USA > California > The Spanish Pioneers And The California Missions > Part 2
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With men like "the world-seeking Genoese," a resolve like that, once formed, is as a barbed arrow, - difficult to be plucked out. From that day on he
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MISSION SAN ANTONIO DE PADUA, ABOUT 1900
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knew no rest. The central idea of his life was "Westward ! Asia !" and he began to work for its realization. It is asserted that with a patriotic intention he hastened home to make first offer of his services to his native land. But Genoa was not looking for new worlds, and declined his proffer. Then he laid his plans before John II. of Portugal. King John was charmed with the idea ; but a coun- cil of his wisest men assured him that the plan was ridiculously foolhardy. At last he sent out a secret expedition, which after sailing out of sight of shore soon lost heart and returned without result. When Columbus learned of this treachery, he was so in- dignant that he left for Spain at once, and there interested several noblemen and finally the Crown itself in his audacious hopes. But after three years of profound deliberation, a junta1 of astronomers and geographers decided that his plan was absurd and impossible, - the islands could not be reached. Disheartened, Columbus started for France; but by a lucky chance tarried at an Andalusian monas- tery, where he won the guardian, Juan Perez de Marchena, to his views. This monk had been con- fessor to the queen; and through his urgent inter- cession the Crown at last sent for Columbus, who returned to court. His plans had grown within him till they almost overbalanced him, and he seems to have forgotten that his discoveries were only a hope and not yet a fact. Courage and persistence he certainly had ; but we could wish that now he had 1 Pronounced Hoon-tah.
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been a trifle more modest. When the king asked on what terms he would make the voyage, he replied : " That you make me an admiral before I start ; that I be viceroy of all the lands that I shall find ; and that I receive one tenth of all the gain." Strong demands, truly, for the poor wool-comber's son of Genoa to speak to the dazzling king of Spain !
Ferdinand promptly rejected this bold demand ; and in January, 1492, Columbus was actually on his way to France to try to make an impression there, when he was overtaken by a messenger who brought him back to court. It is a very large debt that we owe to good Queen Isabella, for it was due to her strong personal interest that Columbus had a chance to find the New World. When all science frowned, and wealth withheld its aid, it was a woman's persistent faith - aided by the Church - that saved history.
There has been a great deal of equally unscientific writing done for and against that great queen. Some have tried to make her out a spotless saint, - a rather hopeless task to attempt in behalf of any human being, - and others picture her as sordid, merce- nary, and in no wise admirable. Both extremes are equally illogical and untrue, but the latter is the more unjust. The truth is that all characters have more than one side ; and there are in history as in everyday life comparatively few figures we can either deify or wholly condemn. Isabella was not an angel, - she was a woman, and with failings, as every woman bas. But she was a remarkable woman and a great one, and worthy our respect as well as
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our gratitude. She has no need to fear comparison of character with "Good Queen Bess," and she made a much greater mark on history. It was not sordid ambition nor avarice which made her give ear to the world-finder. It was the woman's faith and sympathy and intuition which have so many times changed history, and given room for the ex- ploits of so many heroes who would have died unheard of if they had depended upon the slower and colder and more selfish sympathy of men.
Isabella took the lead and the responsibility her- self. She had a kingdom of her own; and if her royal husband Ferdinand did not deem it wise to embark the fortunes of Arragon in such a wild enter- prise, she could meet the expenses from her realm of Castile. Ferdinand seems to have cared little either way; but his fair-haired, blue-eyed queen, whose gentle face hid great courage and determination, was enthusiastic.
The Genoan's conditions were granted ; and on the 17th of April, 1492, one of the most important papers that ever held ink was signed by their Majes- ties, and by Columbus. If you could see that pre- cious contract, you would probably have very little idea whose autograph was the lower one, - for Columbus's rigmarole of a signature would cause consternation at a teller's window nowadays. The gist of this famous agreement was as follows : -
I. That Columbus and his heirs forever should have the office of admiral in all the lands he might discover.
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2. That he should be viceroy and governor-gen- eral of these lands, with a voice in the appointment of his subordinate governors.
3. That he should reserve for himself one tenth part of the gold, silver, pearls, and all other treasures acquired.
4. That he and his lieutenant should be sole judges, concurrent with the High Admiral of Cas- tile, in matters of commerce in the New World.
