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+Project Gutenberg's Christopher Columbus, Volume 7, by Filson Young
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Christopher Columbus, Volume 7
+       And The New World Of His Discovery, A Narrative
+
+Author: Filson Young
+
+Release Date: December 5, 2004 [EBook #4114]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS, VOLUME 7 ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+                         CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS
+
+                   AND THE NEW WORLD OF HIS DISCOVERY
+
+                      A NARRATIVE BY FILSON YOUNG
+
+
+                              Volume 7
+
+
+
+TOWARDS THE SUNSET
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+DEGRADATION
+
+The first things seen by Francisco de Bobadilla when he entered the
+harbour of San Domingo on the morning of the 23rd of August 1500 were the
+bodies of several Spaniards, hanging from a gibbet near the water-side
+--a grim confirmation of what he had heard about the troubled state of the
+island.  While he was waiting for the tide so that he might enter the
+harbour a boat put off from shore to ascertain who was on board the
+caravels; and it was thus informally that Bobadilla first announced that
+he had come to examine into the state of the island.  Columbus was not at
+San Domingo, but was occupied in settling the affairs of the Vega Real;
+Bartholomew also was absent, stamping out the last smouldering embers of
+rebellion in Xaragua; and only James was in command to deal with this
+awkward situation.
+
+Bobadilla did not go ashore the first day, but remained on board his ship
+receiving the visits of various discontented colonists who, getting early
+wind of the purpose of his visit, lost no time in currying favour with
+him, Probably he heard enough that first day to have damned the
+administration of a dozen islands; but also we must allow him some
+interest in the wonderful and strange sights that he was seeing; for
+Espanola, which has perhaps grown wearisome to us, was new to him.  He
+had brought with him an armed body-guard of twenty-five men, and in the
+other caravel were the returned slaves, babies and all, under the charge
+of six friars.  On the day following his arrival Bobadilla landed and
+heard mass in state, afterwards reading out his commission to the
+assembled people.  Evidently he had received a shocking impression of the
+state of affairs in the island; that is the only explanation of the
+action suddenly taken by him, for his first public act was to demand from
+James the release of all the prisoners in the fortress, in order that
+they and their accusers should appear before him.
+
+James is in a difficulty; and, mule-like, since he does not know which
+way to turn, stands stock still.  He can do nothing, he says, without the
+Admiral's consent.  The next day Bobadilla, again hearing mass in state,
+causes further documents to be read showing that a still greater degree
+of power had been entrusted to his hands.  Mule-like, James still stands
+stock still; the greatest power on earth known to him is his eldest
+brother, and he will not, positively dare not, be moved by anything less
+than that.  He refuses to give up the prisoners on any grounds
+whatsoever, and Bobadilla has to take the fortress by assault--an easy
+enough matter since the resistance is but formal.
+
+The next act of Bobadilla's is not quite so easy to understand.  He
+quartered himself in Columbus's house; that perhaps was reasonable enough
+since there may not have been another house in the settlement fit to
+receive him; but he also, we are told, took possession of all his papers,
+public and private, and also seized the Admiral's store of money and
+began to pay his debts with it for him, greatly to the satisfaction of
+San Domingo.  There is an element of the comic in this interpretation of
+a commissioner's powers; and it seemed as though he meant to wind up the
+whole Columbus business, lock, stock, and barrel.  It would not be in
+accordance with our modern ideas of honour that a man's private papers
+should be seized unless he were suspected of treachery or some criminal
+act; but apparently Bobadilla regarded it as necessary.  We must remember
+that although he had only heard one side of the case it was evidently so
+positive, and the fruits of misgovernment were there so visibly before
+his eyes, that no amount of evidence in favour of Columbus would make him
+change his mind as to his fitness to govern.  Poor James, witnessing
+these things and unable to do anything to prevent them, finds himself
+suddenly relieved from the tension of the situation.  Since inaction is
+his note, he shall be indulged in it; and he is clapped in irons and cast
+into prison.  James can hardly believe the evidence of his senses.  He
+has been studying theology lately, it appears, with a view to entering
+the Church and perhaps being some day made Bishop of Espanola, but this
+new turn of affairs looks as though there were to be an end of all
+careers for him, military and ecclesiastical alike.
+
+Christopher at Fort Concepcion had early news of the arrival of
+Bobadilla, but in the hazy state of his mind he did not regard it as an
+event of sufficient importance to make his immediate presence at San
+Domingo advisable.  The name of Bobadilla conveyed nothing to him; and
+when he heard that he had come to investigate, he thought that he came
+to set right some disputed questions between the Admiral and other
+navigators as to the right of visiting Espanola and the Paria coast.
+As the days went on, however, he heard more disquieting rumours; grew at
+last uneasy, and moved to a fort nearer San Domingo in case it should be
+necessary for him to go there.  An officer met him on the road bearing
+the proclamations issued by Bobadilla, but not the message from the
+Sovereigns requiring the Admiral's obedience to the commissioner.
+Columbus wrote to the commissioner a curious letter, which is not
+preserved, in which he sought to gain time; excusing himself from
+responsibility for the condition of the island, and assuring Bobadilla
+that, as he intended to return to Spain almost immediately, he
+(Bobadilla) would have ample opportunity for exercising his command in
+his absence.  He also wrote to the Franciscan friars who had accompanied
+Bobadilla asking them to use their influence--the Admiral having some
+vague connection with the Franciscan order since his days at La Rabida.
+
+No reply came to any of these letters, and Columbus sent word that he
+still regarded his authority as paramount in the island.  For reply to
+this he received the Sovereigns' message to him which we have seen,
+commanding him to put himself under the direction of Bobadilla.  There
+was no mistaking this; there was the order in plain words; and with I
+know not what sinkings of heart Columbus at last set out for San Domingo.
+Bobadilla had expected resistance, but the Admiral, whatever his faults,
+knew how to behave with, dignity in a humiliating position; and he came
+into the city unattended on August 23, 1500.  On the outskirts of the
+town he was met by Bobadilla's guards, arrested, put in chains, and
+lodged in the fortress, the tower of which exists to this day.  He seemed
+to himself to be the victim of a particularly petty and galling kind of
+treachery, for it was his own cook, a man called Espinoza, who riveted
+his gyves upon him.
+
+There remained Bartholomew to be dealt with, and he, being at large and
+in command of the army, might not have proved such an easy conquest, but
+that Christopher, at Bobadilla's request, wrote and advised him to submit
+to arrest without any resistance.  Whether Bartholomew acquiesced or not
+is uncertain; what is certain is that he also was captured and placed in
+irons, and imprisoned on one of the caravels.  James in one caravel,
+Bartholomew in another, and Christopher in the fortress, and all in
+chains--this is what it has come to with the three sons of old Domenico.
+
+The trial was now begun, if trial that can be called which takes place in
+the absence of the culprit or his representative.  It was rather the
+hearing of charges against Christopher and his brothers; and we may be
+sure that every discontented feeling in the island found voice and was
+formulated into some incriminating charge.  Columbus was accused of
+oppressing the Spanish settlers by making them work at harsh and
+unnecessary labour; of cutting down their allowance of food, and
+restricting their liberty; of punishing them cruelly and unduly; of
+waging wars unjustly with the natives; of interfering with the conversion
+of the natives by hastily collecting them and sending them home as
+slaves; of having secreted treasures which should have been delivered to
+the Sovereigns--this last charge, like some of the others, true.  He had
+an accumulation of pearls of which he had given no account to Fonseca,
+and the possession of which he excused by the queer statement that he was
+waiting to announce it until he could match it with an equal amount of
+gold!  He was accused of hating the Spaniards, who were represented as
+having risen in the late rebellion in order to protect the natives and
+avenge their own wrongs--, and generally of having abused his office in
+order to enrich his own family and gratify his own feelings.  Bobadilla
+appeared to believe all these charges; or perhaps he recognised their
+nature, and yet saw that there was a sufficient degree of truth in them
+to disqualify the Admiral in his position as Viceroy.  In all these
+affairs his right-hand man was Roldan, whose loyalty to Columbus, as we
+foresaw, had been short-lived.  Roldan collects evidence; Roldan knows
+where he can lay his hands on this witness; Roldan produces this and that
+proof; Roldan is here, there, and everywhere--never had Bobadilla found
+such a useful, obliging man as Roldan.  With his help Bobadilla soon
+collected a sufficient weight of evidence to justify in his own mind his
+sending Columbus home to Spain, and remaining himself in command of the
+island.
+
+The caravels having been made ready, and all the evidence drawn up and
+documented, it only remained to embark the prisoners and despatch them to
+Spain.  Columbus, sitting in his dungeon, suffering from gout and
+ophthalmic as well as from misery and humiliation, had heard no news;
+but he had heard the shouting of the people in the streets, the beating
+of drums and blowing of horns, and his own name and that of his brothers
+uttered in derision; and he made sure that he was going to be executed.
+Alonso de Villegio, a nephew of Bishop Fonseca's, had been appointed to
+take charge of the ships returning to Spain; and when he came into the
+prison the Admiral thought his last hour had come.
+
+"Villegio," he asked sadly, "where are you taking me?"
+
+"I am taking you to the ship, your Excellency, to embark," replied the
+other.
+
+"To embark?" repeated the Admiral incredulously.  "Villegio! are you
+speaking the truth?"
+
+"By the life of your Excellency what I say is true," was the reply, and
+the news came with a wave of relief to the panic-stricken heart of the
+Admiral.
+
+In the middle of October the caravels sailed from San Domingo, and the
+last sounds heard by Columbus from the land of his discovery were the
+hoots and jeers and curses hurled after him by the treacherous,
+triumphant rabble on the shore.  Villegio treated him and his brothers
+with as much kindness as possible, and offered, when they had got well
+clear of Espanola, to take off the Admiral's chains.  But Columbus, with
+a fine counterstroke of picturesque dignity, refused to have them
+removed.  Already, perhaps, he had realised that his subjection to this
+cruel and quite unnecessary indignity would be one of the strongest
+things in his favour when he got to Spain, and he decided to suffer as
+much of it as he could.  "My Sovereigns commanded me to submit to what
+Bobadilla should order.  By his authority I wear these chains, and I
+shall continue to wear them until they are removed by order of the
+Sovereigns; and I will keep them afterwards as reminders of the reward I
+have received for my services."  Thus the Admiral, beginning to pick up
+his spirits again, and to feel the better for the sea air.
+
+The voyage home was a favourable one and in the course of it Columbus
+wrote the following letter to a friend of his at Court, Dona Juana de la
+Torre, who had been nurse to Prince Juan and was known by him to be a
+favourite of the Queen:
+
+     "MOST VIRTUOUS LADY,--Though my complaint of the world is new, its
+     habit of ill-using is very ancient.  I have had a thousand struggles
+     with it, and have thus far withstood them all, but now neither arms
+     nor counsels avail me, and it cruelly keeps me under water.  Hope in
+     the Creator of all men sustains me: His help was always very ready;
+     on another occasion, and not long ago, when I was still more
+     overwhelmed, He raised me with His right arm, saying, 'O man of
+     little faith, arise: it is I; be not afraid.'
+
+     "I came with so much cordial affection to serve these Princes, and
+     have served them with such service, as has never been heard of or
+     seen.
+
+     "Of the new heaven and earth which our Lord made, when Saint John
+     was writing the Apocalypse, after what was spoken by the mouth of
+     Isaiah, He made me the messenger, and showed me where it lay.  In
+     all men there was disbelief, but to the Queen, my Lady, He gave the
+     spirit of understanding, and great courage, and made her heiress of
+     all, as a dear and much loved daughter.  I went to take possession
+     of all this in her royal name.  They sought to make amends to her
+     for the ignorance they had all shown by passing over their little
+     knowledge and talking of obstacles and expenses.  Her Highness, on
+     the other hand, approved of it, and supported it as far as she was
+     able.
+
+     "Seven years passed in discussion and nine in execution.  During
+     this time very remarkable and noteworthy things occurred whereof no
+     idea at all had been formed.  I have arrived at, and am in, such a
+     condition that there is no person so vile but thinks he may insult
+     me: he shall be reckoned in the world as valour itself who is
+     courageous enough not to consent to it.
+
+     "If I were to steal the Indies or the land which lies towards them,
+     of which I am now speaking, from the altar of Saint Peter, and give
+     them to the Moors, they could not show greater enmity towards me in
+     Spain.  Who would believe such a thing where there was always so
+     much magnanimity?
+
+     "I should have much desired to free myself from this affair had it
+     been honourable towards my Queen to do so.  The support of our Lord
+     and of her Highness made me persevere: and to alleviate in some
+     measure the sorrows which death had caused her, I undertook a fresh
+     voyage to the new heaven and earth which up to that time had
+     remained hidden; and if it is not held there in esteem like the
+     other voyages to the Indies, that is no wonder, because it came to
+     be looked upon as my work.
+
+     "The Holy Spirit inflamed Saint Peter and twelve others with him,
+     and they all contended here below, and their toils and hardships
+     were many, but last of all they gained the victory.
+
+     "This voyage to Paria I thought would somewhat appease them on
+     account of the pearls, and of the discovery of gold in Espanola.
+     I ordered the pearls to be collected and fished for by people with
+     whom an arrangement was made that I should return for them, and, as
+     I understood, they were to be measured by the bushel.  If I did not
+     write about this to their Highnesses, it was because I wished to
+     have first of all done the same thing with the gold.
+
+     "The result to me in this has been the same as in many other things;
+     I should not have lost them nor my honour, if I had sought my own
+     advantage, and had allowed Espanola to be ruined, or if my
+     privileges and contracts had been observed.  And I say just the same
+     about the gold which I had then collected, and [for] which with such
+     great afflictions and toils I have, by divine power, almost
+     perfected [the arrangements].
+
+     "When I went from Paria I found almost half the people from Espanola
+     in revolt, and they have waged war against me until now, as against
+     a Moor; and the Indians on the other side grievously [harassed me].
+     At this time Hojeda arrived and tried to put the finishing stroke:
+     he said that their Highnesses had sent him with promises of gifts,
+     franchises and pay: he gathered together a great band, for in the
+     whole of Espanola there are very few save vagabonds, and not one
+     with wife and children.  This Hojeda gave me great trouble; he was
+     obliged to depart, and left word that he would soon return with more
+     ships and people, and that he had left the Royal person of the
+     Queen, our Lady, at the point of death.  Then Vincente Yanez arrived
+     with four caravels; there was disturbance and mistrust but no
+     mischief: the Indians talked of many others at the Cannibals
+     [Caribbee Islands] and in Paria; and afterwards spread the news of
+     six other caravels, which were brought by a brother of the Alcalde,
+     but it was with malicious intent.  This occurred at the very last,
+     when the hope that their Highnesses would ever send any ships to the
+     Indies was almost abandoned, nor did we expect them; and it was
+     commonly reported that her Highness was dead.
+
+     "A certain Adrian about this time endeavoured to rise in rebellion
+     again, as he had done previously, but our Lord did not permit his
+     evil purpose to succeed.  I had purposed in myself never to touch a
+     hair of anybody's head, but I lament to say that with this man,
+     owing to his ingratitude, it was not possible to keep that resolve
+     as I had intended: I should not have done less to my brother, if he
+     had sought to kill me, and steal the dominion which my King and
+     Queen had given me in trust.
+
+     "This Adrian, as it appears, had sent Don Ferdinand to Xaragua to
+     collect some of his followers, and there a dispute arose with the
+     Alcalde from which a deadly contest ensued, and he [Adrian] did not
+     effect his purpose.  The Alcalde seized him and a part of his band,
+     and the fact was that he would have executed them if I had not
+     prevented it; they were kept prisoners awaiting a caravel in which
+     they might depart.  The news of Hojeda which I told them made them
+     lose the hope that he would now come again.
+
+     "For six months I had been prepared to return to their Highnesses
+     with the good news of the gold, and to escape from governing a
+     dissolute people Who fear neither God nor their King and Queen,
+     being full of vices and wickedness.
+
+     "I could have paid the people in full with six hundred thousand, and
+     for this purpose I had four millions of tenths and somewhat more,
+     besides the third of the gold.
+
+     "Before my departure I many times begged their Highnesses to send
+     there, at my expense, some one to take charge of the administration
+     of justice; and after finding the Alcalde in arms I renewed my
+     supplications to have either some troops or at least some servant of
+     theirs with letters patent; for my reputation is such that even if I
+     build churches and hospitals, they will always be called dens of
+     thieves.
+
+     "They did indeed make provision at last, but it was the very
+     contrary of what the matter demanded: it may be successful, since it
+     was according to their good pleasure.
+
+     "I was there for two years without being able to gain a decree of
+     favour for myself or for those who went there, yet this man brought
+     a coffer full: whether they will all redound to their [Highnesses]
+     service, God knows.  Indeed, to begin with, there are exemptions for
+     twenty years, which is a man's lifetime; and gold is collected to
+     such an extent that there was one person who became worth five marks
+     in four hours; whereof I will speak more fully later on.
+
+     "If it would please their Highnesses to remove the grounds of a
+     common saying of those who know my labours, that the calumny of the
+     people has done me more harm than much service and the maintenance
+     of their [Highnesses] property and dominion has done me good, it
+     would be a charity, and I should be re-established in my honour, and
+     it would be talked about all over the world: for the undertaking is
+     of such a nature that it must daily become more famous and in higher
+     esteem.
+
+     "When the Commander Bobadilla came to Santo Domingo, I was at La
+     Vega, and the Adelantado at Xaragua, where that Adrian had made a
+     stand, but then all was quiet, and the land rich and all men at
+     peace.  On the second day after his arrival, he created himself
+     Governor, and appointed officers and made executions, and proclaimed
+     immunities of gold and tenths and in general of everything else for
+     twenty years, which is a man's lifetime, and that he came to pay
+     everybody in full up to that day, even though they had not rendered
+     service; and he publicly gave notice that, as for me, he had charge
+     to send me in irons, and my brothers likewise, as he has done, and
+     that I should nevermore return thither, nor any other of my family:
+     alleging a thousand disgraceful and discourteous things about me.
+     All this took place on the second day after his arrival, as I have
+     said, and while I was absent at a distance, without my knowing
+     either of him or of his arrival.
+
+     "Some letters of their Highnesses signed in blank, of which he
+     brought a number, he filled up and sent to the Alcalde and to his
+     company with favours and commendations: to me he never sent either
+     letter or messenger, nor has he done so to this day.  Imagine what
+     any one holding my office would think when one who endeavoured to
+     rob their Highnesses, and who has done so much evil and mischief, is
+     honoured and favoured, while he who maintained it at such risks is
+     degraded.
+
+     "When I heard this I thought that this affair would be like that of
+     Hojeda or one of the others, but I restrained myself when I learnt
+     for certain from the friars that their Highnesses had sent him.  I
+     wrote to him that his arrival was welcome, and that I was prepared
+     to go to the Court and had sold all I possessed by auction; and that
+     with respect to the immunities he should not be hasty, for both that
+     matter and the government I would hand over to him immediately as
+     smooth as my palm.  And I wrote to the same effect to the friars,
+     but neither he nor they gave me any answer.  On the contrary, he put
+     himself in a warlike attitude, and compelled all who went there to
+     take an oath to him as Governor; and they told me that it was for
+     twenty years.
+
+     "Directly I knew of those immunities, I thought that I would repair
+     such a great error and that he would be pleased, for he gave them
+     without the need or occasion necessary in so vast a matter: and he
+     gave to vagabond people what would have been excessive for a man who
+     had brought wife and children.  So I announced by word and letters
+     that he could not use his patents because mine were those in force;
+     and I showed them the immunities which John Aguado brought.
+
+     "All this was done by me in order to gain time, so that their
+     Highnesses might be informed of the condition of the country, and
+     that they might have an opportunity of issuing fresh commands as to
+     what would best promote their service in that respect.
+
+     "It is useless to publish such immunities in the Indies: to the
+     settlers who have taken up residence it is a pure gain, for the best
+     lands are given to them, and at a low valuation they will be worth
+     two-hundred thousand at the end of the four years when the period of
+     residence is ended, without their digging a spadeful in them.  I
+     would not speak thus if the settlers were married, but there are not
+     six among them all who are not on the look-out to gather what they
+     can and depart speedily.  It would be a good thing if they should go
+     from Castile, and also if it were known who and what they are, and
+     if the country could be settled with honest people.
+
+     "I had agreed with those settlers that they should pay the third of
+     the gold, and the tenths, and this at their own request; and they
+     received it as a great favour from their Highnesses.  I reproved
+     them when I heard that they ceased to do this, and hoped that the
+     Commander would do likewise, and he did the contrary.
+
+     "He incensed them against me by saying that I wanted to deprive them
+     of what their Highnesses had given them; and he endeavoured to set
+     them at variance with me, and did so; and he induced them to write
+     to their Highnesses that they should never again send me back to the
+     government, and I likewise make the same supplication to them for
+     myself and for my whole family, as long as there are not different
+     inhabitants.  And he together with them ordered inquisitions
+     concerning me for wickednesses the like whereof were never known in
+     hell.  Our Lord, who rescued Daniel and the three children, is
+     present with the same wisdom and power as He had then, and with the
+     same means, if it should please Him and be in accordance with His
+     will.
+
+     "I should know how to remedy all this, and the rest of what has been
+     said and has taken place since I have been in the Indies, if my
+     disposition would allow me to seek my own advantage, and if it
+     seemed honourable to me to do so, but the maintenance of justice and
+     the extension of the dominion of her Highness has hitherto kept me
+     down.  Now that so much gold is found, a dispute arises as to which
+     brings more profit, whether to go about robbing or to go to the
+     mines.  A hundred castellanos are as easily obtained for a woman as
+     for a farm, and it is very general, and there are plenty of dealers
+     who go about looking for girls: those from nine to ten are now in
+     demand, and for all ages a good price must be paid.
+
+     "I assert that the violence of the calumny of turbulent persons has
+     injured me more than my services have profited me; which is a bad
+     example for the present and for the future.  I take my oath that a
+     number of men have gone to the Indies who did not deserve water in
+     the sight of God and of the world; and now they are returning
+     thither, and leave is granted them.
+
+     "I assert that when I declared that the Commander could not grant
+     immunities, I did what he desired, although I told him that it was
+     to cause delay until their Highnesses should, receive information
+     from the country, and should command anew what might be for their
+     service.
+
+     "He excited their enmity against me, and he seems, from what took
+     place and from his behaviour, to have come as my enemy and as a very
+     vehement one; or else the report is true that he has spent much to
+     obtain this employment.  I do not know more about it than what I
+     hear.  I never heard of an inquisitor gathering rebels together and
+     accepting them, and others devoid of credit and unworthy of it, as
+     witnesses against their Governor.
+
+     "If their Highnesses were to make a general inquisition there, I
+     assure you that they would look upon it as a great wonder that the
+     island does not founder.
+
+     "I think your Ladyship will remember that when, after losing my
+     sails, I was driven into Lisbon by a tempest, I was falsely accused
+     of having gone there to the King in order to give him the Indies.
+     Their Highnesses afterwards learned the contrary, and that it was
+     entirely malicious.
+
+     "Although I may know but little, I do not think any one considers me
+     so stupid as not to know that even if the Indies were mine I could
+     not uphold myself without the help of some Prince.
+
+     "If this be so, where could I find better support and security than
+     in the King and Queen, our Lords, who have raised me from nothing to
+     such great honour, and are the most exalted Princes of the world on
+     sea and on land, and who consider that I have rendered them service,
+     and who preserve to me my privileges and rewards: and if any one
+     infringes them, their Highnesses increase them still more, as was
+     seen in the case of John Aguado; and they order great honour to be
+     conferred upon me, and, as I have already said, their Highnesses
+     have received service from me, and keep my sons in their household;
+     all which could by no means happen with another prince, for where
+     there is no affection, everything else fails.
+
+     "I have now spoken thus in reply to a malicious slander, but against
+     my will, as it is a thing which should not recur to memory even in
+     dreams; for the Commander Bobadilla maliciously seeks in this way to
+     set his own conduct and actions in a brighter light; but I shall
+     easily show him that his small knowledge and great cowardice,
+     together with his inordinate cupidity, have caused him to fail
+     therein.
+
+     "I have already said that I wrote to him and to the friars, and
+     immediately set out, as I told him, almost alone, because all the
+     people were with the Adelantado, and likewise in order to prevent
+     suspicion on his part.  When he heard this, he seized Don Diego and
+     sent him on board a caravel loaded with irons, and did the same to
+     me upon my arrival, and afterwards to the Adelantado when he came;
+     nor did I speak to him any more, nor to this day has he allowed any
+     one to speak to me; and I take my oath that I cannot understand why
+     I am made a prisoner.
+
+     "He made it his first business to seize the gold, which he did
+     without measuring or weighing it and in my absence; he said that he
+     wanted it to pay the people, and according to what I hear he
+     assigned the chief part to himself and sent fresh exchangers for the
+     exchanges.  Of this gold I had put aside certain specimens, very big
+     lumps, like the eggs of geese, hens, and pullets, and of many other
+     shapes, which some persons had collected in a short space of time,
+     in order that their Highnesses might be gladdened, and might
+     comprehend the business upon seeing a quantity of large stones full
+     of gold.  This collection was the first to be given away, with
+     malicious intent, so that their Highnesses should not hold the
+     matter in any account until he has feathered his nest, which he is
+     in great haste to do.  Gold which is for melting diminishes at the
+     fire: some chains which would weigh about twenty marks have never
+     been seen again.
+
+     "I have been more distressed about this matter of the gold than even
+     about the pearls, because I have not brought it to her Highness.
+
+     "The Commander at once set to work upon anything which he thought
+     would injure me.  I have already said that with six hundred thousand
+     I could pay every one without defrauding anybody, and that I had
+     more than four millions of tenths and constabulary [dues] without
+     touching the gold.  He made some free gifts which are ridiculous,
+     though I believe that he began by assigning the chief part to
+     himself.  Their Highnesses will find it out when they order an
+     account to be obtained from him, especially if I should be present
+     thereat.  He does nothing but reiterate that a large sum is owing,
+     and it is what I have said, and even less.  I have been much
+     distressed that there should be sent concerning me an inquisitor who
+     is aware that if the inquisition which he returns is very grave he
+     will remain in possession of the government.
+
+     "Would that it had pleased our Lord that their Highnesses had sent
+     him or some one else two years ago, for I know that I should now be
+     free from scandal and infamy, and that my honour would not be taken
+     from me, nor should I lose it.  God is just, and will make known the
+     why and the wherefore.
+
+     "They judge me over there as they would a governor who had gone to
+     Sicily, or to a city or town placed under regular government, and
+     where the laws can be observed in their entirety without fear of
+     ruining everything; and I am greatly injured thereby.
+
+     "I ought to be judged as a captain who went from Spain to the Indies
+     to conquer a numerous and warlike people, whose customs and religion
+     are very contrary to ours; who live in rocks and mountains, without
+     fixed settlements, and not like ourselves: and where, by the Divine
+     Will, I have placed under the dominion of the King and Queen, our
+     Sovereigns, a second world, through which Spain, which was reckoned
+     a poor country, has become the richest.
+
+     "I ought to be judged as a captain who for such a long time up to
+     this day has borne arms without laying them aside for an hour, and
+     by gentlemen adventurers and by custom, and not by letters, unless
+     they were from Greeks or Romans or others of modern times of whom
+     there are so many and such noble examples in Spain; or otherwise I
+     receive great injury, because in the Indies there is neither town
+     nor settlement.
+
+     "The gate to the gold and pearls is now open, and plenty of
+     everything--precious stones, spices and a thousand other things--may
+     be surely expected, and never could a worse misfortune befall me:
+     for by the name of our Lord the first voyage would yield them just
+     as much as would the traffic of Arabia Felix as far as Mecca, as I
+     wrote to their Highnesses by Antonio de Tomes in my reply respecting
+     the repartition of the sea and land with the Portuguese; and
+     afterwards it would equal that of Calicut, as I told them and put in
+     writing at the monastery of the Mejorada.
+
+     "The news of the gold that I said I would give is, that on the day
+     of the Nativity, while I was much tormented, being harassed by
+     wicked Christians and by Indians, and when I was on the point of
+     giving up everything, and if possible escaping from life, our Lord
+     miraculously comforted me and said, 'Fear not violence, I will
+     provide for all things: the seven years of the term of the gold have
+     not elapsed, and in that and in everything else I will afford thee a
+     remedy.'
+
+     "On that day I learned that there were eighty leagues of land with
+     mines at every point thereof.  The opinion now is that it is all
+     one.  Some have collected a hundred and twenty castellanos in one
+     day, and others ninety, and even the number of two hundred and fifty
+     has been reached.  From fifty to seventy, and in many more cases
+     from fifteen to fifty, is considered a good day's work, and many
+     carry it on.  The usual quantity is from six to twelve, and any one
+     obtaining less than this is not satisfied. It seems to me that these
+     mines are like others, and do not yield equally every day.  The
+     mines are new, and so are the workers: it is the opinion of
+     everybody that even if all Castile were to go there, every
+     individual, however inexpert he might be, would not obtain less than
+     one or two castellanos daily, and now it is only commencing.  It is
+     true that they keep Indians, but the business is in the hands of the
+     Christians.  Behold what discernment Bobadilla had, when he gave up
+     everything for nothing, and four millions of tenths, without any
+     reason or even being requested, and without first notifying it to
+     their Highnesses.  And this is not the only loss.
+
+     "I know that my errors have not been committed with the intention of
+     doing evil, and I believe that their Highnesses regard the matter
+     just as I state it: and I know and see that they deal mercifully
+     even with those who maliciously act to their disservice.  I believe
+     and consider it very certain that their clemency will be both
+     greater and more abundant towards me, for I fell therein through
+     ignorance and the force of circumstances, as they will know fully
+     hereafter; and I indeed am their creature, and they will look upon
+     my services, and will acknowledge day by day that they are much
+     profited.  They will place everything in the balance, even as Holy
+     Scripture tells us good and evil will be at the day of judgment.
+
+     "If, however, they command that another person do judge me, which I
+     cannot believe, and that it be by inquisition in the Indies, I very
+     humbly beseech them to send thither two conscientious and honourable
+     persons at my expense, who I believe will easily, now that gold is
+     discovered, find five marks in four hours.  In either case it is
+     needful for them to provide for this matter.
+
+     "The Commander on his arrival at San Domingo took up his abode in my
+     house, and just as he found it so he appropriated everything to
+     himself.  Well and good; perhaps he was in want of it.  A pirate
+     never acted thus towards a merchant.  About my papers I have a
+     greater grievance, for he has so completely deprived me of them that
+     I have never been able to obtain a single one from him; and those
+     that would have been most useful in my exculpation are precisely
+     those which he has kept most concealed.  Behold the just and honest
+     inquisitor!  Whatever he may have done, they tell me that there has
+     been an end to justice, except in an arbitrary form.  God, our Lord,
+     is present with His strength and wisdom, as of old, and always
+     punishes in the end, especially ingratitude and injuries."
