XV. IN SPAIN, 1496-1498
DA GAMA, VESPUCIUS, CABOT.
[Sidenote: 1496. Columbus arrives at Cadiz,]
"The wretched men crawled forth," as Irving tells us of their debarkation, "emaciated by the diseases of the colony and the hardships of the voyage, who carried in their yellow countenances, says an old writer, a mockery of that gold which had been the object of their search, and who had nothing to relate of the New World but tales of sickness, poverty, and disappointment." This is the key to the contrasts in the present reception of the adventurers with that which greeted Columbus on his return to Palos.
When Columbus landed at Cadiz, he was clothed with the robe and girdled with the cord of the Franciscans. His face was unshaven. Whether this was in penance, or an assumption of piety to serve as a lure, is not clear. Oviedo says it was to express his humility; and his humbled pride needed some such expression.
[Sidenote: and learns the condition of the public mind.]
He found in the harbor three caravels just about starting for Española with tardy supplies. It had been intended to send some in January; but the ships which started with them suffered wreck on the neighboring coasts. He had only to ask Pedro Alonso Niño, the commander of this little fleet, for his dispatches, to find the condition of feeling which he was to encounter in Spain. They gave him a sense, more than ever before, of the urgent necessity of making the colony tributary to the treasury of the Crown. It was clear that discord and unproductiveness were not much longer to be endured. So he wrote a letter to the Adelantado, which was to go by the ships, urging expedition in quieting the life of the colonists, and in bringing the resources of the island under such control that it could be made to yield a steady flow of treasure.
[Sidenote: 1496. June 17. Columbus writes to Bartholomew.]
To this end, the new mines of Hayna must be further explored, and the working of them started with diligence. A port of shipment should be found in their neighborhood, he adds. With such instructions to Bartholomew, the caravels sailed on June 17, 1496. It must have been with some trepidation that Columbus forwarded to the Court the tidings of his arrival. If the two dispatches which he sent could have been preserved, we might better understand his mental condition.
[Sidenote: Invited to Court.]
As soon as the messages of Columbus reached their Majesties, then at Almazan, they sent, July 12, 1496, a letter inviting him to Court, and reassuring him in his despondency by expressions of kindness. So he started to join the Court in a somewhat better frame of mind. He led some of his bedecked Indians in his train, not forgetting "in the towns" to make a cacique among them wear conspicuously a golden necklace.
Bernaldez tells us that it was in this wily fashion that Columbus made his journey into the country of Castile,--"the which collar," that writer adds, "I have seen and held in these hands;" and he goes on to describe the other precious ornaments of the natives, which Columbus took care that the gaping crowds should see on this wandering mission.
It is one of the anachronisms of the Historie of 1571 that it places the Court at this time at Burgos, and makes it there to celebrate the marriage of the crown prince with Margaret of Austria. The author of that book speaks of seeing the festivities himself, then in attendance as a page upon Don Juan. It was a singular lapse of memory in Ferdinand Columbus--if this statement is his--to make two events like the arrival of his father at Court, with all the incidental parade as described in the book, and the ceremonies of that wedding festival identical in time. The wedding was in fact nine months later, in April, 1497.
[Sidenote: Received by the sovereigns.]
[Sidenote: Makes new demands.]
Columbus's reception, wherever it was, seems to have been gracious, and he made the most of the amenities of the occasion to picture, in his old exaggerating way, the wealth of the Ophir mines. He was encouraged by the effect which his enthusiasm had produced to ask to be supplied with another fleet, partly to send additional supplies to Española, but mainly to enable him to discover that continental land farther south, of which he had so constantly heard reports.
It was easy for the monarchs to give fair promises, and quite as easy to forget them, for a while at least, in the busy scenes which their political ambitions were producing. Belligerent relations with France necessitated a vigilant watch about the Pyrenees. There were fleets to be maintained to resist, both in the Mediterranean and on the Atlantic coast, attacks which might unexpectedly fall. An imposing armada was preparing to go to Flanders to carry thither the Princess Juana to her espousal with Philip of Austria. The same fleet was to bring back Philip's sister Margaret to become the bride of Prince Juan, in those ceremonials to which reference has already been made.
[Sidenote: 1496. Autumn. A new expedition ordered.]
These events were too engrossing for the monarchs to give much attention to the wishes of Columbus, and it was not till the autumn of 1496 that an appropriation was made to equip another little squadron for him. The hopes it raised were soon dashed, for having some occasion to need money promptly, at a crisis of the contest which the King was waging with France, the money which had been intended for Columbus was diverted to the new exigency. What was worse in the eyes of Columbus, it was to be paid out of some gold which it was supposed that Niño had brought back from the mines of Hayna. This officer on arriving at Cadiz had sent to the Court some boastful messages about his golden lading, which were not confirmed when in December the sober dispatch of the Adelantado, which Niño had kept back, came to be read. The nearest approach to gold which the caravels brought was another crowd of dusky slaves, and the dispatches of Bartholomew pictured the colony in the same conditions of destitution as before. There was no stimulant in such reports either for the Admiral or for the Court, and the New World was again dismissed from the minds of all, or consigned to their derision.
[Sidenote: 1497. Spring. Columbus's rights reaffirmed.]
[Sidenote: New powers.]
When the spring months of 1497 arrived, there were new hopes. The wedding of Prince Juan at Burgos was over, and the Queen was left more at liberty to think of her patronage of the new discoveries. The King was growing more and more apathetic, and some of the leading spirits of the Court were inimical, either actively or reservedly. By the Queen's influence, the old rights bestowed upon Columbus were reaffirmed (April 23, 1497), and he was offered a large landed estate in Española, with a new territorial title; but he was wise enough to see that to accept it would complicate his affairs beyond their present entanglement. He was solicitous, however, to remove some of his present pecuniary embarrassments, and it was arranged that he should be relieved from bearing an eighth of the cost of the ventures of the last three years, and that he should surrender all rights to the profits; while for the three years to come he should have an eighth of the gross income, and a further tenth of the net proceeds. Later, the original agreement was to be restored. His brother Bartholomew was created Adelantado, giving thus the royal sanction to the earlier act of the Admiral.
[Sidenote: Fonseca allowed to grant licenses.]
In the letters patent made out previous to Columbus's second voyage, the Crown distinctly reserved the right to grant other licenses, and invested Fonseca with the power to do so, allowing to Columbus nothing more than one eighth of the tonnage; and in the ordinance of June 2, 1497, in which they now revoked all previous licenses, the revocation was confined to such things as were repugnant to the rights of Columbus. It was also agreed that the Crown should maintain for him a body of three hundred and thirty gentlemen, soldiers, and helpers, to accompany him on his new expedition, and this number could be increased, if the profits of the colony warranted the expenditure. Power was given to him to grant land to such as would cultivate the soil for four years; but all brazil-wood and metals were to be reserved for the Crown.
All this seemed to indicate that the complaints which had been made against the oppressive sternness of the Admiral's rule had not as yet broken down the barriers of the Queen's protection. Indeed, we find up to this time no record of any serious question at Court of his authority, and Irving thinks nothing indicates any symptom of the royal discontent except the reiterated injunctions, in the orders given to him respecting the natives and the colonists, that leniency should govern his conduct so far as was safe.
[Sidenote: 1498. February 22. Makes a will.]
Permission being given to him to entail his estates, he marked out in a testamentary document (February 22, 1498) the succession of his heirs,--male heirs, with Ferdinand's rights protected, if Diego's line ran out; then male heirs of his brothers; and if all male heirs failed, then the estates were to descend by the female line. The title Admiral was made the paramount honor, and to be the perpetual distinction of his representatives. The entail was to furnish forever a tenth of its revenues to charitable uses. Genoa was placed particularly under the patronage of his succeeding representatives, with injunctions always to do that city service, as far as the interests of the Church and the Spanish Crown would permit. Investments were to be made from time to time in the bank of St. George at Genoa, to accumulate against the opportune moment when the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre seemed feasible, either to help to that end any state expedition or to fit out a private one. He enjoined upon his heirs a constant, unwavering devotion to the Papal Church and to the Spanish Crown. At every season of confession, his representative was commanded to lay open his heart to the confessor, who must be prompted by a perusal of the will to ask the crucial questions.
It was in the same document that Columbus prescribed the signature of his representatives in succeeding generations, following a formula which he always used himself.
[Sidenote: Columbus's signature.]
.S. .S.A.S. X M Y [Greek: Chr~o] FERENS.
The interpretation of this has been various: Servus Supplex Altissimi Salvatoris, Christus, Maria, Yoseph, Christo ferens, is one solution; Servidor sus Altezas sacras, Christo, Maria Ysabel, is another; and these are not all.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Unpopularity of Columbus.]
The complacency of the Queen was soothing; her appointment of his son Ferdinand as her page (February 18, 1498) was gratifying, but it could not wholly compensate Columbus for the condition of the public mind, of which he was in every way forcibly reminded. There were both the whisper of detraction spreading abroad, and the outspoken objurgation. The physical debility of his returned companions was made a strong contrast to his reiterated stories of Paradise. Fortunes wrecked, labor wasted, and lives lost had found but a pitiable compensation in a few cargoes of miserable slaves. The people had heard of his enchanting landscapes, but they had found his aloes and mastic of no value. Hidalgoes said there was nothing of the luxury they had been told to expect. The gorgeous cities of the Great Khan had not been found. Such were the kind of taunts to which he was subjected.
[Sidenote: His sojourn with Bernaldez.]
Columbus, during this period of his sojourn in Spain, spent a considerable interval under the roof of Andres Bernaldez, and we get in his history of the Spanish kings the advantage of the talks which the two friends had together.
The Admiral is known to have left with Bernaldez various documents which were given to him in the presence of Juan de Fonseca. From the way in which Bernaldez speaks of these papers, they would seem to have been accounts of the voyage of Columbus then already made, and it was upon these documents that Bernaldez says he based his own narratives.
[Sidenote: Bernaldez's opinions.]
This ecclesiastic had known Columbus at an earlier day, when the Genoese was a vender of books in Andalusia, as he says; in characterizing him, he calls his friend in another place a man of an ingenious turn, but not of much learning, and he leaves one to infer that the book-vender was not much suspected of great familiarity with his wares.
We get as clearly from Bernaldez as from any other source the measure of the disappointment which the public shared as respects the conspicuous failure of these voyages of Columbus in their pecuniary relations.
[Sidenote: Scant returns of gold.]
The results are summed up by that historian to show that the cost of the voyages had been so great and the returns so small that it came to be believed that there was in the new regions no gold to speak of. Taking the first voyage,--and the second was hardly better, considering the larger opportunities,--Harrisse has collated, for instance, all the references to what gold Columbus may have gathered; and though there are some contradictory reports, the weight of testimony seems to confine the amount to an inconsiderable sum, which consisted in the main of personal ornaments. There are legends of the gold brought to Spain from this voyage being used to gild palaces and churches, to make altar ornaments for the cathedral at Toledo, to serve as gifts of homage to the Pope, but we may safely say that no reputable authority supports any such statements.
Notwithstanding this seeming royal content of which the signs have been given, there was, by virtue of a discontented and irritated public sentiment, a course open to Columbus in these efforts to fit out his new expedition which was far from easy. There was so much disinclination in the merchants to furnish ships that it required a royal order to seize them before the small fleet could be gathered.
[Sidenote: Difficulties in fitting out the new expedition.]
[Sidenote: Criminals enlisted.]
The enlistments to man the ships and make up the contingent destined for the colony were more difficult still. The alacrity with which everybody bounded to the summons on his second voyage had entirely gone, and it was only by the foolish device which Columbus decided upon of opening the doors of the prisons and of giving pardon to criminals at large, that he was enabled to help on the registration of his company.
[Sidenote: 1498. Two caravels sail.]
Finding that all went slowly, and knowing that the colony at Española must be suffering from want of supplies, the Queen was induced to order two caravels of the fleet to sail at once, early in 1498, under the command of Pedro Fernandez Coronel. This was only possible because the Queen took some money which she had laid aside as a part of a dower which was intended for her daughter Isabella, then betrothed to Emmanuel, the King of Portugal.
[Sidenote: Fonseca's lack of heart.]
So much was gratifying; but the main object of the new expedition was to make new discoveries, and there were many harassing delays yet in store for Columbus before he could depart with the rest of his fleet. These delays, as we shall see, enabled another people, under the lead of another Italian, to precede him and make the first discovery of the mainland. The Queen was cordial, but an affliction came to distract her, in the death of Prince Juan. Fonseca, who was now in charge of the fitting out of the caravels, seems to have lacked heart in the enterprise; but it serves the purpose of Columbus's adulatory biographers to give that agent of the Crown the character of a determined enemy of Columbus.
[Sidenote: Columbus's altercation with Fonseca's accountant.]
Even the prisons did not disgorge their vermin, as he had wished, and his company gathered very slowly, and never became full. Las Casas tells us that troubles followed him even to the dock. The accountant of Fonseca, one Ximeno de Breviesca, got into an altercation with the Admiral, who knocked him down and exhibited other marks of passion. Las Casas further tells us that this violence, through the representations of it which Fonseca made, produced a greater effect on the monarchs than all the allegations of the Admiral's cruelty and vindictiveness which his accusers from Española had constantly brought forward, and that it was the immediate cause of the change of royal sentiment towards him, which soon afterwards appeared. Columbus seems to have discovered the mistake he had made very promptly, and wrote to the monarchs to counteract its effect. It was therefore with this new anxiety upon his mind that he for the third time committed himself to his career of adventure and exploration. The canonizers would have it that their sainted hero found it necessary to prove by his energy in personal violence that age had not impaired his manhood for the trials before him!
* * * * *
Before following Columbus on this voyage, the reader must take a glance at the conditions of discovery elsewhere, for these other events were intimately connected with the significance of Columbus's own voyagings.
[Sidenote: Da Gama's passage of the African cape.]
The problem which the Portuguese had undertaken to solve was, as has been seen, the passage to India by the Stormy Cape of Africa. Even before Columbus had sailed on his first voyage, word had come in 1490 to encourage King João II. His emissaries in Cairo had learned from the Arab sailors that the passage of the cape was practicable on the side of the Indian Ocean. The success of his Spanish rivals under Columbus in due time encouraged the Portuguese king still more, or at least piqued him to new efforts.
[Sidenote: Reaches Calicut May 20, 1498.]
Vasco da Gama was finally put in command of a fleet specially equipped. It was now some years since his pilot, Pero de Alemquer, had carried Diaz well off the cape. On Sunday, July 8, 1497, Da Gama sailed from below Lisbon, and on November 22 he passed with full sheets the formidable cape. It was not, however, till December 17 that he reached the point where Diaz had turned back. His further progress does not concern us here. Suffice it to say that he cast anchor at Calicut May 20, 1498, and India was reached ten days before Columbus started a third time to verify his own beliefs, but really to find them errors.
Towards the end of August, or perhaps early in September, of the next year (1499), Da Gama arrived at Lisbon on his return voyage, anticipated, indeed, by one of his caravels, which, separated from the commander in April or May, had pushed ahead and reached home on the 10th of July. Portugal at once resounded with jubilation. The fleet had returned crippled with disabled crews, and half the vessels had disappeared; but the solution of a great problem had been reached.
The voyage of Da Gama, opening a trade eagerly pursued and eagerly met, offered, as we shall see, a great contrast to the small immediate results which came from the futile efforts of Columbus to find a western way to the same regions.
[Sidenote: Supposed voyage of Vespucius.]
There have been students of these early explorers who have contended that, while Columbus was harassed in Spain with these delays in preparing for his third voyage, the Florentine Vespucius, whom we have encountered already as helping Berardi in the equipment of Columbus's fleets, had, in a voyage of which we have some confused chronology, already in 1497 discovered and coursed the northern shores of the mainland south of the Caribbean Sea.
Bernaldez tells us that, during the interval between the second and third voyages of Columbus, the Admiral "accorded permission to other captains to make discoveries at the west, who went and discovered various islands." Whether we can connect this statement with any such voyage as is now to be considered is a matter of dispute.
[Sidenote: Who discovered South America?]
This question of the first discovery of the mainland of South America,--we shall see that North America's mainland had already been discovered,--whether by Columbus or Vespucius, is one which has long vexed the historian and still does perplex him, though the general consensus of opinion at the present day is in favor of Columbus, while pursuing the voyage through which we are soon to follow him. The question is much complicated by the uncertainties and confusion of the narratives which are our only guides. The discovery, if not claimed by Vespucius, has been vigorously claimed for him. Its particulars are also made a part of the doubt which has clouded the recitals concerning the voyage of Pinzon and Solis to the Honduras coast, which are usually placed later; but by Oviedo and Gomara this voyage is said to have preceded that of Columbus.
[Sidenote: Claimed for Vespucius.]
The claim for Vespucius is at the best but an enforced method of clarifying the published texts concerning the voyages, in the hopes of finding something like consistency in their dates. Any commentator who undertakes to get at the truth must necessarily give himself up to some sort of conjecture, not only as respects the varied inconsistencies of the narrative, but also as regards the manifold blunders of the printer of the little book which records the voyages. Muñoz had it in mind, it is understood, to prove that Vespucius could not have been on the coast at the date of his alleged discovery; but in the opinions of some the documents do not prove all that Muñoz, Navarrete, and Humboldt have claimed, while the advocacy of Varnhagen in favor of Vespucius does not allow that writer to see what he apparently does not desire to see. The most, perhaps, that we can say is that the proof against the view of Varnhagen, who is in favor of such a voyage in 1497, is not wholly substantiated. The fact seems to be, so far as can be made out, that Vespucius passed from one commander's employ to another's, at a date when Ojeda, in 1499, had not completed his voyage, and when Pinzon started. So supposing a return to Spain in order for Vespucius to restart with Pinzon, it is also supposable that the year 1499 itself may have seen him under two different leaders. If this is the correct view, it of course carries forward the date to a time later than the discovery of the mainland by Columbus. It is nothing but plausible conjecture, after all; but something of the nature of conjecture is necessary to dissipate the confusion. The belief of this sharing of service is the best working hypothesis yet devised upon the question.
If Vespucius was thus with Pinzon, and this latter navigator did, as Oviedo claims, precede Columbus to the mainland, there is no proof of it to prevent a marked difference of opinion among all the writers, in that some ignore the Florentine navigator entirely, and others confidently construct the story of his discovery, which has in turn taken root and been widely believed.
[Sidenote: Alleged voyage of 1497.]
A voyage of 1497 does not find mention in any of the contemporary Portuguese chroniclers. This absence of reference is serious evidence against it. It seems to be certain that within twenty years of their publication, there were doubts raised of the veracity of the narratives attributed to Vespucius, and Sebastian Cabot tells us in 1505 that he does not believe them in respect to this one voyage at any rate, and Las Casas is about as well convinced as Cabot was that the story was unfounded. Las Casas's papers passed probably to Herrera, who, under the influence of them, it would seem, formulated a distinct allegation that Vespucius had falsified the dates, converting 1499 into 1497. To destroy all the claims associated with Pinzon and Solis, Herrera carried their voyage forward to 1506. It was in 1601 that this historian made these points, and so far as he regulated the opinions of Europe for a century and a half, including those of England as derived through Robertson, Vespucius lived in the world's regard with a clouded reputation. The attempt of Bandini in the middle of the last century to lift the shadow was not very fortunate, but better success followed later, when Canovai delivered an address which then and afterwards, when it was reinforced by other publications of his, was something like a gage thrown to the old-time defamatory spirit. This denunciatory view was vigorously worked, with Navarrete's help, by Santarem in the Coleccion of that Spanish scholar, whence Irving in turn got his opinions. Santarem professed to have made most extensive examinations of Portuguese and French manuscripts without finding a trace of the Florentine.
Undaunted by all such negative testimony, the Portuguese Varnhagen, as early as 1839, began a series of publications aimed at rehabilitating the fame of Vespucius, against the views of all the later writers, Humboldt, Navarrete, Santarem, and the rest. Humboldt claimed to adduce evidence to show that Vespucius was all the while in Europe. Varnhagen finally brought himself to the belief that in this disputed voyage of 1497 Vespucius, acting under the orders of Vicente Yañez Pinzon and Juan Diaz de Solis, really reached the main at Honduras, whence he followed the curvatures of the coast northerly till he reached the capes of Chesapeake. Thence he steered easterly, passed the Bermudas, and arrived at Seville. If this is so, he circumnavigated the archipelago of the Antilles, and disproved the continental connection of Cuba. Varnhagen even goes so far as to maintain that Vespucius had not been deceived into supposing the coast was that of Asia, but that he divined the truth. Varnhagen stands, however, alone in this estimate of the evidence.
Valentini, in our day, has even supposed that the incomplete Cuba of the Ruysch map of 1508 was really the Yucatan shore, which Vespucius had skirted.
The claim which some French zealots in maritime discovery have attempted to sustain, of Norman adventurers being on the Brazil coast in 1497-98, is hardly worth consideration.
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[Sidenote: The English expedition under Cabot.]
We turn now to other problems. The Bull of Demarcation was far from being acceptable as an ultimate decision in England, and the spirit of her people towards it is well shown in the Westerne Planting of Hakluyt. This chronicler mistrusts that its "certain secret causes"--which words he had found in the papal bull, probably by using an inaccurate version--were no other than "the feare and jelousie that King Henry of England, with whom Bartholomew Columbus had been to deal in this enterprise, and who even now was ready to send him into Spain to call his brother Christopher to England, should put a foot into this action;" and so the Pope, "fearing that either the King of Portugal might be reconciled to Columbus, or that he might be drawn into England, thought secretly by his unlawful division to defraud England and Portugal of that benefit." So England and Portugal had something like a common cause, and the record of how they worked that cause is told in the stories of Cabot first, and of Cortereal later. We will examine at this point the Cabot story only.
[Sidenote: Newfoundland fisheries.]
Bristol had long been the seat of the English commerce with Iceland, and one of the commodities received in return for English goods was the stockfish, which Cabot was to recognize on the Newfoundland banks. These stories of the codfish noticed by Cabot recalled in the mind of Galvano in 1555, and again more forcibly to Hakluyt a half century later, when Germany was now found to be not far from the latitude of Baccalaos, that there was a tale of some strange men, in the time of Frederick Barbarossa (A. D. 1153), being driven to Lubec in a canoe.
It is by no means beyond possibility that the Basque and other fishermen of Europe may have already strayed to these fishing grounds of Newfoundland, at some period anterior to this voyage of Cabot, and even traces of their frequenting the coast in Bradore Bay have been pointed out, but without convincing as yet the careful student.
[Sidenote: John Cabot.]
