Christopher Columbus Part 9

Christopher, however, was not permitted to give the royal commissioner faith and credence, for the simple reason that Bobadilla did not show him the letter. We have already read of the high-handed manner in which Juan de Agnado acted some years before when sent out to investigate; but, by comparison with Bobadilla, Agnado had been gentleness itself.

Bobadilla was a stern and rigorous churchman, comendador, or commander, of one of the famous religious-military orders in Spain. He could tolerate nothing short of the strictest and most unquestioning obedience to authority. He also had a great respect for high birth, and he, like Bishop Fonseca, could never forget that Christopher Columbus was of humble origin. Both Fonseca and Bobadilla would have been astounded had they dreamed that their princ.i.p.al claim to remembrance by coming ages would be from their reluctant a.s.sociation with a certain ill.u.s.trious man "of humble origin."

It was on August 23, 1499, that Bobadilla's ship entered the mouth of the little river on which San Domingo was situated; and on seeing on either side of the settlement a gallows, and on either gallows the body of a high-born Spaniard lately executed for rebellion, the sight did not incline him to feel kindly toward the low-born governor who had executed them. Columbus and his brother Bartholomew were in the interior at the time, and Bobadilla had no intention of awaiting their return, so eager was he to show his power.

Next morning, when all the colony had gathered in church for ma.s.s, he read them the royal letter authorizing him to inquire into the administration of the Viceroy. The letter stated that their Majesties empowered Bobadilla to seize evil-doers and their property, and that the Admiral and all others in authority must aid him in doing so.

Columbus had left his brother Diego in charge of the colony; and Diego, though weak as a ruler, was strong in words when Bobadilla ordered him to hand over the remainder of the rebels for trial, together with evidence against them. Diego replied that the prisoners were held by order of the viceroy, and that the viceroy's authority was higher than the comendador's. Such an answer was not likely to mollify the royal commissioner.

The next morning after ma.s.s he opened a second letter and read it to the colonists, a letter which the monarchs told him to open only in case Columbus refused to submit to him. This doc.u.ment proclaimed the bearer, Don Francis...o...b..badilla, governor of all the islands. He immediately took the oath of office, and then opened and read to the astonished populace a third royal letter in which Christopher Columbus was commanded to hand over all papers and property belonging to the Crown.

The discontented colonists saw that the day of reckoning had come for their unpopular governor. They exulted in it; and Bobadilla, who realized the satisfactory impression he was making, then and there opened a fourth letter which commanded that he, Bobadilla, should straightway pay all arrears of wages to the men who had worked on San Domingo. As nearly all the men had gone unpaid for a long time past (owing to utter lack of funds), when they heard this last proclamation, they hailed Bobadilla as a benefactor, and his narrow, mean soul swelled with pride.

To be sure, the monarchs really had issued all these letters; but Bobadilla was to read and act upon the second and third letters only in case Columbus refused to obey the first; and here, without giving Columbus any opportunity to speak for himself, Bobadilla had gone to the extreme limit of his powers. It makes one recall Shakespeare's lines about

"Man, proud man, Drest in a little brief authority....

Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven, As make the angels weep."

By the end of the second day the new governor had seized the Admiral's house. Next he sent a search party to find the two brothers and bid them return. This Christopher and Bartholomew did at once; and Bobadilla, whose n.o.ble birth had not given him a n.o.ble soul, treated the grumblers and talebearers of San Domingo to the shameful sight of the Discoverer of the New World marching in chains to prison!

While Columbus had not been a successful ruler, it must be borne in mind that the men he was expected to rule were a most ungovernable lot. But even so, it is difficult to believe that among them all there was not one big enough to forget that the man who had been an unsatisfactory colonial governor had been the bravest explorer ever known. But no, they were pitiless. His own cook was ordered to fasten the chains on him. The onlookers exulted in his disgrace; and their outcries were so loud and so bitter that Columbus and his brothers expected every moment to be put to death.

Bobadilla lost no time in deciding what to do with his prisoners. They must be put out of the way, but not by death. Instead, he ordered a n.o.bleman named Villejo to take them at once to Spain. When Villejo, with some soldiers, entered the cell in order to remove the prisoners to the ship, Columbus thought he was to be escorted to the scaffold. "I see I am to die," he said calmly. Villejo, who seems to have been the only man in San Domingo with an ounce of humanity in him, answered kindly, "I am to escort you to a ship, Your Excellency, and then home to Spain."

As they marched to the sh.o.r.e, a rabble followed, shouting every insult imaginable. And thus did Christopher Columbus sail away, for the third time, from the island which he had found so quiet and peaceful that he once wrote, "The nights are lovely, like May nights in Cordova." Here was a change indeed!