+
+We must keep in mind the circumstances in which this letter was written
+if we are to judge it and the writer wisely.  It is a sad example of
+querulous complaint, in which everything but the writer's personal point
+of view is ignored.  No one indeed is more terrible in this world than
+the Man with a Grievance.  How rarely will human nature in such
+circumstances retire into the stronghold of silence!  Columbus is asking
+for pity; but as we read his letter we incline to pity him on grounds
+quite different from those which he represented.  He complains that the
+people he was sent to govern have waged war against him as against a
+Moor; he complains of Ojeda and of Vincenti Yanez Pinzon; of Adrian de
+Moxeca, and of every other person whom it was his business to govern and
+hold in restraint.  He complains of the colonists--the very people, some
+of them, whom he himself took and impressed from the gaols and purlieus
+of Cadiz; and then he mingles pious talk about Saint Peter and Daniel in
+the den of lions with notes on the current price of little girls and big
+lumps of gold like the eggs of geese, hens, and pullets.  He complains
+that he is judged as a man would be judged who had been sent out to
+govern a ready-made colony, and represents instead that he went out to
+conquer a numerous and warlike people "whose custom and religion are very
+contrary to ours, and who lived in rocks and mountains"; forgetting that
+when it suited him for different purposes he described the natives as so
+peaceable and unwarlike that a thousand of them would not stand against
+one Christian, and that in any case he was sent out to create a
+constitution and not merely to administer one.  Very sore indeed is
+Christopher as he reveals himself in this letter, appealing now to his
+correspondent, now to the King and Queen, now to that God who is always
+on the side of the complainant.  "God our Lord is present with His
+strength and wisdom, as of old, and always punishes in the end,
+especially ingratitude and injuries."  Not boastfulness and weakness, let
+us hope, or our poor Admiral will come off badly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+CRISIS IN THE ADMIRAL'S LIFE
+
+Columbus was not far wrong in his estimate of the effect likely to be
+produced by his manacles, and when the ships of Villegio arrived at Cadiz
+in October, the spectacle of an Admiral in chains produced a degree of
+commiseration which must have exceeded his highest hopes.  He was now in
+his fiftieth year and of an extremely venerable appearance, his kindling
+eye looking forth from under brows of white, his hair and beard
+snow-white, his face lined and spiritualised with suffering and sorrow.
+It must be remembered that before the Spanish people he had always
+appeared in more or less state.  They had not that intimacy with him, an
+intimacy which perhaps brought contempt, which the people in Espanola
+enjoyed; and in Spain, therefore, the contrast between his former
+grandeur and this condition of shame and degradation was the more
+striking.  It was a fact that the people of Spain could not neglect. It
+touched their sense of the dramatic and picturesque, touched their
+hearts also perhaps--hearts quick to burn, quick to forget.  They had
+forgotten him before, now they burned with indignation at the picture of
+this venerable and much-suffering man arriving in disgrace.
+
+His letter to Dofia Juana, hastily despatched by him, probably through
+the office of some friendly soul on board, immediately on his arrival at
+Cadiz, was the first news from the ship received by the King and Queen,
+and naturally it caused them a shock of surprise.  It was followed by the
+despatches from Bobadilla and by a letter from the Alcalde of Cadiz
+announcing that Columbus and his brothers were in his custody awaiting
+the royal orders.  Perhaps Ferdinand and Isabella had already repented
+their drastic action and had entertained some misgivings as to its
+results; but it is more probable that they had put it out of their heads
+altogether, and that their hasty action now was prompted as much by the
+shock of being recalled to a consciousness of the troubled state of
+affairs in the New World as by any real regret for what they had done.
+Moreover they had sent out Bobadilla to quiet things down; and the first
+result of it was that Spain was ringing with the scandal of the Admiral's
+treatment.  In that Spanish world, unsteadfast and unstable, when one end
+of the see-saw was up the other must be down; and it was Columbus who now
+found himself high up in the heavens of favour, and Bobadilla who was
+seated in the dust.  Equipoise any kind was apparently a thing
+impossible; if one man was right the other man must be wrong; no excuses
+for Bobadilla; every excuse for the Admiral.
+
+The first official act, therefore, was an order for the immediate release
+of the Admiral and his brothers, followed by an invitation for him to
+proceed without delay to the Court at Granada, and an order for the
+immediate payment to him of the sum of 2000 ducats [perhaps $250,000 in
+the year 2000  D.W.] this last no ungenerous gift to a Viceroy whose
+pearl accounts were in something less than order.  Perhaps Columbus had
+cherished the idea of appearing dramatically before the very Court in his
+rags and chains; but the cordiality of their letter as well as the gift
+of money made this impossible.  Instead, not being a man to do things by
+halves, he equipped himself in his richest and most splendid garments,
+got together the requisite number of squires and pages, and duly
+presented himself at Granada in his full dignity.  The meeting was an
+affecting one, touched with a humanity which has survived the intervening
+centuries, as a touch of true humanity will when details of mere parade
+and etiquette have long perished.  Perhaps the Admiral, inspired with a
+deep sense of his wrongs, meant to preserve a very stiff and cold
+demeanour at the beginning of this interview; but when he looked into the
+kind eyes of Isabella and saw them suffused with tears at the thought of
+his sorrows all his dignity broke down; the tears came to his own eyes,
+and he wept there naturally like a child.  Ferdinand looking on kind but
+uncomfortable; Isabella unaffectedly touched and weeping; the Admiral, in
+spite of his scarlet cloak and golden collar and jewelled sword, in spite
+of equerries, squires, pages and attendants, sobbing on his knees like a
+child or an old man-these were the scenes and kindly emotions of this
+historic moment.
+
+
+The tears were staunched by kindly royal words and handkerchiefs supplied
+by attendant pages; sobbings breaking out again, but on the whole soon
+quieted; King and Queen raising the gouty Christopher from his knees,
+filling the air with kind words of sympathy, praise, and encouragement;
+the lonely worn heart, somewhat arid of late, and parched from want of
+human sympathy, much refreshed by this dew of kindness.  The Admiral was
+soon himself again, and he would not have been himself if upon recovering
+he had not launched out into what some historians call a "lofty and
+dignified vindication of his loyalty and zeal."  No one, indeed, is
+better than the Admiral at such lofty and dignified vindications.  He
+goes into the whole matter and sets forth an account of affairs at
+Espanola from his own point of view; and can even (so high is the
+thermometer of favour) safely indulge in a little judicious
+self-depreciation, saying that if he has erred it has not been from want
+of zeal but from want of experience in dealing with the kind of material
+he has been set to govern.  All this is very human, natural, and
+understandable; product of that warm emotional atmosphere, bedewed with
+tears, in which the Admiral finds himself; and it is not long before the
+King and Queen, also moved to it by the emotional temperature, are
+expressing their unbroken and unbounded confidence in him and
+repudiating the acts of Bobadilla, which they declare to have been
+contrary to their instructions; undertaking also that he shall be
+immediately dismissed from his post.  Poor Bobadilla is not here in the
+warm emotional atmosphere; he had his turn of it six months ago, when no
+powers were too high or too delicate to be entrusted to him; he is out
+in the cold at the other end of the see-saw, which has let him down to
+the ground with a somewhat sudden thump.
+
+
+Columbus, relying on the influence of these emotions, made bold to ask
+that his property in the island should be restored to him, which was
+immediately granted; and also to request that he should be reinstated in
+his office of Viceroy and allowed to return at once in triumph to
+Espanola.  But emotions are unstable things; they present a yielding
+surface which will give to any extent, but which, when it has hardened
+again after the tears have evaporated, is often found to be in much the
+same condition as before.  At first promises were made that the whole
+matter should be fully gone into; but when it came to cold fact,
+Ferdinand was obliged to recognise that this whole business of discovery
+and colonisation had become a very different thing to what it had been
+when Columbus was the only discoverer; and he was obviously of opinion
+that, as Columbus's office had once been conveniently withdrawn from him,
+it would only be disastrous to reinstate him in it.  Of course he did not
+say so at once; but reasons were given for judicious delay in the
+Admiral's reappointment.  It was represented to him that the colony,
+being in an extremely unsettled state, should be given a short period of
+rest, and also that it would be as well for him to wait until the people
+who had given him so much trouble in the island could be quietly and
+gradually removed.  Two years was the time mentioned as suitable for an
+interregnum, and it is probable that it was the intention of Isabella,
+although not of Ferdinand, to restore Columbus to his office at the end
+of that time.
+
+
+In the meantime it became necessary to appoint some one to supersede
+Bobadilla; for the news that arrived periodically from Espanola during
+the year showed that he had entirely failed in his task of reducing the
+island to order.  For the wholesome if unequal rigours of Columbus
+Bobadilla had substituted laxness and indulgence, with the result that
+the whole colony was rapidly reduced to a state of the wildest disorder.
+Vice and cruelty were rampant; in fact the barbarities practised upon the
+natives were so scandalous that even Spanish opinion, which was never
+very sympathetic to heathen suffering, was thoroughly shocked and
+alarmed.  The Sovereigns therefore appointed Nicholas de Ovando to go out
+and take over the command, with instructions to use very drastic means
+for bringing the colony to order.  How he did it we shall presently see;
+in the meantime all that was known of him (the man not having been tried
+yet) was that he was a poor knight of Calatrava, a man respected in royal
+circles for the performance of minor official duties, but no very popular
+favourite; honest according to his lights--lights turned rather low and
+dim, as was often the case in those days.  A narrow-minded man also,
+without sympathy or imagination, capable of cruelty; a tough,
+stiff-necked stock of a man, fit to deal with Bobadilla perhaps, but
+hardly fit to deal with the colony.  Spain in those days was not a
+nursery of administration.  Of all the people who were sent out
+successively to govern Espanola and supersede one another, the only one
+who really seems to have had the necessary natural ability, had he but
+been given the power, was Bartholomew Columbus; but unfortunately things
+were in such a state that the very name of Columbus was enough to bar a
+man from acceptance as a governor of Espanola.
+
+It was not for any lack of powers and equipment that this procession of
+governors failed in their duties.  We have seen with what authority
+Bobadilia had been entrusted; and Ovando had even greater advantages.
+The instructions he received showed that the needs of the new colonies
+were understood by Ferdinand and Isabella, if by no one else.  Ovando was
+not merely appointed Governor of Espanola but of the whole of the new
+territory discovered in the west, his seat of government being San
+Domingo.  He was given the necessary free hand in the matters of
+punishment, confiscation, and allotment of lands.  He was to revoke the
+orders which had been made by Bobadilla reducing the proportion of gold
+payable to the Crown, and was empowered to take over one-third of the.
+gold that was stored on the island, and one-half of what might be found
+in the future.  The Crown was to have a monopoly of all trade, and
+ordinary supplies were only to be procured through the Crown agent.
+On the other hand, the natives were to be released from slavery, and
+although forced to work in the mines, were to be paid for their labour
+--a distinction which in the working out did not produce much difference.
+A body of Franciscan monks accompanied Ovando for the purpose of tackling
+the religious question with the necessary energy; and every regulation
+that the kind heart of Isabella could think of was made for the happiness
+and contentment of the Indians.
+
+Unhappily the real mischief had already been done.  The natives, who had
+never been accustomed to hard and regular work under the conditions of
+commerce and greed, but had only toiled for the satisfaction of their own
+simple wants, were suffering cruelly under the hard labour in the mines,
+and the severe driving of their Spanish masters.  Under these unnatural
+conditions the native population was rapidly dying off, and there was
+some likelihood that there would soon be a scarcity of native labour.
+These were the circumstances in which the idea of importing black African
+labour to the New World was first conceived--a plan which was destined to
+have results so tremendous that we have probably not yet seen their full
+and ghastly development.  There were a great number of African negro
+slaves at that time in Spain; a whole generation of them had been born in
+slavery in Spain itself; and this generation was bodily imported to
+Espanola to relieve and assist the native labour.
+
+
+These preparations were not made all at once; and it was more than a year
+after the return of Columbus before Ovando was ready to sail.  In the
+meantime Columbus was living in Granada, and looking on with no very
+satisfied eye at the plans which were being made to supersede him, and
+about which he was probably not very much consulted; feeling very sore
+indeed, and dividing his attention between the nursing of his grievances
+and other even less wholesome occupations.  There was any amount of
+smiling kindness for him at Court, but very little of the satisfaction
+that his vanity and ambition craved; and in the absence of practical
+employment he fell back on visionary speculations.  He made great friends
+at this time with a monk named Gaspar Gorricio, with whose assistance he
+began to make some kind of a study of such utterances of the Prophets and
+the Fathers as he conceived to have a bearing on his own career.
+
+Columbus was in fact in a very queer way at this time; and what with his
+readings and his meditatings and his grievances, and his visits to his
+monkish friend in the convent of Las Cuevas, he fell into a kind of
+intellectual stupor, of which the work called 'Libro de las Profecias,'
+or Book of the Prophecies, in which he wrote down such considerations as
+occurred to him in his stupor, was the result.  The manuscript of this
+work is in existence, although no human being has ever ventured to
+reprint the whole of it; and we would willingly abstain from mentioning
+it here if it were not an undeniable act of Columbus's life.  The
+Admiral, fallen into theological stupor, puts down certain figures upon
+paper; discovers that St. Augustine said that the world would only last
+for 7000 years; finds that some other genius had calculated that before
+the birth of Christ it had existed for 5343 years and 318 days; adds 1501
+years from the birth of Christ to his own time; adds up, and finds that
+the total is 6844 years; subtracts, and discovers that this earthly globe
+can only last 155 years longer.  He remembers also that, still according
+to the Prophets, certain things must happen before the end of the world;
+Holy Sepulchre restored to Christianity, heathen converted, second coming
+of Christ; and decides that he himself is the man appointed by God and
+promised by the Prophets to perform these works.  Good Heavens! in what
+an entirely dark and sordid stupor is our Christopher now sunk--a
+veritable slough and quag of stupor out of which, if he does not manage
+to flounder himself, no human hand can pull him.
+
+
+But amid his wallowings in this slough of stupor, when all else, in him
+had been well-nigh submerged by it, two dim lights were preserved towards
+which, although foundered up to the chin, he began to struggle; and by
+superhuman efforts did at last extricate himself from the theological
+stupor and get himself blown clean again by the salt winds before he
+died.  One light was his religion; not to be confounded with theological
+stupor, but quite separate from it in my belief; a certain steadfast and
+consuming faith in a Power that could see and understand and guide him to
+the accomplishment of his purpose.  This faith had been too often a good
+friend and help to Christopher for him to forget it very long, even while
+he was staggering in the quag with Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the Fathers; and
+gradually, as I say, he worked himself out into the region of activity
+again.  First, thinking it a pity that his flounderings in the slough
+should be entirely wasted, he had a copy of his precious theological work
+made and presented it to the Sovereigns, with a letter urging them (since
+he himself was unable to do it) to undertake a crusade for the recovery
+of the Holy Sepulchre--not an altogether wild proposal in those days.
+But Ferdinand had other uses for his men and his money, and contented
+himself with despatching Peter Martyr on a pacific mission to the Grand
+Soldan of Egypt.
+
+The other light left unquenched in Columbus led him back to the firm
+ground of maritime enterprise; he began to long for the sea again, and
+for a chance of doing something to restore his reputation.  An infinitely
+better and more wholesome frame of mind this; by all means let him mend
+his reputation by achievement, instead of by writing books in a
+theological trance or stupor, and attempting to prove that he was chosen
+by the Almighty.  He now addressed himself to the better task of getting
+himself chosen by men to do something which should raise him again in
+their esteem.
+
+
+His maritime ambition was no doubt stimulated at this time by witnessing
+the departure of Ovando, in February 1502, with a fleet of thirty-five
+ships and a company of 2500 people.  It was not in the Admiral's nature
+to look on without envy at an equipment the like of which he himself had
+never been provided with, and he did not restrain his sarcasms at its
+pomp and grandeur, nor at the ease with which men could follow a road
+which had once been pointed out to them.  Ovando had a great body-guard
+such as Columbus had never had; and he also carried with him a great
+number of picked married men with their families, all with knowledge of
+some trade or craft, whose presence in the colony would be a guarantee
+of permanence and steadiness.  He perhaps remembered his own crowd of
+ruffians and gaol-birds, and realised the bitterness of his own mistakes.
+It was a very painful moment for him, and he was only partially
+reconciled to it by the issue of a royal order to Ovando under which he
+was required to see to the restoration of the Admiral's property.  If it
+had been devoted to public purposes it was to be repaid him from the
+royal funds; but if it had been merely distributed among the colonists
+Bobadilla was to be made responsible for it.  The Admiral was also
+allowed to send out an agent to represent him and look after his
+interests; and he appointed Alonso de Carvajal to this office.
+
+
+Ovando once gone, the Admiral could turn again to his own affairs.
+It is true there were rumours that the whole fleet had perished, for it
+encountered a gale very soon after leaving Cadiz, and a great quantity of
+the deck hamper was thrown overboard and was washed on the shores of
+Spain; and the Sovereigns were so bitterly distressed that, as it is
+said, they shut them selves up for eight days.  News eventually came,
+however, that only one ship had been lost and that the rest had proceeded
+safely to San Domingo.  Columbus, much recovered in body and mind, now
+began to apply for a fleet for himself.  He had heard of the discovery by
+the Portuguese of the southern route to India; no doubt he had heard also
+much gossip of the results of the many private voyages of discovery that
+were sailing from Spain at this time; and he began to think seriously
+about his own discoveries and the way in which they might best be
+extended.  He thought much of his voyage to the west of Trinidad and of
+the strange pent-up seas and currents that he had discovered there.  He
+remembered the continual westward trend of the current, and how all the
+islands in that sea had their greatest length east and west, as though
+their shores had been worn into that shape by the constant flowing of the
+current; and it was not an unnatural conclusion for him to suppose that
+there was a channel far to the west through which these seas poured and
+which would lead him to the Golden Chersonesus.  He put away from him
+that nightmare madness that he transacted on the coast of Cuba.  He knew
+very well that he had not yet found the Golden Chersonesus and the road
+to India; but he became convinced that the western current would lead him
+there if only he followed it long enough.  There was nothing insane about
+this theory; it was in fact a very well-observed and well-reasoned
+argument; and the fact that it happened to be entirely wrong is no
+reflection on the Admiral's judgment.  The great Atlantic currents at
+that time had not been studied; and how could he know that the western
+stream of water was the northern half of a great ocean current which
+sweeps through the Caribbean Sea, into and round the Gulf of Mexico, and
+flows out northward past Florida in the Gulf Stream?
+
+His applications for a fleet were favourably received by the King and
+Queen, but much frowned upon by certain high officials of the Court.
+They were beginning to regard Columbus as a dangerous adventurer who,
+although he happened to have discovered the western islands, had brought
+the Spanish colony there to a dreadful state of disorder; and had also,
+they alleged, proved himself rather less than trustworthy in matters of
+treasure.  Still in the summer days of 1501 he was making himself very
+troublesome at Court with constant petitions and letters about his rights
+and privileges; and Ferdinand was far from unwilling to adopt a plan by
+which they would at least get rid of him and keep him safely occupied at
+the other side of the world at the cost of a few caravels.  There was,
+besides, always an element of uncertainty.  His voyage might come to
+nothing, but on the other hand the Admiral was no novice at this game of
+discovery, and one could not tell but that something big might come of
+it.  After some consideration permission was given to him to fit out a
+fleet of four ships, and he proceeded to Seville in the autumn of 1501
+to get his little fleet ready.  Bartholomew was to come with him, and his
+son Ferdinand also, who seems to have much endeared himself to the
+Admiral in these dark days, and who would surely be a great comfort to
+him on the voyage.  Beatriz Enriquez seems to have passed out of his
+life; certainly he was not living with her either now or on his last
+visit to Spain; one way or another, that business is at an end for him.
+Perhaps poor Beatriz, seeing her son in such a high place at Court, has
+effaced herself for his sake; perhaps the appointment was given on
+condition of such effacement; we do not know.
+
+
+Columbus was in no hurry over his preparations.  In the midst of them he
+found time to collect a whole series of documents relating to his titles
+and dignities, which he had copied and made into a great book which he
+called his "Book of Privileges," and the copies of which were duly
+attested before a notary at Seville on January 5, 1502.  He wrote many
+letters to various friends of his, chiefly in relation to these
+privileges; not interesting or illuminating letters to us, although very
+important to busy Christopher when he wrote them.  Here is one written to
+Nicolo Oderigo, a Genoese Ambassador who came to Spain on a brief mission
+in the spring of 1502, and who, with certain other residents in Spain, is
+said to have helped Columbus in his preparations for his fourth voyage:
+
+     "Sir,--The loneliness in which you have left us cannot be described.
+     I gave the book containing my writings to Francisco de Rivarol that
+     he may send it to you with another copy of letters containing
+     instructions.  I beg you to be so kind as to write Don Diego in
+     regard to the place of security in which you put them.  Duplicates
+     of everything will be completed and sent to you in the same manner
+     and by the same Francisco.  Among them you will find a new document.
+     Their Highnesses promised to give all that belongs to me and to
+     place Don Diego in possession of everything, as you will see.  I
+     wrote to Senor Juan Luis and to Sefora Catalina.  The letter
+     accompanies this one.  I am ready to start in the name of the Holy
+     Trinity as soon as the weather is good.  I am well provided with
+     everything.  If Jeronimo de Santi Esteban is coming, he must await
+     me and not embarrass himself with anything, for they will take away
+     from him all they can and silently leave him.  Let him come here and
+     the King and the Queen will receive him until I come.  May our Lord
+     have you in His holy keeping.
+
+               "Done at Seville, March 21, 1502.
+               "At your command.
+
+                                                    .S.
+                                                  .S.A.S.
+                                                  Xpo FERENS."
+
+
+His delays were not pleasing to Ferdinand, who wanted to get rid of him,
+and he was invited to hurry his departure; but he still continued to go
+deliberately about his affairs, which he tried to put in order as far as
+he was able, since he thought it not unlikely that he might never see
+Spain again.  Thinking thus of his worldly duties, and his thoughts
+turning to his native Genoa, it occurred to him to make some benefaction
+out of the riches that were coming to him by which his name might be
+remembered and held in honour there.  This was a piece of practical
+kindness the record of which is most precious to us; for it shows the
+Admiral in a truer and more human light than he often allowed to shine
+upon him.  The tone of the letter is nothing; he could not forbear
+letting the people of Genoa see how great he was.  The devotion of his
+legacy to the reduction of the tax on simple provisions was a genuine
+charity, much to be appreciated by the dwellers in the Vico Dritto di
+Ponticello, where wine and provision shops were so very necessary to
+life.  The letter was written to the Directors of the famous Bank of
+Saint George at Genoa.
+
+     "VERY NOBLE LORDS,--Although my body is here, my heart is
+     continually yonder.  Our Lord has granted me the greatest favour he
+     has granted any one since the time of David.  The results of my
+     undertaking already shine, and they would make a great light if the
+     obscurity of the Government did not conceal them.  I shall go again
+     to the Indies in the name of the Holy Trinity, to return
+     immediately.  And as I am mortal, I desire my son Don Diego to give
+     to you each year, for ever, the tenth part of all the income
+     received, in payment of the tax on wheat, wine, and other
+     provisions.  If this tenth amounts to anything, receive it, and if
+     not, receive my will for the deed.  I beg you as a favour to have
+     this son of mine in your charge.  Nicolo de Oderigo knows more about
+     my affairs than I myself.  I have sent him the copy of my privileges
+     and letters, that he may place them in safe keeping.  I would be
+     glad if you could see them.  The King and the Queen, my Lords, now
+     wish to honour me more than ever.  May the Holy Trinity guard your
+     noble persons, and increase the importance of your very magnificent
+     office.
+               "Done in Seville, April a, 1502.
+
+     "The High-Admiral of the Ocean-Sea and Viceroy and Governor-General
+     of the islands and mainland of Asia and the Indies, belonging to the
+     King and Queen, my Lords, and the Captain-General of the Sea, and a
+     Member of their Council.
+
+                                               .S.
+                                             .S.A.S.
+                                              X M Y
+                                            Xpo FERENS."
+
+
+Columbus was anxious to touch at Espanola on his voyage to the West; but
+he was expressly forbidden to do so, as it was known that his presence
+there could not make for anything but confusion; he was to be permitted,
+however, to touch there on his return journey.  The Great Khan was not
+out of his mind yet; much in it apparently, for he took an Arabian
+interpreter with him so that he could converse with that monarch.  In
+fact he did not hesitate to announce that very big results indeed were to
+come of this voyage of his; among other things he expected to
+circumnavigate the globe, and made no secret of his expectation.  In the
+meantime he was expected to find some pearls in order to pay for the
+equipment of his fleet; and in consideration of what had happened to the
+last lot of pearls collected by him, an agent named Diego de Porras was
+sent along with him to keep an account of the gold and precious stones
+which might be discovered.  Special instructions were issued to Columbus
+about the disposal of these commodities.  He does not seem to have minded
+these somewhat humiliating precautions; he had a way of rising above
+petty indignities and refusing to recognise them which must have been of
+great assistance to his self-respect in certain troubled moments in his
+life.
+
+His delays, however, were so many that in March 1502 the Sovereigns were
+obliged to order him to depart without any more waiting.  Poor
+Christopher, who once had to sue for the means with which to go, whose
+departures were once the occasion of so much state and ceremony, has now
+to be hustled forth and asked to go away.  Still he does not seem to
+mind; once more, as of old, his gaze is fixed beyond the horizon and his
+mind is filled with one idea.  They may not think much of him in Spain
+now, but they will when he comes back; and he can afford to wait.
+Completing his preparations without undignified haste he despatched
+Bartholomew with his four little vessels from Seville to Cadiz, where the
+Admiral was to join them.  He took farewell of his son Diego and of his
+brother James; good friendly James, who had done his best in a difficult
+position, but had seen quite enough of the wild life of the seas and was
+now settled in Seville studying hard for the Church.  It had always been
+his ambition, poor James; and, studying hard in Seville, he did in time
+duly enter the sacred pale and become a priest--by which we may see that
+if our ambitions are only modest enough we may in time encompass them.
+Sometimes I think that James, enveloped in priestly vestments, nodding in
+the sanctuary, lulled by the muttering murmur of the psalms or dozing
+through a long credo, may have thought himself back amid the brilliant
+sunshine and strange perfumes of Espanola; and from a dream of some nymph
+hiding in the sweet groves of the Vega may have awakened with a sigh to
+the strident Alleluias of his brother priests.  At any rate, farewell to
+James, safely seated beneath the Gospel light, and continuing to sit
+there until, in the year 1515, death interrupts him.  We are not any more
+concerned with James in his priestly shelter, but with those elder
+brothers of his who are making ready again to face the sun and the
+surges.
+
+Columbus's ships were on the point of sailing when word came that the
+Moors were besieging a Portuguese post on the coast of Morocco, and, as
+civility was now the order of the day between Spain and Portugal, the
+Admiral was instructed to call on his way there and afford some relief.
+This he did, sailing from Cadiz on the 9th or 10th of May to Ercilla on
+the Morocco coast, where he anchored on the 13th.  But the Moors had all
+departed and the siege was over; so Columbus, having sent Bartholomew and
+some of his officers ashore on a civil visit, which was duly returned,
+set out the same day on his last voyage.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE LAST VOYAGE
+
+The four ships that made up the Admiral's fleet on his fourth and last
+voyage were all small caravels, the largest only of seventy tons and the
+smallest only of fifty.  Columbus chose for his flagship the Capitana,
+seventy tons, appointing Diego Tristan to be his captain.  The next best
+ship was the Santiago de Palos under the command of Francisco Porras;
+Porras and his brother Diego having been more or less foisted on to
+Columbus by Morales, the Royal Treasurer, who wished to find berths for
+these two brothers-in-law of his.  We shall hear more of the Porras
+brothers.  The third ship was the Gallega, sixty tons, a very bad sailer
+indeed, and on that account entrusted to Bartholomew Columbus, whose
+skill in navigation, it was hoped, might make up for her bad sailing
+qualities.  Bartholomew had, to tell the truth, had quite enough of the
+New World, but he was too loyal to Christopher to let him go alone,
+knowing as he did his precarious state of health and his tendency to
+despondency.  The captain of the Gallega was Pedro de Terreros, who had
+sailed with the Admiral as steward on all his other voyages and was now
+promoted to a command.  The fourth ship was called the Vizcaina, fifty
+tons, and was commanded by Bartolome Fieschi, a friend of Columbus's from
+Genoa, and a very sound, honourable man.  There were altogether 143 souls
+on board the four caravels.
+
+The fleet as usual made the Canary Islands, where they arrived on the
+20th of May, and stopped for five days taking in wood and water and fresh
+provisions.  Columbus was himself again--always more himself at sea than
+anywhere else; he was following a now familiar road that had no
+difficulties or dangers for him; and there is no record of the voyage out
+except that it was quick and prosperous, with the trade wind blowing so
+steadily that from the time they left the Canaries until they made land
+twenty days later they had hardly to touch a sheet or a halliard.  The
+first land they made was the island of Martinique, where wood and water
+were taken in and the men sent ashore to wash their linen.  To young
+Ferdinand, but fourteen years old, this voyage was like a fairy tale come
+true, and his delight in everything that he saw must have added greatly
+to Christopher's pleasure and interest in the voyage.  They only stayed a
+few days at Martinique and then sailed westward along the chain of
+islands until they came to Porto Rico, where they put in to the sunny
+harbour which they had discovered on a former voyage.
+
+It was at this point that Columbus determined, contrary to his precise
+orders, to stand across to Espanola.  The place attracted him like a
+magnet; he could not keep away from it; and although he had a good enough
+excuse for touching there, it is probable that his real reason was a very
+natural curiosity to see how things were faring with his old enemy
+Bobadilla.  The excuse was that the Gallega, Bartholomew's ship, was so
+unseaworthy as to be a drag on the progress of the rest of the fleet and
+a danger to her own crew.  In the slightest sea-way she rolled almost
+gunwale under, and would not carry her sail; and Columbus's plan was to
+exchange her for a vessel out of the great fleet which he knew had by
+this time reached Espanola and discharged its passengers.
+
+
+He arrived off the harbour of San Domingo on the 29th of June in very
+threatening weather, and immediately sent Pedro de Terreros ashore with a
+message to Ovando, asking to be allowed to purchase or exchange one of
+the vessels that were riding in the harbour, and also leave to shelter
+his own vessels there during the hurricane which he believed to be
+approaching.  A message came back that he was neither permitted to buy a
+ship nor to enter the harbour; warning him off from San Domingo, in fact.
+
+With this unfavourable message Terreros also brought back the news of the
+island.  Ovando had been in San Domingo since the 15th of April, and had
+found the island in a shocking state, the Spanish population having to a
+man devoted itself to idleness, profligacy, and slave-driving.  The only
+thing that had prospered was the gold-mining; for owing to the licence
+that Bobadilla had given to the Spaniards to employ native labour to an
+unlimited extent there had been an immense amount of gold taken from the
+mines.  But in no other respect had island affairs prospered, and Ovando
+immediately began the usual investigation.  The fickle Spaniards, always
+unfaithful to whoever was in authority over them, were by this time tired
+of Bobadilla, in spite of his leniency, and they hailed the coming of
+Ovando and his numerous equipment with enthusiasm.  Bobadilla had also by
+this time, we may suppose, had enough of the joys of office; at any rate
+he showed no resentment at the coming of the new Governor, and handed
+over the island with due ceremony.  The result of the investigation of
+Ovando, however, was to discover a state of things requiring exemplary
+treatment; friend Roldan was arrested, with several of his allies, and
+put on board one of the ships to be sent back to Spain for trial.  The
+cacique Guarionex, who had been languishing in San Domingo in chains for
+a long time, was also embarked on one of the returning ships; and about
+eighteen hundred-weights of gold which had been collected were also
+stowed into cases and embarked.  Among this gold there was a nugget
+weighing 35 lbs. which had been found by a native woman in a river, and
+which Ovando was sending home as a personal offering to his Sovereigns;
+and some further 40 lbs. of gold belonging to Columbus, which Carvajal
+had recovered and placed in a caravel to be taken to Spain for the
+Admiral.  The ships were all ready to sail, and were anchored off the
+mouth of the river when Columbus arrived in San Domingo.