A Venetian named Zuan Caboto, settling in England, and thenceforward calling himself John Cabot, being a man of experience in travel, and having seen at one time at Mecca the caravans returning from the east, was impressed, as Columbus had been, with a belief in the roundness of the earth. It is not unlikely that this belief had taken for him a compelling nature from the stories which had come to England of the successful voyage of the Spaniards. Indeed, Ramusio distinctly tells us that it was the bruit of Columbus's first voyage which gave to Cabot "a great flame of desire to attempt some notable thing."
[Sidenote: 1496. March 5. Cabot's patent.]
[Sidenote: 1497. May. Cabot sails.]
When Cabot had received for himself and his three sons--one of whom was Sebastian Cabot--a patent (March 5, 1496) from Henry VII. to discover and trade with unknown countries beyond the seas, the envoy of Ferdinand and Isabella at the English court was promptly instructed to protest against any infringement of the rights of Spain in the western regions. Whether this protest was accountable for the delay in sailing, or not, does not appear, for Cabot did not set sail from Bristol till May, 1497.
[Sidenote: Ruysch with Cabot.]
It is inferred from what Beneventanus says in his Ptolemy of 1508 that Ruysch, who gives us the earliest engraved map of Cabot's discoveries, was a companion of Cabot in this initial voyage. When that editor says that he learned from Ruysch of his experiences in sailing from the south of England to a point in 53 degrees of north latitude, and thence due west, it may be referred to such participancy in this expedition from Bristol. We know from a conversation which is reported in Ramusio--unless there is some mistake in it--that Cabot apprehended the nature of what we call great circle sailing, and claimed that his course to the northwest would open India by a shorter route than the westerly run of Columbus.
[Sidenote: 1497. June 24. Cabot sees land.]
[Sidenote: Date of the voyage, 1494 or 1497?]
When Cabot had ventured westerly 700 leagues, he found land, June 24, 1497. There has been some confidence at different times, early and late, that the date of this first Cabot voyage was in reality three years before this. The belief arose from the date of 1494 being given in what seem to have been early copies of a map ascribed to Sebastian Cabot, whence the date 1494 was copied by Hakluyt in 1589, though eleven years later he changed it to 1497. It is sufficient to say that few of the critics of our day, except D'Avezac, hold to this date of 1494. Major supposes that the map of 1544, now in the Paris library and ascribed to Cabot, was a re-drawn draft from the lost Spanish original, in which the date in Roman letters, VII, may have been so carelessly made in joining the arms of the V that it was read IIII; and some such inference was apparently in the mind of Henry Stevens when he published his little tract on Sebastian Cabot in 1870.
The country which Cabot thus first saw was supposed by him to be a part of Asia, and to be occupied, though no inhabitants were seen.
[Sidenote: Cabot's landfall.]
Cabot was for over three hundred years considered as having made his landfall on the coast of Labrador, or at least we find no record that the legend of the map of 1544, placing it at Cape Breton, had impressed itself authoritatively upon the minds of Cabot's contemporaries and successors. Biddle and Humboldt, in the early part of the present century, accepted the Labrador landfall with little question. So it happened that when, in 1843, the Cabot mappemonde of 1544 was discovered, and it was found to place the landfall at the island of Cape Breton, a certain definiteness, where there had been so much vagueness, afforded the student some relief; but as the novelty of the sensation wore off, confidence was again lost, inasmuch as the various uncertainties of the document give much ground for the rejection of all parts of its testimony at variance with better vouched beliefs. It is quite possible that more satisfactory proofs can be adduced of another region for the landfall, but none such have yet been presented to scholars.
It is commonly held now that, sighting land at Cape Breton, Cabot coursed northerly, passed the present Prince Edward Island, and then sailed out of the Strait of Belle Isle,--or at least this is as reasonable a route to make out of the scant record as any, though there is nothing like a commonly received opinion on his track. There is some ground for thinking that he could not have entered the Gulf of St. Lawrence at all. He landed nowhere and saw no inhabitants. If he struck the mainland, it was probably the coasts of New Brunswick or Labrador bordering on the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The two islands which he observed on his right may have been headlands of Newfoundland, seeming to be isolated.
[Sidenote: 1497. August. Cabot returns.]
He reached Bristol in August, having been absent about three months. Raimondo de Soncino, under date of the 24th of that month, wrote to Italy of Cabot's return, and a fortnight earlier (August 10) we find record of a gratuity of ten pounds given to Cabot in recognition of this service. It proved to be an expedition which was to create a greater sensation of its kind than the English had before known. Bristol had nurtured for some years a race of hardy seamen. They had risked the dangers of the great unknown ocean in efforts to find the fabulous island of Brazil, and they had pushed adventurously westward at times, but always to return without success. The intercourse of England with the northern nations and with Iceland may have given them tidings of Greenland; but there is no reason to believe that they ever supposed that country to be other than an extended peninsula of Europe, enfolding the North Atlantic.
[Sidenote: Cabot in England.]
Cabot's telling of a new land, his supposing it the empire of the Great Khan, his tales of the wonderful fishing ground thereabouts, where the water was so dense with fish that his vessels were impeded, and his expectation of finding the land of spices if he went southward from the region of his landfall, were all stories calculated to incite wonder and speculation. It was not strange, then, that England found she had her new sea-hero, as Spain had hers in Columbus; that the king gave him money and a pension; and that, conscious of a certain dignity, Cabot went about the city, drawing the attention of the curious by reason of the fine silks in which he arrayed himself.
[Sidenote: Spain jealous of England.]
Cabot had no sooner returned than Pedro de Ayala, the Spanish envoy in London, again entered a protest, and gave notice to the English king that the land which had been discovered belonged to his master. There is some evidence that Spain kept close watch on the country at the north through succeeding years, and even intended settlement.
[Sidenote: Cabot in Seville?]
This Spanish ambassador wrote home from London, July 25, 1498, that after his first voyage, Cabot had been in Seville and Lisbon. This renders somewhat probable the suspicion that he may have had conferences with La Cosa and Columbus.
[Sidenote: Cabot's charts.]
That John Cabot, on returning from his first voyage, produced a chart which he had made, and that on this and on a solid globe, also of his construction, he had laid down what he considered to be the region he had reached, now admit of no doubt. Foreign residents at the English court reported such facts to the courts of Italy and of Spain. In the map of La Cosa (1500), we find what is considered a reflex of this Cabot chart, in the words running along a stretch of the northeast coast of Asia, which announce the waters adjacent as those visited by the English, and a neighboring headland as the Cape of the English. Even La Cosa's use of the Cabot map was lost sight of before long, and this record of La Cosa remained unknown till Humboldt discovered the map in Paris, in 1832, in the library of Baron Walckenaer, whence it passed in 1853 into the royal museum at Madrid. The views of Cabot respecting this region seem to have been soon obscured by the more current charts showing the voyages of the Cortereals, when the Cape of the English readily disappeared in the "Cabo de Portogesi," a forerunner, very likely, of what we know to-day as Cape Race.
[Sidenote: 1497-98. February. The second Cabot voyage.]
Such an appetizing tale as that of the first Cabot expedition was not likely to rest without a sequel. On the 3d of February, 1497-98, nearly four months before Columbus sailed on his third voyage, the English king granted a new patent to John Cabot, giving him the right to man six ships if he could, and in May he was at sea. Though his sons were not mentioned in the patent, it is supposed that Sebastian Cabot accompanied his father. One vessel putting back to Ireland, five others went on, carrying John Cabot westward somewhere and to oblivion, for we never hear of him again. Stevens ventures the suggestion that John Cabot may have died on the voyage of 1498, whereby Sebastian came into command, and so into a prominence in his own recollections of the voyage, which may account for the obscuration of his father's participancy in the enterprise. One of the ships would seem to have been commanded by Lanslot Thirkill, of London.
What we know of this second voyage are mentions in later years, vague in character, and apparently traceable to what Sebastian had said of it, and not always clearly, for there is an evident commingling of events of this and of the earlier voyage. We get what we know mainly from Peter Martyr, who tells us that Cabot called the region Baccalaos, and from Ramusio, who reports at second hand Sebastian's account, made forty years after the event. From such indefinite sources we can make out that the little fleet steered northwesterly, and got into water packed with ice, and found itself in a latitude where there was little night. Thence turning south they ran down to 36° north latitude. The crews landed here and there, and saw people dressed in skins, who used copper implements. When they reached England we do not know, but it was after October, 1498.
[Sidenote: Extent of this voyage.]
The question of this voyage having extended down the Atlantic seaboard of the present United States to the region of Florida, as has been urged, seems to be set at rest in Stevens's opinion, from the fact that, had Cabot gone so far, he would scarcely have acquiesced in the claims of Ponce de Leon, Ayllon, and Gomez to have first tracked parts of this coast, when Sebastian Cabot as pilot major of Spain (1518), and as president of the Congress of Badajoz (1524), had to adjudicate on such pretensions. There are some objections to this view, in that the results of unofficial explorers as shown in the Portuguese map of Cantino--if that proposition is tenable--and the rival English discoverers, of whom Cabot had been one, might easily have been held to be beyond the Spanish jurisdiction. It is not difficult to demonstrate in these matters the Spanish constant unrecognition of other national explorations.
It has also sometimes been held that the wild character of the coast along which Cabot sailed must have convinced him that he was bordering some continental region intervening between him and the true coast of Asia; that with the "great displeasure" he had felt in finding the land running north, Cabot, in fact, must have comprehended the geographical problem of America long before it was comprehended by the Spaniards. The testimony of the La Cosa and Ruysch maps is not favorable to such a belief.
[Sidenote: England rests her claim on it.]
It seems pretty certain that the success of the Cabot voyage in any worldly gain was not sufficient to move the English again for a long period. Still, the political effect was to raise a claim for England to a region not then known to be a new continent, but of an appreciable acquisition, and England never afterwards failed to rest her rights upon this claim of discovery; and even her successors, the American people, have not been without cause to rest valuable privileges upon the same. The geographical effect was seen in the earliest map which we possess of the new lands as discovered by Spain and England, the great oxhide map of Juan de la Cosa, the companion of Columbus on his second voyage, and the cartographer of his discoveries, which has already been mentioned, and of which a further description will be given later.
[Sidenote: Scant knowledge of the Cabot voyages.]
Why is it that we know no more of these voyages of the Cabots? There seems to be some ground for the suspicion that the "maps and discourses" which Sebastian Cabot left behind him in the hands of William Worthington may have fallen, through the subornation by Spain of the latter, into the hands of the rivals of England at a period just after the publication (1582) of Hakluyt's Divers Voyages, wherein the possession of them by Worthington was made known; at least, Biddle has advanced such a theory, and it has some support in what may be conjectured of the history of the famous Cabot map of 1544, only brought to light three hundred years later.
[Sidenote: The Cabot mappemonde.]
Here was a map evidently based in part on such information as was known in Spain. It was engraved, as seems likely, though purporting to be the work of Cabot, in the Low Countries, and was issued without name of publisher or place, as if to elude responsibility. Notwithstanding it was an engraved map, implying many copies, it entirely disappeared, and would not have been known to exist except that there are references to such a map as having hung in the gallery at Whitehall, as used by Ortelius before 1570, and as noted by Sanuto in 1588. So thorough a suppression would seem to imply an effort on the part of the Spanish authorities to prevent the world's profiting by the publication of maritime knowledge which in some clandestine way had escaped from the Spanish hydrographical office. That this suppression was in effect nearly successful may be inferred from the fact that but a single copy of the map has come down to us, the one now in the great library at Paris, which was found in Germany by Von Martius in 1843.
[Sidenote: Writers on Cabot.]
There has been a good deal done of late years--beginning with Biddle's Sebastian Cabot in 1831, a noteworthy book, showing how much the critical spirit can do to unravel confusion, and ending with the chapter on Cabot by the late Dr. Charles Deane in the Narrative and Critical History of America, and with the Jean et Sébastien Cabot of Harrisse (Paris, 1882)--to clear up the great obscurity regarding the two voyages of John Cabot in 1497 and 1498, an obscurity so dense that for two hundred years after the events there was no suspicion among writers that there had been more than a single voyage. It would appear that this obscurity had mainly arisen from the way in which Sebastian Cabot himself spoke of his explorations, or rather from the way in which he is reported to have spoken.
XVI. THE THIRD VOYAGE
1498-1500.
[Sidenote: Sources. Columbus's letters and journal.]
In following the events of the third voyage, we have to depend mainly on two letters written by Columbus himself. One is addressed to the Spanish monarchs, and is preserved in a copy made by Las Casas. What Peter Martyr tells us seems to have been borrowed from this letter. The other is addressed to the "nurse" of Prince Juan, of which there are copies in the Columbus Custodia at Genoa, and in the Muñoz collection of the Royal Academy of History at Madrid. They are both printed in Navarrete and elsewhere, and Major in his Select Letters of Columbus gives English versions.
There are also some evidences that the account of this voyage given in the Itinerarium Portugalensium was based on Columbus's journal, which Las Casas is known to have had, and to have used in his Historia, adding thereto some details which he got from a recital by Bernaldo de Ibarra, one of Columbus's companions,--indeed, his secretary. The map which accompanied these accounts by Columbus is lost. We only know its existence through the use of it made by Ojeda and others.
Las Casas interspersed among the details which he recorded from Columbus's journal some particulars which he got from Alonso de Vallejo. One of the pilots, Hernan Perez Matheos, enabled Oviedo to add still something more to the other sources; and then we have additional light from the mouths of various witnesses in the Columbus lawsuit. There is a little at second hand, but of small importance, in a letter of Simon Verde printed by Harrisse.
[Sidenote: Columbus's son Diego.]
Before setting sail, Columbus prepared some directions for his son Diego, of which we have only recently had notes, such appearing in the bulletin of the Italian Geographical Society for December, 1889. He commands in these injunctions that Diego shall have an affectionate regard for the mother of his half-brother Ferdinand, adds some rules for the guidance of his bearing towards his sovereigns and his fellow-men, and recommends him to resort to Father Gaspar Gorricio whenever he might feel in need of advice.
[Sidenote: 1498. May 30. Columbus sails.]
[Sidenote: Rumors of a southern continent.]
Columbus lifted anchor in the port of San Lucar de Barrameda on May 30, 1498. He was physically far from being in a good condition for so adventurous an undertaking. He had hoped, he says to his sovereigns, "to find repose in Spain; whereas on the contrary I have experienced nothing but opposition and vexation." His six vessels stood off to the southwest, to avoid a French--some say a Portuguese--fleet which was said to be cruising near Cape St. Vincent. His plan was a definite one, to keep in a southerly course till he reached the equatorial regions, and then to proceed west. By this course, he hoped to strike in that direction the continental mass of which he had intimation both from the reports of the natives in Española and from the trend which he had found in his last voyage the Cuban coast to have. Herrera tells us that the Portuguese king professed to have some knowledge of a continent in this direction, and we may connect it, if we choose, with the stories respecting Behaim and others, who had already sailed thitherward, as some reports go; but it is hard to comprehend that any belief of that kind was other than a guess at a compensating scheme of geography beyond the Atlantic, to correspond with the balance of Africa against Europe in the eastern hemisphere. It is barely possible, though there is no positive evidence of it, that the reports from England of the Cabot discoveries at the north may have given a hint of like prolongation to the south. But a more impelling instinct was the prevalent one of his time, which accompanied what Michelet calls that terrible malady breaking out in this age of Europe, the hunger and thirst for gold and other precious things, and which associated the possession of them with the warmer regions of the globe.
"To the south," said Peter Martyr. "He who would find riches must avoid the cold north!"
[Sidenote: Jayme Ferrer.]
Navarrete preserves a letter which was written to Columbus by Jayme Ferrer, a lapidary of distinction. This jeweler confirmed the prevalent notion, and said that in all his intercourse with distant marts, whence Europe derived its gold and jewels, he had learned from their vendors how such objects of commerce usually came in greatest abundance from near the equator, while black races were those that predominated near such sources. Therefore, as Ferrer told Columbus, steer south and find a black race, if you would get at such opulent abundance. The Admiral remembered he had heard in Española of blacks that had come from the south to that island in the past, and he had taken to Spain some of the metal which had been given to him as of the kind with which their javelins had been pointed. The Spanish assayers had found it a composition of gold, copper, and silver.
[Sidenote: Columbus steers southerly.]
[Sidenote: 1498. June 16. At Gomera.]
So it was with expectations like these that Columbus now worked his way south. He touched for wood and water at Porto Santo and Madeira, and thence proceeded to Gomera. Here, on June 16, he found a French cruiser with two Spanish prizes, but the three ships eluded his grasp and got to sea. He sent three caravels in pursuit, and the Spanish prisoners rising on the crew of one of the prizes, she was easily captured and brought into port.
[Sidenote: Sends three ships direct to Española.]
The Spanish fleet sailed again on June 21. The Admiral had detailed three of his ships to proceed direct to Española to find the new port on its southern side near the mines of Hayna. Their respective captains were to command the little squadron successively a week at a time. These men were: Alonso Sanchez de Carvajal, a man of good reputation; Pedro de Arona, a brother of Beatrix de Henriquez, who had borne Ferdinand to the Admiral; and Juan Antonio Colombo, a Genoese and distant kinsman of the Admiral.
[Sidenote: Columbus at the Cape de Verde Islands.]
Parting with these vessels off Ferro, Columbus, with the three others,--one of which, the flagship, being decked, of a hundred tons burthen, and requiring three fathoms of water,--steered for the Cape de Verde Islands. His stay here was not inspiring. A depressing climate of vapor and an arid landscape told upon his health and upon that of his crew. Encountering difficulties in getting fresh provisions and cattle, he sailed again on July 5, standing to the southwest.
[Sidenote: 1498. July 15.]
[Sidenote: Calms and torrid heats.]
[Sidenote: 1498. July 31. Trinidad seen.]
[Sidenote: August 1.]
Calms and the currents among the islands baffled him, however, and it was the 7th before the high peak of Del Fuego sank astern. By the 15th of July he had reached the latitude of 5° north. He was now within the verge of the equatorial calms. The air soon burned everything distressingly; the rigging oozed with the running tar; the seams of the vessels opened; provisions grew putrid, and the wine casks shrank and leaked. The fiery ordeal called for all the constancy of the crew, and the Admiral himself needed all the fortitude he could command to bear a brave face amid the twinges of gout which were prostrating him. He changed his course to see if he could not run out of the intolerable heat, and after a tedious interval, with no cessation of the humid and enervating air, the ships gradually drew into a fresher atmosphere. A breeze rippled the water, and the sun shone the more refreshing for its clearness. He now steered due west, hoping to find land before his water and provisions failed. He did not discover land as soon as he expected, and so bore away to the north, thinking to see some of the Carib Islands. On July 31 relief came, none too soon, for their water was nearly exhausted. A mariner, about midday, peering about from the masthead, saw three peaks just rising above the horizon. The cry of land was like a benison. The Salve Regina was intoned in every part of the ship. Columbus now headed the fleet for the land. As the ships went on and the three peaks grew into a triple mountain, he gave the island the name of Trinidad, a reminder in its peak of the Trinity, which he had determined at the start to commemorate by bestowing that appellation on the first land he saw. He coasted the shore of this island for some distance before he could find a harbor to careen his ships and replenish his water casks. On August 1 he anchored to get water, and was surprised at the fresh luxuriance of the country. He could see habitations in the interior, but nowhere along the shore were any signs of occupation. His men, while filling the casks, discovered footprints and other traces of human life, but those who made them kept out of sight.
[Sidenote: First sees the South American coast.]
He was now on the southern side of the island, and in that channel which separates Trinidad from the low country about the mouths of the Orinoco. Before long he could see the opposite coast stretching away for twenty leagues, but he did not suspect it to be other than an island, which he named La Isla Santa.
It was indeed strange but not surprising that Columbus found an island of a new continent, and supposed it the mainland of the Old World, as happened during his earlier voyages; and equally striking it was that now when he had actually seen the mainland of a new world he did not know it.
[Sidenote: 1498. August 2.]
By the 2d of August the Admiral had approached that narrow channel where the southwest corner of Trinidad comes nearest to the mainland, and here he anchored. A large canoe, containing five and twenty Indians, put off towards his ships, but finally its occupants lay upon their paddles a bowshot away. Columbus describes them as comely in shape, naked but for breech-cloths, and wearing variegated scarfs about their heads. They were lighter in skin than any Indians he had seen before. This fact was not very promising in view of the belief that precious products would be found in a country inhabited by blacks. The men had bucklers, too, a defense he had never seen before among these new tribes. He tried to lure them on board by showing trinkets, and by improvising some music and dances among his crew. The last expedient was evidently looked upon as a challenge, and was met by a flight of arrows. Two crossbows were discharged in return, and the canoe fled. The natives seemed to have less fear of the smaller caravels, and approached near enough for the captain of one of them to throw some presents to them, a cap, and a mantle, and the like; but when the Indians saw that a boat was sent to the Admiral's ship, they again fled.
While here at anchor, the crew were permitted to go ashore and refresh themselves. They found much delight in the cool air of the morning and evening, coming after their experiences of the torrid suffocation of the calm latitudes. Nature had appeared to them never so fresh.
[Sidenote: The Gulf Stream.]
[Sidenote: Boca del Sierpe.]
[Sidenote: Gulf of Paria.]
[Sidenote: Boca del Drago.]
Columbus grew uneasy in his insecure anchorage, for he had discovered as yet no roadstead. He saw the current flowing by with a strength that alarmed him. The waters seemed to tumble in commotion as they were jammed together in the narrow pass before him. It was his first experience of that African current which, setting across the ocean, plunges hereabouts into the Caribbean Sea, and, sweeping around the great gulf, passes north in what we know as the Gulf Stream. Columbus was as yet ignorant, too, of the great masses of water which the many mouths of the Orinoco discharge along this shore; and when at night a great roaring billow of water came across the channel,--very likely an unusual volume of the river water poured out of a sudden,--and he found his own ship lifting at her anchor and one of his caravels snapping her cable, he felt himself in the face of new dangers, and of forces of nature to which he was not accustomed. To a seaman's senses not used to such phenomena, the situation of the ships was alarming. Before him was the surging flow of the current through the narrow pass, which he had already named the Mouth of the Serpent (Boca del Sierpe). To attempt its passage was almost foolhardy. To return along the coast stemming such a current seemed nearly impossible. He then sent his boats to examine the pass, and they found more water than was supposed, and on the assurances of the pilot, and the wind favoring, he headed his ships for the boiling eddies, passed safely through, and soon reached the placid water beyond. The shore of Trinidad stretched northerly, and he turned to follow it, but somebody getting a taste of the water found it to be fresh. Here was a new surprise. He had not yet comprehended that he was within a land-locked gulf, where the rush of the Orinoco sweetens the tide throughout. As he approached the northwestern limit of Trinidad, he found that a lofty cape jutted out opposite a similar headland to the west, and that between them lay a second surging channel, beset with rocks and seeming to be more dangerous than the last. So he gave it a more ferocious name, the Mouth of the Dragon (Boca del Drago). To follow the opposite coast presented an alternative that did not require so much risk, and, still ignorant of the way in which his fleet was embayed in this marvelous water, he ran across on Sunday, August 5, to the opposite shore. He now coasted it to find a better opening to the north, for he had supposed this slender peninsula to be another island. The water grew fresher as he went on. The shore attracted him, with its harbors and salubrious, restful air, but he was anxious to get into the open sea. He saw no inhabitants. The liveliest creatures which he observed were the chattering monkeys. At length, the country becoming more level, he ran into the mouth of a river and cast anchor. It was perhaps here that the Spaniards first set foot on the continent. The accounts are somewhat confused, and need some license in reconciling them. They had, possibly, landed earlier.
