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counsel and assistance against the adverse opinions of Talavera's Cordovan junta, while the latter by his learning and influence opened to him the portals of Salamanca. There is no tradition so well grounded as that which holds up to the world the strange ignorance of geography and cosmography prevailing in the Salamantine university, which went so far as to put all its doctors unanimously on record against Columbus, and to oppose the superstitions of the vulgar mind against the presentiments, the predictions, and the prophecies of genius and learning. Nevertheless, this popular belief is not only to be reversed and forever regarded as groundless, but to Salamanca is to be attributed the beginning of the good fortune of the discoverer, for with his sojourn in that learned city coincides the first pecuniary aid advanced by the sovereigns to assist his scheme.

All the investigations made and documents discovered during recent years confirm the sagacious opinion of the learned Salamantine writer, Señor Rodriguez Pinilla, who holds that the first flat refusal of the court to entertain the scheme of Columbus was made in the official council at Cordova, over which Hernando de Talavera presided, and that the first signs of a favorable disposition on the part of the State are seen in the sums which the sovereigns ordered to be paid to the extra-official councils, the commissions of the university sitting in the great hall of San Esteban, whereupon a speedy understanding followed between the crown and Columbus.

It is the historical and unquestionable fact, that soon after the conferences of Salamanca, held at the beginning of 1487, the sovereigns began to give the necessary orders for supplying the discoverer with funds, and to provide for his treatment as a royal retainer by recognizing his right, wherever he might be, to maintenance and lodging. In a bundle of old accounts of the treasurer, Francisco Gonzalez of Seville, which may be seen copied in the second volume of Navarrete's celebrated collection, are found the following entries:

On the said day [May 5, 1487] gave I to Cristóbal Colomo, a foreigner, who is now here performing certain things in the service of Their Highnesses, three thousand maravedis, on the warrant of Alonso de Quintanilla, by command of the Bishop [of Palencia].

On the 27th of said month [August, 1487] gave I to Cristóbal Colomo four thousand maravedís, to go to the Royal Seat [Malaga], by command of Their Highnesses and on a warrant of the Bishop. This makes seven thousand maravedís, with three thousand which were paid to him by order, to defray the cost of another journey on the 3d of July.

On the said day [October 15, 1487] gave I to Cristóbal Colomo four thousand maravedís, which

Their Highnesses ordered to be paid to him to help defray his expenses.

On the 16th of June, 1488, gave I to Cristóbal Colomo three thousand maravedís, upon a warrant of Their Highnesses.

The writings of the time contain countless evidences of the confused clashing of ideas in all minds. As neither Vives nor Bacon had yet employed the cognition of natural phenomena in the study of material things, and as neither Pereira nor Descartes had applied the observation of psychic phenomena to the mind, there prevailed a traditional system, which, like the ancients, heard with laughter the voice of the oracle, and mingled the teachings of the recently revived classic authors, resuscitated and new-come from a supernatural sphere, with the confused theories of the Christian writers. Thus, for instance, Albertus Magnus averred the existence of two races of black Ethiopians, belonging to the two opposite hemispheres. But these affirmations of the great medieval philosopher could in no wise prevail against the sixteenth book of "The City of God," in which St. Augustine outlines a universal history literally taken from the Bible, and denies the existence of the antipodes, because of the impossibility of their being descended from Adam, and because they would give the lie to the blessing pronounced upon the sons of the patriarch Jacob, and to the division of the earth. between them as recorded in Genesis. But those illustrious collegians disputed alike concerning the dispersion of the human race to the four quarters of heaven, and the distribution of the solid and liquid parts of the unknown planet. While the opponents of Columbus alleged as the outcome of their calculations that the ocean was of vast extent, and that therefore it was impossible to discover the Indies by sailing downward to the west, owing to the physical difficulty of ascending the watery steep on the homeward voyage, his supporters, relying upon the sixth chapter of Esdras, declared the land to be sixfold greater than the sea, and that consequently the East Indies could their eastern shores could be but a short disreadily be reached by going westward, since tance beyond the Pillars of Hercules and the Bay of Cadiz.

