Columbus

by Laurence Bergreen

  Once the Sovereigns became aware of his failure to deliver what he had originally promised and the overwhelming extent of all that he had discovered, they changed the terms of the agreement to ensure that Columbus remained in his place, as their servant rather than a rival. From their point of view, they were entitled to treat him as they wished; from his perspective, the Sovereigns had unaccountably breached their contract. Columbus rallied, and tried to persuade Ferdinand to maintain Columbus’s status and entitlements. “I shall serve you all the remaining days of my life, few though these may be,” and according to Las Casas he vowed that in the future, his service “will prove a hundred times more illustrious than I have done Your Highness to date.”

  These promises restarted negotiations between Ferdinand and his tarnished Admiral, whose son realized that the king “wished to regain absolute control” over the Indies and “dispose as he pleased of the offices that were only the Admiral’s to grant.” Acknowledging that Columbus still had some life in him, and some claim to his discoveries in the Indies, the king offered a new capitulation and requested the name of an arbiter to bring this about; Columbus, taking the bait, put forward the name of his friend at court Diego Deza, a former Franciscan friar who was now the archbishop of Seville and the successor to Tomás de Torquemada as the Grand Inquisitor for all Spain, and whom the pope himself later reprimanded for being overzealous. The archbishop affirmed that Columbus was entitled to the governorship but referred the entire business to lawyers to sort out. In exceptionally strong language, Las Casas wrote, “The king proceeded to prevaricate on this issue and so the Admiral again petitioned him, reminding His Majesty of the service he had done him, the unjust imprisonment he had suffered, and the unwarranted way he had been stripped of the dignities, rank, and honors Their Majesties had bestowed on him.”

  Later, in Seville, Columbus, as persistent as ever, told the king that “he had no desire to go to law or argue his case before judges. He simply wanted His Majesty . . . to give him that which he thought fit.” The Admiral explained that he was “weary to the bone and simply wanted to go off somewhere on his own and rest.” Fruitless meetings exhausted his patience and strength. Growing weaker, Columbus wrote a formal petition, concluding, “I do believe that it is the pain caused by the delay in dealing with my business that is responsible for my being as crippled as I am.”

  He filled the idle hours fretting about his lost income from the Indies, explaining that the Indians “were and are the island’s real wealth.” They grew the food, baked the bread, and excavated the gold on which the “Christians” all depended, yet he was disturbed to hear that “six out of every seven Indians has died as a direct result of the inhuman treatment meted out to them: some hacked to pieces with swords, others clubbed to death, and yet others succumbing from abuse, hunger, and the appalling conditions under which they had been forced to exist.” This expression of regret did not lead to a mea culpa, as might be expected. Rather, the dire situation meant that a great deal of income had been lost—Spain’s income, and his.

  He offered a similarly shallow excuse for his sending ships filled with slaves back to Spain. It was purely a temporary measure, he now explained. He had intended them to convert to the holy faith, and to learn Spanish customs and skills, and then return to Hispaniola, where they could pass all they had learned to their kin.

  The debates and petitions continued without respite. Even Columbus came to realize he had run out of options, out of luck, and out of time. His persistence would get him nowhere. From his sickbed, he wrote to the archbishop of Seville that since the king seemed determined not to honor “the promises he had made along with the Queen (God rest her soul) both by word of mouth and in writing, I feel that it would be like banging my head against a brick wall for a simple countryman like myself to continue the battle.”

  The death of Queen Isabella reverberated throughout Spain and its expanding empire, threatening political instability and even civil war. Juana, the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, had married Philip the Fair. Mentally unstable, she became known as “Juana la Loca”—Juana the Mad. Supported by the nobility, her husband, Philip, became king of Castile, replacing his father-in-law. For a time it appeared that Juana was destined to rule, despite her infirmity, with the understanding that Ferdinand would become permanent regent. To make this plan a reality, Ferdinand struck coins with the impression “Ferdinand and Juana, King and Queen of Castile, León, and Aragón,” the control of currency being the fastest route to control of government. At the same time, Philip sought to form an alliance with Juana la Loca to fend off Ferdinand. In the fall of 1505, the failure of the harvest, driving the price of wheat to unconscionable levels, added to the sense of chaos afflicting Spain.

