337 



COLUMBUS, CHRISTOPHER. 



COLUMELLA, LUCIUS JCJN1US. 



land was the real Cipango. When this delusion was over, he fancied 

 Cuba to be not far from Mango and Cathay, so brilliantly depicted 

 in his great oracle, Marco Polo. To the time of his death Columbus 

 believed Cuba to be a part of the mainland of India, and it was owing 

 to this mistake that the appellation of Indians was extended to all 

 the Aborigines of the Americas. He next took Hayti, or Santo 

 Domingo, for the ancient Ophir, the sources of the riches of Solo- 

 mon, but he gave it the Latin diminutive of Hispaniola, from its 

 resembling the fairest tracts of Spain. Leaving here tbe germ of a 

 future colony, he set sail homeward the 4th of January 1493. A 

 dreadful storm overtook him on tbe 12th of February. Columbus 

 fearing the loss of his discovery more than the loss of life, retired to 

 write two copies of a short account of it. He wrapped them in wax, 

 inclosed them in two separate casks t one of which he threw into the 

 sea, and the other he placed on the poop of his vessel, that it might 

 float in case she should sink. Happily the storm subsided, but 

 another drove him off the mouth of the Tagus on the 4th of March ; 

 and although distrustful of the Portuguese, he was obliged to take 

 shelter there. At last he landed triumphantly at Palos, the 15th of 

 March 1493. In his journey through Spain, he received princely 

 honours all his way to Barcelona, where the court had gone. His 

 entiance here, with some of the natives, and with the arms and 

 utensils of the discovered islands, was a triumph as striking and 

 more glorious than that of a conqueror. Ferdinand and Isabella 

 received him seated in state, rose as he approached, raised him as he 

 kneeled to kiss their hands, and ordered him to be seated in their 

 presence. 



On the 25th of September 1493, Columbus left Cadiz on a second 

 expedition, with 17 ships and 1500 men. He discovered the Caribbee 

 Islands, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica; and after repeated mutinies of 

 hit colonists, and great hardships, he returned against the tradewinds 

 to Cadiz, June 11, 1496. Having dispelled all the calumnies that had 

 been accumulated upon him, Columbus embarked the 30th of May 

 1498 at fcian Lucar rte Barrameda, on a third expedition, with only six 

 vessels. In this voyage he discovered La Trinidad, the mouths of the 

 Orinoco (which river he imagiued to proceed from the tree of life in 

 the midst of Paradise, the situation of which was then supposed to 

 be in the remotest parts of the east), the coast of Paria, and the 

 Margarita and Cubagua Islands. Un the 14th of August he bore 

 away for Hispaniola to recruit his health. The dissensions which 

 arose here, the calumnies of miscreants who had been shipped off to 

 Spain, countenanced as they were by envious courtiers at home, the 

 unproductiveness of the new settlement, and regret at having vested 

 luch high powers in a subject and a foreigner, who could now be 

 dispensed with, induced Ferdinand, iu July 1500, to despatch Fran- 

 ci*co Bovadilla to supersede Columbus, and bring him back in chains. 

 Vallejo, the officer who had him in charge, and Martin, the master of 

 the caravel, would have taken hia chains off; but Columbus proudly 

 said, " I will wear them till the king orders otherwise, and will pre- 

 serve them as memorials of his gratitude." He bung them up in hia 

 cabinet, and requested they should be buried iu his grave. The 

 general burst of indignation at Cadiz, whicli was echoed throughout 

 Spain, on the arrival of Columbus in fetters, compelled Ferdinand 

 himself to disclaim all knowledge of the shameful transaction. But 

 etill the king kept Columbus in attendance for niue months, wasting 

 hia time in fruitless solicitations for redress ; and at hut appointed 

 Nicholas Ovando governor of Hiapaniola in his place. 



With restricted powers and a broken frame, but with hU ever-soaring 

 and irrepressible enthusiasm, Columbus sailed from Cadiz aguiu on 

 the 9th of May 1502, with four caravels and 150 men, in search of a 

 passage to the Ka.it Indies near the Isthmus of Durieu, which should 

 supersede thut of Vasco de Gama. Being denied relief and even 

 shelter at Santo Domingo, he was swept away by the currents to the 

 north-west; he however missed Yucatan and Mexico, and at last 

 reached Truxillo, whence he coasted Honduras, the Mosquito shore, 

 Costa Rica, Veragua, as far as the point which ho called El Hetrete, 

 where the recent westward coasting of Bastidei had terminated. But 

 here, on the 5th of December, he gave up his splendid vision, and 

 yielded to the clamours of his crews to return in search of gold to 

 Veragua, a country which he himself mistook for the Aurea Cher- 

 sonesua of the ancients. 



