “Vespucci shone only by reflection from an age of glory.
When compared with Columbus, Sebastian Cabot, Bartolomé Dias, and Da
Gama, his place is an inferior one. The majesty of great memories seems
concentrated in the name of Christopher Columbus. It is the originality
of his vast idea, the largeness and fertility of his genius, and the
courage which bore up against a long series of misfortunes, which have
exalted the Admiral high above all his contemporaries.”
A tardy tribute has been at length paid to his memory by his
fellow-citizens of Genoa, and the first stone of a monument in
commemoration of his achievements was laid in that city on the 27th of
September, 1846, and completed in 1862. There is now serious talk of his
canonization.
Among the many so-called portraits of Columbus, too numerous to be
detailed here, but for elaborate notices of which the reader is referred
to the works mentioned at foot,[23] there is not one that can be regarded
as unquestionably authentic. It was at the suggestion of my friend
M. Ferdinand Denis, the distinguished Librarian of the Ste. Geneviève
in Paris, that I have inserted as the frontispiece to this volume a
chromolithograph fac-simile of the St. Christopher on the famous map
of Juan de la Cosa, Columbus’s pilot, made in 1500. My friend most
reasonably suggests that, in this case, St. Christopher represented
Christopher Columbus carrying the Christian faith across the Atlantic,
and that the face would be a portrait. In corroboration of his idea,
I may quote the words of Herrera, whose possession of the Columbian
documents enabled him to speak with accuracy. He says, “Columbus was
tall of stature, with a long and imposing visage. His nose was aquiline;
his eyes blue; his complexion clear, and having a tendency to a glowing
red; the beard and hair red in his youth, but his fatigues early turned
them white.” The cap and costume seem also less those of the saint than
of the sailor. It is to my late revered and dear friend, His Excellency
the Count de Lavradio, that I am indebted for procuring the coloured
photograph from the original map on his visit to Madrid in 1869. The
chromolithograph has been prepared in Berlin.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The Society possesses, in my _Early Voyages to Terra Australis_,
printed in 1859, the evidence of these discoveries; and in my _Prince
Henry the Navigator_, published in 1868, will be seen the procession of
these discoveries from the Prince’s efforts.
[2] The _li_ is about one-tenth of the common league.
[3] The most strenuous advocate for the truth of the tradition that
America was discovered by Prince Madoc, was Dr. John Williams of
Sydenham, who wrote two tracts on the subject in the year 1791 and 1792,
which, if betraying a little of the bias of prejudice, yet manifest a
degree of research that does great credit to his industry and zeal.
[4] A copy of this map is given in the second vol. of Sastre’s _Mercurio
Italico_, Lond. 1789, 8vo., and a photograph of it was published in
Venice in 1869 by H. F. and M. Münster.
[5] The work quoted is Cordeyro’s _Historia Insulana das Ilhas a Portugal
sugeytas no Oceano Occidental_, Lisbon 1717.
[6] For a demonstration that the discovery of the east coast of North
America was made by Sebastian Cabot in 1497, a year before Columbus
reached the terra firma, I must refer the reader to a paper of mine read
before the Society of Antiquaries on May 5, 1870, and now being printed
for the _Archæologia_.
[7] Humboldt has fallen into an error in saying that Joachim Lelewel,
in his _Pisma pomniejsze geogr. historyczné_, 1814, has recently called
up fresh attention to this Polish pilot. The editor has examined the
work carefully from beginning to end, and does not find the name even
once mentioned, although the page to which reference is made contains
allusions to early discoveries.
[8] A copy of this globe is given in Dr. F. W. Ghillany’s _Geschichte des
Seefahrers Ritter Martin Behaim_, Nürnberg, 1853, 4to.
[9] _Historie del S. D. Fernando Colombo_, cap. iv.
[10] “_Siendo yo nacido en Genova”; and “mando al dicho Don Diego, mi
hijo, a la persona que heredare el dicho mayorazgo que tenga y sostenga
siempre en la Ciudad de Genova una persona de nuestro linage ... pues que
della salí y en ella nací._”
[11] Another Caseneuve, probably of this family, is said by De Bry to
have been captain of the fourth expedition of the French to Mexico, in
the year 1567.
[12] Las Casas, in his _History of the Indies_, tells us distinctly that
Columbus derived much information from Perestrello’s maps and papers,
and adds that “in order to acquaint himself practically with the method
pursued by the Portuguese in navigating to the coast of Guinea, he sailed
several times with them as if he had been one of them.” Las Casas says
that he learned this from the admiral’s son Diego, adding that “some time
before his famous voyage Columbus resided in Madeira, where news of fresh
discoveries was constantly arriving, and this,” he says, “appeared to
have been the occasion of Christopher Columbus coming to Spain, and the
beginning of the discovery of this great world” (America).
[13] Humboldt, _Examen Critique_, vol. ii, p. 246-251.
[14] It was shortly after this period that Bartholomew Columbus was
sent by his brother to king Henry VII, to offer his services in a
voyage of navigation; the king is said to have received the offer “con
allegro volto”—“with a cheerful countenance”; but his acceptance of the
proposition was rendered null by Columbus having in the interim attached
himself to the service of queen Isabella.
[15] Vide _Athenæum_ for 1846, page 1274.