5. That he should have the privilege of con- tributing one eighth to the expenses of any other expedition to these new lands, and should then be entitled to one eighth of the profits.
It is a pity that the conduct of Columbus in Spain was not free from a duplicity which did him little credit. He entered the service of Spain, Jan. 20, 1486. As early as May 5, 1487, the Spanish Crown gave him three thousand maravedis (about $18) " for some secret service for their Majesties ; " and during the same year, eight thousand maravedis more. Yet after this he was secretly proffering his services again to the King of Portugal, who in 1488 wrote Columbus a letter giving him the freedom of the kingdom in return for the explorations he was to make for Portugal. But this fell through.
Of the voyage itself you are more likely to have heard,- the voyage which lasted a few months, but to earn which the strong-hearted Genoese had borne nearly twenty years of disheartenment and opposi- tion. It was the years of undaunted struggling to convert the world to his own unfathomed wisdom
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that showed the character of Columbus more fully than all he ever did after the world believed him.
The difficulties of securing official consent and permission being thus at last overcome, there was only the obstacle left of getting an expedition together. This was a very serious matter; there were few who cared to join in such a foolhardy undertaking as it was felt to be. Finally, volun- teers failing, a crew had to be gathered forcibly by order of the Crown; and with his não the "Santa Maria," and his two caravels the "Niña " and the " Pinta," filled with unwilling men, the world-finder was at last ready.
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III.
COLUMBUS, THE FINDER.
C OLUMBUS sailed from Palos, Spain, on Friday, August 3, 1492, at 8 A. M., with one hundred and twenty Spaniards under his command. You know how he and his brave comrade Pinzon held up the spirits of his weakening crew ; and how, on the morning of October 12, they sighted land at last. It was not the mainland of America,- which Colum- bus never saw until nearly eight years later,- but Watling's Island. The voyage had been the longest west which man had yet made ; and it was very char- acteristically illustrative of the state of the world's knowledge then. When the variations of the mag- netic needle were noticed by the voyagers, they decided that it was not the needle but the north star that varied. Columbus was perhaps as well informed as any other geographer of his day; but he came to the sober conclusion that the cause of certain phenomena must be that he was sailing over a bump on the globe ! This was more strongly brought out in his subsequent voyage to the Orinoco, when he detected even a worse earth-bump, and concluded that the world must be pear-shaped ! It is interesting to remember that but for an accidental
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change of course, the voyagers would have struck the Gulf Stream and been carried north, - in which case what is now the United States would have become the first field of Spain's conquest.
The first white man who saw land in the New World was a common sailor named Rodrigo de Triana, though Columbus himself had seen a light the night before. Although it is probable - as you will see later on - that Cabot saw the actual con- tinent of America before Columbus (in 1497), it was Columbus who found the New World, who took possession of it as its ruler under Spain, and who even founded the first European colonies in it,- building, and settling with forty-three men, a town which he named La Navidad (the Nativity), on the island of San Domingo (Española, as he called it), in December, 1492. Moreover, had it not been that Columbus had already found the New World, Cabot never would have sailed.
The explorers cruised from island to island, find- ing many remarkable things. In Cuba, which they reached October 26, they discovered tobacco, which had never been known to civilization before, and the equally unknown sweet potato. These two
products, of the value of which no early explorer dreamed, were to be far more important factors in the money-markets and in the comforts of the world than all the more dazzling treasures. Even the hammock and its name were given to civilization by this first voyage.
In March, 1493, after a fearful return voyage,
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Columbus was again in Spain, telling his wondrous news to Ferdinand and Isabella, and showing them his trophies of gold, cotton, brilliant-feathered birds, strange plants and animals, and still stranger men, - for he had also brought back with him nine Indians, the first Americans to take a European trip. Every honor was heaped upon Columbus by the appreciative country of his adoption. It must have been a gallant sight to see this tall, athletic, ruddy-faced though gray-haired new grandee of Spain riding in almost royal splendor at the king's bridle, before an admiring court.
