Christopher Columbus and How He Received and Imparted the Spirit of Discovery Part 17

[Sidenote: Ferdinand.]

The king, perhaps, was good enough for a king as such personages went in the fifteenth century; but his smiles and remorseless coldness were mixed as few could mix them, even in those days. If the Pope regarded him from Italy, that Holy Father called him pious. The modern student finds him a bigot. His subjects thought him great and glorious, but they did not see his dispatches, nor know his sometimes baleful domination in his cabinet. The French would not trust him. The English watched his ambition. The Moors knew him as their conqueror. The Jews fled before his evil eye. The miserable saw him in his inquisitors. All this pleased the Pope, and the papal will made him in preferred phrase His Most Catholic Majesty,--a phrase that rings in diplomatic formalities to-day.

Every purpose upon which he had set his heart was apt to blind him to aught else, and at times very conveniently so. We may allow that it is precisely this single mind which makes a conspicuous name in history; but conspicuousness and justness do not always march with a locked step.

He had, of course, virtues that shone when the sun shone. He could be equable. He knew how to work steadily, to eat moderately, and to dress simply. He was enterprising in his actions, as the Moors and heretics found out. He did not extort money; he only extorted agonized confessions. He said ma.s.ses, and prayed equally well for G.o.d's benediction on evil as on good things. He made promises, and then got the papal dispensation to break them. He juggled in state policy as his mind changed, and he worked his craft very readily. Machiavelli would have liked this in him, and indeed he was a good scholar of an existing school, which counted the act of outwitting better than the arts of honesty; and perhaps the world is not loftier in the purposes of statecraft to-day. He got people to admire him, but few to love him.

[Sidenote: Columbus's views considered by Talavera and others.]

[Sidenote: At Salamanca.]

The result of an audience with the king was that the projects of Columbus were committed to Talavera, to be laid by him before such a body of wise men as the prior could gather in council. Las Casas says that the consideration of the plans was entrusted to "certain persons of the Court," and he enumerates Cardinal Mendoza, Diego de Deza, Alonso de Cardenas, and Juan Cabrero, the royal chamberlain. The meeting was seemingly held in the winter of 1486-87. The Catholic writers accuse Irving, and apparently with right, of an unwarranted a.s.sumption of the importance of what he calls the Council at Salamanca, and they find he has no authority for it, except a writer one hundred and twenty years after the event, who mentions the matter but incidentally. This source was Remesal's _Historia de Chyapa_ (Madrid, 1619), an account of one of the Mexican provinces. There seems no reason to suppose that at best it was anything more than some informal conference of Talavera with a few councilors, and in no way a.s.sociated with the prestige of the university at Salamanca. The registers of the university, which begin back of the a.s.signed date for such Council, have been examined in vain for any reference to it.

[Ill.u.s.tration: UNIVERSITY OF SALAMANCA.

[_Espana_, p. 132]]

[Ill.u.s.tration: MONUMENT TO COLUMBUS ERECTED AT GENOA, 1862.]

The "Junta of Salamanca" has pa.s.sed into history as a convocation of considerable extent and importance, and a representation of it is made to adorn one of the bas-reliefs of the Admiral's monument at Genoa. We have, however, absolutely no doc.u.mentary records of it. Of whatever moment it may have been, if the problem as Columbus would have presented it had been discussed, the reports, if preserved, could have thrown much light upon the relations which the cosmographical views of its princ.i.p.al character bore to the opinions then prevailing in learned circles of Spain. We know what the _Historie_, Bernaldez, and Las Casas tell us of Columbus's advocacy, but we must regret the loss of his own language and his own way of explaining himself to these learned men.

Such a paper would serve a purpose of showing how, in this period of courageous and ardent insistence on a physical truth, he stood manfully for the light that was in him; and it would afford a needed foil to those pitiful aberrations of intellect which, in the years following, took possession of him, and which were so constantly reiterated with painful and maundering wailing.

[Sidenote: Find favor with Deza.]

Discarding, then, the array of argument which Irving borrows from Remesal, and barely a.s.sociating a little conference, in which Columbus is a central figure, with that St. Stephen's convent whose wondrous petrifactions of creamy and reticulated stone still hold the admiring traveler, we must accept nothing more about its meetings than the scant testimony which has come down to us. It is pleasant to think how it was here that the active interest which Diego de Deza, a Dominican friar, finally took in the cause of Columbus may have had its beginning; but the extent of our positive knowledge regarding the meeting is the deposition of Rodriguez de Maldonado, who simply says that several learned men and mariners, hearing the arguments of Columbus, decided they could not be true, or at least a majority so decided, and that this testimony against Columbus had no effect to convince him of his errors.

This is all that the "Junta of Salamanca" meant. A minority of unknown size favored the advocate.

[Sidenote: 1487. The Court at Cordoba.]

[Sidenote: Malaga surrenders, 1487.]

