Justin Winsor

“ Cadamosto and Cabot, the Venetians, Columbus, the Genoese, Vespucius and Verrazano, the Florentines, are, on the whole, the most important of the great captains of discovery in this virgin age of maritime exploration through the dark waters of the Atlantic; and yet Spain and Portugal, France and England, were those who profited by their genius and labors.
It is a singular fact that, during the years which Columbus spent in Portugal, there is not a single act of his life that can be credited with an exact date, and few can be placed beyond cavil by undisputed documentary evidence. ”

“ This fact gives us the right to judge the infirmities of man in any age from the high vantage-ground of the best emotions of all the centuries. In the application of such perennial justice Columbus must inevitably suffer. The degradation of the times ceases to be an excuse when the man to be judged stands on the pinnacle of the ages. The biographer cannot forget, indeed, that Columbus is a portrait set in the surroundings of his times; but it is equally his duty at the same time to judge the paths which he trod by the scale of an eternal nobleness. ”

“ Many a twin movement of the world's groping spirit thus seeks the light. Progress naturally pushes on parallel lines. Commerce thrusts her intercourse to remotest regions, while the Church yearns for new souls to convert, and peers longingly into the dim spaces that skirt the world's geography. Navigators improve their methods, and learned men in the arts supply them with exacter instruments. The widespread manifestations of all this new life at last crystallize, and Gama and Columbus appear, the reflex of every development. ”

“ He joined with the pluck of his half-English blood—for he was the grandson of John of Gaunt—a training for endurance derived in his country's prolonged contests with the Moor. He was the staple and lofty exemplar of this great age of discovery. He was more so than Columbus, and rendered the adventitious career of the Genoese possible. He knew how to manage men, and stuck devotedly to his work. He respected his helpers too much to drug them with deceit, and there is a straightforward honesty of purpose in his endeavors. He was a trainer of men, and they grew courageous under his instruction. ”

“ No unclothed natives dared to come within range of the Spanish crossbows and arquebuses. Ojeda met every artful and stealthy approach by a sally that dropped the bravest of Caonabo's warriors.
The cacique next tried to starve the Spaniards out. His parties infested every path, and if a foraging force came out, or one of succor endeavored to get in, multitudes of the natives foiled the endeavor. Famine was impending in the fort. The procrastinations of the arts of beleaguering always help the white man behind his ramparts, when the savage is his enemy. ”

“ Some of the younger cavaliers sprang to the front, and gathering around them woodmen and pioneers, they opened the way; and thus a road was constructed through the pass, the first made in the New World. This work of the proud cavaliers was called El puerto de los Hidalgos. The summit of the mountain afforded afresh the grateful view of the luxuriant valley which had delighted Ojeda,—royally rich as it was in every aspect, and deserving the name which Columbus now gave it of the Vega Real. ”

“ The mines which Columbus went to seek were hard to find. The people he went to save to Christ were easy to exterminate. He mourned bitterly that his own efforts were ill requited. He had no pity for the misery of others, except they be his dependents and co-sharers of his purposes. He found a policy worth commemorating in slitting the noses and tearing off the ears of a naked heathen. He vindicates his excess by impressing upon the world that a man setting out to conquer the Indies must not be judged by the amenities of life which belong to a quiet rule in established countries. ”

“ There is nothing more striking in the history of American discovery than the fact that the Italian people furnished to Spain Columbus, to England Cabot, and to France Verrazano; and that the three leading powers of Europe, following as maritime explorers in the lead of Portugal, who could not dispense with Vespucius, another Italian, pushed their rights through men whom they had borrowed from the central region of the Mediterranean, while Italy in its own name never possessed a rood of American soil. ”

“ During this absence from the known and habitable regions of the globe, that orb was thought to sweep over the ominous and foreboding Sea of Darkness. No one could tell how wide that sea was. The learned disagreed in their estimates. A conception, far under the actual condition, had played no small part in making the voyage of Columbus possible. Men possessed legends of its mysteries. Fables of its many islands were repeated; but no one then living was credibly thought to have tested its glooms except by sailing a little beyond the outermost of the Azores. ”

“ They did not see nor did they hear anything of the great Caonabo. Every stream they passed glittered with particles of gold in its sand. The natives had an expert way of separating the metal, and the Spaniards flattered them for their skill. Occasionally a nugget was found. Ojeda picked up a lump which weighed nine ounces, and Peter Martyr looked upon it wonderingly when it reached Spain. If all this was found on the surface, what must be the wealth in the bowels of these astounding mountains? The obvious answer was what Ojeda hastened back to make to Columbus. ”

