Christopher Columbus and How He Received and Imparted the Spirit of Discovery Part 16

[Sidenote: Portuguese missionaries to Egypt.]

Such knowledge, if held to be visionary, was, however, established with some certainty in men's minds before Da Gama actually effected the pa.s.sage of the Cape. This confirmation had doubtless come through some missionaries of the Portuguese king, who in 1490 sent such a positive message from Cairo.

But while the new exertions along the African coast, thus inadvertently instigated by Columbus, were making, what was becoming of his own westward scheme?

[Sidenote: The Portuguese send out an expedition to forestall Columbus.]

The story goes that it was by the advice of Cazadilla that the Portuguese king lent himself to an unworthy device. This was a project to test the views of Columbus, and profit by them without paying him his price. An outline of his intended voyage had been secured from him in the investigation already mentioned. A caravel, under pretense of a voyage to the Cape de Verde Islands, was now dispatched to search for the c.i.p.ango of Marco Polo, in the position which Columbus had given it in his chart. The mercenary craft started out, and buffeted with head seas and angry winds long enough to emasculate what little courage the crew possessed. Without the prop of conviction they deserted their purpose and returned. Once in port, they began to berate the Genoese for his foolhardy scheme. In this way they sought to vindicate their own timidity. This disclosed to Columbus the trick which had been played upon him. Such is the story as the _Historie_ tells it, and which has been adopted by Herrera and others.

[Sidenote: Columbus leaves Portugal, 1484.]

At this point there is too much uncertainty respecting the movements of Columbus for even his credulous biographers to fill out the tale. It seems to be agreed that in the latter part of 1484 he left Portugal with a secrecy which was supposed to be necessary to escape the vigilance of the government spies. There is beside some reason for believing that it was also well for him to shun arrest for debts, which had been incurred in the distractions of his affairs.

[Sidenote: Supposed visit of Columbus to Genoa.]

There is no other authority than Ramusio for believing with Munoz that Columbus had already laid his project before the government of Genoa by letter, and that he now went to reenforce it in person. That power was sorely pressed with misfortunes at this time, and is said to have declined to entertain his proposals. It may be the applicant was dismissed contemptuously, as is sometimes said. It is not, however, as Harrisse has pointed out, till we come down to Ca.s.soni, in his _Annals of Genoa_, published in 1708, that we find a single Genoese authority crediting the story of this visit to Genoa. Harrisse, with his skeptical tendency, does not believe the statement.

[Sidenote: Supposed visit to Venice.]

Eagerness to fill the gaps in his itinerary has sometimes induced the supposition that Columbus made an equally unsuccessful offer to Venice; but the statement is not found except in modern writers, with no other citations to sustain it than the recollections of some one who had seen at some time in the archives a memorial to this effect made by Columbus.

Some writers make him at this time also visit his father and provide for his comfort,--a belief not altogether consonant with the supposition of Columbus's escape from Portugal as a debtor.

[Sidenote: The death of his wife.]

[Sidenote: Shown to be uncertain.]

Irving and the biographers in general find in the death of Columbus's wife a severing of the ties which bound him to Portugal; but if there is any truth in the tumultuous letter which Columbus wrote to Dona Juana de la Torre in 1500, he left behind him in Portugal, when he fled into Spain, a wife and children. If there is the necessary veracity in the _Historie_, this wife had died before he abandoned the country. That he had other children at this time than Diego is only known through this sad, ejaculatory epistle. If he left a wife in Portugal, as his own words aver, Harrisse seems justified in saying that he deserted her, and in the same letter Columbus himself says that he never saw her again.

[Sidenote: Convent of Rabida.]

Ever since a physician of Palos, Garcia Fernandez, gave his testimony in the lawsuit through which, after Columbus's death, his son defended his t.i.tles against the Crown, the picturesque story of the convent of Rabida, and the appearance at its gate of a forlorn traveler accompanied by a little boy, and the supplication for bread and water for the child, has stood in the lives of Columbus as the opening scene of his career in Spain.

This Franciscan convent, dedicated to Santa Maria de Rabida, stood on a height within sight of the sea, very near the town of Palos, and after having fallen into a ruin it was restored by the Duke of Montpensier in 1855. A recent traveler has found this restoration "modernized, whitewashed, and forlorn," while the refurnishing of the interior is described as "paltry and vulgar," even in the cell of its friar, where the visitor now finds a portrait of Columbus and pictures of scenes in his career.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PeRE JUAN PEREZ DE MARCHENA.

[As given by Roselly de Lorgues.]]

[Sidenote: Friar Marchena.]