The grave and graceful queen was greatly inter- ested in the discoveries made, and enthusiastic in preparing for more. Both intellectually and as a woman, the New World appealed to her very strongly; and as to the aborigines, she became absorbed in earnest plans for their welfare. Now that Columbus had proved that one could sail up and down the globe without falling over that " jumping-off place," there was no trouble about finding plenty of imitators.1 He had done his work of genius, - he was the pathfinder, -and had fin- ished his great mission. Had he stopped there, he would have left a much greater name; for in all that came after he was less fitted for his task.
A second expedition was hastened; and Sept. 25, 1493, Columbus sailed again, - this time taking fif- teen hundred Spaniards in seventeen vessels, with
1 As he himself complains: " The very tailors turned explorers."
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animals and supplies to colonize his New World. And now, too, with strict commands from the Crown to Christianize the Indians, and always to treat them well, Columbus brought the first missionaries to America, -twelve of them. The wonderful mother- care of Spain for the souls and bodies of the savages who so long disputed her entrance to the New World began early, and it never flagged. No other nation ever evolved or carried out so noble an "Indian policy" as Spain has maintained over her western possessions for four centuries.
The second voyage was a very hard one. Some of the vessels were worthless and leaky, and the crews had to keep bailing them out.
Columbus made his second landing in the New World Nov. 3, 1493, on the island of Dominica. His colony of La Navidad had been destroyed ; and in December he founded the new city of Isabella. In January, 1494, he founded there the first church in the New World. During the same voyage he also built the first road.
As has been said, the first voyages to America were little in comparison with the difficulty in get- ting a chance to make a voyage at all; and the hardships of the sea were nothing to those that. came after the safe landing. It was now that Colum- bus entered upon the troubles which darkened the remainder of a life of glory. Great as was his genius as an explorer, he was an unsuccessful colonizer ; and though he founded the first four towns in all the New World, they brought him only ill. His colo-
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nists at Isabella soon grew mutinous ; and San Tonias, which he founded in Hayti, brought him no better fortune. The hardships of continued exploration among the West Indies presently overcame his health, and for nearly half a year he lay sick in Isabella. Had it not been for his bold and skilful brother Bartholomew, of whom we hear so little, we might not have heard so much of Columbus.
By 1495, the just displeasure of the Crown with the unfitness of the first viceroy of the New World caused Juan Aguado to be sent out with an open commission to inspect matters. This was more than Columbus could bear ; and leaving Bartholomew as adelantado (a rank for which we now have no equiva- lent ; it means the officer in chief command of an expedition of discoverers), Columbus hastened to Spain and set himself right with his sovereigns. Returning to the New World as soon as possible, he discovered at last the mainland (that of South America), Aug. 1, 1498, but at first thought it an island, and named it Zeta. Presently, however, he came to the mouth of the Orinoco, whose mighty current proved to him that it poured from a continent.
Stricken down by sickness, he returned to Isabella, only to find that his colonists had revolted against Bartholomew. Columbus satisfied the mutineers by sending them back to Spain with a number of slaves, - a disgraceful act, for which the times are his only apology. Good Queen Isabella was so indignant at this barbarity that she ordered the poor Indians to be
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liberated, and sent out Francisco de Bobadilla, who in 1500 arrested Columbus and his two brothers, in Española, and sent them in irons to Spain. Colum- bus speedily regained the sympathy of the Crown, and Bobadilla was superseded; but that was the end of Columbus as viceroy of the New World. In 1502 he made his fourth voyage, discovered Mar- tinique and other islands, and founded his fourth colony, - Bethlehem, 1503. But misfortune was closing in upon him. After more than a year of great hardship and distress, he returned to Spain; and there he died May 20, 1506.
The body of the world-finder was buried in Val- ladolid, Spain, but was several times transferred to new resting-places. It is claimed that his dust now lies, with that of his son Diego, in a chapel of the cathedral of Havana; but this is doubtful. We are not at all sure that the precious relics were not retained and interred on the island of Santo Do- mingo, whither they certainly were brought from Spain. At all events, they are in the New World, - at peace at last in the lap of the America he gave us.