+
+When he found that he was not to be allowed to enter the harbour himself
+Columbus sent a message to Ovando warning him that a hurricane was coming
+on, and begging him to take measures for the safety of his large fleet.
+This, however, was not done, and the fleet put to sea that evening.  It
+had only got so far as the eastern end of Espanola when the hurricane, as
+predicted by Columbus, duly came down in the manner of West Indian
+hurricanes, a solid wall of wind and an advancing wave of the sea which
+submerged everything in its path.  Columbus's little fleet, finding
+shelter denied them, had moved a little way along the coast, the Admiral
+standing close in shore, the others working to the south for sea-room;
+and although they survived the hurricane they were scattered, and only
+met several days later, in an extremely battered condition, at the
+westerly end of the island.  But the large home-going fleet had not
+survived.  The hurricane, which was probably from the north-east, struck
+them just as they lost the lee of the island, and many of them, including
+the ships with the treasure of gold and the caravels bearing Roldan,
+Bobadilla, and Guarionex, all went down at once and were never seen or
+heard of again.  Other ships survived for a little while only to founder
+in the end; a few, much shattered, crept back to the shelter of San
+Domingo; but only one, it is said, survived the hurricane so well as to
+be able to proceed to Spain; and that was the one which carried Carvajal
+and Columbus's little property of gold.  The Admiral's luck again; or the
+intervention of the Holy Trinity--whichever you like.
+
+After the shattering experience of the storm, Columbus, although he did
+not return to San Domingo, remained for some time on the coast of
+Espanola repairing his ships and resting his exhausted crews.  There were
+threatenings of another storm which delayed them still further, and it
+was not until the middle of July that the Admiral was able to depart on
+the real purpose of his voyage.  His object was to strike the mainland
+far to the westward of the Gulf of Paria, and so by following it back
+eastward to find the passage which he believed to exist.  But the winds
+and currents were very baffling; he was four days out of sight of land
+after touching at an island north of Jamaica; and finally, in some
+bewilderment, he altered his course more and more northerly until he
+found his whereabouts by coming in sight of the archipelago off the
+south-western end of Cuba which he had called the Gardens.  From here he
+took a departure south-west, and on the 30th of July came in sight of a
+small island off the northern coast of Honduras which he called Isla de
+Pinos, and from which he could see the hills of the mainland.  At this
+island he found a canoe of immense size with a sort of house or caboose
+built amidships, in which was established a cacique with his family and
+dependents; and the people in the canoe showed signs of more advanced
+civilisation than any seen by Columbus before in these waters.  They wore
+clothing, they had copper hatchets, and bells, and palm-wood swords in
+the edges of which were set sharp blades of flint.  They had a fermented
+liquor, a kind of maize beer which looked like English ale; they had some
+kind of money or medium of exchange also, and they told the Admiral that
+there was land to the west where all these things existed and many more.
+It is strange and almost inexplicable that he did not follow this trail
+to the westward; if he had done so he would have discovered Mexico.  But
+one thing at a time always occupied him to the exclusion of everything
+else; his thoughts were now turned to the eastward, where he supposed the
+Straits were; and the significance of this canoe full of natives was lost
+upon him.
+
+They crossed over to the mainland of Honduras on August 15th, Bartholomew
+landing and attending mass on the beach as the Admiral himself was too
+ill to go ashore.  Three days later the cross and banner of Castile were
+duly erected on the shores of the Rio Tinto and the country was formally
+annexed.  The natives were friendly, and supplied the ships with
+provisions; but they were very black and ugly, and Columbus readily
+believed the assertion of his native guide that they were cannibals.
+They continued their course to the eastward, but as the gulf narrowed the
+force of the west-going current was felt more severely.  Columbus,
+believing that the strait which he sought lay to the eastward, laboured
+against the current, and his difficulties were increased by the bad
+weather which he now encountered.  There were squalls and hurricanes,
+tempests and cross-currents that knocked his frail ships about and almost
+swamped them.  Anchors and gear were lost, the sails were torn out of the
+bolt-ropes, timbers were strained; and for six weeks this state of
+affairs went on to an accompaniment of thunder and lightning which added
+to the terror and discomfort of the mariners.
+
+This was in August and the first half of September--six weeks of the
+worst weather that Columbus had ever experienced.  It was the more
+unfortunate that his illness made it impossible for him to get actively
+about the ship; and he had to have a small cabin or tent rigged up on
+deck, in which he could lie and direct the navigation.  It is bad enough
+to be as ill as he was in a comfortable bed ashore; it is a thousand
+times worse amid the discomforts of a small boat at sea; but what must it
+have been thus to have one's sick-bed on the deck of a cockle-shell which
+was being buffeted and smashed in unknown seas, and to have to think and
+act not for oneself alone but for the whole of a suffering little fleet!
+No wonder the Admiral's distress of mind was great; but oddly enough his
+anxieties, as he recorded them in a letter, were not so much on his own
+account as on behalf of others.  The terrified seamen making vows to the
+Virgin and promises of pilgrimages between their mad rushes to the sheets
+and furious clinging and hauling; his son Ferdinand, who was only
+fourteen, but who had to endure the same pain and fatigue as the rest of
+them, and who was enduring it with such pluck that "it was as if he had
+been at sea eighty years"; the dangers of Bartholomew, who had not wanted
+to come on this voyage at all, but was now in the thick of it in the
+worst ship of the squadron, and fighting for his life amid tempests and
+treacherous seas; Diego at home, likely to be left an orphan and at the
+mercy of fickle and doubtful friends--these were the chief causes of the
+Admiral's anxiety.  All he said about himself was that "by my misfortune
+the twenty years of service which I gave with so much fatigue and danger
+have profited me so little that to-day I have in Castile no roof, and if
+I wished to dine or sup or sleep I have only the tavern for my last
+refuge, and for that, most of the time, I would be unable to pay the
+score."  Not cheerful reflections, these, to add to the pangs of acute
+gout and the consuming anxieties of seamanship under such circumstances.
+Dreadful to him, these things, but not dreadful to us; for they show us
+an Admiral restored to his true temper and vocation, something of the old
+sea hero breaking out in him at last through all these misfortunes, like
+the sun through the hurrying clouds of a stormy afternoon.
+
+
+Forty days of passage through this wilderness of water were endured
+before the sea-worn mariners, rounding a cape on September 12th, saw
+stretching before them to the southward a long coast of plain and
+mountain which they were able to follow with a fair wind.  Gradually the
+sea went down; the current which had opposed them here aided them, and
+they were able to recover a little from the terrible strain of the last
+six weeks.  The cape was called by Columbus 'Gracios de Dios'; and on the
+16th of September they landed at the entrance to a river to take in
+water.  The boat which was sent ashore, however, capsized on the sandy
+bar of the entrance, two men being drowned, and the river was given the
+name of Rio de Desastre.  They found a better anchorage, where they
+rested for ten days, overhauled their stores, and had some intercourse
+with the natives and exploration on shore.  Some incidents occurred which
+can best be described in the Admiral's own language as he recorded them
+in his letter to the Sovereigns.
+
+     " .  .  When I reached there, they immediately sent me two young
+     girls dressed in rich garments.  The older one might not have been
+     more than eleven years of age and the other seven; both with so much
+     experience, so much manner, and so much appearance as would have
+     been sufficient if they had been public women for twenty years.
+     They bore with them magic powder and other things belonging to their
+     art.  When they arrived I gave orders that they should be adorned
+     with our things and sent them immediately ashore.  There I saw a
+     tomb within the mountain as large as a house and finely worked with
+     great artifice, and a corpse stood thereon uncovered, and, looking
+     within it, it seemed as if he stood upright.  Of the other arts they
+     told me that there was excellence.  Great and little animals are
+     there in quantities, and very different from ours; among which I saw
+     boars of frightful form so that a dog of the Irish breed dared not
+     face them.  With a cross-bow I had wounded an animal which exactly
+     resembles a baboon only that it was much larger and has a face like
+     a human being.  I had pierced it with an arrow from one side to the
+     other, entering in the breast and going out near the tail, and
+     because it was very ferocious I cut off one of the fore feet which
+     rather seemed to be a hand, and one of the hind feet.  The boars
+     seeing this commenced to set up their bristles and fled with great
+     fear, seeing the blood of the other animal.  When I saw this I
+     caused to be thrown them the 'uegare,'--[Peccary]--certain animals
+     they call so, where it stood, and approaching him, near as he was to
+     death, and the arrow still sticking in his body, he wound his tail
+     around his snout and held it fast, and with the other hand which
+     remained free, seized him by the neck as an enemy.  This act, so
+     magnificent and novel, together with the fine country and hunting of
+     wild beasts, made me write this to your Majesties."
+
+
+The natives at this anchorage of Cariari were rather suspicious, but
+Columbus seized two of them to act as guides in his journey further down
+the coast.  Weighing anchor on October 5th he worked along the Costa Rica
+shore, which here turns to the eastward again, and soon found a tribe of
+natives who wore large ornaments of gold.  They were reluctant to part
+with the gold, but as usual pointed down the coast and said that there
+was much more gold there; they even gave a name to the place where the
+gold could be found--Veragua; and for once this country was found to have
+a real existence.  The fleet anchored there on October 17th, being
+greeted by defiant blasts of conch shells and splashing of water from the
+indignant natives.  Business was done, however: seventeen gold discs in
+exchange for three hawks' bells.
+
+Still Columbus went on in pursuit of his geographical chimera; even gold
+had no power to detain him from the earnest search for this imaginary
+strait.  Here and there along the coast he saw increasing signs of
+civilisation--once a wall built of mud and stone, which made him think of
+Cathay again.  He now got it into his head that the region he was in was
+ten days' journey from the Ganges, and that it was surrounded by water;
+which if it means anything means that he thought he was on a large island
+ten days' sail to the eastward of the coast of India.  Altogether at sea
+as to the facts, poor Admiral, but with heart and purpose steadfast and
+right enough.
+
+They sailed a little farther along the coast, now between narrow islands
+that were like the streets of Genoa, where the boughs of trees on either
+hand brushed the shrouds of the ships; now past harbours where there were
+native fairs and markets, and where natives were to be seen mounted on
+horses and armed with swords; now by long, lonely stretches of the coast
+where there was nothing to be seen but the low green shore with the
+mountains behind and the alligators basking at the river mouths.  At last
+(November 2nd) they arrived at the cape known as Nombre de Dios, which
+Ojeda had reached some time before in his voyage to the West.
+
+The coast of the mainland had thus been explored from the Bay of Honduras
+to Brazil, and Columbus was obliged to admit that there was no strait.
+Having satisfied himself of that he decided to turn back to Veragua,
+where he had seen the natives smelting gold, in order to make some
+arrangement for establishing a colony there.  The wind, however, which
+had headed him almost all the way on his easterly voyage, headed him
+again now and began to blow steadily from the west.  He started on his
+return journey on the 5th of December, and immediately fell into almost
+worse troubles than he had been in before.  The wood of the ships had
+been bored through and through by seaworms, so that they leaked very
+badly; the crews were sick, provisions were spoilt, biscuits rotten.
+Young Ferdinand Columbus, if he did not actually make notes of this
+voyage at the time, preserved a very lively recollection of it, and it is
+to his Historie, which in its earlier passages is of doubtful
+authenticity, that we owe some of the most human touches of description
+relating to this voyage.  Any passage in his work relating to food or
+animals at this time has the true ring of boyish interest and
+observation, and is in sharp contrast to the second-hand and artificial
+tone of the earlier chapters of his book.  About the incident of the
+howling monkey, which the Admiral's Irish hound would not face, Ferdinand
+remarks that it "frighted a good dog that we had, but frighted one of our
+wild boars a great deal more"; and as to the condition of the biscuits
+when they turned westward again, he says that they were "so full of
+weevils that, as God shall help me, I saw many that stayed till night to
+eat their sop for fear of seeing them."
+
+After experiencing some terrible weather, in the course of which they had
+been obliged to catch sharks for food and had once been nearly
+overwhelmed by a waterspout, they entered a harbour where, in the words
+of young Ferdinand, "we saw the people living like birds in the tops of
+the trees, laying sticks across from bough to bough and building their
+huts upon them; and though we knew not the reason of the custom we
+guessed that it was done for fear of their enemies, or of the griffins
+that are in this island."  After further experiences of bad weather they
+made what looked like a suitable harbour on the coast of Veragua, which
+harbour, as they entered it on the day of the Epiphany (January 9, 1503),
+they named Belem or Bethlehem.  The river in the mouth of which they were
+anchored, however, was subject to sudden spouts and gushes of water from
+the hills, one of which occurred on January 24th and nearly swamped the
+caravels.  This spout of water was caused by the rainy season, which had
+begun in the mountains and presently came down to the coast, where it
+rained continuously until the 14th of February.  They had made friends
+with the Quibian or chief of the country, and he had offered to conduct
+them to the place where the gold mines were; so Bartholomew was sent off
+in the rain with a boat party to find this territory.  It turned out
+afterwards that the cunning Quibian had taken them out of his own country
+and showed them the gold mined of a neighbouring chief, which were not so
+rich as his own.
+
+Columbus, left idle in the absence of Bartholomew, listening to the
+continuous drip and patter of the rain on the leaves and the water,
+begins to dream again--to dream of gold and geography.  Remembers that
+David left three thousand quintals of gold from the Indies to Solomon for
+the decoration of the Temple; remembers that Josephus said it came from
+the Golden Chersonesus; decides that enough gold could never have been
+got from the mines of Hayna in Espanola; and concludes that the Ophir of
+Solomon must be here in Veragua and not there in Espanola.  It was always
+here and now with Columbus; and as he moved on his weary sea pilgrimages
+these mythical lands with their glittering promise moved about with him,
+like a pillar of fire leading him through the dark night of his quest.
+
+
+The rain came to an end, however, the sun shone out again, and activity
+took the place of dreams with Columbus and with his crew.  He decided to
+found a settlement in this place, and to make preparations for seizing
+and working the gold mines.  It was decided to leave a garrison of eighty
+men, and the business of unloading the necessary arms and provisions and
+building houses ashore was immediately begun.  Hawks' bells and other
+trifles were widely distributed among the natives, with special toys and
+delicacies for the Quibian, in order that friendly relations might be
+established from the beginning; and special regulations were framed to
+prevent the possibility of any recurrence of the disasters that overtook
+the settlers of Isabella.
+
+Such are the orderly plans of Columbus; but the Quibian has his plans
+too, which are found to be of quite a different nature.  The Quibian does
+not like intruders, though he likes their hawks' bells well enough; he is
+not quite so innocent as poor Guacanagari and the rest of them were; he
+knows that gold is a thing coveted by people to whom it does not belong,
+and that trouble follows in its train.  Quibian therefore decides that
+Columbus and his followers shall be exterminated--news of which intention
+fortunately came to the ears of Columbus in time, Diego Mendez and
+Rodrigo de Escobar having boldly advanced into the Quibian's village and
+seen the warlike preparations.  Bartholomew, returning from his visit to
+the gold mines, was informed of this state of affairs.  Always quick to
+strike, Bartholomew immediately started with an armed force, and advanced
+upon the village so rapidly that the savages were taken by surprise,
+their headquarters surrounded, and the Quibian and fifty of his warriors
+captured.  Bartholomew triumphantly marched the prisoners back, the
+Quibian being entrusted to the charge of Juan Sanchez, who was rowing him
+in a little boat.  The Quibian complained that his bonds were hurting
+him, and foolish Sanchez eased them a little; Quibian, with a quick
+movement, wriggled overboard and dived to the bottom; came up again
+somewhere and reached home alive.  No one saw him come up, however, and
+they thought had had been drowned.
+
+Columbus now made ready to depart, and the caravels having been got over
+the shallow bar, their loading was completed and they were ready to sail.
+On April 6th Diego Tristan was sent in charge of a boat with a message to
+Bartholomew, who was to be left in command of the settlement; but when
+Tristan had rounded the point at the entrance to the river and come in
+sight of the shore he had an unpleasant surprise; the settlement was
+being savagely attacked by the resurrected Quibian and his followers.
+The fight had lasted for three hours, and had been going badly against
+the Spaniards, when Bartholomew and Diego Mendes rallied a little force
+round them and, calling to Columbus's Irish dog which had been left with
+them, made a rush upon the savages and so terrified them that they
+scattered.  Bartholomew with eight of the other Spaniards was wounded,
+and one was killed; and it was at this point that Tristan's boat arrived
+at the settlement.  Having seen the fight safely over, he went on up the
+river to get water, although he was warned that it was not safe; and sure
+enough, at a point a little farther up the river, beyond some low green
+arm of the shore, he met with a sudden and bloody death.  A cloud of
+yelling savages surrounded his boat hurling javelins and arrows, and only
+one seaman, who managed to dive into the water and crawl ashore, escaped
+to bring the evil tidings.
+
+The Spaniards under Bartholomew's command broke into a panic, and taking
+advantage of his wounded condition they tried to make sail on their
+caravel and join the ships of Columbus outside; but since the time of the
+rains the river had so much gone down that she was stuck fast in the
+sand.  They could not even get a boat over the bar, for there was a heavy
+cross sea breaking on it; and in the meantime here they were, trapped
+inside this river, the air resounding with dismal blasts of the natives'
+conch-shells, and the natives themselves dancing round and threatening to
+rush their position; while the bodies of Tristan and his little crew were
+to be seen floating down the stream, feasted upon by a screaming cloud of
+birds.  The position of the shore party was desperate, and it was only by
+the greatest efforts that the wounded Adelantado managed to rally his
+crew and get them to remove their little camp to an open place on the
+shore, where a kind of stockade was made of chests, casks, spars, and the
+caravel's boat.  With this for cover, the Spanish fire-arms, so long as
+there was ammunition for them, were enough to keep the natives at bay.
+
+
+Outside the bar, in his anchorage beyond the green wooded point, the
+Admiral meanwhile was having an anxious time.  One supposes the entrance
+to the river to have been complicated by shoals and patches of broken
+water extending some considerable distance, so that the Admiral's
+anchorage would be ten or twelve miles away from the camp ashore, and of
+course entirely hidden from it.  As day after day passed and Diego
+Tristan did not return, the Admiral's anxiety increased.  Among the three
+caravels that now formed his little squadron there was only one boat
+remaining, the others, not counting one taken by Tristan and one left
+with Bartholomew, having all been smashed in the late hurricanes.  In the
+heavy sea that was running on the bar the Admiral dared not risk his last
+remaining boat; but in the mean time he was cut off from all news of the
+shore party and deprived of any means of finding out what had happened to
+Tristan.  And presently to these anxieties was added a further disaster.
+It will be remembered that when the Quibian had been captured fifty
+natives had been taken with him; and these were confined in the
+forecastle of the Capitana and covered by a large hatch, on which most of
+the crew slept at night.  But one night the natives collected a heap of
+big stones from the ballast of the ship, and piled them up to a kind of
+platform beneath the hatch; some of the strongest of them got upon the
+platform and set their backs horizontally against the hatch, gave a great
+heave and, lifted it off.  In the confusion that followed, a great many
+of the prisoners escaped into the sea, and swam ashore; the rest were
+captured and thrust back under the hatch, which was chained down; but
+when on the following morning the Spaniards went to attend to this
+remnant it was found that they had all hanged themselves.
+
+This was a great disaster, since it increased the danger of the garrison
+ashore, and destroyed all hope of friendship with the natives.  There was
+something terrible and powerful, too, in the spirit of people who could
+thus to a man make up their minds either to escape or die; and the
+Admiral must have felt that he was in the presence of strange, powerful
+elements that were far beyond his control.  At any moment, moreover, the
+wind might change and put him on a lee shore, or force him to seek safety
+in sea-room; in which case the position of Bartholomew would be a very
+critical one.  It was while things were at this apparent deadlock that a
+brave fellow, Pedro Ledesma, offered to attempt to swim through the surf
+if the boat would take him to the edge of it.  Brave Pedro, his offer
+accepted, makes the attempt; plunges into the boiling surf, and with
+mighty efforts succeeds in reaching the shore; and after an interval is
+seen by his comrades, who are waiting with their boat swinging on the
+edge of the surf, to be returning to them; plunges into the sea, comes
+safely through the surf again, and is safely hauled on board, having
+accomplished a very real and satisfactory bit of service.
+
+The story he had to tell the Admiral was as we know not a pleasant one
+--Tristan and his men dead, several of Bartholomew's force, including the
+Adelantado himself, wounded, and all in a state of panic and fear at the
+hostile natives.  The Spaniards would do nothing to make the little
+fortress safer, and were bent only on escaping from the place of horror.
+Some of them were preparing canoes in which to come out to the ships when
+the sea should go down, as their one small boat was insufficient; and
+they swore that if the Admiral would not take them they would seize their
+own caravel and sail out themselves into the unknown sea as soon as they
+could get her floated over the bar, rather than remain in such a dreadful
+situation.  Columbus was in a very bad way.  He could not desert
+Bartholomew, as that would expose him to the treachery of his own men
+and the hostility of the savages.  He could not reinforce him, except by
+remaining himself with the whole of his company; and in that case there
+would be no means of sending the news of his rich discovery to Spain.
+There was nothing for it, therefore, but to break up the settlement and
+return some other time with a stronger force sufficient to occupy the
+country.  And even this course had its difficulties; for the weather
+continued bad, the wind was blowing on to the shore, the sea was--so
+rough as to make the passage of the bar impossible, and any change for
+the worse in the weather would probably drive his own crazy ships ashore
+and cut off all hope of escape.
+
+The Admiral, whose health was now permanently broken, and who only had
+respite from his sufferings in fine weather and when he was relieved from
+a burden of anxieties such as had been continually pressing on him now
+for three months, fell into his old state of sleeplessness, feverishness,
+and consequent depression; and it, these circumstances it is not
+wonderful that the firm ground of fact began to give a little beneath him
+and that his feet began to sink again into the mire or quag of stupor.
+Of these further flounderings in the quag he himself wrote an account to
+the King and Queen, so we may as well have it in his own words.
+
+     "I mounted to the top of the ship crying out with a weak voice,
+     weeping bitterly, to the commanders of your Majesties' army, and
+     calling again to the four winds to help; but they did not answer me.
+     Tired out, I fell asleep and sighing I heard a voice very full of
+     pity which spoke these words:  O fool!  and slow to believe and to
+     serve Him, thy God and the God of all.  What did He more for Moses?
+     and for David His servant?  Since thou wast born He had always so
+     great care for thee.  When He saw thee in an age with which He was
+     content He made thy name sound marvellously through the world.  The
+     Indies, which are so rich apart of the world, He has given to thee
+     as thine.  Thou hast distributed them wherever it has pleased thee;
+     He gave thee power so to do.  Of the bonds of the ocean which were
+     locked with so strong chains He gave thee the keys, and thou wast
+     obeyed in all the land, and among the Christians thou hast acquired
+     a good and honourable reputation.  What did He more for the people
+     of Israel when He brought them out of Egypt?  or yet for David, whom
+     from being a shepherd He made King of Judea?  Turn to Him and
+     recognise thine error, for His mercy is infinite.  Thine old age
+     will be no hindrance to all great things.  Many very great
+     inheritances are in His power.  Abraham was more than one hundred
+     years old when he begat Isaac and also Sarah was not young.  Thou
+     art calling for uncertain aid.  Answer me, who has afflicted thee so
+     much and so many times--God or the world?  The privileges and
+     promises which God makes He never breaks to any one; nor does He say
+     after having received the service that His intention was not so and
+     it is to be understood in another manner: nor imposes martyrdom to
+     give proof of His power.  He abides by the letter of His word.  All
+     that He promises He abundantly accomplishes.  This is His way.  I
+     have told thee what the Creator hath done for thee and does for all.
+     Now He shows me the reward and payment of thy suffering and which
+     thou hast passed in the service of others.  And thus half dead, I
+     heard everything; but I could never find an answer to make to words
+     so certain, and only I wept for my errors.  He, who ever he might
+     be, finished speaking, saying: Trust and fear not, for thy
+     tribulations are written in marble and not without reason."
+
+
+Mere darkness of stupor; not much to be deciphered from it, nor any
+profitable comment to be made on it, except that it was our poor
+Christopher's way of crying out his great suffering and misery.  We must
+not notice it, much as we should like to hold out a hand of sympathy and
+comfort to him; must not pay much attention to this dark eloquent
+nonsense--merely words, in which the Admiral never does himself justice.
+Acts are his true conversation; and when he speaks in that language all
+men must listen.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+HEROIC ADVENTURES BY LAND AND SEA
+
+No man ever had a better excuse for his superstitions than the Admiral;
+no sooner had he got done with his Vision than the wind dropped, the sun
+came out, the sea fell, and communication with the land was restored.
+While he had been sick and dreaming one of his crew, Diego Mendez, had
+been busy with practical efforts in preparation for this day of fine
+weather; he had made a great raft out of Indian canoes lashed together,
+with mighty sacks of sail cloth into which the provisions might be
+bundled; and as soon as the sea had become calm enough he took this raft
+in over the bar to the settlement ashore, and began the business of
+embarking the whole of the stores and ammunition of Bartholomew's
+garrison.  By this practical method the whole establishment was
+transferred from the shore to the ships in the space of two days, and
+nothing was left but the caravel, which it was found impossible to float
+again.  It was heavy work towing the raft constantly backwards and
+forwards from the ships to the shore, but Diego Mendez had the
+satisfaction of being the last man to embark from the deserted
+settlement, and to see that not an ounce of stores or ammunition had been
+lost.
+
+Columbus, always quick to reward the services of a good man, kissed Diego
+Mendez publicly--on both cheeks, and (what doubtless pleased him much
+better) gave him command of the caravel of which poor Tristan had been
+the captain.
+
+With a favourable wind they sailed from this accursed shore at the end of
+April 1503.  It is strange, as Winsor points out, that in the name of
+this coast should be preserved the only territorial remembrance of
+Columbus, and that his descendant the Duke of Veragua should in his title
+commemorate one of the most unfortunate of the Admiral's adventures.  And
+if any one should desire a proof of the utterly misleading nature of most
+of Columbus's writings about himself, let him know that a few months
+later he solemnly wrote to the Sovereigns concerning this very place that
+"there is not in the world a country whose inhabitants are more timid;
+and the whole place is capable of being easily put into a state of
+defence.  Your people that may come here, if they should wish to become
+masters of the products of other lands, will have to take them by force
+or retire empty-handed.  In this country they will simply have to trust
+their persons in the hands of the savages."  The facts being that the
+inhabitants were extremely fierce and warlike and irreconcilably hostile;
+that the river was a trap out of which in the dry season there was no
+escape, and the harbour outside a mere shelterless lee shore; that it
+would require an army and an armada to hold the place against the
+natives, and that any one who trusted himself in their hands would
+share the fate of the unhappy Diego Tristan.  One may choose between
+believing that the Admiral's memory had entirely failed him (although he
+had not been backward in making a minute record, of all his sufferings)
+or that he was craftily attempting to deceive the Sovereigns.  My own
+belief is that he was neither trying to deceive anybody nor that he had
+forgotten anything, but that he was simply incapable of uttering the bare
+truth when he had a pen in his hand.
+
+
+From their position on the coast of Veragua Espanola bore almost due
+north; but Columbus was too good a seaman to attempt to make the island
+by sailing straight for it.  He knew that the steady west-going current
+would set him far down on his course, and he therefore decided to work up
+the coast a long way to the eastward before standing across for Espanola.
+The crew grumbled very much at this proceeding, which they did not
+understand; in fact they argued from it that the Admiral was making
+straight for Spain, and this, in the crazy condition of the vessels,
+naturally alarmed them.  But in his old high-handed, secret way the
+Admiral told them nothing; he even took away from the other captains all
+the charts that they had made of this coast, so that no one but himself
+would be able to find the way back to it; and he took a kind of pleasure
+in the complete mystification thus produced on his fellow-voyagers.
+"None of them could explain whither I went nor whence I came; they did
+not know the way to return thither," he writes, somewhat childishly.
+
+But he was not back in Espanola yet, and his means for getting there were
+crumbling away beneath his feet.  One of the three remaining caravels was
+entirely riddled by seaworms and had to be abandoned at the harbour
+called Puerto Bello; and the company was crowded on to two ships.  The
+men now became more than ever discontented at the easterly course, and on
+May 1st, when he had come as far east as the Gulf of Darien, Columbus
+felt obliged to bear away to the north, although as it turned out he had
+not nearly made enough easting.  He stood on this course, for nine days,
+the west-going current setting him down all the time; and the first land
+that he made, on May 10th, was the group of islands off the western end
+of Cuba which he had called the Queen's Gardens.
+
+He anchored for six days here, as the crews were completely exhausted;
+the ships' stores were reduced to biscuits, oil, and vinegar; the vessels
+leaked like sieves, and the pumps had to be kept going continually.  And
+no sooner had they anchored than a hurricane came on, and brought up a
+sea so heavy that the Admiral was convinced that his ships could not live
+within it.  We have got so accustomed to reading of storms and tempests
+that it seems useless to try and drive home the horror and terror of
+them; but here were these two rotten ships alone at the end of the world,
+far beyond the help of man, the great seas roaring up under them in the
+black night, parting their worn cables, snatching away their anchors from
+them, and finally driving them one upon the other to grind and strain and
+prey upon each other, as though the external conspiracy of the elements
+against them both were not sufficient!  One writes or reads the words,
+but what does it mean to us? and can we by any conceivable effort of
+imagination realise what it meant to this group of human beings who lived
+through that night so many hundred years ago--men like ourselves with
+hearts to sink and faint, capable of fear and hunger, capable of misery,
+pain, and endurance?  Bruised and battered, wet by the terrifying surges,
+and entirely uncomforted by food or drink, they did somehow endure these
+miseries; and were to endure worse too before they were done with it.
+
+Their six days' sojourn amid the Queen's Gardens, then, was not a great
+success; and as soon as they were able they set sail again, standing
+eastward when the wind permitted them.  But wind and current were against
+them and all through the month of May and the early part of June they
+struggled along the south coast of Cuba, their ships as full of holes as
+a honeycomb, pumps going incessantly, and in addition the worn-out seamen
+doing heroic labour at baling with buckets and kettles.  Lee helm!  Down
+go the buckets and kettles and out run the wretched scarecrows of seamen
+to the weary business of tacking ship, letting go, brailing up, hauling
+in, and making fast for the thousandth time; and then back to the pumps
+and kettles again.  No human being could endure this for an indefinite
+time; and though their diet of worms represented by the rotten biscuit
+was varied with cassava bread supplied by friendly natives, the Admiral
+could not make his way eastward further than Cape Cruz.  Round that cape
+his leaking, strained vessels could not be made to look against the wind
+and the tide.  Could hardly indeed be made to float or swim upon the
+water at all; and the Admiral had now to consider, not whether he could
+sail on a particular point of the compass, but whether he could by any
+means avoid another course which the fates now proposed to him--namely, a
+perpendicular course to the bottom of the sea.  It was a race between the
+water and the ships, and the only thing the Admiral could think of was to
+turn southward across to Jamaica, which he did on June 23rd, putting into
+Puerto Bueno, now called Dry Harbour.  But there was no food there, and
+as his ships were settling deeper and deeper in the water he had to make
+sail again and drive eastwards as far as Puerto Santa Gloria, now called
+Don Christopher's Cove.  He was just in time.  The ships were run ashore
+side by side on a sandy beach, the pumps were abandoned, and in one tide
+the ships were full of water.  The remaining anchor cables were used to
+lash the two ships together so that they would not move; although there
+was little fear of that, seeing the weight of water that was in them.
