Part 11

Some of the ancient philosophers who flourished centuries before the birth of our Lord had convinced themselves that the earth was round. That such is the case is shown by the appearance of a vessel after it has left the shore. At a certain distance the whole of it is seen; farther off only its hulk or body; at a greater distance still, the topmast alone is visible. This proves that something hides the lower part of the ship from the spectator, and that something, is the roundness of the earth. Again--when an eclipse of the moon takes place the moon enters the shadow of the earth, and cannot get the light of the sun, which, reflected on her surface, gives her the bright silvery glow which makes her so lovely by night, and so we appear to lose the whole, or part of her face. Now the shadow that is seen being round, the earth must be round from which it is cast. And when men found, in the days when very long voyages were undertaken, that by sailing and journeying in one direction they came back to the point whence they had started, they wanted indeed no further proof that such was the correct figure of the earth. Thus it was natural for Columbus to expect to reach the eastern shore of India, or of Cathay (as China was then called) by sailing westward across the Atlantic, never dreaming that the earth was so large as it is, and that the pathway he went would make known to the people of the Old World the whole vast continent of America, and the Pacific, the greatest of all Oceans!

Having been refused assistance in his native city, he resolved at last to lay his plans before John the Second of Portugal. The king referred the matter to a Council, where it was soon decided that the voyage could not be carried out, but Columbus was not easily disheartened, as his patience during one-and-twenty years proved, and he begged the Portuguese monarch so earnestly to assist him that he had almost been supplied with the vessels he required, had there not been in Lisbon some persons who were very jealous of him, and wanted the glory of making the attempt themselves. These persons gained information of the proposed route, and then set out in secret to try it, not unknown, as it is said, to the king. But when they had been out at sea some time, and saw the waves spread out around them as far as sight could reach, they lost all courage, and put back to Lisbon as quickly as they could, saying on their return that the voyage could never be tried.

Columbus was indignant at being treated thus: he had passed fourteen years of his life in waiting, and had thought and studied so much for the enterprise on which he had set his heart that he had made no fortune for himself. His gentle wife Felippa was dead; and one day he bid farewell to his home in Lisbon and quitted Portugal with the idea of laying his cause before Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. First of all, however, he went to Genoa, where he saw his father, and provided out of his own scanty means for the old man's comfort.

When he arrived in Spain he sought the favour and assistance of two powerful Spanish nobles, the duke of Medina Sidonia and the Duke of Medina Coeli. The latter was the kinder of the two; he was just going to give Columbus three or four caravels, which lay opposite the port of Cadiz, when he suddenly thought that the enterprise was so vast, that none but a king should direct it. He spoke so kindly, however, of Columbus to Queen Isabella, that she desired him to repair to her court at Cordova.

When he arrived he found the city like a camp, and the king and queen entirely occupied in preparing for a grand campaign against the Moors. One Moorish city after another had indeed yielded to the Spanish arms, but the invaders who had held ground in Spain for nearly eight hundred years, were still in possession of much of the southern part of the country. At such a moment Isabella had no time to listen to the demands of a needy adventurer like Columbus, and his humble dress and his poverty made him an object of contempt in the eyes of the haughty Spanish grandees. At last, through the efforts of the Grand Cardinal of Spain, he was allowed to enter the presence of Ferdinand. The king ordered him to plead his cause before a great council of learned monks at Salamanca. During the time it was held, Columbus was a guest in the convent of St. Stephen, which was the foundation of the famous university of Salamanca. The monks of the convent were kind to him; they entered into his plans, and believed that the voyage he proposed would lead to great discoveries; and prove the source of infinite benefit to mankind; but those who came to confer with them were not of the same opinion, and they tried, by quoting the Holy Scriptures, to convince Columbus that he was in error. Now Columbus was a very devout man, and one strong inducement for him to undertake the voyage was, the hope of spreading the gospel in distant parts of the world, and he must have been greatly pained when sentence was passed against him, and his views except by a few, were misunderstood and treated as idle dreams. Nevertheless he lingered on in Spain, in the hope that his appeal for aid might be heard one day by Isabella herself, who was of a more noble and generous character than her husband. So he followed the court from place to place as the seat of war changed, and in one campaign he bore an honourable part in the struggle with the Moors; while part of the time he remained in Spain he lived quietly at Cordova, earning his bread by making charts, and maps, as he had done before at Lisbon. When he heard that the city of Granada, the stronghold of the Moors, was to be invested by the Spanish army, he determined to make one more appeal, for he was sure that the king and queen would be too busy to listen to him, when the siege had once begun. All they would do was to promise to hear him when they should be released from the cares of war, and Columbus, grieving to think that he had wasted so many years of his life in useless waiting, made up his mind to leave Spain for ever, and apply for aid at the court of France.

