Pagina-afbeeldingen
PDF
ePub

Whether he owed the idea to Toscanelli or | way. not [Mr. Fiske justly remarks] is a question of no great importance, so far as concerns his own originality; for the idea was already in the air. The originality of Columbus did not consist in his conceiving the possibility of reaching the shores of Cathay by sailing west, but in his conceiving it in such distinct and practical shape as to be ready to make the adventure in his own person. (Vol. i., p. 365.)

Columbus had started for the north with his son Diego, but, the boy growing weary and exhausted, he stopped to beg for him a piece of bread and drink of water at the Franciscan monastery of La Rábida, near Palos, in Andalusia. This led to an interview with the prior, Juan Perez, who, in Mr. Fiske's phrase, "had a mind hospitable to new ideas.' He was impressed with the commanding personality of his casual, almost destitute, guest, believed in his vision of what lay beyond the immi. nent ocean, and wrote a letter to the queen by which the balance was inclined in favor of trying if the vision might prove pal pable.

The scientific discoverer, too, must not only apprehend, but accomplish. His work is completed only when he has converted a half-seen possibility into a notorious reality. As Laplace says, "Le mérite de la découverte d'une vérité appartient tout entier à celui qui la démontre." of three caravels, only one of them decked On Friday, August 3, 1492, a little fleet And, in geographical inquiries, demonstra- from stem to stern, set sail from Palos for tion is by exploration.

For eighteen long years Columbus waited, supplicating one monarch after another to accept a hemisphere at the paltry price of a few thousand crowns. The interval, however, brought him manifold experience. He made voyages, in Portuguese ships, to the Gold Coast on one side, to Iceland on the other; and, after quitting Portugal for Spain, lent a hand, not ineffectively, in fighting the Moors. But the vigor of his age was passing, and the object for which he lived seemed as remote as ever. He was poor; some thought him mad, and to the less discerning advisers of Ferdinand and Isabella, he can scarcely have appeared otherwise than under the unprepossessing aspect of a crotchet-monger and stock bore. Yet he maintained inexorably his high pretensions. The Sibyl herself was not stiffer to bargain with. Viceregal and other dignities should be secured to him and to his heirs forever in the new realms of the Indies. And as for the wealth to be derived from them, his share was already dedicated to defraying the cost of a new crusade, by which the Turks should be driven from Jerusalem. It was not then his to relinquish.

At last, sick with hope deferred, he was about to abandon Spain as, eight years previously, he had abandoned Portugal. Henry VII. had let the chance slip of grasping the empire of the west for England; but Charles VIII. might prove clearer-sighted to the interests of France. So the neglected seer would not yet give way to despair, dark though the outlook Its brightening came about in this

was.

It should be remembered, however, that many prelates at the Castilian Court, such as Marchena and Quintanilla, were consistently favorable to Columbus.

Japan. It was manned by ninety despondent or desperate men - released gaol-birds mostly, or insolvent debtors, vagabonds, delinquents, or other scum of seaport existence with no relish for the task of ascertaining the shape of the world by slipping down its tremendous declivity into nether regions whence no remounting might be possible; to say nothing of the risk, barely escaped, some said, by Harold Hardrada, of toppling sheer over the edge of what was habitable into some dreadful chaos of disorganization. "Happy isles there might perhaps be out there among the dim billows; indeed, if sailors' yarns deserved any credit, the western ocean was lia, the island of the Seven Cities, though pretty freely sprinkled with them. Antiunvisited in recent times, might, it was thought, be depended upon to exist, while to the north of it lay, somewhat obscured by legendary fog, the island of the Hand of Satan; the isle of St. Brandan, with its colossal inhabitants, and man-eating dogs, though less definite in position, was scarcely less an admitted reality than Teneriffe; and besides an island of the Fountain of Life and sundry others, there was the famous Brazil,† which might be encountered anywhere between the "roaring forties" and the latitude of the Orcades. But who could hope, steering at random across the great waste of waters in which these lay, to reach any one of them? Nor were there any strong inducements to do so. The possible society of the great Achilles," at any rate, had no attraction for the unwilling comrades

• Identified by Peter Martyr with the West Indian Archipelago, hence called the "Antilles."

