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Columbus's obscure record, 1473–1487.

It is a rather striking fact, as Harrisse puts it, that we cannot place with an exact date any event in Columbus's life from August 7, 1473, when a document shows him to have been in Savona, Italy, till he received at Cordoba, Spain, from the treasurer of the Catholic sovereigns, his first gratuity on May 5, 1487, as is shown by the entry in the books, "given this day 3,000 maravedis," about $18, "to Cristobal Colomo, a stranger." The events of this period of about fourteen years were those which made possible his later career. The incidents connected with this time have become the shuttle-cocks which have been driven backward and forward in their chronological bearings, by all who have undertaken to study the details of this part of Columbus's life. It is nearly as true now as it was when Prescott wrote, that "the discrepancies among the earliest authorities are such as to render hopeless any attempt to settle with precision the chronology of Columbus's movements previous to his first voyage."

His motives for leaving Portugal.

Chief sources of our knowledge.

The motives which induced him to abandon Portugal, where he had married, and where he had apparently found not a little to reconcile him to his exile, are not obscure ones as detailed in the ordinary accounts of his life. All these narratives are in the main based, first, on the Historie (1571); secondly, on the great historical work of Joam de Barros, pertaining to the discoveries of the Portuguese in the East Indies, first published in 1552, and still holding probably the loftiest position in the historical literature of that country; and, finally, on the lives of João II., then monarch of Portugal, by Ruy de Pina and by Vasconcellos. The latter borrowing in the main from the former, was exclusively used by Irving. Las Casas apparently depended on Barros as well as on the Historie. It is necessary to reconcile their statements, as well as it can be done, to get even an inductive view of the events concerned.

The treatment of the subject by Irving would make it certain that it was a new confidence in the ability to make long voyages, inspired by the improvements of the astrolabe as directed by Behaim, that first gave Columbus the assurance to ask for royal patronage of the maritime scheme which had been developing in his mind.

Columbus and Behaim.

Just what constituted the acquaintance of Columbus with Behaim is not clearly established. Herrera speaks of them as friends. Humboldt thinks some intimacy between them may have existed, but finds no decisive proof of it. Behaim had spent much of his life in Lisbon and in the Azores, and there are some striking correspondences in their careers, if we accept the usual accounts. They were born and died in the same year. Each lived for a while on an Atlantic island, the Nuremberger at Fayal, and the Genoese at Porto Santo; and each married the daughter of the governor of his respective island. They pursued their nautical studies at the same time in Lisbon, and the same physicians who reported to the Portuguese king upon Columbus's scheme of westward sailing were engaged with Behaim in perfecting the sea astrolabe.

Columbus and the king of Portugal.

The account of the audience with the king which we find in the Historie is to the effect that Columbus finally succeeded in inducing João to believe in the practicability of a western passage to Asia; but that the monarch could not be brought to assent to all the titular and pecuniary rewards which Columbus contended for as emoluments of success, and that a commission, to whom the monarch referred the project, pronounced the views of Columbus simply chimerical. Barros represents that the advances of Columbus were altogether too arrogant and fantastic ever to have gained the consideration of the king, who easily disposed of the Genoese's pretentious importunities by throwing the burden of denial upon a commission. This body consisted of the two physicians of the royal household, already mentioned, Roderigo and Josef, to whom was added Cazadilla, the Bishop of Ceuta.

Vasconcellos's addition to this story, which he derived almost entirely from Ruy de Pina, Resende, and Barros, is that there was subsequently another reference to a royal council, in which the subject was discussed in arguments, of which that historian preserves some reports. This discussion went farther than was perhaps intended, since Cazadilla proceeded to discourage all attempts at exploration even by the African route, as imperiling the safety of the state, because of the money which was required; and because it kept at too great a distance for an emergency a considerable force in ships and men. In fact the drift of the debate seems to have ignored the main projects as of little moment and as too visionary, and the energy of the hour was centered in a rallying speech made by the Count of Villa Real, who endeavored to save the interests of African exploration. The count's speech quite accomplished its purpose, if we can trust the reports, since it reassured the rather drooping energies of the king, and induced some active measures to reach the extremity of Africa.

Diaz's African voyage, 1486.

Passes the Cape.

PORTUGUESE MAPPEMONDE, 1490. [Sketched from the original MS. in the British Museum.]