+Everything that could be saved was brought up on deck, and a kind of
+cabin or platform which could be fortified was rigged on the highest part
+of the ships.  And so no doubt for some days, although their food was
+almost finished, the wretched and exhausted voyagers could stretch their
+cramped limbs, and rest in the warm sun, and listen, from their safe
+haven on the firm sands, to the hated voice of the sea.
+
+
+Thanks to careful regulations made by the Admiral, governing the
+intercourse between the Spaniards and the natives ashore, friendly
+relations were soon established, and the crews were supplied with cassava
+bread and fruit in abundance.  Two officials superintended every purchase
+of provisions to avoid the possibility of any dispute, for in the event
+of even a momentary hostility the thatched-roof structures on the ships
+could easily have been set on fire, and the position of the Spaniards,
+without shelter amid a hostile population, would have been a desperate
+one.  This disaster, however, was avoided; but the Admiral soon began to
+be anxious about the supply of provisions from the immediate
+neighbourhood, which after the first few days began to be irregular.
+There were a large number of Spaniards to be fed, the natives never kept
+any great store of provisions for themselves, and the Spaniards were
+entirely at their mercy for, provisions from day to day.  Diego Mendez,
+always ready for active and practical service, now offered to take three
+men and make a journey through the island to arrange for the purchase of
+provisions from different villages, so that the men on the ships would
+not be dependent upon any one source.  This offer was gratefully
+accepted; and Mendez, with his lieutenants well supplied with toys and
+trinkets, started eastward along the north coast of Jamaica.  He made no
+mistakes; he was quick and clever at ingratiating himself with the
+caciques, and he succeeded in arranging with three separate potentates to
+send regular supplies of provisions to the men on the ships.  At each
+place where he made this arrangement he detached one of his assistants
+and sent him back with the first load of provisions, so that the regular
+line of carriage might be the more quickly established; and when they had
+all gone he borrowed a couple of natives and pushed on by himself until
+he reached the eastern end of the island.  He made friends here with a
+powerful cacique named Amerro, from whom he bought a large canoe, and
+paid for it with some of the clothing off his back.  With the canoe were
+furnished six Indians to row it, and Mendez made a triumphant journey
+back by sea, touching at the places where his depots had been established
+and seeing that his commissariat arrangements were working properly.  He
+was warmly received on his return to the ships, and the result of his
+efforts was soon visible in the daily supplies of food that now regularly
+arrived.
+
+Thus was one difficulty overcome; but it was not likely that either
+Columbus himself or any of his people would be content to remain for ever
+on the beach of Jamaica.  It was necessary to establish communication
+with Espanola, and thence with Spain; but how to do it in the absence of
+ships or even boats?  Columbus, pondering much upon this matter, one day
+calls Diego Mendez aside; walks him off, most likely, under the great
+rustling trees beyond the beach, and there tells him his difficulty.
+"My son," says he, "you and I understand the difficulties and dangers of
+our position here better than any one else.  We are few; the Indians are
+many; we know how fickle and easily irritated they are, and how a
+fire-brand thrown into our thatched cabins would set the whole thing
+ablaze. It is quite true that you have very cleverly established a
+provision supply, but it is dependent entirely upon the good nature of
+the natives and it might cease to-morrow.  Here is my plan: you have a
+good canoe; why should some one not go over to Espanola in it and send
+back a ship for us?"
+
+Diego Mendez, knowing very well what is meant, looks down upon the
+ground.  His spoken opinion is that such a journey is not merely
+difficult but impossible journey in a frail native canoe across one
+hundred and fifty miles of open and rough sea; although his private
+opinion is other than that.  No, he cannot imagine such a thing being
+done; cannot think who would be able to do it.
+
+Long silence from the Admiral; eloquent silence, accompanied by looks no
+less eloquent.
+
+"Admiral," says Mendez again, "you know very well that I have risked my
+life for you and the people before and would do it again.  But there are
+others who have at least as good a right to this great honour and peril
+as I have; let me beg of you, therefore, to summon all the company
+together, make this proposal to them, and see if any one will undertake
+it.  If not, I will once more risk my life."
+
+The proposal being duly made to the assembled crews, every one, as
+cunning Mendez had thought, declares it impossible; every one hangs back.
+Upon which Diego Mendez with a fine gesture comes forward and volunteers;
+makes his little dramatic effect and has his little ovation.  Thoroughly
+Spanish this, significant of that mixture of vanity and bravery, of
+swagger and fearlessness, which is characteristic of the best in Spain.
+It was a desperately brave thing to venture upon, this voyage from
+Jamaica to Espanola in a native canoe and across a sea visited by
+dreadful hurricanes; and the volunteer was entitled to his little piece
+of heroic drama.
+
+While Mendez was making his preparations, putting a false keel on the
+canoe and fixing weather boards along its gunwales to prevent its
+shipping seas, fitting a mast and sail and giving it a coat of tar, the
+Admiral retired into his cabin and busied himself with his pen.  He wrote
+one letter to Ovando briefly describing his circumstances and requesting
+that a ship should be sent for his relief; and another to the Sovereigns,
+in which a long rambling account was given of the events of the voyage,
+and much other matter besides, dismally eloquent of his floundering in
+the quag.  Much in it--about Solomon and Josephus, of the Abbot Joachim,
+of Saint Jerome and the Great Khan; more about the Holy Sepulchre and the
+intentions of the Almighty in that matter; with some serious practical
+concern for the rich land of Veragua which he had discovered, lest it
+should share the fate of his other discoveries and be eaten up by idle
+adventurers.  "Veragua," he says, "is not a little son which may be given
+to a stepmother to nurse.  Of Espanola and Paria and all the other lands
+I never think without the tears falling from my eyes; I believe that the
+example of these ought to serve for the others."  And then this passage:
+
+     "The good and sound purpose which I always had to serve your
+     Majesties, and the dishonour and unmerited ingratitude, will not
+     suffer the soul to be silent although I wished it, therefore I ask
+     pardon of your Majesties.  I have been so lost and undone; until now
+     I have wept for others that your Majesties might have compassion on
+     them; and now may the heavens weep for me and the earth weep for me
+     in temporal affairs; I have not a farthing to make as an offering in
+     spiritual affairs.  I have remained here on the Indian islands in
+     the manner I have before said in great pain and infirmity, expecting
+     every day death, surrounded by innumerable savages full of cruelty
+     and by our enemies, and so far from the sacraments of the Holy
+     Mother Church that I believe the soul will be forgotten when it
+     leaves the body.  Let them weep for me who have charity, truth and
+     justice.  I did not undertake this voyage of navigation to gain
+     honour or material things, that is certain, because the hope already
+     was entirely lost; but I did come to serve your Majesties with
+     honest intention and with good charitable zeal, and I do not lie."
+
+Poor old heart, older than its years, thus wailing out its sorrows to
+ears none too sympathetic; sad old voice, uplifted from the bright shores
+of that lonely island in the midst of strange seas!  It will not come
+clear to the head alone; the echoes of this cry must reverberate in the
+heart if they are to reach and animate the understanding.
+
+
+At this time also the Admiral wrote to his friend Gaspar Gorricio.  For
+the benefit of those who may be interested I give the letter in English.
+
+
+     REVEREND AND VERY DEVOUT FATHER:
+
+     "If my voyage should be as conducive to my personal health and the
+     repose of my house as it seems likely to be conducive to the
+     aggrandisement of the royal Crown of the King and Queen, my Lords,
+     I might hope to live more than a hundred years.  I have not time to
+     write more at length.  I hope that the bearer of this letter may be
+     a person of my house who will tell you verbally more than can be
+     told in a thousand papers, and also Don Diego will supply
+     information.  I beg as a favour of the Father Prior and all the
+     members of your religious house, that they remember me in all their
+     prayers.
+
+     "Done on the island of Jamaica, July 7, 1503.
+     "I am at the command of your Reverence.
+
+                                               .S.
+                                             .S.A.S.  XMY
+                                              Xpo FERENS."
+
+
+Diego Mendez found some one among the Spaniards to accompany him, but his
+name is not recorded.  The six Indians were taken to row the canoe.  They
+had to make their way at first against the strong currents along the
+northern coast of Jamaica, so as to reach its eastern extremity before
+striking across to Espanola.  At one point they met a flotilla of Indian
+canoes, which chased them and captured them, but they escaped.  When they
+arrived at the end of the easterly point of Jamaica, now known as Morant
+Point, they had to wait two or three days for calm weather and a
+favourable wind to waft them across to Espanola, and while thus waiting
+they were suddenly surrounded and captured by a tribe of hostile natives,
+who carried them off some nine or ten miles into the island, and
+signified their intention of killing them.
+
+But they began to quarrel among themselves as to how they should divide
+the spoils which they had captured with the canoe, and decided that the
+only way of settling the dispute was by some elaborate trial of hazard
+which they used.  While they were busy with their trial Diego Mendez
+managed to escape, got back to the canoe, and worked his way back in it
+alone to the harbour where the Spaniards were encamped.  The other
+Spaniard who was with him probably perished, for there is no record of
+what became of him--an obscure life lost in a brave enterprise.
+
+One would have thought that Mendez now had enough of canoe voyages, but
+he had no sooner got back than he offered to set out again, only
+stipulating that an armed force should march along the coast by land to
+secure his safety until he could stand across to Espanola.  Bartholomew
+Columbus immediately put himself at the head of a large and well-armed
+party for this purpose, and Bartolomeo Fieschi, the Genoese captain of
+one of the lost caravels, volunteered to accompany Mendez in a second
+canoe.  Each canoe was now manned by six Spanish volunteers and ten
+Indians to row; Fieschi, as soon as they had reached the coast of
+Espanola, was to bring the good news to the Admiral; while Mendez must go
+on to San Domingo, procure a ship, and himself proceed to Spain with the
+Admiral's letters.  The canoes were provisioned with water, cassava
+bread, and fish; and they departed on this enterprise some time in August
+1503.
+
+Their passage along the coast was protected by Bartholomew Columbus, who
+marched along with them on the shore.  They waited a few days at the end
+of the island for favourable weather, and finally said farewell to the
+good Adelantado, who we may be sure stood watching them until they were
+well out of sight.
+
+
+There was not a cloud in the sky when the canoes stood out to sea; the
+water was calm, and reflected the blistering heat of the sun.  It was not
+a pleasant situation for people in an open boat; and Mendez and Fieschi
+were kept busy, as Irving says, "animating the Indians who navigated
+their canoes, and who frequently paused at their labour."  The poor
+Indians, evidently much in need of such animation, would often jump into
+the water to escape the intolerable heat, and after a short immersion
+there would return to their task.  Things were better when the sun went
+down, and the cool night came on; half the Indians then slept and half
+rowed, while half of the Spaniards also slept and the other half, I
+suppose, "animated."  Irving also says that the animating half "kept
+guard with their weapons in hand, ready to defend themselves in the case
+of any perfidy on the part of their savage companions"; such perfidy
+being far enough from the thoughts of the savage companions, we may
+imagine, whose energies were entirely occupied with the oars.
+
+The next day was the same: savage companions rowing, Spaniards animating;
+Spaniards and savage companions alike drinking water copiously without
+regard for the smallness of their store.  The second night was very hot,
+and the savage companions finished the water, with the result that on the
+third day the thirst became a torment, and at mid-day the poor companions
+struck work.  Artful Mendez, however, had concealed two small kegs of
+water in his canoe, the contents of which he now administered in small
+doses, so that the poor Indians were enabled to take to their oars again,
+though with vigour much abated.  Presumably the Spaniards had put up
+their weapons by this time, for the only perfidy shown on the part of the
+savage companions was that one of them died in the following night and
+had to be thrown overboard, while others lay panting on the bottom of the
+canoes; and the Spaniards had to take their turn at the oars, although
+they were if anything in a worse case than the Indians.
+
+Late in the night, however, the moon rose, and Mendez had the joy of
+seeing its lower disc cut by a jagged line which proved to be the little
+islet or rock of Navassa, which lies off the westerly end of Espanola.
+New hope now animated the sufferers, and they pushed on until they were
+able to land on this rock, which proved to be without any vegetation
+whatsoever, but on the surface of which there were found some precious
+pools of rain-water.  Mendez was able to restrain the frantic appetites
+of his fellow-countrymen, but the savage companions were less wise, and
+drank their fill; so that some of them died in torment on the spot, and
+others became seriously ill.  The Spaniards were able to make a fire of
+driftwood, and boil some shell-fish, which they found on shore, and they
+wisely spent the heat of the day crouching in the shade of the rocks, and
+put off their departure until the evening.  It was then a comparatively
+easy journey for them to cross the dozen miles that separated them from
+Espanola, and they landed the next day in a pleasant harbour near Cape
+Tiburon.  Fieschi, true to his promise, was then ready to start back for
+Jamaica with news of the safe accomplishment of the voyage; but the
+remnant of the crews, Spaniards and savage companions alike, had had
+enough of it, and no threats or persuasions would induce them to embark
+again.  Mendez, therefore, left his friends to enjoy some little repose
+before continuing their journey to San Domingo, and, taking six natives
+of Espanola to row his canoe; set off along the coast towards the
+capital.  He had not gone half-way when he learned that Ovando was not
+there, but was in Xaragua, so he left his canoe and struck northward
+through the forest until he arrived at the Governor's camp.
+
+Ovando welcomed Mendez cordially, praised him for his plucky voyage, and
+expressed the greatest concern at the plight of the Admiral; but he was
+very busy at the moment, and was on the point of transacting a piece of
+business that furnished a dismal proof of the deterioration which had
+taken place in him.  Anacaona--the lady with the daughter whom we
+remember--was now ruling over the province of Xaragua, her brother having
+died; and as perhaps her native subjects had been giving a little trouble
+to the Governor, he had come to exert his authority.  The narrow official
+mind, brought into contact with native life, never develops in the
+direction of humanity; and Ovando had now for some time made the great
+discovery that it was less trouble to kill people than to try to rule
+over them wisely.  There had evidently always been a streak of Spanish
+cruelty in him, which had been much developed by his residence in
+Espanola; and to cruelty and narrow officialdom he now added treachery of
+a very monstrous and horrible kind.
+
+He announced his intention of paying a state visit to Anacaona, who
+thereupon summoned all her tributary chiefs to a kind of levee held in
+his honour.  In the midst of the levee, at a given signal, Ovando's
+soldiers rushed in, seized the caciques, fastened them to the wooden
+pillars of the house, and set the whole thing on fire; the caciques being
+thus miserably roasted alive.  While this was going on the atrocious work
+was completed by the soldiers massacring every native they could see
+--children, women, and old men included--and Anacaona herself was taken
+and hanged.
+
+All these things Diego Mendez had to witness; and when they were over,
+Ovando still had excuses for not hurrying to the relief of the Admiral.
+He had embarked on a campaign of extermination against the natives, and
+he followed up his atrocities at Xaragua by an expedition to the eastern
+end of Espanola, where very much the same kind of business was
+transacted.  Weeks and months passed in this bloody cruelty, and there
+was always an excuse for putting off Mendez.  Now it was because of the
+operations which he dignified by the name of wars, and now because he had
+no ship suitable for sending to Jamaica; but the truth was that Ovando,
+the springs of whose humanity had been entirely dried up during his
+disastrous reign in Espanola, did not want Columbus to see with his own
+eyes the terrible state of the island, and was callous enough to leave
+him either to perish or to find his own way back to the world.  It was
+only when news came that a fleet of caravels was expected from Spain that
+Ovando could no longer prevent Mendez from going to San Domingo and,
+purchasing one of them.
+
+Ovando had indeed lost all but the outer semblance of a man; the soul or
+animating part of him had entirely gone to corruption.  He had no
+interest in rescuing the Admiral; he had, on the contrary, great interest
+in leaving him unrescued; but curiosity as to his fate, and fear as to
+his actions in case he should return to Espanola, induced the Governor to
+make some effort towards spying cut his condition.  He had a number of
+trained rascals under his command--among them Diego de Escobar, one of
+Roldan's bright brigade; and Ovando had no sooner seen Mendez depart on
+his journey to San Domingo than he sent this Escobar to embark in a small
+caravel on a visit to Jamaica in order to see if the Admiral was still
+alive.  The caravel had to be small, so that there could be no chance of
+bringing off the 130 men who had been left to perish there; and various
+astute instructions were given to Escobar in order to prevent his arrival
+being of any comfort or assistance to the shipwrecked ones.  And so
+Escobar sailed; and so, in the month of March 1504, eight months after
+the vanishing of Mendez below the eastern horizon, the miserable company
+encamped on the two decaying ships on the sands at Puerto Santa Gloria
+descried with joyful excitement the sails of a Spanish caravel standing
+in to the shore.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE ECLIPSE OF THE MOON
+
+We must now return to the little settlement on the coast of Jamaica
+--those two wornout caravels, lashed together with ropes and bridged by an
+erection of wood and thatch, in which the forlorn little company was
+established.  In all communities of men so situated there are alternate
+periods of action and reaction, and after the excitement incidental to
+the departure of Mendez, and the return of Bartholomew with the news that
+he had got safely away, there followed a time of reaction, in which the
+Spaniards looked dismally out across the empty sea and wondered when, if
+ever, their salvation would come.  Columbus himself was now a confirmed
+invalid, and could hardly ever leave his bed under the thatch; and in his
+own condition of pain and depression his influence on the rest of the
+crew must inevitably have been less inspiriting than it had formerly
+been.  The men themselves, moreover, began to grow sickly, chiefly on
+account of the soft vegetable food, to which they were not accustomed,
+and partly because of their cramped quarters and the moist, unhealthy
+climate, which was the very opposite of what they needed after their long
+period of suffering and hardship at sea.
+
+As the days and weeks passed, with no occupation save the daily business
+of collecting food that gradually became more and more nauseous to them,
+and of straining their eyes across the empty blue of the sea in an
+anxious search for the returning canoes of Fieschi, the spirits of the
+castaways sank lower and lower.  Inevitably their discontent became
+articulate and broke out into murmurings.  The usual remedy for this
+state of affairs is to keep the men employed at some hard work; but there
+was no work for them to do, and the spirit of dissatisfaction had ample
+opportunity to spread.  As usual it soon took the form of hostility to
+the Admiral.  They seem to have borne him no love or gratitude for his
+masterly guiding of them through so many dangers; and now when he lay ill
+and in suffering his treacherous followers must needs fasten upon him the
+responsibility for their condition.  After a month or two had passed, and
+it became certain that Fieschi was not coming back, the castaways could
+only suppose that he and Mendez had either been captured by natives or
+had perished at sea, and that their fellow-countrymen must still be
+without news of the Admiral's predicament.  They began to say also that
+the Admiral was banished from Spain; that there was no desire or
+intention on the part of the Sovereigns to send an expedition to his
+relief; even if they had known of his condition; and that in any case
+they must long ago have given him up for lost.
+
+When the pot boils the scum rises to the surface, and the first result of
+these disloyal murmurings and agitations was to bring into prominence the
+two brothers, Francisco and Diego de Porras, who, it will be remembered,
+owed their presence with the expedition entirely to the Admiral's good
+nature in complying with the request of their brother-in-law Morales, who
+had apparently wished to find some distant occupation for them.  They had
+been given honourable posts as officers, in which they had not proved
+competent; but the Admiral had always treated them with kindness and
+courtesy, regarding them more as guests than as servants.  Who or what
+these Porras brothers were, where they came from, who were their father
+and mother, or what was their training, I do not know; it is enough for
+us to know that the result of it all had been the production of a couple
+of very mean scoundrels, who now found an opportunity to exercise their
+scoundrelism.
+
+When they discovered the nature of the murmuring and discontent among the
+crew they immediately set them to work it up into open mutiny.  They
+represented that, as Mendez had undoubtedly perished, there was no hope
+of relief from Espanola; that the Admiral did not even expect such
+relief, knowing that the island was forbidden ground to him.  They
+insinuated that he was as well content to remain in Jamaica as anywhere
+else, since he had to undergo a period of banishment until his friends at
+Court could procure his forgiveness.  They were all, said the Porras
+brothers, being made tools for the Admiral's convenience; as he did not
+wish to leave Jamaica himself, he was keeping them all there, to perish
+as likely as not, and in the meantime to form a bodyguard, and establish
+a service for himself.  The Porras brothers suggested that, under these
+circumstances, it would be as well to take a fleet of native canoes from
+the Indians and make their own way to Espanola; the Admiral would never
+undertake the voyage himself, being too helpless from the gout; but it
+would be absurd if the whole company were to be allowed to perish because
+of the infirmities of one man.  They reminded the murmurers that they
+would not be the first people who had rebelled with success against the
+despotic rule of Columbus, and that the conduct of the Sovereigns on a
+former occasion afforded them some promise that those who rebelled again
+would receive something quite different from punishment.
+
+Christmas passed, the old year went out in this strange, unhomelike
+place, and the new year came in.  The Admiral, as we have seen, was now
+almost entirely crippled and confined to his bed; and he was lying alone
+in his cabin on the second day of the year when Francisco de Porras
+abruptly entered.  Something very odd and flurried about Porras; he jerks
+and stammers, and suddenly breaks out into a flood of agitated speech, in
+which the Admiral distinguishes a stream of bitter reproach and
+impertinence.  The thing forms itself into nothing more or less than a
+hurried, gabbling complaint; the people are dissatisfied at being kept
+here week after week with no hope of relief; they accuse the Admiral of
+neglecting their interests; and so on.  Columbus, raising himself in his
+bed, tries to pacify Porras; gives him reasons why it is impossible for
+them to depart in canoes; makes every endeavour, in short, to bring this
+miserable fellow back to his duties.  He is watching Porras's eye all the
+time; sees that he is too excited to be pacified by reason, and suspects
+that he has considerable support behind him; and suggests that the crew
+had better all be assembled and a consultation held as to the best course
+to pursue.
+
+It is no good to reason with mutineers; and the Admiral has no sooner
+made this suggestion than he sees that it was a mistake.  Porras scoffs
+at it; action, not consultation, is what he demands; in short he presents
+an ultimatum to the Admiral--either to embark with the whole company at
+once, or stay behind in Jamaica at his own pleasure.  And then, turning
+his back on Columbus and raising his voice, he calls out, "I am for
+Castile; those who choose may follow me!"
+
+The shout was a signal, and immediately from every part of the vessel
+resounded the voices of the Spaniards, crying out that they would follow
+Porras.  In the midst of the confusion Columbus hobbled out of his bed
+and staggered on to the deck; Bartholomew seized his weapons and prepared
+for action; but the whole of the crew was not mutinous, and there was a
+large enough loyal remnant to make it unwise for the chicken-hearted
+mutineers to do more for the moment than shout: Some of them, it is true,
+were heard threatening the life of the Admiral, but he was hurried back
+to his bed by a few of the faithful ones, and others of them rushed up to
+the fierce Bartholomew, and with great difficulty persuaded him to drop
+his lance and retire to Christopher's cabin with him while they dealt
+with the offenders.  They begged Columbus to let the scoundrels go if
+they wished to, as the condition of those who remained would be improved
+rather than hurt by their absence, and they would be a good riddance.
+They then went back to the deck and told Porras and his followers that
+the sooner they went the better, and that nobody would interfere with
+their going as long as they offered no one any violence.
+
+The Admiral had some time before purchased some good canoes from the
+natives, and the mutineers seized ten of these and loaded them with
+native provisions.  Every effort was made to add to the number of the
+disloyal ones; and when they saw their friends making ready to depart
+several of these did actually join.  There were forty-eight who finally
+embarked with the brothers Porras; and there would have been more, but
+that so many of them were sick and unable to face the exposure of the
+voyage.  As it was, those who remained witnessed with no very cheerful
+emotions the departure of their companions, and even in some cases fell
+to tears and lamentations.  The poor old Admiral struggled out of his bed
+again, went round among the sick and the loyal, cheering them and
+comforting them, and promising to use every effort of the power left to
+him to secure an adequate reward for their loyalty when he should return
+to Spain.
+
+We need only follow the career of Porras and his deserters for the
+present far enough to see them safely off the premises and out of the way
+of the Admiral and our narrative.  They coasted along the shore of
+Jamaica to the eastward as Mendez had done, landing whenever they had a
+mind to, and robbing and outraging the natives; and they took a
+particularly mean and dirty revenge on the Admiral by committing all
+their robbings and outragings as though under his authority, assuring the
+offended Indians that what they did they did by his command and that what
+they took he would pay for; so that as they went along they sowed seeds
+of grievance and hostility against the Admiral.  They told the natives,
+moreover, that Columbus was an enemy of all Indians, and that they would
+be very well advised to kill him and get him out of the way.
+
+They had not managed very well with the navigation of the canoes; and
+while they were waiting for fine weather at the eastern end of the island
+they collected a number of natives to act as oarsmen.  When they thought
+the weather suitable they put to sea in the direction of Espanola.  They
+were only about fifteen miles from the shore, however, when the wind
+began to head them and to send up something of a sea; not rough, but
+enough to make the crank and overloaded canoes roll heavily, for they had
+not been prepared, as those of Mendez were, with false keels and
+weather-boards.  The Spaniards got frightened and turned back to
+Jamaica; but the sea became rougher, the canoes rolled more and more,
+they often shipped a quantity of water, and the situation began to look
+serious.  All their belongings except arms and provisions were thrown
+overboard; but still, as the wind rose and the sea with it, it became
+obvious that unless the canoes were further lightened they would not
+reach the shore in safety. Under these circumstances the Spaniards
+forced the natives to leap into the water, where they swam about like
+rats as well as they could, and then came back to the canoes in order to
+hold on and rest themselves. When they did this the Spaniards slashed at
+them with their swords or cut off their hands, so that one by one they
+fell back and, still swimming about feebly as well as they could with
+their bleeding hands or stumps of arms, the miserable wretches perished
+and sank at last.
+
+By this dreadful expedient the Spaniards managed to reach Jamaica again,
+and when they landed they immediately fell to quarrelling as to what they
+should do next.  Some were for trying to make the island of Cuba, the
+wind being favourable for that direction; others were for returning and
+making their submission to the Admiral; others for going back and seizing
+the remainder of his arms and stores; others for staying where they were
+for the present, and making another attempt to reach Espanola when the
+weather should be more favourable.  This last plan, being the counsel of
+present inaction, was adopted by the majority of the rabble; so they
+settled themselves at a neighbouring Indian village, behaving in: the
+manner with which we are familiar.  A little later, when the weather was
+calm, they made another attempt at the voyage, but were driven back in
+the same way; and being by this time sick of canoe voyages, they
+abandoned the attempt, and began to wander back westward through the
+island, maltreating the natives as before, and sowing seeds of bitter
+rancour and hostility against the Admiral; in whose neighbourhood we
+shall unfortunately hear of them again.
+
+In the meantime their departure had somewhat relieved the condition of
+affairs on board the hulks.  There were more provisions and there was
+more peace; the Admiral, rising above his own infirmities to the
+necessities of the occasion, moved unweariedly among the sick, cheering
+them and nursing them back into health and good humour, so that gradually
+the condition of the little colony was brought into better order and
+health than it had enjoyed since its establishment.
+
+But now unfortunately the evil harvest sown by the Porras gang in their
+journey to the east of the island began to ripen.  The supplies of
+provisions, which had hitherto been regularly brought by the natives,
+began to appear with less punctuality, and to fall off both in quantity
+and quality.  The trinkets with which they were purchased had now been
+distributed in such quantities that they began to lose their novelty and
+value; sometimes the natives demanded a much higher price for the
+provisions they brought, and (having by this time acquired the art of
+bargaining) would take their stores away again if they did not get the
+price they asked.
+
+But even of this device they soon grew weary; from being irregular, the
+supplies of provisions from some quarters ceased altogether, and the
+possibilities of famine began to stare the unhappy castaways in the face.
+It must be remembered that they were in a very weak physical condition,
+and that among the so-called loyal remnant there were very few who were
+not invalids; and they were unable to get out into the island and forage
+for themselves.  If the able-bodied handful were to sally forth in search
+of provisions, the hulks would be left defenceless and at the mercy of
+the natives, of whose growing hostility the Admiral had by this time
+discovered abundant evidence.  Thus little by little the food supply
+diminished until there was practically nothing left, and the miserable
+company of invalids were confronted with the alternative of either dying
+of starvation or desperately attempting a canoe voyage.
+
+
+It was from this critical situation that the spirit and resource of
+Columbus once more furnished a way of escape, and in these circumstances
+that he invented and worked a device that has since become famous--the
+great Eclipse Trick.  Among his small library in the cabin of the ship
+was the book containing the astronomical tables of Regiomontanus; and
+from his study of this work he was aware that an eclipse of the moon was
+due on a certain date near at hand.  He sent his Indian interpreter to
+visit the neighbouring caciques, summoning them to a great conference to
+be held on the evening of the eclipse, as the Admiral had matters of
+great importance to reveal to them.  They duly arrived on the evening
+appointed; not the caciques alone, but large numbers of the native
+population, well prepared for whatever might take place.  Columbus then
+addressed them through his interpreter, informing him that he was under
+the protection of a God who dwelt in the skies and who rewarded all who
+assisted him and punished all his enemies.  He made an effective use of
+the adventures of Mendez and Porras, pointing out that Mendez, who took
+his voyage by the Admiral's orders, had got away in safety, but that
+Porras and his followers, who had departed in disobedience and mutiny,
+had been prevented by the heavenly power from achieving their object.  He
+told them that his God was angry with them for their hostility and for
+their neglect to supply him with provisions; and that in token of his
+anger he was going to send them a dreadful punishment, as a sign of which
+they would presently see the moon change colour and lose its light, and
+the earth become dark.
+
+This address was spun out as long as possible; but even so it was
+followed by an interval in which, we may be sure, Columbus anxiously eyed
+the serene orb of night, and doubtless prayed that Regiomontanus might
+not have made a mistake in his calculations.  Some of the Indians were
+alarmed, some of them contemptuous; but it was pretty clearly realised on
+both sides that matters between them had come to a head; and probably if
+Regiomontanus, who had worked out these tables of figures and
+calculations so many years ago in his German home, had done his work
+carelessly or made a mistake, Columbus and his followers would have been
+massacred on the spot.  But Regiomontanus, God bless him!  had made no
+mistake.  Sure enough, and punctually to the appointed time, the dark
+shadow began to steal over the moon's disc; its light gradually faded,
+and a ghostly darkness crept over the face of the world.  Columbus,
+having seen that all was right with the celestial machinery, had retired
+to his cabin; and presently he found himself besieged there in the dark
+night by crowds of natives frantically bringing what provisions they had
+and protesting their intention of continuing to bring them for the rest
+of their lives.  If only the Admiral would ask his God to forgive them,
+there was no limit to the amount of provisions that he might have!  The
+Admiral, piously thankful, and perhaps beginning to enjoy the situation a
+little, kept himself shut up in his cabin as though communing with the
+implacable deity, while the darkness deepened over the land and the shore
+resounded with the howling and sobbing of the terrified natives.  He kept
+a look-out on the sky; and when he saw that the eclipse was about to pass
+away, he came out and informed the natives that God had decided to pardon
+them on condition of their remaining faithful in the matter of
+provisions, and that as a sign of His mercy He would restore the light.
+The beautiful miracle went on through its changing phases; and, watching
+in the darkness, the terrified natives saw the silver edge of the moon
+appearing again, the curtain that had obscured it gradually rolling away,
+and land and sea lying visible to them and once more steeped in the
+serene light which they worshipped.  It is likely that Christopher slept
+more soundly that night than he had slept for many nights before.
