Part 28 (1/2)

[Sidenote: 1493. May 20. Receives a coat of arms.]

We find the sovereigns bestowing upon him, on the 20th of May, a coat of arms, which shows a castle and a lion in the upper quarters, and in those below, a group of golden islands in a sea of waves, on the one hand, and the arms to which his family had been ent.i.tled, on the other.

Humboldt speaks of this archipelago as the first map of America, but he apparently knew only Oviedo's description of the arms, for the latter places the islands in a gulf formed by a mainland, and in this fas.h.i.+on they are grouped in a blazon of the arms which is preserved at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at Paris--a duplicate being at Genoa.

Harrisse says that this design is the original water-color, made under Columbus's eye in 1502. In this picture,--which is the earliest blazonry which has come down to us,--the other lower quarter has the five golden anchors on a blue ground, which it is claimed was adjudged to Columbus as the distinctive badge of an Admiral of Spain. The personal arms are relegated to a minor overlying s.h.i.+eld at the lower point of the escutcheon. Oviedo also says that trees and other objects should be figured on the mainland.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE ARMS OF COLUMBUS.

[From Oviedo's _Cosmica_.]]

The lion and castle of the original grant were simply reminders of the arms of Leon and Castile; but Columbus seems, of his own motion, so far as Harrisse can discover, to have changed the blazonry of those objects in the drawing of 1502 to agree with those of the royal arms. It was by the same arrogant license, apparently, that he introduced later the continental sh.o.r.e of the archipelago; and Harrisse can find no record that the anchors were ever by any authority added to his blazon, nor that the professed family arms, borne in connection, had any warrant whatever.

The earliest engraved copy of the arms is in the _Historia General_ of Oviedo in 1535, where a profile helmet supports a crest made of a globe topped by a cross. In Oviedo's _Coronica_ of 1547, the helmet is shown in front view. There seems to have been some wide discrepancies in the heraldic excursions of these early writers. Las Casas, for instance, puts the golden lion in a silver field,--when heraldry abhors a conjunction of metals, as much as nature abhors a vacuum. The discussion of the family arms which were added by Columbus to the escutcheon made a significant part of the arguments in the suit, many years later, of Balda.s.sare (Balthazar) Colombo to possess the Admiral's dignities; and as Harrisse points out, the emblem of those Italian Colombos of any pretensions to n.o.bility was invariably a dove of some kind,--a device quite distinct from those designated by Columbus. This a.s.sumption of family arms by Columbus is held by Harrisse to be simply a concession to the prejudices of his period, and to the exigencies of his new position.

The arms have been changed under the dukes of Veragua to show silver-capped waves in the sea, while a globe surmounted by a cross is placed in the midst of a gulf containing only five islands.

[Sidenote: His alleged motto.]

There is another later accompaniment of the arms, of which the origin has escaped all search. It is far more familiar than the escutcheon, on which it plays the part of a motto. It sometimes represents that Columbus found for the allied crowns a new world, and at other times that he gave one to them.

Por Castilla e por Leon Nuevo Mundo hallo Colon.

A Castilla, y a Leon Nuevo Mundo dio Colon.

Oviedo is the earliest to mention this distich in 1535. It is given in the _Historie_, not as a motto of the arms, but as an inscription placed by the king on the tomb of Columbus some years after his death. If this is true, it does away with the claims of Gomara that Columbus himself added it to his arms.

[Sidenote: Diplomacy of the Bull of Demarcation.]

But diplomacy had its part to play in these events. As the Christian world at that time recognized the rights of the Holy Father to confirm any trespa.s.s on the possessions of the heathen, there was a prompt effort on the part of Ferdinand to bring the matter to the attention of the Pope. As early as 1438, bulls of Martin V. and Eugene IV. had permitted the Spaniards to sail west and the Portuguese south; and a confirmation of the same had been made by Pope Nicholas the Fifth. In 1479, the rival crowns of Portugal and Spain had agreed to respect their mutual rights under these papal decisions.

The messengers whom Ferdinand sent to Rome were instructed to intimate that the actual possession which had been made in their behalf of these new regions did not require papal sanction, as they had met there no Christian occupants; but that as dutiful children of the church it would be grateful to receive such a benediction on their energies for the faith as a confirmatory bull would imply. Ferdinand had too much of wiliness in his own nature, and the practice of it was too much a part of the epoch, wholly to trust a man so notoriously perverse and obstinate as Alexander VI. was. Though Munoz calls Alexander the friend of Ferdinand, and though the Pope was by birth an Aragonese, experience had shown that there was no certainty of his support in a matter affecting the interest of Spain.

[Sidenote: 1493. May 3. The Bull issued.]

A folio printed leaf in Gothic characters, of which the single copy sold in London in 1854 is said to be the only one known to bibliographers, made public to the world the famous Bull of Demarcation of Alexander VI., bearing date May 3, 1493. If one would believe Hakluyt, the Pope had been induced to do this act by his own option, rather than at the intercession of the Spanish monarchs. Under it, and a second bull of the day following, Spain was ent.i.tled to possess, ”on condition of planting the Catholic faith,” all lands not already occupied by Christian powers, west of a meridian drawn one hundred leagues west of the Azores and Cape de Verde Islands, evidently on the supposition that these two groups were in the same longitude, the fact being that the most westerly of the southern, and the most easterly of the northern, group possessed nearly the same meridian. Though Portugal was not mentioned in describing this line, it was understood that there was reserved to her the same privilege easterly.

[Ill.u.s.tration: POPE ALEXANDER VI.

[A bust in the Berlin Museum.]]

There was not as yet any consideration given to the division which this great circle meridian was likely to make on the other side of the globe, where Portugal was yet to be most interested. The Cape of Good Hope had not then been doubled, and the present effect of the division was to confine the Portuguese to an exploration of the western African coast and to adjacent islands. It will be observed that in the placing of this line the magnetic phenomena which Columbus had observed on his recent voyage were not forgotten, if the coincidence can be so interpreted.

Humboldt suggests that it can.

[Sidenote: Line of no variation.]

To make a physical limit serve a political one was an obvious recourse at a time when the line of no variation was thought to be unique and of a true north and south direction; but within a century the observers found three other lines, as Acosta tells us in his _Historia Natural de las Indias_, in 1589; and there proved to be a persistent migration of these lines, all little suited to terrestrial demarcations. Roselly de Lorgues and the canonizers, however, having given to Columbus the planning of the line in his cell at Rabida, think, with a surprising prescience on his part, and with a very convenient obliviousness on their part, that he had chosen ”precisely the only point of our planet which science would choose in our day,--a mysterious demarcation made by its omnipotent Creator,” in sovereign disregard, unfortunately, of the laws of his own universe!

[Sidenote: Suspicious movements in Portugal.]