[Sidenote: Paria.]
A canoe with three natives now came out to the caravel nearest shore. The Spanish captain secured the men by a clever trick. After a parley, he gave them to understand he would go on shore in their boat, and jumping violently on its gunwale, he overturned it. The occupants were easily captured in the water. Being taken on board the flagship, the inevitable hawks' bells captivated them, and they were set on shore to delight their fellows. Other parleys and interchanges of gifts followed. Columbus now ascertained, as well as he could by signs, that the word "Paria," which he heard, was the name of the country. The Indians pointed westerly, and indicated that men were much more numerous that way. The Spaniards were struck with the tall stature of the men, and noted the absence of braids in their hair. It was curious to see them smell of everything that was new to them,--a piece of brass, for instance. It seemed to be their sense of inquiry and recognition. It is not certain if Columbus participated in this intercourse on shore. He was suffering from a severe eruption of the eyes, and one of the witnesses said that the formal taking possession of the country was done by deputy on that account. This statement is contradicted by others.
[Sidenote: The natives.]
As he went on, the country became even more attractive, with its limpid streams, its open and luxuriant woods, its clambering vines, all enlivened with the flitting of brilliant birds. So he called the place The Gardens. The natives appeared to him to partake of the excellence of the country. They were, as he thought, manlier in bearing, shapelier in frame, with greater intelligence in their eyes, than any he had earlier discovered. Their arts were evidently superior to anything he had yet seen. Their canoes were handier, lighter, and had covered pavilions in the waist. There were strings of pearls upon the women which raised in the Spaniards an increased sense of cupidity. The men found oysters clinging to the boughs that drooped along the shore. Columbus recalled how he had read in Pliny of the habit of the pearl oyster to open the mouth to catch the dew, which was converted within into pearls. The people were as hospitable as they were gracious, and gave the strangers feasts as they passed from cabin to cabin. They pointed beyond the hills, and signified that another coast lay there, where a greater store of pearls could be found.
[Sidenote: 1498. August 10.]
To leave this paradise was necessary, and on August 10 the ships went further on, soon to find the water growing still fresher and more shallow. At last, thinking it dangerous to push his flagship into such shoals, Columbus sent his lightest caravel ahead, and waited her coming back. On the next day she returned, and reported that there was an inner bay beyond the islands which were seen, into which large volumes of fresh water poured, as if a huge continent were drained. Here were conditions for examination under more favorable circumstances, and on August 11 Columbus turned his prow toward the Dragon's Mouth. His stewards declared the provisions growing bad, and even the large stores intended for the colony were beginning to spoil. It was necessary to reach his destination. Columbus's own health was sinking. His gout had little cessation. His eyes had almost closed with a weariness that he had before experienced on the Cuban cruise, and he could but think of the way in which he had been taken prostrate into Isabella on returning from that expedition.
[Sidenote: Passes the Boca del Drago.]
[Sidenote: Tobago and Grenada.]
[Sidenote: Cubagua and Margarita.]
Near the Dragon's Mouth he found a harbor in which to prepare for the passage of the tumultuous strait. There seemed no escape from the trial. The passage lay before him, wide enough in itself, but two islands parted its currents and forced the boiling waters into narrower confines. Columbus studied their motion, and finally made up his mind that the turmoil of the waters might after all come from the meeting of the tide and the fresh currents seeking the open sea, and not from rocks or shoals. At all events, the passage must be made. The wind veering round to the right quarter, he set sail and entered the boisterous currents. As long as the wind lasted there was a good chance of keeping his steering way. Unfortunately, the wind died away, and so he trusted to luck and the sweeping currents. They carried him safely beyond. Once without, he was brought within sight of two islands to the northeast. They were apparently those we to-day call Tobago and Grenada. It was now the 15th of August, and Columbus turned westward to track the coast. He came to the islands of Cubagua and Margarita, and surprised some native canoes fishing for pearls.
[Sidenote: Pearls.]
His crews soon got into parley with the natives, and breaking up some Valentia ware into bits, the Spaniards bartered them so successfully that they secured three pounds, as Columbus tells us, of the coveted jewels. He had satisfied himself that here was a new field for the wealth which could alone restore his credit in Spain; but he could not tarry. As he wore ship, he left behind a mountainous reach of the coast that stretched westerly, and he would fain think that India lay that way, as it had from Cuba. At that island and here, he had touched, as he thought, the confines of Asia, two protuberant peninsulas, or perhaps masses of the continent, separated by a strait, which possibly lay ahead of him.
[Sidenote: Columbus's geographical delusions.]
There was much that had been novel in all these experiences. Columbus felt that the New World was throwing wider open the gates of its sublime secrets. Lying on his couch, almost helpless from the cruel agonies of the gout, and sightless from the malady of his eyes, the active mind of the Admiral worked at the old problems anew. We know it all from the letter which a few weeks later he drafted for the perusal of his sovereigns, and from his reports to Peter Martyr, which that chronicler has preserved for us. We know from this letter that his thoughts were still dwelling on the Mount Sopora of Solomon, "which mountain your Highnesses now possess in the island of Española,"--a convenient stepping-stone to other credulous fancies, as we shall see. The sweetness and volume of the water which had met him in the Gulf of Paria were significant to him of a great watershed behind. He reverted to the statement in Esdras of the vast preponderance on the globe of land, six parts to one of water, and thought he saw a confirmation of it in the immense flow that argued a corresponding expansion of land. He recalled all that he recollected of Aristotle and the other sages. He went back to his experiences in mid-ocean, when he was startled at the coincidence of the needle and the pole star. He remembered how he had found all the conditions of temperature and the other physical aspects to be changed as he passed that line, and it seemed as if he was sweeping into regions more ethereal. He had found the same difference when he passed, a few weeks before, out of the baleful heats of the tropical calms. He grew to think that this line of no variation of magnetism with corresponding marvels of nature marked but the beginning of a new section of the earth that no one had dreamed of. St. Augustine, St. Basil, and St. Ambrose had placed the Garden of Eden far in the Old World's east, apart from the common vicinage of men, high up above the baser parts of the earth, in a region bathed in the purest ether, and so high that the deluge had not reached it. All the stories of the Middle Ages, absorbed in the speculative philosophy of his own time, had pointed to the distant east as the seat of Paradise, and was he not now coming to it by the western passage? If the scant riches of the soil could not restore the enthusiasm which his earlier discoveries aroused in the dull spirits of Europe, would not a glimpse of the ecstatic pleasures of Eden open their eyes anew? He had endeavored to make his contemporaries feel that the earth was round, and he had proved it, as he thought, by almost touching, in a westward passage, the Golden Chersonesus. It is significant that the later Historie of 1571 omits this vagary of Paradise. The world had moved, and geographical discovery had made some records in the interim, awkward for the biographer of Columbus.
[Sidenote: Paradise found.]
There was a newer belief linked with this hope of Paradise. All this wondrous life and salubrity which Columbus saw and felt, if it had not been able to restore his health, could only come from his progress up a swelling apex of the earth, which buttressed the Garden of Eden. It was clear to his mind that instead of being round the earth was pear-shaped, and that this great eminence, up which he had been going, was constantly lifting him into purer air. The great fountain which watered the spacious garden of the early race had discharged its currents down these ethereal slopes, and sweetened all this gulf that had held him so close within its embaying girth. If such were the wonders of these outposts of the celestial life, what must be the products to be seen as one journeyed up, along the courses of such celestial streams? As he steered for Española, he found the currents still helped him, or he imagined they did. Was it not that he was slipping easily down this wonderful declivity?
[Sidenote: Columbus and Vespucius.]
That he had again discovered the mainland he was convinced by such speculations. He had no conception of the physical truth. The vagaries of his time found in him the creature of their most rampant hallucinations. This aberration was a potent cause in depriving him of the chance to place his own name on this goal of his ambition. It accounts much for the greater impression which Americus Vespucius, with his clearer instincts, was soon to make on the expectant and learned world. The voyage of that Florentine merchant, one of those trespassers that Columbus complained of, was, before the Admiral should see Spain again, to instigate the publication of a narrative, which took from its true discoverer the rightful baptism of the world he had unwittingly found. The wild imaginings of Columbus, gathered from every resource of the superstitious past, moulded by him into beliefs that appealed but little to the soberer intelligence of his time, made known in tumultuous writings, and presently to be expressed with every symptom of mental wandering in more elaborate treatises, offered to his time an obvious contrast to the steadier head of Vespucius. The latter's far more graphic description gained for him, as we shall see, the position of a recognized authority. While Columbus was puzzling over the aberration of the pole star and misshaping the earth, Vespucius was comprehending the law of gravitation upon our floating sphere, and ultimately representing it in the diagram which illustrated his narrative. We shall need to return on a later page to these causes which led to the naming of America.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 1498. August 19. Columbus sees Española.]
[Sidenote: His observations of nature.]
[Sidenote: Meets the Adelantado.]
For four days Columbus had sailed away to the northwest, coming to the wind every night as a precaution, before he sighted Española on August 19, being then, as he made out, about fifty leagues west of the spot where he supposed the port had been established for the mines of Hayna. He thought that he had been steering nearer that point, but the currents had probably carried him unconsciously west by night, as they were at that moment doing with the relief ships that he had parted with off Ferro. As Columbus speculated on this steady flow of waters with that keenness of observation upon natural phenomena which attracted the admiration of Humboldt, and which is really striking, if we separate it from his turbulent fancies, he accounted by its attrition for the predominating shape of the islands which he had seen, which had their greatest length in the direction of the current. He knew that its force would, perhaps, long delay him in his efforts to work eastward, and so he opened communication with the shore in hopes to find a messenger by whom to dispatch a letter to the Adelantado. This was easily done, and the letter reached its destination, whereupon Bartholomew started out in a caravel to meet the little fleet. It was with some misgiving that Columbus resumed his course, for he had seen a crossbow in the hands of a native. It was not an article of commerce, and it might signify another disaster like that of La Navidad. He was accordingly relieved when he shortly afterwards saw a Spanish caravel approaching, and, hailing the vessel, found that the Adelantado had come to greet him.
There was much interchange of news and thought to occupy the two in their first conference; and Columbus's anxiety to know the condition of the colony elicited a wearisome story, little calculated to make any better record in Spain than the reports of his own rule in the island.
[Sidenote: Events in Española during the absence of Columbus.]
[Sidenote: Santo Domingo founded.]
[Sidenote: Columbus and slavery.]
The chief points of it were these: Bartholomew had early carried out the Admiral's behests to occupy the Hayna country. He had built there a fortress which he had named St. Cristoval, but the workmen, finding particles of gold in the stones and sands which they used, had nicknamed it the Golden Tower. While this was doing, there was difficulty in supporting the workmen. Provisions were scarce, and the Indians were not inclined to part with what they had. The Adelantado could go to the Vega and exact the quarterly tribute under compulsion; but that hardly sufficed to keep famine from the door at St. Cristoval. Nothing had as yet been done to plant the ground near the fort, nor had herds been moved there. The settlement of Isabella was too far away for support. Meanwhile Niño had arrived with his caravels, but he had not brought all the expected help, for the passage had spoiled much of the lading. It was by Niño that Bartholomew received that dispatch from his brother which he had written in the harbor of Cadiz when, on his arrival from his second voyage, he had discerned the condition of public opinion. It was at this time, too, that he repeated to Bartholomew the decision of the theologians, that to be taken in war, or to be guilty of slaying any of their Majesties' liege subjects, was quite enough to render the Indians fit subjects for the slave-block. The Admiral's directions, therefore, were to be sure that this test kept up the supply of slaves; and as there was nobody to dispute the judgment of his deputy, Niño had taken back to Spain those three hundred, which were, as we have seen, so readily converted into reputed gold on his arrival.
[Sidenote: Santo Domingo named.]
Bartholomew had selected the site for a new town near the mouth of the Ozema, convenient for the shipment of the Hayna treasure, and, naming it at first the New Isabella, it soon received the more permanent appellation of Santo Domingo, which it still bears.
[Sidenote: Xaragua conquered.]
[Sidenote: Behechio and Anacaona.]
Bartholomew had a pleasing story to tell of the way in which he had brought Behechio and his province of Xaragua into subjection. This territory was the region westward from about the point where Columbus had touched the island a few days before. Anacaona, the wife of Caonabo,--now indeed his widow,--had taken refuge with Behechio, her brother, after the fall of her husband. She is represented as a woman of fine appearance, and more delicate and susceptible in her thoughts than was usual among her people; and perhaps Bartholomew told his brother what has since been surmised by Spanish writers, that she had managed to get word to him of her friendly sentiments for celestial visitors. Bartholomew found, as he was marching thither with such forces as he could spare for the expedition, that the cacique who met him in battle array was easily disposed, for some reason or other, perhaps through Anacaona's influence, to dismiss his armed warriors, and to escort his visitor through his country with great parade of hospitality. When they reached the cacique's chief town, a sort of fête was prepared in the Adelantado's honor, and a mock battle, not without sacrifice of life, was fought for his delectation. Peter Martyr tells us that when the comely young Indian maidens advanced with their palm branches and saluted the Adelantado, it seemed as if the beautiful dryads of the olden tales had slipped out of the vernal woods. Then Anacaona appeared on a litter, with no apparel but garlands, the most beautiful dryad of them all. Everybody feasted, and Bartholomew, to ingratiate himself with his host, eat and praised their rarest delicacy, the guana lizard, which had been offered to them many times before, but which they never as yet had tasted. It became after this a fashion with the Spaniards to dote on lizard flesh. Everything within the next two or three days served to cement this new friendship, when the Adelantado put it to a test, as indeed had been his purpose from the beginning. He told the cacique of the great power of his master and of the Spanish sovereigns; of their gracious regard for all their distant subjects, and of the poor recompense of a tribute which was expected for their protection. "Gold!" exclaimed the cacique, "we have no gold here." "Oh, whatever you have, cotton, hemp, cassava bread,--anything will be acceptable." So the details were arranged. The cacique was gratified at being let off so easy, and the Spaniards went their way.
[Sidenote: Native conspiracy.]
This and the subsequent visit of Bartholomew to Xaragua to receive the tribute were about the only cheery incidents in the dreary retrospect to which the Admiral listened. The rest was trouble and despair. A line of military posts had been built connecting the two Spanish settlements, and the manning of them, with their dependent villages, enabled the Adelantado to scatter a part of the too numerous colony at Isabella, so that it might be relieved of so many mouths to feed. This done, there was a conspiracy of the natives to be crushed. Two of the priests had made some converts in the Vega, and had built a chapel for the use of the neophytes. One of the Spaniards had outraged a wife of the cacique. Either for this cause, or for the audacious propagandism of the priests, some natives broke into the Spanish chapel, destroyed its shrine, and buried some of its holy vessels in a field. Plants grew up there in the form of a cross, say the veracious narrators. This, nevertheless, did not satisfy the Spaniards. They seized such Indians as they considered to have been engaged in the desecration, and gave them the fire and fagots, as they would have done to Moor or Jew. The horrible punishment aroused the cacique Guarionex with a new fury. He leagued the neighboring caciques into a conspiracy. Their combined forces were threatening Fort Conception when the Adelantado arrived with succor. By an adroit movement, Bartholomew ensnared by night every one of the leaders in their villages, and executed two of them. The others he ostentatiously pardoned, and he could tell Columbus of the great renown he got for his clemency.
[Sidenote: Roldan's revolt.]
There was nothing in all the bad tidings which Bartholomew had to rehearse quite so disheartening as the revolt of Roldan, the chief judge of the island,--a man who had been lifted from obscurity to a position of such importance that Columbus had placed the administration of justice in his hands. The reports of the unpopularity of Columbus in Spain, and the growing antipathy in Isabella to the rule of Bartholomew as a foreigner, had served to consolidate the growing number of the discontented, and Roldan saw the opportunity of easily raising himself in the popular estimate by organizing the latent spirit of rebellion. It was even planned to assassinate the Adelantado, under cover of a tumult, which was to be raised at an execution ordered by him; but as the Adelantado had pardoned the offender, the occasion slipped by. Bartholomew's absence in Xaragua gave another opportunity. He had sent back from that country a caravel loaded with cotton, as a tribute, and Diego, then in command at Isabella, after unlading the vessel, drew her up on the beach. The story was busily circulated that this act was done simply to prevent any one seizing the ship and carrying to Spain intelligence of the misery to which the rule of the Columbuses was subjecting the people. The populace made an issue on that act, and asked that the vessel be sent to Cadiz for supplies. Diego objected, and to divert the minds of the rebellious, as well as to remove Roldan from their counsels, he sent him with a force into the Vega, to overawe some caciques who had been dilatory in their tribute. This mission, however, only helped Roldan to consolidate his faction, and gave him the chance to encourage the caciques to join resistance.
[Sidenote: The mutineers in the Vega Real.]
[Sidenote: At Isabella.]
Roldan had seventy well-armed men in his party when he returned to Isabella to confront Bartholomew, who had by this time got back from Xaragua. The Adelantado was not so easily frightened as Roldan had hoped, and finding it not safe to risk an open revolt, this mutinous leader withdrew to the Vega with the expectation of surprising Fort Conception. That post, however, as well as an outlying fortified house, was under loyal command, and Roldan was for a while thwarted. Bartholomew was not at all sure of any of the principal Spaniards, but how far the disaffection had gone he was unable to determine. Although he knew that certain leading men were friendly to Roldan, he was not prepared to be passive. His safety depended on resolution, and so he marched at once to the Vega. Roldan was in the neighborhood, and was invited to a parley. It led to nothing. The mutineers, making up their minds to fly to the delightful pleasures of Xaragua, suddenly marched back to Isabella, plundered the arsenal and storehouses, and tried to launch the caravel. The vessel was too firmly imbedded to move, and Roldan was forced to undertake the journey to Xaragua by land. To leave the Adelantado behind was a sure way to bring an enemy in his rear, and he accordingly thought it safer to reduce the garrison at Conception, and perhaps capture the Adelantado.
[Sidenote: Coronel arrives.]
This movement failed; but it resulted in Roldan's ingratiating himself with the tributary caciques, and intercepting the garrison's supplies. It was at this juncture, when everything looked desperate for Bartholomew, shut up in the Vega fort, that news reached him of the arrival (February 3, 1498) at the new port of Santo Domingo of the advance section of the Admiral's fleet, sent thither, as we have seen, by the Queen's assiduity, under the command of Pedro Fernandez Coronel.
Bartholomew could tell the Admiral of the good effect which the intelligence received through Coronel had on the colony. His own title of Adelantado, it was learned, was legitimated by the act of the sovereigns; and Columbus himself had been powerful enough to secure confirmation of his old honors, and to obtain new pledges for the future. The mutineers soon saw that the aspects of their revolt were changed. They could not, it would seem, place that dependence on the unpopularity of the Admiral at Court which had been a good part of their encouragement.
[Sidenote: Bartholomew's new honors.]
Proceeding to Santo Domingo, Bartholomew proclaimed his new honors, and, anxious to pacificate the island before the arrival of Columbus, he dispatched Coronel to communicate with Roldan, who had sulkily followed the Adelantado in his march from the Vega. Roldan refused all intercourse, and, shielding himself behind a pass in the mountains, he warned off the pacificator. He would yield to no one but the Admiral.
[Sidenote: The rebels go to Xaragua.]
There was nothing for the Adelantado to do but to outlaw the rebels, who, in turn, sped away to what Irving calls the "soft witcheries" of the Xaragua dryads. The archrebel was thus well out of the way for a time; but his influence still worked among the Indians of the Vega, and Bartholomew had not long left Conception before the garrison was made aware of a native conspiracy to surprise it.
[Sidenote: Guarionex's revolt.]
Word was sent to Santo Domingo, and the Adelantado was promptly on the march for relief. Guarionex, who had headed the revolt again, fled to the mountains of Ciguay, where a mountain cacique, Mayobanex, the same who had conducted the attack on the Spaniards at the Gulf of Samana during the first voyage, received the fugitive chief of the valley.
It was into these mountain fastnesses that the Adelantado now pursued the fugitives, with a force of ninety foot, a few horse, and some auxiliary Indians. He boldly thridded the defiles, and crossed the streams, under the showers of lances and arrows. As the native hordes fled before him, he fired their villages in the hope of forcing the Ciguayans to surrender their guest; but the mountain leaders could not be prevailed upon to wrong the rights of hospitality. When no longer able to resist in arms, Mayobanex and Guarionex fled to the hills.
The Adelantado now sent all of his men back to the Vega to look after the crops, except about thirty, and with these he scoured the region. He would not have had success by mere persistency, but he got it by artifice and treachery. Both Mayobanex and Guarionex were betrayed in their hiding-places and captured. Clemency was shown to their families and adherents, and they were released; but both caciques remained in their bonds as hostages for the maintenance of the quiet which was now at last in some measure secured.
[Sidenote: 1498. August 30. Columbus arrives.]
Such was the condition of affairs when Columbus arrived and heard the story of these two troubled years and more during which he had been absent.
* * * * *
It was the 30th of August when Columbus and his brother landed at Santo Domingo. There had not been much to encourage the Admiral in this story of the antecedent events. No portrayal of riot, dissolution, rapine, intrigue, and idleness could surpass what he saw and heard of the bedraggled and impoverished settlement at Isabella. The stores which he had brought would be helpful in restoring confidence and health; but it was a source of anxiety to him that nothing had been heard of the three caravels from which he had parted off Ferro.
[Sidenote: Roldan and the belated ships.]