+
+
+
+
+
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+
+
+                         CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS
+                   AND THE NEW WORLD OF HIS DISCOVERY
+
+                      A NARRATIVE BY FILSON YOUNG
+
+
+
+TOWARDS THE SUNSET
+
+BOOK 7.
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+DEGRADATION
+
+The first things seen by Francisco de Bobadilla when he entered the
+harbour of San Domingo on the morning of the 23rd of August 1500 were the
+bodies of several Spaniards, hanging from a gibbet near the water-side--
+a grim confirmation of what he had heard about the troubled state of the
+island.  While he was waiting for the tide so that he might enter the
+harbour a boat put off from shore to ascertain who was on board the
+caravels; and it was thus informally that Bobadilla first announced that
+he had come to examine into the state of the island.  Columbus was not at
+San Domingo, but was occupied in settling the affairs of the Vega Real;
+Bartholomew also was absent, stamping out the last smouldering embers of
+rebellion in Xaragua; and only James was in command to deal with this
+awkward situation.
+
+Bobadilla did not go ashore the first day, but remained on board his ship
+receiving the visits of various discontented colonists who, getting early
+wind of the purpose of his visit, lost no time in currying favour with
+him, Probably he heard enough that first day to have damned the
+administration of a dozen islands; but also we must allow him some
+interest in the wonderful and strange sights that he was seeing; for
+Espanola, which has perhaps grown wearisome to us, was new to him.  He
+had brought with him an armed body-guard of twenty-five men, and in the
+other caravel were the returned slaves, babies and all, under the charge
+of six friars.  On the day following his arrival Bobadilla landed and
+heard mass in state, afterwards reading out his commission to the
+assembled people.  Evidently he had received a shocking impression of the
+state of affairs in the island; that is the only explanation of the
+action suddenly taken by him, for his first public act was to demand from
+James the release of all the prisoners in the fortress, in order that
+they and their accusers should appear before him.
+
+James is in a difficulty; and, mule-like, since he does not know which
+way to turn, stands stock still.  He can do nothing, he says, without the
+Admiral's consent.  The next day Bobadilla, again hearing mass in state,
+causes further documents to be read showing that a still greater degree
+of power had been entrusted to his hands.  Mule-like, James still stands
+stock still; the greatest power on earth known to him is his eldest
+brother, and he will not, positively dare not, be moved by anything less
+than that.  He refuses to give up the prisoners on any grounds
+whatsoever, and Bobadilla has to take the fortress by assault--an easy
+enough matter since the resistance is but formal.
+
+The next act of Bobadilla's is not quite so easy to understand.  He
+quartered himself in Columbus's house; that perhaps was reasonable enough
+since there may not have been another house in the settlement fit to
+receive him; but he also, we are told, took possession of all his papers,
+public and private, and also seized the Admiral's store of money and
+began to pay his debts with it for him, greatly to the satisfaction of
+San Domingo.  There is an element of the comic in this interpretation of
+a commissioner's powers; and it seemed as though he meant to wind up the
+whole Columbus business, lock, stock, and barrel.  It would not be in
+accordance with our modern ideas of honour that a man's private papers
+should be seized unless he were suspected of treachery or some criminal
+act; but apparently Bobadilla regarded it as necessary.  We must remember
+that although he had only heard one side of the case it was evidently so
+positive, and the fruits of misgovernment were there so visibly before
+his eyes, that no amount of evidence in favour of Columbus would make him
+change his mind as to his fitness to govern.  Poor James, witnessing
+these things and unable to do anything to prevent them, finds himself
+suddenly relieved from the tension of the situation.  Since inaction is
+his note, he shall be indulged in it; and he is clapped in irons and cast
+into prison.  James can hardly believe the evidence of his senses.  He
+has been studying theology lately, it appears, with a view to entering
+the Church and perhaps being some day made Bishop of Espanola, but this
+new turn of affairs looks as though there were to be an end of all
+careers for him, military and ecclesiastical alike.
+
+Christopher at Fort Concepcion had early news of the arrival of
+Bobadilla, but in the hazy state of his mind he did not regard it as an
+event of sufficient importance to make his immediate presence at San
+Domingo advisable.  The name of Bobadilla conveyed nothing to him; and
+when he heard that he had come to investigate, he thought that he came
+to set right some disputed questions between the Admiral and other
+navigators as to the right of visiting Espanola and the Paria coast.
+As the days went on, however, he heard more disquieting rumours; grew at
+last uneasy, and moved to a fort nearer San Domingo in case it should be
+necessary for him to go there.  An officer met him on the road bearing
+the proclamations issued by Bobadilla, but not the message from the
+Sovereigns requiring the Admiral's obedience to the commissioner.
+Columbus wrote to the commissioner a curious letter, which is not
+preserved, in which he sought to gain time; excusing himself from
+responsibility for the condition of the island, and assuring Bobadilla
+that, as he intended to return to Spain almost immediately, he
+(Bobadilla) would have ample opportunity for exercising his command in
+his absence.  He also wrote to the Franciscan friars who had accompanied
+Bobadilla asking them to use their influence--the Admiral having some
+vague connection with the Franciscan order since his days at La Rabida.
+
+No reply came to any of these letters, and Columbus sent word that he
+still regarded his authority as paramount in the island.  For reply to
+this he received the Sovereigns' message to him which we have seen,
+commanding him to put himself under the direction of Bobadilla.  There
+was no mistaking this; there was the order in plain words; and with I
+know not what sinkings of heart Columbus at last set out for San Domingo.
+Bobadilla had expected resistance, but the Admiral, whatever his faults,
+knew how to behave with, dignity in a humiliating position; and he came
+into the city unattended on August 23, 1500.  On the outskirts of the
+town he was met by Bobadilla's guards, arrested, put in chains, and
+lodged in the fortress, the tower of which exists to this day.  He seemed
+to himself to be the victim of a particularly petty and galling kind of
+treachery, for it was his own cook, a man called Espinoza, who riveted
+his gyves upon him.
+
+There remained Bartholomew to be dealt with, and he, being at large and
+in command of the army, might not have proved such an easy conquest, but
+that Christopher, at Bobadilla's request, wrote and advised him to submit
+to arrest without any resistance.  Whether Bartholomew acquiesced or not
+is uncertain; what is certain is that he also was captured and placed in
+irons, and imprisoned on one of the caravels.  James in one caravel,
+Bartholomew in another, and Christopher in the fortress, and all in
+chains--this is what it has come to with the three sons of old Domenico.
+
+The trial was now begun, if trial that can be called which takes place in
+the absence of the culprit or his representative.  It was rather the
+hearing of charges against Christopher and his brothers; and we may be
+sure that every discontented feeling in the island found voice and was
+formulated into some incriminating charge.  Columbus was accused of
+oppressing the Spanish settlers by making them work at harsh and
+unnecessary labour; of cutting down their allowance of food, and
+restricting their liberty; of punishing them cruelly and unduly; of
+waging wars unjustly with the natives; of interfering with the conversion
+of the natives by hastily collecting them and sending them home as
+slaves; of having secreted treasures which should have been delivered to
+the Sovereigns--this last charge, like some of the others, true.  He had
+an accumulation of pearls of which he had given no account to Fonseca,
+and the possession of which he excused by the queer statement that he was
+waiting to announce it until he could match it with an equal amount of
+gold!  He was accused of hating the Spaniards, who were represented as
+having risen in the late rebellion in order to protect the natives and
+avenge their own wrongs--, and generally of having abused his office in
+order to enrich his own family and gratify his own feelings.  Bobadilla
+appeared to believe all these charges; or perhaps he recognised their
+nature, and yet saw that there was a sufficient degree of truth in them
+to disqualify the Admiral in his position as Viceroy.  In all these
+affairs his right-hand man was Roldan, whose loyalty to Columbus, as we
+foresaw, had been short-lived.  Roldan collects evidence; Roldan knows
+where he can lay his hands on this witness; Roldan produces this and that
+proof; Roldan is here, there, and everywhere--never had Bobadilla found
+such a useful, obliging man as Roldan.  With his help Bobadilla soon
+collected a sufficient weight of evidence to justify in his own mind his
+sending Columbus home to Spain, and remaining himself in command of the
+island.
+
+The caravels having been made ready, and all the evidence drawn up and
+documented, it only remained to embark the prisoners and despatch them to
+Spain.  Columbus, sitting in his dungeon, suffering from gout and
+ophthalmic as well as from misery and humiliation, had heard no news;
+but he had heard the shouting of the people in the streets, the beating
+of drums and blowing of horns, and his own name and that of his brothers
+uttered in derision; and he made sure that he was going to be executed.
+Alonso de Villegio, a nephew of Bishop Fonseca's, had been appointed to
+take charge of the ships returning to Spain; and when he came into the
+prison the Admiral thought his last hour had come.
+
+"Villegio," he asked sadly, "where are you taking me?"
+
+"I am taking you to the ship, your Excellency, to embark," replied the
+other.
+
+"To embark?" repeated the Admiral incredulously.  "Villegio! are you
+speaking the truth?"
+
+"By the life of your Excellency what I say is true," was the reply, and
+the news came with a wave of relief to the panic-stricken heart of the
+Admiral.
+
+In the middle of October the caravels sailed from San Domingo, and the
+last sounds heard by Columbus from the land of his discovery were the
+hoots and jeers and curses hurled after him by the treacherous,
+triumphant rabble on the shore.  Villegio treated him and his brothers
+with as much kindness as possible, and offered, when they had got well
+clear of Espanola, to take off the Admiral's chains.  But Columbus, with
+a fine counterstroke of picturesque dignity, refused to have them
+removed.  Already, perhaps, he had realised that his subjection to this
+cruel and quite unnecessary indignity would be one of the strongest
+things in his favour when he got to Spain, and he decided to suffer as
+much of it as he could.  "My Sovereigns commanded me to submit to what
+Bobadilla should order.  By his authority I wear these chains, and I
+shall continue to wear them until they are removed by order of the
+Sovereigns; and I will keep them afterwards as reminders of the reward I
+have received for my services."  Thus the Admiral, beginning to pick up
+his spirits again, and to feel the better for the sea air.
+
+The voyage home was a favourable one and in the course of it Columbus
+wrote the following letter to a friend of his at Court, Dona Juana de la
+Torre, who had been nurse to Prince Juan and was known by him to be a
+favourite of the Queen:
+
+     "MOST VIRTUOUS LADY,--Though my complaint of the world is new, its
+     habit of ill-using is very ancient.  I have had a thousand struggles
+     with it, and have thus far withstood them all, but now neither arms
+     nor counsels avail me, and it cruelly keeps me under water.  Hope in
+     the Creator of all men sustains me: His help was always very ready;
+     on another occasion, and not long ago, when I was still more
+     overwhelmed, He raised me with His right arm, saying, 'O man of
+     little faith, arise: it is I; be not afraid.'
+
+     "I came with so much cordial affection to serve these Princes, and
+     have served them with such service, as has never been heard of or
+     seen.
+
+     "Of the new heaven and earth which our Lord made, when Saint John
+     was writing the Apocalypse, after what was spoken by the mouth of
+     Isaiah, He made me the messenger, and showed me where it lay.  In
+     all men there was disbelief, but to the Queen, my Lady, He gave the
+     spirit of understanding, and great courage, and made her heiress of
+     all, as a dear and much loved daughter.  I went to take possession
+     of all this in her royal name.  They sought to make amends to her
+     for the ignorance they had all shown by passing over their little
+     knowledge and talking of obstacles and expenses.  Her Highness, on
+     the other hand, approved of it, and supported it as far as she was
+     able.
+
+     "Seven years passed in discussion and nine in execution.  During
+     this time very remarkable and noteworthy things occurred whereof no
+     idea at all had been formed.  I have arrived at, and am in, such a
+     condition that there is no person so vile but thinks he may insult
+     me: he shall be reckoned in the world as valour itself who is
+     courageous enough not to consent to it.
+
+     "If I were to steal the Indies or the land which lies towards them,
+     of which I am now speaking, from the altar of Saint Peter, and give
+     them to the Moors, they could not show greater enmity towards me in
+     Spain.  Who would believe such a thing where there was always so
+     much magnanimity?
+
+     "I should have much desired to free myself from this affair had it
+     been honourable towards my Queen to do so.  The support of our Lord
+     and of her Highness made me persevere: and to alleviate in some
+     measure the sorrows which death had caused her, I undertook a fresh
+     voyage to the new heaven and earth which up to that time had
+     remained hidden; and if it is not held there in esteem like the
+     other voyages to the Indies, that is no wonder, because it came to
+     be looked upon as my work.
+
+     "The Holy Spirit inflamed Saint Peter and twelve others with him,
+     and they all contended here below, and their toils and hardships
+     were many, but last of all they gained the victory.
+
+     "This voyage to Paria I thought would somewhat appease them on
+     account of the pearls, and of the discovery of gold in Espanola.
+     I ordered the pearls to be collected and fished for by people with
+     whom an arrangement was made that I should return for them, and, as
+     I understood, they were to be measured by the bushel.  If I did not
+     write about this to their Highnesses, it was because I wished to
+     have first of all done the same thing with the gold.
+
+     "The result to me in this has been the same as in many other things;
+     I should not have lost them nor my honour, if I had sought my own
+     advantage, and had allowed Espanola to be ruined, or if my
+     privileges and contracts had been observed.  And I say just the same
+     about the gold which I had then collected, and [for] which with such
+     great afflictions and toils I have, by divine power, almost
+     perfected [the arrangements].
+
+     "When I went from Paria I found almost half the people from Espanola
+     in revolt, and they have waged war against me until now, as against
+     a Moor; and the Indians on the other side grievously [harassed me].
+     At this time Hojeda arrived and tried to put the finishing stroke:
+     he said that their Highnesses had sent him with promises of gifts,
+     franchises and pay: he gathered together a great band, for in the
+     whole of Espanola there are very few save vagabonds, and not one
+     with wife and children.  This Hojeda gave me great trouble; he was
+     obliged to depart, and left word that he would soon return with more
+     ships and people, and that he had left the Royal person of the
+     Queen, our Lady, at the point of death.  Then Vincente Yanez arrived
+     with four caravels; there was disturbance and mistrust but no
+     mischief: the Indians talked of many others at the Cannibals
+     [Caribbee Islands] and in Paria; and afterwards spread the news of
+     six other caravels, which were brought by a brother of the Alcalde,
+     but it was with malicious intent.  This occurred at the very last,
+     when the hope that their Highnesses would ever send any ships to the
+     Indies was almost abandoned, nor did we expect them; and it was
+     commonly reported that her Highness was dead.
+
+     "A certain Adrian about this time endeavoured to rise in rebellion
+     again, as he had done previously, but our Lord did not permit his
+     evil purpose to succeed.  I had purposed in myself never to touch a
+     hair of anybody's head, but I lament to say that with this man,
+     owing to his ingratitude, it was not possible to keep that resolve
+     as I had intended: I should not have done less to my brother, if he
+     had sought to kill me, and steal the dominion which my King and
+     Queen had given me in trust.
+
+     "This Adrian, as it appears, had sent Don Ferdinand to Xaragua to
+     collect some of his followers, and there a dispute arose with the
+     Alcalde from which a deadly contest ensued, and he [Adrian] did not
+     effect his purpose.  The Alcalde seized him and a part of his band,
+     and the fact was that he would have executed them if I had not
+     prevented it; they were kept prisoners awaiting a caravel in which
+     they might depart.  The news of Hojeda which I told them made them
+     lose the hope that he would now come again.
+
+     "For six months I had been prepared to return to their Highnesses
+     with the good news of the gold, and to escape from governing a
+     dissolute people Who fear neither God nor their King and Queen,
+     being full of vices and wickedness.
+
+     "I could have paid the people in full with six hundred thousand, and
+     for this purpose I had four millions of tenths and somewhat more,
+     besides the third of the gold.
+
+     "Before my departure I many times begged their Highnesses to send
+     there, at my expense, some one to take charge of the administration
+     of justice; and after finding the Alcalde in arms I renewed my
+     supplications to have either some troops or at least some servant of
+     theirs with letters patent; for my reputation is such that even if I
+     build churches and hospitals, they will always be called dens of
+     thieves.
+
+     "They did indeed make provision at last, but it was the very
+     contrary of what the matter demanded: it may be successful, since it
+     was according to their good pleasure.
+
+     "I was there for two years without being able to gain a decree of
+     favour for myself or for those who went there, yet this man brought
+     a coffer full: whether they will all redound to their [Highnesses]
+     service, God knows.  Indeed, to begin with, there are exemptions for
+     twenty years, which is a man's lifetime; and gold is collected to
+     such an extent that there was one person who became worth five marks
+     in four hours; whereof I will speak more fully later on.
+
+     "If it would please their Highnesses to remove the grounds of a
+     common saying of those who know my labours, that the calumny of the
+     people has done me more harm than much service and the maintenance
+     of their [Highnesses] property and dominion has done me good, it
+     would be a charity, and I should be re-established in my honour, and
+     it would be talked about all over the world: for the undertaking is
+     of such a nature that it must daily become more famous and in higher
+     esteem.
+
+     "When the Commander Bobadilla came to Santo Domingo, I was at La
+     Vega, and the Adelantado at Xaragua, where that Adrian had made a
+     stand, but then all was quiet, and the land rich and all men at
+     peace.  On the second day after his arrival, he created himself
+     Governor, and appointed officers and made executions, and proclaimed
+     immunities of gold and tenths and in general of everything else for
+     twenty years, which is a man's lifetime, and that he came to pay
+     everybody in full up to that day, even though they had not rendered
+     service; and he publicly gave notice that, as for me, he had charge
+     to send me in irons, and my brothers likewise, as he has done, and
+     that I should nevermore return thither, nor any other of my family:
+     alleging a thousand disgraceful and discourteous things about me.
+     All this took place on the second day after his arrival, as I have
+     said, and while I was absent at a distance, without my knowing
+     either of him or of his arrival.
+
+     "Some letters of their Highnesses signed in blank, of which he
+     brought a number, he filled up and sent to the Alcalde and to his
+     company with favours and commendations: to me he never sent either
+     letter or messenger, nor has he done so to this day.  Imagine what
+     any one holding my office would think when one who endeavoured to
+     rob their Highnesses, and who has done so much evil and mischief, is
+     honoured and favoured, while he who maintained it at such risks is
+     degraded.
+
+     "When I heard this I thought that this affair would be like that of
+     Hojeda or one of the others, but I restrained myself when I learnt
+     for certain from the friars that their Highnesses had sent him.  I
+     wrote to him that his arrival was welcome, and that I was prepared
+     to go to the Court and had sold all I possessed by auction; and that
+     with respect to the immunities he should not be hasty, for both that
+     matter and the government I would hand over to him immediately as
+     smooth as my palm.  And I wrote to the same effect to the friars,
+     but neither he nor they gave me any answer.  On the contrary, he put
+     himself in a warlike attitude, and compelled all who went there to
+     take an oath to him as Governor; and they told me that it was for
+     twenty years.
+
+     "Directly I knew of those immunities, I thought that I would repair
+     such a great error and that he would be pleased, for he gave them
+     without the need or occasion necessary in so vast a matter: and he
+     gave to vagabond people what would have been excessive for a man who
+     had brought wife and children.  So I announced by word and letters
+     that he could not use his patents because mine were those in force;
+     and I showed them the immunities which John Aguado brought.
+
+     "All this was done by me in order to gain time, so that their
+     Highnesses might be informed of the condition of the country, and
+     that they might have an opportunity of issuing fresh commands as to
+     what would best promote their service in that respect.
+
+     "It is useless to publish such immunities in the Indies: to the
+     settlers who have taken up residence it is a pure gain, for the best
+     lands are given to them, and at a low valuation they will be worth
+     two-hundred thousand at the end of the four years when the period of
+     residence is ended, without their digging a spadeful in them.  I
+     would not speak thus if the settlers were married, but there are not
+     six among them all who are not on the look-out to gather what they
+     can and depart speedily.  It would be a good thing if they should go
+     from Castile, and also if it were known who and what they are, and
+     if the country could be settled with honest people.
+
+     "I had agreed with those settlers that they should pay the third of
+     the gold, and the tenths, and this at their own request; and they
+     received it as a great favour from their Highnesses.  I reproved
+     them when I heard that they ceased to do this, and hoped that the
+     Commander would do likewise, and he did the contrary.
+
+     "He incensed them against me by saying that I wanted to deprive them
+     of what their Highnesses had given them; and he endeavoured to set
+     them at variance with me, and did so; and he induced them to write
+     to their Highnesses that they should never again send me back to the
+     government, and I likewise make the same supplication to them for
+     myself and for my whole family, as long as there are not different
+     inhabitants.  And he together with them ordered inquisitions
+     concerning me for wickednesses the like whereof were never known in
+     hell.  Our Lord, who rescued Daniel and the three children, is
+     present with the same wisdom and power as He had then, and with the
+     same means, if it should please Him and be in accordance with His
+     will.
+
+     "I should know how to remedy all this, and the rest of what has been
+     said and has taken place since I have been in the Indies, if my
+     disposition would allow me to seek my own advantage, and if it
+     seemed honourable to me to do so, but the maintenance of justice and
+     the extension of the dominion of her Highness has hitherto kept me
+     down.  Now that so much gold is found, a dispute arises as to which
+     brings more profit, whether to go about robbing or to go to the
+     mines.  A hundred castellanos are as easily obtained for a woman as
+     for a farm, and it is very general, and there are plenty of dealers
+     who go about looking for girls: those from nine to ten are now in
+     demand, and for all ages a good price must be paid.
+
+     "I assert that the violence of the calumny of turbulent persons has
+     injured me more than my services have profited me; which is a bad
+     example for the present and for the future.  I take my oath that a
+     number of men have gone to the Indies who did not deserve water in
+     the sight of God and of the world; and now they are returning
+     thither, and leave is granted them.
+
+     "I assert that when I declared that the Commander could not grant
+     immunities, I did what he desired, although I told him that it was
+     to cause delay until their Highnesses should, receive information
+     from the country, and should command anew what might be for their
+     service.
+
+     "He excited their enmity against me, and he seems, from what took
+     place and from his behaviour, to have come as my enemy and as a very
+     vehement one; or else the report is true that he has spent much to
+     obtain this employment.  I do not know more about it than what I
+     hear.  I never heard of an inquisitor gathering rebels together and
+     accepting them, and others devoid of credit and unworthy of it, as
+     witnesses against their Governor.
+
+     "If their Highnesses were to make a general inquisition there, I
+     assure you that they would look upon it as a great wonder that the
+     island does not founder.
+
+     "I think your Ladyship will remember that when, after losing my
+     sails, I was driven into Lisbon by a tempest, I was falsely accused
+     of having gone there to the King in order to give him the Indies.
+     Their Highnesses afterwards learned the contrary, and that it was
+     entirely malicious.
+
+     "Although I may know but little, I do not think any one considers me
+     so stupid as not to know that even if the Indies were mine I could
+     not uphold myself without the help of some Prince.
+
+     "If this be so, where could I find better support and security than
+     in the King and Queen, our Lords, who have raised me from nothing to
+     such great honour, and are the most exalted Princes of the world on
+     sea and on land, and who consider that I have rendered them service,
+     and who preserve to me my privileges and rewards: and if any one
+     infringes them, their Highnesses increase them still more, as was
+     seen in the case of John Aguado; and they order great honour to be
+     conferred upon me, and, as I have already said, their Highnesses
+     have received service from me, and keep my sons in their household;
+     all which could by no means happen with another prince, for where
+     there is no affection, everything else fails.
+
+     "I have now spoken thus in reply to a malicious slander, but against
+     my will, as it is a thing which should not recur to memory even in
+     dreams; for the Commander Bobadilla maliciously seeks in this way to
+     set his own conduct and actions in a brighter light; but I shall
+     easily show him that his small knowledge and great cowardice,
+     together with his inordinate cupidity, have caused him to fail
+     therein.
+
+     "I have already said that I wrote to him and to the friars, and
+     immediately set out, as I told him, almost alone, because all the
+     people were with the Adelantado, and likewise in order to prevent
+     suspicion on his part.  When he heard this, he seized Don Diego and
+     sent him on board a caravel loaded with irons, and did the same to
+     me upon my arrival, and afterwards to the Adelantado when he came;
+     nor did I speak to him any more, nor to this day has he allowed any
+     one to speak to me; and I take my oath that I cannot understand why
+     I am made a prisoner.
+
+     "He made it his first business to seize the gold, which he did
+     without measuring or weighing it and in my absence; he said that he
+     wanted it to pay the people, and according to what I hear he
+     assigned the chief part to himself and sent fresh exchangers for the
+     exchanges.  Of this gold I had put aside certain specimens, very big
+     lumps, like the eggs of geese, hens, and pullets, and of many other
+     shapes, which some persons had collected in a short space of time,
+     in order that their Highnesses might be gladdened, and might
+     comprehend the business upon seeing a quantity of large stones full
+     of gold.  This collection was the first to be given away, with
+     malicious intent, so that their Highnesses should not hold the
+     matter in any account until he has feathered his nest, which he is
+     in great haste to do.  Gold which is for melting diminishes at the
+     fire: some chains which would weigh about twenty marks have never
+     been seen again.
+
+     "I have been more distressed about this matter of the gold than even
+     about the pearls, because I have not brought it to her Highness.
+
+     "The Commander at once set to work upon anything which he thought
+     would injure me.  I have already said that with six hundred thousand
+     I could pay every one without defrauding anybody, and that I had
+     more than four millions of tenths and constabulary [dues] without
+     touching the gold.  He made some free gifts which are ridiculous,
+     though I believe that he began by assigning the chief part to
+     himself.  Their Highnesses will find it out when they order an
+     account to be obtained from him, especially if I should be present
+     thereat.  He does nothing but reiterate that a large sum is owing,
+     and it is what I have said, and even less.  I have been much
+     distressed that there should be sent concerning me an inquisitor who
+     is aware that if the inquisition which he returns is very grave he
+     will remain in possession of the government.
+
+     "Would that it had pleased our Lord that their Highnesses had sent
+     him or some one else two years ago, for I know that I should now be
+     free from scandal and infamy, and that my honour would not be taken
+     from me, nor should I lose it.  God is just, and will make known the
+     why and the wherefore.
+
+     "They judge me over there as they would a governor who had gone to
+     Sicily, or to a city or town placed under regular government, and
+     where the laws can be observed in their entirety without fear of
+     ruining everything; and I am greatly injured thereby.
+
+     "I ought to be judged as a captain who went from Spain to the Indies
+     to conquer a numerous and warlike people, whose customs and religion
+     are very contrary to ours; who live in rocks and mountains, without
+     fixed settlements, and not like ourselves: and where, by the Divine
+     Will, I have placed under the dominion of the King and Queen, our
+     Sovereigns, a second world, through which Spain, which was reckoned
+     a poor country, has become the richest.
+
+     "I ought to be judged as a captain who for such a long time up to
+     this day has borne arms without laying them aside for an hour, and
+     by gentlemen adventurers and by custom, and not by letters, unless
+     they were from Greeks or Romans or others of modern times of whom
+     there are so many and such noble examples in Spain; or otherwise I
+     receive great injury, because in the Indies there is neither town
+     nor settlement.
+
+     "The gate to the gold and pearls is now open, and plenty of
+     everything--precious stones, spices and a thousand other things--may
+     be surely expected, and never could a worse misfortune befall me:
+     for by the name of our Lord the first voyage would yield them just
+     as much as would the traffic of Arabia Felix as far as Mecca, as I
+     wrote to their Highnesses by Antonio de Tomes in my reply respecting
+     the repartition of the sea and land with the Portuguese; and
+     afterwards it would equal that of Calicut, as I told them and put in
+     writing at the monastery of the Mejorada.
+
+     "The news of the gold that I said I would give is, that on the day
+     of the Nativity, while I was much tormented, being harassed by
+     wicked Christians and by Indians, and when I was on the point of
+     giving up everything, and if possible escaping from life, our Lord
+     miraculously comforted me and said, 'Fear not violence, I will
+     provide for all things: the seven years of the term of the gold have
+     not elapsed, and in that and in everything else I will afford thee a
+     remedy.'
+
+     "On that day I learned that there were eighty leagues of land with
+     mines at every point thereof.  The opinion now is that it is all
+     one.  Some have collected a hundred and twenty castellanos in one
+     day, and others ninety, and even the number of two hundred and fifty
+     has been reached.  From fifty to seventy, and in many more cases
+     from fifteen to fifty, is considered a good day's work, and many
+     carry it on.  The usual quantity is from six to twelve, and any one
+     obtaining less than this is not satisfied. It seems to me that these
+     mines are like others, and do not yield equally every day.  The
+     mines are new, and so are the workers: it is the opinion of
+     everybody that even if all Castile were to go there, every
+     individual, however inexpert he might be, would not obtain less than
+     one or two castellanos daily, and now it is only commencing.  It is
+     true that they keep Indians, but the business is in the hands of the
+     Christians.  Behold what discernment Bobadilla had, when he gave up
+     everything for nothing, and four millions of tenths, without any
+     reason or even being requested, and without first notifying it to
+     their Highnesses.  And this is not the only loss.
+
+     "I know that my errors have not been committed with the intention of
+     doing evil, and I believe that their Highnesses regard the matter
+     just as I state it: and I know and see that they deal mercifully
+     even with those who maliciously act to their disservice.  I believe
+     and consider it very certain that their clemency will be both
+     greater and more abundant towards me, for I fell therein through
+     ignorance and the force of circumstances, as they will know fully
+     hereafter; and I indeed am their creature, and they will look upon
+     my services, and will acknowledge day by day that they are much
+     profited.  They will place everything in the balance, even as Holy
+     Scripture tells us good and evil will be at the day of judgment.
+
+     "If, however, they command that another person do judge me, which I
+     cannot believe, and that it be by inquisition in the Indies, I very
+     humbly beseech them to send thither two conscientious and honourable
+     persons at my expense, who I believe will easily, now that gold is
+     discovered, find five marks in four hours.  In either case it is
+     needful for them to provide for this matter.
+
+     "The Commander on his arrival at San Domingo took up his abode in my
+     house, and just as he found it so he appropriated everything to
+     himself.  Well and good; perhaps he was in want of it.  A pirate
+     never acted thus towards a merchant.  About my papers I have a
+     greater grievance, for he has so completely deprived me of them that
+     I have never been able to obtain a single one from him; and those
+     that would have been most useful in my exculpation are precisely
+     those which he has kept most concealed.  Behold the just and honest
+     inquisitor!  Whatever he may have done, they tell me that there has
+     been an end to justice, except in an arbitrary form.  God, our Lord,
+     is present with His strength and wisdom, as of old, and always
+     punishes in the end, especially ingratitude and injuries."
