Read Ebook: Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 A series of pen and pencil sketches of the lives of more than 200 of the most prominent personages in History by Horne Charles F Charles Francis Editor

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It was customary in those days to exchange prisoners taken in arms, or to ransom them; but the English had suffered such loss and defeat through Joan that they determined she should die.

Their only way to do this without publicly dishonoring themselves, was to accuse her of being a witch, and to compel the "religious" tribunal of her own land to become her murderer.

During the first six months of her captivity Joan was treated humanely; but the defeat of the English at Compi?gne awoke anew the superstitions of the English, who believed that, though a prisoner, she exercised her spell upon the army; and she was taken to Le Crotoy, and cast into an iron cage with chains upon her wrists and ankles. After being starved, insulted, and treated with the most hellish brutality in prison for nearly ten months, the saviour of France was brought before a tribunal of men, all of them her enemies. There were three days of this shameful pretence of a trial, and the holy maid, deserted by those whom she had crowned with glory and benefits, was trapped into signing a paper which she supposed only a form of abjuration, but which proved to be a confession of all the crimes with which she was charged; and after she was returned to her dungeon this was exhibited to the people to convince them of her guilt and turn the tide of public sympathy. The Bishop of Beauvais then sentenced her to prison for the rest of her life, on condition that she resume woman's apparel; yet one morning she woke to find no dress in her prison but the clothes she had worn in battle. No sooner had she donned these than the bishop appeared, and accused her of disobedience to the orders of the Church, and he fixed her execution for the next day.

When the horrible fact was made known to her that she was to be burned at the stake in the market-place of Rouen, before a multitude of people, she burst into piercing cries of agony. Her physical strength, courage, and brain-power were all impaired by the months of abuse she had endured, and her very soul was torn by the neglect and indifference which the base king manifested toward her. Up to the very last hour she had believed deliverance would come, but it came only through death. Never since that spectacle of the bleeding Nazarene upon the Cross of Calvary, has the world beheld so terrible a picture of crucified innocence and purity as that of Joan of Arc, the saviour of France, burning in the market-place of Rouen. With her dying breath she cried out that the Voices were real, and that she had obeyed God in listening to their counsels.

Her last word was the name of--Jesus.

It is probable that if Mainz, his country, had not been a free city, this young gentleman would have been unable to conceive or to carry into execution his invention. Despotism and superstition equally insist upon silence; they would have stifled the universal and resistless echo which genius was about to create for written words. Printing and liberty were both to spring from the same soil and the same climate.

Mainz, Strasburg, Worms, and other municipal towns on the Rhine, then governed themselves, under the suzerainty of the empire, as small federal republics, like Florence, Genoa, Venice, and the other states of Italy. The nobility warlike, the burgesses increasing in importance, and the laboring population vacillating between these two classes, who alternately oppressed and courted it, from time to time, here as everywhere, fought for supremacy. Outbursts of civil war, excited by vanity or interest, and in which the victory remained sometimes with the patricians, sometimes with the burgesses, and at others with the artisans, made them alternately victors, conquered, and proscribed. This is the history of all cities, of all republics, and of all empires. Mainz, was a miniature of Rome or Athens, only the proscribed party had not the sea to cross to escape from their country; they went outside the walls, and crossed the Rhine; those of Strasburg going to Mainz, and those of Mainz to Strasburg, to wait until their party recovered power, or until they were recalled by their fellow-citizens.

Thus it was religion which, in this young wandering apostle, was seeking the soil wherein to sow a single seed, of which the fruit hereafter was to be a thousand various grains. It is the glory of printing that it was given to the world by religion, not by industry. Religious enthusiasm was alone worthy to give birth to the instrument of truth.