These vessels appeared not long afterwards, bringing a new perplexity. Forced by currents which their crews did not understand, they had been carried westerly, and had wandered about in the unknown seas in search of Española. A few days before reaching Santo Domingo, the ships had anchored off the territory of Behechio, where Roldan and his followers already were. The mutineers observed the approach of the caravels, not quite sure of their character, thinking possibly that they had been dispatched against their band; but Roldan boldly went on board, and, ascertaining their condition, he had the address to represent that he was stationed in that region to collect the tribute, and was in need of stores, arms, and munitions. The commander of the vessel at once sent on shore what he demanded; and while this was going on, Roldan's men ingratiated themselves with the company on board the caravels, and readily enlisted a part of them in the revolt. The new-comers, being some of the emancipated convicts which Columbus had so unwisely registered among his crews, were not difficult to entice to a life of pleasure. By the time Roldan had secured his supplies and was ready to announce his true character, it was not certain how far the captains of the vessels could trust their crews. The chief of these commanders undertook, when the worst was known, to bring the revolters back to their loyalty; but he argued in vain. The wind being easterly, and to work up against it to Santo Domingo being a slow process, it was decided that one of the captains, Colombo, should conduct about forty armed men by land to the new town. When he landed them, the insidious work of the mutineers became apparent. Only eight of his party stood to his command, and over forty marched over to the rebels, each with his arms. The overland march was necessarily given up, and the three caravels, to prevent further desertions, hoisted sail and departed. Carvajal remained behind to urge Roldan to duty; but the most he could do was to exact a promise that he would submit to the Admiral if pardoned, but not to the Adelantado.
[Sidenote: 1498. September 12.]
The report which Carvajal made to Columbus, when shortly afterwards he joined his companions in Santo Domingo, coming by land, was not very assuring. Columbus was too conscious of the prevalence of discontent, and he had been made painfully aware of the uncertainty of convict loyalty. He then made up his mind that all such men were a menace, and that they were best got rid of. Accordingly he announced that five ships were ready to sail for Spain and would take any who should desire to go, and that the passage would be free.
[Sidenote: Roldan and Ballester.]
[Sidenote: 1498. October 18. The ships sail for Spain.]
Learning from Carvajal that Roldan was likely soon to lead his men near Fort Conception, Columbus notified Miguel Ballester, its commander, to be on his guard. He also directed him to seek an interview with the rebel leader, in order to lure him back to duty by offer of pardon from the Admiral. As soon as Ballester heard of Roldan's arrival in the neighborhood, he went out to meet him. Roldan, however, was in no mood to succumb. His force had grown, and some of the leading Spaniards had been drawn towards him. So he defied the Admiral in his speeches, and sent him word that if he had any further communications to make to him they should be sent by Carvajal, for he would treat with no other. Columbus, on receiving this message, and not knowing how far the conspiracy had extended among those about him, ordered out the military force of the settlement. There were not more than seventy men to respond; nor did he feel much confidence in half of these. There being little chance of any turn of affairs for the better with which he could regale the sovereigns, Columbus ordered the waiting ships to sail, and on October 18 they put to sea.
[Sidenote: Columbus and slavery.]
The ships carried two letters which Columbus had written to the monarchs. In the one he spoke of his new discoveries, and of the views which had developed in his mind from the new phenomena, as has already been represented, and promised that the Adelantado should soon be dispatched with three caravels to make further explorations. In the other he repeated the story of events since he had landed at Santo Domingo. He urged that Roldan might be recalled to Spain for examination, or that he might be committed to the custody of Carvajal and Ballester to determine the foundation of his grievances. At the same time he requested that a further license be given, to last two years, for the capture and transmission of slaves. It was not unlikely that the case of Roldan and his abettors was represented with equal confidence in other letters, for there were many hands among the passengers to which they could be confided.
[Sidenote: Columbus seeks to quiet the colony.]
[Sidenote: 1498. October 20.]
The ships gone, the Admiral gave himself to the difficult task of pacificating the colony. The vigorous rule of the Adelantado had made enemies who were to be propitiated, though Las Casas tells us that the rule had been strict no farther than that it had been necessarily imperative in emergencies. Columbus wrote on October 20 an expostulatory letter to Roldan. To send it by Carvajal, as was necessary, if Roldan was to receive it, would be to intrust negotiations to a person who was already committed in some sort to the rebel's plan, or at least some of the Admiral's leading councilors believed such to be the case, apparently too hastily. Columbus did not share that distrust, and Carvajal was sent. This letter crossed one from the leading rebels, in which they demanded from Columbus release from his service, and expressed their determination to maintain independence.
[Sidenote: Conferences with Roldan.]
[Sidenote: 1498. November 6. Roldan's terms.]
When Carvajal reached Bonao, where the rebels were gathered,--and Ballester had accompanied him,--their joint persuasions had some effect on Roldan and others, principal rebels; but the followers, as a mass, objected to the leaders entering into any conference except under a written guaranty of safety for them and those that should accompany them. This message was accordingly returned to Columbus, and Ballester at the same time wrote to him that the revolt was fast making head; that the garrisons were disaffected, and losing by desertion; and that the common people could not be trusted to stand by the Admiral if it came to war. He advised, therefore, a speedy reconciliation or agreement of some sort. The guaranty was sent, and Roldan soon presented himself to the Admiral. The demands of the rebel and the prerogatives of the Admiral were, it proved, too widely apart for any accommodation. So Roldan, having possessed himself of the state of feeling in Santo Domingo, returned to his followers, promising to submit definite terms in writing. These were sent under date of November 6, 1498, with a demand for an answer before the 11th. The terms were inadmissible. To disarm charges of exaction, Columbus made public proclamation of a readiness to grant pardon to all who should return to allegiance within thirty days, and to such he would give free transportation to Spain. Carvajal carried this paper to Roldan, and was accompanied by Columbus's major-domo, Diego de Salamanca, in the hopes that the two might yet arrange some terms, mutually acceptable.
[Sidenote: Columbus agrees to them.]
The messenger found Roldan advanced from Bonao, and besieging Ballester in Conception. The revolt had gone too far, apparently, to be stayed, but the persuasion of the mediators at last prevailed, and terms were arranged. These provided full pardon and certificates of good conduct; free passage from Xaragua, to which point two caravels should be sent; the full complement of slaves which other returning colonists had; liberty for such as had them to take their native wives, and restoration of sequestered property. Roldan and his companions signed this agreement on November 16, and agreed to wait eight days for the signature of the Admiral. Columbus signed it on the 21st, and further granted indulgences of one kind or another to such as chose to remain in Española.
[Sidenote: Delays in carrying out the agreement.]
[Sidenote: New agreement.]
[Sidenote: Signed September 28, 1499.]
Under the agreement, the ships were to be ready in fifty days, but Columbus, in the disorganized state of the colony, found it impossible to avoid delays, and his self-congratulations that he had got rid of the turbulent horde were far from warranted. While under this impression, and absent with the Adelantado, inspecting the posts throughout the island, and deciding how best he could restore the regularities of life and business, the arrangements which he had made for carrying out the agreement with Roldan had sorely miscarried. Nearly double the time assigned to the preparation of the caravels had elapsed, when the vessels at last left Santo Domingo for Xaragua. A storm disabling one of them, there were still further delays; and when all were ready, the procrastination in their outfit offered new grounds for dispute, and it was found necessary to revise the agreement. Carvajal was still the mediator. Roldan met the Admiral on a caravel, which had sailed toward Xaragua. The terms which Roldan now proposed were that he should be permitted to send some of his friends, fifteen in number, if he desired so many, to Spain; that those who remained should have grants of land; that proclamation should be made of the baseless character of the charges against him and his accomplices; and that he himself should be restored to his office of Alcalde Mayor. Columbus, who had received a letter from Fonseca in the meanwhile, showing that there was little chance of relief from Spain, saw the hopelessness of his situation, and sufficiently humbled himself to accept the terms. When they were submitted to the body of the mutineers, this assembly added another clause giving them the right to enforce the agreement by compulsion in case the Admiral failed to carry it out. This, also, was agreed to in despair; while the Admiral endeavored to relieve the mortification of the act by inserting a clause enforcing obedience to the commands of the sovereigns, of himself, and of his regularly appointed justices. This agreement was ratified at Santo Domingo, September 28, 1499.
[Sidenote: Roldan reinstated.]
[Sidenote: Repartimientos.]
[Sidenote: Columbus and slavery.]
It was not a pleasant task for Columbus to brook the presence of Roldan and his victorious faction in Santo Domingo. The reinstated alcalde had no occasion to be very complaisant after he had seen the Admiral cringe before him. Columbus endeavored, in making the grants of lands, to separate the restored rebels as much as he could, in order to avoid the risks of other mutinous combinations. He agreed with the caciques that they should be relieved from the ordinary tribute of treasure if they would furnish these new grantees with laborers for their farms. Thus at the hands of Columbus arose the beginning of that system of repartimientos, with all its miseries for the poor natives, which ended in their extermination. The apologists of Columbus consider that the exigencies of his situation forced him into these fiendish enactments, and that he is not to be held responsible for them as of his free will. They forget the expressions of his first letter to Santangel, which prefigured all the misery which fell upon myriads of these poor creatures. The record, unfortunately, shows that it was Columbus who invariably led opinion in all these oppressions, and not he who followed it. His artfulness never sprang to a new device so exultingly as when it was a method of increasing the revenue at the cost of the natives. When we read, in the letter written to his sovereigns during this absence, of his always impressing on the natives, in his intercourse with them, "the courtesy and nobleness of all Christians," we shudder at the hollowness of the profession.
[Sidenote: Roldan's demands.]
The personal demands of Roldan under the capitulation were also to be met. They included restoration of lands which he called his own, new lands to be granted, the stocking of them from the public herds; and Columbus met them, at least, until the grants should be confirmed at Court. This was not all. Roldan visited Bonao, and made one of his late lieutenants an assistant alcalde,--an assumption of the power of appointment at which Columbus was offended, as some tell us; but if the Historie is to be depended on, the appointment invited no unfavorable comment from Columbus. When it was found that this new officer was building a structure ostensibly for farm purposes, but of a character more like a fortress, suitable for some new mutiny to rally in, Columbus at last rose on his dignity and forbade it.
[Sidenote: 1499. October. Caravels sent to Spain.]
[Sidenote: Columbus sends Ballester to support his cause in Spain.]
In October, 1499, the Admiral dispatched two caravels to Spain. It did not seem safe for him to embark in them, though he felt his presence was needed at Court to counteract the mischief of his enemies and Roldan's friends. Some of the latter went in the ships. The most he could do was to trust his cause to Miguel Ballester and Garcia de Barrantes, who embarked as his representatives. They bore his letters to the monarchs. In these he enumerated the compulsions under which he had signed the capitulation with Roldan, and begged their Majesties to treat it as given under coercion, and to bring the rebels to trial. He then mentioned what other assistants he needed in governing the colony, such as a learned judge and some discreet councilors. He ended with asking that his son, Diego, might be spared from Court to assist him.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Royal infringements of Columbus's privileges.]
[Sidenote: 1499. Ojeda's voyage.]
While Columbus was making these requests, he was ignorant of the way in which the Spanish Court had already made serious trespasses upon his prerogatives as Admiral of the Indies. He had said in his letter to the sovereigns, "Your Majesties will determine on what is to be done," in consequence of these new discoveries at Paria. He was soon to become painfully conscious of what was done. The real hero of Columbus's second voyage, Alonso de Ojeda, comes again on the scene. He was in Spain when the accounts which Columbus had transmitted to Court of his discoveries about the Gulf of Paria reached Seville. Such glowing descriptions fired his ambition, and learning from Columbus's other letters and from the reports by those who had returned of the critical condition of affairs in Española, he anticipated the truth when he supposed that the Admiral could not so smother the disquiet of his colony as to venture to leave it for further explorations. He saw, too, the maps which Columbus had sent back and the pearls which he had gathered. He acknowledged all this in a deposition taken at Santo Domingo in 1513. So he proposed to Fonseca that he might be allowed to undertake a private voyage, and profit, for himself and for the Crown, by the resources of the country, inasmuch as it must be a long time before Columbus himself could do so. Fonseca readily commended the plan and gave him a license, stipulating that he should avoid any Portuguese possession and any lands that Columbus had discovered before 1495. It was the purpose, by giving this date, to throw open the Paria region.
[Sidenote: Vespucius with Ojeda.]
[Sidenote: Juan de la Cosa.]
[Sidenote: 1499. May 20. Ojeda sails.]
[Sidenote: At Venezuela.]
The ships were fitted out at Seville in the early part of 1499, and some men, famous in these years, made part of the company which sailed on them. There was Americus Vespucius, who was seemingly now for the first time to embark for the New World, since it is likely that out of this very expedition the alleged voyage of his in 1497 has been made to appear by some perversion of chronology. There was Juan de la Cosa, a famous hydrographer, who was the companion of Columbus in his second Cuban cruise. Irving says that he was with Columbus in his first voyage; but it is thought that it was another of the same name who appears in the registers of that expedition. Several of those who had returned from Española after the Paria cruise of Columbus were also enlisted, and among them Bartholomew Roldan, the pilot of that earlier fleet. The expedition of Ojeda sailed May 20, 1499. They made land 200 leagues east of the Orinoco, and then, guided by Columbus's charts, the ships followed his track through the Serpent's and the Dragon's Mouths. Thence passing Margarita, they sailed on towards the mountains which Columbus had seen, and finally entered a gulf, where they saw some pile dwellings of the natives. They accordingly named the basin Venezuela, in reference to the great sea-built city of the Adriatic. It is noteworthy that Ojeda, in reporting to their Majesties an account of this voyage, says that he met in this neighborhood some English vessels, an expedition which may have been instigated by Cabot's success. It is to be observed, at the same time, that this is the only authority which we have for such an early visit of the English to this vicinity, and the statement is not credited by Biddle, Helps, and other recent writers. Ojeda turned eastward not long after, having run short of provisions. He then approached the prohibited Española, and hoped to elude notice while foraging at its western end.
[Sidenote: 1499. September 5. Ojeda touches at Española.]
It was while here that Ojeda's caravels were seen and tidings of their presence were transmitted to Santo Domingo. Ignorance of what he had to deal with in these intruders was one of the reasons which made it out of the question for Columbus to return to Spain in the ships which he had dispatched in October. Ojeda had appeared on the coast on September 5, 1499, and as succeeding reports came to Columbus, it was divulged that Ojeda was in command, and that he was cutting dyewoods thereabouts.
[Sidenote: Columbus sends Roldan to warn Ojeda off.]
Now was the time to heal the dissensions of Roldan, and to give him a chance to recover his reputation. So the Admiral selected his late bitter enemy to manage the expedition which he thought it necessary to dispatch to the spot. Roldan sailed in command of two caravels on September 29, and, approaching unobserved the place where Ojeda's ships were at anchor, he landed with twenty-five men, and sent out scouts. They soon reported that Ojeda was some distance away from his ships at an Indian village, making cassava bread. Ojeda heard of the approach, but not in time to prevent Roldan getting between him and his ships. The intruder met him boldly, said he was on an exploring expedition, and had put in for supplies, and that if Roldan would come on board his ships, he would show his license signed by Fonseca. When Roldan went on board, he saw the document. He also learned from those he talked with in the ships--and there were among them some whom he knew, and some who had been in Española--that the Admiral's name was in disgrace at Court, and there was imminent danger of his being deprived of his command at Española. Moreover, the Queen, who had befriended him against all others, was ill beyond recovery. Ojeda promising to sail round to Santo Domingo and explain his conduct to the Admiral, Roldan left him, and carried back the intelligence to Columbus.
The Viceroy waited patiently for Ojeda's vessels to appear, and to hear the explanation of what he deemed a flagrant violation of his rights. Ojeda, having got rid of Roldan, had accomplished all that he intended by the promise. When he set sail, it was to pass round the coast easterly to the shore of Xaragua, where he anchored, and opened communication with the Spanish settlers, remnants of Roldan's party, who had not been quite satisfied to find their reinstated leader acting as an emissary of Columbus. Ojeda, with impetuous sympathy, listened to their complaints, and had agreed to be their leader in marching to Santo Domingo to demand some redresses, when Roldan, sent by Columbus to watch him, once more appeared. Ojeda declined a conference, and kept on his ship.
[Sidenote: 1500. June. Ojeda reaches Cadiz.]
Roldan had harbored a deserter from one of Ojeda's fleet, and as he refusedto give him up, Ojeda watched his opportunity and seized two of Roldan's men to hold as hostages. So the two wary adventurers watched each other for an advantage. After a while, Ojeda, in his ships, stood down the coast. Roldan followed along the shore. Coming up to where the ships were anchored, Roldan induced Ojeda to send a boat ashore, when, by an artifice, he captured the boat and its crew. This game of stratagems ended with an agreement on Ojeda's part to leave the island, while Roldan restored the captive boat. The prisoners were exchanged. Ojeda bore off shore, and though Roldan heard of his landing again at a distant point, he was gone when the pursuers reached the spot. Las Casas says that Ojeda made for some islands, where he completed his lading of slaves, and set sail for Spain, arriving at Cadiz in June, 1500.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Niño's voyage to the pearl coast.]
[Sidenote: Guerra aids him.]
While Columbus was congratulating himself on being well rid of this dangerous visitor, he was not at all aware of the uncontrollable eagerness which the joyous reports of pearls had engendered in the adventurous spirits of the Spanish seaports. Among such impatient sailors was the pilot, Pedro Alonso Niño, who had accompanied Columbus on his first voyage, and had also but recently returned from the Paria coast, having been likewise with the Admiral on his third voyage. He found Fonseca as willing, if only the Crown could have its share, as Ojeda had found him, and just as forgetful of the vested rights of Columbus. So the license was granted only a few days after that given to Ojeda, and of similar import. Niño, being a poor man, sought the aid of Luis Guerra in fitting out a small caravel of only fifty tons; and in consideration of this assistance, Guerra's brother, Cristoval, was placed in command, with a crew, all told, of thirty-three souls. They sailed from Palos early in June, 1499, and were only fifteen days behind Ojeda on the coast. They had some encounters and some festivities with the natives; but they studiously attended to their main object of bartering for pearls, and when they reached Spain on their return in April, 1500, and laid out the shares for the Crown, for Guerra, and for the crew, of the rich stores of pearls which they had gathered, men said, "Here at last is one voyage to the new islands from which some adequate return is got." And so the first commensurate product of the Indies, instead of saving the credit of Columbus, filled the pockets of an interloping adventurer.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: V. Y. Pinzon's voyage.]
[Sidenote: 1499. December.]
[Sidenote: Pinzon crosses the equator.]
[Sidenote: The southern sky.]
But a more considerable undertaking of the same illegitimate character was that of Vicente Yañez Pinzon, the companion of Columbus on his first voyage. Leaguing with him a number of the seamen of the Admiral, including some of his pilots on his last voyage, Pinzon fitted out at Palos four caravels, which sailed near the beginning of December, 1499, not far from the time when Columbus was thinking, because of the flight of Ojeda, that an end was at last coming to these intrusions within his prescribed seas. Pinzon was not so much influenced by greed as by something of that spirit which had led him to embark with Columbus in 1492, the genuine eagerness of the explorer. He was destined to do what Columbus had been prevented from doing by the intense heat and by the demoralized condition of his crew,--strike the New World in the equatorial latitudes. So he stood boldly southwest, and crossed the equator, the first to do it west of the line of demarcation. Here were new constellations as well as a new continent for the transatlantic discoverer. The north star had sunk out of sight. Thus it was that the southern heavens brought a new difficulty to navigation, as well as unwonted stellar groups to the curious observer. The sailor of the northern seas had long been accustomed to the fixity of the polar star in making his observations for latitude. The southern heavens were without any conspicuous star in the neighborhood of the pole: and in order to determine such questions, the star at the foot of the Southern Cross was soon selected, but it necessitated an allowance of 30° in all observations.
[Sidenote: 1500. January 20. Sees Cape Consolation.]
[Sidenote: Coasts north.]
It was on January 20, 1500, or thereabouts, that Pinzon saw a cape which he called Consolation, and which very likely was the modern Cape St. Augustine,--though the identification is not established to the satisfaction of all,--which would make Pinzon the first European to see the most easterly limit of the great southern continent. A belief like this requires us, necessarily, to reject Varnhagen's view that as early as the previous June (1499) Ojeda had made his landfall just as far to the east. Pinzon took possession of the country, and then, sailing north, passed the mouth of the Amazon, and found that even out of sight of land he could replenish his water-casks from the flow of fresh waters, which the great river poured into the ocean. It did not occur to his practical mind, as it had under similar circumstances to Columbus, that he was drinking the waters of Paradise!
[Sidenote: 1500. June. Pinzon at Española.]
[Sidenote: Reaches Palos, September, 1500.]
Reaching the Gulf of Paria, Pinzon passed out into the Caribbean Sea, and touched at Española in the latter part of June, 1500. Proceeding thence to the Lucayan Islands, two of his caravels were swallowed up in a gale, and the other two disabled. The remaining ships crossed to Española to refit, whence sailing once more, they reached Palos in September, 1500.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 1500. January. Diego de Lepe's voyage.]
Meanwhile, following Pinzon, Diego de Lepe, sailing also from Palos with two caravels in January, 1500, tracked the coast from below Cape St. Augustine northward. He was the first to double this cape, as he showed in the map which he made for Fonseca, and doing so he saw the coast stretching ahead to the southwest. From this time South America presents on the charts this established trend of the coast. Humboldt thinks that Diego touched at Española before returning to Spain in June, 1500.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Portuguese explorations by the African route.]
We must now return to the further exploration of the Portuguese by the African route, for we have reached a period when, by accident and because of the revised line of demarcation, the Portuguese pursuing that route acquired at the same time a right on the American coast which they have since maintained in Brazil, as against what seems to have been a little earlier discovery of that coast by Pinzon, in the voyage already mentioned.
[Sidenote: 1500. March 9.]
[Sidenote: Cabral discovers the Brazil coast.]
[Sidenote: 1500. May 1.]
In the year following the return to Lisbon of Da Gama with the marvelous story of the African route to India, the Portuguese government were prompted naturally enough to establish more firmly their commercial relations with Calicut. They accordingly fitted out three ships to make trial once more of the voyage. The command was given to Pedro Alvarez Cabral, and there were placed under him Diaz, who had first rounded the stormy cape, and Coelho, who had accompanied Da Gama. The expedition sailed on March 9, 1500. Leaving the Cape de Verde Islands, Cabral shaped his course more westerly than Da Gama had done, but for what reason is not satisfactorily ascertained. Perhaps it was to avoid the calms off the coast of Guinea; perhaps to avoid breasting a storm; and indeed it may have been only to see if any land lay thitherward easterly of the great line of demarcation. Whatever the motive, the fleet was brought on April 22 opposite an eminence, which received then the name of Monte Pascoal, and is to-day, as then it became by right of discovery, within the Portuguese limits of South America, the Land of the True Cross, as he named it, Vera Cruz; later, however, to be changed to Santa Cruz. The coast was examined, and in the bay of Porto Seguro, on May 1, formal possession of the country was taken for the crown of Portugal. Cabral sent a caravel back with the news, expressed in a letter drawn up by Pedro Vaz de Caminha. This letter, which is dated on the day possession was taken, was first made known by Muñoz, who discovered it in the archives at Lisbon. It was not till July 29 that the Portuguese king, in a letter which is printed by Navarrete, notified the Spanish monarchs of Cabral's discovery, and this letter was printed in Rome, October 23, 1500.