From the time he left Cordova little is known of him until he appeared at the gate of the Convent of St. Maria de Rabida, which stood in the midst of a forest of pine trees, near the port of Palos, in Andalusia. His son Diego was with him; the boy was both tired and hungry, for they had come a long way without resting. Just as Columbus was asking for some bread and water for him at the gate, Friar Juan Perez, the guardian of the convent happened to pass by. The good friar welcomed the strangers kindly; he bade them enter, and in the course of conversation Columbus opened his heart to him and told him about his plans, and his firm trust that by the grace of God he should be able to carry them out. Friar Juan had already thought on the subject himself, and he was so delighted with the ideas of Columbus that he sent for two friends to confer with him: one was Fernandez Garcia, a physician of Palos, who had a great longing to go in search of unknown lands; the other was Martin Alonzo Pinzon, a merchant who had vessels of his own, and traded with many foreign ports. These were presently joined by some mariners of Palos, who had had much experience at sea.

Friar Juan persuaded Columbus to stay a little longer in Spain, and wrote a letter to Queen Isabella, hoping that his influence might induce her to sanction the enterprise, since he had once been her confessor, and had always been held by her in great esteem. The court had removed to Santa Fé, and an honest pilot, named Sebastian Rodriguez, undertook to convey the letter thither. At the end of a fortnight he brought back an answer from the queen which gave hope and joy to Columbus and his friends, and caused Friar Juan to saddle his mule in haste, and set out at midnight for the Spanish court. Isabella was indeed beginning to think the voyage worthy of consideration, and wished to talk on the subject with Juan himself. And very soon she summoned Columbus to Santa Fé, and sent him some money to enable him to buy a mule for his journey, and a dress suitable to appear in at court, so that he might no longer be despised for his needy attire.

Columbus arrived in time to see Boabdil, the last of the Moorish kings in Spain, deliver the keys of the Alhambra into the hands of the Spanish sovereigns: the hundred thousand Moors, who had shut themselves up within the massive walls of Granada, had been forced to yield; the Crescent was thrown down, and the Royal standard of Spain was planted on the red towers of the most beautiful of Moorish palaces. There were rejoicings and festivities without end among the Spaniards, but Columbus was sad and forlorn in the midst of all the gaiety; the courtiers were jealous of the favour Isabella had shown him on his arrival, and although the king and queen kept their promise and listened to him once more, they were persuaded, by a haughty and powerful priest named Talavera, now Bishop of Granada, to offer him terms which he could not accept. He began to feel utterly disheartened, and resolving again to leave Spain and ask help from France, he mounted his mule and quitted Santa Fé. He had reached the pass of Pinos, two leagues from Granada, when to his surprise a courier overtook him and recalled him to the Court. Some of his friends had at last persuaded Isabella to grant him real assistance, and she became all at once so eager for the voyage to be carried out, that she declared her kingdom of Castille should defray the cost of it, and offered to pledge her own jewels to furnish money besides.

The king and queen then signed a decree by which Columbus was to be supplied with vessels and men; to be named Admiral of the Fleet, and Viceroy of all the lands he should discover; and to have a right to a tenth part of all the gold, silver, pearls, precious stones, and spices he might find within the limits of the land he was to rule over for the Spanish sovereigns. Besides this the title of Don was to be prefixed to his name and to the name of his heirs.

All the doubts, the long weary days of waiting, were at an end. In deep thankfulness and joy Columbus went back to Palos, from which port it was arranged that the fleet should set sail. And one May morning a Royal decree was read in the porch of the largest church there which ordered the authorities of Palos to have two caravels[12] ready for the sea within ten days, Columbus himself having the right to fit out a third vessel.

But now his troubles broke out afresh, no one would furnish barks, not a mariner could be pressed into the service; it was believed that all who engaged in such a voyage must surely perish. After tumults and disputes which lasted many weeks, Martin Pinzon and his brother came forward with a vessel of their own, and two other caravels were with the greatest difficulty procured.

