1503. July 7. Letter of Columbus to the sovereigns.
The Admiral, while the preparations were making, drew up a letter to his sovereigns, which it was intended that Mendez, after arranging with Ovando for the rescue, should bear himself to Spain by the first opportunity. At least it is the reasonable assumption of Humboldt that this is the letter which has come down to us dated July 7, 1503.
Lettera rarissima.
It is not known that this epistle was printed at the time, though manuscript copies seem to have circulated. An Italian version of it was, however, printed at Venice a year before Columbus died. The original Spanish text was not known to scholars till Navarrete, having discovered in the king's library at Madrid an early transcript of it, printed it in the first volume of his Coleccion. It is the document usually referred to, from the title of Morelli's reprint (1810) of the Italian text, as the Lettera rarissima di Cristoforo Colombo. This letter is even more than his treatise on the prophets a sorrowful index of his wandering reason. In parts it is the merest jumble of hurrying thoughts, with no plan or steady purpose in view. It is in places well calculated to arouse the deepest pity. It was, of course, avowedly written at a venture, inasmuch as the chance of its reaching the hands of his sovereigns was a very small one. "I send this letter," he says, "by means of and by the hands of Indians; it will be a miracle if it reaches its destination."
He not only goes back over the adventures of the present expedition, in a recital which has been not infrequently quoted in previous pages, but he reverts gloomily to the more distant past. He lingers on the discouragements of his first years in Spain. "Every one to whom the enterprise was mentioned," he says of those days, "treated it as ridiculous, but now there is not a man, down to the very tailors, who does not beg to be allowed to become a discoverer." He remembers the neglect which followed upon the first flush of indignation when he returned to Spain in chains. "The twenty years' service through which I have passed with so much toil and danger have profited me nothing, and at this very day I do not possess a roof in Spain that I can call my own. If I wish to eat or sleep I have nowhere to go but to a low tavern, and most times lack wherewith to pay the bill. Another anxiety wrings my very heartstrings, when I think of my son Diego, whom I have left an orphan in Spain, stripped of the house and property which is due to him on my account, although I had looked upon it as a certainty that your Majesties, as just and grateful princes, would restore it to him in all respects with increase."
"I was twenty-eight years old," he says again, "when I came into your Highnesses' services, and now I have not a hair upon me that is not gray, my body is infirm, and all that was left to me, as well as to my brother, has been taken away and sold, even to the frock that I wore, to my great dishonor."
And then, referring to his present condition, he adds: "Solitary in my trouble, sick, and in daily expectation of death, I am surrounded by millions of hostile savages, full of cruelty. Weep for me, whoever has charity, truth, and justice!"
He next works over in his mind the old geographical problems. He recalls his calculation of an eclipse in 1494, when he supposed, in his error, that he had "sailed twenty-four degrees westward in nine hours." He recalls the stories that he had heard on the Veragua coast, and thinks that he had known it all before from books. Marinus had come near the truth, he gives out, and the Portuguese have proved that the Indies in Ethiopia is, as Marinus had said, four and twenty degrees from the equinoctial line. "The world is but small," he sums up; "out of seven divisions of it, the dry part occupies six, and the seventh is entirely covered by water. I say that the world is not so large as vulgar opinion makes it, and that one degree from the equinoctial line measures fifty-six miles and two thirds, and this may be proved to a nicety."
Columbus on gold.