It seems to have been the apprehension of the Portuguese, if we may trust this letter, that the new coast lay directly in the route to the Cape of Good Hope, though on the right hand.
[Sidenote: Cabral at Calicut, September 13, 1500.]
Leaving two banished criminals to seek their chances of life in the country, and to ascertain its products, Cabral set sail on May 22, and proceeded to the Cape of Good Hope. Fearful gales were encountered and four vessels were lost, and his subordinate, Diaz, found an ocean grave off the stormy cape of his own finding. But Calicut was at last reached, September 13.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Date of Cabral's discovery.]
[Sidenote: His landfall.]
There is a day or two difference in the dates assigned by different authorities for this discovery of Cabral. Ramusio, quoting a pilot of the fleet fourteen months after the event, says April 24, and leading Portuguese historians have followed him; but the letter which Cabral sent back to Portugal, as already related, says April 22. The question would be a trifling one, as Humboldt suggests, except that it bears upon the question of just where this fortuitous landfall was made, involving estimates of distance sailed before Cabral entered the harbor of Porto Seguro. It is probable that this was at a point a hundred and seventy leagues south of the spot reached earlier (January, 1500) by Pinzon and De Lepe. Yet on this point there are some differences of opinion, which are recapitulated by Humboldt.
[Sidenote: Cabral and Pinzon.]
The most impartial critics, however, agree with Humboldt in giving Pinzon the lead, if not to the extent of the forty-eight days before Cabral left Lisbon, as Humboldt contends.
If Barros is correct in his deductions, it was not known on board of Cabral's fleet that Columbus had already discovered in the Paria region what he supposed an extension of the Asiatic main. The first conclusion of the Portuguese naturally was that they had stumbled either on a new group of islands, or perhaps on some outlying members of the group of the Antilles. Of course nothing was known at the time of the discoveries of Pinzon and Lepe.
[Sidenote: The results of the African route.]
It has often been remarked that if Columbus had not sailed in 1492, Cabral would have revealed America in 1500. It is a striking fact that the Portuguese had pursued their quest for India with an intelligence and prescience which geographical truth confirmed. The Spaniards went their way in error, and it took them nearly thirty years to find a route that could bring them where they could defend at the antipodes their rights under the Bull of Demarcation. Columbus sought India and found America without knowing it. Cabral, bound for the Cape of Good Hope, stumbled upon Brazil, and preëmpted the share of Portugal in the New World as Da Gama has already secured it in Asia. Thus the African route revealed both Cathay and America.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The Columbus lawsuit.]
[Sidenote: La Cosa's map, 1500.]
For these voyages commingling with those of Columbus along the spaces of the Caribbean Sea, we get the best information, all things considered, from the testimonies of the participants in them, which were rendered in the famous lawsuit which the Crown waged against the heirs of Columbus. The well-known map of Juan de la Cosa posts us best on the cartographical results of these same voyages up to the summer of 1500.
La Cosa was, as Las Casas called him, the best of the pilots then living, and there is a story of his arrogating to himself a superiority to Columbus, even.
As La Cosa returned to Spain with Ojeda in June, 1500, and sailed again in October with Bastidas, this famous map was apparently made in that interval, since it purports in an inscription to have been drafted in 1500. In posting the geographical knowledge which he had acquired up to that date, La Cosa drew upon his own experiences in the voyages which he had already made with Columbus (1493-96), and with Ojeda (1499-1500). It is to be regretted that we have from his pencil no later draft, for his experience in these seas was long and intimate, since he accompanied Bastidas in 1500-2, led expeditions of his own in 1504-6 and 1507-8, and went again with Ojeda in 1509.
La Cosa, indeed, does not seem to have improved his map on any subsequent date, and that he puts down Cape St. Augustine so accurately is another proof of that headland being seen by Pinzon or Lepe in 1500, and that news of its discovery had reached the map makers.
[Sidenote: Objections to La Cosa's map.]
The objections to La Cosa's map as a source of historical information have been that (1) he gives an incorrect shape to Cuba, and makes it an island eight years before Ocampo sailed around it; and that (2) he gives an unrecognizable coast northward from where the Gulf of Mexico should be. Henry Stevens, in his Historical and Geographical Notes, undertakes to answer these objections.
[Sidenote: Insularity of Cuba.]
First, Stevens reverts to the belief of La Cosa that he did not imagine Cuba to be an island, because no one ever knew of an island 335 leagues long, as Columbus and he, sailing along its southern side, had found it to be, taking the distance they had gone rather than the true limits. Stevens depends much on the belief of Columbus that the bay of islands which he fancied himself within, when he turned back, was the Gulf of Ganges,--supposing that Peter Martyr quoted Columbus, when he wrote to that effect in August, 1495. If Varnhagen is correct in his routes of Vespucius, that navigator, in 1497, making the circuit of the Gulf of Mexico, had established the insularity of Cuba. Few modern scholars, it is fair to say, accept Varnhagen's theories. It became a question, after Humboldt had made the La Cosa chart public in 1833, how its maker had got the information of the insularity of Cuba. Humboldt was convinced that though a "complacent witness" to Columbus's ridiculous notarial transaction during his second voyage, La Cosa had dared to tell the truth, even at the small risk of having his tongue pulled out.
The Admiral's belief, bolstered after his own fashion by suborning his crew, was far from being accepted by all.
Peter Martyr not long afterward voiced the hesitancy which was growing. It was beginning to be believed that the earth was larger than Columbus thought, and that his discoveries had not taken him as far as Cathay. Every new report veered the vane on this old gossiper's steeple, and he went on believing one day and disbelieving the next.
We may perhaps question now if the official promulgation of the Cuban circumnavigation by Sebastian Ocampo in 1508 was much more than the Spanish acknowledgment of its insularity, when they could no longer deny it. Henry Stevens has claimed to put La Cosa's island of Cuba in accord with Columbus, or at least partly so. He finds this western limit of Cuba on the La Cosa map drawn with "a dash of green paint," which he holds to be a color used to define unknown coasts. He studied the map in Jomard's colored facsimile, and trusted it, not having examined the original to this end,--though he had apparently seen it in the Paris auction-room in 1853, when, as a competitor, he had run up the price which the Spanish government paid for it. He says that the same green emblem of unknown lands is also placed upon the coast of Asia, where a peninsular Cuba would have joined it. He seems to forget that he should have found, to support his theory, a gap rather than a supposable coast, and should rather have pointed to the vignette of St. Christopher as affording that gap.
Ruysch in 1507 marked in his map this unknown western limit with a conventional scroll, while he made his north coast not unlike the Asiatic coast of Mauro (1457) and Behaim (1492), and with no gap. Stevens also interprets the St. Dié map of 1508-13 as showing this peninsular Cuba in what is there placed as the main, with a duplicated insular Cuba in what is called Isabella. The warrant for this supposition is the transfer under disguises of the La Cosa and Ruysch names of their Cuba to the continental coast of the St. Dié map, leaving the "Isabella" entirely devoid of names.
Stevens ventures the opinion that La Cosa may have been on the first voyage of Columbus as well as on the second, and his reason for this is that the north coast of Cuba, which Columbus then coasted, is so correctly drawn; but this opinion ignores the probability, indeed the certainty, that this approximate accuracy could just as well be reached by copying from Columbus's map of that first voyage.
It should be borne in mind, however, that Varnhagen, who had faith in the 1497 voyage of Vespucius as having settled the insular character of Cuba, interprets this St. Dié map quite differently, as showing a rudimentary Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi mouth instead of the Gulf of Ganges.
[Sidenote: La Cosa's coast of Asia.]
Second, Stevens grasps the obvious interpretation that La Cosa simply drew in for this northern coast that of Asia as he conceived it. This hardly needs elucidation. But his opinion is not so well grounded that the northern part of this Asiatic coast, where La Cosa intended to improve on the notions which had come from Marco Polo and the rest, is simply the northern coast of the Gulf of St. Lawrence as laid down by the explorations of Cabot. If it be taken as giving from Cabot's recitals the trend of the coasts found by him, it seems to show that that navigator knew nothing of the southern entrance of that gulf. This adds further to the uncertainty of what is called the Cabot mappemonde of 1544. That La Cosa intended the coasts of the Cabots' discoveries to belong to inland waters Stevens thinks is implied by the sea thereabouts being called Mar instead of Mar oceanus. It is difficult to see the force of these supplemental views of Stevens, and to look upon the drawing of La Cosa in this northern region as other than Asia modified vaguely by the salient points of the outer coast lines as glimpsed by Cabot.
If the Spanish envoy in England carried out his intention of sending a copy of Cabot's chart to Spain, it could hardly have escaped falling into the hands of La Cosa. We have already mentioned the chance of John Cabot having visited the peninsula in the interval between his two voyages.
[Sidenote: Columbus and the Cabot voyages.]
The chief ground for believing that Columbus ever heard of the voyages of the Cabots--for there is no plain statement that he did--is that we know how La Cosa had knowledge of them; and that upon his map the vignette of St. Christopher bearing the infant Christ may possibly have been, as it has sometimes been held to be, a direct reference to La Cosa's commander, who may be supposed in that case to have been acquainted with the compliment paid him, and consequently with the map's record of the Cabots.
[Sidenote: The Cantino map.]
Whether La Cosa understood the natives better than Columbus, or whether he had information of which we have no record, it is certain that within two years rumor or fact brought it to the knowledge of the Portuguese that the westerly end of Cuba lay contiguous to a continental shore, stretching to the north, in much the position of the eastern seaboard of the United States. This is manifest from the Cantino map, which was sent from Lisbon to Italy before November, 1502, and which prefigured the so-called Admiral's map of the Ptolemy of 1513. There will be occasion to discuss later the over-confident dictum of Stevens that this supposed North American coast was simply a duplicated Cuba, turned north and south, and stretching from a warm region, as the Spaniards knew it, well up into the frozen north. Cosa's map seems to have exerted little or no influence on the earliest printed maps of the New World, and in this it differs from the Cantino map.
[Sidenote: Minor expeditions.]
We know not what unexpected developments may further have sprung from obscure and furtive explorations, which were now beginning to be common, and of which the record is often nothing more than an inference. Stories of gold and pearls were great incentives. The age was full of a spirit of private adventure. The voyages of Ojeda, Niño, and Pinzon were but the more conspicuous.
XVII. THE DEGRADATION AND DISHEARTENMENT OF COLUMBUS
1500.
Columbus, writing to the Spanish sovereigns from Española, said, in reference to the lifelong opposition which he had encountered:--
[Sidenote: Opponents of Columbus.]
"May it please the Lord to forgive those who have calumniated and still calumniate this excellent enterprise of mine, and oppose and have opposed its advancement, without considering how much glory and greatness will accrue from it to your Highnesses throughout all the world. They cannot state anything in disparagement of it except its expense, and that I have not immediately sent back the ships loaded with gold."
[Sidenote: Charges against Columbus.]
Was this an honest statement? Columbus knew perfectly well that there had been much else than disappointment at the scant pecuniary returns. He knew that there was a widespread dissatisfaction at his personal mismanagement of the colony; at his alleged arrogance and cupidity as a foreigner; at his nepotism; at his inordinate exaltation of promise, and at his errant faith that brooked no dispute. He knew also that his enthusiasm had captivated the Queen, and that as long as she could be held captive he could appeal to her not in vain. If there had been any honesty in the Queen's professions in respect to the selling of slaves, he knew that he had outraged them. Even when he was writing this letter, it came over him that there was a fearful hazard for him both in the persistency of this denunciation of others against him and in the heedless arrogance of such perverseness on his own part.
"I know," he says, "that water dropping on a stone will at length make a hole." We shall see before long that foreboding cavity.
[Sidenote: Columbus and Roldan.]
[Sidenote: Guevara.]
[Sidenote: Anacaona's daughter.]
[Sidenote: Adrian do Moxica.]
The defection of Roldan turned so completely into servility is but one of the strange contrasts of the wonderful course of vicissitudes in the life of Columbus. There presently came a new trial for him and for Roldan. A young well-born Spaniard, Fernando de Guevara, had appeared in Española recently, and by his dissolute life he had created such scandals in Santo Domingo that Columbus had ordered him to leave the island. He had been sent to Xaragua to embark in one of Ojeda's ships; but that adventurer had left the coast when the outlaw reached the port. While waiting another opportunity to embark, Guevara was kept in that part of the island under Roldan's eye. This implied no such restraint as to deny him access to the society of Anacaona, with whose daughter, Higuamota, who seems to have inherited something of her mother's commanding beauty and mental qualities, he fell in love, and found his passion requited. He sought companionship also with one of the lieutenants of Roldan, who had been a leader in his late revolt, Adrian de Moxica, then living not far away, who had for him the additional attachment of kinship, for the two were cousins. Las Casas tells us that Roldan had himself a passion for the young Indian beauty, and it may have been for this as well as for his desire to obey the Admiral that he commanded the young cavalier to go to a more distant province. The ardent lover had sought to prepare his way for a speedy marriage by trying to procure a priest to baptize the maiden. This caused more urgent commands from Roldan, which were ostentatiously obeyed, only to be eluded by a clandestine return, when he was screened with some associates in the house of Anacaona. This queenly woman seems to have favored his suit with her daughter. He was once more ordered away, when he began to bear himself defiantly, but soon changed his method to suppliancy. Roldan was appeased by this. Guevara, however, only made it the cloak for revenge, and with some of his friends formed a plot to kill Roldan. This leaked out, and the youth and his accomplices were arrested and sent to Santo Domingo. This action aroused Roldan's old confederate, Moxica, and, indignant at the way in which the renegade rebel had dared to turn upon his former associates, Moxica resolved upon revenge.
[Sidenote: Moxica's plot.]
[Sidenote: Moxica taken.]
To carry it out he started on a tour through the country where the late mutineers were settled, and readily engaged their sympathies. Among those who joined in his plot was Pedro Riquelme, whom Roldan had made assistant alcalde. The old spirit of revolt was rampant. The confederates were ready for any excess, either upon Roldan or upon the Admiral. Columbus was at Conception in the midst of the aroused district, when a deserter from the plotters informed him of their plan. With a small party the Admiral at once sped in the night to the unguarded quarters of the leaders, and Moxica and several of his chief advisers were suddenly captured and carried to the fort. The execution of the ringleader was at once ordered. Impatient at the way in which the condemned man dallied in his confessions to a priest, Columbus ordered him pushed headlong from the battlements. The French canonists screen Columbus for this act by making Roldan the perpetrator of it. The other confederates were ironed in confinement at Conception, except Riquelme, who was taken later and conveyed to Santo Domingo.
The revolt was thus summarily crushed. Those who had escaped fled to Xaragua, whither the Adelantado and Roldan pursued them without mercy.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Columbus and his colony.]
Columbus had perhaps never got his colony under better control than existed after this vigorous exhibition of his authority. Such a show of prompt and audacious energy was needed to restore the moral supremacy which his recusancy under the threats of Roldan had lost. The fair weather was not to last long.
[Sidenote: 1500. August 23. Bobadilla arrives.]
Early in the morning of August 23, 1500, two caravels were descried off the harbor of Santo Domingo. The Admiral's brother Diego was in authority, Columbus being still at Conception, and Bartholomew absent with Roldan. Diego sent out a canoe to learn the purpose of the visitors. It returned, and brought word that a commissioner was come to inquire into the late rebellion of Roldan. Diego's messengers had at the same time informed the newcomer of the most recent defection of Moxica, and that there were still other executions to take place, particularly those of Riquelme and Guevara, who were confined in the town. As the ships entered the river, the gibbets on either bank, with their dangling Spaniards, showed the commissioner that there were other troublous times to inquire into than those named in his warrant. While the commissioner remained on board his ship, receiving the court of those who early sought to propitiate him, and while he was getting his first information of the condition of the island, mainly from those who had something to gain by the excess of their denunciations, it is necessary to go back a little in time, and ascertain who this important personage was, and what was the mission on which he had been sent.
[Sidenote: Growth of the royal dissatisfaction with Columbus.]
The arrangements for sending him had been made slowly. They were even outlined when Ojeda had started on his voyage, for he had, in his interviews with Roldan, blindly indicated that some astonishment of this sort was in store. Evidently Fonseca had not allowed Ojeda to depart without some intimations.
[Sidenote: Charges against Columbus.]
Notwithstanding Columbus professed to believe that nothing but the lack of pecuniary return for the great outlays of his expeditions could be alleged against them, he was well aware, and he had constantly acted as if well aware, of the great array of accusations which had been made against him in Spain, with a principal purpose of undermining the indulgent regard of the Queen for him. He had known it with sorrow during his last visit to Spain, and had found, as we have seen, that he could not secure men to accompany him and put themselves under his control unless he unshackled criminals in the jails. He little thought that such utter disregard of the morals and self-respect of those whom he had settled in the New World would, by a sort of retributive justice, open the way, however unjustly, to put the displaced gyves on himself, amid the exultant feelings of these same criminals. Such reiterated criminations were like the water-drops that wear the stone, and he had, as we have noted, felt the certainty of direful results.
[Sidenote: His exaggerations of the wealth of the Indies.]
[Sidenote: Columbus deceives the Crown.]
[Sidenote: Columbus's sons hooted at in the Alhambra.]
How much the disappointment at the lack of gold had to do with increasing the force of these charges, it is not difficult to imagine. Columbus was certainly not responsible for that; but he was responsible for the inordinate growth of the belief in the profuse wealth of the new-found Indies. His constantly repeated stories of the wonderful richness of the region had done their work. His professions of a purpose to enrich the world with noble benefactions, and to spend his treasure on the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre, were the vain boastings of a man who thought thereby to enroll his name among the benefactors of the Church. He did not perceive that the populace would wonder whence these resources were to come, unless it was by defrauding the Crown of its share, and by amassing gold while they could not get any. There is something ludicrous in the excuse which he later gave for concealing from the sovereigns his accumulation of pearls. He felt it sufficient to say that he thought he would wait till he could make as good a show of gold! There were some things that even fifteenth-century Christians held to be more sacred than wresting Jerusalem from the Moslem, and these were money in hand when they had earned it, and food to eat when their misfortunes had beggared their lives. It was not an uncalled-for strain on their loyalty to the Crown, when the notion prevailed that the sovereigns and their favorite were gathering riches out of their despair. There was little to be wondered at, in the crowd of these hungry and debilitated victims, wandering about the courts of the Alhambra, under the royal windows, and clamoring for their pay. There was nothing to be surprised at in the hootings that followed the Admiral's sons, pages of the Queen, if they passed within sight of these embittered throngs.
[Sidenote: Ferdinand's confessed blunder.]
It was quite evident that Ferdinand, who had never warmed to the Admiral's enthusiasm, had long been conscious that in the exclusive and extended powers which had been given to Columbus a serious administrative blunder had been made. He said as much at a later day to Ponce de Leon.
The Queen had been faithful, but the recurrent charges had given of late a wrench to her constancy. Was it not certain that something must be wrong, or these accusations would not go on increasing? Had not the great discoverer fulfilled his mission when he unveiled a new world? Was it quite sure that the ability to govern it went along with the genius to find it? These were the questions which Isabella began to put to herself.
[Sidenote: Isabella begins to doubt.]
[Sidenote: Columbus to be superseded.]
[Sidenote: Witnesses against Columbus.]
She was not a person to hesitate at anything, when conviction came. She had shown this in the treatment of the Jews, of the Moors, and of other heretics. The conviction that Columbus was not equal to his trust was now coming to her. The news of the serious outbreak of Roldan's conspiracy brought the matter to a test, and in the spring of 1499 the purpose to send out some one with almost unlimited powers for any emergency was decided upon. Still the details were not worked out, and there were occurrences in the internal and external affairs of Spain that required the prior attention of the sovereigns. Very likely the news of Columbus's success in finding a new source of wealth in the pearls of Paria may have had something to do with the delay. When the ships which carried to Spain a crowd of Roldan's followers arrived, the question took a fresh interest. Columbus's friends, Ballester and Barrantes, now found their testimony could make little headway against the crowd of embittered witnesses on the other side. Isabella, besides, was forced to see in the slaves that Columbus had sent by the same ships something of an obstinate opposition to her own wishes. Las Casas tells us that so great was the Queen's displeasure that it was only the remembrance of Columbus's services that saved him from prompt disgrace. To be sure, the slaves had been sent in part by virtue of the capitulation which Columbus had made with the rebels, but should the Viceroy of the Indies be forced to such capitulations? Had he kept the colony in a condition worthy of her queenly patronage, when it could be reported to her that the daughters of caciques were found among these natives bearing their hybrid babes? "What authority had my viceroy to give my vassals to such ends?" she asked.
[Sidenote: Columbus and the slave trade.]
[Sidenote: Bobadilla appointed commissioner.]
There were two things in recent letters of Columbus which damaged his cause just at this juncture. One was his petition for a new lease of the slave trade. This Isabella answered by ordering all slaves which he had sent home to be sought out and returned. Her agents found a few. The other was the request of Columbus for a judge to examine the dispute between himself and Roldan. This Ferdinand answered by appointing the commissioner whose arrival at Santo Domingo we have chronicled. He was Francisco de Bobadilla, an officer of the royal household.
Before disclosing what Bobadilla did in Santo Domingo, it is best to try to find out what he was expected to do.
[Sidenote: His character.]
There is no person connected with the career of Columbus--hardly excepting Fonseca--more generally defamed than this man, who was, nevertheless, if we may believe Oviedo, a very honest and a very religious man. The historians of Columbus need to mete out to Bobadilla what very few have done, the same measure of palliation which they are more willing to bestow on Columbus. With this parallel justice, it may be that he will not bear with discredit a comparison with Columbus himself, in all that makes a man's actions excusable under provocation and responsibility. An indecency of haste may come from an excess of zeal quite as well as from an unbridled virulence.
It may be in some ways a question if the conditions this man was sent to correct were the result of the weakness or inadaptability of Columbus, or merely the outcome of circumstances, enough beyond his control to allow of excuses. There is, however, no question that the Spanish government had duties to perform towards itself and its subjects which made it properly disinclined to jeopardize the interests which accompany such duties.
[Sidenote: Bobadilla's powers.]