“ Life in Isabella had made many of them painfully conscious of the lack of that success and comfort which had been counted upon. The failure of what in these later days is known as the commissariat was not surprising. With all our modern experience in fitting out great expeditions, we know how often the fate of such enterprises is put in jeopardy by rascally contractors. Their arts, however, are not new ones. Fonseca was not so wary, Columbus was not so exacting, that such arts could not be practiced in Seville, as to-day in London and New York. ”

“ A venerable Indian, who watched all the ceremonials with close attention, divining their religious nature, made known to the Admiral, through the Lucayan interpreter, something of the sustaining belief of his own people, in words that were impressive. Columbus's confidence in the incapacity of the native mind for such high conceptions as this poor Indian manifested received a grateful shock when the old man, grave in his manner and unconscious in his dignity, pictured the opposite rewards of the good and bad in another world. ”

“ Columbus had been dead ten years when Jovius, as a historian, attracted the notice of Pope Leo X., and entered upon such a career of prosperity that he could build a villa on Lake Como, and adorn it with a gallery of portraits of those who had made his age famous. That he included a likeness of Columbus among his heroes there seems to be no doubt. Whether the likeness was painted from life, and by whom, or modeled after an ideal, more or less accordant with the reports of those who may have known the Genoese, is entirely beyond our knowledge. ”

“ The unknown, however, is always a terror. Going north from temperate Europe increased the cold, going south augmented the heat; and it was no bold thought for the naturalist to conclude that a north existed in which the cold was unbearable, and a south in which the heat was too great for life. Views like these stayed the impulse for exploration even down to the century of Columbus, and magnified the horrors which so long balked the exploration of the Portuguese on the African coast. There had been intervals, however, when men in the Indian Ocean had dared to pass the equator. ”

“ Thus a name that in the beginning was given to a part in distinction merely and without any reference to the entire field of the new explorations, was now become, by implication, an injustice to the great first discoverer of all. The mischief, aided by accident and by a not unaccountable [Pg 623] evolution, was not to be undone, and, in the singular mutations of fate, a people inhabiting a region of which neither Columbus nor Vespucius had any conception are now distinctively known in the world's history as Americans. ”

“ To sail into the supposed burning zone beyond Cape Bojador, and to face the destruction of life which was believed to be inevitable, required a courage quite as conspicuous as to cleave the floating verdure of the Sargasso Sea, on a western passage. It must be confessed that he shared with Columbus those proclivities which in the instigators of African slavery so easily slipped into cruelty. They each believed there was a merit, if a heathen's soul be at stake, in not letting commiseration get the better of piety. ”

“ It was the 27th of March, 1495, when Columbus, at the head of this little army, marched forth from Isabella, to confront a force of the natives, which, if we choose to believe the figures that are given by Las Casas, amounted to 100,000 men, massed under the command of Manicaotex. The whites climbed the Pass of the Hidalgos, where Columbus had opened the way the year before, and descended into that lovely valley, no longer a hospitable paradise. ”

“ Columbus felt that the New World was throwing wider open the gates of its sublime secrets. Lying on his couch, almost helpless from the cruel agonies of the gout, and sightless from the malady of his eyes, the active mind of the Admiral worked at the old problems anew. We know it all from the letter which a few weeks later he drafted for the perusal of his sovereigns, and from his reports to Peter Martyr, which that chronicler has preserved for us. ”

“ Harrisse points out that Columbus, in his time, acquired such a popular reputation for prolixity that a court fool of Charles the Fifth linked the discoverer of the Indies with Ptolemy as twins in the art of blotting. He wrote as easily as people of rapid impulses usually do, when they are not restrained by habits of orderly deliberation. He has left us a mass of jumbled thoughts and experiences, which, unfortunately, often perplex the historian, while they of necessity aid him. ”

“ Italy, seeing her maritime power drop away as the naval supremacy of the Atlantic seaboard rose, was forced to send her experienced navigators to the oceanic ports, to maintain the supremacy of her name and genius in Cadamosto, Columbus, Vespucius, Cabot, and Verrazano. Those cosmographical views which had come down the ages, at times obscured, then for a while patent, and of which the traces had lurked in the minds of learned men by an almost continuous sequence for many centuries, at last possessed by inheritance the mind of Columbus. ”

“ The long sway of the Moors was disintegrating. The Arab domination in science and seamanship was yielding to the Western genius. The Turks had in the boyhood (1453) of Columbus consummated their last great triumph in the capture of Constantinople, thus placing a barrier to Christian commerce with the East. This conquest drove out the learned Christians of the East, who had drunk of the Arab erudition, and they fled with their stores of learning to the western lands, coming back to the heirs of the Romans with the spirit which Rome in the past had sent to the East. ”

“ The degradation of such a man appeals more forcibly to human sympathy than almost any other event in the record of humanity. That sympathy has obscured the import of his degradation, and that mournful explanation of the events, which, either on his voyage or shortly after his return, Columbus wrote and sent to the nurse of Prince Juan, has long worked upon the sensibilities of a world tender for his misfortunes. ”

