Christopher Columbus and How He Received and Imparted the Spirit of Discovery Part 5

The personal contributions of the later writers, Munoz and Navarrete, have been already considered, in speaking of the diversified ma.s.s of doc.u.mentary proofs which accompany or gave rise to their narratives.

The _Colon en Espana_ of Tomas Rodriguez Pinilla (Madrid, 1884) is in effect a life of the Admiral; but it ignores much of the recent critical and controversial literature, and deals mainly with the old established outline of events.

[Sidenote: German writers.]

[Sidenote: Humboldt.]

Among the Germans there was nothing published of any importance till the critical studies of Forster, Peschel, and Ruge, in recent days. De Bry had, indeed, by his translations of Benzoni (1594) and Herrera (1623), familiarized the Germans with the main facts of the career of Columbus.

During the present century, Humboldt, in his _Examen Critique de l'Histoire et de la Geographie du Nouveau Continent_, has borrowed the language of France to show the scope of his critical and learned inquiries into the early history of the Spanish contact in America, and has left it to another hand to give a German rendering to his labors.

With this work by Humboldt, brought out in its completer shape in 1836-39, and using most happily all that had been done by Munoz and Navarrete to make clear both the acts and environments of the Admiral, the intelligence of our own time may indeed be said to have first clearly apprehended, under the light of a critical spirit, in which Irving was deficient, the true significance of the great deeds that gave America to Europe. Humboldt has strikingly grouped the lives of Toscanelli and Las Casas, from the birth of the Florentine physician in 1397 to the death of the Apostle to the Indians in 1566, as covering the beginning and end of the great discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

[Sidenote: Henry Harrisse.]

It is also to be remarked that this service of broadly, and at the same time critically, surveying the field was the work of a German writing in French; while it is to an American citizen writing in French that we owe, in more recent years, such a minute collation and examination of every original source of information as set the labors of Henry Harrisse, for thoroughness and discrimination, in advance of any critical labor that has ever before been given to the career and character of Christopher Columbus. Without the aid of his researches, as embodied in his _Christophe Colomb_ (Paris, 1884), it would have been quite impossible for the present writer to have reached conclusions on a good many mooted points in the history of the Admiral and of his reputation. Of almost equal usefulness have been the various subsidiary books and tracts which Harrisse has devoted to similar fields.

Harrisse's books const.i.tute a good example of the constant change of opinion and revision of the relations of facts which are going on incessantly in the mind of a vigilant student in recondite fields of research. The progress of the correction of error respecting Columbus is ill.u.s.trated continually in his series of books on the great navigator, beginning with the _Notes on Columbus_ (N. Y., 1866), which have been intermittently published by him during the last twenty-five years.

Harrisse himself is a good deal addicted to hypotheses; but they fare hard at his hands if advanced by others.

[Sidenote: French writers.]

[Sidenote: Attempted canonization of Columbus.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: ROSELLY DE LORGUES.]

The only other significant essays which have been made in French have been a series of biographies of Columbus, emphasizing his missionary spirit, which have been aimed to prepare the way for the canonization of the great navigator, in recognition of his instrumentality in carrying the cross to the New World. That, in the spirit which characterized the age of discovery, the voyage of Columbus was, at least in profession, held to be one conducted primarily for that end does not, certainly, admit of dispute. Columbus himself, in his letter to Sanchez, speaks of the rejoicing of Christ at seeing the future redemption of souls. He made a first offering of the foreign gold by converting a ma.s.s of it into a cup to hold the sacred host, and he spent a wordy enthusiasm in promises of a new crusade to wrest the Holy Sepulchre from the Moslems.

Ferdinand and Isabella dwelt upon the propagandist spirit of the enterprise they had sanctioned, in their appeals to the Pontiff to confirm their worldly gain in its results. Ferdinand, the son of the Admiral, referring to the family name of Colombo, speaks of his father as like Noah's dove, carrying the olive branch and oil of baptism over the ocean. Professions, however, were easy; faith is always exuberant under success, and the world, and even the Catholic world, learned, as the ages went on, to look upon the spirit that put the poor heathen beyond the pale of humanity as not particularly sanctifying a pioneer of devastation.

[Sidenote: Roselly de Lorgues.]