Bobadilla was, to be sure, invested with dangerous powers, but not with more dangerous ones than Columbus himself had possessed. When two such personations of unbridled authority come in antagonism, the possessor of the greater authority is sure to confirm himself by commensurate exactions upon the other. Bobadilla's commission was an implied warrant to that end. He might have been more prudent of his own state, and should have remembered that a trust of the nature of that with which he was invested was sure to be made accountable to those who imparted to him the power, and perhaps at a time when they chose to abandon their own instructions. He ought to have known that such an abandonment comes very easy to all governments in emergencies. He might have been more considerate of the man whom Spain had so recently flattered. He should not have forgotten, if almost everybody else had, that the Admiral had given a new world to Spain.
[Sidenote: Columbus and the criminals.]
He should not have been unmindful, if almost every one else was, that this new world was a delusion now, but might dissolve into a beatific vision. But all this was rather more than human nature was capable of in an age like that. It is to be said of Bobadilla that when he summoned Columbus to Santo Domingo and prejudged him guilty, he had shown no more disregard of a rival power, which he was sent to regulate, than Columbus had manifested for a deluded colony, when he selfishly infected it with the poison of the prisons. It must not, indeed, be forgotten that the strongest support of the new envoy came from the very elements of vice which Columbus had implanted in the island. He grew to understand this, and later he was forced to give a condemnation of his own act when he urged the sending of such as are honorably known, "that the country may be peopled with honest men."
[Sidenote: Bobadilla's character.]
[Sidenote: Did he exceed his powers?]
Las Casas tells us of Bobadilla that his probity and disinterestedness were such that no one could attack them. If it be left for posterity to decide between the word of Las Casas and Columbus, in estimates of virtue and honesty, there is no question of the result. When Bobadilla was selected to be sent to Española, there was every reason to choose the most upright of persons. There was every reason, also, to instruct him with a care that should consider every probable attendant circumstance. After this was done, the discretion of the man was to determine all. We can read in the records the formal instructions; but there were beside, as is expressly stated, verbal directions which can only be surmised. Bobadilla was accused of exceeding the wishes of the Queen. Are we sure that he did? It is no sign of it that the monarchs subsequently found it politic to disclaim the act of their agent. Such a desertion of a subordinate was not unusual in those times, nor indeed would it be now.
If Isabella, "for the love of Christ and the Virgin Mary," could depopulate towns, as she said she did, by the ravages of the inquisition, and fill her coffers by the attendant sequestrations, it is not difficult to conceive that, with a similar and convenient conviction of duty, she would give no narrow range to her vindictiveness and religious zeal when she came to deal with an Admiral whom she had created, and who was not very deferential to her wishes.
[Sidenote: Bobadilla's powers.]
A synopsis of the powers confided to Bobadilla in writing needs to be presented. They begin with a letter of March 21, 1499, referring to reports of the Roldan insurrection, and directing him, if on inquiry he finds any persons culpable, to arrest them and sequestrate their effects, and to call upon the Admiral for assistance in carrying out these orders. Two months later, May 21, a circular letter was framed and addressed to the magistrates of the islands, which seems to have been intended to accredit Bobadilla to them, if the Admiral should be no longer in command. This order gave notice to these magistrates of the full powers which had been given to Bobadilla in civil and criminal jurisdiction. Another order of the same date, addressed to the "Admiral of the ocean sea," orders him to surrender all royal property, whether forts, arms, or otherwise, into Bobadilla's hands,--evidently intended to have an accompanying effect with the other. Of a date five days later another letter addressed to the Admiral reads to this effect:--
"We have directed Francisco de Bobadilla, the bearer of this, to tell you for us of certain things to be mentioned by him. We ask you to give faith and credence to what he says, and to obey him. May 26, 1499."
[Sidenote: His verbal orders.]
[Sidenote: 1500. July. Bobadilla leaves Spain.]
This is an explicit avowal on the sovereigns' part of having given verbal orders. In addition to these instructions, a royal order required the commissioner to ascertain what was due from the Crown for unpaid salaries, and to compel the Admiral to join in liquidating such obligations so far as he was bound for them, "that there may be no more complaints." If one may believe Columbus's own statements as made in his subsequent letter to the nurse of Prince Juan, it had been neglect, and not inability, on his part which had allowed these arrears to accrue. Bobadilla was also furnished with blanks signed by the sovereigns, to be used to further their purposes in any way and at his discretion. With these extraordinary documents, and possessed of such verbal and confidential directions as we may imagine rather than prove, Bobadilla had sailed in July, 1500, more than a year after the letters were dated. His two caravels brought back to Española a number of natives, who were in charge of some Franciscan friars.
[Sidenote: Bobadilla lands at Santo Domingo.]
We left Bobadilla on board his ship, receiving court from all who desired thus early to get his ear. It was not till the next day that he landed, attended by a guard of twenty-five men, when he proceeded to the church to mass.
[Sidenote: His demands.]
This over, the crowd gathered before the church. Bobadilla ordered a herald to read his original commission of March 21, 1499, and then he demanded of the acting governor, Diego, who was present, that Guevara, Riquelme, and the other prisoners should be delivered to him, together with all the evidence in their cases, and that the accusers and magistrates should appear before him. Diego referred him to the Admiral as alone having power in such matters, and asked for a copy of the document just read to send to Columbus. This Bobadilla declined to give, and retired, intimating, however, that there were reserved powers which he had, before which even the Admiral must bow.
The peremptoriness of this movement was, it would seem, uncalled for, and there could have been little misfortune in waiting the coming of the Admiral, compared with the natural results of such sudden overturning of established authority in the absence of the holder of it. Urgency may not, nevertheless, have been without its claims. It was desirable to stay the intended executions; and we know not what exaggerations had already filled the ears of Bobadilla. At this time there would seem to have been the occasion to deliver the letter to Columbus which had commanded his obedience to the verbal instructions of the sovereigns; and such a delivery might have turned the current of these hurrying events, for Columbus had shown, in the case of Agueda, that he was graciously inclined to authority. Instead of this, however, Bobadilla, the next day, again appeared at mass, and caused his other commissions to be read, which in effect made him supersede the Admiral. This superiority Diego and his councilors still unadvisedly declined to recognize. The other mandates were read in succession; and the gradual rise to power, which the documents seemed to imply, as the progress of the investigations demanded support, was thus reached at a bound. This is the view of the case which has been taken by Columbus's biographers, as naturally drawn from the succession of the powers which were given to Bobadilla. It is merely an inference, and we know not the directions for their proclamations, which had been verbally imparted to Bobadilla. It is this uncertainty which surrounds the case with doubt. It is apparent that the reading of these papers had begun to impress the rabble, if not those in authority. That order which commanded the payment of arrears of salaries had a very gratifying effect on those who had suffered from delays. Nothing, however, moved the representatives of the Viceroy, who would not believe that anything could surpass his long-conceded authority.
[Sidenote: Bobadilla assaults the fort.]
There is nothing strange in the excitement of an officer who finds his undoubted supremacy thus obstinately spurned, and we must trace to such excitement the somewhat overstrained conduct which made a show of carrying by assault the fortress in which Guevara and the other prisoners were confined. Miguel Diaz, who commanded the fort,--the same who had disclosed the Hayna mines,--when summoned to surrender had referred Bobadilla to the Admiral from whom his orders came, and asked for copies of the letters patent and orders, for more considerate attention. It was hardly to be expected that Bobadilla was to be beguiled by any such device, when he had a force of armed men at his back, aided by his crew and the aroused rabble, and when there was nothing before him but a weak citadel with few defenders. There was nothing to withstand the somewhat ridiculous shock of the assault but a few frail bars, and no need of the scaling ladders which were ostentatiously set up. Diaz and one companion, with sword in hand, stood passively representing the outraged dignity of command. Bobadilla was victorious, and the manacled Guevara and the rest passed over to new and less stringent keepers.
[Sidenote: Bobadilla in full possession.]
Bobadilla was now in possession of every channel of authority. He domiciled himself in the house of Columbus, took possession of all his effects, including his papers, making no distinction between public and private ones, and used what money he could find to pay the debts of the Admiral as they were presented to him. This proceeding was well calculated to increase his popularity, and it was still more enhanced when he proclaimed liberty to all to gather gold for twenty years, with only the payment of one seventh instead of a third to the Crown.
[Sidenote: Columbus hears of Bobadilla.]
[Sidenote: Columbus and the Franciscans.]
Let us turn to Columbus himself. The reports which reached him at Fort Conception did not at first convey to him an adequate notion of what he was to encounter. He associated the proceedings with such unwarranted acts as Ojeda's and Pinzon's in coming with their ships within his prescribed dominion. The greater audacity, however, alarmed him, and the threats which Bobadilla had made of sending him to Spain in irons, and the known success of his usurpation within the town, were little calculated to make Columbus confident in the temporary character of the outburst. He moved his quarters to Bonao to be nearer the confusion, and here he met an officer bearing to him a copy of the letters under which the government had been assumed by Bobadilla. Still the one addressed to Columbus, commanding him to acquiesce, was held back. It showed palpably that Bobadilla conceived he had passed beyond the judicial aim of his commission. Columbus, on his part, was loath to reach that conclusion, and tried to gain time. He wrote to Bobadilla an exculpating and temporizing letter, saying that he was about to leave for Spain, when everything would pass regularly into Bobadilla's control. He sent other letters, calculated to create delays, to the Franciscans who had come with him. He had himself affiliated with that order, and perhaps thought his influence might not be unheeded. He got no replies, and perhaps never knew what the spirit of these friars was. They evidently reflected the kind of testimony which Bobadilla had been accumulating. We find somewhat later, in a report of one of them, Nicholas Glassberger,--who speaks of the 1,500 natives whom they had made haste to baptize in Santo Domingo,--some of the cruel insinuations which were rife, when he speaks of "a certain admiral, captain, and chief, who had ill treated these natives, taking their goods and wives, and capturing their virgin daughters, and had been sent to Spain in chains."
[Sidenote: Bobadilla sends the sovereigns' letter to Columbus.]
Columbus as yet could hardly have looked forward to any such indignity as manacles on his limbs. Nor did he probably suspect that Bobadilla was using the signed blanks, entrusted to him by the sovereigns, to engage the interests of Roldan and other deputies of the Viceroy scattered through the island. Columbus, in these uncertainties, caused it to be known that he considered his perpetual powers still unrevoked, if indeed they were revocable at all. This state of his mind was rudely jarred by receiving a little later, at the hands of Francisco Velasquez, the deputy treasurer, and of Juan de Trasierra, one of the Franciscans, the letter addressed to him by the sovereigns, commanding him to respect what Bobadilla should tell him. Here was tangible authority; and when it was accompanied by a summons from Bobadilla to appear before him, he hesitated no longer, and, with the little state befitting his disgrace, proceeded at once to Santo Domingo.
[Sidenote: Columbus approaches Santo Domingo.]
[Sidenote: 1500. August 23. Columbus is imprisoned in chains.]
The Admiral's brother Diego had already been confined in irons on one of the caravels; and Bobadilla, affecting to believe, as Irving holds, that Columbus would not come in any compliant mood, made a bustle of armed preparation. There was, however, no such intention on Columbus's part, nor had been, since the royal mandate of implicit obedience had been received. He came as quietly as the circumstances would permit, and when the new governor heard he was within his grasp, his orders to seize him and throw him into prison were promptly executed (August 23, 1500). In the southeastern part of the town, the tower still stands, with little signs of decay, which then received the dejected Admiral, and from its summit all approaching vessels are signaled to-day. Las Casas tells us of the shameless and graceless cook, one of Columbus's own household, who riveted the fetters. "I knew the fellow," says that historian, "and I think his name was Espinosa."
While the Adelantado was at large with an armed force, Bobadilla was not altogether secure in his triumph. He demanded of Columbus to write to his brother and counsel him to come in and surrender. This Columbus did, assuring the Adelantado of their safety in trusting to the later justice of the Crown. Bartholomew obeyed, as the best authorities say, though Peter Martyr mentions a rumor that he came in no accommodating spirit, and was captured while in advance of his force. It is certain he also was placed in irons, and confined on one of the caravels. It was Bobadilla's purpose to keep the leaders apart, so there could be no concert of action, and even to prevent their seeing any one who could inform them of the progress of the inquest, which was at once begun.
[Sidenote: Charges against Columbus.]
It seems evident that Bobadilla, either of his own impulse or in accordance with secret instructions, was acting with a secrecy and precipitancy which would have been justifiable in the presence of armed sedition, but was uncalled for with no organized opposition to embarrass him. Columbus at a later day tells us that he was denied ample clothing, even, and was otherwise ill treated. He says, too, he had no statement of charges given to him. It is a later story, started by Charlevoix, that such accusations were presented to him in writing, and met by him in the same method.
The trial was certainly a remarkable procedure, except we consider it simply an ex parte process for indictment only, as indeed it really was. Irving lays stress on the reversal by Bobadilla of the natural order of his acts, amounting, in fact, to prejudging a person he was sent to examine. He also thinks that the governor was hurried to his conclusions in order to make up a show of necessity for his precipitate action. It has something of that look. "The rebels he had been sent to judge became, by this singular perversion of rule," says Irving, "necessary and cherished evidences to criminate those against whom they had rebelled." This is the mistake of the apologists for Columbus. Bobadilla seems to have been sent to judge between two parties, and not to assume that only one was culpable. Even Irving suspects the true conditions. He allows that Bobadilla would not have dared to go to this length, had he not felt assured that "certain things," as the mandate to Columbus expressed it, would not be displeasing to the king.
The charges against the Admiral had been stock ones for years, and we have encountered them more than once in the progress of this narrative. They are rehearsed at length in the documents given by Navarrete, and are repeated and summarized by Peter Martyr. It is perhaps true that there was some novelty in the asseveration that Columbus's recent refusal to have some Indians baptized was simply because it deprived him of selling them as slaves. This accusation, considering Columbus's relations to the slave trade which he had created, is as little to be wondered at as any.
[Sidenote: Columbus and slavery.]
Las Casas tells us how indignant Isabella had been with his presumptuous way of dealing with what she called her subjects; and by a royal order of June 20, 1500, she had ordered, as we have seen, the return in Bobadilla's fleet of nineteen of the slaves who had been sold. There was no better way of commending Bobadilla's action to the Queen, apparently, than by making the most of Columbus's unfortunate relations to the slave trade.
As the accusations were piled up, Bobadilla saw the inquest leading, in his mind, to but one conclusion, the unnatural character of the Viceroy and his unfitness for command,--a phrase not far from the truth, but hardly requiring the extraordinary proceedings which had brought the governor to a recognition of it. There is little question that the public sentiment of the colony, so far at least as it dare manifest itself, commended the governor. Columbus in his dungeon might not see this with his own eyes, but if the reports are true, his ears carried it to his spirit, for howls and taunts against him came from beyond the walls, as the expression of the hordes which felt relieved by his fate. Columbus himself confessed that Bobadilla had "succeeded to the full" in making him hated of the people. All this was matter to brood upon in his loneliness. He magnified slight hints. He more than suspected he was doomed to a violent fate. When Alonso de Villejo, who was to conduct him to Spain, in charge of the returning ships, came to the dungeon, Columbus saw for the first time some recognition of his unfortunate condition. Las Casas, in recounting the interview, says that Villejo was "an hidalgo of honorable character and my particular friend," and he doubtless got his account of what took place from that important participant.
"Villejo," said the prisoner, "whither do you take me?"
"To embark on the ship, your excellency."
"To embark, Villejo? Is that the truth?"
"It is true," said the captain.
For the first time the poor Admiral felt that he yet might see Spain and her sovereigns.
[Sidenote: 1500. October. Columbus sent to Spain.]
[Sidenote: His chains.]
The caravels set sail in October, 1500, and soon passed out of earshot of the hootings that were sent after the miserable prisoners. The new keepers of Columbus were not of the same sort as those who cast such farewell taunts. If the Historie is to be believed, Bobadilla had ordered the chains to be kept on throughout the voyage, since, as the writer of that book grimly suggests, Columbus might at any time swim back, if not secured. Villejo was kind. So was the master of the caravel, Andreas Martin. They suggested that they could remove the manacles during the voyage; but the Admiral, with that cherished constancy which persons feel, not always wisely, in such predicaments, thinking to magnify martyrdom, refused. "No," he said; "my sovereigns ordered me to submit, and Bobadilla has chained me. I will wear these irons until by royal order they are removed, and I shall keep them as relics and memorials of my services."
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Degradation of Columbus.]
[Sidenote: His letter to the nurse of Prince Juan analyzed.]
[Sidenote: Charges against Columbus.]
The relations of Columbus and Bobadilla bring before us the most startling of the many combinations of events in the history of a career which is sadder, perhaps, notwithstanding its glory, than any other mortal presents in profane history. The degradation of such a man appeals more forcibly to human sympathy than almost any other event in the record of humanity. That sympathy has obscured the import of his degradation, and that mournful explanation of the events, which, either on his voyage or shortly after his return, Columbus wrote and sent to the nurse of Prince Juan, has long worked upon the sensibilities of a world tender for his misfortunes. We cannot indeed read this letter without compassion, nor can we read it dispassionately without perceiving that the feelings of the man who wrote it had been despoiled of a judicial temper by his errors as well as by his miseries. His statements of the case are wholly one-sided. He never sees what it pains him to see. He forgets everything that an enemy would remember. He finds it difficult to tell the truth, and trusts to iterated professions to be taken for truths. He claims to have no conception why he was imprisoned, when he knew perfectly well, as he says himself, that he had endeavored to create an opposition to constituted authority "by verbal and written declarations;" and he reiterates this statement after he had bowed to royal commands that were as explicit as his own treatment of them had been recalcitrant. Indeed, he puts himself in the rather ridiculous posture of answering a long series of charges, of which at the same time he professes to be ignorant.
In the course of this letter, Columbus set up a claim that he had been seriously misjudged in trying to measure his accountability by the laws that govern established governments rather than by those which grant indulgences to the conqueror of a numerous and warlike nation. The position is curiously inconsistent with his professed intentions, as the sole ruler of a colony, to be just in the eyes of God and men. The Crown had given him its authority to establish precisely what he claims had not been established, a government of laws kindly disposed to protect both Spaniard and native, and yet he did not understand why his doings were called in question. He had boasted repeatedly how far from warlike and dangerous the natives were, so that a score of Spaniards could put seven thousand to rout, as he was eager to report in one case. The chief of the accusations against him did not pertain to his malfeasance in regard to the natives, but towards the Spaniards themselves, and it was begging the question to consider his companions a conquered nation. If there were no established government as respects them, he would be the last to admit it; and if it were proved against him, there was no one so responsible for the absence of it as himself. Again he says: "I ought to be judged by cavaliers who have gained victories themselves,--by gentlemen, and not by lawyers." The fact was that the case had been judged by hidalgoes without number, and to his disgrace, and it was taken from them to give him the protection of the law, such as it was; and, as he himself acknowledges, there is in the Indies "neither civil right nor judgment seat." As he was the source of all the bulwarks of life and liberty in these same Indies, he thus acknowledges the deficiencies of his own protective agencies. There is something childishly immature in the proposition which he advances that he should be judged by persons in his own pay.
[Sidenote: Palliation.]
It is of course necessary to allow the writer of this letter all the palliation that a man in his distressed and disordered condition might claim. Columbus had in fact been perceptibly drifting into a state of delusion and aberration of mind ever since the sustaining power of a great cause had been lifted from him. From the moment when he turned his mule back at the instance of Isabella's message, the lofty purpose had degenerated to a besetting cupidity, in which he made even the Divinity a constant abettor. In this same letter he tells of a vision of the previous Christmas, when the Lord confronted him miraculously, and reminded him of his vow to amass treasure enough in seven years to undertake his crusade to Jerusalem. This visible Godhead then comforted him with the assurance that his divine power would see that it came to pass. "The seven years you were to await have not yet passed. Trust in me and all will be right." It is easy to point to numerous such instances in Columbus's career, and the canonizers do not neglect to do so, as evincing the sublime confidence of the devoted servant of the Lord; but one can hardly put out of mind the concomitants of all such confidence. The most that we can allow is the unaccountableness of a much-vexed conscience.
XVIII. COLUMBUS AGAIN IN SPAIN
1500-1502.
[Sidenote: 1500. October. Columbus reaches Cadiz.]
[Sidenote: Public sympathy at his degradation.]
It was in October, 1500, after a voyage of less discomfort than usual, that the ships of Villejo, carrying his manacled prisoners, entered the harbor of Cadiz. If Bobadilla had precipitately prejudged his chief prisoner, public sentiment, when it became known that Columbus had arrived in chains, was not less headlong in its sympathetic revulsion. Bobadilla would at this moment have stood a small chance for a dispassionate examination. The discoverer of the New World coming back from it a degraded prisoner was a discordant spectacle in the public mind, filled with recollections of those days of the first return to Palos, when a new range had been given to man's conceptions of the physical world. This common outburst of indignation showed, as many times before and since, how the world's sense of justice has in it more of spirit than of steady discernment. The hectic flush was sure to pass,--as it did.
[Sidenote: Columbus's letter to the nurse of Prince Juan.]
It was while on his voyage, or shortly after his return, that Columbus wrote the letter to the lady of the Court usually spoken of as the nurse of Prince Juan, which has been already considered. Before the proceedings of the inquest which Bobadilla had forwarded by the ship were sent to the Court, then in the Alhambra, Columbus, with the connivance of Martin, the captain of his caravel, had got this exculpatory letter off by a special messenger. The lady to whom it was addressed was, it will be remembered, Doña Juana de la Torre, an intimate companion of the Queen, with whom the Admiral's two sons, as pages of the Queen, had been for some months in daily relations. The text of this letter has long been known. Las Casas copied it in his Historia. Navarrete gives it from another copy, but corrected by the text preserved at Genoa; while Harrisse tells us that the text in Paris contains an important passage not in that at Genoa.
[Sidenote: The sovereigns order Columbus to be released.]
While its ejaculatory arguments are not well calculated to impose on the sober historian, there was enough of fervor laid against its background of distressing humility to work on the sympathies of its recipient, and of the Queen, to whom it was early and naturally revealed. "I have now reached that point that there is no man so vile, but thinks it his right to insult me," was the language, almost at its opening, which met their eyes. The further reading of the letter brought up a picture of the manacled Admiral. Very likely the rumor of the rising indignation spreading from Cadiz to Seville, and from Seville elsewhere, as well as the letters of the alcalde of Cadiz, into whose hands Columbus had been delivered, and of Villejo, who had had him in custody, added to the tumult of sensations mutually shared in that little circle of the monarchs and the Doña Juana. If we take the prompt action of the sovereigns in ordering the immediate release of Columbus, their letter of sympathy at the baseness of his treatment, the two thousand ducats put at his disposal to prepare for a visit to the Court, and the cordial royal summons for him to come,--if all these be taken at their apparent value, the candid observer finds himself growing distrustful of Bobadilla's justification through his secret instructions. As the observer goes on in the story and notes the sequel, he is more inclined to believe that the sovereigns, borne on the rising tide of indignant sympathy, had defended themselves at the expense of their commissioner. We may never know the truth.
