the irons. With characteristic pride Columbus refused to allow, without the king's command, the removal of chains which had been imposed by a delegated representative of the king. To his dying day he kept the fetters as memorials in his chamber! His arrival under such circumstances and in such a condition, produced a reaction in his favour. Ferdinand and Isabella ordered his immediate liberation, and provided for his dignified progress to court, where he was received with honour and graciousness Bobadilla was to be removed forthwith, and Columbus to be reinstated in his governorship. But instead of this an interim-governor for two years, to pave the way for the return of Columbus, was appointed in the person of Nicholas de Ovando, whose subsequent conduct to the great discoverer was of the basest kind.
Columbus was advanced in years, broken in health, maltreated, betrayed, impoverished—such was his exceeding great reward for his magnificent discoveries. Some men would have lapsed into sullen and discontented inaction, or died of a broken heart. But he was possessed by a great idea. Still he would reach India by the west—India which Vasco de Gama, five years before, had reached by the passage round the Cape. A fourth and last expedition was organized for Columbus, but it was petty in the extreme, compared to that with which Ovando had set forth to assume the government of Hispaniola. Such as it was, it sailed on the 9th of May, 1502, under the command of Columbus. The last of his voyages was also the most perilous. In this voyage he discovered Cape Honduras; and, skirting the Mosquito coast, he experienced a terrific tempest. The name of Cape Gracias a Dios still survives to attest the "thanks to God" there offered up by the devout Columbus for his preservation. The rumoured gold mines of Veragua irradiated him with hopes of a proximity to the country of the grand khan, and a river talked of by the natives he fancied to be the Ganges! After the discovery of Puerto Bello, a series of perils and disasters, greater than any to which Columbus had been yet exposed, culminated when he reached a harbour of Jamaica with his ships reduced to mere wrecks. He ran them aground near the shore, and they filled with water to the decks. Cabins were erected for the accommodation of the crews, and a faithful coadjutor was despatched to Ovando at St. Domingo. Then there came, and for long months continued, a frightful time of hardship and danger for Columbus, even whose stout brain and heart nearly gave way. To mutinies among his men was added the refusal of provisions by the natives. Hard fighting could not quell the mutineers, but they had at least to fly. The natives were vanquished by Columbus' dexterity and astronomical knowledge. Foreseeing an eclipse of the moon, he threatened them with a darkening of the great orb of the night, as significant of the anger of the divinity. The darkness came; the terrified natives implored the European's intervention, promising all that he might ask for. When the eclipse was about to end, he came forth from his cabin, announcing that heaven relented; and as the moon recovered her brightness, the savages believed. At last the long and purposely delayed ships arrived from Ovando. Columbus and the survivors of his crew reached St. Domingo to find his own mild policy overturned, and the old native population nearly extinguished by massacre. With heavy heart he set sail for Spain, and on the 7th of November, 1504, he dropped anchor in the harbour of San Lucar.
Eighteen months more and Columbus was at last to enjoy repose—the repose of the grave. Sad and dreary months! He was steeped in poverty—his just dues were denied him. "I live by borrowing," he writes once. Yet he was more solicitous for the payment of his seamen than of himself. His health was irretrievably gone, and ultimately rheumatism prevented him from continuing to write the applications for justice to which the coldest replies were vouchsafed. His best friend, Queen Isabella, died, and with her Columbus' hopes. But to the last he preserved the pride which, in earlier years, had made him reject the offered co-operation of the crown, rather than abate one jot of his just claims. From Seville he dragged himself to Segovia, where Ferdinand received him frostily. The king offered indeed to refer to arbitration all matters in dispute between Columbus and the crown, but he insisted on including in them the claim to reinstatement in his office of viceroy. Columbus refused. All mere money-matters he would refer to arbitration, but his inalienable honours and dignities, never. Months of delay ensued, until the final voyage was to be made. Conscious of his approaching end, Columbus made at least one will, of which the authenticity is indisputable, and having received the sacrament and performed the other offices of his faith, he gave up his soul to his Maker on the 20th August, 1506. "In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum" (Into thy hands, Lord, I commend my spirit), were his last words. His ashes, after many transfers, now rest in the cathedral church of the Havanna. He was buried first at Valladolid, whence his remains were removed to the Carthusian monastery of Las Cuevas, near Seville. It was there that over his grave was placed the memorable inscription, which he had in his lifetime been allowed to use by special favour of his sovereigns:—
A Castilla y a Leon
Nuevo Mundo dió Colon—
What he received in return has been seen.—F. E.
COLUMBUS, Diego, eldest son of the discoverer of America, was, in spite of his illegitimacy, designated by the great Columbus as his heir. A page, when young, of the prince royal of Spain, and afterwards attached to the Spanish court, Diego aided, or tried to aid his father, in the frequent and fruitless negotiations of the latter with Spanish royalty and its representatives. Much of Diego's own life was spent in the unsuccessful assertion of his rights as the heir of his father. Recognized in 1509 as second admiral of the Indies, Diego proceeded to San Domingo, but enjoyed his vice-regal dignity for only four years. Returning to Spain in 1515, to answer in person the charges brought against him in an official letter of the council of the Indies, he had to experience the same treatment which embittered the last years of his father. Following the court from place to place, unable to obtain redress for his grievances or a decision for his claims, he spent ten weary years of solicitation and hope deferred, dying at Montalban in his forty-ninth year. His original acquisition of the admiralship of the Indies, seems to have been facilitated by his marriage to a lady of rank, the daughter of one, and the niece of another, Spanish grandee. This lady accompanied him to San Domingo, where her talents and character exercised a great and salutary influence on the viceregal court and the general society of the island. But her influence does not appear to have been of any service to her husband in the closing years of Don Diego's life.—F. E.
COLUMBUS, Fernando de, the son and biographer of the great admiral, was born in Cordova either in 1487 or 1488. His mother, Doña Beatrix Enriquez, was a lady of respectable family, but was never married to the admiral. At seven years old, Fernando and his elder brother, Diego, were placed as pages in the household of Don Juan, the son and heir of Ferdinand and Isabella. The education he received at court enabled him to turn to literary advantage the material collected in his subsequent travels. At the age of fourteen (1492) he accompanied his father to America in his fourth and last voyage, and endured all the hardships of that enterprise with a bravery which seems to have endeared him to the heart of the great navigator. We afterwards hear of him as engaged in pressing his father's claims on the Spanish court. After his father's death he appears to have made two more voyages to America, and accompanied the Emperor Charles V. to Italy, Flanders, and Germany. According to Luñiga his travels were extended over all Europe, and part of Africa and Asia. Throughout life he seems to have preserved his literary tastes, and formed a library of more than twenty thousand volumes, in print and manuscript. With the sanction of the emperor, he commenced the building of a splendid edifice at Seville, intended for an academy of mathematics, but did not live to complete the undertaking. His own most important contribution to literature is a history of his father, written in Spanish, but now extant only in a retranslation from the Italian version of Alonzo de Ulloa, full of inaccuracies, which so learned a man as Fernando de Columbus could scarcely have fallen into. Fernando died at Seville, 12th July, 1539, worn out with the fatigue of his unceasing labours. He was never married, and left no issue. His valuable library was bequeathed to the cathedral of Seville.—F. M. W.
COLUMELLA, Lucius Junius Moderatus, a Latin writer on agriculture, born probably at Gades (Cadiz) in Spain, about the beginning of the christian era. He possessed an estate in the country of Sa Cerdaña, near the Pyrenees, where he carried on the cultivation of the vine with great success. He seems, however, to have resided for a considerable part of his life at Rome, and to have travelled through various parts of the Roman
