Columbus Rediscovered: In Quest of Ships by Peter Stanford It was mid-1485 . Columbus had slipped down the coast to the small port of Los Palos, just across the border of Portugal in Castile's province of Andalusia. He left quietly, leaving debts behind from his long campaign to convince King Joao II, head of the nation that led the way in oceanic exploration and discovery, to back his plans for the westward voyage. His arrival in the small port of Los Palos was quiet too. Relatives of his wife Felipa Perestrello e Moniz, who died the year before, lived in the area; presumably he sought shelter with them . But, we know little of how he sustained himself. One very human scene survives, a scene recalled more than a quarter century later by a witness testifying in the litigation pursued by the heirs of Columbus to secure their full inheritance from the crown. He tells of Columbus arriving at the monastery of la Rabida, a mile or so downstream from Los Palos, and asking for water and bread for his son Diego, then about five years old. He was given bread and water, and more-he found a willing audience for hi s project. Antonio de Marchena, a visiting Franciscan, who was an astronomer of some note, heard his tale and became interested in the great undertaking. Marchena must have been fired up by Columbus's missionary zeal. For-make no mistake about it-here was a man with a mission. His argument that the voyage should be made to win souls for Christendom was no add-on to his case to gain support. It was integral to his purpose-a purpose embodying a search for the truth of things. His drive to expand Christendom seems structurally very close to a desire to expand human awareness; God in this rubric was the truth. And it was a duty of His servants to go out and discover the true shape of things in the world He had created. This picture of Columbus's mission pull s many things together in his story-from his wide-ranging assembling of know ledge of the expanding experience of the great ocean to the westward (a compendious knowledge gleaned from a thousand sources and recorded in meticulous notes) to such things as the delight he took in a fair morning at sea and the evident joy he felt in rounding the next headland of the islands he came upon on the far side of that wide ocean. Dusty Answers on the Roads of Spain Whatever Columbus told Marchena that August day, in that remote, sand-surrounded outpost of the faith, at la Rabida, it converted the Franciscan into a determined and ultimately effective supporter of the quest. Years later, Columbus reminded Isabella and Ferdinand that he was seven years in their country importuning them for the project, "and never in all this time did any pilot, mariner, philosopher or other scientist call my enterprise anything but false." He added: "I received help from no one but Friar Antonio de Marchena .... " Columbus was able to leave young Diego at La Rabida, thus freeing himself to pursue his campaign to get ships and backing for his voyage. Marchena got him an introduction to the powerful Duke of Medina Sidonia (ancestor of the unfortunate duke who led the Spanish Armada to destruction 100 years later). He seemed to strike pay dirt almost immediately, being referred to the Count of Medina Celi, a shipowner who pledged ships. But this proved to be fool's gold, for the Count was not about to sponsor such an expedition without approval from the Queen. One suspects an elaborately courteous putoff, though Samuel Eliot Morison and other biographers of Columbus seem to accept Medina Celi's offer at face value. The more skeptical among us note that, despite the expedients 18
the crown was put to to provide ships and financing, Medina Celi played no part in the eventual expedition. Columbu s pre ssed on to Cordova, inland up the Guadalquivir, where the King and Queen made their residence part of the year. The Catholic Sovereigns had departed when he arrived, in January 1486, and Columbus stayed on to await their return. There, in the Genoese colony in Cordova, he made friends with Diego Harana, at whose house he met Beatriz Enriquez, a twenty-year-old Harana cousin whose parents had died . Beatriz became his mistress, and in 1488 she bore him a second son, Ferdinand. Morison comments fairly on this liaison: "The Harana family were pleased with the connection; at least two of them later served under Columbus, and the friendship between them and his legitimate descendants continued for two or three generations." Amid these familial scenes, Columbus finally got his audience with Queen Isabella on 1May 1486, after almost a year seeking this meeting. All we know of the meeting is its outcome: the Queen appointed her confessor, Hernando de Talavera, to examine Columbus on his project and make a recommendation. Strong tradition has it that there was an electric something between Isabella and Columbus. They were both tall and fair and in their mid-thirties. In both, courtly and careful manners masked a dedication to a kind of ideal vision of the world, and one feels in both a contempt for opportunistic maneuver. Perhaps all this added up to what Morison calls a "spark of understanding" between them. The Talavera Commission recommended against Columbus' s Enterprise of the Indies, as Columbus named his project. Columbus had followed the court north to the University of Salamanca near Madrid, where his case was thoroughly looked into-but we do not know the arguments that were made against it. The outcome in any case is unsurprising. Here is this Genoese of no particular background, arguing with learned men as though he could tell them a thing or two. It was a bookish age, in which the authority of written precedent was sought for everything. Marco Polo 's discoveries in China were dismissed by learned people because there was no corroboration of some things he reported among the writings of Roman authorities of a thousand years earlier! Columbus was self-taught. His wide reading, broadened and tempered by his extensive on-deck experience at sea, made him an excellent navigator and something of a poet. But we may be quite sure that these qualities did not endear him to his examiners, who considered him uneducated and presumptuous. Their review of his proposal probably took on something of the nature of an inquisition-that is, a searching-out of error and heresy, or deviation from divine truth as perceived by the authorities of the day. The idea that these learned men were aware by superior knowledge that the world was larger than Columbus thought and that Asia was smaller (so that there had to be a huge space to be traversed before you reached the Far East) is probably not sound. It is not backed by anything written at the time, and no one came forth with such arguments when Columbus returned from his first voyage. Even after all Columbus's four voyages to the New World were completed, a new , otherwise authoritative map, Johann Ruysch 's Map of 1508 (see SH 53, p19), showed Columbus's discoveries just where Columbus thought they were, southeast of China, with Greenland in the north bordering on the Gobi Desert in Tibet. The two authorities we have who report on the Salamanca SEA HISTORY 54, SUMMER 1990