DEATH OF THE ADMIRAL.
It was infamous in Ovando to leave Columbus so long in such a strait. The excuses he pleaded were absence at Jaraguá, and lack of suitable ships; but had he been in earnest to deliver the admiral, means could have been found before the lapse of a year. Although on arriving at Santo Domingo Columbus received lodgings in Ovando's house, and the governor was outwardly exceedingly attentive to his guest, in reality there was little in common between the two men but jealousy and distrust. Porras was allowed to roam at large, though finally sent to Spain for trial. Columbus sailed for Spain September 12, 1504. For a time he kept his bed at Seville, writing heart-rending letters to the sovereigns, who paid little attention to them. By the help of the adelantado, ever his most faithful friend and brother, Columbus managed the following year to creep up to court and beg redress from the king, for the queen was now dead. But Ferdinand was deeply disgusted; not so much however as to prevent his granting the illustrious discoverer a magnificent burial shortly after. It was the 20th of May, 1506, that Columbus died at Valladolid, at the age of about seventy years.[IV-25]
Thus terminated the first attempt of Spaniards to plant a colony on the main-land of North America. Columbus himself, the leader, advanced with proffers of friendship in one hand and a sword in the other, retaliated upon a fancied savage treachery by a still more insidious treachery, and was driven from the country by a brave ruler, whose deeds deserve to be enrolled beside those of patriots everywhere. One kind act of a tender-hearted Spanish sailor—would I had more of them to record in this history—brings the direst misfortune on his countrymen, delays for a dozen years the occupation of Veragua, and turns the tide of conquest in other directions.
CHARACTER OF COLUMBUS.
Most remarkable in the character of Columbus was the combination of the theoretical and the practical; and most remarkable in his theories was the anomaly that though nearly all of them were false, they led to as grand results as if they had been true. The aperture through which failure creeps into carefully laid schemes is usually some glaring defect of character; and such defect often appears where little suspected, in natures warped by genius, or where one quality is unduly developed at the expense of another quality. We often see men of rare ability wrecked by what would be regarded an act of folly unaccountable in the stupidest person; but we do not often see success resulting from these same defects. The greatest defect in the faculties of Columbus, extravagance of belief, was the primary cause of his success. Simple to us as is the reality of the earth's rotundity, and of the practicability of a western route to Asia, no one could then have entertained those doctrines without extraordinary credulity; even though Pythagoras and others had so long ago expressed such ideas, no one could then have acted on them short of infatuation bordering on insanity. To say the world is round was not enough; Thales of Miletus proved it not a plane two thousand years before. If it were round, the water would run off; if it were flat, why then one safely might sail on it; if it be flat, and the water runs not off, then at the other end there must be land that keeps the water on, and one might sail over the flat sea to that land—all such logic was less puerile than the feelings by which the Genoese ordinarily reached conclusions. His efforts were the embodiment of the ideas of many thoughtful men, timorous persons, perhaps, or merely meditative and passive, but in none of whom united his ability, courage, and enthusiasm; above all, none so scientific were at the same time so determined. Often the knowledge of a prophecy is the cause of its fulfilment. Some say Alonso Sanchez told him of Española, and he himself affirms that once he visited Iceland. It may have been that on this voyage he learned from the Norsemen of their Vinland and Helluland. What then? Were this true, such stories would have had with him scarcely greater weight than the sayings of the ancients, or than current interpretations of holy writ.
Nothing more plainly proves the power that sent him forth than the fact that in scarcely one of his original conceptions was he correct. He thought to reach Asia over an unobstructed ocean sea by sailing west; he did not. To the day of his death he thought America was Asia, and that Cuba was mainland; that the earth was much smaller than it is, and that six sevenths of it was land. He dwelt much on a society of Amazons who never had existence, and at every step among the Islands he ingenuously allowed his inflamed imagination to deceive him. He claimed to have been divinely appointed for this mission; he affirmed his voyage a miracle, and himself inspired with the conception of it by the most holy Trinity; he vowed to rescue the holy sepulchre, which he never did; he proclaimed visions which he never saw, such as St Elmo at the top-mast with seven lighted tapers, and told of voices which he never heard; he pictured himself a missionary to benighted heathen, when in truth he was scattering among them legions of fiery devils. But what he knew and did, assuredly, was enough, opening the ocean to highways, and finding new continents; enough to fully entitle him to all the glory man can give to man; and as for his errors of judgment, had he been able to map America as accurately as can we to-day, had he been divine instead of, as he claimed, only divinely appointed, with myriads of attendant ministers, his achievement would have been none the greater. From the infirmities of his nature sprang the nobility of Brutus; from the weaknesses of Columbus was compounded his strength.