When the spring of 1487 came, and the court departed to Cordoba, and began to make preparations for the campaign against Malaga, there was no hope that the considerations which had begun in the learned sessions at Salamanca would be followed up. Columbus seems to have journeyed after the Court in its migrations: sometimes lured by pittances doled out to him by the royal treasurer; sometimes getting pecuniary a.s.sistance from his new friend, Diego de Deza; selling now and then a map that he had made, it may be; and accepting hospitality where he could get it, from such as Alonso de Quintanilla. In these wandering days, he was for a while, at least, in attendance on the Court, then surrounded with military parade, before the Moorish stronghold at Malaga. The town surrendered on August 18, 1487, and the Court then returned to Cordoba.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SPAIN, 1482.

[From the _Ptolemy_ of 1482.]]

[Sidenote: 1487. Intimacy of Columbus with Beatrix Enriquez.]

[Sidenote: Ferdinand Columbus born, 1488.]

It was in the autumn of 1487, at Cordoba, that Columbus fell into such an intimacy as spousehood only can sanction with a person of good condition as to birth, but poor in the world's goods. Whether this relation had the sanction of the Church or not has been a subject of much inquiry and opinion. The cla.s.s of French writers, who are aiming to secure the canonization of Columbus, have found it essential to clear the moral character of Columbus from every taint, and they confidently a.s.sert, and doubtless think they show, that nothing but conjugal right is manifest in this connection,--a question which the Church will in due time have to decide, if it ever brings itself to the recognition of the saintly character of the great discoverer. Even the ardent supporters of the cause of beatification are forced to admit that there is no record of such a marriage. No contemporary recognition of such a relation is evinced by any family ceremonies of baptism or the like, and there is no mention of a wife in all the transactions of the crowning endeavors of his life. As viceroy, at a later day, he constantly appears with no attendant vice-queen. She is absolutely out of sight until Columbus makes a significant reference to her in his last will, when he recommends this Beatrix Enriquez to his lawful son Diego; saying that she is a person to whom the testator had been under great obligations, and that his conscience is burdened respecting her, for a reason which he does not then think fitting to explain. This testamentary behest and acknowledgment, in connection with other manifestations, and the absence of proof to the contrary, has caused the belief to be general among his biographers, early and late, that the fruit of this intimacy, Ferdinand Columbus, was an illegitimate offspring. He was born, as near as can be made out, on the 15th of August, 1488. The mother very likely received for a while some consolation from her lover, but Columbus did not apparently carry her to Seville, when he went there himself; and the support which he gave her was not altogether regularly afforded, and was never of the quality which he asked Diego to grant to her when he died.

She unquestionably survived the making of Diego's will in 1523, and then she fades into oblivion. Her son, Ferdinand, if he is the author of the _Historie_, makes no mention of a marriage to his mother, though he is careful to record the one which was indisputably legal, and whose fruit was Diego, the Admiral's successor. The lawful son was directed by Columbus, when starting on his third voyage, to pay to Beatrix ten thousand maravedis a year; but he seems to have neglected to do so for the last three or four years of her life. Diego finally ordered these arrears to be paid to her heirs. Las Casas distinctly speaks of Ferdinand as a natural son, and Las Casas had the best of opportunities for knowing whereof he wrote.

[Sidenote: Columbus sends his brother to England.]

[Sidenote: Relations of England to the views of Columbus.]

While all this suspense and amorous intrigue were perplexing the ardent theorist, he is supposed to have dispatched his brother Bartholomew to England to disclose his projects to Henry VII. Hakluyt, in his _Westerne Planting_, tells us that it "made much for the t.i.tle of the kings of England" to the New World that Henry VII. gave a ready acceptance to the theory of Columbus as set forth somewhat tardily by his brother Bartholomew, when escaping from the detention of the pirates, he was at last able, on February 13, 1488, to offer in England his sea-card, embodying Christopher's theories, for the royal consideration.

[Sidenote: The Cabots in England.]

William Castell, in his _Short Discovery of America_, says that Henry VII. "unhappily refused to be at any charge in the discovery, supposing the learned Columbus to build castles in the air." It is a common story that Henry finally brought himself to accede to the importunities of Bartholomew, but only at a late day, and after Christopher had effected his conquest of the Spanish Court. Columbus himself is credited with saying that Henry actually wrote him a letter of acceptance. This epistle was very likely a fruition of the new impulses to oceanic discovery which the presence, a little later, of the Venetian Cabots, was making current among the English sailors; for John Cabot and his sons, one of whom, Sebastian, being at that time a youth of sixteen or seventeen, had, according to the best testimony, established a home in Bristol, not far from 1490.

If the report of the Spanish envoy in England to his sovereigns is correct as to dates, it was near this time that the Bristol merchants were renewing their quests oceanward for the islands of Brazil and the Seven Cities. We have seen that these islands with others had for some time appeared on the conjectural charts of the Atlantic, and very likely they had appeared on the sea-card shown by Bartholomew Columbus to Henry VII. These efforts may perhaps have been in a measure instigated by that fact. At all events, any hazards of further western exploration could be met with greater heart if such stations of progress could be found in mid ocean. Of the report of all this which Bartholomew may have made to his brother we know absolutely nothing, and he seems not to have returned to Spain till after a sojourn in France which ended in 1494.