It is the world's misfortune when a great opportunity loses any of its dignity; and it is no great satisfaction to look upon a person of Columbus's environments and find him but a creature of questionable grace. So his canonization has not, with all the endeavors which have been made, been brought about. The most conspicuous of the advocates of it, with a crowd of imitators about him, has been Antoine Francois Felix Valalette, Comte Roselly de Lorgues, who began in 1844 to devote his energies to this end. He has published several books on Columbus, part of them biographical, and all of them, including his _Christoph Colomb_ of 1864, mere disguised supplications to the Pope to order a deserved sanctification. As contributions to the historical study of the life of Columbus, they are of no importance whatever. Every act and saying of the Admiral capable of subserving the purpose in view are simply made the salient points of a career a.s.sumed to be holy. Columbus was in fact of a piece, in this respect, with the age in which he lived. The official and officious religious profession of the time belonged to a period which invented the Inquisition and extirpated a race in order to send them to heaven. None knew this better than those, like Las Casas, who mated their faith with charity of act. Columbus and Las Casas had little in common.

The _Histoire Posthume de Colomb_, which Roselly de Lorgues finally published in 1885, is recognized even by Catholic writers as a work of great violence and indiscretion, in its denunciations of all who fail to see the saintly character of Columbus. Its inordinate intemperance gave a great advantage to Cesario Fernandez Duro in his examination of De Lorgues's position, made in his _Colon y la Historia Postuma_.

Columbus was certainly a mundane verity. De Lorgues tells us that if we cannot believe in the supernatural we cannot understand this worldly man. The writers who have followed him, like Charles Buet in his _Christophe Colomb_ (Paris, 1886), have taken this position. The Catholic body has so far summoned enough advocates of historic truth to prevent the result which these enthusiasts have kept in view, notwithstanding the seeming acquiescence of Pius IX. The most popular of the idealizing lives of Columbus is probably that by Auguste, Marquis de Belloy, which is tricked out with a display of engravings as idealized as the text, and has been reproduced in English at Philadelphia (1878, 1889). It is simply an ordinary rendering of the common and conventional stories of the last four centuries. The most eminent Catholic historical student of the United States, Dr. John Gilmary Shea, in a paper on this century's estimates of Columbus, in the _American Catholic Quarterly Review_ (1887), while referring to the "imposing array of members of the hierarchy" who have urged the beatification of Columbus, added, "But calm official scrutiny of the question was required before permission could be given to introduce the cause;" and this permission has not yet been given, and the evidence in its favor has not yet been officially produced.

France has taken the lead in these movements for canonization, ostensibly for the reason that she needed to make some reparation for s.n.a.t.c.hing the honor of naming the New World from Columbus, through the printing-presses of Saint Die and Stra.s.sburg. A sketch of the literature which has followed this movement is given in Baron van Brocken's _Des Vicissitudes Posthumes de Christophe Colomb, et de sa Beatification Possible_ (Leipzig et Paris, 1865).

[Sidenote: English writers.]

[Sidenote: Robertson.]

Of the writers in English, the labors of Hakluyt and Purchas only incidentally touched the career of Columbus; and it was not till Stevens issued his garbled version of Herrera in 1725, that the English public got the record of the Spanish historian, garnished with something that did not represent the original. This book of Stevens is responsible for not a little in English opinion respecting the Spanish age of discovery, which needs in these later days to be qualified. Some of the early collections of voyages, like those of Churchill, Pinkerton, and Kerr, included the story of the _Historie_ of 1571. It was not till Robertson, in 1777, published the beginning of a contemplated _History of America_ that the English reader had for the first time a scholarly and justified narrative, which indeed for a long time remained the ordinary source of the English view of Columbus. It was, however, but an outline sketch, not a sixth or seventh part in extent of what Irving, when he was considering the subject, thought necessary for a reasonable presentation of the subject. Robertson's footnotes show that his main dependence for the story of Columbus was upon the pages of the _Historie_ of 1571, Peter Martyr, Oviedo, and Herrera. He was debarred the help to be derived from what we now use, as conveying Columbus's own record of his story. Lord Grantham, then the British amba.s.sador at Madrid, did all the service he could, and his secretary of legation worked a.s.ssiduously in complying with the wishes which Robertson preferred; but no solicitation could at that day render easily accessible the archives at Simancas.

