The Life of Columbus | Page 3

led to great events. This may be an idle and a useless speculation, but it is an inevitable one. Never was there such a field for this kind of speculation as in the voyages, especially the first one, of Columbus. The first point of land that he saw, and landed at, is as nearly as possible the central point of what must once have been the United Continent of North and South America. The least change of circumstance might have made an immense difference in the result. The going to sleep of the helmsman, the unshipping of the rudder, (which did occur in the case of "The Pinzon,") the slightest mistake in taking an observation, might have made, and probably did make, considerable change in the event. During that memorable first voyage of Columbus, the gentlest breeze carried with it the destinies of future empires. Had he made his first discovery of land at a point much southward of that which he did discover, South America might have been colonized by the Spaniards with all the vigour that belonged to their first efforts at colonization; and, being a continent, might not afterwards have been so easily wrested from their sway by the maritime nations.
On the other hand, had some breeze, big with the fate of nations, carried Columbus northwards, it would hardly have been left for the English, more than a century afterwards, to found those Colonies which have proved to be the seeds of the greatest nation that the world is likely to behold.
It was, humanly speaking, singularly unfortunate for Spanish dominion in America, that the earliest discoveries of the Spaniards were those of the West India Islands. A multiplicity of governors introduced confusion, feebleness, and want of system, into colonial government. The numbers, comparatively few, of the original inhabitants in each island, were rapidly removed from the scene of action; and the Spaniards lacked, at the beginning, that compressing force which would have been found in the existence of a body of natives who could not have been removed by the outrages of Spanish cruelty, the strength of Spanish liquors, or the virulence of Spanish diseases.[Footnote 2]
[Footnote 2: The smallpox, for instance, was a disease introduced by the Spaniards, which the comparatively feeble constitution of the Indians could not withstand.]
The Monarchs of Spain, too, would have been compelled to treat their new discoveries and conquests more seriously. To have held the country at all, they must have held it well. It would not have been Ovandos, Bobadillas, Nicuesas and Ojedas who could have been employed to govern, discover, conquer, colonize--and ruin by their folly--the Spanish possessions in the Indies. The work of discovery and conquest, begun by Columbus, must then have been entrusted to men like Cortes, the Pizarros, Vasco Nunez, or the President Gasca; and a colony or a kingdom founded by any of these men might well have remained a great colony, or a great kingdom, to the present day. ARTHUR HELPS. London, October, 1868.

CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
Early Discoveries in the Fifteenth Century
CHAPTER II.
Early Years of Columbus
CHAPTER III.
Columbus in Spain
CHAPTER IV.
First Voyage
CHAPTER V.
Homeward bound
CHAPTER VI.
Second Voyage of Discovery
CHAPTER VII.
Illness; Further Discoveries; Plots against Columbus
CHAPTER VIII.
Criminals sent to the Indies; Repartimientos; Insurrection
CHAPTER IX.
Columbus's Third Voyage
CHAPTER X.
Arrival at Hispaniola; Bad Treatment by Bobadlilla
CHAPTER XI.
Columbus pleads his Cause at Court; New Enterprise; Ovando
CHAPTER XII.
Remarkable Despatch; Mutiny; Eclipse predicted, and its influence; Mutiny quelled
CHAPTER XIII.
Falling Fortunes: Conclusion
CHAPTER I.
Early Discoveries in the Fifteenth Century.
LEGENDS OF THE SEA.
Modern familiarity with navigation renders it difficult for us to appreciate adequately the greatness of the enterprise which was undertaken by the discoverers of the New World. Seen by the light of science and of experience, the ocean, if it has some real terrors, has no imaginary ones. But it was quite otherwise in the fifteenth century. Geographical knowledge was but just awakening, after ages of slumber; and throughout those ages the wildest dreams had mingled fiction with fact. Legends telling of monsters of the deep, jealous of invasion of their territory; of rocks of lodestone, powerful enough to extract every particle of iron from a passing ship; of stagnant seas and fiery skies; of wandering saints and flying islands; all combined to invest the unknown with the terrors of the supernatural, and to deter the explorer of the great ocean. The half-decked vessels that crept along the Mediterranean shores were but ill-fitted to bear the brunt of the furious waves of the Atlantic. The now indispensable sextant was but clumsily anticipated by the newly invented astrolabe. The use of the compass had scarcely become familiar to navigators, who indeed but imperfectly understood its properties. And who could tell, it was objected, that a ship which might succeed in sailing down the waste of waters would ever be able to return, for would not the voyage home