When the caravel was under way, Villejo offered to remove the Admiral's shackles.

"No," answered Columbus, with dignity, "their Majesties gave Bobadilla authority to put me in irons; they alone must issue the authority to take the irons off."

And so in irons the greatest discoverer the world has ever known made his sixth crossing of the Atlantic. And in irons he landed in Cadiz in November, 1500.

CHAPTER XVIII

PUBLIC SYMPATHY

We have just seen Columbus land in chains at Cadiz. We next see him free, traveling in great splendor to that scene of his first successful interview with Isabella--Granada. What had happened meanwhile to lift him out of misery and disgrace? Simply what always happens when a really great man is too harshly punished, a reaction in the public mind.

In all Spain Columbus had hardly a friend; yet when the people of Cadiz saw him leave Villejo's ship in chains, they were moved with deepest sympathy. They began telling each other that, no matter what his faults might be, he had been the first man deliberately to put out across the dreaded Atlantic and reveal to the world that land, and not monsters, lay on the other side. Had any one else ever begged, during seven years, for the privilege thus to risk his life for the benefit of Spain in particular, and all mankind in general? Even the Portuguese, greatest of exploring nations, had only hugged the African coast cautiously; but this man had sailed straight away from land into the setting sun. Even landsmen appreciated the fine courage that required.

And the first man bold enough to wish to go out and unravel the mystery of the west now walked in chains from a Spanish ship to a Spanish prison! It was monstrous ingrat.i.tude, all declared; and they did not hesitate to show their sympathy. The story of his disgrace traveled rapidly, and everywhere it brought out the better nature of the Spanish people, who accordingly denounced this harsh treatment by their sovereigns.

And what had Columbus himself done to help matters along? The wisest thing that he could have done; he had refrained from writing to Ferdinand and Isabella. His silence spoke in his favor; for they did not learn what had happened till a lady-in-waiting at court, a friend of Columbus and of the queen, received a letter which Columbus had written during the voyage, and which the good Villejo sent off by a trusty messenger the minute the ship reached Spain. This lady carried the shocking news to the queen, perhaps even read the whole letter to her; if so, Isabella must have winced at this pa.s.sage: "I have been wounded extremely by the fact that a man should have been sent out to make inquiry into my conduct who knew that if he sent home a very aggravated account against me, he could remain himself at the head of the government."

Hardly had the queen heard this letter when there came a report from Villejo containing the same story of Bobadilla's brutal haste in dealing with the Admiral. And directly after this came an inquiry from the alcalde (mayor) of Cadiz asking what he should do with his distinguished prisoner.

Isabella saw it was all too true; Bobadilla had gone to the uttermost limit of authority without even waiting to try less offensive measures.

She saw that she had selected a very unworthy person for the delicate task of removing a great man from office. Even Ferdinand, who, as we have seen, had no great opinion of Columbus, was grieved over the unhappy affair. Immediately they dispatched a courier to the alcalde with instructions to set the Admiral free, and to treat him with every consideration. Then they invited Columbus to come to them at court, and ordered a credit of two thousand ducats for him, a large sum in those days, for it was equal to about ten thousand dollars in our money. This they did without even waiting to hear Bobadilla's side of the story.

Columbus reached Granada in December, 1500; nine years precisely after the memorable journey that Friar Juan Perez had caused him to make to the same place. As on his return from the second voyage, when he was expecting royal reproaches, he received instead only the kindest treatment. Both Ferdinand and Isabella made him feel, instantly, that, whatever had gone wrong, they knew his worth and considered him a distinguished man.

So overcome was he by this magnanimity that it was some minutes before the white-haired, worn-out man could control his feelings sufficiently to tell his story. Finally, however, he managed to speak. He admitted all that had gone amiss in Espanola and said his only excuse was his inexperience in governing. (Ah, good Admiral, if only you had remembered your inexperience on that January day in that same city of Granada, when you insisted on being made Viceroy of all the lands you might discover!)

The queen, while she pitied Columbus profoundly in his distress, was too wise a woman to let her pity run away with her prudence; so she answered cautiously:--

"Common report accuses you of acting with a degree of severity quite unsuitable for an infant colony, and likely to incite rebellion in it.