The poor and youthful sacristan of Haarlem was in love. He used to walk on holydays to the spring outside the town, and sit under the willows by the canals, to indulge in his day-dreams. His heart full of the image of his bride, he used to amuse himself, in true lover's fashion, by engraving with his knife the initials of his mistress and himself, interlaced, as an emblem of the union of their hearts and of their interwoven destinies. But, instead of cutting these ciphers on the bark, and leaving them to grow with the tree, like the mysterious ciphers so often seen on the trees in the forests and by the brooks, he engraved them on little blocks of willow stripped of their bark, and still reeking with the moisture of their sap; and he used to carry them, as a remembrance of his dreams and a pledge of affection, to his lady-love.

At length, having made a model of a press, which seemed to him to combine all the requirements of printing, according to his ideas at that time, he concealed it under his cloak, and walking to the town, went to a skilful turner in wood and metal, named Conrad Saspach, who lived in the Mercer's Lane, asking him to make the machine of full size. He requested the workman to keep it secret, merely telling him that it was a machine by the help of which he proposed to produce some masterpieces of art and mechanism, of which the marvels should be known in due time.

The turner, taking the model in his hands, and turning it backward and forward with the smile of contempt that a skilful artist usually puts on when looking at a rough specimen, said, somewhat scornfully, "But it is just simply a press that you are asking me for, Master Hans!"

This was the first printing-press.

He was still young, and the report of his lawsuit at Strasburg had made his fame known all over Germany, but he returned a workman to a city which he had quitted as a knight. Humiliation, poverty, and glory contended with each other in his fate and in the behavior of his fellow-citizens. Love alone recognized him for what he had been, and for what he was one day to become.

The tendency of the new art, which began by cheapening sacred books under the auspices of the Church alone, escaped, during the first years of its existence, the notice of the Roman court, which saw an auxiliary in what it afterward considered as an opponent.

A short time afterward, the Emperor Maximilian, erecting the printers and compositors into a species of intellectual priesthood, relieved them by the nobility of their occupation from all degradation of rank. He ennobled the art and the artists together; he authorized them to wear robes embroidered with gold and silver, which nobles only had a right to wear, and gave them for armorial bearings an eagle with his wings spread over a globe, a symbol of the flight of written thoughts, and of its conquest of the world.

"I bequeath," he says in his will, "to my sister all the books which I printed at the monastery of St. Arbogast." The poor inventor's only legacy to his surviving relative was the common property of almost all inventors like himself--wasted youth, a persecuted life, a name aspersed, toil, watchings, and the oblivion of his contemporaries.

WILLIAM CAXTON

The original of Raoul's "History," the "Oration of John Russell on Charles, Duke of Burgundy, being created a Knight of the Garter," and the "Translation" of Raoul, were, as far as we know, Caxton's first three works; the last finished in 1471. A "Stanza," by Wynkyn de Worde, notices an edition of "Bartholomoeus, de Proprietatibus Rerum," as printed by Caxton at Cologne , but the actual existence of this edition is unknown. Nor has more certain information yet been obtained of the exact period of Caxton's return to his native country. The usual supposition has been that he brought the art of printing into England in 1474, and this date is indicated by the figures which are united in the centre of his device as a printer. In 1477, however, he had undoubtedly quitted the Low Countries and taken up his residence in the vicinity of Westminster Abbey, where and in which year he printed his "Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers." Stowe says he first exercised his business in an old chapel near the entrance of the abbey; but a very curious placard, a copy of which, in Caxton's largest type, is now at Oxford in the late Mr. Douce's library, shows that he printed in the Almonry. It is as follows: "If it plese any man spirituel or temporel to bye ony Pyes of two and thre comemoracions of Salisburi vse emprynted, after the forme of this present lettre whiche ben wel and truly correct, late hym come to Westmonester in to the Almonesrye at the reed pole and he shal have them good chepe. Supplico stet cedula." According to Bagford, Caxton's office was afterward removed to King Street.

From the evidence of Wynkyn de Worde, in the colophon of his edition of "Vitae Patrum," 1495, it appears that these "Lives of the Fathers" were "translated out of French into English by William Caxton, of Westminster, lately dead," and that he finished the work "at the last day of his life." His death, however, seems fixed, by two or three entries in the parish accounts of St. Margaret, Westminster, to the year 1491 or 1492, in which we read, "Item: atte bureyng of William Caxton for iiij, torches vj^s viij^d. Item: for the belle at same Bureyng vj^d." Wynkyn de Worde no doubt referred to this time.