[Sidenote: 1500. December 17. Columbus at Court.]
That was a striking scene when Columbus, delivered from his irons on the 17th of December, 1500, held his first interview with the Spanish monarchs. Oviedo was an eyewitness of it; but we find more of its accompaniments in the story as told by Herrera than in the scant narrative of the Historie. Humboldt fancies that it was the Admiral's son who wrote it. The author of that book had no heart to record at much length the professions of regret on the part of the King, since they were not easily reconcilable with what, in that writer's judgment, would have been the honorable reception of Bobadilla and Roldan, had they escaped the fate of the tempests which later overwhelmed them. When the first warmth of Columbus's reception had subsided, there would have been no reason to suspect that those absent servants of the Crown would have been denied a suitable welcome.
Herrera tells us of the touching character of this interview of December 17; how the Queen burst into tears, and the emotional Admiral cast himself on the ground at her feet. When Columbus could speak, he began to recall the reasons for which he had been imprisoned, and rehearsed them with humble and exculpatory professions. He forgot that in the letter which so excited their sympathy he had denied that he knew any such reasons, and the sovereigns forgot it too. The meeting had awakened the tenderer parts of their natures, and their hearts went out to him. They made verbal promises of largesses and professions of restitution, but Harrisse could find no written expressions of this kind, till in the instructions of March 14, 1502, when they expressed their directions for his guidance during his next voyage. The Admiral grew confident, as of old, in their presence. He had always reached a coign of vantage in his personal intercourse with the Queen. He had evidently not lost that power. He began to picture his return to Santo Domingo with the triumph that he now enjoyed. It was a hollow hope. He was never again to be Viceroy of the Indies.
[Sidenote: Columbus suspended from power.]
[Sidenote: Other explorers in American waters.]
[Sidenote: Portuguese claims.]
The disorders in Española were but a part of the reasons why it was now decided to suspend the patented rights of the Admiral, if not permanently to deny the further exercise of them. We have seen how the government had committed itself to other discoveries, profiting, as it did, by the maps which Columbus had sent back to Spain. These discoveries were a new source of tribute which could not be neglected. Rival nations too were alert, and ships of the Portuguese and of the English had been found prowling about within the unquestioned limits allowed to Spain by the new treaty line of Tordesillas. At the north and at the south these same powers were pushing their search, to see if perchance portions of the new regions could not be found to project so far east as to bring them on the Portuguese side of that same line. Portugal had already claimed that Cabral had found such territory under the equator and south of it. An eastward projection of Brazil at the south, twenty degrees and more, is very common in the contemporary Portuguese maps.
[Sidenote: 1501. May 13. Coelho's voyage.]
[Sidenote: Was Vespucius on this voyage?]
On the 13th of May, 1501, a new Portuguese fleet of three ships, under the command of Gonçalo Coelho, sailed from Lisbon to develop the coast of the southern Vera Cruz, as South America was now called, and to see if a way could be found through it to the Moluccas. In June, the fleet, while at the Cape de Verde Islands, met Cabral with his vessels on their return from India. Here it was that Cabral's interpreter, Gasparo, communicated the particulars of Cabral's discovery to Vespucius, who was, as seems pretty clear, though by no means certain, on board this outward-bound fleet. A letter exists, brought to light by Count Baldelli Boni, not, however, in the hand of Vespucius, in which the writer, under date of June 4, gave the results of his note-takings with Cabral to Pier Francisco de Medici. Varnhagen is in some doubt about the genuineness of this document. Indeed, the historian, if he weighs all the testimony that has been adduced for and against the participancy of Vespucius in this voyage, can hardly be quite sure that the Florentine was aboard at all, and Santarem is confident he was not. Navarrete thinks he was perhaps there in some subordinate capacity. Humboldt is staggered at the profession of Vespucius in still keeping the Great Bear above the horizon at 32° south, since it is lost after reaching 26°.
[Sidenote: The Mundus Novus of Vespucius.]
With all this doubt, we have got to make something out of another letter, which in the published copy purports to have been written in 1503 about this voyage by Vespucius himself, and from it we learn that his ship had struck the coast at Cape St. Roque, on August 17, 1501. The discoverers reached and named Cape St. Augustine on August 28. On November 1, they were at Bahia. By the 3d of April, 1502, they had reached the latitude of 52° south, when, driven off the coast in a severe gale, they made apparently the island of Georgia, whence they stood over to Africa, and reached Lisbon on September, 7, 1502. By what name Vespucius called this South American coast we do not know, for his original Italian text is lost, but the Mundus Novus of the Latin paraphrase or version raised a feeling of expectancy that something new had really been found, distinct from the spicy East. Varnhagen is convinced that Vespucius, different from Columbus, had awakened to the conception of an absolutely new quarter of the earth. There is little ground for the belief, however, in its full extent and confidence. The little tract had in it the elements of popularity, and in 1504 and 1505 the German and French presses gave it currency in several editions in the Latin tongue, whence it was turned into Italian, German, and Dutch, spreading through Europe the fame of Vespucius. We trace to this voyage the origin of the nomenclature of the coast of the South American continent which then grew up, and is represented in the earlier maps, like that of Lorenz Fries, for instance, in 1504.
[Sidenote: Discoveries of Vespucius.]
[Sidenote: Maps of early voyages.]
A letter dated August 12, 1507, preserved in Tritemius's Epistolarum familiarum libri duo (1536), has been thought to refer to a printed map which showed the discoveries of Vespucius down to 10° south. This map is unknown, apparently, as the particulars given concerning it do not agree with the map of Ruysch, the only one, so far as known, to antedate that epistle. It is possibly the missing map which Waldseemüller is thought to have first made, and which became the prototype of the recognized Waldseemüller map of the Ptolemy of 1513, and was possibly the one from which the Cantino map, yet to be described, was perfected in other parts than those of the Cortereal discoveries. This anterior map may have been merely an early state of the plate, and Lelewel gives reasons for believing that early impressions of this map were in the market in 1507.
[Sidenote: Columbus and Vespucius.]
Thus while Columbus was nurturing his deferred hopes, neglected and poor, and awaiting what after all was but a tantalizing revival of royal interest, the rival Portuguese, acting most probably under the influences of Columbus's own countryman, this Florentine, were stretching farther towards the true western route to the Moluccas than the Admiral had any conception of. Vespucius was also at the same time unwittingly asserting claims which should in the end rob the Great Discoverer of the meed of bestowing his name on the new continent which he had just as unwittingly discovered. The contrast is of the same strange impressiveness which marks so many of the improbable turns in the career of Columbus.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 1500. Spanish purposes at the north.]
Meanwhile, what was going on in the north, where Portugal was pushing her discoveries in the region already explored by Cabot? The Spaniards had been dilatory here. The monarchs, May 6, 1500, while they were distracted with the reports of the disquietude of Española, had turned their attention in this direction, and had thought of sending ships into the seas which "Sebastian Cabot had discovered." They had done nothing, however, though Navarrete finds that explorations thitherward, under Juan Dornelos and Ojeda, had been planned.
[Sidenote: Bretons and Normans at the north.]
If we may believe some of the accounts of explorations this way on the part of the Bretons and Normans, they had founded a settlement called Brest on the Labrador coast, just within the Straits of Belle Isle, on a bay now called Bradore, as early as 1500. It is said that traces of their houses can be still seen there. But there is no definite contemporary record of their exploits. We have such records of the Portuguese movements, though not through Spanish sources. Unaccountably, Peter Martyr, who kept himself alert for all such impressions, makes no reference to any Portuguese voyages; and it is only when we come down to Gomara (1551) that we find a Spanish writer reverting to the narratives. In doing so, Gomara makes, at the same time, some confusion in the chronology.
[Sidenote: Cortereal voyages.]
Portugal had missed a great opportunity in discrediting Columbus, but she had succeeded in finding one in Da Gama. She was now in wait for a chance to mate her southern route with a western, or rather with a northern,--at any rate, with one which would give her some warrant for efforts not openly in violation of the negotiations which had followed upon the Bull of Demarcation. Opportunely, word came to Lisbon of the successes of the Cabot voyages, and there was the probability of islands and interjacent passages at the north very like the geographical configuration which the Spaniards had found farther south. To appearances, Cabot had met with such land on the Portuguese side of the division line of the treaty of Tordesillas.
[Sidenote: 1500. Gaspar Cortereal.]
[Sidenote: 1501. Gaspar Cortereal again.]
King Emanuel had a vassal in Gaspar Cortereal, who at this time was a man about fifty years old, and he had already in years past conducted explorations oceanward, though we have no definite knowledge of their results. It has been conjectured that Columbus may have known him; but there is nothing to make this certain. At any rate, there was little in the surroundings of Columbus at Española, when he was subjected to chains in the summer of 1500, to remind him of any northern rivalry, though the visits of Ojeda and Pinzon to that island were foreboding. It was just at that time that Cortereal sailed away from Portugal to the northwest. He discovered the Terra do Labrador, which he named apparently because he thought its natives would increase very handily the slave labor of Portugal. To follow up this quest, Gaspar sailed again with three ships, May 15, 1501, which is the date given by Damian de Goes. Harrisse is not so sure, but finds that Gaspar was still in port April 21, 1501. Cortereal ran a course a little more to the west, and came to a coast, two thousand miles away, as was reckoned, and skirted it without finding any end. He decided from the volume of its rivers, that it was probably a continental area. The voyagers found in the hands of some natives whom they saw a broken sword and two silver earrings, evidently of Italian make. The natural inference is that they had fallen among tribes which Cabot had encountered on his second voyage, if indeed these relics did not represent earlier visitors. Cortereal also found in a high latitude a country which he called Terra Verde. Two of the vessels returned safely, bringing home some of the natives, and the capture of such, to make good the name bestowed during the previous voyage, seems to have been the principal aim of the explorers. The third ship, with Gaspar on board, was never afterwards heard of.
[Sidenote: Original sources on the Cortereal voyages.]
[Sidenote: Portuguese habit of concealing information.]
It so happened that Pasqualigo, the Venetian ambassador in Lisbon, made record of the return of the first of these vessels, in a letter which he wrote from Lisbon, October 19, 1501; and it is from this, which made part of the well-known Paesi novamente retrovati (Vicenza, 1507), that we derive what little knowledge we have of these voyages. The reports have fortunately been supplemented by Harrisse in a dispatch dated October 17, 1501, which he has produced from the archives of Modena, in which one Alberto Cantino tells how he heard the captain of the vessel which arrived second tell the story to the king. This dispatch to the Duke of Ferrara was followed by a map showing the new discoveries. This cartographical record had been known for some years before it was reproduced by Harrisse on a large scale. It is apparent from this that the discoverers believed, or feigned to believe, that the new-found regions lay westward from Ireland half-way to the American coasts. The evidence that they feigned to believe rather than that they knew these lands to be east of their limitary line may not be found; but it was probably some such doubt of their honesty which induced Robert Thorne, of Bristol, to speak of the purpose which the Portuguese had in falsifying their maps. Nor were the frauds confined to maps. Translations were distorted and narratives perverted. Biddle, in his Life of Cabot, points out a marked instance of this, where the simple language of Pasqualigo is twisted so as to convey the impression of a long acquaintance of the natives with Italian commodities, as proving that the Italians had formerly visited the region,--a hint which Biddle supposed the Zeni narrative at a later date was contrived to sustain, so as to deceive many writers. We shall soon revert to this Cantino map.
[Sidenote: 1501. Miguel Cortereal.]
The voyage which Miguel Cortereal is known to have undertaken in the summer of 1501, which has been connected with this series of northwest voyages, is held by Harrisse, in his revised opinions, not to have been to the New World at all, but to have been conducted against the Grand Turk, and Cortereal returned from it on November 4, 1501.
[Sidenote: 1502. Miguel Cortereal again.]
To search for the missing Gaspar Cortereal, Miguel, on May 10, 1502, again sailed to the northwest with two or three ships. They found the same coast as before, searched it without success, and returned again without a leader; for Miguel's ship missed the others at a rendezvous and was never again heard of.
[Sidenote: Terre des Cortereal.]
[Sidenote: Straits of Anian.]
The endeavors of the Portuguese in this direction did not end here; and the region thus brought by them to the attention of the cartographer soon acquired in their maps the name of Terre des Cortereal, or Terra dos Corte reals, or, as Latinized by Sylvanus, Regalis Domus. There is little, however, to connect these earliest ventures with later history, except perhaps that from their experiences it is that a vague cartographical conception of the fabled Straits of Anian confronts us in many of the maps of the latter half of the sixteenth century. No one has made it quite sure whence the appellation or even the idea of such a strait came. By some it has been thought to have grown out of Marco Polo's Ania, which was conceived to be in the north. By Navarrete, Humboldt, and others it has been made to grow in some way out of these Cortereal voyages, and Humboldt supposes that the entrance to Hudson Bay, under 60° north latitude, was thought at that time to lead to some sort of a transcontinental passage, going it is hardly known where. The name does not seem at first to have been magnified into all its later associations of a kingdom, or "regnum" of Anian, as the Latin nomenclature then had it. Its great city of Quivira did not appear till some time after the middle of the sixteenth century, and then it was not always quite certain to the cosmographical mind whether all this magnificence might not better be placed on the Asiatic side of such a strait. This imaginary channel was made for a long period to run along the parallels of latitudes somewhere in the northern regions of the New World, after America had begun generally to have its independent existence recognized, south of the Arctic regions at least. The next stage of the belief violently changed the course of the straits across the parallels, prefiguring the later discovered Bering's Straits; and this is made prominent in maps of Zalterius (1566) and Mercator (1569), and in the maps of those who copied these masters.
[Sidenote: Spanish maps.]
[Sidenote: Maps of the Cortereal discoveries.]
It took thirty years for the Cortereal discoveries to work their way into the conceptions of the Spanish map makers. Whether this dilatory belief came from lack of information, obliviousness, or simply from an heroic persistence in ignoring what was not their boast, is a question to be decided through an estimate of the Spanish character. There seems, however, to have been interest enough on the part of a single Italian noble to seek information at once, as we see from the Cantino map; but the knowledge was not, nevertheless, apparently a matter of such interest but it could escape Ruysch in 1508. Not till Sylvanus issued his edition of Ptolemy, in 1511, did any signs of these Cortereal expeditions appear on an engraved map.
[Sidenote: The Cantino map. 1502.]
Only a few years have passed since students of these cartographical fields were first allowed free study of this Cantino map. It is, after La Cosa, the most interesting of all the early maps of the American coast as its configuration had grown to be comprehended in the ten years which followed the first voyage of Columbus.
[Sidenote: The Cortereal discoveries east of the line of demarcation.]
[Sidenote: Terra Verde.]
There are three special points of interest in this chart. The first is the evident purpose of the maker, when sending it (1502) to his correspondent in Italy, to render it clear that the coasts which the Portuguese had tracked in the northwest Atlantic were sufficiently protuberant towards the rising sun to throw them on the Portuguese side of the revised line of demarcation. It is by no means certain, however, in doing so, that they pretended their discoveries to have been other than neighboring to Asia, since a peninsula north of these regions is called a "point of Asia." The ordinary belief of geographers at that time was that our modern Greenland was an extension of northern Europe. So it does not seem altogether certain that the Terra Verde of Cortereal can be held to be identical with its namesake of the Sagas.
[Sidenote: Columbus and the Cantino map in the Paria region.]
[Sidenote: Columbus in want.]
The second point of interest is what seems to be the connection between this map and those which had emanated from the results of the Columbus voyages, directly or indirectly. Columbus had made a chart of his track through the Gulf of Paria, and had sent it to Spain, and Ojeda had coursed the same region by it. We know from a letter of Angelo Trivigiano, the secretary of the Venetian ambassador in Spain, dated at Granada, August 21, 1501, and addressed to Domenico Malipiero, that at that time Columbus, who had ingratiated himself with the writer of the letter, was living without money, in great want, and out of favor with the sovereigns. This letter-writer then speaks of his intercession with Peter Martyr to have copies of his narrative of the voyages of Columbus made, and of his pleading with Columbus himself to have transcripts of his own letters to his sovereigns given to him, as well as a map of the new discoveries from the Admiral's own charts, which he then had with him in Granada.
There are three letters of Trivigiano, but the originals are not known. Foscarini in 1752 used them in his Della Letteratura veneziana, as found in the library of Jacopo Soranzo; but both these originals and Foscarini's copies have eluded the search of Harrisse, who gives them as printed or abstracted by Zurla.
What we have is not supposed to be the entire text, and we may well regret the loss of the rest. Trivigiano says of the map that he expected it to be extremely well executed on a large scale, giving ample details of the country which had been discovered. He refers to the delays incident to sending to Palos to have it made, because persons capable of such work could only be found there.
No such copy as that made for Malipiero is now known. Harrisse thinks that if it is ever discovered it will be very like the Cantino map, with the Cortereal discoveries left out. This same commentator also points out that there are certainly indications in the Cantino map that the maker of it, in drafting the region about the Gulf of Paria at least, worked either from Columbus's map or from some copy of it, for his information seems to be more correct than that which La Cosa followed.
[Sidenote: What is the coast north of Cuba?]
The third point of interest in this Cantino map, and one which has given rise to opposing views, respects that coast which is drawn in it north of the completed Cuba, and which at first glance is taken with little question for the Atlantic coast of the United States from Florida up. Is it such? Did the cartographers of that time have anything more than conjecture by which to run such a coast line?
A letter of Pasqualigo, dated at Lisbon, October 18, 1501, and found by Von Ranke at Venice in the diary of Marino Sanuto,--a running record of events, which begins in 1496,--has been interpreted by Humboldt as signifying that at this time it was known among the Portuguese observers of the maritime reports that a continental stretch of coast connected the Spanish discoveries in the Antilles with those of the Portuguese at the north. Harrisse questions this interpretation, and considers that what Humboldt thinks knowledge was simply a tentative conjecture. If this knowledge is represented in the Cantino map, there is certainly too great remoteness in the regions of the Cortereal discoveries to form such a connection. It is of course possible that the map is a falsification in this respect, to make the line of demarcation serve the Portuguese interests, and such falsification is by no means improbable.
[Sidenote: The Cantino and La Cosa maps at variance.]
[Sidenote: Bimini.]
It will be remembered that the La Cosa map showed no hesitancy in placing the Antilles on the coast of Asia, and put the region of the Cabot landfall on the coast of Cathay. Consequently, the difference between the La Cosa and the Cantino maps for this region north of Cuba is phenomenal. In these two or three years (1500-1502), something had come to pass which seemed to raise the suspicion that this northern continental line might possibly not be Asiatic after all, or at least it might not have the trend or contour which had before been given it on the Asiatic theory. It is an interesting question from whom this information could have come. Was this coast in the Cantino map indeed not North American, but the coast of Yucatan, misplaced, as one conjecture has been? But this involves a recognition of some voyage on the Yucatan coast of which we have no record. Was it the result of one of the voyages of Vespucius, and was Varnhagen right in tracking that navigator up the east Florida shore? Was it drawn by some unauthorized Spanish mariners, who were--we know Columbus complained of such--invading his vested rights, or perhaps by some of those to whom he was finally induced to concede the privilege of exploration? Was it found by some English explorer who answers the description of Ojeda in 1501, when he complains that people of this nation had been in these regions some years before? Was it the discovery of some of those against whom a royal prohibition of discovery was issued by the Catholic kings, September 3, 1501? Was it anything more than the result of some vague information from the Lucayan Indians, aided by a sprinkling of supposable names, respecting a land called Bimini lying there away? Eight or nine years later, Peter Martyr, in the map which he published in 1511, seems to have thought so, and certain stories of a fountain of youth in regions lying in that direction were already prevalent, as Martyr also shows us. The fact seems to be that we have no Spanish map between the making of La Cosa's in 1500 and this one of Peter Martyr in 1511, to indicate any Spanish acquaintance with such a northern coast.
[Sidenote: Peter Martyr's map. 1511.]
This map of 1511, if it is honest enough to show what the Spanish government knew of Florida, is indicative of but the vaguest information, and its divulgence of that coast may, in Brevoort's opinion, account for the rarity of the chart, in view of the determination of Spain to keep control as far as she could of all cartographical records of what her explorers found out.
It is evident, if we accept the theory of this Cantino map showing the coast of the United States, that we have in it a delineation nearer the source by several years than those which modern students have longer known in the Waldseemüller map of 1508, the Stobnicza map of 1512, the Reisch map of 1515, and the so-called Admiral's map of 1513,--all which arose, it is very clear, from much the same source as this of Cantino. What is that source? There are some things that seem to indicate that this source was the description of Portuguese rather than of other seamen. This belief falls in with what we know of the cordial relations of Portugal and Duke René, under whose auspices Waldseemüller at least worked. Thus it would seem that while Spain was impeding cartographical knowledge through the rest of Europe, Portugal was so assiduously helping it that for many years the Ptolemies and other central and southern European publications were making known the cosmographical ideas which originated in Portugal.
It has been already said that Humboldt in his Examen Critique (iv. 262) refers to a letter which indicates that in October, 1501, the Portuguese had already learned, or it may be only conjectured, that the coast from the region of the Antilles ran uninterruptedly north till it united with the snowy shores of the northern discoveries. This, then, seems to indicate that it was a Portuguese source that supplied conjecture, if not fact, to the maker of the Cantino map. Harrisse's solution of this matter, as also mentioned already, is that the letter found by Von Ranke and the letter which we know Pasqualigo sent to Venice about the Cortereal voyages were one and the same, and that it was rather conjecture than fact that the Portuguese possessed at this time.
The obvious difficulty in the cartographical problem for the Portuguese was, as has been said, to make it appear that they were not disregarding the agreement at Tordesillas while they were securing a region for sovereignty. We have already said that this accounts for the extreme eastern position found in the Cantino and the cognate maps of the Newfoundland region, which, as thus drawn, it was not easy to connect with the coast line of eastern Florida. Hence the open sea-gap which exists between them in the maps, while the evidence of the descriptions would make the coast line continuous.
We have thus suggested possible solutions of this continental shore above Florida. It must be confessed that the truth is far from patent, and we must yet wait perhaps a long time before we discover, if indeed we ever do, to whom this mapping of the coast, as shown in the Cantino map, was due.
[Sidenote: Was the Florida coast known?]
There are evidences other than those of this Cantino map that the Portuguese were in this Floridian region in the early years of the sixteenth century, and Lelewel tried to work out their discoveries from scattered data, in a conjectural map, which he marks 1501-1504, and which resembles the Ptolemy map of 1513. The bringing forward of the Cantino map confirms much of the supposed cartography.