Thus the days which still elapsed before the fleet could sail, so full of joy and hope for the Admiral, were passed by the sailors and the friends they were to leave on shore in terror and deep gloom. At last, on Friday, August the 3rd, in the year 1492, the caravels sailed at daybreak from the bar of Saltes, near Palos, having on board one hundred and twenty persons, who before starting had all joined in fervent prayer that God would protect them from danger, and grant them success. A favourable wind bore them in the direction of the Canary Islands. The vessel Columbus sailed in was called the _Santa Maria_; the second, the _Pinta_, was commanded by Martin Alonzo Pinzon, and the third, the _Niña_, by his brother Vincent Yañez Pinzon. When they had been out at sea three days the _Pinta_ made a sign of distress; either by accident or through malice to Columbus her rudder had been broken. Martin Pinzon repaired it as well as he could with cords, but the next day the wind broke them, and all the vessels put in towards the Canary Islands, and waited thereabouts three weeks whilst a new rudder was made for the damaged bark. This occasioned much loss of time, and news being brought that some Portuguese ships were sailing towards the Island of Ferro, Columbus set sail again in a great hurry, fearing that the jealousy of the King of Portugal might even now prevent him from finishing his voyage. For three days the caravels were held in a deep calm, and all the men on board felt very anxious until the winds arose, and carried them on their way. The last land they saw was the Island of Ferro, and when they lost sight of that, the spirits of most of the mariners began to droop, and a wreck which they came upon a hundred and fifty leagues from Ferro, did not tend to make them more hopeful.

On the 14th of September they saw a heron and a water wagtail, which very much surprised them, as they were the first birds they had seen. The next night there fell from the sky, only four or five leagues from the vessels, a wonderful stream of fire, although the sea was calm, and the winds were asleep, and the currents steady to the northward. This was probably one of the meteors which are often seen in warm climates. After that, from day to day, they perceived an abundance of grasses and herbs on the surface of the water--which appeared to have been plucked only a short time before from some island or rock--the green patches looked almost like floating islands themselves. Then they saw many tunny and gold fish, and a white bird of the tropics that never passes a night on the sea. They thought, too, that the waves were less salt than those they had crossed at first. All these signs made the mariners very desirous of going in search of islands, but Columbus would not yield to their wishes, and pursued the steady course he had planned towards the west. On the 18th of September the captain of the swift-sailing caravel _Pinta_ told the Admiral that he had seen a number of large birds flying towards the north, and that he thought there was land in that direction. This time, however, Columbus felt sure that the supposed land was nothing but a bank of clouds. The next morning a bird of the tropics alighted on the Admiral's ship, and the day after two more came with a black bird which had on its head a tuft of white feathers; besides which, at dawn, three little singing birds had perched themselves on one of the masts, and only flew away at dark. Their sweet song must have made some of the forlorn mariners think of their homes and the pine forest of Palos and the gardens of southern Spain, with their orange and pomegranate trees, whilst to others it may have said, "God, in His infinite love, has sent the little birds to cheer your hearts, and to tell you that land is near, and that you need not fear to tread the shore of strange men, since He is the father of all."

There came a time, indeed, when these things vanished, and as the wind always blew from the east, the men despaired of ever being able to return to their homes. They began to reproach Columbus bitterly for having led them, as they supposed, on a lost track, and distrusted the signs of land even when they were renewed by fresh patches of verdure appearing, and whole flights of singing birds coming to the caravels early in the morning, and flying away to their unseen nests at dusk. Some of the seamen in their frenzy were so wicked as to make a plot to throw the Admiral overboard, and they meant after that, to turn the vessel homeward, and to say, if they ever got back to Spain, that he had fallen from the ship's side whilst gazing at the stars. Columbus had enough to do to pacify the crews. To the gentle he spoke kind words; those who were eager for riches he flattered with hopes of gain, and the most violent of all he threatened with the severest punishment if they should attempt to prevent the voyage from being completed. At this time he was exposed to extreme danger, but he had a brave heart, and trusted in God, and did not feel afraid even when he knew that the plot had been made to take away his life. And although he was more anxious than any man on board, and passed many a sleepless night, looking vainly across the starlit sea for land, he never despaired of finding it at last.

So the days passed in alternate hope and fear. Once Martin Pinzon felt so sure that he saw land, that the crews of each vessel knelt down and chanted a solemn thanksgiving, "Glory to God in the highest," such were the words that rose up in the calm evening air, but, alas! the land turned out to be only a cloud.

