It was Queen Isabel of Castile, wife of King Ferdinand of Aragon,[50] who after considerable hesitation, and against the advice of a council of leading bishops and statesmen, determined finally to pledge her sympathy, and tradition says her jewels if necessary, in the mariner’s cause. Part of the attraction of his project lay in its appeal to her Castilian imagination, for Castile had been ever haunted by the possibilities of the bleak grey ocean that rolled at the gates of Galicia; but still more potent than the thought of discovery was the desire of spreading the Catholic Faith. This hope also inspired Columbus, who regarded his enterprise as in the nature of a crusade, believing that he had been called to preach the Gospel to the millions of heathen inhabiting Cathay.
When Columbus set forth on his first voyage to ‘the Indies’, as he roughly called the unknown territory he sought, those who sailed in his three ships were many of them ‘pressed’ men, that is, sailors ordered on board by their town, that having incurred royal displeasure was given this way of appeasing it. Thus they were without enthusiasm or any belief in what they thought their admiral’s mad and dangerous adventure, and from the time that they lost sight of land they never ceased to grumble and utter threats of mutiny. At one time it was the extraordinary variations in the compass that brought them trembling to complain; at another the steadiness of the wind blowing from the East that they believed would never change and allow them to return home; finally it was the sluggish waters of the Sargassa Sea, amid whose weeds they saw themselves destined to drift until they died of starvation and thirst. To every suggestion of setting the sails eastward Columbus turned a deaf ear: but for the rest he threatened, cajoled, or argued, as the occasion seemed to demand, his own heart sinking each time the cry of ‘Land!’ was raised and the ardently desired vision proved only to be some bank of clouds lying low upon the horizon.
At length came the news that a moving light had been seen in the darkness. ‘It appeared like a candle that went up and down,’ says Columbus in his diary, and all waited eagerly for dawn that revealed at last a wooded island, later called the Bahamas, but then believed to be part of the mainland of Asia. Clad in armour, and carrying the royal banner of Spain, the great discoverer of the West stepped ashore, and there, humbly kneeling, he and his crews raised to Heaven a Te Deum of thankfulness and joy.
Columbus made five voyages to the West in all, for the way once shown proved easy enough, nor did he need to ‘press’ crews for the enterprise, but rather to guard against unwelcome stowaways. The brown-skinned Indians, gaily coloured parrots, gold nuggets, and strange roots that he brought back as witness of his first success were enough to inflame the minds and ambitions of Spaniards with such high hopes of wealth and glory that they almost fought to be allowed to join the expeditions.
Vasco da Gama was rewarded for his voyage to India with a large pension and the Portuguese title of ‘Dom’: he died in honoured old age. It is sad to find that after the first triumphant return, when no glory and praise seemed too great to bestow on their hero, the Spaniards turned against Columbus. They blamed him because gold was not more abundant; because his settlers quarrelled and started feuds with the natives; because, although a very great mariner, he did not prove a ‘governor’ able to control and manage other men easily. Not a few were jealous of his genius, and determined to bring about his ruin out of spite.
From his third voyage to the West Columbus was sent back by his enemies in chains, ill with wounded pride at his shameful treatment. Queen Isabel, hearing of it, instantly ordered his release, and tried to soothe his indignation; but not long afterwards she herself died, and Ferdinand, left to himself, was wholly intent on Aragonese ambitions in the Mediterranean. To him the conquest of Naples was far more important than any discovery of Cathay, and so Columbus’s complaints went unheeded and he died in poverty forgotten by all save a few. ‘After twenty years of toil and peril,’ he exclaimed bitterly, as he was borne ashore from his last voyage, ‘I do not own even a roof in Spain.’
The New World to which he had won an entrance was given the name of another, namely, of a Florentine, Amerigo Vespucci, who, sailing beyond the West Indies, reached the mainland.
The effect of Columbus’s discovery upon the life of Europe was momentous. No longer the Atlantic lay like a grey wall between man and the Unknown. It had become a highway, not to Cathay but to a greater West, where were riches beyond all human dreaming, ready as a harvest for the enterprising and hardworking.
The central road of mediaeval commerce had been the Mediterranean, the highway of the modern world was to be the Atlantic, and the commercial future of Europe lay not with the city republics of the South but with the nations of the North and West, with Portugal and Spain, with Flanders and England, that had lain upon the fringe of the Old World but stood at the very heart of the New.