+
+We must keep in mind the circumstances in which this letter was written
+if we are to judge it and the writer wisely.  It is a sad example of
+querulous complaint, in which everything but the writer's personal point
+of view is ignored.  No one indeed is more terrible in this world than
+the Man with a Grievance.  How rarely will human nature in such
+circumstances retire into the stronghold of silence!  Columbus is asking
+for pity; but as we read his letter we incline to pity him on grounds
+quite different from those which he represented.  He complains that the
+people he was sent to govern have waged war against him as against a
+Moor; he complains of Ojeda and of Vincenti Yanez Pinzon; of Adrian de
+Moxeca, and of every other person whom it was his business to govern and
+hold in restraint.  He complains of the colonists--the very people, some
+of them, whom he himself took and impressed from the gaols and purlieus
+of Cadiz; and then he mingles pious talk about Saint Peter and Daniel in
+the den of lions with notes on the current price of little girls and big
+lumps of gold like the eggs of geese, hens, and pullets.  He complains
+that he is judged as a man would be judged who had been sent out to
+govern a ready-made colony, and represents instead that he went out to
+conquer a numerous and warlike people "whose custom and religion are very
+contrary to ours, and who lived in rocks and mountains"; forgetting that
+when it suited him for different purposes he described the natives as so
+peaceable and unwarlike that a thousand of them would not stand against
+one Christian, and that in any case he was sent out to create a
+constitution and not merely to administer one.  Very sore indeed is
+Christopher as he reveals himself in this letter, appealing now to his
+correspondent, now to the King and Queen, now to that God who is always
+on the side of the complainant.  "God our Lord is present with His
+strength and wisdom, as of old, and always punishes in the end,
+especially ingratitude and injuries."  Not boastfulness and weakness, let
+us hope, or our poor Admiral will come off badly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+CRISIS IN THE ADMIRAL'S LIFE
+
+Columbus was not far wrong in his estimate of the effect likely to be
+produced by his manacles, and when the ships of Villegio arrived at Cadiz
+in October, the spectacle of an Admiral in chains produced a degree of
+commiseration which must have exceeded his highest hopes.  He was now in
+his fiftieth year and of an extremely venerable appearance, his kindling
+eye looking forth from under brows of white, his hair and beard snow-
+white, his face lined and spiritualised with suffering and sorrow.  It
+must be remembered that before the Spanish people he had always appeared
+in more or less state.  They had not that intimacy with him,
+an intimacy which perhaps brought contempt, which the people in Espanola
+enjoyed; and in Spain, therefore, the contrast between his former
+grandeur and this condition of shame and degradation was the more
+striking.  It was a fact that the people of Spain could not neglect.
+It touched their sense of the dramatic and picturesque, touched their
+hearts also perhaps--hearts quick to burn, quick to forget.  They had
+forgotten him before, now they burned with indignation at the picture of
+this venerable and much-suffering man arriving in disgrace.
+
+His letter to Dofia Juana, hastily despatched by him, probably through
+the office of some friendly soul on board, immediately on his arrival at
+Cadiz, was the first news from the ship received by the King and Queen,
+and naturally it caused them a shock of surprise.  It was followed by the
+despatches from Bobadilla and by a letter from the Alcalde of Cadiz
+announcing that Columbus and his brothers were in his custody awaiting
+the royal orders.  Perhaps Ferdinand and Isabella had already repented
+their drastic action and had entertained some misgivings as to its
+results; but it is more probable that they had put it out of their heads
+altogether, and that their hasty action now was prompted as much by the
+shock of being recalled to a consciousness of the troubled state of
+affairs in the New World as by any real regret for what they had done.
+Moreover they had sent out Bobadilla to quiet things down; and the first
+result of it was that Spain was ringing with the scandal of the Admiral's
+treatment.  In that Spanish world, unsteadfast and unstable, when one end
+of the see-saw was up the other must be down; and it was Columbus who now
+found himself high up in the heavens of favour, and Bobadilla who was
+seated in the dust.  Equipoise any kind was apparently a thing
+impossible; if one man was right the other man must be wrong; no excuses
+for Bobadilla; every excuse for the Admiral.
+
+The first official act, therefore, was an order for the immediate release
+of the Admiral and his brothers, followed by an invitation for him to
+proceed without delay to the Court at Granada, and an order for the
+immediate payment to him of the sum of 2000 ducats [perhaps $250,000 in
+the year 2000  D.W.] this last no ungenerous gift to a Viceroy whose
+pearl accounts were in something less than order.  Perhaps Columbus had
+cherished the idea of appearing dramatically before the very Court in his
+rags and chains; but the cordiality of their letter as well as the gift
+of money made this impossible.  Instead, not being a man to do things by
+halves, he equipped himself in his richest and most splendid garments,
+got together the requisite number of squires and pages, and duly
+presented himself at Granada in his full dignity.  The meeting was an
+affecting one, touched with a humanity which has survived the intervening
+centuries, as a touch of true humanity will when details of mere parade
+and etiquette have long perished.  Perhaps the Admiral, inspired with a
+deep sense of his wrongs, meant to preserve a very stiff and cold
+demeanour at the beginning of this interview; but when he looked into the
+kind eyes of Isabella and saw them suffused with tears at the thought of
+his sorrows all his dignity broke down; the tears came to his own eyes,
+and he wept there naturally like a child.  Ferdinand looking on kind but
+uncomfortable; Isabella unaffectedly touched and weeping; the Admiral, in
+spite of his scarlet cloak and golden collar and jewelled sword, in spite
+of equerries, squires, pages and attendants, sobbing on his knees like a
+child or an old man-these were the scenes and kindly emotions of this
+historic moment.
+
+
+The tears were staunched by kindly royal words and handkerchiefs supplied
+by attendant pages; sobbings breaking out again, but on the whole soon
+quieted; King and Queen raising the gouty Christopher from his knees,
+filling the air with kind words of sympathy, praise, and encouragement;
+the lonely worn heart, somewhat arid of late, and parched from want of
+human sympathy, much refreshed by this dew of kindness.  The Admiral was
+soon himself again, and he would not have been himself if upon recovering
+he had not launched out into what some historians call a "lofty and
+dignified vindication of his loyalty and zeal."  No one, indeed, is
+better than the Admiral at such lofty and dignified vindications.  He
+goes into the whole matter and sets forth an account of affairs at
+Espanola from his own point of view; and can even (so high is the
+thermometer of favour) safely indulge in a little judicious self-
+depreciation, saying that if he has erred it has not been from want of
+zeal but from want of experience in dealing with the kind of material
+he has been set to govern.  All this is very human, natural, and
+understandable; product of that warm emotional atmosphere, bedewed with
+tears, in which the Admiral finds himself; and it is not long before the
+King and Queen, also moved to it by the emotional temperature, are
+expressing their unbroken and unbounded confidence in him and repudiating
+the acts of Bobadilla, which they declare to have been contrary to their
+instructions; undertaking also that he shall be immediately dismissed
+from his post.  Poor Bobadilla is not here in the warm emotional
+atmosphere; he had his turn of it six months ago, when no powers were too
+high or too delicate to be entrusted to him; he is out in the cold at the
+other end of the see-saw, which has let him down to the ground with a
+somewhat sudden thump.
+
+
+Columbus, relying on the influence of these emotions, made bold to ask
+that his property in the island should be restored to him, which was
+immediately granted; and also to request that he should be reinstated in
+his office of Viceroy and allowed to return at once in triumph to
+Espanola.  But emotions are unstable things; they present a yielding
+surface which will give to any extent, but which, when it has hardened
+again after the tears have evaporated, is often found to be in much the
+same condition as before.  At first promises were made that the whole
+matter should be fully gone into; but when it came to cold fact,
+Ferdinand was obliged to recognise that this whole business of discovery
+and colonisation had become a very different thing to what it had been
+when Columbus was the only discoverer; and he was obviously of opinion
+that, as Columbus's office had once been conveniently withdrawn from him,
+it would only be disastrous to reinstate him in it.  Of course he did not
+say so at once; but reasons were given for judicious delay in the
+Admiral's reappointment.  It was represented to him that the colony,
+being in an extremely unsettled state, should be given a short period of
+rest, and also that it would be as well for him to wait until the people
+who had given him so much trouble in the island could be quietly and
+gradually removed.  Two years was the time mentioned as suitable for an
+interregnum, and it is probable that it was the intention of Isabella,
+although not of Ferdinand, to restore Columbus to his office at the end
+of that time.
+
+
+In the meantime it became necessary to appoint some one to supersede
+Bobadilla; for the news that arrived periodically from Espanola during
+the year showed that he had entirely failed in his task of reducing the
+island to order.  For the wholesome if unequal rigours of Columbus
+Bobadilla had substituted laxness and indulgence, with the result that
+the whole colony was rapidly reduced to a state of the wildest disorder.
+Vice and cruelty were rampant; in fact the barbarities practised upon the
+natives were so scandalous that even Spanish opinion, which was never
+very sympathetic to heathen suffering, was thoroughly shocked and
+alarmed.  The Sovereigns therefore appointed Nicholas de Ovando to go out
+and take over the command, with instructions to use very drastic means
+for bringing the colony to order.  How he did it we shall presently see;
+in the meantime all that was known of him (the man not having been tried
+yet) was that he was a poor knight of Calatrava, a man respected in royal
+circles for the performance of minor official duties, but no very popular
+favourite; honest according to his lights--lights turned rather low and
+dim, as was often the case in those days.  A narrow-minded man also,
+without sympathy or imagination, capable of cruelty; a tough, stiff-
+necked stock of a man, fit to deal with Bobadilla perhaps, but hardly fit
+to deal with the colony.  Spain in those days was not a nursery of
+administration.  Of all the people who were sent out successively to
+govern Espanola and supersede one another, the only one who really seems
+to have had the necessary natural ability, had he but been given the
+power, was Bartholomew Columbus; but unfortunately things were in such a
+state that the very name of Columbus was enough to bar a man from
+acceptance as a governor of Espanola.
+
+It was not for any lack of powers and equipment that this procession of
+governors failed in their duties.  We have seen with what authority
+Bobadilia had been entrusted; and Ovando had even greater advantages.
+The instructions he received showed that the needs of the new colonies
+were understood by Ferdinand and Isabella, if by no one else.  Ovando was
+not merely appointed Governor of Espanola but of the whole of the new
+territory discovered in the west, his seat of government being San
+Domingo.  He was given the necessary free hand in the matters of
+punishment, confiscation, and allotment of lands.  He was to revoke the
+orders which had been made by Bobadilla reducing the proportion of gold
+payable to the Crown, and was empowered to take over one-third of the.
+gold that was stored on the island, and one-half of what might be found
+in the future.  The Crown was to have a monopoly of all trade, and
+ordinary supplies were only to be procured through the Crown agent.
+On the other hand, the natives were to be released from slavery, and
+although forced to work in the mines, were to be paid for their labour--
+a distinction which in the working out did not produce much difference.
+A body of Franciscan monks accompanied Ovando for the purpose of tackling
+the religious question with the necessary energy; and every regulation
+that the kind heart of Isabella could think of was made for the happiness
+and contentment of the Indians.
+
+Unhappily the real mischief had already been done.  The natives, who had
+never been accustomed to hard and regular work under the conditions of
+commerce and greed, but had only toiled for the satisfaction of their own
+simple wants, were suffering cruelly under the hard labour in the mines,
+and the severe driving of their Spanish masters.  Under these unnatural .
+conditions the native population was rapidly dying off, and there was
+some likelihood that there would soon be a scarcity of native labour.
+These were the circumstances in which the idea of importing black African
+labour to the New World was first conceived--a plan which was destined to
+have results so tremendous that we have probably not yet seen their full
+and ghastly development.  There were a great number of African negro
+slaves at that time in Spain; a whole generation of them had been born in
+slavery in Spain itself; and this generation was bodily imported to
+Espanola to relieve and assist the native labour.
+
+
+These preparations were not made all at once; and it was more than a year
+after the return of Columbus before Ovando was ready to sail.  In the
+meantime Columbus was living in Granada, and looking on with no very
+satisfied eye at the plans which were being made to supersede him, and
+about which he was probably not very much consulted; feeling very sore
+indeed, and dividing his attention between the nursing of his grievances
+and other even less wholesome occupations.  There was any amount of
+smiling kindness for him at Court, but very little of the satisfaction
+that his vanity and ambition craved; and in the absence of practical
+employment he fell back on visionary speculations.  He made great friends
+at this time with a monk named Gaspar Gorricio, with whose assistance he
+began to make some kind of a study of such utterances of the Prophets and
+the Fathers as he conceived to have a bearing on his own career.
+
+Columbus was in fact in a very queer way at this time; and what with his
+readings and his meditatings and his grievances, and his visits to his
+monkish friend in the convent of Las Cuevas, he fell into a kind of
+intellectual stupor, of which the work called 'Libro de las Profecias,'
+or Book of the Prophecies, in which he wrote down such considerations as
+occurred to him in his stupor, was the result.  The manuscript of this
+work is in existence, although no human being has ever ventured to
+reprint the whole of it; and we would willingly abstain from mentioning
+it here if it were not an undeniable act of Columbus's life.  The
+Admiral, fallen into theological stupor, puts down certain figures upon
+paper; discovers that St. Augustine said that the world would only last
+for 7000 years; finds that some other genius had calculated that before
+the birth of Christ it had existed for 5343 years and 318 days; adds 1501
+years from the birth of Christ to his own time; adds up, and finds that
+the total is 6844 years; subtracts, and discovers that this earthly globe
+can only last 155 years longer.  He remembers also that, still according
+to the Prophets, certain things must happen before the end of the world;
+Holy Sepulchre restored to Christianity, heathen converted, second coming
+of Christ; and decides that he himself is the man appointed by God and
+promised by the Prophets to perform these works.  Good Heavens! in what
+an entirely dark and sordid stupor is our Christopher now sunk--a
+veritable slough and quag of stupor out of which, if he does not manage
+to flounder himself, no human hand can pull him.
+
+
+But amid his wallowings in this slough of stupor, when all else, in him
+had been well-nigh submerged by it, two dim lights were preserved towards
+which, although foundered up to the chin, he began to struggle; and by
+superhuman efforts did at last extricate himself from the theological
+stupor and get himself blown clean again by the salt winds before he
+died.  One light was his religion; not to be confounded with theological
+stupor, but quite separate from it in my belief; a certain steadfast and
+consuming faith in a Power that could see and understand and guide him to
+the accomplishment of his purpose.  This faith had been too often a good
+friend and help to Christopher for him to forget it very long, even while
+he was staggering in the quag with Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the Fathers; and
+gradually, as I say, he worked himself out into the region of activity
+again.  First, thinking it a pity that his flounderings in the slough
+should be entirely wasted, he had a copy of his precious theological work
+made and presented it to the Sovereigns, with a letter urging them (since
+he himself was unable to do it) to undertake a crusade for the recovery
+of the Holy Sepulchre--not an altogether wild proposal in those days.
+But Ferdinand had other uses for his men and his money, and contented
+himself with despatching Peter Martyr on a pacific mission to the Grand
+Soldan of Egypt.
+
+The other light left unquenched in Columbus led him back to the firm
+ground of maritime enterprise; he began to long for the sea again, and
+for a chance of doing something to restore his reputation.  An infinitely
+better and more wholesome frame of mind this; by all means let him mend
+his reputation by achievement, instead of by writing books in a
+theological trance or stupor, and attempting to prove that he was chosen
+by the Almighty.  He now addressed himself to the better task of getting
+himself chosen by men to do something which should raise him again in
+their esteem.
+
+
+His maritime ambition was no doubt stimulated at this time by witnessing
+the departure of Ovando, in February 1502, with a fleet of thirty-five
+ships and a company of 2500 people.  It was not in the Admiral's nature
+to look on without envy at an equipment the like of which he himself had
+never been provided with, and he did not restrain his sarcasms at its
+pomp and grandeur, nor at the ease with which men could follow a road
+which had once been pointed out to them.  Ovando had a great body-guard
+such as Columbus had never had; and he also carried with him a great
+number of picked married men with their families, all with knowledge of
+some trade or craft, whose presence in the colony would be a guarantee
+of permanence and steadiness.  He perhaps remembered his own crowd of
+ruffians and gaol-birds, and realised the bitterness of his own mistakes.
+It was a very painful moment for him, and he was only partially
+reconciled to it by the issue of a royal order to Ovando under which he
+was required to see to the restoration of the Admiral's property.  If it
+had been devoted to public purposes it was to be repaid him from the
+royal funds; but if it had been merely distributed among the colonists
+Bobadilla was to be made responsible for it.  The Admiral was also
+allowed to send out an agent to represent him and look after his
+interests; and he appointed Alonso de Carvajal to this office.
+
+
+Ovando once gone, the Admiral could turn again to his own affairs.
+It is true there were rumours that the whole fleet had perished, for it
+encountered a gale very soon after leaving Cadiz, and a great quantity of
+the deck hamper was thrown overboard and was washed on the shores of
+Spain; and the Sovereigns were so bitterly distressed that, as it is
+said, they shut them selves up for eight days.  News eventually came,
+however, that only one ship had been lost and that the rest had proceeded
+safely to San Domingo.  Columbus, much recovered in body and mind, now
+began to apply for a fleet for himself.  He had heard of the discovery by
+the Portuguese of the southern route to India; no doubt he had heard also
+much gossip of the results of the many private voyages of discovery that
+were sailing from Spain at this time; and he began to think seriously
+about his own discoveries and the way in which they might best be
+extended.  He thought much of his voyage to the west of Trinidad and of
+the strange pent-up seas and currents that he had discovered there.  He
+remembered the continual westward trend of the current, and how all the
+islands in that sea had their greatest length east and west, as though
+their shores had been worn into that shape by the constant flowing of the
+current; and it was not an unnatural conclusion for him to suppose that
+there was a channel far to the west through which these seas poured and
+which would lead him to the Golden Chersonesus.  He put away from him
+that nightmare madness that he transacted on the coast of Cuba.  He knew
+very well that he had not yet found the Golden Chersonesus and the road
+to India; but he became convinced that the western current would lead him
+there if only he followed it long enough.  There was nothing insane about
+this theory; it was in fact a very well-observed and well-reasoned
+argument; and the fact that it happened to be entirely wrong is no
+reflection on the Admiral's judgment.  The great Atlantic currents at
+that time had not been studied; and how could he know that the western
+stream of water was the northern half of a great ocean current which
+sweeps through the Caribbean Sea, into and round the Gulf of Mexico, and
+flows out northward past Florida in the Gulf Stream?
+
+His applications for a fleet were favourably received by the King and
+Queen, but much frowned upon by certain high officials of the Court.
+They were beginning to regard Columbus as a dangerous adventurer who,
+although he happened to have discovered the western islands, had brought
+the Spanish colony there to a dreadful state of disorder; and had also,
+they alleged, proved himself rather less than trustworthy in matters of
+treasure.  Still in the summer days of 1501 he was making himself very
+troublesome at Court with constant petitions and letters about his rights
+and privileges; and Ferdinand was far from unwilling to adopt a plan by
+which they would at least get rid of him and keep him safely occupied at
+the other side of the world at the cost of a few caravels.  There was,
+besides, always an element of uncertainty.  His voyage might come to
+nothing, but on the other hand the Admiral was no novice at this game of
+discovery, and one could not tell but that something big might come of
+it.  After some consideration permission was given to him to fit out a
+fleet of four ships, and he proceeded to Seville in the autumn of 1501
+to get his little fleet ready.  Bartholomew was to come with him, and his
+son Ferdinand also, who seems to have much endeared himself to the
+Admiral in these dark days, and who would surely be a great comfort to
+him on the voyage.  Beatriz Enriquez seems to have passed out of his
+life; certainly he was not living with her either now or on his last
+visit to Spain; one way or another, that business is at an end for him.
+Perhaps poor Beatriz, seeing her son in such a high place at Court, has
+effaced herself for his sake; perhaps the appointment was given on
+condition of such effacement; we do not know.
+
+
+Columbus was in no hurry over his preparations.  In the midst of them he
+found time to collect a whole series of documents relating to his titles
+and dignities, which he had copied and made into a great book which he
+called his "Book of Privileges," and the copies of which were duly
+attested before a notary at Seville on January 5, 1502.  He wrote many
+letters to various friends of his, chiefly in relation to these
+privileges; not interesting or illuminating letters to us, although very
+important to busy Christopher when he wrote them.  Here is one written to
+Nicolo Oderigo, a Genoese Ambassador who came to Spain on a brief mission
+in the spring of 1502, and who, with certain other residents in Spain, is
+said to have helped Columbus in his preparations for his fourth voyage:
+
+     "Sir,--The loneliness in which you have left us cannot be described.
+     I gave the book containing my writings to Francisco de Rivarol that
+     he may send it to you with another copy of letters containing
+     instructions.  I beg you to be so kind as to write Don Diego in
+     regard to the place of security in which you put them.  Duplicates
+     of everything will be completed and sent to you in the same manner
+     and by the same Francisco.  Among them you will find a new document.
+     Their Highnesses promised to give all that belongs to me and to
+     place Don Diego in possession of everything, as you will see.  I
+     wrote to Senor Juan Luis and to Sefora Catalina.  The letter
+     accompanies this one.  I am ready to start in the name of the Holy
+     Trinity as soon as the weather is good.  I am well provided with
+     everything.  If Jeronimo de Santi Esteban is coming, he must await
+     me and not embarrass himself with anything, for they will take away
+     from him all they can and silently leave him.  Let him come here and
+     the King and the Queen will receive him until I come.  May our Lord
+     have you in His holy keeping.
+
+               "Done at Seville, March 21, 1502.
+               "At your command.
+
+                                                    .S.
+                                                  .S.A.S.
+                                                  Xpo FERENS."
+
+
+His delays were not pleasing to Ferdinand, who wanted to get rid of him,
+and he was invited to hurry his departure; but he still continued to go
+deliberately about his affairs, which he tried to put in order as far as
+he was able, since he thought it not unlikely that he might never see
+Spain again.  Thinking thus of his worldly duties, and his thoughts
+turning to his native Genoa, it occurred to him to make some benefaction
+out of the riches that were coming to him by which his name might be
+remembered and held in honour there.  This was a piece of practical
+kindness the record of which is most precious to us; for it shows the
+Admiral in a truer and more human light than he often allowed to shine
+upon him.  The tone of the letter is nothing; he could not forbear
+letting the people of Genoa see how great he was.  The devotion of his
+legacy to the reduction of the tax on simple provisions was a genuine
+charity, much to be appreciated by the dwellers in the Vico Dritto di
+Ponticello, where wine and provision shops were so very necessary to
+life.  The letter was written to the Directors of the famous Bank of
+Saint George at Genoa.
+
+     "VERY NOBLE LORDS,--Although my body is here, my heart is
+     continually yonder.  Our Lord has granted me the greatest favour he
+     has granted any one since the time of David.  The results of my
+     undertaking already shine, and they would make a great light if the
+     obscurity of the Government did not conceal them.  I shall go again
+     to the Indies in the name of the Holy Trinity, to return
+     immediately.  And as I am mortal, I desire my son Don Diego to give
+     to you each year, for ever, the tenth part of all the income
+     received, in payment of the tax on wheat, wine, and other
+     provisions.  If this tenth amounts to anything, receive it, and if
+     not, receive my will for the deed.  I beg you as a favour to have
+     this son of mine in your charge.  Nicolo de Oderigo knows more about
+     my affairs than I myself.  I have sent him the copy of my privileges
+     and letters, that he may place them in safe keeping.  I would be
+     glad if you could see them.  The King and the Queen, my Lords, now
+     wish to honour me more than ever.  May the Holy Trinity guard your
+     noble persons, and increase the importance of your very magnificent
+     office.
+               "Done in Seville, April a, 1502.
+
+     "The High-Admiral of the Ocean-Sea and Viceroy and Governor-General
+     of the islands and mainland of Asia and the Indies, belonging to the
+     King and Queen, my Lords, and the Captain-General of the Sea, and a
+     Member of their Council.
+
+                                               .S.
+                                             .S.A.S.
+                                              X M Y
+                                            Xpo FERENS."
+
+
+Columbus was anxious to touch at Espanola on his voyage to the West; but
+he was expressly forbidden to do so, as it was known that his presence
+there could not make for anything but confusion; he was to be permitted,
+however, to touch there on his return journey.  The Great Khan was not
+out of his mind yet; much in it apparently, for he took an Arabian
+interpreter with him so that he could converse with that monarch.  In
+fact he did not hesitate to announce that very big results indeed were to
+come of this voyage of his; among other things he expected to
+circumnavigate the globe, and made no secret of his expectation.  In the
+meantime he was expected to find some pearls in order to pay for the
+equipment of his fleet; and in consideration of what had happened to the
+last lot of pearls collected by him, an agent named Diego de Porras was
+sent along with him to keep an account of the gold and precious stones
+which might be discovered.  Special instructions were issued to Columbus
+about the disposal of these commodities.  He does not seem to have minded
+these somewhat humiliating precautions; he had a way of rising above
+petty indignities and refusing to recognise them which must have been of
+great assistance to his self-respect in certain troubled moments in his
+life.
+
+His delays, however, were so many that in March 1502 the Sovereigns were
+obliged to order him to depart without any more waiting.  Poor
+Christopher, who once had to sue for the means with which to go, whose
+departures were once the occasion of so much state and ceremony, has now
+to be hustled forth and asked to go away.  Still he does not seem to
+mind; once more, as of old, his gaze is fixed beyond the horizon and his
+mind is filled with one idea.  They may not think much of him in Spain
+now, but they will when he comes back; and he can afford to wait.
+Completing his preparations without undignified haste he despatched
+Bartholomew with his four little vessels from Seville to Cadiz, where the
+Admiral was to join them.  He took farewell of his son Diego and of his
+brother James; good friendly James, who had done his best in a difficult
+position, but had seen quite enough of the wild life of the seas and was
+now settled in Seville studying hard for the Church.  It had always been
+his ambition, poor James; and, studying hard in Seville, he did in time
+duly enter the sacred pale and become a priest--by which we may see that
+if our ambitions are only modest enough we may in time encompass them.
+Sometimes I think that James, enveloped in priestly vestments, nodding in
+the sanctuary, lulled by the muttering murmur of the psalms or dozing
+through a long credo, may have thought himself back amid the brilliant
+sunshine and strange perfumes of Espanola; and from a dream of some nymph
+hiding in the sweet groves of the Vega may have awakened with a sigh to
+the strident Alleluias of his brother priests.  At any rate, farewell to
+James, safely seated beneath the Gospel light, and continuing to sit
+there until, in the year 1515, death interrupts him.  We are not any more
+concerned with James in his priestly shelter, but with those elder
+brothers of his who are making ready again to face the sun and the
+surges.
+
+Columbus's ships were on the point of sailing when word came that the
+Moors were besieging a Portuguese post on the coast of Morocco, and, as
+civility was now the order of the day between Spain and Portugal, the
+Admiral was instructed to call on his way there and afford some relief.
+This he did, sailing from Cadiz on the 9th or 10th of May to Ercilla on
+the Morocco coast, where he anchored on the 13th.  But the Moors had all
+departed and the siege was over; so Columbus, having sent Bartholomew and
+some of his officers ashore on a civil visit, which was duly returned,
+set out the same day on his last voyage.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE LAST VOYAGE
+
+The four ships that made up the Admiral's fleet on his fourth and last
+voyage were all small caravels, the largest only of seventy tons and the
+smallest only of fifty.  Columbus chose for his flagship the Capitana,
+seventy tons, appointing Diego Tristan to be his captain.  The next best
+ship was the Santiago de Palos under the command of Francisco Porras;
+Porras and his brother Diego having been more or less foisted on to
+Columbus by Morales, the Royal Treasurer, who wished to find berths for
+these two brothers-in-law of his.  We shall hear more of the Porras
+brothers.  The third ship was the Gallega, sixty tons, a very bad sailer
+indeed, and on that account entrusted to Bartholomew Columbus, whose
+skill in navigation, it was hoped, might make up for her bad sailing
+qualities.  Bartholomew had, to tell the truth, had quite enough of the
+New World, but he was too loyal to Christopher to let him go alone,
+knowing as he did his precarious state of health and his tendency to
+despondency.  The captain of the Gallega was Pedro de Terreros, who had
+sailed with the Admiral as steward on all his other voyages and was now
+promoted to a command.  The fourth ship was called the Vizcaina, fifty
+tons, and was commanded by Bartolome Fieschi, a friend of Columbus's from
+Genoa, and a very sound, honourable man.  There were altogether 143 souls
+on board the four caravels.
+
+The fleet as usual made the Canary Islands, where they arrived on the
+20th of May, and stopped for five days taking in wood and water and fresh
+provisions.  Columbus was himself again--always more himself at sea than
+anywhere else; he was following a now familiar road that had no
+difficulties or dangers for him; and there is no record of the voyage out
+except that it was quick and prosperous, with the trade wind blowing so
+steadily that from the time they left the Canaries until they made land
+twenty days later they had hardly to touch a sheet or a halliard.  The
+first land they made was the island of Martinique, where wood and water
+were taken in and the men sent ashore to wash their linen.  To young
+Ferdinand, but fourteen years old, this voyage was like a fairy tale come
+true, and his delight in everything that he saw must have added greatly
+to Christopher's pleasure and interest in the voyage.  They only stayed a
+few days at Martinique and then sailed westward along the chain of
+islands until they came to Porto Rico, where they put in to the sunny
+harbour which they had discovered on a former voyage.
+
+It was at this point that Columbus determined, contrary to his precise
+orders, to stand across to Espanola.  The place attracted him like a
+magnet; he could not keep away from it; and although he had a good enough
+excuse for touching there, it is probable that his real reason was a very
+natural curiosity to see how things were faring with his old enemy
+Bobadilla.  The excuse was that the Gallega, Bartholomew's ship, was so
+unseaworthy as to be a drag on the progress of the rest of the fleet and
+a danger to her own crew.  In the slightest sea-way she rolled almost
+gunwale under, and would not carry her sail; and Columbus's plan was to
+exchange her for a vessel out of the great fleet which he knew had by
+this time reached Espanola and discharged its passengers.
+
+
+He arrived off the harbour of San Domingo on the 29th of June in very
+threatening weather, and immediately sent Pedro de Terreros ashore with a
+message to Ovando, asking to be allowed to purchase or exchange one of
+the vessels that were riding in the harbour, and also leave to shelter
+his own vessels there during the hurricane which he believed to be
+approaching.  A message came back that he was neither permitted to buy a
+ship nor to enter the harbour; warning him off from San Domingo, in fact.
+
+With this unfavourable message Terreros also brought back the news of the
+island.  Ovando had been in San Domingo since the 15th of April, and had
+found the island in a shocking state, the Spanish population having to a
+man devoted itself to idleness, profligacy, and slave-driving.  The only
+thing that had prospered was the gold-mining; for owing to the licence
+that Bobadilla had given to the Spaniards to employ native labour to an
+unlimited extent there had been an immense amount of gold taken from the
+mines.  But in no other respect had island affairs prospered, and Ovando
+immediately began the usual investigation.  The fickle Spaniards, always
+unfaithful to whoever was in authority over them, were by this time tired
+of Bobadilla, in spite of his leniency, and they hailed the coming of
+Ovando and his numerous equipment with enthusiasm.  Bobadilla had also by
+this time, we may suppose, had enough of the joys of office; at any rate
+he showed no resentment at the coming of the new Governor, and handed
+over the island with due ceremony.  The result of the investigation of
+Ovando, however, was to discover a state of things requiring exemplary
+treatment; friend Roldan was arrested, with several of his allies, and
+put on board one of the ships to be sent back to Spain for trial.  The
+cacique Guarionex, who had been languishing in San Domingo in chains for
+a long time, was also embarked on one of the returning ships; and about
+eighteen hundred-weights of gold which had been collected were also
+stowed into cases and embarked.  Among this gold there was a nugget
+weighing 35 lbs. which had been found by a native woman in a river, and
+which Ovando was sending home as a personal offering to his Sovereigns;
+and some further 40 lbs. of gold belonging to Columbus, which Carvajal
+had recovered and placed in a caravel to be taken to Spain for the
+Admiral.  The ships were all ready to sail, and were anchored off the
+mouth of the river when Columbus arrived in San Domingo.
+
+When he found that he was not to be allowed to enter the harbour himself
+Columbus sent a message to Ovando warning him that a hurricane was coming
+on, and begging him to take measures for the safety of his large fleet.