Caxton, Mr. Warton observes, by translating, or procuring to be translated, a great number of books from the French, greatly contributed to promote the state of literature in England. In regard to his types, Mr. Dibdin says he appears to have made use of five distinct sets, or fonts, of letters, which, in his account of Caxton's works, he has engraved plates in fac-simile. Edward Rowe Mores, in his "Dissertation upon English Typographical Founders and Foundries," says Caxton's letter was originally of the sort called Secretary, and of this he had two fonts; afterward he came nearer to the English face, and had three fonts of Great Primer, a rude one which he used anno 1474, another something better, and a third cut about 1482; one of Double Pica, good, which first appears 1490; and one of Long Primer, at least nearly agreeing with the bodies which have since been called by those names. All of Caxton's works were printed in what are called black letter.

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS

The discovery and the discoverer of America have furnished an almost inexhaustible theme for the critic, the biographer, and the historian. In the year 1892 there was celebrated an event which has come by common consent to be regarded as a world-famous epoch, worthy to be held in everlasting remembrance. We commemorated the man whose discovery almost doubled the extent of the habitable globe.

The life, the voyages, the brilliant triumphs, and the mournful end of Columbus are already familiar to most readers. To recount them at length would be here a needless repetition. Let us rather attempt to glance at some of the historic disputes involving the character and acts of the great discoverer, to sketch briefly the sources of information about him, and to characterize some of the more important writings upon the subject.

There is no lack of biographical material concerning the discoverer of America. He has left memorials of his personality and life-history more abundant than most of the men who have influenced their age. There are more than sixty authentic letters of Columbus in existence. There are long narratives of his expeditions and discoveries, by persons who knew him more or less intimately. There is an extended biography of him written by his own son, Ferdinand Columbus, or from materials furnished by him. There are numerous documents and state papers authenticating his acts, his privileges, and his dignities. And yet, with all the wealth of material, so copious upon his character and his career, it would seem, from recent developments, that the true discoverer of America is yet to be discovered.

Among the many lives of Columbus that have been written, there exist some twenty-five in the English language. Of these two or three only have any historical or critical value. The mass of biographies, both English and American, are mere echoes or abridgments, in other forms of language, of the great work of Washington Irving, first published in 1828. This book was written in Spain, and based upon collections of documents not previously used by biographers. Hence its value as the most copious and systematic life of Columbus which had appeared in any language. The finished and graceful style which characterizes all the works of its accomplished author gave it a high place in literature, which it has maintained for more than half a century, being constantly reprinted.

Next in point of time to Irving, though treating Columbus with less fulness of detail, came the polished historian Prescott, whose "History of Ferdinand and Isabella" was published in 1837. This ardent and laborious scholar was, like Irving, constitutionally inclined to the optimistic view of his leading characters. To magnify the virtues and to minimize the faults of their heroes has always been the besetting sin of biographers. The pomp and picturesque circumstance of the Spanish court, the splendid administrative abilities of Ferdinand, the beauty, amiability, and devoted piety of Isabella, are depicted in glowing colors, but the crimes and cruelties which they sanctioned, while condemned upon one page, are softly extenuated upon others. Columbus appears as a romantic figure in history, the glory of whose successful discovery atones for his many failings.

Of the original sources of information about Columbus the most important are:

The last five writers had personal knowledge or intercourse with Columbus, while Las Casas, Oviedo, and Ferdinand had the advantage of residence in America, and intimate knowledge of the aborigines, and of the men and events of the period.