  The crisis deepened when Ferdinand arranged to marry Germaine de Foix, all of eighteen years of age, compared with Ferdinand’s ripe fifty-four, and, even more unsettling, the niece of the king of France, long persona non grata in Spanish diplomatic circles. Given Germaine’s age, the prospect of heirs suddenly loomed, and the old order of Ferdinand and Isabella, and the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile, and the stability and grandeur that they had represented, appeared to fade into the chronicles of the past.

  On March 22, 1506, Ferdinand married his young bride, setting the stage for civil war. Philip and Juana made every effort to assert their authority. Then, one day in September, Philip overexerted himself while playing a Spanish ball game called pelota, but appeared to recover. A few days later, on September 25, he exercised again, fell ill, and by nightfall he was dead. Poison was suspected as the agent of Philip’s demise, and King Ferdinand the culprit, but nothing was ever proved. The death prompted riots and pushed fragile Juana la Loca, now in her late twenties, into a profoundly affectless state in which she refused to speak or eat. Ferdinand and his newly acquired queen Germaine rebounded, having won the support of—or at least not alienating—the necessary church authorities. He remained in place as regent.

  Against this tumultuous background, Columbus sought to have his rights, as he saw them, restored and confirmed for all time.

  King Ferdinand left Valladolid to call on Columbus, who, his son explained, was “much afflicted by the gout and by grief at seeing himself fallen from his high estate, as well as by other ills.” The old navigator, out of favor if not actually in disgrace, still mattered enough for the king to display concern. They had a long history, beginning with Isabella’s sponsoring the first voyage, and continuing with both of Columbus’s sons serving as pages in the royal court.

  It had taken Columbus years to win standing at court. For all his ambition and desire to impose himself on Spain and its rulers, there was something profoundly otherworldly about him, something that went well beyond conventional piety and mysticism, something that drove and tormented rather than comforted him. His faith brought him no peace. He had driven himself well past the limits of endurance, and had little strength left.

  Columbus felt too weak to rise from his bed to greet the king; in his place, he sent his reliable brother Bartholomew, who carried a letter in which Columbus, “in adverse and distressing circumstances,” apologized for being unable to greet the king.

  Ferdinand intended to rescue his father’s reputation from the conspiracies arrayed against him, but his account revealed the ancient mariner in rapid decline, dwelling on his reputation and entitlements rather than the tasks of discovery, all the while needlessly endangering the lives of those who served him. He had created crises in order to demonstrate his ability to escape them, or to show his martyrdom to the world. In the name of discovery, or divine will, or the Sovereigns, he concocted confrontations, or persisted in misunderstanding his pilots or the Indians, cajoling them through the force of his personality into telling him what he wished to hear. Only in the midst of a crisis, stranded on a beach, or in the grip of a deadly storm did Columbus steadily focus on the tasks necessary for survival; otherwise, he indulged his grandiose fantasies and half consciously looked
for occasions to place himself in harm’s way, to tempt the devil and then loudly praise God for rescuing him from disaster. His fertile psyche devised great problems, as well as the great discoveries for which he became known.

  Although Columbus’s voyages had resulted in monumental discoveries, he took scant delight in them. He remained convinced that China lay just over the horizon, that paradise was accessible from the ocean, and that he had sailed to the outskirts of “India.” His morality remained absolutely fixed. It could be said that over the course of his four voyages, he had discovered everything, but learned nothing. His preconceptions might have been tested and stretched a bit by his experiences, but they remained intact, an edifice of faith and will in a world that he had helped to change.

  The world, in fact, was already moving beyond him, taking his discoveries into a new realm in which the “other world” became known as the New World. He was credited with discovering a continent that he had never recognized and that was named for someone else—Amerigo Vespucci. Discoveries happen in that capricious and convoluted way; often as not, credit is arbitrary.