Columbus was neither a perfect man nor a scoun- drel, - though as each he has been alternately pic- tured. He was a remarkable man, and for his day and calling a good one. He had with the faith of genius a marvellous energy and tenacity, and through a great stubbornness carried out an idea which seems to us very natural, but to the world then seemed ridiculous. As long as he remained in
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the profession to which he had been reared, and in which he was probably unequalled at the time, he made a wonderful record. But when, after half a century as a sailor, he suddenly turned viceroy, he became the proverbial "sailor on land," - abso- lutely " lost." In his new duties he was unpractical, headstrong, and even injurious to the colonization of the New World. It has been a fashion to accuse the Spanish Crown of base ingratitude toward Co- lumbus; but this is unjust. The fault was with his own acts, which made harsh measures by the Crown necessary and right. He was not a good manager, nor had he the high moral principle without which no ruler can earn honor. His failures were not from rascality but from some weaknesses, and from a general unfitness for the new duties to which he was too old to adapt himself.
We have many pictures of Columbus, but prob- ably none that look like him. There was no photog- raphy in his day, and we cannot learn that his por- trait was ever drawn from life. The pictures that have come down to us were made, with one excep- tion, after his death, and all from memory or from descriptions of him. He is represented to have been tall and imposing, with a rather stern face, gray eyes, aquiline nose, ruddy but freckled cheeks, and gray hair, and he liked to wear the gray habit of a Franciscan missionary. Several of his original let- ters remain to us, with his remarkable autograph, and a sketch that is attributed to him.
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IV.
MAKING GEOGRAPHY.
W HILE Columbus was sailing back and forth between the Old World and the new one which he had found, was building towns and nam- ing what were to be nations, England seemed almost ready to take a hand. All Europe was in- terested in the strange news which came from Spain. England moved through the instrumentality of a Venetian, whom we know as Sebastian Cabot. On the 5th of March, 1496, - four years after Colum- bus's discovery, - Henry VII. of England granted a patent to "John Gabote, a citizen of Venice," and his three sons, allowing them to sail westward on a voyage of discovery. John, and Sebastian his son, sailed from Bristol in 1497, and saw the mainland of America at daybreak, June 24, of the same year, - probably the coast of Nova Scotia, -but did noth- ing. After their return to England, the elder Cabot died. In May, 1498, Sebastian sailed on his second voyage, which probably took him into Hudson's Bay and a few hundred miles down the coast. There is little probability in the theory that he ever saw any part of what is now the United States. He was a northern rover, - so thoroughly so, that the three
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hundred colonists whom he brought out perished with cold in July.
England did not treat her one early explorer well ; and in 1512 Cabot entered the more grateful service of Spain. In 1517 he sailed to the Spanish pos- sessions in the West Indies, on which voyage he was accompanied by an Englishman named Thomas Pert. In August, 1526, Cabot sailed with another Spanish expedition bound for the Pacific, which had already been discovered by a heroic Spaniard ; but his officers mutinied, and he was obliged to abandon his purpose. He explored the Rio de la Plata (the "Silver River ") for a thousand miles, built a fort at one of the mouths of the Parana, and explored part of that river and of the Paraguay, -for South Amer- ica had been for nearly a generation a Spanish pos- session. Thence he returned to Spain, and later to England, where he died about 1557.
Of the rude maps which Cabot made of the New World, all are lost save one which is preserved in France ; and there are no documents left of him. Cabot was a genuine explorer, and must be included in the list of the pioneers of America, but as one whose work was fruitless of consequences, and who saw, but did not take a hand in, the New World. He was a man of high courage and stubborn per- severance, and will be remembered as the discov- erer of Newfoundland and the extreme northern mainland.
After Cabot, England took a nap of more than half a century. When she woke again, it was to find
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that Spain's sleepless sons had scattered over half the New World; and that even France and Portu- gal had left her far behind. Cabot, who was not an Englishman, was the first English explorer; and the next were Drake and Hawkins, and then Captains Amadas and Barlow, after a lapse of seventy-five and eighty-seven years, respectively,-during which a large part of the two continents had been discov- ered, explored, and settled by other nations, of which Spain was undeniably in the lead. Columbus, the first Spanish explorer, was not a Spaniard; but with his first discovery began such an impetuous and un- ceasing rush of Spanish-born explorers as achieved more in a hundred years than all the other nations of Europe put together achieved here in America's first three hundred. Cabot saw and did nothing; and three quarters of a century later Sir John Haw- kins and Sir Francis Drake - whom old histories laud greatly, but who got rich by selling poor Afri- cans into slavery, and by actual piracy against un- protected ships and towns of the colonies of Spain, with which their mother England was then at peace - saw the West Indies and the Pacific, more than half a century after these had become possessions of Spain. Drake was the first Englishman to go through the Straits of Magellan,- and he did it sixty years after that heroic Portuguese had found them and christened them with his life-blood. Drake was probably first to see what is now Oregon, - his only important discovery. He "took posses- sion" of Oregon for England, under the name of
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" New Albion ; " but old Albion never had a settle- ment there.
