Christopher Columbus and How He Received and Imparted the Spirit of Discovery Part 56

[Sidenote: His burial.]

[Sidenote: His coffin carried to Seville.]

It is not even certain where the body was first placed, though it is usually affirmed to have been deposited in the Franciscan convent in Valladolid. Nor is there any evidence to support another equally prevalent story that King Ferdinand had ordered the removal of the remains to Seville seven years later, when a monument was built bearing the often-quoted distich,--

a CASTILLA Y a LEON NUEVO MUNDO DIo COLON,--

it being pretty evident that such an inscription was never thought of till Castellanos suggested it in his _Elegias_ in 1588. If Diego's will in 1509 can be interpreted on this matter, it seems pretty sure that within three years (1509) after the death of Columbus, instead of seven, his coffin had been conveyed to Seville and placed inside the convent of Las Cuevas, in the vault of the Carthusians, where the bodies of his son Diego and brother Bartholomew were in due time to rest beside his own. Here the remains were undisturbed till 1536, when the records of the convent affirm that they were given up for transportation, though the royal order is given as of June 2, 1537. From that date till 1549 there is room for conjecture as to their abiding-place.

[Sidenote: 1541. Removed to Santo Domingo.]

[Sidenote: Remains removed to Havana.]

It was during this interval that his family were seeking to carry out what was supposed to be the wish of the Admiral to rest finally in the island of Espanola. From 1537 to 1540 the government are known to have issued three different orders respecting the removal of the remains, and it is conjectured the transference was actually made in 1541, shortly after the completion of the cathedral at Santo Domingo. If any record was made at the time to designate the spot of the reentombment in that edifice, it is not now known, and it was not till 1676 that somebody placed an entry in its records that the burial had been made on the right of the altar. A few years later (1683), the recollections of aged people are quoted to substantiate such a statement. We find no other notice till a century afterwards, when, on the occasion of some repairs, a stone vault, supposed in the traditions to be that which held the remains, was found on "the gospel side" of the chancel, while another on "the epistle side" was thought to contain the remains of Bartholomew Columbus. This was the suspected situation of the graves when the treaty of Basle, in 1795, gave the Santo Domingo end of the island to France, and the Spanish authorities, acting in concert with the Duke of Veragua, as the representative of the family of Columbus, determined on the removal of the remains to Havana. It is a question which has been raised since 1877 whether the body of Columbus was the one then removed, and over which so much parade was made during the transportation and reinterment in Cuba. There has been a controversy on the point, in which the Bishop of Santo Domingo and his adherents have claimed that the remains of Columbus are still in their charge, while it was those of his son Diego which had been removed. The Academy of History at Madrid have denied this, and in a long report to the Spanish government have a.s.serted that there was no mistake in the transfer, and that the additional casket found was that of Christopher Colon, the grandson.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CATHEDRAL AT SANTO DOMINGO.]

[Sidenote: Question of the ident.i.ty of his remains.]

It was represented, moreover, that those features of the inscription on the lately found leaden box which seemed to indicate it as the casket of the first Admiral of the Indies had been fraudulently added or altered.

The question has probably been thrown into the category of doubt, though the case as presented in favor of Santo Domingo has some recognizably weak points, which the advocates of the other side have made the most of, and to the satisfaction perhaps of the more careful inquirers. The controversial literature on the subject is considerable. The repairs of 1877 in the Santo Domingo cathedral revealed the empty vault from which the transported body had been taken; but they showed also the occupied vault of the grandson Luis, and another in which was a leaden case which bore the inscriptions which are in dispute.

[Sidenote: Alleged burial of his chains with him.]

It is the statement of the _Historie_ that Columbus preserved the chains in which he had come home from his third voyage, and that he had them buried with him, or intended to do so. The story is often repeated, but it has no other authority than the somewhat dubious one of that book; and it finds no confirmation in Las Casas, Peter Martyr, Bernaldez, or Oviedo.

Humboldt says that he made futile inquiry of those who had a.s.sisted in the reinterment at Havana, if there were any trace of these fetters or of oxide of iron in the coffin. In the accounts of the recent discovery of remains at Santo Domingo, it is said that there was equally no trace of fetters in the casket.

[Sidenote: The age of Columbus.]

The age of Columbus is almost without a parallel, presenting perhaps the most striking appearances since the star shone upon Bethlehem. It saw Martin Luther burn the Pope's bull, and a.s.sert a new kind of independence. It added Erasmus to the broadeners of life. Ancient art was revivified in the discovery of its most significant remains. Modern art stood confessed in Da Vinci, Michael Angelo, t.i.tian, Raphael, Holbein, and Durer. Copernicus found in the skies a wonderful development without great telescopic help. The route of the Portuguese by the African cape and the voyage of Columbus opened new worlds to thought and commerce. They made the earth seem to man, north and south, east and west, as man never before had imagined it. It looked as if mercantile endeavor was to be constrained by no bounds. Articles of trade were multiplied amazingly. Every movement was not only new and broad, but it was rapid beyond conception. It was more like the remodeling of j.a.pan, which we have seen in our day, than anything that had been earlier known.