†The name of the South American country is from "brazil-wood," and is believed to be unconnected with the older designation of the legendary island.

of another Ulysses, continually at his wit's
end to avert mutiny and murder by his
motley crew, "the curses and the groans
of whom harassed him day and night.
The great flame-banner borne by Teneriffe,
The compass, like an old friend false at last
In our most need, appall'd them, and the

wind

Still westward, and the weedy seas.

But every prognostic of evil was forgotten

when there came

at length

The landbird, and the branch with berries on

it,

The carven staff and last the light, the light
On Guanahani!

The uncertainty by which the biographers of Columbus are haunted extends to the identity of the first western shore touched by him. All that can be certainly stated is that Guanahani is one of the Bahamas; to determine which has been the object of many researches, none of them wholly conclusive, since at least half-a-dozen islands in the group still assert plausible claims to the coveted dis

tinction.

ages replaced the sedate and skilful Orien tals of Marco Polo's narrative, there could "be no question but that such anomalies would be removed by further exploration. These views were undisputed, and seemed indisputable. It was, accordingly, for the purpose not of testing them, but of profiting by the splendid prospect they opened, that a second expedition was immediately organized. It attracted fifteen hundred eager participators. "Their dreams were of the marble palaces of Quinsay, of isles of Spices, and the treasures of Prester John."

The safe return of Columbus to Spain was little short of miraculous. His flagship, the Santa Maria, was wrecked on the shore of Cuba; Martin Pinzon, his second in command, treacherously deserted him with the Pinta; only the little Niña, a half-decked carrack, more fitly to be called a boat than a ship, remained to bring back the admiral and his momentous news. An unprecedented freight, surely, to be committed to so frail a craft, for transportation across a wintry ocean! And it was after unaccountably weatherng a furious storm that she at last safely dropped her anchor in Palos harbor, March 15, 1493.

Thus nobody [Mr. Fiske continues] had the faintest suspicion of what had been done. beyond the ken of the generation that witThe grandeur of the achievement was quite nessed it. For we have since come to learn that in 1492 the contact between the eastern and the western halves of our planet was first really begun, and the two streams of human life which had flowed on for countless ages apart were thenceforth to mingle together. The first voyage of Columbus is thus a unique event in the history of mankind. Nothing like it was ever done before, and nothing like it can ever be done again. No worlds are left for a future Columbus to conquer. The era of which this great Italian mariner was the most illustrious representative has closed forever. (Vol. i., p. 446.)

The chief result of his second voyage was the discovery of Jamaica. His third, in 1498, being directed further south, carried him into the stifling zone of calms, and along it, by the unperceived effect of the equatorial current, to the mouths of the Orinoco. The force and volume of the discharge through them told him at once that a tierra infinita - a continent

[ocr errors]

was at hand, and suggested the lofty mount of the terrestrial paradise as the source of so imposing a flow. But it was Indescribable excitement followed upon not an Eden, but an Eldorado, that the her recognition. The reappearance of cavaliers of Spain were in search of; and Columbus seemed, indeed, rather a resur- the coveted riches of Cathay were every rection than a return. His success had day retiring to a more shadowy remotebeggared expectation, and met tumultuousness. Discontent grew rife; the "Adrecognition. Honors were showered upon him; the king and queen rose from their thrones to receive him, and bade him be seated in their presence; Isabella wept with joy at his recital; the incredible was verified; the East had been found in the West. He himself entertained not the slightest doubt that he had reached at Cuba the shore of Cathay, and at Hispaniola the sea-girt kingdom of Cipango. And although the looked-for stores of precious stones and metals were not yet forthcoming, and cinnamon-colored sav

miral of Mosquito-land" (as he began to be called), so lately applauded and acclaimed, became an object of indignant scorn; there was rebellion in Hispaniola; there were murmurings at Seville and Cordoba; inimical influences triumphed at court; and the savage and stupid Bobadilla was sent out with plenary authority over the new colony. Thus it came about that Columbus returned in chains from his third voyage. Isabella, it is true, was afflicted and indignant at the affront put upon him; but he was never reinstated in

