Columbus in favor.
While this strange bruit was thus spreading more or less, we get some glimpses of the personal life of Columbus during these days of his sojourn in Barcelona. We hear of him riding through the streets on horseback, on one side of the King, with Prince Juan on the other.
Reward for first seeing land.
We find record of his being awarded the pension of thirty crowns, as the first discoverer of land, by virtue of the mysterious light, and Irving thinks that we may condone this theft from the brave sailor who unquestionably saw land the first, by remembering that "Columbus's whole ambition was involved." It seems to others that his whole character was involved.
Story of the egg.
We find him a guest at a banquet given by Cardinal Mendoza, and the well-known story of his making an egg stand upright, by chipping one end of it, is associated with this merriment of the table. An impertinent question of a shallow courtier had induced Columbus to show a table full of guests that it was easy enough to do anything when the way was pointed out. The story, except as belonging to a traditional stock of anecdotes, dating far back of Columbus, always ready for an application, has no authority earlier than Benzoni, and loses its point in the destruction of the end on which the aim was to make it stand. This has been so palpable to some of the repeaters of the story that they have supposed that the feat was accomplished, not by cracking the end of the egg, but by using a quick motion which broke the sack which holds the yolk, so that that weightier substance settled at one end, and balanced the egg in an upright position.
So passed the time with the new-made hero, in drinking, as Irving expresses it, "the honeyed draught of popularity before enmity and detraction had time to drug it with bitterness."
1493. May 20. Receives a coat of arms.
We find the sovereigns bestowing upon him, on the 20th of May, a coat of arms, which shows a castle and a lion in the upper quarters, and in those below, a group of golden islands in a sea of waves, on the one hand, and the arms to which his family had been entitled, on the other. Humboldt speaks of this archipelago as the first map of America, but he apparently knew only Oviedo's description of the arms, for the latter places the islands in a gulf formed by a mainland, and in this fashion they are grouped in a blazon of the arms which is preserved at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at Paris—a duplicate being at Genoa. Harrisse says that this design is the original water-color, made under Columbus's eye in 1502. In this picture,—which is the earliest blazonry which has come down to us,—the other lower quarter has the five golden anchors on a blue ground, which it is claimed was adjudged to Columbus as the distinctive badge of an Admiral of Spain. The personal arms are relegated to a minor overlying shield at the lower point of the escutcheon. Oviedo also says that trees and other objects should be figured on the mainland.
