THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA BY COLUMBUS. 193 people. To make up for the loss of this settlement, he chose a healthier and better spot near a spacious bay, and there traced out the plan of a town, at whose walls he obliged every man to work for the common safety; and the walls and houses of the first town built by Europeans in the New World were soon sufficiently advanced to afford shelter and security. This town he named Isabella, in honour of the queen. But a new scene of difficulty now opened to Columbus. Among the number of the colonists, some envied him his power, and some the share of the profits he was entitled to claim; while others, eager to grasp at once at the possession of the country, blamed him as lukewarm to the interests of the king and queen, because he would not revenge the destruction of Navidad by a decided attack on the Indians. The dissensions occasioned by these various feelings obliged him to send several of the malcontents home to Spain, where they found it easy to prejudice many persons against him, and he soon found that nothing but his returning with a quantity of gold could outweigh the misrepresentations of his enemies at court. This consideration accounts for, though it cannot excuse, the harsh measure he adopted of exacting as much gold dust as would fill a hawk's bell, four times in each year, from every individual Indian above the age of fourteen, in the gold districts, and twenty-five pounds of cotton for such as lived in other parts of the country. The harshness with which this tax was collected was such, that many of the natives escaped from it by a voluntary death, and many others died from want; because, in their despair, they pulled up their roots of mandioc, and left their maize grounds untilled, that, if possible, they might force the Spaniards to leave their land. the strangers were relieved by supplies from Spain, while the Indians soon felt the utmost distress of famine, and, in a few months, more than a third part of the inhabitants of the island had perished. But Columbus returned from this his second voyage in 1496. On his appearance at court, the gold, the pearls, the cotton, and the captive Indians, he presented to the sovereigns; made them ashamed of having listened to his enemies; and they resolved to send out every thing that might render Hispaniola a permanent establishment, and to furnish Columbus with such a fleet as would enable him to go in search of those new and rich countries, K which he was persuaded, from the accounts of the Indians, lay at no great distance. But the first joyful impressions made by his return were soon effaced: the more important his discoveries proved to be, the more the mean jealousies of the courtiers, and of Ferdinand himself, were excited; and it was not until two years afterwards that he was enabled to set out on his third voyage, with six ships, on board of which were supplies for the colony, and a number of new colonists, most of whom were criminals from the different prisons in Spain. The first land Columbus made on this voyage was the island of Trinidad, at the mouth of the Oronoko, and thence he steered along the coasts of Para and Cumana; but the bad condition of his ships prevented him from prosecuting the discovery of the continent, and obliged him to sail for Hayti, or Hispaniola. On arriving, he found that his brother had removed the capital from Isabella and fixed it at San Domingo, the name of which was afterwards extended to the whole island. Columbus immediately set about the improvement of the colony, correcting abuses, restraining crimes, and endeavouring to promote the interest of his sovereigns, and the extension of religion among the natives, whom he endeavoured on all occasions to protect. In the meantime, Yanez Pinzon, who had served under Columbus in his first voyage, had touched on the Brazilian shore, and was followed by Cabral, who made a more complete survey of that fertile and beautiful country. And in the same year, Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine gentleman, had accompanied Alonzo de Ojeda on a private expedition to the New World, and having had the address to make it appear that he first saw the great continent, it received his name, America, which it still bears. But while the magnitude and importance of Columbus's discoveries became daily more and more evident, his enemies at court were harassing the king and queen with complaints against his tyranny and his folly, which they said had cost the nation such sums in fitting out the various expeditions as the wretched new countries could never repay; they accused him, moreover, of pride and arrogance, and of assuming an authority above that of the king himself. These calumnies against an absent man were but too easily believed; and Francis de Bovadilla, a knight of Calatrava, was sent out to examine into the conduct of Columbus, and if he found him guilty to send him to Spain, and to assume his offices in the colony. It THE SUBSTANTIAL ENGLISH FARMER'S WIFE. 195 is needless to say that this interested judge condemned the admiral; and the man whose genius had given a new world to the crown of Spain was sent to his sovereign a prisoner and in chains. He arrived in Spain, in December, 1500; and it was no sooner known to Isabella that he was in chains, than she sent orders to release him, and money for his journey to court, where she received him with tender respect, and Ferdinand with decent civility. Bovadilla was degraded, but Columbus was not restored. But his spirit was not yet daunted. He sailed on a fourth voyage two years afterwards, during which he suffered from storms, shipwreck, desertion, mutiny, and above all, from the malice of his jealous enemies. He shortly returned to Spain, where he died in 1504, of a broken heart, and caused the chains with which he had been bound to be buried in the coffin with him. 1. What effect did the discoveries of Columbus produce on the Spaniards? and what number of persons went out with his second expedition ? 