Franciscan friar; and Franciscan poverty now fell to his lot. But his life's work was accomplished. Aged beyond his years by misery and hardship, weighed down by sickness, destitution, and neglect, he died at Valladolid, May 20, 1506, in such complete obscurity that the event escaped notice from the busy chroniclers of current news. Yet he had thrown wide a new realm to humanity! His remains were allowed little repose. Removed in 1513 from Valladolid to Seville, they were thence transferred to the cathedral of San Domingo, and are now supposed to be interred at Havana. But their identity, characteristically enough, is problemati

cal.

his viceroyalty. Four small caravels were, | lesson not to put trust in princes. His however, entrusted to him in the interests favorite garb of late had been that of a of what might be termed strategic exploration. For Portugal had recently, through the agency of Vasco de Gama, struck out a sea-way to the Indies by having doubled the Cape of Good Hope; and nothing could appear more easy or desirable than for Spain, travelling round the other side of the world, to confront her there. All that was needed was to pursue the oceanic route still further west from Cuba; and this Columbus attempted to do in 1502. But an utterly unexpected obstacle baffled his circumnavigating project. To his extreme discomfiture, an isthmus stood in his way where he had expected to find a straitno other than the Strait of Malacca, which, unless his cartographical notions were completely astray, must separate the great "Eden-continent" from the Golden Chersonese; and, after a year spent in painfully beating about the coasts of Honduras and Veragua, he was compelled to abandon the hope of finding then and there a westerly exit from the Caribbean Sea. Provisions were failing; many of his men had been slain by the natives; his ships, unprotected by copper sheathing, were rendered unseaworthy by the ravages of the teredo; and he barely succeeded on St. John's eve, 1503, in beaching their riddled hulks on the desolate shore of Jamaica. There he spent another miserable year of turmoil and danger; and at last, November 7, 1504, landed at San Lucar, only to learn that the "Holy Catholic Queen," whom he loved, and who had been his constant protectress, lay on her deathbed.

His voyagings were now ended. They had eventuated for him in poignant disappointment. Posterity judges of them by their momentous result; but that result could be only imperfectly appreciated by contemporaries keenly alive, on the contrary, to the partial failures by which it seemed to be marred. The promised way to the Indies had, to be sure, been thrown open; but merely to what appeared like some back premises connected with the shining, still inaccessible, kingdoms of the East. No dreams of avarice, at any rate, had yet come true; least of all for Columbus himself. So far was he from possessing the means to fulfil his vow of equipping a crusading army for the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre, that what effects he had were privily seized and sold by royal order to cover his liabilities. Ingratitude could scarcely be carried further; but Columbus had learned well the

Problematical, too, in large measure is the character of the great discoverer. In Mr. Winsor's judgment he was a crazy fanatic, half knave, half fool in his mystical intervals, and outside of them a cheat, a liar, and a tyrant. But accusations so violent and unreasoned may safely be left to refute themselves. A certain class of French writers, on the other hand, admit no flaw in a career stamped, in their view, with legible marks of superhuman heroism and sanctity. If a choice between these two extremes were imposed upon us, we should certainly prefer to err with M. Roselly de Lorgues rather than with Mr. Justin Winsor. For Columbus owned a moral nature of no common type. He was swayed by motives incomprehensible to vulgar minds; he followed grand ideals, and if the consequences of his actions as a colonial ruler did not always correspond to his intentions, it must be remembered that his position was one of extraordinary and unprecedented difficulty. No share of responsibility, assuredly, for the atrocious cruelties practised by his successors in Hispaniola belongs to him; he had the interests of the natives at heart; his disposition was clement; neither measures of extortion nor crimes of rapine could be charged against him. And it was his main ambition to spread the empire of the Cross.

