The death of the queen deprived Columbus of the only protector who could stand between him and Fonseca. The reimbursement for the wrongs which he had suffered at that man's hands was never made. The last eighteen months of the Admiral's life were spent in sickness and poverty. Accumulated hardship and disappointment had broken him down, and he died on Death of Columbus. Ascension day, May 20, 1506, at Valladolid. So little heed was taken of his passing away that the local annals of that city, "which give almost every insignificant event from 1333 to 1539, day by day, do not mention it."[616] His remains were buried in the Franciscan monastery at Valladolid, whence they were removed in 1513 to the monastery of Las Cuevas, at Seville, where the body of his son Diego, second Admiral and Viceroy of the Indies, was buried in 1526. Ten years after this date, the bones of father and son were removed to Hispaniola, to the cathedral of San Domingo; whence they have since been transferred to Havana. The result of so many removals has been to raise doubts as to whether the ashes now reposing at Havana are really those of Columbus and his son; and over this question there has been much critical discussion, of a sort that we may cheerfully leave to those who like to spend their time over such trivialities.
There is a tradition that Ferdinand and Isabella, at some date unspecified, had granted to Columbus, as a legend for his coat-of-arms, the noble motto:—
Á Castilla y á Leon
Nuevo mundo dió Colon,
i. e. "To Castile-and-Leon Columbus gave a New World;" and we are further told that, when the "Nuevo Mundo." Admiral's bones were removed to Seville, this motto was, by order of King Ferdinand, inscribed upon his tomb.[617] This tradition crumbles under the touch of historical criticism. The Admiral's coat-of-arms, as finally emblazoned under his own inspection at Seville in 1502, quarters the royal Castle-and-Lion of the kingdom of Castile with his own devices of five anchors, and a group of golden islands with a bit of Terra Firma, upon a blue sea. But there is no legend of any sort, nor is anything of the kind mentioned by Las Casas or Bernaldez or Peter Martyr. The first allusion to such a motto is by Oviedo, in 1535, who gives it a somewhat different turn:—
Por Castilla y por Leon
Nuevo mundo halló Colon,
i. e. "For Castile-and-Leon Columbus found a New World." But the other form is no doubt the better, for Ferdinand Columbus, at some time not later than 1537, had adopted it, and it may be read to-day upon his tomb in the cathedral at Seville. The time-honoured tradition has evidently transferred to the father the legend adopted, if not originally devised, by his son.
But why is this mere question of heraldry a matter of importance for the historian? Simply because it furnishes one of the most striking among many illustrations of the fact that at no time during the life of Columbus, nor for some years after his death, did anybody use the phrase "New World" with conscious reference to his discoveries. At the time of his death their true significance had not yet begun to dawn upon the mind of any voyager or any writer. It was supposed that he had found a new route to the Indies by sailing west, and that in the course of this achievement he had discovered some new islands and a bit or bits of Terra Firma of more or less doubtful commercial value. To group these items of discovery into an organic whole, and to ascertain that they belonged to a whole quite distinct from the Old World, required the work of many other discoverers, companions and successors to Columbus. In the following chapter I shall endeavour to show how the conception of the New World was thus originated and at length became developed into the form with which we are now familiar.[Back to Contents]