Assuredly it was no part of the experience and ingenuity which springs from life-long application that made Columbus so essentially a visionary; nor was it his scientific attainments, nor the splendid successes which despite the so frequent frowns of fortune we must accredit him. In his avocation of mariner he was a plain, thoughtful man of sound judgment and wise discretion; but fired by enthusiasm he became more than an ordinary navigator; he became more as he fancied himself, superhuman, the very arm of omnipotence. Once born in him the infatuation that he was the divinely appointed instrument for the accomplishment of this work, and frowning monarchs or perilous seas were as straws in his way. We see clearly enough what moved him, these four hundred years after the event, though he who was moved in reality knew little about it. By the pressure of rapidly accumulating ideas we see brought to the front in discovery Christopher Columbus, just as in the reformation of the church Martin Luther is crowded to the front. The German monk was not the Reformation; like the Genoese sailor, he was but an instrument in the hands of a power palpable to all, but called by different persons different names.
While yet mingling in the excitements of progressive manhood, he became lost in a maze of mysticism, and to the end of his life he never recovered possession of himself. Not that self-mastery, the first necessity of correct conduct, was wholly gone; there was method in his madness; and he could deny the demons within him, but it was only to leave open the door and give himself up to yet other demons.
In the centuries of battle now lately renewed between science and religion, Columbus fought on both sides. Never was a man more filled at once with the material and the spiritual, with the emotional and the intellectual. Mingling with beatified spirits in the garden of his moral paradise were naked wild men equally as glorious in their immoralities. His creed, which was his very life, was not in his eyes a bundle of supernatural abstractions, but concrete reality as much as were any of his temporal affairs. Himself an honest devotee of science, and believing science the offspring of religion, science and himself must therefore finally be forever laid upon the same altar. He had no thought of work apart from religion, or of religion apart from work. He had ready a doctrine for every heavenly display, a theory for every earthly phenomenon. When pictures of other lands rose in his imagination, he knew them to be real, just as Juan Diego of Mexico knew to be real the apparition of our Lady of Guadalupe at Tepeyacac. By the gnawing hunger of temporal and spiritual ambition he was enabled to see the new lands suggested by science, just as the imprisoned monk, starved and scourged into the beholdings of insanity, sees angels of every incarnation.
While thus obliged to view all his achievements through the atmosphere of creative mysticism, in weighing his manifold qualities, it is well always to remember that there were achievements, and those of the very highest order. His mysticism was the mysticism of practical life rather than of inactive ideality. His faith was of value to him in giving definiteness to energy otherwise vague and fitful. His all-potential enthusiasm subordinated to one idea every erratic and incoherent aspiration. It gave his life a fixedness of purpose which lust, avarice, and every appetite combined could not have given without it; so that while he brooded with misanthropic wistfulness he did not shirk any fancied duty, even when attended by pain and misfortune. His was not a cloistered inspiration, but an overwhelmingly active enthusiasm. There was in him no longing after a perfect life; in his own eyes his life was perfect. No restless questionings over the unknowable; there was no unknowable. His oblique imagination encompassed all worlds and penetrated all space. His positivism bound the metaphysical no less firmly than the material. Abstract conceptions were more tangible than concrete facts. Realities were but accidents; ideas were the only true realities. The highway of the heavens which to profoundest investigation is dusty with the débris of an evolving universe, to this self-sufficient sailor was as plain as the king's road from Seville to Cádiz.