Any one who is sick, as some of you may know, is apt to be anxious and
fretful and full of fears as to how he is going to get along, or who
will look out for his family. Very often there is no need for this
feeling; very often it is a part of the complaint from which the sick
person is suffering.
In the case of Columbus, however, there was good cause for this
depressed and anxious feeling. King Ferdinand, after Queen Isabella's
death, did nothing to help Columbus. He would not agree to give the
Admiral what he called his rights, and though Columbus kept writing
letters from his sick room asking for justice, the king would do nothing
for him. And when the king's smile is turned to a frown, the fashion of
the court is to frown, too.
So Columbus had no friends at the king's court. Diego, his eldest son,
was still one of the royal pages, but he could do nothing. Without
friends, without influence, without opportunity, Columbus began to
feel that he should never get his rights unless he could see the king
himself. And sick though he was he determined to try it.
It must have been sad enough to see this sick old man drag himself
feebly to the court to ask for justice from the king whom he had
enriched. You would think that when King Ferdinand really saw Columbus
at the foot of the throne, and when he remembered all that this man had
done for him and for Spain, and how brave and persistent and full of
determination to do great things the Admiral once had been, he would at
least have given the old man what was justly due him.
But he would not. He smiled on the old sailor, and said many pleasant
things and talked as if he were a friend, but he would not agree to
anything Columbus asked him; and the poor Admiral crawled back to his
sick bed again, and gave up the struggle. I have done all that I can do,
he said to the few friends who remained faithful to him; I must leave it
all to God. He has always helped me when things were at the worst.
And God helped him by taking him away from all the fret, and worry, and
pain, and struggle that made up so much of the Admiral's troubled life.
On the twentieth of May, 1506, the end came. In the house now known as
Number 7 Columbus Avenue, in the city of Valladolid; in Northern Spain,
with a few faithful friends at his side, he signed his will, lay back in
bed and saying trustfully these words: Into thy hands, O Lord, I commit
my spirit! the Admiral of the Ocean Seas, the Viceroy of the Indies,
the Discoverer of a New World, ended his fight for life. Christopher
Columbus was dead.
He was but sixty years old. With Tennyson, and Whittier, and Gladstone,
and De Lesseps living to be over eighty, and with your own good
grandfather and grandmother, though even older than Columbus, by no
means ready to be called old people, sixty years seems an early age to
be so completely broken and bent and gray as was he. But trouble,
and care, and exposure, and all the worries and perils of his life of
adventure, had, as you must know, so worn upon Columbus that when he
died he seemed to be an old, old man. He was white-haired, you remember,
even before he discovered America, and each year he seemed to grow older
and grayer and more feeble.
And after he had died in that lonely house in Valladolid, the world
seems for a time to have almost forgotten him. A few friends followed
him to the grave; the king, for whom he had done so much, did not
trouble himself to take any notice of the death of his Admiral, whom
once he had been forced to honor, receive and reward. The city of
Valladolid, in which Columbus died, was one of those fussy little towns
in which everybody knew what was happening next door, and talked and
argued about whatever happened upon its streets and in its homes; and
yet even Valladolid hardly seemed to know of the presence within its
gates of the sick "Viceroy of the Indies." Not until four weeks after
his death did the Valladolid people seem to realize what had happened;
and then all they did was to write down this brief record: "The said
Admiral is dead."
To-day, the bones of Columbus inclosed in a leaden casket lie in the
Cathedral of Santo Domingo. People have disputed about the place where
the Discoverer of America was born; they are disputing about the place
where he is buried. But as it seems now certain that he was born in
Genoa, so it seems also certain that his bones are really in the tomb
in the old Cathedral at Santo Domingo, that old Haytian city which he
founded, and where he had so hard a time.
At least a dozen places in the Old World and the New have built
monuments and statues in his honor; in the United States, alone, over
sixty towns and villages bear his name, or the kindred one of Columbia.
The whole world honors him as the Discoverer of America; and yet the
very name that the Western Hemisphere bears comes not from the man who
discovered it, but from his friend and comrade Americus Vespucius.
