PÈRE JUAN PEREZ DE MARCHENA.
[As given by Roselly de Lorgues.]
Friar Marchena.
This friar, Juan Perez de Marchena, was at the time of the supposed visit of Columbus the prior of the convent, and being casually attracted by the scene at the gate, where the porter was refreshing the vagrant travelers, and by the foreign accent of the stranger, he entered into talk with the elder of them and learned his name. Columbus also told him that he was bound to Huelva to find the home of one Muliar, a Spaniard who had married the youngest sister of his wife. The story goes further that the friar was not uninformed in the cosmographical lore of the time, had not been unobservant of the maritime intelligence which had naturally been rife in the neighboring seaport of Palos, and had kept watch of the recent progress in geographical science. He was accordingly able to appreciate the interest which Columbus manifested in such subjects, as he unfolded his own notions of still greater discoveries which might be made at the west. Keeping the wanderer and his little child a few days, Marchena invited to the convent, to join with them in discussion, the most learned man whom the neighborhood afforded, the physician of Palos,—the very one from whose testimony our information comes. Their talks were not without reënforcements from the experiences of some of the mariners of that seaport, particularly one Pedro de Velasco, who told of manifestation of land which he had himself seen, without absolute contact, thirty years before, when his ship had been blown a long distance to the northwest of Ireland.
Columbus goes to Cordoba.
The friendship formed in the convent kept Columbus there amid congenial sympathizers, and it was not till some time in the winter of 1485-86, and when he heard that the Spanish sovereigns were at Cordoba, gathering a force to attack the Moors in Granada, that, leaving behind his boy to be instructed in the convent, Columbus started for that city. He went not without confidence and elation, as he bore a letter of credentials which the friar had given him to a friend, Fernando de Talavera, the prior of the monastery of Prado, and confessor of Queen Isabella.
Doubts about the visits to Rabida.
This story has almost always been placed in the opening of the career of Columbus in Spain. It has often in sympathizing hands pointed a moral in contrasting the abject condition of those days with the proud expectancy under which, some years later, he sailed out of the neighboring harbor of Palos, within eyeshot of the monks of Rabida. Irving, however, as he analyzed the reports of the famous trial already referred to, was quite sure that the events of two visits to Rabida had been unwittingly run into one in testimony given after so long an interval of years. It does indeed seem that we must either apply this evidence of 1513 and 1515 to a later visit, or else we must determine that there was great similarity in some of the incidents of the two visits.
The date of 1491, to which Harrisse pushes the incidents forward, depends in part on the evidence of one Rodriguez Cobezudo that in 1513 it was about twenty-two years since he had lent a mule to Juan Perez de Marchena, when he went to Santa Fé from Rabida to interpose for Columbus. The testimony of Garcia Fernandez is that this visit of Marchena took place after Columbus had once been rebuffed at court, and the words of the witness indicate that it was on that visit when Juan Perez asked Columbus who he was and whence he came; showing, perhaps, that it was the first time Perez had seen Columbus. Accordingly this, as well as the mule story, points to 1491. But that the circumstances of the visit which Garcia Fernandez recounts may have belonged to an earlier visit, in part confounded after fifteen years with a later one, may yet be not beyond a possibility. It is to be remembered that the Historie speaks of two visits, one later than that of 1484. It is not easy to see that all the testimony which Harrisse introduced to make the visit of 1491 the first and only visit of Columbus to the convent is sufficient to do more than render the case probable.
1486. Enters the service of Spain.