2. What did Columbus discover when he reached Hispaniola ? 3. In honour of whom was the new town named? 4. After all the unjust treatment he had received, what was the end of Columbus ? LESSON CXXXVII. MAY THE SEVENTEENTH. The Substantial English Farmer's Wife. HER "lord and master" was a stout man, of middle height and middle age; with a healthy, ruddy, square face, all alive with intelligence and good-humour; and with a rich round voice, loud enough to have hailed a ship at sea. The wife was like her husband, with a difference, as they say in heraldry. Like him in looks, only thinner and paler; like him in voice and phrase, only not so loud; like him in merriment and good-humour; like him in her talent of welcoming, and making happy, and being kind; like him in cherishing an abundance of pets, and in getting through, with marvellous facility, an astounding quantity of business and pleasure. Perhaps the quality in which they resembled each other most completely was the happy ease and serenity of behaviour, so seldom found amongst people of the middle rank, who have usually a best manner and a worst, and whose best (that is, the studied, the company manner) is so very much the worst. She was 2 frankness itself; entirely free from prickly defiance, or bristling self-love. She never took offence, or gave it; never thought of herself or of what others would think of her; had never been affected with the besetting sins of her station, a dread of the vulgar, or an aspiration after the genteel. Her pets were her cows, her poultry, her bees, and her flowers; chiefly her poultry, almost as numerous as the bees, and as various as the flowers. The farm-yard swarmed with peacocks, turkeys, geese, tame and wildducks, fowls, guinea-hens, and pigeons; besides a brood or two of favourite bantams, in the green court before the door, with a little ridiculous strutter of a cock at their head, who imitated the magnificent demeanour of the great Tom of the barn-yard, just as Tom in his turn copied the fierce bearing of that warlike and terrible biped, the he-turkey. Next to her poultry our good farmer's wife loved her flower-garden; and indeed it was of the very first water, the only thing about the place that was fine. She was a real genuine florist; valued pinks, tulips, and auriculas, for certain qualities of shape and colour, with which beauty has nothing to do; preferred black ranunculuses, and gave into all those obliquities of a triple-refined taste by which the professed florist contrives to keep pace with the vagaries of the Bibliomaniac. Of all odd fashions, that of dark, gloomy, dingy flowers, appears to me the oddest. Your true connoisseur, now, shall prefer a deep puce hollyhock, to the gay pink blossoms which cluster round that splendid plant like a pyramid of roses. did she. The nomenclature of her garden was more distressing still. One is never thoroughly sociable with flowers till they are naturalized as it were, christened, provided with decent, homely, well-wearing English names. Now her plants had all sorts of heathenish appellations, which,-no offence to her learning,-always sounded wrong. So Within doors every thing went well. There were no fine misses sitting before the piano, and mixing the alloy of their new-fangled tinsel with the old sterling metal; nothing but one son excellently brought up, a fair slim youth, whose extraordinary and somewhat pensive elegance of mind and manner was thrown into fine relief by his father's loud hilarity, and harmonized delightfully with the smiling kindness of his mother. His Spensers and Thomsons, too, looked well amongst the hyacinths and GRAPHIC DESCRIPTION OF THE MEDITERRANEAN. 197 geraniums that filled the windows of the little snug room in which they usually sate; a sort of after-thought, built at an angle from the house, and looking into the farmyard. It was closely packed with favourite arm-chairs, favourite sofas, favourite tables, and a sideboard decorated with the prize cups and collars of the greyhounds, and generally loaded with substantial work-baskets, jars of flowers, great pyramids of home-made cakes, and sparkling bottles of gooseberry-wine, famous all over the country. ཀཱཀཱཀཱཀ 1. In what quality did the farmer and his wife most resemble each other ? 2. What pets had the farmer's wife? 3. What did our farmer's wife love next to her poultry? 4. Describe the little snug sitting-room. LESSON CXXXVIII. MAY THE EIGHTEENTH. Graphic Description of the Mediterranean. The THAT the Mediterranean generally, and its beautiful boundaries of Alps and Apennines, with its deeply-indented and irregular shores, form the most delightful region of the known earth, in all that relates to climate, productions, and physical formation, will be readily conceded by every one who has visited its shores. countries which border on this midland water, with their promontories buttressing a mimic ocean, their mountainsides teeming with the picturesque of human life, their heights crowned with watch-towers, their rocky shelves consecrated by hermitages, and their unrivalled sheet dotted with sails, rigged, as it might be, expressly to produce effect in a picture, form a sort of world apart that is replete with delights to all who have the happy fortune to feel charms which not only fascinate the beholder, but which linger in the memories of the absent like visions of a glorious past. Byron describes it as "Fill'd with the face of heaven, which from afar Their magical variety diffuse : And now they change; a paler shadow strews Dies like the dolphin, whom each pang imbues The last still loveliest till-'tis gone-and all is grey." |