Sir John Hawkins, Drake's kinsman, was, like him, a distinguished sailor, but not a real discoverer or explorer at all. Neither of them explored or colonized the New World; and neither left much more impress on its history than if he had never been born. Drake brought the first potatoes to England ; but the importance even of that dis- covery was not dreamed of till long after, and by other men.
Captains Amadas and Barlow, in 1584, saw our coast at Cape Hatteras and the island of Roanoke, and went away without any permanent result. The following year Sir Richard Grenville discovered Cape Fear, and there was an end of it. Then came Sir Walter Raleigh's famous but petty expeditions to Virginia, the Orinoco, and New Guinea, and the less important voyages of John Davis (in 1585-87) to the Northwest. Nor must we forget brave Mar- tin Frobisher's fruitless voyages to Greenland in 1576-81. This was the end of England in America until the seventeenth century. In 1602 Captain Gosnold coasted nearly our whole Atlantic seaboard, particularly about Cape Cod; and five years later yet was the beginning of English occupancy in the New World. The first English settlement which made a serious mark on history - as Jamestown did not - was that of the Pilgrim Fathers in 1620; and they came not for the sake of opening a new world, but to escape the intolerance of the
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old. In fact, as Mr. Winsor has pointed out, the Saxon never took any particular interest in America until it began to be understood as a commercial opportunity.
But when we turn to Spain, what a record is that of the hundred years after Columbus and before Plymouth Rock ! In 1499 Vincente Yañez de Pin- zon, a companion of Columbus, discovered the coast of Brazil, and claimed the new country for Spain, but made no settlement. His discoveries were at the mouths of the Amazon and the Orinoco ; and he was the first European to see the greatest river in the world. In the following year Pedro Alvarez Cabral, a Portuguese, was driven to the coast of Brazil by a storm, "took possession " for Portugal, and founded a colony there.
As to Amerigo Vespucci, the inconsiderable ad- venturer whose name so overshadows his exploits, his American claims are extremely dubious. Ves- pucci was born in Florence in 1451, and was an educated man, - his father being a notary and his uncle a Dominican who gave him a good schooling. He became a clerk in the great house of the Medi- cis, and in their service was sent to Spain about 1490. There he presently got into the employ of the merchant who fitted out Columbus's second expedition, - a Florentine named Juanoto Berardi. When Berardi died, in 1495, he left an unfinished contract to fit out twelve ships for the Crown; and Vespucci was intrusted with the completion of the contract. There is no reason whatever to believe
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that he accompanied Columbus either on the first or the second voyage. According to his own story, he sailed from Cadiz May 10, 1497 (in a Spanish expedition), and reached the mainland eighteen days before Cabot saw it. The statement of ency- clopædias that Vespucci "probably got as far north as Cape Hatteras" is ridiculous. The proof is ab- solute that he never saw an inch of the New World north of the equator. Returning to Spain in the latter part of 1498, he sailed again, May 16, 1499, with Ojeda, to San Domingo, a voyage on which he was absent about eighteen months. He left Lisbon on his third voyage, May 10, 1501, going to Brazil. It is not true, despite the encyclopædias, that he discovered and named the Bay of Rio Janeiro ; both those honors belong to Cabral, the real discoverer and pioneer of Brazil, and a man of vastly greater historical importance than Vespucci. Vespucci's fourth voyage took him from Lisbon (June 10, 1503) to Bahia, and thence to Cape Frio, where he built a little fort. In 1504 he returned to Portu- gal, and in the following year to Spain, where he died in 1512.
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