Having at length got away from this unfriendly island, as the Niña was making her way toward Cape St. Vincent and within 400 miles of it, she was seized by another fierce tempest and driven upon the coast of Portugal, Columbus is driven ashore in Portugal, where the king is advised to have him assassinated; where Columbus and his crew were glad of a chance to run into the river Tagus for shelter. The news of his voyage and his discoveries aroused intense excitement in Lisbon. Astonishment was mingled with chagrin at the thought that the opportunity for all this glory and profit had first been offered to Portugal and foolishly lost. The king even now tried to persuade himself that Columbus had somehow or other been trespassing upon the vast and vague undiscovered dominions granted to the Crown of Portugal by Pope Eugenius IV. Some of the king's counsellors are said to have urged him to have Columbus assassinated; it would be easy enough to provoke such a high-spirited man into a quarrel and then run him through the body.[524] To clearer heads, however, the imprudence of such a course was manifest. It was already impossible to keep the news of the discovery from reaching but to offend Spain so grossly would be dangerous. Spain, and Portugal could not afford to go to war with her stronger neighbour. In fact even had John II. been base enough to resort to assassination, which seems quite incompatible with the general character of Lope de Vega's "perfect prince," Columbus was now too important a personage to be safely interfered with. So he was invited to court and made much of. On the 13th of March he set sail again and arrived in the harbour of Palos at noon of the 15th. His little caravel was promptly recognized by the people, and as her story flew from mouth to mouth all the business of the town was at an end for that day.[525]
Towards evening, while the bells were ringing and the streets brilliant with torches, another vessel entered the harbour and dropped anchor. She was none other than the Columbus and Pinzon at Palos; death of Pinzon. Pinta! The storm had driven her to Bayonne, whence Martin Pinzon instantly despatched a message to Ferdinand and Isabella, making great claims for himself and asking permission to wait upon them with a full account of the discovery. As soon as practicable he made his way to Palos, but when on arriving he saw the Niña already anchored in the harbour his guilty heart failed him. He took advantage of the general hub-bub to slink ashore as quickly and quietly as possible, and did not dare to show himself until after the Admiral had left for Seville. The news from Columbus reached the sovereigns before they had time to reply to the message of Pinzon; so when their answer came to him it was cold and stern and forbade him to appear in their presence. Pinzon was worn out with the hardships of the homeward voyage, and this crushing reproof was more than he could bear. His sudden death, a few days afterward, was generally attributed to chagrin.[526]
From Seville the Admiral was summoned to attend court at Barcelona, where he was received with triumphal honours. He was directed to seat himself in the presence of the sovereigns, a courtesy usually reserved for royal personages.[527] Columbus is received by the sovereigns at Barcelona, April, 1493. Intense interest was felt in his specimens of stuffed birds and small mammals, his live parrots, his collection of herbs which he supposed to have medicinal virtues, his few pearls and trinkets of gold, and especially his six painted and bedizened barbarians, the survivors of ten with whom he had started from Hispaniola. Since in the vague terminology of that time the remote and scarcely known parts of Asia were called the Indies, and since the islands and coasts just discovered were Indies, of course these red men must be Indians. So Columbus had already named them in his first letter written from the Niña, off the Azores, sent by special messenger from Palos, and now in April, 1493, printed at Barcelona, containing the particulars of his discovery,—a letter appropriately addressed to the worthy Santangel but for whose timely intervention he might have ridden many a weary league on that mule of his to no good purpose.[528] It was generally assumed without question that the Admiral's theory of his discovery must be correct, that the coast of Cuba must be the eastern extremity of China, that the coast of Hispaniola must be the northern extremity of Cipango, and that a direct route—much shorter than that which Portugal had so long been seeking—had now been found to those lands of illimitable wealth described by Marco Polo.[529] To be sure Columbus had not as yet seen the evidences of this Oriental splendour, and had been puzzled at not finding them, but he felt confident that he had come very near them and would come full upon them in a second voyage. There was nobody who knew enough to refute these opinions,[530] and really why should not this great geographer, General excitement at the news that a way to the Indies had been found. who had accomplished so much already which people had scouted as impossible,—why should he not know what he was about? It was easy enough now to get men and money for the second voyage. When the Admiral sailed from Cadiz on September 25, 1493, it was with seventeen ships carrying 1,500 men. Their dreams were of the marble palaces of Quinsay, of isles of spices, and the treasures of Prester John. The sovereigns wept for joy as they thought that such untold riches were vouchsafed them by the special decree of Heaven, as a reward for having overcome the Moor at Granada and banished the Jews from Spain.[531] Columbus shared these views and regarded himself as a special instrument for executing the divine decrees. He renewed his vow to rescue the Holy Sepulchre, promising within the next seven years to equip at his own expense a crusading army of 50,000 foot and 4,000 horse; within five years thereafter he would follow this with a second army of like dimensions.
