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.”