Almost every item involved in the checkered and eventful life of Columbus has afforded a fruitful theme for controversy. His birth, even, is disputed, under stress of evidence, as falling anywhere between 1435 and 1447--a discrepancy of twelve years. His birthplace is claimed by more towns than that of Homer, although his own statement, that he was a native of Genoa, has met general concurrence. His knowledge of geography, astronomy, and navigation is asserted and denied with various degrees of pertinacity. His treatment by the sovereigns of Portugal, Castile, and Aragon is so far in question that irreconcilable differences of opinion exist. How much Columbus really owed to the aid of the crown, and how much to private enterprise, in fitting out his expeditions of discovery, cannot be definitely ascertained. How far he was hindered by the bigotry, or helped by the enlightenment of powerful ecclesiastics, as at the council of Salamanca, is a theme of perennial controversy.

The island where he first landed is so far from being identified, that many books have been written to prove the claims of this, that, or the other gem of the sea to be the true land-fall of Columbus. His treatment of the natives has been made the subject of unsparing denunciation and of undiscriminating eulogy. His conduct toward his own, often mutinous, crews is alternately lauded as humane and generous, or denounced as arrogant and cruel, according to the sympathies or the point of view of the critic. His imprisonment and attempted disgrace have been made the theme of indignant comment and of extenuating apology. His moral character and marital relations are subjects of irreconcilable differences of judgment. His deep religious bias, so manifest in nearly all his writings, has been praised as a mark of exalted merit by some writers, and stigmatized by others as cant and superstition. The last resting-place of his bones, even, is in doubt, which it required an elaborate investigation by the Royal Academy of History of Madrid to solve in favor of Havana, as against the cathedral of Santo Domingo; though its report is still controverted, and M. A. Pinart has proved to the satisfaction of many that a misprision took place and that the true remains of Columbus still rest at Santo Domingo. The movement to canonize the great discoverer has been championed with more zeal than discretion by some over-ardent churchmen, while the too-evident human frailties of the proposed candidate for the honors of sainthood have inspired an abundant caution in the councils of the Vatican.

On a subject fraught with so much inherent difficulty, contradictory evidence, and conflict of opinion, he is on the safest ground who candidly holds his judgment in reserve. In the light of the keenly-sifted evidence which modern critical study has brought to bear, the laudatory judgments of Irving and Prescott, rendered sixty years ago, cannot stand wholly approved.

Neither can a discerning reader accept the fulsome laudations of his principal French biographer, Roselly de Lorgues, whose rhetorical panegyrics and pious eulogies place its author in the front rank of the canonizers.

On the other hand, those who have taken the unfavorable view of Columbus, have done their utmost to divest him of most of the honors which the general voice of history has assigned him as America's greatest discoverer. The established fact that parts of North America were seen centuries before, though no permanent settlement nor continuity of intercourse ensued, has been used to discredit him, though he was undeniably the pioneer who set out with a plan to discover, and did discover by design, what others found only by accident. His geographical ideas were derived, they say, from Behaim and Toscanelli; his nautical skill from Pinzon; his certainty of finding new lands from Alonzo Sanchez; his courage and daring from some of his fellow-voyagers.

We are pointed to his double reckoning on his first voyage, by which he deceived his sailors as to their true distance from Spain, as evidence of a false nature. He is charged with ambition, cupidity, and arrogance, in demanding titles, dignities, and money as fruits of his discoveries. He was, we are told, a fanatic, a visionary, a tyrant, a buccaneer, a liar, and a slave-trader. He was proud, cruel, and vindictive.

What manner of man, then, was this Columbus, with whose name the trump of fame has been busy so long? As to his person, we have no verified portrait, while the likenesses claiming to represent his features, present irreconcilable differences. But here is the description of him given by Herrera: "Columbus was tall of stature, long-visaged, of a majestic aspect, his nose hooked, his eyes gray, of a clear complexion, somewhat ruddy. He was witty and pleasant, well-spoken and eloquent, moderately grave, affable to strangers, to his own family mild. His conversation was discreet, which gained him the affection of those he had to deal with, and his presence attracted respect, having an air of authority and grandeur. He was a man of undaunted courage and high thoughts, patient, unmoved in the many troubles and adversities that attended him, ever relying on the Divine Providence." Gomara describes him as "a man of good height, strong-limbed, with a long countenance, fresh and rosy in aspect, somewhat given to anger, hardy in exposure to fatigues."