Still, Robertson got from one source or another more than it was pleasant to the Spanish authorities to see in print, and they later contrived to prevent a publication of his work in Spanish.

[Sidenote: Jeremy Belknap.]

The earliest considerable recounting of the story of Columbus in America was by Dr. Jeremy Belknap, who, having delivered a commemorative discourse in Boston in 1792, before the Ma.s.sachusetts Historical Society, afterward augmented his text when it became a part of his well-known _American Biography_, a work of respectable standing for the time, but little remembered to-day.

[Sidenote: Was.h.i.+ngton Irving.]

It was in 1827 that Was.h.i.+ngton Irving published his _Life of Columbus_, and he produced a book that has long remained for the English reader a standard biography. Irving's canons of historical criticism were not, however, such as the fearless and discriminating student to-day would approve. He commended Herrera for "the amiable and pardonable error of softening excesses," as if a historian sat in a confessional to deal out exculpations. The learning which probes long established pretenses and grateful deceits was not acceptable to Irving. "There is a certain meddlesome spirit," he says, "which, in the garb of learned research, goes prying about the traces of history, casting down its monuments, and marring and mutilating its fairest trophies. Care should be taken to vindicate great names from such pernicious erudition."

Under such conditions as Irving summoned, there was little chance that a world's exemplar would be pushed from his pedestal, no matter what the evidence. The _vera pro gratis_ in personal characterization must not a.s.sail the traditional hero. And such was Irving's notion of the upright intelligence of a historian.

Mr. Alexander H. Everett, who was then the minister of the United States at Madrid, saw a chance of making a readable book out of the journal of Columbus as preserved by Las Casas, and recommended the task of translating it to Irving, then in Europe. This proposition carried the willing writer to Madrid, where he found comfortable quarters, with quick sympathy of intercourse, under the roof of a Boston scholar then living there, Obadiah Rich. The first two volumes of the doc.u.mentary work of Navarrete coming out opportunely, Irving was not long in determining that, with its wealth of material, there was a better opportunity for a newly studied life of Columbus than for the proposed task. So Irving settled down in Madrid to the larger endeavor, and soon found that he could have other a.s.sistance and encouragement from Navarrete himself, from the Duke of Veragua, and from the then possessor of the papers of Munoz. The subject grew under his hands. "I had no idea," he says, "of what a complete labyrinth I had entangled myself in." He regretted that the third volume of Navarrete's book was not far enough advanced to be serviceable; but he worked as best he could, and found many more facilities than Robertson's helper had discovered. He went to the Biblioteca Colombina, and he even brought the annotations of Columbus in the copy of Pierre d'Ailly, there preserved, to the attention of its custodians for the first time; almost feeling himself the discoverer of the book, though it was known to him that Las Casas, at least, had had the advantage of using these minutes of Columbus.

Irving knew that his pains were not unavailing, at any rate, for the English reader. "I have woven into my book," he says, "many curious particulars not hitherto known concerning Columbus; and I think I have thrown light upon some points of his character which have not been brought out by his former biographers." One of the things that pleased the new biographer most was his discovery, as he felt, in the account by Bernaldez, that Columbus was born ten years earlier than had been usually reckoned; and he supposed that this increase of the age of the discoverer at the time of his voyage added much greater force to the characteristics of his career. Irving's book readily made a mark.

Jeffrey thought that its fame would be enduring, and at a time when no one looked for new light from Italy, he considered that Irving had done best in working, almost exclusively, the Spanish field, where alone "it was obvious" material could be found.

When Alexander H. Everett, pardonably, as a G.o.dfather to the work, undertook in January, 1829, to say in the _North American Review_ that Irving's book was a delight of readers, he antic.i.p.ated the judgment of posterity; but when he added that it was, by its perfection, the despair of critics, he was forgetful of a method of critical research that is not p.r.o.ne to be dazed by the prestige of demiG.o.ds.

In the interval between the first and second editions of the book, Irving paid a visit to Palos and the convent of La Rabida, and he got elsewhere some new light in the papers of the lawsuit of Columbus's heirs. The new edition which soon followed profited by all these circ.u.mstances.

