But as he was too full of his message to be easily shaken off, he was treated with the basest trickery. At the suggestion of the Bishop of Ceuta, Columbus was kept waiting for his answer, and asked to furnish his plans in detail with charts and illustrations. He did so, and while the Council pretended to be poring over these for a final decision, a caravel was sent to the Cape Verde islands to try the route he had suggested,—a trial with the pickings of Italian brains.
The Portuguese sailed westward for several days till the weather became stormy; then, as their heart was not in the venture, they put back to Europe with a fresh stock of the legends Henry had so heartily despised. They had come to an impenetrable mist, which had stopped their progress; apparitions had warned them back; the sea in those parts swarmed with monsters; it became impossible to breathe.
MAP OF 1492.
[(see list of maps)]
Columbus learned how he had been used, and his wife's death helped to decide him, in his disgust for place and people. Towards the end of 1484, he left Lisbon. Three years later, when he had become fully as much disgusted with the dilatory sloth and tricks of Spain, he offered himself again to Portugal. King John had repented of his meanness; on March 20, 1488, he wrote in answer to Columbus, eagerly offering on his side to guarantee him against any suits that might be taken against him in Lisbon. But the Court of Castille now became, in its turn, afraid of quite losing what might be infinite advantage; Columbus was kept in the service of Ferdinand and Isabella; and at last in August, 1492, the "Catholic Kings" sent him out from Palos to discover what he could on his own terms.
What followed, the discovery of America, and all the subsequent ventures of the Cabots, of Amerigo Vespucci, of Cortés and Pizarro, De Soto and Raleigh and the Pilgrim Fathers, are not often connected in any way with the slow and painful beginnings of European expansion in the Portugal of the fifteenth century, but it is a true and real connection all the same. The whole onward and outward movement of the great exploring age was set in motion by one man. It might have come to pass without him, but the fact is simply that through him it did, as a matter of history, result. "And let him that did more than this, go before him."
FOOTNOTES:
[1] From a water-colour.
[2] From Major's Life of Henry the Navigator.