[Ill.u.s.tration: STATUE OF COLUMBUS AT SANTO DOMINGO.]

The long sway of the Moors was disintegrating. The Arab domination in science and seamans.h.i.+p was yielding to the Western genius. The Turks had in the boyhood (1453) of Columbus consummated their last great triumph in the capture of Constantinople, thus placing a barrier to Christian commerce with the East. This conquest drove out the learned Christians of the East, who had drunk of the Arab erudition, and they fled with their stores of learning to the western lands, coming back to the heirs of the Romans with the spirit which Rome in the past had sent to the East.

But what Christian Europe was losing in the East Portugal and Prince Henry were gaining for her in the great and forbidding western waste of waters and along its African sh.o.r.es. As the hot tide of Mahometan invasion rolled over the Bosphorus, the burning equatorial zone was pierced from the north along the coasts of the Black Continent.

[Sidenote: Italian discoverers.]

[Sidenote: His growing belief in the western pa.s.sage.]

Italy, seeing her maritime power drop away as the naval supremacy of the Atlantic seaboard rose, was forced to send her experienced navigators to the oceanic ports, to maintain the supremacy of her name and genius in Cadamosto, Columbus, Vespucius, Cabot, and Verrazano. Those cosmographical views which had come down the ages, at times obscured, then for a while patent, and of which the traces had lurked in the minds of learned men by an almost continuous sequence for many centuries, at last possessed by inheritance the mind of Columbus. By reading, by conference with others, by noting phenomena, and by reasoning, in the light of all these, upon the problem of a western pa.s.sage to India, obvious as it was if once the sphericity of the earth be acknowledged, he gradually grew to be confident in himself and trustful in his agency with others. He was far from being alone in his beliefs, nor was his age anything more than a reflection of long periods of like belief.

[Sidenote: Deficiencies of character.]

There was simply needed a man with courage and constancy in his convictions, so that the theory could be demonstrated. This age produced him. Enthusiasm and the contagion of palpable though shadowy truths gave Columbus, after much tribulation, the countenance in high quarters that enabled him to reach success, deceptive though it was. It would have been well for his memory if he had died when his master work was done.

With his great aim certified by its results, though they were far from being what he thought, he was unfortunately left in the end to be laid bare on trial, a common mortal after all, the creature of buffeting circ.u.mstances, and a weakling in every element of command. His imagination had availed him in his upward course when a serene habit in his waiting days could obscure his defects. Later, the problems he encountered were those that required an eye to command, with tact to persuade and skill to coerce, and he had none of them.

[Sidenote: Roger Bacon and Columbus.]

[Sidenote: Pierre d'Ailly's _Imago Mundi_.]

The man who becomes the conspicuous developer of any great world-movement is usually the embodiment of the ripened aspirations of his time. Such was Columbus. It is the forerunner, the man who has little countenance in his age, who points the way for some hazardous after-soul to pursue. Such was Roger Bacon, the English Franciscan. It was Bacon's lot to direct into proper channels the new surging of the experimental sciences which was induced by the revived study of Aristotle, and was carrying dismay into the strongholds of Platonism.

Standing out from the background of Arab regenerating learning, the name of Roger Bacon, linked often with that of Albertus Magnus, stood for the best knowledge and insight of the thirteenth century. Bacon it was who gave that tendency to thought which, seized by Cardinal Pierre d'Ailly, and incorporated by him in his _Imago Mundi_ (1410), became the link between Bacon and Columbus. Humboldt has indeed expressed his belief that this encyclopaedic Survey of the World exercised a more important influence upon the discovery of America than even the prompting which Columbus got from his correspondence with Toscanelli. How well Columbus pored over the pages of the _Imago Mundi_ we know from the annotations of his own copy, which is still preserved in the Biblioteca Colombina.

It seems likely that Columbus got directly from this book most that he knew of those pa.s.sages in Aristotle, Strabo, and Seneca which speak of the Asiatic sh.o.r.es as lying opposite to Hispania. There is some evidence that this book was his companion even on his voyages, and Humboldt points out how he translates a pa.s.sage from it, word for word, when in 1498 he embodied it in a letter which he wrote to his sovereigns from Espanola.

[Sidenote: His acquaintance with the elder writers.]

If we take the pains, as Humboldt did, to examine the writings of Columbus, to ascertain the sources which he cited, we find what appears to be a broad acquaintance with books. It is to be remembered, however, that the Admiral quoted usually at second hand, and that he got his acquaintance with cla.s.sic authors, at least, mainly through this _Imago Mundi_ of Pierre d'Ailly. Humboldt, in making his list of Columbus's authors, omits the references to the Scriptures and to the Church fathers, "in whom," as he says, "Columbus was singularly versed," and then gives the following catalogue:--

Aristotle; Julius Caesar; Strabo; Seneca; Pliny; Ptolemy; Solinus; Julius Capitolinus; Alfrazano; Avenruyz; Rabbi Samuel de Israel; Isidore, Bishop of Seville; the Venerable Bede; Strabus, Abbe of Reichenau; Duns Scotus; Francois Mayronis; Abbe Joachim de Calabre; Sacrobosco, being in fact the English mathematician Holywood; Nicholas de Lyra, the Norman Franciscan; King Alfonso the Wise, and his Moorish scribes; Cardinal Pierre d'Ailly; Gerson, Chancellor of the University of Paris; Pope Pius II., otherwise known as aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini; Regiomonta.n.u.s, as the Latinized name of Johann Muller of Konigsberg is given, though Columbus does not really name him; Paolo Toscanelli, the Florentine physician; and Nicolas de Conti, of whom he had heard through Toscanelli, perhaps.