Columbus maintained these latter assertions with much persistence, as Padre Las Casas tells us, resting equally on the verses of the prophet Esdras, then of general acceptance, and on the writings of Cardinal d'Ailly, his oracle, who likewise deemed the sea of small extent compared with the land, in conformity with passages from Aristotle, Seneca, and Pliny, who, according to him, must have known much about. the earth, for the singular reason that the two first were the preceptors of Alexander and Nero,

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stagger and bewilder the most expert: such as the perfect ease of navigating the sunset seas; the exploration of the Indian shores by the ancient Seleucians, who inherited in Syria the power and glory of Alexander; the expeditions which, setting out from Baetica afterward sailed in the waters of Mauritania and others even further south; the remains of Spanish ships seen by Prince Caius in the Arabian Gulf in the time of Augustus; the world-girdling voyage of the Carthaginian Hanno, abundant in prophetic statements; the arrival of one Eudoxus at Cadiz by unknown and mysterious courses, fleeing from Ptolemy, and a hundred tokens more, each fitting better than the other the project then under consideration, with various embellishments that served with some show of consistency to give it weight and authority.

Again, Macrobius, in the second book of his commentaries on Scipio's "Dream," afforded weapons to the friends of Columbus; for, in the midst of many errors, he vaguely maintained the rotundity of the earth and the existence of the antipodes. This opinion seems to have been shared by Polybius, Mela, and Solinus, who are cited by Las Casas in his great "History of the West Indies," a work very favorable to the memory of Columbus. To the vexed problem of the antipodes there was joined another, concerning the habitability of the torrid and frozen zones, which was generally denied, notwithstanding the testimony of Columbus that he had sojourned in Iceland and in Guinea. Paying no heed to the practical proofs of experience, the contestants resorted to ancient authors for evidence, and recited how Aristotle, in his book "Of the World," strewed the western seas with numerous islands and even continents greater than our known world, all of them perfectly inhabitable; how Lucan in his poems alluded to a mysterious tribe of Arabs, scattered through unknown deserts; how Marcianus taught Pliny the existence about the north pole of the Hyperboreans, fortunate in being born and reared under the frondage of elysian groves, and so long-lived that family succession could only be effected by suicide in leaping from the crags of the highest mountains an expedient often resorted to, it seems, in the torrid zone also, where the life-giving ocean winds prevail; how two such diverse authors as Avicenna and Anselmo told of groups of islands, lost and forgotten, like gigantic pearls, in the wastes of the Shadowy Sea; how Plato, in his divine dialogues of the Timaeus and the Critias, commemorated a land called Atlantis, which stretched with reefs of coral and groves of palms, and opaline seas and mountains of gems, between the Pillars of Hercules and Africa's western shores even to farthest Asia, swallowed up in the abysses, but still showing its

traces in the sunken forests of rare and unknown leafage that stayed the keel of the passing bark, and held it in their vast embrace; how the Platonists had inherited their traditions of the mysterious Atlantis from the wise lawgiver Solon, who in turn derived it from the mystic Nile; how the principal classical geographers connected with the disappearance of Atlantis the submersion of Acarnania in the Ambracian Gulf, of Achaia in the Corinthian Sea, of a part of the Asian and European continents in the Propontis and the Euxine Sea, the cleavage of the two splendid shores of the Bosphorus, and the comparatively recent formation of Lesbos; how Seneca in the sixth book of his "Morals" attributed to Thucydides the attempt to assign a definite date to the submersion of the Atlantean continent; how certain legends told of the former union of Africa and Europe by an isthmus between the two shores of the straits, recorded the disappearance of an arm of Guadalquivir, and told of strange plants and seawrack seen filling the ocean to the westward of the Canaries; how St. Ambrose, in his discourse upon the "Vocations of Men," declared a perfect and assured hope of bringing to day far-off regions where new races should receive the light and revelation of the Gospel-confused and contradictory legends, all of them, well calculated to lead astray an unfixed and irresolute mind, but not the mind of Columbus,- that prophet absolutely confident in his own predictions,—who, in the midst of such a sea of confusion, begotten of innumerable reports, some known to him and others unknown, listened only to the sure voice of his heavendecreed mission, and pressed on, with firm and invincible will, toward the realization of his divine ideal.