In August, 1486, Bartholomew Diaz, the most eminent of a line of Portuguese navigators, had departed on the African route, with two consorts. As he neared the latitude of the looked-for Cape, he was driven south, and forced away from the land, by a storm. When he was enabled to return on his track he struck the coast, really to the eastward of the true cape, though he did not at the time know it. This was in May, 1487. His crew being unwilling to proceed farther, he finally turned westerly, and in due time discovered what he had done. The first passage of the Cape was thus made while sailing west, just as, possibly, the mariners of the Indian seas may have done. In December he was back in Lisbon with the exhilarating news, and it was probably conveyed to Columbus, who was then in Spain, by his brother Bartholomew, the companion of Diaz in this eventful voyage, as Las Casas discovered by an entry made by Bartholomew himself in a copy of D'Ailly's Imago Mundi. Thirty years before, as we have seen, Fra Mauro had prefigured the Cape in his map, but it was now to be put on the charts as a geographical discovery; and by 1490, or thereabouts, succeeding Portuguese navigators had pushed up the west coast of Africa to a point shown in a map preserved in the British Museum, but not far enough to connect with what was supposed with some certainty to be the limit reached during the voyages of the Arabian navigators, while sailing south from the Red Sea. There was apparently not a clear conception in the minds of the Portuguese, at this time, just how far from the Cape the entrance of the Arabian waters really was. It is possible that intelligence may have thus early come from the Indian Ocean, by way of the Mediterranean, that the Oriental sailors knew of the great African cape by approaching it from the east.

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 passage 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?

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 Cipango 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.

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.

Supposed visit of Columbus to Genoa.

There is no other authority than Ramusio for believing with Muñoz that Columbus had already laid his project before the government of Genoa by letter, and that he now went to reënforce 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 Cassoni, 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.

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.

The death of his wife.

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 Doña 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.

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 titles 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 refurnishing 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.

PÈRE JUAN PEREZ DE MARCHENA. [As given by Roselly de Lorgues.]

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 refreshing 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 unobservant 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 reënforcements 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 ship had been blown a long distance to the northwest of Ireland.

Columbus goes to Cordoba.

The friendship 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.

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 analyzed 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.

The date of 1491, to which Harrisse pushes the incidents forward, depends in part on the evidence of one Rodriguez Cobezudo that in 1513 it was about twenty-two years since he had lent a mule to Juan Perez de Marchena, when he went to Santa Fé from Rabida to interpose for Columbus. The testimony of Garcia Fernandez is that this visit of Marchena took place after Columbus had once been rebuffed at court, and the words of the witness indicate that it was on that visit when Juan Perez asked Columbus who he was and whence he came; showing, perhaps, that it was the first time Perez had seen Columbus. Accordingly this, as well as the mule story, points to 1491. But that the circumstances of the visit which Garcia Fernandez recounts may have belonged to an earlier visit, in part confounded after fifteen years with a later one, may yet be not beyond a possibility. It is to be remembered that the Historie speaks of two visits, one later than that of 1484. It is not easy to see that all the testimony which Harrisse introduced to make the visit of 1491 the first and only visit of Columbus to the convent is sufficient to do more than render the case probable.

1486. Enters the service of Spain.

We determine the exact date of the entering of Columbus into the service of Spain to be January 20, 1486, from a record of his in his journal on shipboard under January 14, 1493, where he says that on the 20th of the same month he would have been in their Highnesses' service just seven years. We find almost as a matter of course other statements of his which give somewhat different dates by deduction. Two statements of Columbus agreeing would be a little suspicious. Certain payments on the part of the Crowns of Castile and Aragon do not seem to have begun, however, till the next year, or at least we have no earlier record of such than one on May 5, 1487, and from that date on they were made at not great intervals, till an interruption came, as will be later shown.

Changes his name to Colon.

In Spain the Christoforo Colombo of Genoa chose to call himself Cristoval Colon, and the Historie tells us that he sought merely to make his descendants distinct of name from their remote kin. He argued that the Roman name was Colonus, which readily was transformed to a Spanish equivalent. Inasmuch as the Duke of Medina-Celi, who kept Columbus in his house for two years during the early years of his Spanish residence, calls him Colomo in 1493, and Oviedo calls him Colom, it is a question if he chose the form of Colon before he became famous by his voyage.

The Genoese in Spain.

The Genoese had been for a long period a privileged people in Spain, dating such acceptance back to the time of St. Ferdinand. Navarrete has instanced numerous confirmations of these early favors by successive monarchs down to the time of Columbus. But neither this prestige of his birthright nor the letter of Friar Perez had been sufficient to secure in the busy camp at Cordoba any recognition of this otherwise unheralded and humble suitor. The power of the sovereigns was overtaxed already in the engrossing preparations which the Court and army were making for a vigorous campaign against the Moors. The exigencies of the war carried the sovereigns, sometimes together and at other times apart, from point to point. Siege after siege was conducted, and Talavera, whose devotion had been counted upon by Columbus, had too much to occupy his attention, to give ear to propositions which at best he deemed chimerical.