RESENTMENT OF THE SPANIARDS.

117

Such of these disappointed men as lived to return filled the kingdom with their clamors. Seating themselves in the very courts of the Alhambra, holding up the grapes of which they eat, and displaying the rags which hardly covered them, they would declare that they were reduced to this poor condition by their misfortunes. They had listened to fables and been deceived by lies. When the king came forth they surrounded him, reproaching him and the admiral as the cause of their wretched state, and cried out, "Pay! pay!" And if the sons of Columbus, who were pages to the queen, passed that way, "They shouted to the very heavens, saying, Look at the sons of the Admiral of Mosquitoland, of that man who has discovered the lands of deceit and disappointment, a place of sepulchre and wretchedness to Spanish hidalgos." 1

This reaction in feeling and opinion made it possible to send him home in chains from his third expedition. The popular in- His failure difference to the injustice and cruelty which pursued him to and disgrace. the end of his days, and the bitter hostility of his many enemies, are explicable only by the disappointment of those magnificent hopes excited by his first discovery, and which he still held out in spite of the stern facts which had opened the eyes of everybody else. Small deference was paid to the authority of one who was looked upon, at best, as a half-crazed enthusiast, and the haughty Spaniards resented it as an insult that any power should still rest in the hands, or any confidence be placed in the word, of one whom they thought rather deserving of punishment as an impostor than of reward as a benefactor. He had promised power, dominion, riches; a short passage to Cathay; the conquest of the East: a savage island or two in the Western seas was as yet the only fulfilment of that promise. What else it was to be he never knew. Not till he was dead did the world begin to understand that he had found a New World.

1 The History of the Life and Actions of Admiral Christopher Colon, etc. By his son, Don Ferdinand Colon.

CHAPTER VI.

COLUMBUS, VESPUCCI, AND THE CABOTS.

THIRD VOYAGE OF COLUMBUS. — HIS DISCOVERY OF THE MAIN LAND. THE VOYAGE OF AMERIGO VESPUCCI.- FIRST PRINTED ACCOUNT OF THE NEW WORLD. — PUBLICATIONS OF ST. DIE COLLEGE. THE PRINTER-MONKS, WALDSEEMÜLLER AND RINGMANN. - EXPEDITION OF THE CABOTS FROM ENGLAND. - NORTH AMERICA DISCOVERED. MAP OF SEBASTIAN CABOT.-JOHN CABOT'S PATENTS FROM HENRY VII.FIRST ENGLISH COLONY SENT TO THE NEW WORLD. · SEBASTIAN CABOT SAILS DOWN THE AMERICAN COAST.

On the 30th of May, 1498, Columbus sailed from the port of San Lucar, in Spain, on his third voyage. His special purpose this time was to search for a country which he believed lay south of those lands he had previously discovered. On the 31st of July following, when he was about to abandon his southerly course in despair and turn northward for the Carribee Islands, one of his sailors saw from the masthead a range of three mountains. Giving many thanks to God for his mercy, for the supply of water was failing, the provision of corn and wine and meat was well-nigh exhausted, and the crews of the three vessels were in sore distress from exposure to the heat of the tropics, the admiral made for the land, which proved to be an island. To this he gave the name it still bears of Trinidad, in honor of the Holy Trinity, and also, perhaps, because of the three mountains which were first seen.

Columbus

the main land

the Orinoco.

1498.

Running along the coast, he soon saw, as he supposed, another island, at the south, but which was the low land of the delta first touches of the great River Orinoco. Entering the Gulf of Paria, he at mouth of sailed along for days with Trinidad on the one hand and the coast of the continent on the other, delighted with the beauty and verdure of the country and with the blandness of the climate, and astonished at the freshness and volume of the water which, with an "awful roaring," met and struggled with the sea. The innermost part of the gulf, to which he penetrated, he called the Gulf of Pearls, and into this poured the rivers whose waters, he believed, came from the earthly Paradise.1

1 Letters of Columbus, translated by R. H. Major, and published by the Hakluyt Society. Third Voyage.

1498.]

THIRD VOYAGE OF COLUMBUS.

119

Paradise.

For, according to his theory of the globe, the two hemispheres were not round alike, but the Eastern was shaped like the breast The earthly of a woman, or the half of a round pear with a raised projection at its stalk; and on this prominence, the spot highest and nearest the sky and under the equinoctial line, was the garden wherein God had planted Adam. He did not suppose it possible that mortal man could ever reach that blessed region; but as he had sailed westward, after passing a meridian line a hundred miles west of the Azores, he had noted that the North Star rose gradually higher in the heavens, the needle shifted from northeast to northwest, the heat, hitherto so intolerable that he thought they "should have been

burnt," became more and more moderate, the air daily more refreshing and delightful, and he was persuaded that he was approaching the highest part of the globe. As he sailed westward his ships "had risen smoothly toward the sky," till he had come, at length, to this pleasant land" as fresh and green and beautiful as the gardens of Valencia in April," to this mighty rush of sweet waters that filled the Gulf of Pearls and flowed far out to sea, coming as believed from the Garden of Eden.!