There is one theory which to some minds gives a very easy solution of this problem, without requiring belief in any knowledge, clandestine or public, of such a land.
Brevoort in his Verrazano had already been inclined to the view later emphasized by Stevens in his Schöner, and reiterated by Coote in his editorial revision of that posthumous work.
Stevens is content to allow Ocampo, in 1508, to have been the earliest probable discoverer of this coast, and Ponce de Leon as the original attested finder in 1513.
[Sidenote: This Cantino coast a duplicated Cuba.]
The Stevens theory is that this seeming Florida arose from a Portuguese misconception of the first two voyages of Columbus, by which two regions were thought to have been coasted instead of different sides of the same, and that what others consider an early premonition of Florida and the upper coasts was simply a duplicated Cuba, to make good the Portuguese conception. It is not explained how so strange a misconception of very palpable truths could have arisen, or how a coast trending north and south so far could have been confounded with one stretching at right angles to such a course for so short a distance.
Stevens traces the influence of his "bogus Cuba" in a long series of maps based on Portuguese notions, in which he names those of Waldseemüller (1513), Stobnicza (1512), Schöner (1515, 1520), Reisch (1515), Bordone (1528), Solinus (1520), Friess (1522), and Grynæus (1532--made probably earlier), as opposed to the Spanish and more truthful view, which is expressed by Ruysch (1507-8) and Peter Martyr, (1511).
It is a proposition not to be dismissed lightly nor accepted triumphantly on our present knowledge. We must wait for further developments.
The fancy that this coast was Asia and that Cuba was Asia might, indeed, have led to the transfer to it at one time of the names which Columbus had placed along the north coast of his supposed peninsular Cuba; but that proves a misplacement of the names, and not a creation of the coast. For a while this continental land was backed up on the maps against a meridian scale, which hid the secret of its western limits, and left it a possible segment of Asia. Then it stood out alone with a north and southwestern line, but with Asia beyond, just as if it were no part of it, and this delineation was common even while there was a division of geographical belief as to North America and Asia being one.
[Sidenote: Cuba an island.]
The fact that Cuba, in the drafting of the La Cosa and Cantino maps, is represented as an island has at times been held to signify that the views of Columbus respecting its peninsular rather than its insular character were not wholly shared by his contemporaries. That foolish act by which, under penalty, the Admiral forced his crew to swear that it was a part of the main might well imply that he expected his assertions would be far from acceptable to other cosmographers. If Varnhagen's opinion as to the track of Vespucius in his voyage of 1497, following the contour of the Gulf of Mexico, be accepted as knowledge of the time, the insularity of Cuba was necessarily proved even at that early day; but it is the opinion of Henry Stevens, as has been already shown, that the green outline of the western parts of Cuba in La Cosa's chart was only the conventional way of expressing an uncertain coast. Consequently it did not imply insularity. If it is to be supposed that the Portuguese had a similar method of expressing uncertainties of coast, they did not employ it in the Cantino map, and Cuba in 1502 is unmistakably an island. It is, moreover, sufficiently like the Cuba of La Cosa to show it was drawn from one and the same prototype. If the maker of the Cantino map followed La Cosa, or a copy of La Cosa, or the material from which La Cosa worked, there is no proof that he ever suspected the peninsularity of Cuba.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Columbus looking on at other explorations.]
Columbus, in his hours of neglect, and amid his unheeded pleas for recognition, during these two grewsome years in Spain, may never have comprehended in their full significance these active efforts of the Portuguese to anticipate his own hopes of a western passage beyond the Golden Chersonesus; but the doings of Mendoza, Cristobal Guerra, and other fellow-subjects of Spain were not wholly unknown to him.
[Sidenote: 1500. October. Bastidas's expedition.]
In October, 1500, and before Columbus knew just what his reception in Spain was going to be, Rodrigo de Bastidas, accompanied by La Cosa and Vasco Nuñez Balboa, sailed from Cadiz on an expedition that had for its object to secure to the Crown one quarter of the profits, and to make an examination of the coast line beyond the bay of Venezuela, in order that it might be made sure that no channel to an open sea lay beyond. The two caravels followed the shore to Nombre de Dios, and at the narrowest part of the isthmus, without suspecting their nearness to the longed-for sea, the navigators turned back. Finding their vessels unseaworthy, for the worms had riddled their bottoms, they sought a harbor in Española, near which their vessels foundered after they had saved a part of their lading. A little later, this gave Bobadilla a chance to arrest the commander for illicit trade with the natives. This transaction was nothing more, apparently, than the barter of trinkets for provisions, as he was leading his men across the island to the settlements.
[Sidenote: Portuguese and English in these regions.]
It was while with Bastidas, in 1501-2, that La Cosa reports seeing the Portuguese prowling about the Caribbean and Mexican waters, seeking for a passage to Calicut. It was while on a mission of remonstrance to Lisbon that La Cosa was later arrested and imprisoned, and remained till August, 1504, a prisoner in Portugal.
[Sidenote: 1502. January. Ojeda's voyage.]
We have seen that in 1499 Ojeda had met or heard of English vessels on the coast of Terra Firma, or professed that he had. The Spanish government, suspecting they were but precursors of others who might attempt to occupy the coast, determined on thwarting such purposes, if possible, by anticipating occupation. Ojeda was given the power to lead thither a colony, if he could do it without cost to the Crown, which reserved a due share of his profits. He obtained the assistance of Juan de Vegara and Garcia de Ocampo, and with this backing he sailed with four ships from Cadiz in January, 1502, while Columbus was preparing his own little fleet for his last voyage. It was a venture, however, that came to naught. The natives, under ample provocation, proved hostile, food was lacking, the leaders quarreled, and the partners of Ojeda, combining, overpowered (May, 1502) their leader, and sent him a prisoner to Española, where he arrived in September, 1502.
[Sidenote: English in the West Indies.]
There has never been any clear definition as to who these Englishmen were, or what was their project, during these earliest years of the sixteenth century. There is evidence that Henry VII. about this time authorized some ventures in which his countrymen were joint sharers with the Portuguese, but we know nothing further of the regions visited than that the Privy Purse expenses show how some Bristol men received a gratuity for having been at the "Newefounde Launde." There is also a vague notion to be formed from an old entry that Sebastian Cabot himself again visited this region in 1503, and brought home three of the natives,--to say nothing of additional even vaguer suspicions of other ventures of the English at this time.
* * * * *
In enumerating the ocean movements that were now going on, some intimation has been given of the tiresome expectancy of something better which was intermittently beguiling the spirits of Columbus during the eighteen months that he remained in Spain. It is necessary to trace his unhappy life in some detail, though the particulars are not abundant.
[Sidenote: Columbus's life in Spain. 1500-1502.]
Ferdinand had not been unobservant of all these expeditionary movements, and they were quite as threatening to the Spanish supremacy in the New World as his own personal defection was to the dejected Admiral. It had become very clear that by tying his own hands, as he had in the compact which Columbus was urging to have observed, the King had allowed opportunities to pass by which he could profit through the newly aroused enthusiasm of the seaports.
[Sidenote: Ferdinand allows other expeditions.]
We have seen that he had, nevertheless, through Fonseca sanctioned the expeditions of Ojeda, Pinzon, and others, and had notably in that of Niño got large profits for the exchequer. He had done this in defiance of the vested rights of Columbus, and there is little doubt that to bring Columbus into disgrace by the loss of his Admiral's power served in part to open the field of discovery more as Ferdinand wished. With the Viceroy dethroned and become a waiting suitor, there was little to stay Ferdinand's ambition in sending out other explorers. His experience had taught him to allow no stipulations on which explorers could found exorbitant demands upon the booty and profit of the ventures. Anybody could sail westward now, and there was no longer the courage of conviction required to face an unknown sea and find an opposite shore. Columbus, who had shown the way, was now easily cast off as a useless pilot.
It was not difficult for the King to frame excuses when Columbus urged his reinstatement. There was no use in sending back an unpopular viceroy before the people of the colony had been quieted. Give them time. It might be seasonable enough to send to them their old master when they had forgotten their misfortunes under him. Perhaps a better man than Bobadilla could be found to still the commotions, and if so he might be sent. In the face of all this and the King's determination, Columbus could do nothing but acquiesce, and so he gradually made up his mind to bide his time once more. It was not a new discipline for him.
[Sidenote: Bobadilla's rule in Española.]
It was clear from the intelligence which was reaching Spain that Bobadilla would have to be superseded. Freed from the restraints which had created so much complaint during the rule of Columbus, and even courted with offers of indulgence, the miserable colony at Española readily degenerated from bad to worse. The new governor had hoped to find that a lack of constraint would do for the people what an excess of it had failed to do. He erred in his judgment, and let the colony slip beyond his control. Licentiousness was everywhere. The only exaction he required was the tribute of gold. He reduced the proportion which must be surrendered to the Crown from a third to an eleventh, but he so apportioned the labor of the natives to the colonists that the yield of gold grew rapidly, and became more with the tax an eleventh than it had been when it was a third. This inhuman degradation of the poor natives had become an organized misery when, a little later, Las Casas arrived in the colony, and he depicts the baleful contrasts of the Indians and their attractive island. Gold was potent, but it was not potent enough to keep Bobadilla in his place. The representations of the agony of life among the natives were so harrowing that it was decided to send a new governor at once.
[Sidenote: Ovando sent to Española.]
The person selected was Nicholas de Ovando, a man of whom Las Casas, who went out with him, gives a high character for justice, sobriety, and graciousness. Perhaps he deserved it. The sympathizers with Columbus find it hard to believe such praise. Ovando was commissioned as governor over all the continental and insular domains, then acquired or thereafter to be added to the Crown in the New World. He was to have his capital at Santo Domingo. He was deputed, with about as much authority as Bobadilla had had, to correct abuses and punish delinquents, and was to take one third of all gold so far stored up, and one half of what was yet to be gathered. He was to monopolize all trade for the Crown. He was to segregate the colonists as much as possible in settlements. No supplies were to be allowed to the people unless they got them through the royal factor. New efforts were to be made through some Franciscans, who accompanied Ovando, to convert the Indians. The natives were to be made to work in the mines as hired servants, paid by the Crown.
[Sidenote: Negro slaves to be introduced.]
It had already become evident that such labor as the mining of gold required was too exhausting for the natives, and the death-rate among them was such that eyes were already opened to the danger of extermination. By a sophistry which suited a sixteenth-century Christian, the existence of this poor race was to be prolonged by introducing the negro race from Africa, to take the heavier burden of the toil, because it was believed they would die more slowly under the trial. So it was royally ordered that slaves, born of Africans, in Spain, might be carried to Española. The promise of Columbus's letter to Sanchez was beginning to prove delusive. It was going to require the degradation of two races instead of one. That was all!
[Sidenote: 1501. Columbus's property restored.]
[Sidenote: His factor.]
To assuage the smart of all this forcible deprivation of his power, Columbus was apprised that under a royal order of September 27, 1501, Ovando would see to the restitution of any property of his which Bobadilla had appropriated, and that the Admiral was to be allowed to send a factor in the fleet to look after his interests under the articles which divided the gold and treasure between him and the Crown. To this office of factor Columbus appointed Alonso Sanchez de Carvajal.
[Sidenote: Ovando's fleet.]
[Sidenote: 1502. February 3. It sails.]
The pomp and circumstance of the fleet were like a biting sarcasm to the poor Admiral. One might expect he could have no high opinions of its pilots, for we find him writing to the sovereigns, on February 6, a letter laying before them certain observations on the art of navigation, in which he says: "There will be many who will desire to sail to the discovered islands; and if the way is known those who have had experience of it may safest traverse it." Perhaps he meant to imply that better pilots were more important than much parade. He in his most favored time had never been fitted out with a fleet of thirty sail, so many of them large ships. He had never carried out so many cavaliers, nor so large a proportion of such persons of rank, as made a shining part of the 2,500 souls now embarked. He could contrast his Franciscan gown and girdle of rope with Ovando's brilliant silks and brocades which the sovereigns authorized him to wear. There was more state in the new governor's bodyguard of twenty-two esquires, mounted and foot, than Columbus had ever dreamed of in Santo Domingo. Instead of vile convicts there were respectable married men with their families, the guaranty of honorable living. So that when the fleet went to sea, February 13, 1502, there were hopes that a right method of founding a colony on family life had at last found favor.
[Sidenote: 1502. April. Reaches Santo Domingo.]
The vessels very soon encountered a gale, in which one ship foundered, and from the deck-loads which were thrown over from the rest and floated to the shore it was for a long time apprehended that the fleet had suffered much more severely. A single ship was all that failed finally to reach Santo Domingo about the middle of April, 1502.
Let us turn now to Columbus himself. He had not failed, as we have said, to reach something like mental quiet in the conviction that he could expect nothing but neglect for the present. So his active mind engaged in those visionary and speculative trains of thought wherein, when his body was weary and his spirits harried, he was prone to find relief.
[Sidenote: Columbus's Libros de las proficias.]
He set himself to the composition of a maundering and erratic paper, which, under the title of Libros de las proficias, is preserved in the Biblioteca Colombina at Seville. The manuscript, however, is not in the handwriting of Columbus, and no one has thought it worth while to print the whole of it.
[Sidenote: Isaiah's prophecy.]
[Sidenote: Conquest of the Holy Land.]
In it there is evidence of his study, with the assistance of a Carthusian friar, of the Bible and of the early fathers of the Church, and it shows, as his letter to Juan's nurse had shown, how he had at last worked himself into the belief that all his early arguments for the westward passage were vain; that he had simply been impelled by something that he had not then suspected; and that his was but a predestined mission to make good what he imagined was the prophecy of Isaiah in the Apocalypse. This having been done, there was something yet left to be accomplished before the anticipated eclipse of all earthly things came on, and that was the conquest of the Holy Land, for which he was the appointed leader. He addressed this driveling exposition, together with an urgent appeal for the undertaking of the crusade, to Ferdinand and Isabella, but without convincing them that such a self-appointed instrument of God was quite worthy of their employment.
[Sidenote: End of the world.]
The great catastrophe of the world's end was, as Columbus calculated, about 155 years away. He based his estimate upon an opinion of St. Augustine that the world would endure for 7,000 years; and upon King Alfonso's reckoning that nearly 5,344 years had passed when Christ appeared. The 1,501 years since made the sum 6,845, leaving out of the 7,000 the 155 years of his belief.
[Sidenote: Defeated by Satan.]
He also fancied, or professed to believe, in a letter which he subsequently wrote to the Pope, that the present deprivation of his titles and rights was the work of Satan, who came to see that the success of Columbus in the Indies would be only a preparation for the Admiral's long-vaunted recovery of the Holy Land. The Spanish government meanwhile knew, and they had reason to know, that their denial of his prerogatives had quite as much to do with other things as with a legion of diabolical powers. Unfortunately for Columbus, neither they nor the Pope were inclined to act on any interpretation of fate that did not include a civil policy of justice and prosperity.
[Sidenote: His geographical whimsies.]
[Sidenote: Would seek a passage westerly through the Caribbean Sea.]
[Sidenote: Columbus misunderstands the currents.]
These visions of Columbus were harmless, and served to beguile him with pious whimsies. But the mood did not last. He next turned to his old geographical problems. The Portuguese were searching north and south for the passage that would lead to some indefinite land of spices, and afford a new way to reach the trade with Calicut and the Moluccas, which at this time, by the African route, was pouring wealth into the Portuguese treasury in splendid contrast to the scant return from the Spanish Indies. He harbored a belief that a better passage might yet be found beyond the Caribbean Sea. La Cosa, in placing that vignette of St. Christopher and the infant Christ athwart the supposed juncture of Asia and South America, had eluded the question, not solved it. Columbus would now go and attack the problem on the spot. His expectation to find a desired opening in that direction was based on physical phenomena, but in fact on only partial knowledge of them. He had been aware of the strong currents which set westward through the Caribbean Sea, and he had found them still flowing west when he had reached the limit of his exploration of the southern coast of Cuba. Bastidas, who had just pushed farther west on the main coast, had turned back while the currents were still flowing on, along what seemed an endless coast beyond. Bastidas did not arrive in Spain till some months after Columbus had sailed, for he was detained a prisoner in Española at this time. Some tidings of his experiences may have reached Spain, however, or the Admiral may not have got his confirmation of these views till he found that voyager at Santo Domingo, later. Columbus had believed Cuba to be another main, confining this onward waste of waters to the south of it.
[Sidenote: Gulf Stream.]
It was clear to him that such currents must find an outlet to the west, and if found, such a passage would carry him on to the sea that washed the Golden Chersonesus. He indeed died without knowing the truth. This same current, deflected about Honduras and Yucatan, sweeps by a northerly circuit round the great Gulf of Mexico, and, passing out by the Cape of Florida, flows northward in what we now call the Gulf Stream.
There is nothing in all the efforts of the canonizers more absurdly puerile than De Lorgues's version of the way in which Columbus came to believe in this strait. He had a vision, and saw it! The only difficulty in the matter was that the poor Admiral was so ecstatic in his hallucination that he mistook the narrowness of an isthmus for the narrowness of a strait!
[Sidenote: A convenient relief to Ferdinand to send Columbus on such a search.]
[Sidenote: 1501. Columbus prepares to equip his ships.]
[Sidenote: 1502. February. Columbus writes to the Pope.]
The proposition of such a search was not inopportune in the eyes of Ferdinand. There were those about the Court who thought it unwise to give further employment to a man who was degraded from his honors; but to the King it was a convenient way of removing a persistent and active-minded complainant from the vicinity of the Court, to send him on some quest or other, and no one could tell but there was some truth in his new views. It was worth while to let him try. So once again, by the royal permission, Columbus set himself to work equipping a little fleet. It was the autumn of 1501 when he appeared in Seville with the sovereign's commands. He varied his work of preparing the ships with spending some part of his time on his treatise on the prophecies, while a friar named Gaspar Gorricio helped him in the labor. Early in 1502 he had got it into shape to present to the sovereigns, and in February he wrote the letter to Pope Alexander VII. which has already been mentioned.
[Sidenote: Forbidden to touch at Española.]
As the preparations went on, he began to think of Española, and how he might perhaps be allowed to touch there; but orders were given to him forbidding it on the outward passage, though suffering it on the return, for it was hoped by that time that the disorders of the island would be suppressed. It was arranged that the Adelantado and his own son Ferdinand should accompany him, and some interpreters learned in Arabic were put on board, in case his success put him in contact with the people of the Great Khan.
The suspension of his rights lay heavily on his mind, and early in March, 1502, he ventured to refer to the subject once more in a letter to the sovereigns. They replied, March 14, in some instructions which they sent from Valencia de Torre, advising him to keep his mind at ease, and leave such things to the care of his son Diego. They assured him that in due time the proper restitution of all would be made, and that he must abide the time.
[Sidenote: 1502. January 5. Columbus's care to preserve his titles, etc.]
He had already taken steps to secure a perpetuity of the record of his honors and deeds, if nothing else could be permanent. It was at Seville, January 5, 1502, that Columbus, appearing before a notary in his own house, attested that series of documents respecting his titles and prerogatives which are so religiously preserved at Genoa. These papers, as we have seen, were copies which Columbus had lately secured from the documents in the Spanish Admiralty, among which he was careful to include the revocation of June 2, 1497, of the licenses which, much to Columbus's annoyance, had been granted in 1495, to allow others than himself to explore in the new regions. We may not wonder at this, but we can hardly conjecture why a transaction of his which had caused as much as anything his wrongs, mortification, and the loss of his dignities should have been as assiduously preserved. These are the royal orders which enabled Columbus, at his request, to fill up his colony with unshackled convicts. This he might as well have let the world forget. The royal order requiring Bobadilla or his successor to restore all the sequestered property of Columbus, and the new declaration of his rights, he might well have been anxious to preserve.
[Sidenote: Columbus and the Bank of St. George.]
There was one other act to be done which lay upon his mind, now that the time of sailing approached. He wished to make provision that his heirs should be able to confer some favor on his native city, and he directed that investments should be made for that purpose in the Bank of St. George at Genoa. He then notified the managers of that bank of his intention in a letter which is so characteristic of his moods of dementation that it is here copied as Harrisse translates it:--
HIGH NOBLE LORDS:--Although the body walks about here, the heart is constantly over there. Our Lord has conferred on me the greatest favor to any one since David. The results of my undertaking already appear, and would shine greatly were they not concealed by the blindness of the government. I am going again to the Indies under the auspices of the Holy Trinity, soon to return; and since I am mortal, I leave it with my son Diego that you receive every year, forever, one tenth of the entire revenue, such as it may be, for the purpose of reducing the tax upon corn, wine, and other provisions. If that tenth amounts to something, collect it. If not, take at least the will for the deed. I beg of you to entertain regard for the son I have recommended to you. Nicolo de Oderigo knows more about my own affairs than I do myself, and I have sent him the transcripts of any privileges and letters for safe-keeping. I should be glad if you could see them. My lords, the King and Queen endeavor to honor me more than ever. May the Holy Trinity preserve your noble persons and increase your most magnificent House. Done in Sevilla, on the second day of April, 1502.
The chief Admiral of the ocean, Viceroy and Governor-General of the islands and continent of Asia and the Indies, of my lords, the King and Queen, their Captain-General of the sea, and of their Council.
.S. .S.A.S. X M Y [Greek: Chr~o] FERENS.
[Sidenote: 1502. December 8. The bank's reply.]
The letter was handed by Columbus to a Genoese banker, then in Spain, Francisco de Rivarolla, who forwarded it to Oderigo; but as this ambassador was then on his way to Spain, Harrisse conjectures that he did not receive the letter till his return to Genoa, for the reply of the bank is dated December 8, 1502, long after Columbus had sailed. This response was addressed to Diego, and inclosed a letter to the Admiral. The great affection and good will of Columbus towards "his first country" gratified them inexpressibly, as they said to the son; and to the father they acknowledged the act of his intentions to be "as great and extraordinary as that which has been recorded about any man in the world, considering that by your own skill, energy, and prudence, you have discovered such a considerable portion of this earth and sphere of the lower world, which during so many years past and centuries had remained unknown to its inhabitants."
The letter of Columbus to the bank remained on the files of that institution--a single sheet of paper, written on one side only, and pierced in the centre for the thread of the file--undiscovered till the archivist of the bank, attracted by the indorsement, M D II, EPLA D. ADMIRATI DON XROPHORI COLUMBI, identified it in 1829, when, at the request of the authorities of Genoa, it was transferred to the keeping of its archivists. It is to be seen at the city hall, to-day, placed between two glass plates, so that either side of the paper can be read.