+This, however, was not done, and the fleet put to sea that evening.  It
+had only got so far as the eastern end of Espanola when the hurricane, as
+predicted by Columbus, duly came down in the manner of West Indian
+hurricanes, a solid wall of wind and an advancing wave of the sea which
+submerged everything in its path.  Columbus's little fleet, finding
+shelter denied them, had moved a little way along the coast, the Admiral
+standing close in shore, the others working to the south for sea-room;
+and although they survived the hurricane they were scattered, and only
+met several days later, in an extremely battered condition, at the
+westerly end of the island.  But the large home-going fleet had not
+survived.  The hurricane, which was probably from the north-east, struck
+them just as they lost the lee of the island, and many of them, including
+the ships with the treasure of gold and the caravels bearing Roldan,
+Bobadilla, and Guarionex, all went down at once and were never seen or
+heard of again.  Other ships survived for a little while only to founder
+in the end; a few, much shattered, crept back to the shelter of San
+Domingo; but only one, it is said, survived the hurricane so well as to
+be able to proceed to Spain; and that was the one which carried Carvajal
+and Columbus's little property of gold.  The Admiral's luck again; or the
+intervention of the Holy Trinity--whichever you like.
+
+After the shattering experience of the storm, Columbus, although he did
+not return to San Domingo, remained for some time on the coast of
+Espanola repairing his ships and resting his exhausted crews.  There were
+threatenings of another storm which delayed them still further, and it
+was not until the middle of July that the Admiral was able to depart on
+the real purpose of his voyage.  His object was to strike the mainland
+far to the westward of the Gulf of Paria, and so by following it back
+eastward to find the passage which he believed to exist.  But the winds
+and currents were very baffling; he was four days out of sight of land
+after touching at an island north of Jamaica; and finally, in some
+bewilderment, he altered his course more and more northerly until he
+found his whereabouts by coming in sight of the archipelago off the
+south-western end of Cuba which he had called the Gardens.  From here he
+took a departure south-west, and on the 30th of July came in sight of a
+small island off the northern coast of Honduras which he called Isla de
+Pinos, and from which he could see the hills of the mainland.  At this
+island he found a canoe of immense size with a sort of house or caboose
+built amidships, in which was established a cacique with his family and
+dependents; and the people in the canoe showed signs of more advanced
+civilisation than any seen by Columbus before in these waters.  They wore
+clothing, they had copper hatchets, and bells, and palm-wood swords in
+the edges of which were set sharp blades of flint.  They had a fermented
+liquor, a kind of maize beer which looked like English ale; they had some
+kind of money or medium of exchange also, and they told the Admiral that
+there was land to the west where all these things existed and many more.
+It is strange and almost inexplicable that he did not follow this trail
+to the westward; if he had done so he would have discovered Mexico.  But
+one thing at a time always occupied him to the exclusion of everything
+else; his thoughts were now turned to the eastward, where he supposed the
+Straits were; and the significance of this canoe full of natives was lost
+upon him.
+
+They crossed over to the mainland of Honduras on August 15th, Bartholomew
+landing and attending mass on the beach as the Admiral himself was too
+ill to go ashore.  Three days later the cross and banner of Castile were
+duly erected on the shores of the Rio Tinto and the country was formally
+annexed.  The natives were friendly, and supplied the ships with
+provisions; but they were very black and ugly, and Columbus readily
+believed the assertion of his native guide that they were cannibals.
+They continued their course to the eastward, but as the gulf narrowed the
+force of the west-going current was felt more severely.  Columbus,
+believing that the strait which he sought lay to the eastward, laboured
+against the current, and his difficulties were increased by the bad
+weather which he now encountered.  There were squalls and hurricanes,
+tempests and cross-currents that knocked his frail ships about and almost
+swamped them.  Anchors and gear were lost, the sails were torn out of the
+bolt-ropes, timbers were strained; and for six weeks this state of
+affairs went on to an accompaniment of thunder and lightning which added
+to the terror and discomfort of the mariners.
+
+This was in August and the first half of September--six weeks of the
+worst weather that Columbus had ever experienced.  It was the more
+unfortunate that his illness made it impossible for him to get actively
+about the ship; and he had to have a small cabin or tent rigged up on
+deck, in which he could lie and direct the navigation.  It is bad enough
+to be as ill as he was in a comfortable bed ashore; it is a thousand
+times worse amid the discomforts of a small boat at sea; but what must it
+have been thus to have one's sick-bed on the deck of a cockle-shell which
+was being buffeted and smashed in unknown seas, and to have to think and
+act not for oneself alone but for the whole of a suffering little fleet!
+No wonder the Admiral's distress of mind was great; but oddly enough his
+anxieties, as he recorded them in a letter, were not so much on his own
+account as on behalf of others.  The terrified seamen making vows to the
+Virgin and promises of pilgrimages between their mad rushes to the sheets
+and furious clinging and hauling; his son Ferdinand, who was only
+fourteen, but who had to endure the same pain and fatigue as the rest of
+them, and who was enduring it with such pluck that "it was as if he had
+been at sea eighty years"; the dangers of Bartholomew, who had not wanted
+to come on this voyage at all, but was now in the thick of it in the
+worst ship of the squadron, and fighting for his life amid tempests and
+treacherous seas; Diego at home, likely to be left an orphan and at the
+mercy of fickle and doubtful friends--these were the chief causes of the
+Admiral's anxiety.  All he said about himself was that "by my misfortune
+the twenty years of service which I gave with so much fatigue and danger
+have profited me so little that to-day I have in Castile no roof, and if
+I wished to dine or sup or sleep I have only the tavern for my last
+refuge, and for that, most of the time, I would be unable to pay the
+score."  Not cheerful reflections, these, to add to the pangs of acute
+gout and the consuming anxieties of seamanship under such circumstances.
+Dreadful to him, these things, but not dreadful to us; for they show us
+an Admiral restored to his true temper and vocation, something of the old
+sea hero breaking out in him at last through all these misfortunes, like
+the sun through the hurrying clouds of a stormy afternoon.
+
+
+Forty days of passage through this wilderness of water were endured
+before the sea-worn mariners, rounding a cape on September 12th, saw
+stretching before them to the southward a long coast of plain and
+mountain which they were able to follow with a fair wind.  Gradually the
+sea went down; the current which had opposed them here aided them, and
+they were able to recover a little from the terrible strain of the last
+six weeks.  The cape was called by Columbus 'Gracios de Dios'; and on the
+16th of September they landed at the entrance to a river to take in
+water.  The boat which was sent ashore, however, capsized on the sandy
+bar of the entrance, two men being drowned, and the river was given the
+name of Rio de Desastre.  They found a better anchorage, where they
+rested for ten days, overhauled their stores, and had some intercourse
+with the natives and exploration on shore.  Some incidents occurred which
+can best be described in the Admiral's own language as he recorded them
+in his letter to the Sovereigns.
+
+     " .  .  When I reached there, they immediately sent me two young
+     girls dressed in rich garments.  The older one might not have been
+     more than eleven years of age and the other seven; both with so much
+     experience, so much manner, and so much appearance as would have
+     been sufficient if they had been public women for twenty years.
+     They bore with them magic powder and other things belonging to their
+     art.  When they arrived I gave orders that they should be adorned
+     with our things and sent them immediately ashore.  There I saw a
+     tomb within the mountain as large as a house and finely worked with
+     great artifice, and a corpse stood thereon uncovered, and, looking
+     within it, it seemed as if he stood upright.  Of the other arts they
+     told me that there was excellence.  Great and little animals are
+     there in quantities, and very different from ours; among which I saw
+     boars of frightful form so that a dog of the Irish breed dared not
+     face them.  With a cross-bow I had wounded an animal which exactly
+     resembles a baboon only that it was much larger and has a face like
+     a human being.  I had pierced it with an arrow from one side to the
+     other, entering in the breast and going out near the tail, and
+     because it was very ferocious I cut off one of the fore feet which
+     rather seemed to be a hand, and one of the hind feet.  The boars
+     seeing this commenced to set up their bristles and fled with great
+     fear, seeing the blood of the other animal.  When I saw this I
+     caused to be thrown them the 'uegare,'--[Peccary]--certain animals
+     they call so, where it stood, and approaching him, near as he was to
+     death, and the arrow still sticking in his body, he wound his tail
+     around his snout and held it fast, and with the other hand which
+     remained free, seized him by the neck as an enemy.  This act, so
+     magnificent and novel, together with the fine country and hunting of
+     wild beasts, made me write this to your Majesties."
+
+
+The natives at this anchorage of Cariari were rather suspicious, but
+Columbus seized two of them to act as guides in his journey further down
+the coast.  Weighing anchor on October 5th he worked along the Costa Rica
+shore, which here turns to the eastward again, and soon found a tribe of
+natives who wore large ornaments of gold.  They were reluctant to part
+with the gold, but as usual pointed down the coast and said that there
+was much more gold there; they even gave a name to the place where the
+gold could be found--Veragua; and for once this country was found to have
+a real existence.  The fleet anchored there on October 17th, being
+greeted by defiant blasts of conch shells and splashing of water from the
+indignant natives.  Business was done, however: seventeen gold discs in
+exchange for three hawks' bells.
+
+Still Columbus went on in pursuit of his geographical chimera; even gold
+had no power to detain him from the earnest search for this imaginary
+strait.  Here and there along the coast he saw increasing signs of
+civilisation--once a wall built of mud and stone, which made him think of
+Cathay again.  He now got it into his head that the region he was in was
+ten days' journey from the Ganges, and that it was surrounded by water;
+which if it means anything means that he thought he was on a large island
+ten days' sail to the eastward of the coast of India.  Altogether at sea
+as to the facts, poor Admiral, but with heart and purpose steadfast and
+right enough.
+
+They sailed a little farther along the coast, now between narrow islands
+that were like the streets of Genoa, where the boughs of trees on either
+hand brushed the shrouds of the ships; now past harbours where there were
+native fairs and markets, and where natives were to be seen mounted on
+horses and armed with swords; now by long, lonely stretches of the coast
+where there was nothing to be seen but the low green shore with the
+mountains behind and the alligators basking at the river mouths.  At last
+(November 2nd) they arrived at the cape known as Nombre de Dios, which
+Ojeda had reached some time before in his voyage to the West.
+
+The coast of the mainland had thus been explored from the Bay of Honduras
+to Brazil, and Columbus was obliged to admit that there was no strait.
+Having satisfied himself of that he decided to turn back to Veragua,
+where he had seen the natives smelting gold, in order to make some
+arrangement for establishing a colony there.  The wind, however, which
+had headed him almost all the way on his easterly voyage, headed him
+again now and began to blow steadily from the west.  He started on his
+return journey on the 5th of December, and immediately fell into almost
+worse troubles than he had been in before.  The wood of the ships had
+been bored through and through by seaworms, so that they leaked very
+badly; the crews were sick, provisions were spoilt, biscuits rotten.
+Young Ferdinand Columbus, if he did not actually make notes of this
+voyage at the time, preserved a very lively recollection of it, and it is
+to his Historie, which in its earlier passages is of doubtful
+authenticity, that we owe some of the most human touches of description
+relating to this voyage.  Any passage in his work relating to food or
+animals at this time has the true ring of boyish interest and
+observation, and is in sharp contrast to the second-hand and artificial
+tone of the earlier chapters of his book.  About the incident of the
+howling monkey, which the Admiral's Irish hound would not face, Ferdinand
+remarks that it "frighted a good dog that we had, but frighted one of our
+wild boars a great deal more"; and as to the condition of the biscuits
+when they turned westward again, he says that they were "so full of
+weevils that, as God shall help me, I saw many that stayed till night to
+eat their sop for fear of seeing them."
+
+After experiencing some terrible weather, in the course of which they had
+been obliged to catch sharks for food and had once been nearly
+overwhelmed by a waterspout, they entered a harbour where, in the words
+of young Ferdinand, "we saw the people living like birds in the tops of
+the trees, laying sticks across from bough to bough and building their
+huts upon them; and though we knew not the reason of the custom we
+guessed that it was done for fear of their enemies, or of the griffins
+that are in this island."  After further experiences of bad weather they
+made what looked like a suitable harbour on the coast of Veragua, which
+harbour, as they entered it on the day of the Epiphany (January 9, 1503),
+they named Belem or Bethlehem.  The river in the mouth of which they were
+anchored, however, was subject to sudden spouts and gushes of water from
+the hills, one of which occurred on January 24th and nearly swamped the
+caravels.  This spout of water was caused by the rainy season, which had
+begun in the mountains and presently came down to the coast, where it
+rained continuously until the 14th of February.  They had made friends
+with the Quibian or chief of the country, and he had offered to conduct
+them to the place where the gold mines were; so Bartholomew was sent off
+in the rain with a boat party to find this territory.  It turned out
+afterwards that the cunning Quibian had taken them out of his own country
+and showed them the gold mined of a neighbouring chief, which were not so
+rich as his own.
+
+Columbus, left idle in the absence of Bartholomew, listening to the
+continuous drip and patter of the rain on the leaves and the water,
+begins to dream again--to dream of gold and geography.  Remembers that
+David left three thousand quintals of gold from the Indies to Solomon for
+the decoration of the Temple; remembers that Josephus said it came from
+the Golden Chersonesus; decides that enough gold could never have been
+got from the mines of Hayna in Espanola; and concludes that the Ophir of
+Solomon must be here in Veragua and not there in Espanola.  It was always
+here and now with Columbus; and as he moved on his weary sea pilgrimages
+these mythical lands with their glittering promise moved about with him,
+like a pillar of fire leading him through the dark night of his quest.
+
+
+The rain came to an end, however, the sun shone out again, and activity
+took the place of dreams with Columbus and with his crew.  He decided to
+found a settlement in this place, and to make preparations for seizing
+and working the gold mines.  It was decided to leave a garrison of eighty
+men, and the business of unloading the necessary arms and provisions and
+building houses ashore was immediately begun.  Hawks' bells and other
+trifles were widely distributed among the natives, with special toys and
+delicacies for the Quibian, in order that friendly relations might be
+established from the beginning; and special regulations were framed to
+prevent the possibility of any recurrence of the disasters that overtook
+the settlers of Isabella.
+
+Such are the orderly plans of Columbus; but the Quibian has his plans
+too, which are found to be of quite a different nature.  The Quibian does
+not like intruders, though he likes their hawks' bells well enough; he is
+not quite so innocent as poor Guacanagari and the rest of them were; he
+knows that gold is a thing coveted by people to whom it does not belong,
+and that trouble follows in its train.  Quibian therefore decides that
+Columbus and his followers shall be exterminated--news of which intention
+fortunately came to the ears of Columbus in time, Diego Mendez and
+Rodrigo de Escobar having boldly advanced into the Quibian's village and
+seen the warlike preparations.  Bartholomew, returning from his visit to
+the gold mines, was informed of this state of affairs.  Always quick to
+strike, Bartholomew immediately started with an armed force, and advanced
+upon the village so rapidly that the savages were taken by surprise,
+their headquarters surrounded, and the Quibian and fifty of his warriors
+captured.  Bartholomew triumphantly marched the prisoners back, the
+Quibian being entrusted to the charge of Juan Sanchez, who was rowing him
+in a little boat.  The Quibian complained that his bonds were hurting
+him, and foolish Sanchez eased them a little; Quibian, with a quick
+movement, wriggled overboard and dived to the bottom; came up again
+somewhere and reached home alive.  No one saw him come up, however, and
+they thought had had been drowned.
+
+Columbus now made ready to depart, and the caravels having been got over
+the shallow bar, their loading was completed and they were ready to sail.
+On April 6th Diego Tristan was sent in charge of a boat with a message to
+Bartholomew, who was to be left in command of the settlement; but when
+Tristan had rounded the point at the entrance to the river and come in
+sight of the shore he had an unpleasant surprise; the settlement was
+being savagely attacked by the resurrected Quibian and his followers.
+The fight had lasted for three hours, and had been going badly against
+the Spaniards, when Bartholomew and Diego Mendes rallied a little force
+round them and, calling to Columbus's Irish dog which had been left with
+them, made a rush upon the savages and so terrified them that they
+scattered.  Bartholomew with eight of the other Spaniards was wounded,
+and one was killed; and it was at this point that Tristan's boat arrived
+at the settlement.  Having seen the fight safely over, he went on up the
+river to get water, although he was warned that it was not safe; and sure
+enough, at a point a little farther up the river, beyond some low green
+arm of the shore, he met with a sudden and bloody death.  A cloud of
+yelling savages surrounded his boat hurling javelins and arrows, and only
+one seaman, who managed to dive into the water and crawl ashore, escaped
+to bring the evil tidings.
+
+The Spaniards under Bartholomew's command broke into a panic, and taking
+advantage of his wounded condition they tried to make sail on their
+caravel and join the ships of Columbus outside; but since the time of the
+rains the river had so much gone down that she was stuck fast in the
+sand.  They could not even get a boat over the bar, for there was a heavy
+cross sea breaking on it; and in the meantime here they were, trapped
+inside this river, the air resounding with dismal blasts of the natives'
+conch-shells, and the natives themselves dancing round and threatening to
+rush their position; while the bodies of Tristan and his little crew were
+to be seen floating down the stream, feasted upon by a screaming cloud of
+birds.  The position of the shore party was desperate, and it was only by
+the greatest efforts that the wounded Adelantado managed to rally his
+crew and get them to remove their little camp to an open place on the
+shore, where a kind of stockade was made of chests, casks, spars, and the
+caravel's boat.  With this for cover, the Spanish fire-arms, so long as
+there was ammunition for them, were enough to keep the natives at bay.
+
+
+Outside the bar, in his anchorage beyond the green wooded point, the
+Admiral meanwhile was having an anxious time.  One supposes the entrance
+to the river to have been complicated by shoals and patches of broken
+water extending some considerable distance, so that the Admiral's
+anchorage would be ten or twelve miles away from the camp ashore, and of
+course entirely hidden from it.  As day after day passed and Diego
+Tristan did not return, the Admiral's anxiety increased.  Among the three
+caravels that now formed his little squadron there was only one boat
+remaining, the others, not counting one taken by Tristan and one left
+with Bartholomew, having all been smashed in the late hurricanes.  In the
+heavy sea that was running on the bar the Admiral dared not risk his last
+remaining boat; but in the mean time he was cut off from all news of the
+shore party and deprived of any means of finding out what had happened to
+Tristan.  And presently to these anxieties was added a further disaster.
+It will be remembered that when the Quibian had been captured fifty
+natives had been taken with him; and these were confined in the
+forecastle of the Capitana and covered by a large hatch, on which most of
+the crew slept at night.  But one night the natives collected a heap of
+big stones from the ballast of the ship, and piled them up to a kind of
+platform beneath the hatch; some of the strongest of them got upon the
+platform and set their backs horizontally against the hatch, gave a great
+heave and, lifted it off.  In the confusion that followed, a great many
+of the prisoners escaped into the sea, and swam ashore; the rest were
+captured and thrust back under the hatch, which was chained down; but
+when on the following morning the Spaniards went to attend to this
+remnant it was found that they had all hanged themselves.
+
+This was a great disaster, since it increased the danger of the garrison
+ashore, and destroyed all hope of friendship with the natives.  There was
+something terrible and powerful, too, in the spirit of people who could
+thus to a man make up their minds either to escape or die; and the
+Admiral must have felt that he was in the presence of strange, powerful
+elements that were far beyond his control.  At any moment, moreover, the
+wind might change and put him on a lee shore, or force him to seek safety
+in sea-room; in which case the position of Bartholomew would be a very
+critical one.  It was while things were at this apparent deadlock that a
+brave fellow, Pedro Ledesma, offered to attempt to swim through the surf
+if the boat would take him to the edge of it.  Brave Pedro, his offer
+accepted, makes the attempt; plunges into the boiling surf, and with
+mighty efforts succeeds in reaching the shore; and after an interval is
+seen by his comrades, who are waiting with their boat swinging on the
+edge of the surf, to be returning to them; plunges into the sea, comes
+safely through the surf again, and is safely hauled on board, having
+accomplished a very real and satisfactory bit of service.
+
+The story he had to tell the Admiral was as we know not a pleasant one--
+Tristan and his men dead, several of Bartholomew's force, including the
+Adelantado himself, wounded, and all in a state of panic and fear at the
+hostile natives.  The Spaniards would do nothing to make the little
+fortress safer, and were bent only on escaping from the place of horror.
+Some of them were preparing canoes in which to come out to the ships when
+the sea should go down, as their one small boat was insufficient; and
+they swore that if the Admiral would not take them they would seize their
+own caravel and sail out themselves into the unknown sea as soon as they
+could get her floated over the bar, rather than remain in such a dreadful
+situation.  Columbus was in a very bad way.  He could not desert
+Bartholomew, as that would expose him to the treachery of his own men
+and the hostility of the savages.  He could not reinforce him, except by
+remaining himself with the whole of his company; and in that case there
+would be no means of sending the news of his rich discovery to Spain.
+There was nothing for it, therefore, but to break up the settlement and
+return some other time with a stronger force sufficient to occupy the
+country.  And even this course had its difficulties; for the weather
+continued bad, the wind was blowing on to the shore, the sea was--so
+rough as to make the passage of the bar impossible, and any change for
+the worse in the weather would probably drive his own crazy ships ashore
+and cut off all hope of escape.
+
+The Admiral, whose health was now permanently broken, and who only had
+respite from his sufferings in fine weather and when he was relieved from
+a burden of anxieties such as had been continually pressing on him now
+for three months, fell into his old state of sleeplessness, feverishness,
+and consequent depression; and it, these circumstances it is not
+wonderful that the firm ground of fact began to give a little beneath him
+and that his feet began to sink again into the mire or quag of stupor.
+Of these further flounderings in the quag he himself wrote an account to
+the King and Queen, so we may as well have it in his own words.
+
+     "I mounted to the top of the ship crying out with a weak voice,
+     weeping bitterly, to the commanders of your Majesties' army, and
+     calling again to the four winds to help; but they did not answer me.
+     Tired out, I fell asleep and sighing I heard a voice very full of
+     pity which spoke these words:  O fool!  and slow to believe and to
+     serve Him, thy God and the God of all.  What did He more for Moses?
+     and for David His servant?  Since thou wast born He had always so
+     great care for thee.  When He saw thee in an age with which He was
+     content He made thy name sound marvellously through the world.  The
+     Indies, which are so rich apart of the world, He has given to thee
+     as thine.  Thou hast distributed them wherever it has pleased thee;
+     He gave thee power so to do.  Of the bonds of the ocean which were
+     locked with so strong chains He gave thee the keys, and thou wast
+     obeyed in all the land, and among the Christians thou hast acquired
+     a good and honourable reputation.  What did He more for the people
+     of Israel when He brought them out of Egypt?  or yet for David, whom
+     from being a shepherd He made King of Judea?  Turn to Him and
+     recognise thine error, for His mercy is infinite.  Thine old age
+     will be no hindrance to all great things.  Many very great
+     inheritances are in His power.  Abraham was more than one hundred
+     years old when he begat Isaac and also Sarah was not young.  Thou
+     art calling for uncertain aid.  Answer me, who has afflicted thee so
+     much and so many times--God or the world?  The privileges and
+     promises which God makes He never breaks to any one; nor does He say
+     after having received the service that His intention was not so and
+     it is to be understood in another manner: nor imposes martyrdom to
+     give proof of His power.  He abides by the letter of His word.  All
+     that He promises He abundantly accomplishes.  This is His way.  I
+     have told thee what the Creator hath done for thee and does for all.
+     Now He shows me the reward and payment of thy suffering and which
+     thou hast passed in the service of others.  And thus half dead, I
+     heard everything; but I could never find an answer to make to words
+     so certain, and only I wept for my errors.  He, who ever he might
+     be, finished speaking, saying: Trust and fear not, for thy
+     tribulations are written in marble and not without reason."
+
+
+Mere darkness of stupor; not much to be deciphered from it, nor any
+profitable comment to be made on it, except that it was our poor
+Christopher's way of crying out his great suffering and misery.  We must
+not notice it, much as we should like to hold out a hand of sympathy and
+comfort to him; must not pay much attention to this dark eloquent
+nonsense--merely words, in which the Admiral never does himself justice.
+Acts are his true conversation; and when he speaks in that language all
+men must listen.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+HEROIC ADVENTURES BY LAND AND SEA
+
+No man ever had a better excuse for his superstitions than the Admiral;
+no sooner had he got done with his Vision than the wind dropped, the sun
+came out, the sea fell, and communication with the land was restored.
+While he had been sick and dreaming one of his crew, Diego Mendez, had
+been busy with practical efforts in preparation for this day of fine
+weather; he had made a great raft out of Indian canoes lashed together,
+with mighty sacks of sail cloth into which the provisions might be
+bundled; and as soon as the sea had become calm enough he took this raft
+in over the bar to the settlement ashore, and began the business of
+embarking the whole of the stores and ammunition of Bartholomew's
+garrison.  By this practical method the whole establishment was
+transferred from the shore to the ships in the space of two days, and
+nothing was left but the caravel, which it was found impossible to float
+again.  It was heavy work towing the raft constantly backwards and
+forwards from the ships to the shore, but Diego Mendez had the
+satisfaction of being the last man to embark from the deserted
+settlement, and to see that not an ounce of stores or ammunition had been
+lost.
+
+Columbus, always quick to reward the services of a good man, kissed Diego
+Mendez publicly--on both cheeks, and (what doubtless pleased him much
+better) gave him command of the caravel of which poor Tristan had been
+the captain.
+
+With a favourable wind they sailed from this accursed shore at the end of
+April 1503.  It is strange, as Winsor points out, that in the name of
+this coast should be preserved the only territorial remembrance of
+Columbus, and that his descendant the Duke of Veragua should in his title
+commemorate one of the most unfortunate of the Admiral's adventures.  And
+if any one should desire a proof of the utterly misleading nature of most
+of Columbus's writings about himself, let him know that a few months
+later he solemnly wrote to the Sovereigns concerning this very place that
+"there is not in the world a country whose inhabitants are more timid;
+and the whole place is capable of being easily put into a state of
+defence.  Your people that may come here, if they should wish to become
+masters of the products of other lands, will have to take them by force
+or retire empty-handed.  In this country they will simply have to trust
+their persons in the hands of the savages."  The facts being that the
+inhabitants were extremely fierce and warlike and irreconcilably hostile;
+that the river was a trap out of which in the dry season there was no
+escape, and the harbour outside a mere shelterless lee shore; that it
+would require an army and an armada to hold the place against the
+natives, and that any one who trusted himself in their hands would
+share the fate of the unhappy Diego Tristan.  One may choose between
+believing that the Admiral's memory had entirely failed him (although he
+had not been backward in making a minute record, of all his sufferings)
+or that he was craftily attempting to deceive the Sovereigns.  My own
+belief is that he was neither trying to deceive anybody nor that he had
+forgotten anything, but that he was simply incapable of uttering the bare
+truth when he had a pen in his hand.
+
+
+From their position on the coast of Veragua Espanola bore almost due
+north; but Columbus was too good a seaman to attempt to make the island
+by sailing straight for it.  He knew that the steady west-going current
+would set him far down on his course, and he therefore decided to work up
+the coast a long way to the eastward before standing across for Espanola.
+The crew grumbled very much at this proceeding, which they did not
+understand; in fact they argued from it that the Admiral was making
+straight for Spain, and this, in the crazy condition of the vessels,
+naturally alarmed them.  But in his old high-handed, secret way the
+Admiral told them nothing; he even took away from the other captains all
+the charts that they had made of this coast, so that no one but himself
+would be able to find the way back to it; and he took a kind of pleasure
+in the complete mystification thus produced on his fellow-voyagers.
+"None of them could explain whither I went nor whence I came; they did
+not know the way to return thither," he writes, somewhat childishly.
+
+But he was not back in Espanola yet, and his means for getting there were
+crumbling away beneath his feet.  One of the three remaining caravels was
+entirely riddled by seaworms and had to be abandoned at the harbour
+called Puerto Bello; and the company was crowded on to two ships.  The
+men now became more than ever discontented at the easterly course, and on
+May 1st, when he had come as far east as the Gulf of Darien, Columbus
+felt obliged to bear away to the north, although as it turned out he had
+not nearly made enough easting.  He stood on this course, for nine days,
+the west-going current setting him down all the time; and the first land
+that he made, on May loth, was the group of islands off the western end
+of Cuba which he had called the Queen's Gardens.
+
+He anchored for six days here, as the crews were completely exhausted;
+the ships' stores were reduced to biscuits, oil, and vinegar; the vessels
+leaked like sieves, and the pumps had to be kept going continually.  And
+no sooner had they anchored than a hurricane came on, and brought up a
+sea so heavy that the Admiral was convinced that his ships could not live
+within it.  We have got so accustomed to reading of storms and tempests
+that it seems useless to try and drive home the horror and terror of
+them; but here were these two rotten ships alone at the end of the world,
+far beyond the help of man, the great seas roaring up under them in the
+black night, parting their worn cables, snatching away their anchors from
+them, and finally driving them one upon the other to grind and strain and
+prey upon each other, as though the external conspiracy of the elements
+against them both were not sufficient!  One writes or reads the words,
+but what does it mean to us? and can we by any conceivable effort of
+imagination realise what it meant to this group of human beings who lived
+through that night so many hundred years ago--men like ourselves with
+hearts to sink and faint, capable of fear and hunger, capable of misery,
+pain, and endurance?  Bruised and battered, wet by the terrifying surges,
+and entirely uncomforted by food or drink, they did somehow endure these
+miseries; and were to endure worse too before they were done with it.
+
+Their six days' sojourn amid the Queen's Gardens, then, was not a great
+success; and as soon as they were able they set sail again, standing
+eastward when the wind permitted them.  But wind and current were against
+them and all through the month of May and the early part of June they
+struggled along the south coast of Cuba, their ships as full of holes as
+a honeycomb, pumps going incessantly, and in addition the worn-out seamen
+doing heroic labour at baling with buckets and kettles.  Lee helm!  Down
+go the buckets and kettles and out run the wretched scarecrows of seamen
+to the weary business of tacking ship, letting go, brailing up, hauling
+in, and making fast for the thousandth time; and then back to the pumps
+and kettles again.  No human being could endure this for an indefinite
+time; and though their diet of worms represented by the rotten biscuit
+was varied with cassava bread supplied by friendly natives, the Admiral
+could not make his way eastward further than Cape Cruz.  Round that cape
+his leaking, strained vessels could not be made to look against the wind
+and the tide.  Could hardly indeed be made to float or swim upon the
+water at all; and the Admiral had now to consider, not whether he could
+sail on a particular point of the compass, but whether he could by any
+means avoid another course which the fates now proposed to him--namely, a
+perpendicular course to the bottom of the sea.  It was a race between the
+water and the ships, and the only thing the Admiral could think of was to
+turn southward across to Jamaica, which he did on June 23rd, putting into
+Puerto Bueno, now called Dry Harbour.  But there was no food there, and
+as his ships were settling deeper and deeper in the water he had to make
+sail again and drive eastwards as far as Puerto Santa Gloria, now called
+Don Christopher's Cove.  He was just in time.  The ships were run ashore
+side by side on a sandy beach, the pumps were abandoned, and in one tide
+the ships were full of water.  The remaining anchor cables were used to
+lash the two ships together so that they would not move; although there
+was little fear of that, seeing the weight of water that was in them.
+Everything that could be saved was brought up on deck, and a kind of
+cabin or platform which could be fortified was rigged on the highest part
+of the ships.  And so no doubt for some days, although their food was
+almost finished, the wretched and exhausted voyagers could stretch their
+cramped limbs, and rest in the warm sun, and listen, from their safe
+haven on the firm sands, to the hated voice of the sea.