  Columbus languished in his humble lodgings in Valladolid, but, contrary to legend, he was neither isolated nor impoverished. His sons Ferdinand and Diego were in attendance, as were several of his companions on recent voyages, notably the heroic Diego Méndez. It was apparent to all that he was dying.

  The ills afflicting him at the end of his life have been the subject of much speculation. The symptoms he reported, and which others confirmed, are consistent with crippling and painful arthritis—which Columbus called “gout”—and with malaria, caused by a parasite transmitted by the anopheles mosquito, marked by the high fevers, shaking chills, and anemia afflicting him. Headache, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea are common symptoms, and if he suffered from malaria, as he likely did, he was often miserable. Reviewing his symptoms, some modern doctors have diagnosed a form of reactive arthritis formerly known as Reiter’s syndrome. Caused by infection, this condition can lead to severe inflammation of the eyes (such as conjunctivitis) and painful swelling of the joints, both of which had tormented Columbus for years. If he had contracted reactive arthritis, he might well have suffered from genitourinary and gastrointestinal inflammations. Many of these conditions came and went over time, but there is no doubt that he suffered mightily from their combined effects.

  After a winter spent in steady decline, Columbus dictated his will on May 19. In it, he appointed his son Diego executor, and included provisions for his son Ferdinand’s mother, Beatriz de Arana, who “weighs heavily on my conscience.” But he refused to elaborate: “The reason for this I am not permitted to explain.”

  On May 20, 1506, Columbus died in Valladolid, “having received with much devotion all the sacraments of the Church and said these last words, in manus tuas, Domine, commenda spiritum meum, God, in His great mercy and goodness, assuredly received him into his glory. Ad quem nos cum eo perducat. Amen.”

  He was fifty-four years old.

  Las Casas commented, “And so it was that a man who had, by his own efforts, discovered another world greater than the one we knew before and far more blessed, departed this life in a state of distress and bitterness and poverty without, as he put it himself, so much as a roof he could call his own where he might shelter from the rain and rest from his labors. He died, dispossessed and stripped of the position and honors he had earned by his tireless and heroic efforts and by risking his life over and over again.”

  Columbus’s modest funeral procession wound its way through Valladolid to a Franciscan monastery, where his mortal remains were buried in a crypt. That was not to be his final resting place; rather, it marked the beginning of an endlessly unfolding and often bitterly contested saga of his remains and his legacy.

  In 1509, three years after his death, his remains were removed to the Chapel of Santa Ana in the monastery of Santa María de Las Cuevas, near Seville, where he had spent the years in retreat and reflection between his third and fourth voyages. His son Diego, who became the second admiral, died in 1526, and he was also buried at Las Cuevas. A decade later, in 1536, the third admiral, Luís Columbus, transferred the remains of father and son, along with those of his brother Bartholomew and his wife, Felipa Moñiz, to the Cathedral of Santa María la Menor in Santo Domingo on the island of Hispaniola.

  Several years after that, Luís Columbus, who had given up his family’s administrative responsibilities in exchange for a title—Duke of Veragua—and an annuity, was convicted of bigamy, and sentenced to ten years’ military service in North Africa. Even when confined to remote outposts, Luís Columbus, who had a long history of entanglements with women, bribed his guards, found a mistress, and married her, although his three previous wives were all living. He was exiled again, this time to Oran, a large port city in Algeria, where he died at age fifty, in 1572. He was interred in what had become the Columbus family burial place in the cathedral of Santo Domingo.

  In 1697, Spain ceded part of Hispaniola, now Haiti, to France, and later the rest of the island. To prevent the remains of the Columbus family from going to the French, they were shipped to Havana, Cuba, in 1795, where they were entombed in another cathedral, apparently for all time. But it was not meant to be. In 1877, a priest in the cathedral at Santo Domingo uncovered a lead casket filled with bones, several legends identifying the “Discoverer of America, First Admiral,” and a lead bullet. A year later, further excavations yielded another sign, this one reading “Last of the remains of the first admiral, Sire Christopher Columbus, discoverer.” It could not be established who had placed the signs there, or the significance of the bullet.