Benzoni says that Columbus was "a man of exalted intellect, of a pleasant and ingenuous countenance."

Bernaldez, the historian of Ferdinand and Isabella, who knew him intimately in his later years, says "he was a man of very lofty genius, and of marvellously honored memory."

With these personal characteristics, Columbus united a restless spirit, a firm will, and a singularly enthusiastic temperament. The latter faculty gave him a consuming zeal for his undertakings, which was as rare as it proved ultimately successful in compassing his great discovery. He was discouraged by no rebuffs, would take no denials. His motto seemed to be never to despair, and never to let go. His spiritual nature was as remarkable as his intellectual. Here, his imagination was the predominant faculty. He firmly believed himself divinely commissioned to find out the Indies, and to bring their inhabitants into the fold of the true faith. He had early vowed to devote the profits of his enterprise, if successful, to rescue the tomb of Christ from the infidels. Himself a devout son of the Church, he fervently believed that he had miraculous aid on many perilous occasions of his life. Humble before God, he was sufficiently proud and independent before men. He insisted upon conditions with the haughty sovereigns of Spain which they deemed exacting, but the high views and tenacity of Columbus carried the day, and his own terms were granted at last. He never forgot, in all his subsequent trials and humiliations, that he was a Spanish admiral, and Viceroy of the Indies.

Such was the character of Columbus. Let us now look at his environment, which in all men contributes so much to make or modify character. Born in Genoa, the headquarters in that day of navigation, Columbus early imbibed a passion for maritime affairs. His youthful days and nights were given to the study of astronomy and of navigation. He was a trained sailor and map-maker from his boyhood. He brooded over the problems involved in the spherical form of the earth. He caught up all the hints and allusions in classical and mediaeval writers that came in his way, of other lands than those already known. The Atlantis of Plato, and the clear prediction in Seneca of another world in the west, fired his imagination. He himself tells us that he voyaged to the Ultima Thule of his day, which was Iceland, besides various expeditions in the Atlantic and Mediterranean.

The early fancies of isles in the western sea loomed up before his eyes, and repeated themselves in his dreams. These visions were heightened by that vague sense of wonder that is linked with the unknown. No wonder, then, that Columbus, with a bent almost preternatural toward the undiscovered regions of the globe, should dream of new lands, new men, new scenery, and new wealth. But to his vivid imagination dreams became realities, until he believed with all the force of his ardent nature that he was divinely commissioned to be a discoverer. Hitherto the Portuguese voyages familiar to Columbus had only skirted the coast of Africa, and discovered the Cape Verde Islands and the Azores. It was not till 1486, years after the idea of his western voyage took firm root in his mind, that the Cape of Good Hope was at last doubled by Vasco da Gama. All voyages prior to his had been only tentative and brief, slowly creeping from headland to headland, or else finding new islands by being drifted out of courses long familiar to mariners.

It was the supreme merit of Columbus that he was the first to cut loose from one continent to find another, and to steer boldly across an unknown sea, in search of an unknown world. We need not belittle the finding of Greenland and of other parts of North America by the Norsemen in the ninth and tenth centuries. We may hail Eric the Red and his stout son, Leif Ericson, as pioneers in what may be termed coasting voyages of discovery. But the story of America gains as little from these shadowy and abortive voyages as civilization has gained from their fruitless results.