+
+
+Thanks to careful regulations made by the Admiral, governing the
+intercourse between the Spaniards and the natives ashore, friendly
+relations were soon established, and the crews were supplied with cassava
+bread and fruit in abundance.  Two officials superintended every purchase
+of provisions to avoid the possibility of any dispute, for in the event
+of even a momentary hostility the thatched-roof structures on the ships
+could easily have been set on fire, and the position of the Spaniards,
+without shelter amid a hostile population, would have been a desperate
+one.  This disaster, however, was avoided; but the Admiral soon began to
+be anxious about the supply of provisions from the immediate
+neighbourhood, which after the first few days began to be irregular.
+There were a large number of Spaniards to be fed, the natives never kept
+any great store of provisions for themselves, and the Spaniards were
+entirely at their mercy for, provisions from day to day.  Diego Mendez,
+always ready for active and practical service, now offered to take three
+men and make a journey through the island to arrange for the purchase of
+provisions from different villages, so that the men on the ships would
+not be dependent upon any one source.  This offer was gratefully
+accepted; and Mendez, with his lieutenants well supplied with toys and
+trinkets, started eastward along the north coast of Jamaica.  He made no
+mistakes; he was quick and clever at ingratiating himself with the
+caciques, and he succeeded in arranging with three separate potentates to
+send regular supplies of provisions to the men on the ships.  At each
+place where he made this arrangement he detached one of his assistants
+and sent him back with the first load of provisions, so that the regular
+line of carriage might be the more quickly established; and when they had
+all gone he borrowed a couple of natives and pushed on by himself until
+he reached the eastern end of the island.  He made friends here with a
+powerful cacique named Amerro, from whom he bought a large canoe, and
+paid for it with some of the clothing off his back.  With the canoe were
+furnished six Indians to row it, and Mendez made a triumphant journey
+back by sea, touching at the places where his depots had been established
+and seeing that his commissariat arrangements were working properly.  He
+was warmly received on his return to the ships, and the result of his
+efforts was soon visible in the daily supplies of food that now regularly
+arrived.
+
+Thus was one difficulty overcome; but it was not likely that either
+Columbus himself or any of his people would be content to remain for ever
+on the beach of Jamaica.  It was necessary to establish communication
+with Espanola, and thence with Spain; but how to do it in the absence of
+ships or even boats?  Columbus, pondering much upon this matter, one day
+calls Diego Mendez aside; walks him off, most likely, under the great
+rustling trees beyond the beach, and there tells him his difficulty.
+"My son," says he, "you and I understand the difficulties and dangers of
+our position here better than any one else.  We are few; the Indians are
+many; we know how fickle and easily irritated they are, and how a fire-
+brand thrown into our thatched cabins would set the whole thing ablaze.
+It is quite true that you have very cleverly established a provision
+supply, but it is dependent entirely upon the good nature of the natives
+and it might cease to-morrow.  Here is my plan: you have a good canoe;
+why should some one not go over to Espanola in it and send back a ship
+for us?"
+
+Diego Mendez, knowing very well what is meant, looks down upon the
+ground.  His spoken opinion is that such a journey is not merely
+difficult but impossible journey in a frail native canoe across one
+hundred and fifty miles of open and rough sea; although his private
+opinion is other than that.  No, he cannot imagine such a thing being
+done; cannot think who would be able to do it.
+
+Long silence from the Admiral; eloquent silence, accompanied by looks no
+less eloquent.
+
+"Admiral," says Mendez again, "you know very well that I have risked my
+life for you and the people before and would do it again.  But there are
+others who have at least as good a right to this great honour and peril
+as I have; let me beg of you, therefore, to summon all the company
+together, make this proposal to them, and see if any one will undertake
+it.  If not, I will once more risk my life."
+
+The proposal being duly made to the assembled crews, every one, as
+cunning Mendez had thought, declares it impossible; every one hangs back.
+Upon which Diego Mendez with a fine gesture comes forward and volunteers;
+makes his little dramatic effect and has his little ovation.  Thoroughly
+Spanish this, significant of that mixture of vanity and bravery, of
+swagger and fearlessness, which is characteristic of the best in Spain.
+It was a desperately brave thing to venture upon, this voyage from
+Jamaica to Espanola in a native canoe and across a sea visited by
+dreadful hurricanes; and the volunteer was entitled to his little piece
+of heroic drama.
+
+While Mendez was making his preparations, putting a false keel on the
+canoe and fixing weather boards along its gunwales to prevent its
+shipping seas, fitting a mast and sail and giving it a coat of tar, the
+Admiral retired into his cabin and busied himself with his pen.  He wrote
+one letter to Ovando briefly describing his circumstances and requesting
+that a ship should be sent for his relief; and another to the Sovereigns,
+in which a long rambling account was given of the events of the voyage,
+and much other matter besides, dismally eloquent of his floundering in
+the quag.  Much in it--about Solomon and Josephus, of the Abbot Joachim,
+of Saint Jerome and the Great Khan; more about the Holy Sepulchre and the
+intentions of the Almighty in that matter; with some serious practical
+concern for the rich land of Veragua which he had discovered, lest it
+should share the fate of his other discoveries and be eaten up by idle
+adventurers.  "Veragua," he says, "is not a little son which may be given
+to a stepmother to nurse.  Of Espanola and Paria and all the other lands
+I never think without the tears falling from my eyes; I believe that the
+example of these ought to serve for the others."  And then this passage:
+
+     "The good and sound purpose which I always had to serve your
+     Majesties, and the dishonour and unmerited ingratitude, will not
+     suffer the soul to be silent although I wished it, therefore I ask
+     pardon of your Majesties.  I have been so lost and undone; until now
+     I have wept for others that your Majesties might have compassion on
+     them; and now may the heavens weep for me and the earth weep for me
+     in temporal affairs; I have not a farthing to make as an offering in
+     spiritual affairs.  I have remained here on the Indian islands in
+     the manner I have before said in great pain and infirmity, expecting
+     every day death, surrounded by innumerable savages full of cruelty
+     and by our enemies, and so far from the sacraments of the Holy
+     Mother Church that I believe the soul will be forgotten when it
+     leaves the body.  Let them weep for me who have charity, truth and
+     justice.  I did not undertake this voyage of navigation to gain
+     honour or material things, that is certain, because the hope already
+     was entirely lost; but I did come to serve your Majesties with
+     honest intention and with good charitable zeal, and I do not lie."
+
+Poor old heart, older than its years, thus wailing out its sorrows to
+ears none too sympathetic; sad old voice, uplifted from the bright shores
+of that lonely island in the midst of strange seas!  It will not come
+clear to the head alone; the echoes of this cry must reverberate in the
+heart if they are to reach and animate the understanding.
+
+
+At this time also the Admiral wrote to his friend Gaspar Gorricio.  For
+the benefit of those who may be interested I give the letter in English.
+
+
+     REVEREND AND VERY DEVOUT FATHER:
+
+     "If my voyage should be as conducive to my personal health and the
+     repose of my house as it seems likely to be conducive to the
+     aggrandisement of the royal Crown of the King and Queen, my Lords,
+     I might hope to live more than a hundred years.  I have not time to
+     write more at length.  I hope that the bearer of this letter may be
+     a person of my house who will tell you verbally more than can be
+     told in a thousand papers, and also Don Diego will supply
+     information.  I beg as a favour of the Father Prior and all the
+     members of your religious house, that they remember me in all their
+     prayers.
+
+     "Done on the island of Jamaica, July 7, 1503.
+     "I am at the command of your Reverence.
+
+                                               .S.
+                                             .S.A.S.  XMY
+                                              Xpo FERENS."
+
+
+Diego Mendez found some one among the Spaniards to accompany him, but his
+name is not recorded.  The six Indians were taken to row the canoe.  They
+had to make their way at first against the strong currents along the
+northern coast of Jamaica, so as to reach its eastern extremity before
+striking across to Espanola.  At one point they met a flotilla of Indian
+canoes, which chased them and captured them, but they escaped.  When they
+arrived at the end of the easterly point of Jamaica, now known as Morant
+Point, they had to wait two or three days for calm weather and a
+favourable wind to waft them across to Espanola, and while thus waiting
+they were suddenly surrounded and captured by a tribe of hostile natives,
+who carried them off some nine or ten miles into the island, and
+signified their intention of killing them.
+
+But they began to quarrel among themselves as to how they should divide
+the spoils which they had captured with the canoe, and decided that the
+only way of settling the dispute was by some elaborate trial of hazard
+which they used.  While they were busy with their trial Diego Mendez
+managed to escape, got back to the canoe, and worked his way back in it
+alone to the harbour where the Spaniards were encamped.  The other
+Spaniard who was with him probably perished, for there is no record of
+what became of him--an obscure life lost in a brave enterprise.
+
+One would have thought that Mendez now had enough of canoe voyages, but
+he had no sooner got back than he offered to set out again, only
+stipulating that an armed force should march along the coast by land to
+secure his safety until he could stand across to Espanola.  Bartholomew
+Columbus immediately put himself at the head of a large and well-armed
+party for this purpose, and Bartolomeo Fieschi, the Genoese captain of
+one of the lost caravels, volunteered to accompany Mendez in a second
+canoe.  Each canoe was now manned by six Spanish volunteers and ten
+Indians to row; Fieschi, as soon as they had reached the coast of
+Espanola, was to bring the good news to the Admiral; while Mendez must go
+on to San Domingo, procure a ship, and himself proceed to Spain with the
+Admiral's letters.  The canoes were provisioned with water, cassava
+bread, and fish; and they departed on this enterprise some time in August
+1503.
+
+Their passage along the coast was protected by Bartholomew Columbus, who
+marched along with them on the shore.  They waited a few days at the end
+of the island for favourable weather, and finally said farewell to the
+good Adelantado, who we may be sure stood watching them until they were
+well out of sight.
+
+
+There was not a cloud in the sky when the canoes stood out to sea; the
+water was calm, and reflected the blistering heat of the sun.  It was not
+a pleasant situation for people in an open boat; and Mendez and Fieschi
+were kept busy, as Irving says, "animating the Indians who navigated
+their canoes, and who frequently paused at their labour."  The poor
+Indians, evidently much in need of such animation, would often jump into
+the water to escape the intolerable heat, and after a short immersion
+there would return to their task.  Things were better when the sun went
+down, and the cool night came on; half the Indians then slept and half
+rowed, while half of the Spaniards also slept and the other half, I
+suppose, "animated."  Irving also says that the animating half "kept
+guard with their weapons in hand, ready to defend themselves in the case
+of any perfidy on the part of their savage companions"; such perfidy
+being far enough from the thoughts of the savage companions, we may
+imagine, whose energies were entirely occupied with the oars.
+
+The next day was the same: savage companions rowing, Spaniards animating;
+Spaniards and savage companions alike drinking water copiously without
+regard for the smallness of their store.  The second night was very hot,
+and the savage companions finished the water, with the result that on the
+third day the thirst became a torment, and at mid-day the poor companions
+struck work.  Artful Mendez, however, had concealed two small kegs of
+water in his canoe, the contents of which he now administered in small
+doses, so that the poor Indians were enabled to take to their oars again,
+though with vigour much abated.  Presumably the Spaniards had put up
+their weapons by this time, for the only perfidy shown on the part of the
+savage companions was that one of them died in the following night and
+had to be thrown overboard, while others lay panting on the bottom of the
+canoes; and the Spaniards had to take their turn at the oars, although
+they were if anything in a worse case than the Indians.
+
+Late in the night, however, the moon rose, and Mendez had the joy of
+seeing its lower disc cut by a jagged line which proved to be the little
+islet or rock of Navassa, which lies off the westerly end of Espanola.
+New hope now animated the sufferers, and they pushed on until they were
+able to land on this rock, which proved to be without any vegetation
+whatsoever, but on the surface of which there were found some precious
+pools of rain-water.  Mendez was able to restrain the frantic appetites
+of his fellow-countrymen, but the savage companions were less wise, and
+drank their fill; so that some of them died in torment on the spot, and
+others became seriously ill.  The Spaniards were able to make a fire of
+driftwood, and boil some shell-fish, which they found on shore, and they
+wisely spent the heat of the day crouching in the shade of the rocks, and
+put off their departure until the evening.  It was then a comparatively
+easy journey for them to cross the dozen miles that separated them from
+Espanola, and they landed the next day in a pleasant harbour near Cape
+Tiburon.  Fieschi, true to his promise, was then ready to start back for
+Jamaica with news of the safe accomplishment of the voyage; but the
+remnant of the crews, Spaniards and savage companions alike, had had
+enough of it, and no threats or persuasions would induce them to embark
+again.  Mendez, therefore, left his friends to enjoy some little repose
+before continuing their journey to San Domingo, and, taking six natives
+of Espanola to row his canoe; set off along the coast towards the
+capital.  He had not gone half-way when he learned that Ovando was not
+there, but was in Xaragua, so he left his canoe and struck northward
+through the forest until he arrived at the Governor's camp.
+
+
+Ovando welcomed Mendez cordially, praised him for his plucky voyage, and
+expressed the greatest concern at the plight of the Admiral; but he was
+very busy at the moment, and was on the point of transacting a piece of
+business that furnished a dismal proof of the deterioration which had
+taken place in him.  Anacaona--the lady with the daughter whom we
+remember--was now ruling over the province of Xaragua, her brother having
+died; and as perhaps her native subjects had been giving a little trouble
+to the Governor, he had come to exert his authority.  The narrow official
+mind, brought into contact with native life, never develops in the
+direction of humanity; and Ovando had now for some time made the great
+discovery that it was less trouble to kill people than to try to rule
+over them wisely.  There had evidently always been a streak of Spanish
+cruelty in him, which had been much developed by his residence in
+Espanola; and to cruelty and narrow officialdom he now added treachery of
+a very monstrous and horrible kind.
+
+He announced his intention of paying a state visit to Anacaona, who
+thereupon summoned all her tributary chiefs to a kind of levee held in
+his honour.  In the midst of the levee, at a given signal, Ovando's
+soldiers rushed in, seized the caciques, fastened them to the wooden
+pillars of the house, and set the whole thing on fire; the caciques being
+thus miserably roasted alive.  While this was going on the atrocious work
+was completed by the soldiers massacring every native they could see--
+children, women, and old men included--and Anacaona herself was taken and
+hanged.
+
+All these things Diego Mendez had to witness; and when they were over,
+Ovando still had excuses for not hurrying to the relief of the Admiral.
+He had embarked on a campaign of extermination against the natives, and
+he followed up his atrocities at Xaragua by an expedition to the eastern
+end of Espanola, where very much the same kind of business was
+transacted.  Weeks and months passed in this bloody cruelty, and there
+was always an excuse for putting off Mendez.  Now it was because of the
+operations which he dignified by the name of wars, and now because he had
+no ship suitable for sending to Jamaica; but the truth was that Ovando,
+the springs of whose humanity had been entirely dried up during his
+disastrous reign in Espanola, did not want Columbus to see with his own
+eyes the terrible state of the island, and was callous enough to leave
+him either to perish or to find his own way back to the world.  It was
+only when news came that a fleet of caravels was expected from Spain that
+Ovando could no longer prevent Mendez from going to San Domingo and,
+purchasing one of them.
+
+Ovando had indeed lost all but the outer semblance of a man; the soul or
+animating part of him had entirely gone to corruption.  He had no
+interest in rescuing the Admiral; he had, on the contrary, great interest
+in leaving him unrescued; but curiosity as to his fate, and fear as to
+his actions in case he should return to Espanola, induced the Governor to
+make some effort towards spying cut his condition.  He had a number of
+trained rascals under his command--among them Diego de Escobar, one of
+Roldan's bright brigade; and Ovando had no sooner seen Mendez depart on
+his journey to San Domingo than he sent this Escobar to embark in a small
+caravel on a visit to Jamaica in order to see if the Admiral was still
+alive.  The caravel had to be small, so that there could be no chance of
+bringing off the 130 men who had been left to perish there; and various
+astute instructions were given to Escobar in order to prevent his arrival
+being of any comfort or assistance to the shipwrecked ones.  And so
+Escobar sailed; and so, in the month of March 1504, eight months after
+the vanishing of Mendez below the eastern horizon, the miserable company
+encamped on the two decaying ships on the sands at Puerto Santa Gloria
+descried with joyful excitement the sails of a Spanish caravel standing
+in to the shore.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE ECLIPSE OF THE MOON
+
+We must now return to the little settlement on the coast of Jamaica--
+those two wornout caravels, lashed together with ropes and bridged by an
+erection of wood and thatch, in which the forlorn little company was
+established.  In all communities of men so situated there are alternate
+periods of action and reaction, and after the excitement incidental to
+the departure of Mendez, and the return of Bartholomew with the news that
+he had got safely away, there followed a time of reaction, in which the
+Spaniards looked dismally out across the empty sea and wondered when, if
+ever, their salvation would come.  Columbus himself was now a confirmed
+invalid, and could hardly ever leave his bed under the thatch; and in his
+own condition of pain and depression his influence on the rest of the
+crew must inevitably have been less inspiriting than it had formerly
+been.  The men themselves, moreover, began to grow sickly, chiefly on
+account of the soft vegetable food, to which they were not accustomed,
+and partly because of their cramped quarters and the moist, unhealthy
+climate, which was the very opposite of what they needed after their long
+period of suffering and hardship at sea.
+
+As the days and weeks passed, with no occupation save the daily business
+of collecting food that gradually became more and more nauseous to them,
+and of straining their eyes across the empty blue of the sea in an
+anxious search for the returning canoes of Fieschi, the spirits of the
+castaways sank lower and lower.  Inevitably their discontent became
+articulate and broke out into murmurings.  The usual remedy for this
+state of affairs is to keep the men employed at some hard work; but there
+was no work for them to do, and the spirit of dissatisfaction had ample
+opportunity to spread.  As usual it soon took the form of hostility to
+the Admiral.  They seem to have borne him no love or gratitude for his
+masterly guiding of them through so many dangers; and now when he lay ill
+and in suffering his treacherous followers must needs fasten upon him the
+responsibility for their condition.  After a month or two had passed, and
+it became certain that Fieschi was not coming back, the castaways could
+only suppose that he and Mendez had either been captured by natives or
+had perished at sea, and that their fellow-countrymen must still be
+without news of the Admiral's predicament.  They began to say also that
+the Admiral was banished from Spain; that there was no desire or
+intention on the part of the Sovereigns to send an expedition to his
+relief; even if they had known of his condition; and that in any case
+they must long ago have given him up for lost.
+
+When the pot boils the scum rises to the surface, and the first result of
+these disloyal murmurings and agitations was to bring into prominence the
+two brothers, Francisco and Diego de Porras, who, it will be remembered,
+owed their presence with the expedition entirely to the Admiral's good
+nature in complying with the request of their brother-in-law Morales, who
+had apparently wished to find some distant occupation for them.  They had
+been given honourable posts as officers, in which they had not proved
+competent; but the Admiral had always treated them with kindness and
+courtesy, regarding them more as guests than as servants.  Who or what
+these Porras brothers were, where they came from, who were their father
+and mother, or what was their training, I do not know; it is enough for
+us to know that the result of it all had been the production of a couple
+of very mean scoundrels, who now found an opportunity to exercise their
+scoundrelism.
+
+When they discovered the nature of the murmuring and discontent among the
+crew they immediately set them to work it up into open mutiny.  They
+represented that, as Mendez had undoubtedly perished, there was no hope
+of relief from Espanola; that the Admiral did not even expect such
+relief, knowing that the island was forbidden ground to him.  They
+insinuated that he was as well content to remain in Jamaica as anywhere
+else, since he had to undergo a period of banishment until his friends at
+Court could procure his forgiveness.  They were all, said the Porras
+brothers, being made tools for the Admiral's convenience; as he did not
+wish to leave Jamaica himself, he was keeping them all there, to perish
+as likely as not, and in the meantime to form a bodyguard, and establish
+a service for himself.  The Porras brothers suggested that, under these
+circumstances, it would be as well to take a fleet of native canoes from
+the Indians and make their own way to Espanola; the Admiral would never
+undertake the voyage himself, being too helpless from the gout; but it
+would be absurd if the whole company were to be allowed to perish because
+of the infirmities of one man.  They reminded the murmurers that they
+would not be the first people who had rebelled with success against the
+despotic rule of Columbus, and that the conduct of the Sovereigns on a
+former occasion afforded them some promise that those who rebelled again
+would receive something quite different from punishment.
+
+Christmas passed, the old year went out in this strange, unhomelike
+place, and the new year came in.  The Admiral, as we have seen, was now
+almost entirely crippled and confined to his bed; and he was lying alone
+in his cabin on the second day of the year when Francisco de Porras
+abruptly entered.  Something very odd and flurried about Porras; he jerks
+and stammers, and suddenly breaks out into a flood of agitated speech, in
+which the Admiral distinguishes a stream of bitter reproach and
+impertinence.  The thing forms itself into nothing more or less than a
+hurried, gabbling complaint; the people are dissatisfied at being kept
+here week after week with no hope of relief; they accuse the Admiral of
+neglecting their interests; and so on.  Columbus, raising himself in his
+bed, tries to pacify Porras; gives him reasons why it is impossible for
+them to depart in canoes; makes every endeavour, in short, to bring this
+miserable fellow back to his duties.  He is watching Porras's eye all the
+time; sees that he is too excited to be pacified by reason, and suspects
+that he has considerable support behind him; and suggests that the crew
+had better all be assembled and a consultation held as to the best course
+to pursue.
+
+It is no good to reason with mutineers; and the Admiral has no sooner
+made this suggestion than he sees that it was a mistake.  Porras scoffs
+at it; action, not consultation, is what he demands; in short he presents
+an ultimatum to the Admiral--either to embark with the whole company at
+once, or stay behind in Jamaica at his own pleasure.  And then, turning
+his back on Columbus and raising his voice, he calls out, "I am for
+Castile; those who choose may follow me!"
+
+The shout was a signal, and immediately from every part of the vessel
+resounded the voices of the Spaniards, crying out that they would follow
+Porras.  In the midst of the confusion Columbus hobbled out of his bed
+and staggered on to the deck; Bartholomew seized his weapons and prepared
+for action; but the whole of the crew was not mutinous, and there was a
+large enough loyal remnant to make it unwise for the chicken-hearted
+mutineers to do more for the moment than shout: Some of them, it is true,
+were heard threatening the life of the Admiral, but he was hurried back
+to his bed by a few of the faithful ones, and others of them rushed up to
+the fierce Bartholomew, and with great difficulty persuaded him to drop
+his lance and retire to Christopher's cabin with him while they dealt
+with the offenders.  They begged Columbus to let the scoundrels go if
+they wished to, as the condition of those who remained would be improved
+rather than hurt by their absence, and they would be a good riddance.
+They then went back to the deck and told Porras and his followers that
+the sooner they went the better, and that nobody would interfere with
+their going as long as they offered no one any violence.
+
+The Admiral had some time before purchased some good canoes from the
+natives, and the mutineers seized ten of these and loaded them with
+native provisions.  Every effort was made to add to the number of the
+disloyal ones; and when they saw their friends making ready to depart
+several of these did actually join.  There were forty-eight who finally
+embarked with the brothers Porras; and there would have been more, but
+that so many of them were sick and unable to face the exposure of the
+voyage.  As it was, those who remained witnessed with no very cheerful
+emotions the departure of their companions, and even in some cases fell
+to tears and lamentations.  The poor old Admiral struggled out of his bed
+again, went round among the sick and the loyal, cheering them and
+comforting them, and promising to use every effort of the power left to
+him to secure an adequate reward for their loyalty when he should return
+to Spain.
+
+We need only follow the career of Porras and his deserters for the
+present far enough to see them safely off the premises and out of the way
+of the Admiral and our narrative.  They coasted along the shore of
+Jamaica to the eastward as Mendez had done, landing whenever they had a
+mind to, and robbing and outraging the natives; and they took a
+particularly mean and dirty revenge on the Admiral by committing all
+their robbings and outragings as though under his authority, assuring the
+offended Indians that what they did they did by his command and that what
+they took he would pay for; so that as they went along they sowed seeds
+of grievance and hostility against the Admiral.  They told the natives,
+moreover, that Columbus was an enemy of all Indians, and that they would
+be very well advised to kill him and get him out of the way.
+
+They had not managed very well with the navigation of the canoes; and
+while they were waiting for fine weather at the eastern end of the island
+they collected a number of natives to act as oarsmen.  When they thought
+the weather suitable they put to sea in the direction of Espanola.  They
+were only about fifteen miles from the shore, however, when the wind
+began to head them and to send up something of a sea; not rough, but
+enough to make the crank and overloaded canoes roll heavily, for they had
+not been prepared, as those of Mendez were, with false keels and weather-
+boards.  The Spaniards got frightened and turned back to Jamaica; but the
+sea became rougher, the canoes rolled more and more, they often shipped a
+quantity of water, and the situation began to look serious.  All their
+belongings except arms and provisions were thrown overboard; but still,
+as the wind rose and the sea with it, it became obvious that unless the
+canoes were further lightened they would not reach the shore in safety.
+Under these circumstances the Spaniards forced the natives to leap into
+the water, where they swam about like rats as well as they could, and
+then came back to the canoes in order to hold on and rest themselves.
+When they did this the Spaniards slashed at them with their swords or cut
+off their hands, so that one by one they fell back and, still swimming
+about feebly as well as they could with their bleeding hands or stumps of
+arms, the miserable wretches perished and sank at last.
+
+By this dreadful expedient the Spaniards managed to reach Jamaica again,
+and when they landed they immediately fell to quarrelling as to what they
+should do next.  Some were for trying to make the island of Cuba, the
+wind being favourable for that direction; others were for returning and
+making their submission to the Admiral; others for going back and seizing
+the remainder of his arms and stores; others for staying where they were
+for the present, and making another attempt to reach Espanola when the
+weather should be more favourable.  This last plan, being the counsel of
+present inaction, was adopted by the majority of the rabble; so they
+settled themselves at a neighbouring Indian village, behaving in: the
+manner with which we are familiar.  A little later, when the weather was
+calm, they made another attempt at the voyage, but were driven back in
+the same way; and being by this time sick of canoe voyages, they
+abandoned the attempt, and began to wander back westward through the
+island, maltreating the natives as before, and sowing seeds of bitter
+rancour and hostility against the Admiral; in whose neighbourhood we
+shall unfortunately hear of them again.
+
+In the meantime their departure had somewhat relieved the condition of
+affairs on board the hulks.  There were more provisions and there was
+more peace; the Admiral, rising above his own infirmities to the
+necessities of the occasion, moved unweariedly among the sick, cheering
+them and nursing them back into health and good humour, so that gradually
+the condition of the little colony was brought into better order and
+health than it had enjoyed since its establishment.
+
+But now unfortunately the evil harvest sown by the Porras gang in their
+journey to the east of the island began to ripen.  The supplies of
+provisions, which had hitherto been regularly brought by the natives,
+began to appear with less punctuality, and to fall off both in quantity
+and quality.  The trinkets with which they were purchased had now been
+distributed in such quantities that they began to lose their novelty and
+value; sometimes the natives demanded a much higher price for the
+provisions they brought, and (having by this time acquired the art of
+bargaining) would take their stores away again if they did not get the
+price they asked.
+
+But even of this device they soon grew weary; from being irregular, the
+supplies of provisions from some quarters ceased altogether, and the
+possibilities of famine began to stare the unhappy castaways in the face.
+It must be remembered that they were in a very weak physical condition,
+and that among the so-called loyal remnant there were very few who were
+not invalids; and they were unable to get out into the island and forage
+for themselves.  If the able-bodied handful were to sally forth in search
+of provisions, the hulks would be left defenceless and at the mercy of
+the natives, of whose growing hostility the Admiral had by this time
+discovered abundant evidence.  Thus little by little the food supply
+diminished until there was practically nothing left, and the miserable
+company of invalids were confronted with the alternative of either dying
+of starvation or desperately attempting a canoe voyage.
+
+
+It was from this critical situation that the spirit and resource of
+Columbus once more furnished a way of escape, and in these circumstances
+that he invented and worked a device that has since become famous--the
+great Eclipse Trick.  Among his small library in the cabin of the ship
+was the book containing the astronomical tables of Regiomontanus; and
+from his study of this work he was aware that an eclipse of the moon was
+due on a certain date near at hand.  He sent his Indian interpreter to
+visit the neighbouring caciques, summoning them to a great conference to
+be held on the evening of the eclipse, as the Admiral had matters of
+great importance to reveal to them.  They duly arrived on the evening
+appointed; not the caciques alone, but large numbers of the native
+population, well prepared for whatever might take place.  Columbus then
+addressed them through his interpreter, informing him that he was under
+the protection of a God who dwelt in the skies and who rewarded all who
+assisted him and punished all his enemies.  He made an effective use of
+the adventures of Mendez and Porras, pointing out that Mendez, who took
+his voyage by the Admiral's orders, had got away in safety, but that
+Porras and his followers, who had departed in disobedience and mutiny,
+had been prevented by the heavenly power from achieving their object.  He
+told them that his God was angry with them for their hostility and for
+their neglect to supply him with provisions; and that in token of his
+anger he was going to send them a dreadful punishment, as a sign of which
+they would presently see the moon change colour and lose its light, and
+the earth become dark.
+
+This address was spun out as long as possible; but even so it was
+followed by an interval in which, we may be sure, Columbus anxiously eyed
+the serene orb of night, and doubtless prayed that Regiomontanus might
+not have made a mistake in his calculations.  Some of the Indians were
+alarmed, some of them contemptuous; but it was pretty clearly realised on
+both sides that matters between them had come to a head; and probably if
+Regiomontanus, who had worked out these tables of figures and
+calculations so many years ago in his German home, had done his work
+carelessly or made a mistake, Columbus and his followers would have been
+massacred on the spot.  But Regiomontanus, God bless him!  had made no
+mistake.  Sure enough, and punctually to the appointed time, the dark
+shadow began to steal over the moon's disc; its light gradually faded,
+and a ghostly darkness crept over the face of the world.  Columbus,
+having seen that all was right with the celestial machinery, had retired
+to his cabin; and presently he found himself besieged there in the dark
+night by crowds of natives frantically bringing what provisions they had
+and protesting their intention of continuing to bring them for the rest
+of their lives.  If only the Admiral would ask his God to forgive them,
+there was no limit to the amount of provisions that he might have!  The
+Admiral, piously thankful, and perhaps beginning to enjoy the situation a
+little, kept himself shut up in his cabin as though communing with the
+implacable deity, while the darkness deepened over the land and the shore
+resounded with the howling and sobbing of the terrified natives.  He kept
+a look-out on the sky; and when he saw that the eclipse was about to pass
+away, he came out and informed the natives that God had decided to pardon
+them on condition of their remaining faithful in the matter of
+provisions, and that as a sign of His mercy He would restore the light.
+The beautiful miracle went on through its changing phases; and, watching
+in the darkness, the terrified natives saw the silver edge of the moon
+appearing again, the curtain that had obscured it gradually rolling away,
+and land and sea lying visible to them and once more steeped in the
+serene light which they worshipped.  It is likely that Christopher slept
+more soundly that night than he had slept for many nights before.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+At last extricate himself from the theological stupor
+He had a way of rising above petty indignities
+Hearts quick to burn, quick to forget
+Idea of importing black African labour to the New World
+Islands in that sea had their greatest length east and west
+Man with a Grievance
+Stayed till night to eat their sop for fear of seeing (weevils)
+The terrified seamen making vows to the Virgin
+When the pot boils the scum rises to the surface
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Christopher Columbus, v7
+by Filson Young
+
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