Part 16 (1/2)

[Sidenote: Portuguese missionaries to Egypt.]

Such knowledge, if held to be visionary, was, however, established with some certainty in men's minds before Da Gama actually effected the pa.s.sage of the Cape. This confirmation had doubtless come through some missionaries of the Portuguese king, who in 1490 sent such a positive message from Cairo.

But while the new exertions along the African coast, thus inadvertently instigated by Columbus, were making, what was becoming of his own westward scheme?

[Sidenote: The Portuguese send out an expedition to forestall Columbus.]

The story goes that it was by the advice of Cazadilla that the Portuguese king lent himself to an unworthy device. This was a project to test the views of Columbus, and profit by them without paying him his price. An outline of his intended voyage had been secured from him in the investigation already mentioned. A caravel, under pretense of a voyage to the Cape de Verde Islands, was now dispatched to search for the c.i.p.ango of Marco Polo, in the position which Columbus had given it in his chart. The mercenary craft started out, and buffeted with head seas and angry winds long enough to emasculate what little courage the crew possessed. Without the prop of conviction they deserted their purpose and returned. Once in port, they began to berate the Genoese for his foolhardy scheme. In this way they sought to vindicate their own timidity. This disclosed to Columbus the trick which had been played upon him. Such is the story as the _Historie_ tells it, and which has been adopted by Herrera and others.

[Sidenote: Columbus leaves Portugal, 1484.]

At this point there is too much uncertainty respecting the movements of Columbus for even his credulous biographers to fill out the tale. It seems to be agreed that in the latter part of 1484 he left Portugal with a secrecy which was supposed to be necessary to escape the vigilance of the government spies. There is beside some reason for believing that it was also well for him to shun arrest for debts, which had been incurred in the distractions of his affairs.

[Sidenote: Supposed visit of Columbus to Genoa.]

There is no other authority than Ramusio for believing with Munoz that Columbus had already laid his project before the government of Genoa by letter, and that he now went to reenforce it in person. That power was sorely pressed with misfortunes at this time, and is said to have declined to entertain his proposals. It may be the applicant was dismissed contemptuously, as is sometimes said. It is not, however, as Harrisse has pointed out, till we come down to Ca.s.soni, in his _Annals of Genoa_, published in 1708, that we find a single Genoese authority crediting the story of this visit to Genoa. Harrisse, with his skeptical tendency, does not believe the statement.

[Sidenote: Supposed visit to Venice.]

Eagerness to fill the gaps in his itinerary has sometimes induced the supposition that Columbus made an equally unsuccessful offer to Venice; but the statement is not found except in modern writers, with no other citations to sustain it than the recollections of some one who had seen at some time in the archives a memorial to this effect made by Columbus.

Some writers make him at this time also visit his father and provide for his comfort,--a belief not altogether consonant with the supposition of Columbus's escape from Portugal as a debtor.

[Sidenote: The death of his wife.]

[Sidenote: Shown to be uncertain.]

Irving and the biographers in general find in the death of Columbus's wife a severing of the ties which bound him to Portugal; but if there is any truth in the tumultuous letter which Columbus wrote to Dona Juana de la Torre in 1500, he left behind him in Portugal, when he fled into Spain, a wife and children. If there is the necessary veracity in the _Historie_, this wife had died before he abandoned the country. That he had other children at this time than Diego is only known through this sad, ejaculatory epistle. If he left a wife in Portugal, as his own words aver, Harrisse seems justified in saying that he deserted her, and in the same letter Columbus himself says that he never saw her again.

[Sidenote: Convent of Rabida.]

Ever since a physician of Palos, Garcia Fernandez, gave his testimony in the lawsuit through which, after Columbus's death, his son defended his t.i.tles against the Crown, the picturesque story of the convent of Rabida, and the appearance at its gate of a forlorn traveler accompanied by a little boy, and the supplication for bread and water for the child, has stood in the lives of Columbus as the opening scene of his career in Spain.

This Franciscan convent, dedicated to Santa Maria de Rabida, stood on a height within sight of the sea, very near the town of Palos, and after having fallen into a ruin it was restored by the Duke of Montpensier in 1855. A recent traveler has found this restoration ”modernized, whitewashed, and forlorn,” while the refurnis.h.i.+ng of the interior is described as ”paltry and vulgar,” even in the cell of its friar, where the visitor now finds a portrait of Columbus and pictures of scenes in his career.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PeRE JUAN PEREZ DE MARCHENA.

[As given by Roselly de Lorgues.]]

[Sidenote: 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 refres.h.i.+ng 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 un.o.bservant 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 reenforcements 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 s.h.i.+p had been blown a long distance to the northwest of Ireland.

[Sidenote: Columbus goes to Cordoba.]

The friends.h.i.+p 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.

[Sidenote: 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 a.n.a.lyzed 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.