  It was later determined that the remains in Havana were actually those of Diego Columbus, the Admiral’s son, and that Columbus himself was still buried in the cathedral of Santo Domingo. In 1879, a report compiled by the Spanish Royal Academy of History listed no less than five burial places for Columbus. After the Spanish-American War in 1898, Spain transported what appeared to be Columbus’s remains in a lead casket to Cadiz, and then up the Guadalquivir River. On January 19, 1899, the lead casket was reburied in the Seville Cathedral, the third cathedral to host the Admiral. As he did in life, the Admiral of the Ocean Sea simultaneously unites and divides three countries and two continents.

  Today, Spain considers Seville the final resting place for Columbus’s remains. The Dominican Republic insists that Columbus and his errant grandson Luís are buried in Santo Domingo, and that Seville has only the remains of his son Diego. DNA tests on the remains proved inconclusive. The controversy is not likely to be resolved anytime soon. And no one knows what to make of the lead bullet found with Columbus’s remains. The exhumations and re-interments of his remains evoke the unquiet soul of a voyager with no final resting place, fated to haunt the shores he explored in his lifetime.

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  EPILOGUE

  Columbus Day

  The drastic devaluation of Columbus seems a recent phenomenon, but it originated at the time of his voyages. The Spanish judicial investigator, Francisco de Bobadilla, sent him home in chains. King Ferdinand disdained him. Bishop Fonseca’s intense dislike for Columbus was widely known. Amerigo Vespucci fostered the impression that he, rather than Columbus, had discovered a New World, and gave his name to the continent. His former lieutenant, Alonso de Ojeda, laid claim to territories first visited by Columbus. Nicolás de Ovando, who succeeded Columbus as governor of Hispaniola, endangered his life and mocked him. The Porras brothers, Francisco Roldán, and others who sailed with Columbus staged mutinies with little or no retribution.

  The most lasting damage to Columbus’s reputation came from the pen of Bartolomé de Las Casas. Arriving in Hispaniola with the new governor, Nicolás de Ovando, in 1502, Las Casas began as a slave owner. In 1510, he became the first priest to be ordained in the Americas, often called the “Apostle to the Indians.” In his influential jeremiad, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (
Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias ), written in 1542, he laid out the torture and genocidal practices of the Spanish colonialists who followed Columbus.

  Las Casas championed the nearly extinct victims of this outrage—“the simplest people in the world,” he wrote of the Taíno Indians, “long suffering, unassertive, and submissive, . . . without malice or guile, utterly faithful and obedient”—in short, the kind of subjects the Spanish crown would want to have. Yet instead of cultivating these gentle and intelligent people, “we know for sure our fellow-countrymen have, through their cruelty and wickedness, depopulated and laid waste an area which boasted more than ten kingdoms, each of them larger than the Iberian Peninsula.” They slaughtered their children, “on occasion running through a mother and her baby with a single thrust of their swords.” The Spaniards were even more brutal with the Indians’ leaders, whom they lashed to a “griddle consisting of sticks resting on pitchforks driven into the ground and then grill[ed] them over a slow fire, with the result that they howled in agony and despair as they died a lingering death.”

  All this Las Casas witnessed. He estimated that “the despotic and diabolical behavior of the Christians has, over the last forty years, led to the unjust and totally unwarranted deaths of more than twelve million souls, women and children among them.” Indeed, he believed fifteen million to be a more accurate tally of deaths caused by Christians resorting to torture, wholesale slaughter, and “the harshest and most iniquitous and brutal slavery that man has ever devised for his fellow men.” Las Casas’s figures have long been debated, but even conservative estimates are stark: of 250,000 Indians under Spanish rule, only 40,000 survived after fifteen years. After a few decades, only a few hundred survived. Many died from infectious diseases caused by exposure to germs borne by the Europeans or their livestock, against which the inhabitants of the New World were defenseless.