[Footnote 212: Crit. Exam. vol. ii. p. 330; vol. iv. p. 72 and note.]
This great man thought it for his interest to keep the secret, if not of his discoveries, at least of the route he had followed. As his treaty of Santa Fé with Isabella and Ferdinand secured to him the government and a part of the fruits of the lands discovered by him, he had not cared to provoke or facilitate competition. Indeed we have two letters from Isabella, (September 5th, 1493, and August 16th, 1494,) reproaching him for leaving the degrees of latitude blank, and asking for a complete chart of the islands with their names and distances. [Footnote 213] He became still less communicative after the crown of Castile violated its engagements with him, (1495,) and when his enemy Fonseca gave up his charts to the navigator Hojeda. They had reduced him, he said, to the position of a man who opens the door for others to pass through. Silence may, then, have seemed to him a means of defending his legitimate possessions, or, at least, of diminishing the force of attacks upon his just rights.
[Footnote 213: Crit. Exam. vol. iii. p. 340. We hear of a chart given at Rome, in 1505, by Bartholemew Columbus, the admiral's brother, to a canon of St. John of Lateran, and given by him to Alessandro Zozi, author of the collection of 1507. Its fate is unknown. Crit. Exam. vol. iv. p. 80, note. This does not look like publicity.]
Besides, though his discovery anticipated by six years the arrival of the Portuguese in the East-Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, it was eclipsed by the brilliant voyages of Vasco de Gama and Alvares Cabral, followed as they were by immediate results. What were Spaniards and Portuguese in search of? The Indies, the empire of Cathay, or of China, those regions depicted by antiquity and by the travellers of the middle ages as gorged with precious metals, with pearls and diamonds, with spices and glittering tissues. Now, the Portuguese had been wafted to the very source of these treasures. In the earliest years of the sixteenth century, their fleets returned laden with spoils from kingdoms of sonorous names, rendered famous by the songs or by the ambition of the poets and conquerors of classic antiquity. All this time the Spaniards, following the steps of Christopher Columbus, were groping in the western seas among remote regions supposed by them to belong to extreme Asia, finding only savage tribes where they had looked for imposing monarchies. They had picked up a few pearls, a little gold, and some slaves, and had returned to Europe, unable to conceal from themselves the fact that their rivals of Lisbon owed more to Vasco de Gama than Castile to Christopher Columbus.
If, then, in the eyes of history, the glory of the immortal Genoese lies in having sought with a reflective and discerning boldness, and discovered more than he sought, namely, an unknown world independent of all other lands, at a time when the only aim in view was to open a western route to the "land of spices," in the beginning his voyage looked like a half successful enterprise. Was the talk of discoveries, properly speaking? What were a small number of islands compared with that southern country coasted by Americus to the fiftieth degree of south latitude without finding its termination?
The discovery of the Southern sea by Balboa at the Isthmus of Panama, (1513,) the extraordinary conquests of Mexico and Peru, the adventures of a Cortez and of a Pizarro, chilled yet more the public opinion toward him whose works, considered then so humble, had given the impetus to these prodigious enterprises.
A little while yet, and he was considered a simpleton for believing that his navigation from east to west had brought him to Asia, and for having found what he did not seek. John Beller, in reprinting at Anvers (1584) the Cosmography of Apian and Frisius, adds a description of the Indies, drawn from the Cosmography of Jerome Girava, of Tarragona. The latter, à propos of Cuba, explains that under the name of Indies are comprehended all the lands recently discovered. "This name," he says, "comes from the fact that the Genoese, Christopher Columbus, a distinguished mariner and a poor cosmographer, [Footnote 214] having obtained in 1492 the favor and aid of Ferdinand the Catholic and of Isabella to go in search of regions until then unseen and unknown, called them the Indies. After making the discovery, he returned in the same year, saying that he had found the Indies. Therefore have these lands retained the name."
[Footnote 214: Naucierus insignia ac mediocriter cosmographia peritus, p. 167, Biblioth Magazine, 15824.]
Thus did Christopher Columbus lose ground so materially in the admiration of his contemporaries that his end was obscure and almost overlooked. Peter Martyr of Anghiera, who is called his friend, but hardly seems to have merited the title, for two months and a half saw him upon the bed of pain to which the last great crisis nailed him at Valladolid. He does not speak of this illness in his letters, nor of his death which took place May 20th, 1506, short time after his own departure. His Oceanic Decades mention it incidentally several years later.[Footnote 215]
[Footnote 215: It was between the years 1510 and 1514 that Pierre Martyr thought proper to remember the great man's death.]