It was not, however, till 1480, when the successful application of the astrolabe[735] to the purposes of navigation removed from the contemplated expedition of Columbus much of its hazardous character, that he formally proposed his great voyage of discovery to the crown of Portugal. He had always felt it to be an enterprise only to be undertaken in the service of some sovereign state which could assume dominion over whatever territories he might discover, and which, with the means of conquest and colonisation at its disposal, would be also able to spread the Christian religion, a desire which seems to have been at all times present in his meditations. In this year Columbus obtained an audience with the king, and, being graciously received, revealed his plans fully to the monarch. Though the king was at the time discouraged from entering upon any new scheme of discovery, by the cost and trouble already incurred in the as yet unsuccessful exploration of the route along the African coast, he nevertheless gave a favourable consideration to the scheme of Columbus, and referred it to a learned junto, who were charged with all questions of maritime enterprise. This scientific body, however, treated the project as extravagant, an opinion confirmed by a council composed of the prelates and persons of the greatest learning in the kingdom. But the junto, though unwilling to accept the proposal of Columbus, were not slow to profit by the information he had given to them; and while pretending to afford him their best attention, despatched a vessel on their own account to test some of his views. The whole plan failed; the mariners after sailing for some days to the west of the Cape Verde Islands came back in terror at the rough weather they had experienced, and the seemingly vast extent of ocean to be sailed over; and Columbus, justly indignant at the contemptible treatment he had received, at once took his departure from such a court and country, to seek elsewhere a patron surrounded by more honest counsellors.[736]
He leaves Lisbon, A.D. 1484, and visits Spain, A.D. 1485.
Broken-hearted, friendless, and almost penniless, he left Lisbon with his son Diego, then a little boy, towards the close of 1484, and is supposed to have retraced his steps to Genoa, and thence carried his proposal to Venice. Receiving no encouragement at either of these places, he found his way to Spain, in the winter of 1485, and there had the good fortune to make friends at the ancient convent of La Rabida, situated not far from the small seaport of Palos in Andalusia.
His kind reception by the prior of the convent of La Rabida.
At the gate of this convent the discoverer of a new world stopped to ask a little bread and water for his famishing boy, and the prior, Juan Perez de Marchena, happening to pass at the time, was struck with the dignified, careworn, and poverty-stricken appearance of the stranger, and, entering into conversation with him, soon ascertained the leading incidents of his life, and the object of his visit to Spain. The prior himself, a man of extensive information, who had already paid some attention to geographical and nautical science, detained Columbus as his guest, at the same time sending for a scientific friend, Garcia Fernandez (to whom we are indebted for this account), to converse with him; and, in the end, the prior’s first impressions were in some measure confirmed by the ancient mariners of Palos, for they, too, had heard of strange and rich lands beyond the setting sun. The earnest manner of Columbus, and his extensive knowledge made, day by day, an increasing impression on the prior and his friends, till at length in the spring of 1485, when the Spanish court had reached the ancient city of Cordova with the view of prosecuting the war against the Moorish kingdom of Granada, Columbus, furnished with letters of introduction from the worthy prior, determined to lay his grand scheme before Ferdinand and Isabella.
First interview with the sovereigns of Spain.
Its result.
Nearly a year elapsed, however, before Columbus was enabled to obtain an audience with the sovereigns, and even then his troubles were not overcome. The king referred his project for consideration to a body of “learned men,” who met in the Dominican convent of St. Stephen in Salamanca; and although at this convent Columbus was hospitably entertained during the course of the inquiry, his theory was received with incredulity. Nor, indeed, was this surprising. An obscure mariner and a member of no learned institution could hardly hope to convert at once to his theory an erudite assembly, most of whom entertained the impression that he was at the best a mere visionary. “Was it likely,” exclaimed one of his learned examiners, in a burst of indignant unbelief, “that there was a part of the world where the feet of the people who inhabited it were opposite to ours; where they walk with their heels upward, and their heads hanging down; where the trees grow with their branches downward; where it rains, hails, and snows upward, and where all things are topsy-turvy?” “Even ‘admitting’ the earth to be spherical, it was only,” they said, “inhabitable in the northern hemisphere, and in that section only was canopied by the heavens, the opposite half being, in their opinion, a chaos, a gulph, or a mere waste of water.” One of their objections was indeed amusing: “Should a ship succeed in reaching,” they argued, “the extremity of India, she could never get back again, for the rotundity of the globe would present a kind of mountain, up which it would be impossible for her to sail with the most favourable wind.”[737]
The ridicule he endured.
The sound reasoning, however, of Columbus made a deep impression on the minds of some of the members of the conference (as especially on Diego De Deza, afterwards Archbishop of Seville), and the seed thus sown grew and in time prospered. In the meanwhile, however, he had much to endure. The affairs of war hurried the court from place to place, so that any question of less importance than the campaign was disregarded. His plans, too, when known, were generally scoffed at and ridiculed as the dreams of one of the wildest of schemers. The very children of the towns were taught to regard him as a visionary madman, and pointed to their foreheads as he passed them; though, amid the sufferings hope long deferred creates, he was, on the whole, generously treated by the court and his expenses paid while attending on it.