On the first voyage of Columbus, he was more fortunate in the uncertain elements which always affect sea voyages so overpoweringly than in some of his later ones. His own vessel, with single deck, was about ninety feet long, by a breadth of twenty feet. The Pinta, a faster sailer, and the Nina were smaller caravels, and without decks, commanded respectively by the brothers Martin and Vicente Pinzon. The three vessels carried ninety persons, sailing September 6, 1492, running first south to the Canaries, and then stretching straight westward on the twenty-eighth parallel for what the admiral believed to be the coast of Japan. Delightful weather favored the voyagers, but when, on the tenth day out from Spain, the caravels struck into that wonderful stretch of seaweed and grass, known as the Sargasso Sea, fear lest they should run aground or soon be unable to sail in either direction took possession of the crews. In five days the caravels ran into smooth water again. But as their distance from Spain grew greater, the spirit of protest and mutiny grew louder. Columbus needed all of his invincible constancy and firmness of purpose to quell and to animate his despairing crews. At last, October 21, 1492--day ever memorable in the annals of this world--the unknown land rose from the bosom of the water. It was named by its pious discoverer San Salvador--Holy Saviour. The charm of climate and of landscape enchanted all, and fear and despondency gave way to delight and joy and the most extravagant anticipations. The subsequent history of this first voyage, the wreck of the admiral's flag-ship Santa Maria, the base desertion of Pinzon, and his baffled attempt to forestall Columbus in the credit of the discovery, the triumphal honors paid to the successful admiral, and the pope's bull conferring upon Spain all lands west of a meridian one hundred leagues from the Azores--all this is familiar to most readers. The actual discoveries of the first voyage included Cuba and Hispaniola , with some little islands of the Bahama group, of small importance.

On his second voyage Columbus found no difficulty in collecting seventeen ships and 1,500 adventurers, so popular had the new way to the Indies become when the way was once found. He set sail six months after his return to Spain, or on September 15, 1493. He returned in June, 1496, after three years of explorations, interrupted by a long illness, and having discovered Jamaica, Porto Rico, Santa Cruz, Antigua, Montserrat, Dominica, and Guadaloupe.

The third voyage began May 30, 1498, and embraced six vessels and 200 men. Columbus struck southwestward from the Cape Verde Islands and ran nearly to the equator, into a region of torrid heat, discovering Trinidad, Tobago, Grenada, and the Gulf of Paria, and making his first landing on the continent, at the Pearl Coast, near the mouth of the Orinoco, in what is now Venezuela. This voyage witnessed many disasters--the rebellion of Roldan, the severe prostration of the admiral by fever, and his seizure and imprisonment in chains by the infamous Bobadilla.

The fourth and last voyage of Columbus, with four small caravels and 150 men, was begun May 11, 1502. On this voyage he discovered Martinique and the coasts of Honduras, Nicaragua, and Veragua, on the mainland, returning to Spain, after untold disasters and miseries, on November 7, 1504. Then followed the weary struggle of the infirm old voyager to secure justice and a part of his hard-earned benefits from the crown. But Isabella had died, and Ferdinand, under the influence of the hard-hearted and cruel bigot, Fonseca, postponed all the claims of Columbus. He who had given a world died in poverty, a suppliant for the means of an honorable existence.

It is easy enough for the writers of the nineteenth century to criticise the actors of the fifteenth; and learned scholars, sitting in luxurious easy-chairs in great libraries, can pass swift and severe judgment upon the acts and motives of Columbus. But let them go back four hundred years, and divest themselves of the bias which the science of to-day unconsciously inspires; let them quit the age of steam-engines, telegraphs, democratic governments, printing-presses, and Sunday-schools; let them orient themselves, and become Spaniards of 1492, instead of Americans of 1892; let them take the place of Columbus--if they are gifted with imagination enough among their manifold endowments to do it; let them think his thoughts, endure his trials, cherish his resolves, encounter his rebuffs, overcome his obstacles, launch out on his voyage, govern his mutinous crew, deal with his savage and hostile tribes, combat the traitors in his camp, suffer his shipwrecks, struggle with his disappointments, bear the ignominy of his chains, see his visions, and pray his prayers.