A practical result followed all this upstirring of diverse opinions, in that the pilot reached a better understanding with the sovereigns and gained a more effective patronage for the plans which the Cordovan junta had condemned. But although aid was frequently, and even abundantly, given, despite the interminable straits of the court, a decisive decree ordering the voyage itself could not be obtained while the paramount efforts for the reconquest blocked the way. After the sojourn in Salamanca, the royal pair undertook the conquest of Malaga, and during its progress Columbus shifted about, now at the siege of the city, now at the court in Cordova, and at one time even in Lisbon. Many deny this last journey of his, but we need not be surprised at their denial, seeing that such uncertainty and perplexity reigns among the historians of that age that some among them are ignorant of and deny the conferences of Salamanca, locating in Cordova and Granada the two commissions convoked to

hear the discoverer and investigate the discovery. But there is no room for doubting the visit of Columbus to Lisbon. It suffices that we possess the letter of Dom John, granting him safeconduct and immunity from any suit for debt in 1488; and we have moreover a famous marginal note written by his own hand in his favorite volume, "De Imagine Mundi," of d'Ailly, wherein he records the coincidence of his journey to Lisbon with the discovery, so favorable to his plans, of the extremest point of southern Africa, known as the Cape of Good Hope. We know naught of what Columbus did during his last visit to the fair capital of Portugal; we can fix neither the date of his departure nor of his return; but we may certainly say that he gathered there all the facts then attainable in that era of geographical discovery, and set them down with wise diligence and scrupulous exactness in his memory and in his books. Bartolomé Diaz had in fact just discovered the Cape, beyond which the superstitious dread of his sailors prevented his going. The world had taken another stride toward the realms of Prester John, that weird goal which stimulated countless expeditions and so strongly influenced the dreams of Columbus. The abode of that mysterious personage, said by Marco Polo to lie in the odorous forests of Central Asia, stretched, as conjectured by the Portuguese Corvilhan, to the crags of Abyssinia amid Libyan sands; and, when the tidings spread, the pilot-discoverer could not fail to note the hardships suffered in the search for the Cape, thenceforth already known by the contradictory names of Good Hope and Tempest. In his preserved memoranda he records how, in a second attempt, he would have abandoned the use of ships of large size, preferring vessels built so solidly as to defy the fierce gales, yet small enough to enter any arm of the sea; and how he would have taken three times the quantity of ship's stores needed for a long voyage that had been taken on previous voyages—and in this he showed his good judgment. Tempests so often lashed those waters, and with such fury, that ships foundered in the turbulent waves. But now the Sea of Shadows was dispelled; Africa almost circumnavigated; Prester John almost within reach of the hands stretched out to him from every quarter; the Eastern Indies brought very near-almost found, indeed-by expeditions as daring as Alexander's; the aroma of new spices spread in the senses of men; and the fountain-head of humanity and of history well nigh discovered, the Aryan land of fetishes and castes, of palanquins and palms, of gold and gems, of symbolical flowers and prehistoric fables, completing the planet with its exuberant life, and coinciding with the resuscitation of Grecian statues from the dust and ruins of the olden

time, and with the hope of discovery of new worlds in the time to come. But Columbus, who noted down prophecies and fables alike, records in his marginal memoranda how Bartolomé Diaz sailed six hundred leagues beyond the furthest known limits of navigation and discovered the Cape of Good Hope; whereby, taking its latitude by the astrolabe of Behaim, he proved not only that it lay forty-five degrees south of the equinox, but also three thousand five hundred leagues distant from Lisbon. The mathematician and the prophet were blended in Columbus, who, just as he read, with sacred reverence, Esdras and Job in his prayers, accepted as mathematical truths latitudes and distances which he set down in bald figures.