Mr. Fiske has devoted much pains to elucidating the intricate questions relating to the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci, with the satisfactory result of dissipating still more completely than it had been dissipated before, the cloud which long overhung the fair fame of the great Florentine pilot. It is now quite clear that he pretended to nothing that he had not really done, and was absolutely innocent of the

base design of appropriating any portion | fog and sleet. It was the island of South of the hardly won reputation of Columbus. Georgia, in latitude 54° S., and about 1,200 He started on his first voyage in May, miles east from Tierra del Fuego. Captain 1497, reaching terra firma at Cape Hon. Cook, who rediscovered it in January (midduras a year before Columbus discovered summer) 1775, called it the most wretched the Orinoco and the adjacent Pearl Coast, place he had ever seen on the globe. In comparison with this scarped and craggy and a few days after John Cabot sighted island, covered down to the water's edge with the coast of Labrador in the Matthew. glaciers, Cook called the savage wastes of He then circuited the Gulf of Mexico, Tierra del Fuego balmy and hospitable. steered north by Florida to Chesapeake Struggling gusts lash the waves into perpetual Bay, and across to the Bermudas, whence | fury, and at intervals in the blinding snowa few weeks sail brought him, October 15, flurries, alternated with freezing rains, one 1498, to Cadiz. It is lamentable to read catches ominous glimpses of tumbling ice-floes For a day and a that the ships of which there were four and deadly ledges of rock. under the command of Vicente Pinzon night, while the Portuguese ships were driven -carried two hundred and twenty-two sailors, with blood half frozen in their veins, along within sight of this dreadful coast, the slaves, kidnapped on the plea that the prayed to their patron saints and made vows crime of cannibalism placed the perpetra of pilgrimage. As soon as the three ships tors outside the pale of humanity. Inex- succeeded in exchanging signals, it was deplicably little general interest was excited cided to make for home. Vespucius then by this remarkable trip, and Florida re-headed straight NN.E., through the huge mained practically unknown until rediscovered by Ponce de Leon on Whit Sunday (Pascua Florida) of the year

1513.

After a voyage to the Pearl Coast in 1499-1500, Vespucci exchanged the ser vice of Spain for that of Portugal. An ensuing expedition attained world-wide celebrity. Coasting from point to point of the "Land of Parroquets "(Cabral's designation for Brazil), the ships guided by him anchored on November 1 (All Saints' day), 1501, in a haven dubbed on the spot "Bahia de Todos Santos;" and on January I they arrived in a spacious bay, called, because of the date and under the mistaken notion of its being the estuary of a great river, Rio de Janeiro. They pursued their way to the south-west until it became evident that they had crossed the line of demarcation between Portuguese and Spanish acquisitions, drawn by the pope one hundred leagues west of the Azores. Then, having no desire to prosecute discovery in the interest of the rival power, a change of course was resolved upon, the caravels were headed south-east, and Vespucci was endowed with plenary authority over them and their crews. The upshot of the adventure cannot be better described than in Mr. Fiske's spirited phrases:

ocean, for Sierra Leone, and the distance of
more than 4,000 miles was made - with won-
derful accuracy, though Vespucius says noth-
ing about that- in thirty-three days.
Sierra Leone one of the caravels, no longer

At

seaworthy, was abandoned and burned. After a fortnight's rest ashore, the party went on in the other two ships to the Azores, and thence, after some further delay, to Lisbon, where they arrived on the 7th of September, 1502. (Vol. ii., p. 104.)

was

The region of America disclosed by this voyage was the first to be entitled a New World. The expression employed by Vespucci himself, in a published and widely circulated letter to Lorenzo de' Medici, the younger, caught the public ear, and gained immediate currency. It bore, to begin with, a sense somewhat different from that which we now attach to it a sense, indeed, connected with the obsolete doctrine of the terrestrial "five zones." The "New World primarily understood rather as an antipodal than as an occidental continent. The astonishing novelty which the term emphasized in the popular fancy, lay in the ex istence of an inhabited territory wholly outside the ancient limits of what was accounted habitable, and separated from it by the long-reputed impassable belt of torrid equatorial heat. This special meaning was, however, soon effaced; and the The nights [he says] grew longer and longer, phrase bears its wider modern significance until by April 3 they covered fifteen hours. in the famous motto adopted, before 1537, On that day the astrolabe showed a southern latitude of 52°. Before night a frightful storm by Ferdinand Columbus as the legend for overtook our navigators, and after four days his coat of arms, and engraved upon his of scudding under bare poles land hove in tomb in the cathedral of Seville :sight, but no words of welcome greeted it. In that rough sea the danger on such a coast was appalling, all the more so because of the

A Castilla y á Leon
Nuevo mundo dió Colon.

the Amazon and the Andes. Magellan's voyage, however, in 1520, was highly effective in setting things straight; and Asia was thenceforward compelled to keep to its own side of the Pacific. Before the middle of the century, in fact, a tolerably correct general idea of the form and dimensions of the American double continent had been acquired by Mercator. Yet Schouten van Horn sailed round its southern cape only in 1616; it was not until 1728 that Vitus Bering discovered the north-west strait; and the Rocky Mountains remained unknown down to the year 1743.