This friar, Juan Perez de Marchena, was at the time of the supposed visit of Columbus the prior of the convent, and being casually attracted by the scene at the gate, where the porter was refreshing the vagrant travelers, and by the foreign accent of the stranger, he entered into talk with the elder of them and learned his name. Columbus also told him that he was bound to Huelva to find the home of one Muliar, a Spaniard who had married the youngest sister of his wife. The story goes further that the friar was not uninformed in the cosmographical lore of the time, had not been un.o.bservant of the maritime intelligence which had naturally been rife in the neighboring seaport of Palos, and had kept watch of the recent progress in geographical science. He was accordingly able to appreciate the interest which Columbus manifested in such subjects, as he unfolded his own notions of still greater discoveries which might be made at the west. Keeping the wanderer and his little child a few days, Marchena invited to the convent, to join with them in discussion, the most learned man whom the neighborhood afforded, the physician of Palos,--the very one from whose testimony our information comes. Their talks were not without reenforcements from the experiences of some of the mariners of that seaport, particularly one Pedro de Velasco, who told of manifestation of land which he had himself seen, without absolute contact, thirty years before, when his ship had been blown a long distance to the northwest of Ireland.

[Sidenote: Columbus goes to Cordoba.]

The friendship formed in the convent kept Columbus there amid congenial sympathizers, and it was not till some time in the winter of 1485-86, and when he heard that the Spanish sovereigns were at Cordoba, gathering a force to attack the Moors in Granada, that, leaving behind his boy to be instructed in the convent, Columbus started for that city. He went not without confidence and elation, as he bore a letter of credentials which the friar had given him to a friend, Fernando de Talavera, the prior of the monastery of Prado, and confessor of Queen Isabella.

[Sidenote: Doubts about the visits to Rabida.]

This story has almost always been placed in the opening of the career of Columbus in Spain. It has often in sympathizing hands pointed a moral in contrasting the abject condition of those days with the proud expectancy under which, some years later, he sailed out of the neighboring harbor of Palos, within eyeshot of the monks of Rabida. Irving, however, as he a.n.a.lyzed the reports of the famous trial already referred to, was quite sure that the events of two visits to Rabida had been unwittingly run into one in testimony given after so long an interval of years. It does indeed seem that we must either apply this evidence of 1513 and 1515 to a later visit, or else we must determine that there was great similarity in some of the incidents of the two visits.

The date of 1491, to which Harrisse pushes the incidents forward, depends in part on the evidence of one Rodriguez Cobezudo that in 1513 it was about twenty-two years since he had lent a mule to Juan Perez de Marchena, when he went to Santa Fe from Rabida to interpose for Columbus. The testimony of Garcia Fernandez is that this visit of Marchena took place after Columbus had once been rebuffed at court, and the words of the witness indicate that it was on that visit when Juan Perez asked Columbus who he was and whence he came; showing, perhaps, that it was the first time Perez had seen Columbus. Accordingly this, as well as the mule story, points to 1491. But that the circ.u.mstances of the visit which Garcia Fernandez recounts may have belonged to an earlier visit, in part confounded after fifteen years with a later one, may yet be not beyond a possibility. It is to be remembered that the _Historie_ speaks of two visits, one later than that of 1484. It is not easy to see that all the testimony which Harrisse introduced to make the visit of 1491 the first and only visit of Columbus to the convent is sufficient to do more than render the case probable.

[Sidenote: 1486. Enters the service of Spain.]

We determine the exact date of the entering of Columbus into the service of Spain to be January 20, 1486, from a record of his in his journal on shipboard under January 14, 1493, where he says that on the 20th of the same month he would have been in their Highnesses' service just seven years. We find almost as a matter of course other statements of his which give somewhat different dates by deduction. Two statements of Columbus agreeing would be a little suspicious. Certain payments on the part of the Crowns of Castile and Aragon do not seem to have begun, however, till the next year, or at least we have no earlier record of such than one on May 5, 1487, and from that date on they were made at not great intervals, till an interruption came, as will be later shown.

[Sidenote: Changes his name to Colon.]

In Spain the Christoforo Colombo of Genoa chose to call himself Cristoval Colon, and the _Historie_ tells us that he sought merely to make his descendants distinct of name from their remote kin. He argued that the Roman name was Colonus, which readily was transformed to a Spanish equivalent. Inasmuch as the Duke of Medina-Celi, who kept Columbus in his house for two years during the early years of his Spanish residence, calls him Colomo in 1493, and Oviedo calls him Colom, it is a question if he chose the form of Colon before he became famous by his voyage.

[Sidenote: The Genoese in Spain.]

The Genoese had been for a long period a privileged people in Spain, dating such acceptance back to the time of St. Ferdinand. Navarrete has instanced numerous confirmations of these early favors by successive monarchs down to the time of Columbus. But neither this prestige of his birthright nor the letter of Friar Perez had been sufficient to secure in the busy camp at Cordoba any recognition of this otherwise unheralded and humble suitor. The power of the sovereigns was overtaxed already in the engrossing preparations which the Court and army were making for a vigorous campaign against the Moors. The exigencies of the war carried the sovereigns, sometimes together and at other times apart, from point to point. Siege after siege was conducted, and Talavera, whose devotion had been counted upon by Columbus, had too much to occupy his attention, to give ear to propositions which at best he deemed chimerical.