“ Columbus now sought to engage the attention of some of the powerful grandees of Spain, who, though subjects, were almost autocratic in their own regions, serving the Crown not so much as vassals as sympathetic helpers in its wars. They were depended upon to recruit the armies from their own trains and dependents; money came from their chests, provisions from their estates, and ships from their own marine; their landed patrimonies, indeed, covered long stretches of the coast, whose harbors sheltered their considerable navies. Such were the dukes of Medina-Sidonia and Medina-Celi. ”

“ We have seen that within thirty years from the death of Columbus the outline of South America was defined, while it had taken nearly two centuries and a quarter to free the coast lines of the New World from an entanglement in men's minds with the outlines of eastern Asia, and another century and a quarter were required to complete the arctic contour of America, so that the New World at last should stand a wholly revealed and separate continent. ”

“ There is no person connected with the career of Columbus—hardly excepting Fonseca—more generally defamed than this man, who was, nevertheless, if we may believe Oviedo, a very honest and a very religious man. The historians of Columbus need to mete out to Bobadilla what very few have done, the same measure of palliation which they are more willing to bestow on Columbus. With this parallel justice, it may be that he will not bear with discredit a comparison with Columbus himself, in all that makes a man's actions excusable under provocation and responsibility. ”

“ Bristol had nurtured for some years a race of hardy seamen. They had risked the dangers of the great unknown ocean in efforts to find the fabulous island of Brazil, and they had pushed adventurously westward at times, but always to return without success. The intercourse of England with the northern nations and with Iceland may have given them tidings of Greenland; but there is no reason to believe that they ever supposed that country to be other than an extended peninsula of Europe, enfolding the North Atlantic. ”

“ Nothing of protest or appeal came opportunely to the determined King. "The more he was petitioned," says Las Casas, "the more bland he was in avoiding any conclusion." He hoped by exhausting the patience of the Admiral to induce him to accept some estates in Castile in lieu of such powers in the Indies. Columbus rejected all such intimations with indignation. He would have nothing but his bonded rights. "I have done all that I can do," he said in a pitiful, despairing letter to Deza. "I must leave the issue to God. He has always sustained me in extremities." ”

“ Not far from the time when our vigorous young Genoese wool-comber may be supposed to have embarked on some of these venturesome exploits of the great inland sea, there might have come jumping from port to port, westerly along the Mediterranean shores, the story of the death of that great maritime spirit of Portugal, Prince Henry, the Navigator, and of the latest feats of his captains in the great ocean of the west. ”

“ When, at the very outset of the negotiations, Talavera found this uplifted suitor making demands that belonged rather to proved success than to a contingent one, there was little prospect of accommodation, unless one side or the other should abandon its position. If Columbus's own words count for anything, he was conscious of being a laughing-stock, while he was making claims for office and emoluments that would mortgage the power of a kingdom. ”

“ He thought, in making an agreement with his sovereigns to become a viceroy, that he was securing an honor; he was in truth pledging his happiness and beggaring his life. He sought to attain that which the fates had unfitted him for, and the Spanish monarchs, in an evil day, which was in due time their regret, submitted to his hallucinated dictation. No man ever evinced less capacity for ruling a colony. ”

“ It is a natural movement of the mind to wrap the absent in the gloom of the present hour; and while Columbus had been passing along the gentle waters of the new archipelago, his actual experiences had been in strange contrast to the turmoil of the sea as it washed the European shores. He had indeed suffered on his return voyage the full tumultuousness of the elements, and we can hardly fail to recognize the disquiet of mind and falling of heart which those savage gales [Pg 244] must have given to the kin and friends of the untraceable wanderers. ”

“ Columbus sent a brave fellow, Diego Mendez, to see what he could learn. He found a force of savages advancing to the attack; but this single Spaniard disconcerted them, and they put off the plan. Again, with but a single companion, one Rodrigo de Escobar, Mendez boldly went into the Quibian's village, and came back alive to tell the Admiral of all the preparations for war which he had seen, or which were inferred at least. The news excited the quick spirits of the Adelantado, and, following a plan of Mendez, he at once started (March 30) with an armed force. ”

“ The sternness of winter caught his little barks in a harbor near 50° south latitude, and his Spanish crews, restless under the command of a Portuguese, revolted. The rebels were soon more numerous than the faithful. The position was more threatening than any Columbus had encountered, but the Portuguese had a hardy courage and majesty of command that the Genoese never could summon. Magellan confronted the rebels so boldly that they soon quailed. He was in unquestioned command of his own vessels from that time forward. ”

“ Hardly a name in profane history is more august than his. Hardly another character in the world's record has made so little of its opportunities. His discovery was a blunder; his blunder was a new world; the New World is his monument! ”