Thus nobody had the faintest suspicion of what had been done. In the famous letter to Santangel there is of course not a word about a New World. The grandeur of the achievement was quite beyond the ken of the generation that witnessed it. This voyage was an event without any parallel in history. For we have since come to learn that in 1492 the contact between the eastern and the western halves of our planet was first really begun, and the two streams of human life which had flowed on for countless ages apart were thenceforth to mingle together. The first voyage of Columbus is thus a unique event in the history of mankind. Nothing like it was ever done before, and nothing like it can ever be done again. No worlds are left for a future Columbus to conquer. The era of which this great Italian mariner was the most illustrious representative has closed forever.[Back to Contents]
CHAPTER VI.
THE FINDING OF STRANGE COASTS.
But that era did not close with Columbus, nor did he live long enough to complete the Discovery of America. Our practice of affixing specific dates to great events is on many accounts indispensable, but it is sometimes The Discovery of America was a gradual process. misleading. Such an event as the discovery of a pair of vast continents does not take place within a single year. When we speak of America as discovered in 1492, we do not mean that the moment Columbus landed on two or three islands of the West Indies, a full outline map of the western hemisphere from Labrador and Alaska to Cape Horn suddenly sprang into existence—like Pallas from the forehead of Zeus—in the minds of European men. Yet people are perpetually using arguments which have neither force nor meaning save upon the tacit assumption that somehow or other some such sort of thing must have happened. This grotesque fallacy lies at the bottom of the tradition which has caused so many foolish things to be said about that gallant mariner, Americus Vespucius. In geographical discussions the tendency to overlook the fact that Columbus and his immediate successors did not sail with the latest edition of Black's General Atlas in their cabins is almost inveterate; it keeps revealing itself in all sorts of queer statements, and probably there is no cure for it except in familiarity with the long series of perplexed and struggling maps made in the sixteenth century. Properly regarded, the Discovery of America was not a single event, but a very gradual process. It was not like a case of special creation, for it was a case of evolution, and the voyage of 1492 was simply the most decisive and epoch-marking incident in that evolution. Columbus himself, after all his four eventful voyages across the Sea of Darkness, died in the belief that he had simply discovered the best and straightest route to the eastern shores of Asia. Yet from his first experiences in Cuba down to his latest voyage upon the coasts of Honduras and Veragua, he was more or less puzzled at finding things so different from what he had anticipated. If he had really known anything with accuracy about the eastern coast of Asia, he would doubtless soon have detected his fundamental error, but no European in his day had any such knowledge. In his four voyages Columbus was finding what he supposed to be parts of Asia, what we now know to have been parts of America, but what were really to him and his contemporaries neither more nor less than Strange Coasts. We have now to consider briefly his further experiences upon these strange coasts.
The second voyage of Columbus was begun in a very different mood and under very different auspices from either his former or his two subsequent voyages. On his first departure from Palos, in 1492, all save a few devoted friends regarded him as a madman rushing upon his doom; and outside the Spanish peninsula the expedition seems to have attracted no notice. But on the second start, in 1493, all hands supposed that they were going straight to golden Cathay and to boundless riches. It was not now with groans but with pæans that they flocked on board the ships; and the occasion was observed, with more or less interest, by some people in other countries of Europe,—as in Italy, and for the moment in France and England.
At the same time with his letter to Santangel, the Admiral had despatched another account, substantially the same,[532] to Gabriel The letter to Sanchez. Sanchez,[533] another officer of the royal treasury. Several copies of a Latin translation of this letter were published at Rome, at Paris, and elsewhere, in the course of the year 1493.[534] The story which it contained was at once paraphrased in Italian verse by Giuliano Dati, one of the most popular poets of the age, and perhaps in the autumn of 1493 the amazing news that the Indies had been found by sailing west[535] was sung by street urchins in Florence. We are also informed, in an ill-vouched but not improbable clause in Ramusio, that not far from that same time the news was heard with admiration in London, where it was pronounced "a thing more divine than human to sail by the West unto the East, where spices grow, by a way that was never known before;"[536] and it seems altogether likely that it was this news that prompted the expedition of John Cabot hereafter to be mentioned.[537]