Columbus Returns to Spain
Once at anchor, and once having satisfied the Portuguese
authorities that he was a duly accredited officer of the Spanish
Marine, Columbus was hospitably received, granted supplies, and
invited by King John II, the same with whom he had held memorable
converse in 1483 or 1484, to visit him at Valparaíso near Lisbon.
Columbus went with some trepidation and, according to Portuguese
accounts, told the King that he "had come from the discovery of the
islands of Cipangu and Antillia, " but made no mention of Cathay and
the Great Kaan, or of India. "O man of miserable understanding," the
King is said, by Spaniards, to have exclaimed at the interview,
smiting his breast, "why didst thou let an undertaking of such great
importance go out of thine hands!"
By the 15th of March the Admiral was at Palos, where on the evening
of the same day Martín
Alonso Pinzón
likewise arrived, having brought the Pinta safe into port at Bayona
in Galicia. But it was a full month before Columbus was received by
Ferdinand and Isabella in Barcelona, and in the meantime Pinzón,
already ill when he disembarked, had breathed his last. What light
upon the great voyage to the Antilles might have been shed had
Pinzón — forceful personality that he was — survived!
In Sevilla where, amid much ovation, Columbus awaited the pleasure
of the Spanish sovereigns, there came to him a letter, dated the
30th of March, addressed to "The Admiral of the Ocean Sea and
Viceroy and Governor of the islands discovered in the Indies, " and
confirming what had previously been conditionally granted to him in
the Capitulation and Letters Patent of April, 1492.
If the welcome to the Admiral at Sevilla had been noteworthy, that
which he was accorded at Barcelona was more noteworthy still.
Throngs attended him, and his bodyguard was the best chivalry of
Spain. In advance marched a group of some half-dozen New World
Indians and a squad of sailors from the Nina. The Indians wore gold
armaments and carried spears and arrows, while the sailors bore
aloft forty parrots of gorgeous plumage, besides other birds,
together with rare plants and animals, among which not the least was
an iguana five feet long, its back bristling with spines.
Ferdinand and Isabella, happy at the success of their adventurous
protégé, which no doubt they had scarcely expected, were augustly
gracious. Seated under a golden canopy in the Alcázar of the Moorish
Kings, they rose to greet Columbus on his entry, gently deprecated
his lowliness in stooping to kiss their hands, and made him sit at
their feet. So placed, the discoverer of America, a master of
speech, told his tale, illustrating it with the Indians, the
sailors, the specimens, and the gold. The monarchs and court then
said a prayer, the choir of the royal chapel chanted Te Deum, and
the ceremony closed.
The news of the return of Columbus soon spread and evoked ingenious
appraisals among the learned. "In the month of August last," as
Hannibal Januarius, an Italian gentleman from Barcelona, wrote to
his brother in 1493: "This great King [Ferdinand], at the prayer of
one named Collomba, caused four [sic] little vessels to be equipped
to navigate . . . upon the ocean in a straight line toward the west
until finally the east was reached. The earth being round he should
certainly arrive in the eastern regions." Also from Barcelona, on
the 14th of May, Peter Martyr, the Horace Walpole of his day, wrote
to his friend Count Tindilla: "A few days after [an attempted
assassination of King Ferdinand], there returned from the Western
Antipodes a certain Christopher Columbus, a Ligurian, who with
barely three ships penetrated to the province which was believed to
be fabulous: he returned bearing substantial proofs in the shape of
many precious things and particularly of gold." Again, on the 1st of
October, this time from Milan, Martyr wrote to the Archbishop of
Braga: "A certain Columbus has sailed to the Western Antipodes, even
as he believes to the very shores of India. He has discovered many
islands beyond the eastern ocean adjoining the Indies, which are
believed to be those of which mention has been made among
cosmographers. I do not wholly deny this, although the magnitude of
the globe seems to suggest otherwise, for there are not wanting
those who think it but a small journey from the end of Spain to the
shores of India." Finally, on January 31, 1494, our letter-writer
addresses these words to the Archbishop of Granada: "The King and
Queen at Barcelona have created an Admiral of the Ocean Sea,
Columbus returned from his most honorable charge, and they have
admitted him to sit in their presence, which is, as you know, a
supreme proof of benevolence and honor with our Sovereigns."
But, anticipating rumors, reports, and letters, Columbus himself had
had a word to say respecting his voyage. Writing from shipboard, on
February 15, 1493, to Luis de Santangel, his stanch advocate with
Isabella, he had declared: "When I reached Juana [Cuba] I followed
its coast westwardly and found it so large that I thought it might
be the mainland province of Cathay."
As a matter of fact, however, interest in this exploit on the part
of Columbus attached itself less to the geographical discoveries
than to the preternatural creatures that lurked on the margins of
the earth. Hannibal Januarius, our Italian acquaintance of
epistolary bent, remarked to his brother, apropos of the Genoese
navigator, that "the earth being round the latter should certainly
arrive in the eastern regions." But forgetful, near the end of his
letter, of the scientific aspects of the great voyage, Januarius
wrote: "He [Columbus] adds that he has lately been in a country
where men are born with tails." Nor was the soft impeachment wholly
inaccurate, for, in his own shipboard letter to Santangel, the
Admiral said: "There remains for me on the western side [of Cuba]
two provinces whereto I did not go — one of which they call Anan —
where the people are born with tails." And in his Journal Columbus
had already noted that "far away" there were, as he understood, "men
with one eye, and others with dogs' noses who were cannibals." But
he was wary in statement, for in the Santangel letter he concluded
the subject by remarking that "down to the present [he had] not
found in those islands [the Antilles] any monstrous men as many
expected."
With regard to mermaids it was different. These the Admiral had
himself seen, both on the coast of Guinea and in the Antilles. The
Antillean sirens, as he had seen them, were three in number. "They
rose well out of the sea" but were "not so beautiful as painted,
though having to some extent the human face." And Columbus believed
in Amazons. He had never beheld any, but had been told they lived in
the island of Martinino [Martinique], and he had meant to stop there
on his way home to secure a few to exhibit, along with his Indians,
to Ferdinand and Isabella.
His half-dozen Indians, his forty gorgeous parrots, his spined
iguana, and his gold — of the latter not more than enough to whet a
royal appetite — together with stories about "mermaids," and natives
who burnt a queer herb, " tabacos," were about all in the way of
wonders, ocular or auricular, that Columbus had brought home with
him. The great thing, the super-epoch-making thing, though not yet
understood so to be, was the voyage itself; the voyage itself and
the will to make it. This, too, largely irrespective of whether the
objective was in some sort Asia, or simply a Barataria, an island to
govern.
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