Part 58 (1/2)

[Sidenote: His enforced oath at Cuba.]

A second instance of Columbus's luckless impotence, at a time when an honorable man would have relied upon his character, was the attempt to make it appear that he had reached the coast of Asia by imposing an oath on his men to that effect, in penalty of having their tongues wrenched out if they recanted. One can hardly conceive a more debasing exercise of power.

[Sidenote: His ambition of territorial power.]

His insistence upon territorial power was the serious mistake of his life. 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.

[Sidenote: His professed inspiration.]

The most sorrowful of all the phases of Columbus's character is that hapless collapse, when he abandoned all faith in the natural world, and his premonitions of it, and threw himself headlong into the vortex of what he called inspiration.

Everything in his scientific argument had been logical. It produced the reliance which comes of wisdom. It was a manly show of an incisive reason. If he had rested here his claims for honor, he would have ranked with the great seers of the universe, with Copernicus and the rest. His successful suit with the Spanish sovereigns turned his head, and his degradation began when he debased a n.o.ble purpose to the level of mercenary claims. He relied, during his first voyage, more on chicanery in controlling his crew than upon the dignity of his aim and the natural command inherent in a lofty spirit. This deceit was the beginning of his decadence, which ended in a sad self-aggrandizement, when he felt himself no longer an instrument of intuition to probe the secrets of the earth, but a possessor of miraculous inspiration. The man who had been self-contained became a thrall to a fevered hallucination.

The earnest mental study which had sustained his inquisitive spirit through long years of dealings with the great physical problems of the earth was forgotten. He hopelessly began to accredit to Divinity the measure of his own fallibility. ”G.o.d made me,” he says, ”the messenger of the new heaven and the new earth, of which He spoke in the Apocalypse by St. John, after having spoken of it by the mouth of Isaiah, and He showed me the spot where to find it.” He no longer thought it the views of Aristotle which guided him. The Greek might be pardoned for his ignorance of the intervening America. It was mere sacrilege to impute such ignorance to the Divine wisdom.

[Sidenote: Lost his friends.]

There is no excuse but the plea of insanity. He naturally lost his friends with losing his manly devotion to a cause. I do not find the beginning of this surrender of his manhood earlier than in the will which he signed February 22, 1498, when he credits the Holy Trinity with having inspired him with the idea that one could go to the Indies by pa.s.sing westward.

In his letter to the nurse of Don Juan, he says that the prophecy of Isaiah in the Apocalypse had found its interpreter in him, the messenger to disclose a new part of the world. ”Human reason,” he wrote in the _Proficias_, ”mathematics, and maps have served me in no wise. What I have accomplished is simply the fulfillment of the prophecy of David.”

[Sidenote: His pitiable death.]

We have seen a pitiable man meet a pitiable death. 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! Its discoverer might have been its father; he proved to be its despoiler. He might have given its young days such a benignity as the world likes to a.s.sociate with a maker; he left it a legacy of devastation and crime. He might have been an unselfish promoter of geographical science; he proved a rabid seeker for gold and a viceroyalty. He might have won converts to the fold of Christ by the kindness of his spirit; he gained the execrations of the good angels. He might, like Las Casas, have rebuked the fiendishness of his contemporaries; he set them an example of perverted belief. The triumph of Barcelona led down to the ignominy of Valladolid, with every step in the degradation palpable and resultant.

CHAPTER XXI.

THE DESCENT OF COLUMBUS'S HONORS.

[Sidenote: His kinsfolk.]

Columbus had left behind him, as the natural guardians of his name and honors, the following relatives: his brother Bartholomew, who in December, 1508, had issue of an illegitimate daughter, his only child so far as known; his brother Diego, who, as a priest, was precluded from having lawful issue; his son Diego, now become the first inheritor of his honors; his natural son, Ferdinand, the most considerable in intellectual habit of all Columbus's immediate kin.

[Sidenote: His son Diego.]

The descent of his t.i.tles depended in the first instance on such a marriage as Diego might contract. Within a year or two Diego had had by different women two b.a.s.t.a.r.d children, Francisco and Cristoval, shut off from heirs.h.i.+p by the manner of their birth. Diego was at this time not far from four and twenty years of age.

Ten or twelve days after Diego succeeded to his inheritance, Philip the Handsome, now sharing the throne of Castile as husband of Juana, daughter of Isabella, ordered that what was due to Columbus should be paid to his successor. This order reached Espanola in June, 1506, but was not obeyed promptly; and when Ferdinand of Aragon returned from Italy in August, 1507, and succeeded to the Castilian throne, he repeated the order on August 24.

[Sidenote: Diego's income.]

[Sidenote: Diego presses for a rest.i.tution of Columbus's honors.]

It would seem that in due time Diego was in receipt of 450,000 ounces of gold annually from the four foundries in Espanola. This, with whatever else there may have been, was by no means satisfactory to the young aspirant, and he began to press Ferdinand for a rest.i.tution of his inherited honors and powers with all the pertinacity which had characterized his father's urgency.

[Sidenote: 1508. Suit against the Crown.]

Upon the return of Ferdinand from Naples, Diego determined to push the matter to an issue, but Ferdinand still evaded it. Diego now asked, according to Las Casas and Herrera, to be allowed to bring a suit against the Crown before the Council of the Indies, and the King yielded to the request, confident, very likely, in his ability to control the verdict in the public interests. The suit at once began (1508), and continued for several years before all was accomplished, and in December of that same year (1508), we find Diego empowering an attorney of the Duke of Alva to represent his case.

The defense of the Crown was that a transmission of the viceroyalty to the Admiral's son was against public policy, and at variance with a law of 1480, which forbade any judicial office under the Crown being held in perpetuity. It was further argued in the Crown's behalf that Columbus had not been the chief instrument of the first discovery and had not discovered the mainland, but that other voyagers had antic.i.p.ated him. In response to all allegations, Diego rested his case on the contracts of the Crown with his father, which a.s.sured him the powers he asked for.