[Sidenote: Prescott.]

Irving's occupation of the field rendered it both easy and gracious for Prescott, when, ten years later (1837), he published his _Ferdinand and Isabella_, to say that his predecessor had stripped the story of Columbus of the charm of novelty; but he was not quite sure, however, in the privacy of his correspondence, that Irving, by attempting to continue the course of Columbus's life in detail after the striking crisis of the discovery, had made so imposing a drama as he would have done by condensing the story of his later years. In this Prescott shared something of the spirit of Irving, in composing history to be read as a pastime, rather than as a study of completed truth. Prescott's own treatment of the subject is scant, as he confined his detailed record to the actions incident to the inception and perfection of the enterprise of the Admiral, to the doings in Spain or at court. He was, at the same time, far more independent than Irving had been, in his views of the individual character round which so much revolves, and the reader is not wholly blinded to the unwholesome deceit and overweening selfishness of Columbus.

[Sidenote: Arthur Helps.]

Within twenty years Arthur Helps approached the subject from the point of view of one who was determined, as he thought no one of the writers on the subject of the Spanish Conquest had been, to trace the origin of, and responsibility for, the devastating methods of Spanish colonial government; "not conquest only, but the result of conquest, the mode of colonial government which ultimately prevailed, the extirpation of native races, the introduction of other races, the growth of slavery, and the settlement of the _encomiendas_, on which all Indian society depended." It is not to Helps, therefore, that we are to look for any extended biography of Columbus; and when he finds him in chains, sent back to Spain, he says of the prisoner, "He did not know how many wretched beings would have to traverse those seas, in bonds much worse than his; nor did he foresee, I trust, that some of his doings would further all this coming misery." It does not appear from his footnotes that Helps depended upon other than the obvious authorities, though he says that he examined the Munoz collection, then as now in the Royal Academy of History at Madrid.

[Sidenote: R. H. Major.]

The last scholarly summary of Columbus's career previous to the views incident to the criticism of Harrisse on the _Historie_ of 1571 was that which was given by R. H. Major, in the second edition of his _Select Letters of Columbus_ (London, 1870).

[Sidenote: Aaron Goodrich.]

There have been two treatments of the subject by Americans within the last twenty years, which are characteristic. The _Life and Achievements of the So-called Christopher Columbus_ (New York, 1874), by Aaron Goodrich, mixes that unreasoning trust and querulous conceit which is so often thrown into the scale when the merits of the discoverers of the alleged Vinland are contrasted with those of the imagined Indies. With a craze of petulancy, he is not able to see anything that cannot be twisted into defamation, and his book is as absurdly constant in derogation as the hallucinations of De Lorgues are in the other direction.

[Sidenote: H. H. Bancroft.]

When Hubert Howe Bancroft opened the story of his Pacific States in his _History of Central America_ (San Francisco, 1882), he rehea.r.s.ed the story of Columbus, but did not attempt to follow it critically except as he tracked the Admiral along the coasts of Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. This writer's estimate of the character of Columbus conveys a representation of what the Admiral really was, juster than national pride, religious sympathy, or kindly adulation has usually permitted. It is unfortunately, not altogether chaste in its literary presentation.

His characterization of Irving and Prescott in their endeavors to draw the character of Columbus has more merit in its insight than skill in its drafting.

[Sidenote: Winsor.]

[Sidenote: Bibliography of Columbus.]

The brief sketch of the career of Columbus, and the examination of the events that culminated in his maritime risks and developments, as it was included in the _Narrative and Critical History of America_ (vol. ii., Boston, 1885), gave the present writer an opportunity to study the sources and trace the bibliographical threads that run through an extended and diversified literature, in a way, it may be, not earlier presented to the English reader. If any one desires to compa.s.s all the elucidations and guides which a thorough student of the career and fame of Columbus would wish to consider, the apparatus thus referred to, and the footnotes in Harrisse's _Christophe Colomb_ and in his other germane publications, would probably most essentially shorten his labors.

Harrisse, who has prepared, but not yet published, lists of the books devoted to Columbus _exclusively_, says that they number about six hundred t.i.tles. The literature which treats of him incidentally is of a vast extent.