But the thing I find hardest to pardon is your reducing to slavery many Indians who had done nothing to deserve such a fate. This was contrary to my express orders. As ill fortune willed it, just at the time that news came to me of this breach of my instructions, everybody was complaining of you; no one spoke a word in your favor. I felt obliged to send a commissioner to the Indies to investigate and give me a true report, and, if necessary, to put limits to the authority you were accused of overstepping. If he found you guilty of the charges against you, he was to relieve you of the government and send you to Spain to give an account of your stewardship. This was the extent of his commission. I find that I have made a bad choice in my agent, and I shall take care to make an example of Bobadilla so as to warn others not to exceed their power. But I cannot promise at once to reinstate you as governor. As to your rank of Admiral, I never intended to deprive you of it. But you must abide your time and trust in me."

Isabella's reply is a model of fairness and prudence so far as Columbus is concerned, but it is hardly fair to Bobadilla. The comendador had been brutal, it is true; but it was not true that he had gone beyond the extent of his commission. His brutality consisted in pouncing upon the offender without any preliminaries whatever. Yet it turned out that, in acting thus, he did the best possible thing for Columbus's subsequent treatment. There is no doubt that had he proceeded slowly, with a fair and formal inquiry into all the complaints against the Admiral, it would have been clearly shown that, from the very beginning, everything had gone wrong in the colony. The Indians, once friendly, were now bitter against the Spaniards. The colonists were a bad lot, but Columbus himself had examined and accepted most of them before the ships left Spain.

If mistakes were committed while he was absent exploring Cuba, they were made by his brothers and by those whom he himself had selected to rule in his absence. All of this evidence would have been against Columbus, who in consequence would have been deposed as governor and sent home to answer Bobadilla's charges before a royal court of inquiry. Arriving as a man disgraced after a fair trial, n.o.body's sympathies would have been stirred. It was precisely because Bobadilla had acted like a brute instead of like a wise judge that everybody denounced him and pitied his victim.

Considering all this, and considering that Columbus himself had admitted his "inexperience in government" to the queen, it is astonishing to learn that he was deeply hurt because she did not reinstate him instantly as ruler of the island! Experience had taught the great discoverer but little. At a moment when he should have fallen on his knees in thankfulness because he would never again have to be responsible for that colony of vicious men, he instead felt hurt! He wanted to return and start the whole sorry business over again.

Moreover, he protested, as indeed he had been doing for years, because other navigators were imploring the monarchs to break their contract giving _him_ a monopoly of western exploration, and to allow them to undertake voyages, asking no government a.s.sistance whatsoever. Now was the time for him to say, "It is to Spain's interest that she send as many explorers as possible over to these new lands, in order that we may quickly determine how many islands there really are, and whether what I last visited was the mainland; only, pray let me hasten back free from every responsibility except that of a navigator; so that I, who so justly deserve the first chance of exploring the new lands, may get there ahead of these others who are clamoring to go."

Had Columbus been businesslike enough to make this proposition to the monarchs, he need not have died in ignorance of the prodigious fact that he had discovered a great continent undreamed-of by Europeans. But, instead of renouncing his monopoly, he complained that licenses had been granted to others to sail west in violation of the agreement that he alone, and his descendants after him, should sail among the new lands.

This att.i.tude annoyed King Ferdinand exceedingly.

For Columbus to hope to keep this monopoly in his own family was madness; as by this time other countries, having heard of his opening up the way, had sent out explorers to plant their standards. John and Sebastian Cabot had gone out from Bristol, England, to Newfoundland, and had discovered, in June, 1497, the North American continent before Columbus had touched South America. Early in 1499 one of the pilots who had accompanied Columbus on his Cuban trip secured a license, and not only explored the Central American coast for several hundred miles, but traded his European trifles and gewgaws with the natives for gold and silver, returning to Spain with real profits.

That same year, 1499, Vicente Pinzon of Palos, who with his brother Martin had made the first voyage, also secured a license and sailed southwest over the equator, discovering the Amazon River and taking possession of Brazil for Spain. Our adventurous acquaintance Ojeda also had been busy. When the Paria pearls arrived in Sevilla, he asked his friend Fonseca to show him both the pearls and Columbus's map of Trinidad and the neighboring coast. Although Ojeda had recently been in open rebellion against the Admiral in Haiti, as we have seen, Fonseca did not hesitate to let him see where the pearl land lay; and so Ojeda, with an Italian named Vespucci, whom we shall meet later, sailed to Paria and gathered its wealth.

Also, in this year so great for navigation, a Portuguese fleet of thirteen ships set out from Lisbon to round the Cape of Good Hope. In trying to escape the long calms which had beset Bartolome Dias in the Gulf of Guinea, Pedro Cabral, commander of the fleet, struck out quite far from the Morocco coast and got into the Equatorial Current. The existence of this powerful westward current had never been suspected by either Spanish or Portuguese mariners. Wind and current combining, Cabral and his captains found themselves, in about a month's time, on the coast of Brazil near the present Rio de Janeiro. Thus a current never before known carried them to land never before known. And thus for the second time, if the shipwrecked pilot told the truth, America was discovered by accident.