When the mutiny was at its greatest height the heavenly Father let the men who had murmured look on the blessed signs of land until their wicked thoughts passed away, and hope and trust came back to their hearts instead. For, on the 10th of October, there could be no doubt that they were near some shore. Beside fresh herbs and grasses, they saw a green fish, which is only found near rocks, a reed and a carved stick, a little plank, and a branch of thorn covered with red berries, which looked as if it had only just been plucked.

After evening prayer on that day Columbus ordered a careful watch to be made, and remained himself on the high stern of the _Santa Maria_ during the night. Now and then he observed a glimmer of light, which he supposed came from the shore, and at two o'clock in the morning the firing of a gun from the _Pinta_ was the signal that land had really been seen. Not an eye closed that night; the sails were taken in, and the whole company on board the caravels waited in breathless suspense for the dawn. As the day broke, Columbus perceived a level island stretching out before them covered with trees; the natives were already coming out of the woods and rushing towards the shore, evidently astonished at the sight of the strange vessels. The boats were manned and armed, and Columbus, Martin Pinzon, and Vincente, his brother, each got into a boat, Columbus bearing the royal standard of Spain, and the others banners with green crosses upon them. The natives stood around as they landed, and looked on, half fearful, in silence. Columbus kissed the earth on which he first set foot, and planting the cross upon it, called it by the name of St. Salvador.[13] Then the Spaniards hailed him as Admiral, and swore obedience to him: those who had rebelled were now thoroughly ashamed of their wicked conduct, and entreated his pardon--a pardon he readily granted--for it was not in his noble nature to resent an injury done to himself.

The Spanish government had decreed a reward of 10,000 maravedis[14] to him who should first discover land; to this Columbus added a promise of a doublet of silk or velvet. But although Rodrigo de Triana was the mariner who first saw land from the _Pinta_, it was agreed by all that the Admiral should have the prize, because it was he who had perceived the light, probably of some torch the natives had carried, at intervals, during the night.

The island Columbus first landed upon was one of the Lucayos or Bahamas; in his delight he fancied he had really reached the eastern shores of India, and hence it was that the natives of the New World were called Indians. He stayed a day or two at the island, making friends with the dark-complexioned men, who soon lost all fear of the strangers, and regarded with great curiosity the cups, glass beads, and hawks' bells they gave them in exchange for the parrots, the balls of spun-cotton, and the cassava bread, made from a great root called "yuca," which they brought down to the shore. They were simple in their manners, and evidently thought the shining armour and weapons of the white man very strange. They did not know the use of iron, and taking the swords by the blades they cut themselves with them. Some of them wore little ornaments of gold in their noses, and when the Spaniards asked them by signs whence they got the gold, they answered by pointing to the south.

Columbus now resolved to go in search of the precious metal, and left the island, taking with him seven Indians as interpreters. When he returned to his ship the natives crowded around him in their canoes, each of which, small or large, was made in one piece out of the trunk of a tree. After finding some little islands, he came upon the lovely island of Cuba. Here the caravels glided down a great shining river, with waters deep and clear, and anchored not far from the sea. It seemed to the mariners a fairy region, in which they forgot all the care and the terror of their voyage. Trees, higher than any they had seen in Europe, were covered with the most tempting fruits and brilliant flowers, birds of gay-coloured plumage sang on their branches or flitted about. The sunshine falling on the scales of the fish made them look like precious stones, and at night, fireflies flashed through the air, and moon and stars shone with a strange lustre unknown in Europe. The cabins of the natives of Cuba were more elegant in their construction than those of the other islands, and were all well covered with branches of palm trees. That the people were accustomed to fish was shown by the nets, made of the fibres of palm leaves, which were found in some of the empty dwellings. Here was seen for the first time the "batata," or potatoe plant, which has since proved such a blessing to Europe, and some Spaniards, whom Columbus, believing that he had indeed reached Cathay, sent on a mission to the Grand Khan, tell how, when they came back from their fruitless journey, they met on the road numbers of people, men and women, who held in one hand a lighted brand, and in the other some leaves of a plant called "tabacas," rolled up in the form of a little cylinder, one end of which they lighted and the other they put into their mouths. It is needless to say that this was the origin of smoking amongst the Europeans, and hence the city of Havannah in Cuba has always been famous for the manufacture of cigars.