If it was a wrong to Columbus that the in the library at Windsor Castle. It is great western continent came to bear an- applied to a large equatorial island, beother name than his, nobody, so to speak, tween which and the coast of Cathay lie was responsible. Certainly not his Flor- the smaller islands of Japan and Florida! entine friend, upon whom, nevertheless, North America is conspicuous by absence, much odium, as if for a conscious act of while the equatorial island must be allowed usurpation, has been cast. The business to stand for a very early stage in the car. managed itself, after the haphazard fashiontographic development of the land of in which affairs of nomenclature very often do get transacted. Only the starting impulse was given by an unguarded suggestion from a certain young professor of geography at the college of Saint-Dié, in Lorraine. This Martin Waldseemüller published in 1507 a brochure on cosmography, wherein he proposed for the "Quarta orbis pars" the designation America, after its discoverer, Americus Vespucius, "a man of sagacious mind." So it was done, much more thoroughly than Waldseemüller contemplated. For the "Quarta pars" as he understood it, was simply the original " Mundus Novus," or the country known to us as Brazil; while the appellation “ America" widened its meaning so rapidly, and, as it might seem, so irresistibly, that, in 1541, it was applied by Gerard Mercator to the whole of the prodigious expanse of land in the Western hemisphere. But Amerigo himself never knew of the great future in store for his name. Having returned to his Spanish allegiance, he sailed twice to the Gulf of Darien, with considerable results in the way of gold and pearls; was appointed in 1508 to the important office of pilot major of Spain; and died at Seville, February 12, 1512, at the age of sixty. He was an enterprising and able, and appears to have been a worthy, man. Nothing, at least, is known to his moral disadvantage; and he enjoyed opportunities of distinction in turpitude which were, by some others, under similar circumstances, turned to the fullest account.

The slow laboriousness with which America was discovered is duly reflected in what Mr. Fiske calls "the long series of perplexed and struggling maps made in the sixteenth century." Cathay and Cipango long held their ground in them, and were only with difficulty displaced by the strange continent, which, emerging first, as it were, in embryo, gradually assumed its genuine proportions, and completed its true outlines. The earliest representation by name of "America" is in a sketch of the date 1514, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, and found, some thirty years ago,

Amerigo, latinized as Americus, represents the

Old High German Amalrich, signifying "the stead

fast."

The main object of early explorers of the American coasts was to pierce or turn the barrier they opposed. The Indies lay beyond; they were the goal in view; the interposed solid breastwork was regarded as a mere obstacle to the attainment of that goal. It seemed incredible that it should extend without break from tropic to tropic, and beyond, right over both temperate zones. Yet the quest for a navigable channel was pushed continually nearer to the poles. Thus, when the Isthmus of Darien was encountered in the place of the expected Strait of Malacca, and the southern route by the Strait of Magellan proved too perilous and tedious for commercial use, a "north-west passage" became an object of keen desire. For three hundred and twenty-nine years the search continued. Every inlet between Florida and Labrador was examined in the hope that it might yield an outlet on the other side. Verrazano, with this intent, groped and burrowed along the coast from Cape Fear to Cape St. John; John Davis penetrated through Davis Strait into Baffin's Bay; Henry Hudson ascended the Hudson River nearly to the site of Albany, and pushed, by a fresh effort, into Hudson's Bay, where he miserably perished, set adrift by his mutinous crew in an open boat. But the upshot of his enterprise was only to show that the long-desired route to the Indies by the northern sum. mit of America must be relegated to arctic latitudes. Sir Robert M'Clure's voyage in 1853, accordingly, while it solved a secular problem, and gratified geographical curiosity, was absolutely ineffective

« VorigeDoorgaan »