Behold him, launched on his uncertain voyage across the "sea of darkness," in three little caravels, no larger than the modern yacht, and far less seaworthy. Watch his devoted and anxious look, his solitary self-communings, his all-night vigils under the silent stars. See his motley crew, picked up at random in Palos streets, ignorant, superstitious, and full of fears, dreading every added mile of the voyage, and alarmed at the prevalent east winds which they thought would never permit them to sail back to Spain; so that Columbus, on a contrary head-wind springing up, thanked God with all the fervency of his pious soul. Pursue his career in his later expeditions, hampered by the mutinous vagabonds whom fate had thrust upon him as followers, many of them desperadoes just out of jail. See his baffled endeavors to maintain order and discipline among such a crew; to restrain their excesses, curb their lawless acts of violence, and secure some semblance of decency in their conduct toward the natives. Many of them, we read, were so given over to idleness and sloth, that they actually made the islanders beasts of burden, to carry them on their backs. It is a most unhappy fact that the missionaries of the cross were often accompanied by bands of miscreants, who wantonly broke every commandment in the decalogue and trampled upon every precept of the gospel. See him in his last voyage, beating about the rocks and shoals of an unknown archipelago, overtaken by West India hurricanes, almost engulfed in waterspouts, scudding under bare poles amid perilous breakers, blinded by lightning, deafened by incessant peals of thunder, his crazy little barks tossed about like cockle-shells in the raging waves, his anchors lost, his worm-eaten vessels as full of holes as a honey-comb, two caravels abandoned, and the two remaining run ashore at Jamaica, where Columbus built huts on their decks to shelter his forlorn crew. See him stranded here, pressed by hunger and want, visited by sickness and almost blindness, burning with fever under the wilting, fiery heat of the tropics, desolate, forsaken, infirm, and old. There he lay a whole year without relief, until the cup of his misery was full.

If Columbus was sometimes harsh and cruel, we are to remember that he lived in an age when the most cruel and barbarous punishments were common. There are numerous instances of his clemency both to natives and to his revolted Spaniards, and he more than once jeopardized his own life by sparing theirs. Among a treacherous and vindictive race, many of whom were continually plotting for his overthrow, the admiral, endowed with full power over the lives and acts of his followers, was compelled to make examples of the worst, many of whom were criminals released from the prisons of Spain. Like other fighters, he met treachery with treachery, cruelty with cruelty. He had never learned to love his enemies, nor to turn his cheek for the second blow. Show us the man invested with absolute power, in that or in any former age, who abused it less. Try him by the moral standards, not of our humane and enlightened age, but by those of his own. Compared with the deeds of darkness that were done by Bobadilla and Ovando, the governors who replaced him, the reign of Columbus appears, even at its worst, to have been mild and merciful.

The age of Columbus took him as he was--all full of human imperfections and frailties, but full also to overflowing with a great idea, and with a will, a perseverance, a constancy, and a faith so sublime, as fairly to conquer every obstacle, after a weary struggle of eighteen years, and to carry forward his arduous enterprise to triumphant success. That the great discoverer failed as a governor and administrator makes nothing against his merits as a discoverer. That his light at last went out in darkness--that the world he discovered brought nothing to Spain but disappointment and Dead Sea ashes--that he dragged out a miserable old age in rotten and unseaworthy ships, lying ill in the torrid heats of the West Indies, racked with excruciating pain, and in absolute penury and want--all this but adds point to a life so full of paradox that we may almost pardon him for believing in miracles. After so much glory and so much fame, his life darkened down to its dreary and pathetic close. His ardent soul went at last where wicked governments cease from troubling, and weary mariners are at rest. On May 20, 1506, worn out by disease, anxieties, and labors, the great discoverer launched forth on his last voyage of discovery, beyond the border of that unknown land whose boundaries are hid from mortal ken.

VASCO DA GAMA

Vasco da Gama was the pet of fortune. Never did a man win immortality more easily. As a discoverer and a navigator he should rank not only below Columbus, but also below Bartolemeo Diaz and Cabral among his own countrymen, as well as Vespucius and Magellan, who carried the Spanish flag, and the Cabots, who established England's claim to the most important portions of the New World. As a commander, an administrator, and ruler of newly discovered regions, however, he ranks easily above them all. He not only led the way to India, but laid securely the foundations of Portuguese empire in the East.

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