[Sidenote: Columbus invited back to Portugal.]

It was believed by Irving that Columbus, having opened a correspondence with the Portuguese king respecting a return to the service of that country, had received from that monarch an epistle, dated March 20, 1488, in which he was permitted to come back, with the offer of protection against any suit of civil or criminal nature, and that this had been declined. We are left to conjecture of what suits of either kind he could have been apprehensive.

Humboldt commends the sagacity of Navarrete in discerning that it was not so much the persuasion of Diego de Deza which kept Columbus at this time from accepting such royal offers, as the illicit connection which he had formed in Cordoba with Dona Beatrix Enriquez, who before the summer was over had given birth to a son.

On the other hand, that the permission was not neglected seems proved by a memorandum made by Columbus's own hand in a copy of Pierre d'Ailly's _Imago Mundi_, preserved in the Biblioteca Colombina at Seville, where, under date of December, 1488, "at Lisbon," he speaks of the return of Diaz from his voyage to the Cape of Good Hope. This proof is indeed subject to the qualification that Las Casas has considered the handwriting of the note to be that of Bartholomew Columbus, but Harrisse has no question of its ident.i.ty with the chirography of Columbus. This last critic ventures the conjecture that it was in some way to settle the estate of his wife that Columbus at this time visited Portugal.

[Sidenote: Spanish subsidies withheld.]

Columbus had ceased to receive the Spanish subsidies in June, 1488, or at least we know no record of any later largess. Ferdinand was born to him in August. It was very likely subsequent to this last event that Columbus crossed the Spanish frontier into Portugal, if Harrisse's view of his crossing at all be accepted. His stay was without doubt a short one, and from 1489 to 1492 there is every indication that he never left the Spanish kingdom.

[Sidenote: Duke of Medina-Celi harbors Columbus.]

We know on the testimony of a letter of Luis de la Cerda, the Duke of Medina-Celi, given in Navarrete, that for two years after the arrival of Columbus from Portugal he had been a guest under the duke's roof in Cogulludo, and it seems to Harrisse probable that this gracious help on the part of the duke was bestowed after the return to Spain. All that we know with certainty of its date is that it occurred before the first voyage, the duke himself mentioning it in a letter of March 19, 1493.

[Sidenote: 1489. Columbus ordered to Cordoba.]

It was not till May, 1489, when the court was again at Cordoba, according to Diego Ortiz de Zuniga, in his work on Seville, that the sovereigns were gracious enough to order Columbus to appear there, when they furnished him lodgings. They also, perhaps, at the same time, issued a general order, dated at Cordoba May 12, in which all cities and towns were directed to furnish suitable accommodations to Columbus and his attendants, inasmuch as he was journeying in the royal service.

[Sidenote: Columbus at the siege of Baza.]

[Sidenote: Friars from the Holy Sepulchre.]

The year 1489 was a hazardous but fruitful one. The sovereigns were pus.h.i.+ng vigorously their conquest of the Moor. Isabella herself attended the army, and may have appeared in the beleaguering lines about Baza, in one of those suits of armor which are still shown to travelers. Zuniga says that Columbus arrayed himself among the combatants, and was doubtless acquainted with the mission of two friars who had been guardians of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem. These priests arrived during the siege, bringing a message from the Grand Soldan of Egypt, in which that potentate threatened to destroy all Christians within his grasp, unless the war against Granada should be stopped. The point of driving the Moors from Spain was too nearly reached for such a threat to be effective, and Isabella decreed the annual payment of a thousand ducats to support the faithful custodians of the Sepulchre, and sent a veil embroidered with her own hand to decorate the shrine. Irving traces to this circ.u.mstance the impulse, which Columbus frequently in later days showed, to devote the antic.i.p.ated wealth of the Indies to a crusade in Palestine, to recover and protect the Holy Sepulchre.

[Sidenote: Boabdil surrenders, December 22, 1489.]

[Sidenote: Columbus's views again considered.]

The campaign closed with the surrender on December 22 of the fortress of Baza, when Spain received from Muley Boabdil, the elder of the rival Moorish kings, all the territory which he claimed to have in his power.

In February, 1490, Ferdinand and Isabella entered Seville in triumph, and a season of hilarity and splendor followed, signalized in the spring by the celebration with great jubilation of the marriage of the Princess Isabella with Don Alonzo, the heir to the crown of Portugal. These engrossing scenes were little suited to give Columbus a chance to press his projects on the Court. He soon found nothing could be done to get the farther attention of the monarchs till some respites occurred in the preparations for their final campaign against the younger Moorish king.

It was at this time, as Irving and others have conjectured, that the consideration of the project of a western pa.s.sage, which had been dropped when events moved the Court from Salamanca, was again taken up by such investigators as Talavera had summoned, and again the result was an adverse decision. This determination was communicated by Talavera himself to the sovereign, and it was accompanied by the opinion that it did not become great princes to engage in such chimerical undertakings.

[Sidenote: Deza impressed.]

[Sidenote: Delays.]