As soon as Columbus returned from Portugal, he endeavored to renew his negotiations with the sovereigns; but he found the physical road to their court, and the moral pathway to their hearts, blocked and impeded by his having been lost sight of during his unfortunate absence, and by the absorption of all minds in the Moorish war. The sovereigns, having won at Malaga and Velez-Malaga, were spurred on by the seductive power of victory to continue their task, now become easier through the innumerable internal dissidencies of the Granadian kingdom, broken into fragments, which were held, like hostile fortresses reared against one another, by the three nominal kings of the Moors, Hacem, Boabdil, and Zagal. So, after convoking in Aragon one of their famous cortes, quickened with the life-giving breath of liberty, and after celebrating at Seville, with justs and tourneys and festivals, the marriage of their eldest daughter Doña Isabella to so powerful and eminent a youth as was Prince Miguel, heir to the crown of Portugal, they turned anew their thoughts to the necessary completion of the glorious work of reconquest. It was an inauspicious moment to discuss any other business. The partizans of Columbus had increased, and, withal, their individual influence. Quintanilla, the good and thrifty comptroller, gained importance in proportion as he displayed his talents in procuring for the royal treasury large levies, to which he often added advances from his private fortune; Mendoza, the faithful cardinal, increased his power and won distinction in proportion as his charity aided the living and his prayers the dead-without losing sight of the everlasting struggle against the Moors; the Marchioness of Moya, whose splendid garments and gorgeous tent, during the siege of Malaga, exposed her to a violent death, for she was wounded by an Arab santon who mistook her for Isabella, had won the heart of the queen, who declared that never would she have reigned in Spain without the vote of her

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This convent has been preserved as a National Memorial since 1846. Cortez also found shelter here after his return from Mexico.

friend's husband; yet despite the great authority and influence of all of these in the royal government and in the Christian camp, they remained mute as the dead, and dared not divert a single man or doubloon from the chief enterprise of the day. While Columbus knocked at every door, offering continents to men whose sphere of action was confined within a single city, the devastation of the Granadian estates under the Christian invasion; the investment of the conquering hosts round about Baza where a Spanish city had been reared face to face with the Arab town, both glowing with festivals and combats, the knightly feats of the Pulgars awaking among the soldiers of the Cross a new zeal in the religious crusade, and bequeathing to Moorish poetry new strains in the national epic tale; the last but one of the Moorish kings upon his knees before the Catholic Sovereigns, offering to them in homage, within sight of the blue sea fringed with wild fig-trees and roseate sea-walls, the city of Almeria, crowned with towers and palms; the ambassadors of Turkey, come from Jerusalem the captive to stay the arm stretched out over cowering Granada, who in her tribulation ap

peared beautiful as Zion of the prophets; the rampart of the mighty Alpujarras, flaming beneath the sun of Andalusia and odorous with oriental jasmine, yet echoing with the clash of bloody but poetically heroic combats; Salobreña, scene of the death of the aged Hacem, that scourge of Christendom, whose memory is tearfully sung in elegies of his race which call to mind the sublime lamentations of the scriptures; every laurel-tree of the Vega turned into a warrior's lance, and every link of the fetters unrived from the feet of the captives redeemed in thousands by these same lances; every garden become a scene of ceaseless encounters; every dwelling made a fortress of defense and a goal of attack; all that broad plain a Homeric field of Troy, the end of a century-old war and the beginning of a new fatherland; all these things left no room for any undertaking apart from that marvelous epopee. How then, in such a moment, could thought be given to Columbus?- until then scarce heeded, and now forgotten!

COLUMBUS, on seeing himself forgotten, contemplated, as a last stern resort, the beginning

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