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The Return Of Columbus
by
A courtier of shallow wit, with the purpose of throwing discredit on the achievement of Columbus, intimated that it was not so great an exploit after all; all that was necessary was to sail west a certain number of days; the lands lay there waiting to be discovered. Were there not other men in Spain, he asked, capable of this?
The response of Columbus was to take an egg and ask those present to make it stand upright on its end. After they had tried and failed he struck the egg on the table, cracking the shell and giving it a base on which to stand.
“But anybody could do that!” cried the critic.
“Yes; and anybody can become a discoverer when once he has been shown the way,” retorted Columbus. “It is easy to follow in a known track.”
By this time all Europe had heard of the brilliant discovery of the Genoese mariner, and everywhere admiration at his achievement and interest in its results were manifested. Europe had never been so excited by any single event. The world was found to be larger than had been dreamed of, and it was evident that hundreds of new things remained to be known. Word came to Barcelona that King John of Portugal was equipping a large armament to obtain a share of the new realms in the west, and all haste was made to anticipate this dangerous rival by sending Columbus again to the New World.
On the 25th of September, 1493, he set sail with a gallant armament, which quite threw into the shade his three humble caravels of the year before. It consisted of seventeen vessels, some of them of large size for that day, and fifteen hundred souls, including several persons of rank, and members of the royal household. Many of those that had taken part in the Moorish war, stimulated by the love of adventure, were to win fame in the coming years in the conquest of the alluring realms of the West, and the earliest of these sailed now under the banner of the Great Admiral.
The story of Columbus is too familiar to readers for more to be said of it here. It was one in which the boasted honor of the Spanish court was replaced by injustice and lack of good faith. Envy and malice surrounded the discoverer, and in 1500 he was sent home in chains by an infamous governor. The king, roused by a strong display of public indignation, disavowed the base act of his agent, and received Columbus again with a show of favor, but failed to reinstate him in the office of which he had been unjustly deprived. The discoverer of America died at Valladolid in 1506, giving directions that the fetters which he had once worn, and which he had kept as evidence of Spanish ingratitude, should be buried with him.