Humboldt can find no evidence that Columbus had read the travels of Marco Polo, and does not discover why Navarrete holds that he had, though Polo's stories must have permeated much that Columbus read; nor does he understand why Irving says that Columbus took Marco Polo's book on his first voyage.

[Sidenote: Columbus and Toscanelli.]

We see often in the world's history a simultaneousness in the regeneration of thought. Here and there a seer works on in ignorance of some obscure brother elsewhere. Rumor and circulating ma.n.u.scripts bring them into sympathy. They grow by the correlation. It is just this correspondence that confronts us in Columbus and Toscanelli, and it is not quite, but almost, perceptible that this wise Florentine doctor was the first, despite Humboldt's theory, to plant in the mind of Columbus his aspirations for the truths of geography. It is meet that Columbus should not be mentioned without the accompanying name of Toscanelli. It was the Genoese's different fortune that he could attempt as a seaman a practical demonstration of his fellow Italian's views.

Many a twin movement of the world's groping spirit thus seeks the light.

Progress naturally pushes on parallel lines. Commerce thrusts her intercourse to remotest regions, while the Church yearns for new souls to convert, and peers longingly into the dim s.p.a.ces that skirt the world's geography. Navigators improve their methods, and learned men in the arts supply them with exacter instruments. The widespread manifestations of all this new life at last crystallize, and Gama and Columbus appear, the reflex of every development.

[Sidenote: Opportuneness of his discoveries.]

Thus the discovery of Columbus came in the ripeness of time. No one of the anterior accidents, suggesting a western land, granting that there was some measure of fact in all of them, had come to a world prepared to think on their developments. Vinland was practically forgotten, wherever it may have been. The tales of Fousang had never a listener in Europe.

Madoc was as unknown as Elidacthon. While the new Indies were not in their turn to be forgotten, their discoverer was to bury himself in a world of conjecture. The superlatives of Columbus soon spent their influence. The pioneer was lost sight of in the new currents of thought which he had started. Not of least interest among them was the cognizance of new races of men, and new revelations in the animal and physical kingdoms, while the question of their origins pressed very soon on the theological and scientific sense of the age.

[Sidenote: Not above his age.]

[Sidenote: Claims for palliation.]

No man craves more than Columbus to be judged with all the palliations demanded of a difference of his own age and ours. No child of any age ever did less to improve his contemporaries, and few ever did more to prepare the way for such improvements. The age created him and the age left him. There is no more conspicuous example in history of a man showing the path and losing it.

It is by no means sure, with all our boast of benevolent progress, that atrocities not much short of those which we ascribe to Columbus and his compeers may not at any time disgrace the coming as they have blackened the past years of the nineteenth century. This fact gives us the right to judge the infirmities of man in any age from the high vantage-ground of the best emotions of all the centuries. In the application of such perennial justice Columbus must inevitably suffer. The degradation of the times ceases to be an excuse when the man to be judged stands on the pinnacle of the ages. The biographer cannot forget, indeed, that Columbus is a portrait set in the surroundings of his times; but it is equally his duty at the same time to judge the paths which he trod by the scale of an eternal n.o.bleness.

[Sidenote: Test of his character.]

[Sidenote: Not a creator of ideas.]

The very domination of this man in the history of two hemispheres warrants us in estimating him by an austere sense of occasions lost and of opportunities embraced. The really great man is superior to his age, and antic.i.p.ates its future; not as a sudden apparition, but as the embodiment of a long growth of ideas of which he is the inheritor and the capable exemplar. Humboldt makes this personal domination of two kinds. The one comes from the direct influence of character; the other from the creation of an idea, which, freed from personality, works its controlling mission by changing the face of things. It is of this last description that Humboldt makes the domination of Columbus. It is extremely doubtful if any instance can be found of a great idea changing the world's history, which has been created by any single man. None such was created by Columbus. There are always forerunners whose agency is postponed because the times are not propitious. A masterful thought has often a long pedigree, starting from a remote antiquity, but it will be dormant till it is environed by the circ.u.mstances suited to fructify it.

This was just the destiny of the intuition which began with Aristotle and came down to Columbus. To make his first voyage partook of foolhardiness, as many a looker-on reasonably declared. It was none the less foolhardy when it was done. If he had reached the opulent and powerful kings of the Orient, his little c.o.c.kboats and their brave souls might have fared hard for their intrusion. His blunder in geography very likely saved him from annihilation.

[Sidenote: His character differently drawn.]