Like Columbus, this Americus Vespucius was an Italian; like him, he was
a daring sailor and a fearless adventurer, sailing into strange seas
to see what he could find. He saw more of the American coast than did
Columbus, and not being so full of the gold-hunting and slave-getting
fever as was the Admiral, he brought back from his four voyages so much
information about the new-found lands across the sea, that scholars, who
cared more for news than gold, became interested in what he reported.
And some of the map-makers in France, when they had to name the new
lands in the West that they drew on their maps--the lands that were not
the Indies, nor China, nor Japan--called them after the man who had told
them so much about them--Americus Vespucius. And so it is that to-day
you live in America and not in Columbia, as so many people have thought
this western world of ours should be named.
And even the titles, and riches, and honors that the king and queen of
Spain promised to Columbus came very near being lost by his family,
as they had been by himself. It was only by the hardest work, and by
keeping right at it all the time, that the Admiral's eldest son, Diego
Columbus, almost squeezed out of King Ferdinand of Spain the things that
had been promised to his father.
But Diego was as plucky, and as brave, and as persistent as his father
had been; then, too, he had lived at court so long--he was one of the
queen's pages, you remember that he knew just what to do and how to act
so as to get what he wanted. And at last he got it.
He was made Viceroy over the Indies; he went across the seas to Hayti,
and in his palace in the city of Santo Domingo he ruled the lands his
father had found, and which for centuries were known as the Spanish
Main; he was called Don Diego; he married a high-born lady of Spain, the
niece of King Ferdinand; he received the large share of "the riches of
the Indies" that his father had worked for, but never received. And the
family of Christopher Columbus, the Genoese adventurer--under the title
of the Dukes of Veragua--have, ever since Don Diego's day, been of what
is called "the best blood of Spain."
If you have read this story of Christopher Columbus aright, you must
have come to the conclusion that the life of this Italian sea captain
who discovered a new world was not a happy one. From first to last it
was full of disappointment. Only once, in all his life, did he know what
happiness and success meant, and that was on his return from his first
voyage, when he landed amid cheers of welcome at Palos, and marched into
Barcelona in procession like a conqueror to be received as an equal by
his king and queen.
Except for that little taste of glory, how full of trouble was his life!
He set out to find Cathay and bring back its riches and its treasures.
He did not get within five thousand miles of Cathay. He returned from
his second voyage a penitent, bringing only tidings of disaster. He
returned from his third voyage in disgrace, a prisoner and in chains,
smarting under false charges of theft, cruelty and treason. He
returned from his fourth voyage sick unto death, unnoticed, unhonored,
unwelcomed.
From first to last he was misunderstood. His ideas were made fun of,
his efforts were treated with contempt, and even what he did was not
believed, or was spoken of as of not much account. A career that began
in scorn ended in neglect. He died unregarded, and for years no one
gave him credit for what he had done, nor honor for what he had brought
about.
Such a life would, I am sure, seem to all boys and girls, but a dreary
prospect if they felt it was to be theirs or that of any one they
loved. And yet what man to-day is more highly honored than Christopher
Columbus? People forget all the trials and hardships and sorrows of
his life, and think of him only as one of the great successes of the
world--the man who discovered America.
And out of his life of disaster and disappointment two things stand
forth that all of us can honor and all of us should wish to copy. These
are his sublime persistence and his unfaltering faith. Even as a boy,
Columbus had an idea of what he wished to try and what he was bound to
do. He kept right at that idea, no matter what might happen to annoy him
or set him back.
It was the faith and the persistence of Columbus that discovered America
and opened the way for the millions who now call it their home. It is
because of these qualities that we honor him to-day; it is because this
faith and persistence ended as they did in the discovery of a new world,
that to-day his fame is immortal.
Other men were as brave, as skillful and as wise as he. Following in
his track they came sailing to the new lands; they explored its coasts,
conquered its red inhabitants, and peopled its shores with the life that
has made America today the home of millions of white men and millions of
free men. But Columbus showed the way.