66

on his soul" he

1 Irving (Life of Columbus, book x., chap. iii.) says that Columbus still supposed Paria to be an island, even after he had left the gulf and sailed westward along the outer coast. But Columbus himself, in his letter to the King and Queen, makes a distinction between the main land and Trinidad, in speaking of the one as an island and the other as the land of Gracia. Nor is it probable that he supposed the earthly paradise to be on an island, or that such a volume of water- of which he doubted if "there is any river in the world so large and so deep"- could have its course from the "nipple" of the globe except over a continent. Charlevoix (History of New France, Shea's translation, vol. i., p. 21) says:

It was hard no doubt, to turn away from this celestial land, even to go back to Spain and relate in person to his sovereigns the marvellous things he had discovered, and the approach he had made to the topmost pinnacle of the globe; harder still to thrust away from him considerations so sublime and so congenial to his proat Hispani foundly religious nature, to attend to the vulgar affairs of a turbulent colony, where, as he afterward wrote, "there were few men who were not vagabonds, and there were none who had either wife or children." 1

The colony

ola.

But in his absence rebellion and anarchy in Hispaniola had reached a point beyond his control, and when he appealed to his sovereigns for

a judge to decide between him and these turbulent Spaniards, who set all law, whether human or divine, at defiance, the court sent, not a judge, but an executioner. His enemies had at length so far prevailed against him that Bobadilla, who came professedly to look into

Brutal con

duct of Bobadilla.

these troubles, dared to usurp the government of the colony, to take up his residence in the house of Columbus, seizing all it contained, both of public and private property and public and private papers, and the moment the admiral came within his reach, to arrest and send him in chains on board ship for transportation to Spain as a felon. When Andreas Martin, the master of the caravel, moved to pity at the sight of so monstrous and cruel an in"On the 11th he had seen another land which also he, at first, took to be an island and styled Isla Santa, but he soon found it to be the continent."

1 "Letter of Columbus to Doña Juana de la Torres," in Select Letters, edited by R. H. Major.

1499.]

VOYAGE OF ALONZO DE OJEDA.

121

dignity, offered to strike these fetters from the limbs of his distinguished prisoner, Columbus refused, with the words, says his son Ferdinand," that since their Catholic Majesties, by their letter directed him to perform whatsoever Bobadilla did in their name command him to do, in virtue of which authority and commission he had put him in irons, he would have none but their Highnesses themselves do their pleasure herein; and he was resolved to keep those fetters as relics, and a memorial of the reward of his many services." 1 Some atonement was attempted for this outrage in the reception given him by Ferdinand and Isabella. He nevertheless hung up the chains on the wall of his chamber, only to be taken down when, six years later, they were laid with him in his coffin.

Some months before his return to Spain he had sent home a report of the results of his voyage, the continent he had found, which he supposed to be the extremity of the Indies, its wonderful climate, its great rivers, and its strange and attractive people. The excitement which such news must have aroused in every port of Spain was, no doubt, intense, and landsmen, as well as sailors, burned to be off to this land where the natives hung breastplates of gold upon their naked bodies and wound great strings of pearls about their heads and necks. "Now there is not a man," says Columbus, in one of his letters,— reminding his sovereigns that he waited seven years at the royal court and was only treated with ridicule, "Now there is not a man, down to the very tailors, who does not beg to be allowed to become a discoverer."

Ojeda. May

20, 1499.

At Seville an intrepid and experienced navigator, Alonzo de Ojeda, who was with Columbus on his first voyage, and knew, Voyage of therefore, the way to the Indies of the West, proposed at Alonzo de once a private expedition. Some merchants of Seville supplied the means, and his patron, the Bishop of Fonseca, superintendent of Indian affairs, and the most bitter and persistent enemy of Columbus, gave him license for the voyage, and treacherously procured for him the charts which the great navigator had sent home, notwithstanding the royal order that none should go without permission within fifty leagues of the lands he had last discovered.2 Ojeda sailed from Port St. Mary on the 20th of May, 1499, and with him went Amerigo Vespucci, a native of Florence, but then re- Amerigo siding in Seville as the agent of a commercial house. This Vespucci. Vespucci had assisted in the fitting out of other expeditions; he knew

1 The Life of the Admiral, by his son, Don Ferdinand Colon. Pinkerton's Voyages, vol. xii., p. 121.

2 History of the New World. Girolamo Benzoni. Published by the Hakluyt Society, p. 37. Herrera, Decade I., book iv., chap. i.