About a fortnight later (May 19), he ratified an undoubted will, which had been drafted by his own hand the year before at Segovia, and executed it with the customary formalities. Its testamentary provisions were not unnatural. He made Diego his heir, and his entailed property was, in default of heirs to Diego, to pass to his illegitimate son Ferdinand, and from him, in like default, to his own brother, the Adelantado, and his male descendants; and all such failing, to the female lines in a similar succession. He enjoined upon his representatives, of whatever generation, to serve the Spanish King with fidelity. Upon Diego, and upon later heads of the family, he imposed the duty of relieving all distressed relatives and others in poverty. He imposed on his lawful son the appointment of some one of his lineage to live constantly in Genoa, to maintain the family dignity. He directed him to grant due allowances to his brother and uncle; and when the estates yielded the means, to erect a chapel in the Vega of Española, where masses might be said daily for the repose of the souls of himself and of his nearest relatives. He made the furthering of the crusade to recover the Holy Sepulchre equally contingent upon the increase of his income. He also directed Diego to provide for the maintenance of Donna Beatrix Enriquez, the mother of Ferdinand, as "a person to whom I am under great obligations," and "let this be done for the discharge of my conscience, for it weighs heavy on my soul,—the reasons for which I am not here permitted to give;" and this was a behest that Diego, in his own will, acknowledges his failure to observe during the last years of the lady's life. Then, in a codicil, Columbus enumerates sundry little bequests to other persons to whom he was indebted, and whose kindness he wished to remember. He was honest enough to add that his bequests were imaginary unless his rights were acknowledged. "Hitherto I neither have had, nor have I now, any positive income." He failed to express any wish respecting the spot of his interment. The documents were committed at once to a notary, from whose archives a copy was obtained in 1524 by his son Diego, and this copy exists to-day among the family papers in the hands of the Duke of Veragua.
1506. May 20. Columbus dies.
This making of a will was almost his last act. On the next day he partook of the sacrament, and uttering, "Into thy hands, O Lord, I commit my spirit," he gasped his last. It was on the 20th of May, 1506,—by some circumstances we might rather say May 21,—in the city of Valladolid, that this singular, hopeful, despondent, melancholy life came to its end. He died at the house No. 7 Calle de Colon, which is still shown to travelers.
HOUSE WHERE COLUMBUS DIED.
[From Ruge's Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen.]
His death unnoticed.
There was a small circle of relatives and friends who mourned. The tale of his departure came like a sough of wind to a few others, who had seen no way to alleviate a misery that merited their sympathy. The King could have but found it a relief from the indiscretion of his early promises. The world at large thought no more of the mournful procession which bore that wayworn body to the grave than it did of any poor creature journeying on his bier to the potter's field.
It is hard to conceive how the fame of a man over whose acts in 1493 learned men cried for joy, and by whose deeds the adventurous spirit had been stirred in every seaport of western Europe, should have so completely passed into oblivion that a professed chronicler like Peter Martyr, busy tattler as he was, should take no notice of his illness and death. There have come down to us five long letters full of news and gossip, which Martyr wrote from Valladolid at this very time, with not a word in them of the man he had so often commemorated. Fracanzio da Montalboddo, publishing in 1507 some correction of his early voyages, had not heard of Columbus's death; nor had Madrignano in dating his Latin rendering of the same book in 1508. It was not till twenty-seven days after the death-bed scene that the briefest notice was made in passing, in an official document of the town, to the effect that "the said Admiral is dead!"
His burial.