[Sidenote: Columbus in Cordoba.]

We know in a vague way that while the Court was thus withdrawn from Cordoba the disheartened wanderer remained in that city, supporting himself, according to Bernaldez, in drafting charts and in selling printed books, which Harrisse suspects may have been publications, such as were then current, containing calendars and astronomical predictions, like the _Lunarios_ of Granollach and Andres de Li.

[Sidenote: Makes acquaintances.]

It was probably at this time, too, that he made the acquaintance of Alonso de Quintanilla, the comptroller of the finances of Castile. He attained some terms of friendship with Antonio Geraldini, the papal nuncio, and his brother, Alexander Geraldini, the tutor of the royal children. It is claimed that all these friends became interested in his projects, and were advocates of them.

[Sidenote: Writes out the proofs of a western land.]

We are told by Las Casas that Columbus at one time gathered and placed in order all the varied manifestations, as he conceived them, of some such transatlantic region as his theory demanded; and it seems probable that this task was done during a period of weary waiting in Cordoba. We know nothing, however, of the ma.n.u.script except as Las Casas and the _Historie_ have used its material, and through them some of the details have been gleaned in the preceding chapter.

[Sidenote: Mendoza.]

These accessions of friends, aided doubtless by some such systemization of the knowledge to be brought to the question as this lost ma.n.u.script implies, opened the way to an acquaintance with Pedro Gonzales de Mendoza, Archbishop of Toledo and Grand Cardinal of Spain. This prelate, from the confidence which the sovereigns placed in him, was known in Martyr's phrase as "the third king of Spain," and it could but be seen by Columbus that his sympathies were essential to the success of plans so far reaching as his own. The cardinal was gracious in his intercourse, and by no means inaccessible to such a suitor as Columbus; but he was educated in the exclusive spirit of the prevailing theology, and he had a keen scent for anything that might be supposed heterodox.

It proved necessary for the thought of a spherical earth to rest some time in his mind, till his ruminations could bring him to a perception of the truths of science.

[Sidenote: Gets the ear of Ferdinand for Columbus.]

According to the reports which Oviedo gives us, the seed which Columbus sowed, in his various talks with the cardinal, in due time germinated, and the constant mentor of the sovereigns was at last brought to prepare the way, so that Columbus could have a royal audience. Thus it was that Columbus finally got the ear of Ferdinand, at Salamanca, whither the monarchs had come for a winter's sojourn after the turmoils of a summer's campaign against the Moors.

[Sidenote: Characters of the sovereigns of Spain.]

We cannot proceed farther in this narrative without understanding, in the light of all the early and late evidence which we have, what kind of beings these sovereigns of Aragon and Castile were, with whom Columbus was to have so much intercourse in the years to come. Ferdinand and Isabella, the wearers of the crowns of Aragon and Castile, were linked in common interests, and their joint reign had augured a powerful, because united, Spain. The student of their characters, as he works among the doc.u.ments of the time, cannot avoid the recognition of qualities little calculated to satisfy demands for n.o.bleness and devotion which the world has learned to a.s.sociate with royal obligations. It may be possibly too much to say that habitually, but not too much to a.s.sert that often, these Spanish monarchs were more ready at perfidy and deceit than even an allowance for the teachings of their time would permit. Often the student will find himself forced to grant that the queen was more culpable in these respects than the king. An anxious inquirer into the queen's ways is not quite sure that she was able to distinguish between her own interests and those of G.o.d. The doc.u.mentary researches of Bergenroth have decidedly lowered her in the judgments of those who have studied that investigator's results. We need to plead the times for her, and we need to push the plea very far.

[Sidenote: Isabella.]

"Perhaps," says Helps, speaking of Isabella, "there is hardly any great personage whose name and authority are found in connection with so much that is strikingly evil, all of it done, or rather a.s.sented to, upon the highest and purest motives." To palliate on such grounds is to believe in the irresponsibility of motives, which should transcend times and occasions.

She is not, however, without loyal adulators of her own time and race.

We read in Oviedo of her splendid soul. Peter Martyr found commendations of ordinary humanity not enough for her. Those nearest her person spoke as admiringly. It is the fortune, however, of a historical student, who lies beyond the influence of personal favor, to read in archives her most secret professions, and to gauge the innermost wishes of a soul which was carefully posed before her contemporaries. It is mirrored to-day in a thousand revealing lenses that were not to be seen by her contemporaries. Irving and Prescott simply fall into the adulation of her servitors, and make her confessors responsible for her acquiescence in the expulsion of the Jews and in the horrors of the Inquisition.