Christopher Columbus and How He Received and Imparted the Spirit of Discovery Part 46

[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 compa.s.sion, nor can we read it dispa.s.sionately 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 const.i.tuted 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 G.o.d 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 ama.s.s treasure enough in seven years to undertake his crusade to Jerusalem. This visible G.o.dhead then comforted him with the a.s.surance that his divine power would see that it came to pa.s.s. "The seven years you were to await have not yet pa.s.sed. 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.

CHAPTER 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 s.h.i.+ps 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 dispa.s.sionate 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 pa.s.s,--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 s.h.i.+p 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, Dona 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 pa.s.sage 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 Dona 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 rehea.r.s.ed 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 rest.i.tution, 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 Espanola 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 s.h.i.+ps 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+ps, under the command of Goncalo 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 doc.u.ment. Indeed, the historian, if he weighs all the testimony that has been adduced for and against the partic.i.p.ancy 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 s.h.i.+p 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 lat.i.tude 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MUNDUS NOVUS, first page.]

[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 Waldseemuller is thought to have first made, and which became the prototype of the recognized Waldseemuller 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 a.s.serting 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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 Espanola, had turned their attention in this direction, and had thought of sending s.h.i.+ps 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: STRAITS OF BELLE ISLE, SHOWING SITE OF EARLY NORMAN FIs.h.i.+NG STATION AT BRADORE.

[After Reclus's _L'Amerique_.]]

[Ill.u.s.tration: MS. OF GASPAR CORTEREAL.

[From Harrisse's _Cortereal_, _Postscriptum_, 1883.]]

[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 pa.s.sages 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.]