Aware that many of the most worthless settlers desired to return home, he issued, on the 12th of September, a proclamation, offering free passage and provisions for the voyage to all who wished to return to Spain, hoping thus to relieve the colony of the idle and disaffected, and to weaken the power of the leaders of revolt, until he could carry into effect the necessary measures for their entire discomfiture and subjection. A large portion of the more lawless of the early colonists accepted the offer; and having sent full advices to his sovereigns, by the vessels in which they sailed on the 18th October, of what was going on in the island, Columbus entered into arrangements which he hoped would tend to restore order before he himself returned to Spain. Having been enabled to settle matters somewhat to his own satisfaction at Dominica, he left his brother, Don Diego, in temporary command of that place, and joined Bartholomew on a tour to visit the various stations, and to restore, if possible, order throughout the whole of the island.
Makes a tour of inspection
The tour of inspection and restoration required much more time than Columbus had anticipated. Everything had fallen into confusion during the late troubles. Farms lay neglected, mines were abandoned, the flocks and herds were scattered or destroyed, the caciques had ceased to pay their tribute, and the natives no longer cultivated their allotted tracts of land. In the midst of these perplexities, and while making herculean exertions to restore order, Columbus received a reply from Spain to his communication, which, though furnishing him with increased power, coldly stated that another investigation would shortly be made into the state of affairs. He was greatly troubled in mind by its tone, naturally feeling that his complaints had little weight with the government, and that the misrepresentations of his enemies were prejudicing him with his sovereigns; nevertheless, his zeal for their cause never flagged, and his labour to restore order was incessant. At length he triumphed; faction was subdued; the Spaniards renewed their labour on the land; the fields which had lain waste were again cultivated; and the natives, like their employers, seeing the folly of resistance, and the loss they themselves sustained by it, submitted patiently to the terms which Columbus had laid down and eventually enforced.
but is arrested, and sent a prisoner to Spain.
But all these reforms had been brought about by a course which had greatly increased the number of his enemies. Every worthless fellow whom he had sent home or punished became his implacable foe and intrigued for his downfall; and too many of them had influence at court, which, in the absence of Columbus, produced its effect. At last he was superseded; and, to the disgrace of Ferdinand and Isabella, who lent too ready an ear to the calumnious reports spread against him, this great and good man was arrested, and he and his two brothers sent in chains back to the country to which he had given a new and a now mighty world.
Arrives at Cadiz, Nov. 1500.
Thus humiliated, Christopher Columbus landed at Cadiz towards the close of the year 1500. The fact of the ignominy to which he had been subjected spoke with the voice of thunder to the feelings of the people. They neither cared for nor inquired into the cause of his great humiliation. It was sufficient for them to know that this noble-minded man had been brought home in chains from the world he had discovered, and the sensation thus produced was almost as great as the reception which had awaited him on his triumphant return from the first discovery of America, in March 1493.
His own feelings of the wrongs he had sustained at the hands of his worthless enemies are nowhere so well described as in the letter he addressed, immediately on his return to Spain, to a lady who was in immediate attendance on the queen, and stood high in her favour.[765] “I have now reached that point,” he remarks, “that there is no man so vile but thinks it his right to insult me. The day will come when the world will reckon it a virtue to him who has not given his consent to their abuse. If I had plundered the Indies, even to the country where is the fabled altar of St. Peter’s, and had given them all to the Moors, they could not have shown towards me more bitter enmity than they have done in Spain. Who would believe such things of a country where there has always been so much nobility? I should much like to clear myself of this affair, if only it were consistent with etiquette to do so, face to face with my queen.... The slanders of worthless men,” he continues, “have done me more injury than all my services have profited me.... I have had so strange a character given to me that if I were to build hospitals and churches, they would call them caves for robbers.”
And is restored to the royal favour.
This letter, combined with other representations of the real facts of the case, and with the unmistakeable expression of public opinion, made a great impression on the mind of Isabella, and had at once the effect of relieving Columbus and his brothers from their ignoble imprisonment. He was invited to the court, then at Grenada, where he appeared on the 17th of December, not in a prison dress, and in the degraded position in which he had landed at Cadiz, but in rich attire, and attended by an honourable retinue. When the Queen saw the venerable navigator approach, she was moved to tears at sufferings to which she and Ferdinand had been the unwilling or unknowing parties—in so far that they had superseded him and given to his successor power to inflict grievous wrong on one of the noblest of men. When the brave old seaman saw how his queen was affected, his spirit, which had endured with lofty scorn the injuries and insults of ignoble men, gave way; he threw himself upon his knees, and wept like a child. His sovereigns had found that he was still as worthy as ever of their confidence, and that thought was a sufficient solace for all he had suffered. Columbus was soon reinstated in all his privileges and dignities, and those who had injured him were degraded and disgraced. Everything was done which it was in the power of Isabella to do, to vindicate herself to the world from the charge of ingratitude towards the great navigator.