All this had given Europe some idea of the vastness of the world to the west. If Columbus was to bring his own discoveries to a glorious finish, it was high time that, instead of quibbling over maintaining a contract, he should have given up the empty honors that were to have been his, and have asked only for permission to hurry back and discover more land.

Ferdinand, who now saw that the islands would need not one but a dozen governors if ever they were to be colonized and developed, would not hear of reinstating Columbus as governor. The most the monarchs would give him in the way of satisfaction was that Bobadilla should be removed and another man, who had had nothing to do thus far with the quarrels of the New World, should be appointed for two years. This new governor, whose name was Nicolas de Ovando, was specially instructed to protect Columbus's profits in the colony, if profits there should ever be.

Orders were given that the property of Columbus and his brothers, which Bobadilla had confiscated, was to be restored; and whenever gold was found and smelted, Columbus's share was to be put aside for him. This proved that the sovereigns intended to be just to Columbus, but the latter was nevertheless much depressed over his lost dignities.

The Comendador Ovando, of the famous religious order called the Knights of Alcantara, was appointed to succeed Bobadilla, and began his preparations with certain definite and practical ideas on the subject of colonizing. He was the first to see that respectable married men with their wives and children were needed to give the settlement character; so he offered, or asked the sovereigns to offer, proper inducement to married men. He also secured as many trained workers as possible-- artisans and craftsmen. His other measures appear less wise; that is, he felt he must go in state and dignity, else the people would not regard his authority; so he took many body servants and house servants, and rich priestly robes, for he relied a great deal on the appearance of power. No less than thirty-five vessels would suffice to carry his twenty-five hundred pa.s.sengers (among them Bartolome de las Casas) to San Domingo; and when he started in all his state, the heart of Columbus was sad and sore.

"Ah," thought he, "if only _I_ had had decent men, instead of jail- birds and loafers!" and he pondered sadly on his many misfortunes.

And still the monarchs kept him waiting and would not furnish him with a fleet. While he was waiting came the bitter and disquieting news that Portuguese explorers were returning in a stream from the Indian Ocean with exceedingly rich cargoes, all justly traded for in the markets of Calcutta. Why, he groaned, had _his_ India been so barren of riches?

He began to ponder over all the theories he had read concerning the geography of the world, and to wonder what his discoveries might really be. If it dawned upon him that he had struck islands fringing on absolutely new, unsuspected land, he appears to have dismissed the extraordinary idea, and to have come back to Martin Alonzo Pinzon's theory that he, by sailing west over the globe, had come to Asiatic regions. It must be so, he argued. Marco Polo had made known the fact that an ocean bounded Asia on the east, and that ocean must be the Atlantic, which continued across to Europe. The Indian Ocean which the Portuguese had crossed must be the southern part of the Atlantic, where it curved around Asia's southern sh.o.r.es. Ah, if only he could reach it!

If only he had sailed straight for the rich mainland, instead of wasting his time on those pretty islands, inhabited only by a "poor people"!

He began to recall how the land north of the Gulf of Paria stretched far west; how the southern sh.o.r.e of Cuba stretched far west; how the currents of the Caribbean Sea indicated, by the fact that they had washed Cuba, Haiti, and Porto Rico into their long narrow east-and-west shape that somewhere in the west they pa.s.sed through a strait which separated some large island from southeastern Asia; and that strait must lead into the Indian Ocean--the very ocean the Portuguese were now sailing so profitably! He wisely resolved to linger no longer in Spain, importuning for his lost governorship, but to undertake a fourth voyage and find this pa.s.sage.

Good reasoning, all this about "the strait," if only facts had been geographically correct; and a brave determination, too, for an old man afflicted with rheumatism and fever and bad sight to resolve to put out once more on that boisterous ocean. We salute you, Don Cristobal! You are a true navigator, never afraid of hardships and labor and perplexing problems. Even had you not discovered America for us, we still would salute you, because you were a tremendous worker!

Full of his new plan, Columbus left beautiful Granada where he had spent two empty years and went to Sevilla. King Ferdinand readily granted him four ships, for the Admiral Cristobal Colon, off on a voyage of discovery, was not nearly so troublesome as the deposed governor and viceroy, lingering around the court to obtain his lost t.i.tle and revenues.