Finally, the fierce resistance of the natives and the crazy state of his 

 ships forced him, at the close of April, 1503, to make the best of hia 

 way for Hispaniola with only two crowded wrecks, which, being 

 incapable of keeping the sea, came, on the 24th of June, to anchor at 

 Jamaica. After famine and despair had occasioned a series of mutinies 

 and disasters far greater than any that he had yet experienced, he at 

 last arrived, on the 13th of August, at Santo Domingo. Here he 

 exhausted his funds in relieving his crews, extending his generosity 

 even to those who had been most outrageous. Sailing homewards on 

 the 12th of September, he anchored his tempest-toesed and shattered 

 bark at San Lucar, the 7th of November 1504. From San Lucar hi 

 proceeded to Sevilla, where he soon after received the news of the 

 death of his patroness Isabella. Ho was detained by illness till the 

 spring of 1505, when he arrived, wearied and exhausted, at Segovia, 

 to have only another courtly denial of redress, and to linger a yea 

 longer in neglect, poverty, and pain, till death gave him relief a 

 Volladolid on the 20th of May 1506. Thus ended a noble and glorious 



.areer, inseparably connected with the records of the injustice and 

 ngratitude of kings. To make some amends for the sorrows and 

 vrongs of this great man, his remains received a pompous funeral, and 

 lis grave and coat of arms the following motto : 

 " A Castilla y a Leon 

 Nuevo Mundo dio Colon." 



Although Sebastian Cabot discovered Newfoundland and Labrador 

 n June 1497, and Columbus did not touch the American continent 

 ill he visited the coast of Paria in August 1498, yet Columbus first 

 eached Guanahani, and what may properly be denominated the 

 Columbian Archipelago, and is really the discoverer of the New 

 Vorld. Rafn (' Antiquitates Americana;,' 1845) seems to have estab- 

 ished if the passages he quotes from the Sagas are not interpolations 

 not merely that the Northmen discovered the American continent, but 

 ;hat they formed settlements on the coast between Boston and New 

 fork, in or before the llth century. Humboldt, a great authority iu 

 such matters, has adopted this view ('Kosmos,' ii. 234, and Notes) : 

 Jancroft ('Hist, of United States," chap, i.) examines and rejects it. 

 The legend of an Irish discovery and colonisation has found no recent 

 supporters among the learned. 



The voyage of one Antonio Sanchez from the Canaries to Hayti in 

 .484, mentioned by the Inca Garcilaso and some other Spanish writers, 

 s regarded as a fable. The accounts however of Spaniards and Portu- 

 guese who had sailed westward so far as to perceive indications of 

 and, were useful to Columbus, according to his own avowal. 

 Ferdinand and Isabella, in a written declaration of the 4th of August 

 1494, ascribe the new discoveries to Columbus. Amerigo Vespucci, 

 whose name was afterwards given to the new hemisphere, did not see 

 t till he accompanied Ojeda, ns a pilot, to the coast of Paria in 1499. 



(The following are the principal authorities for the Life of Colam- 

 >as : Navigations del Re di Castiglia, delle Isule e Paesi nuovarnente 

 Urovati, and the Latin translation, Navigatio Chriatophori Oolombi, 

 Vicenza, 1507; Itinerarium Portugallensium, Milan, 1508; Grinjeus, 

 Novta Orbit Regionum, Bale, 1533; Life of the Admiral, y his son 

 Fernando, Oviedo; Chronicle of the Indies, Sevilla, 1535; Manu- 

 script History of Fernando and Isabella, by the curate of Los Palacros; 

 Manuscript History of the Indies, by Las Casas ; Letters and Decades 

 of the Ocean, by Peter Martyr d'Anghierra, or Angleria; Hen-era, 

 Jfiitury of the Indies; Robertson, History of America; Churchill, 

 Voyages, vol. ii. ; Navarrete, Relation de los quatro Viajes de Cristobal 

 Colon; Irving, Life of Columbia ; Hrescott, Ferdinand and Isabella.) 



COLUMELLA, LU'CIOS JU'NIUS MODKRA'TUd, the author of 

 one of the most voluminous and valuable works on Roman agriculture, 

 if not himself a native of Gadea (Cadiz), sprung from a family belonging 

 to that town, which had been long most intimately connected with 

 Rome. In several parts of his work he speaks of a paternal uncle, 

 Marcus Columella, who had lived in Bsetica (Andalusia), and had been 

 well known as an intelligent agriculturist. In particular he speaks of 

 his success in the improvement of the breed of sheep by the intro- 

 duction of rams from Mauritania, and it has been suggested that the 

 celebrated stock of the Merinos owes its origin to this importation. 

 The author himself possessed an estate in the country of the Ceretaui 

 (La Cerdafia), near the Pyrenees, where he was eminently successful 

 in the growth of the vine. When he wrote his work he appears to 

 have been residing either at Rome, or in the neighbourhood; but he 

 had a personal knowledge of many p^rts of the Roman empire. He 

 himself mentions a residence of some length in Cilicia and Syria 

 (ii. 10, 18), but without stating the object which carried him into that 

 part of the world. As he mentions having been present at a con- 

 versation on agriculture in which L. Volusius who died A.D. 20 (Tao. 

 ' Annales,' iii. 30), took part (i. 7, 3), and as he again speaks of Seneca 

 (whose death occurred in 66) as still living (iii. 3, 31), he must have 

 been born about the beginning of the Christian era. 



The work of Columella is addresse.l to Publiua Silvinus, and coa- 

 sists of twelve books : the first two on the choice of a farm and farm- 

 house, the selection of slaves, the cultivatiou of arable and pasture 

 land ; the next three on the cultivation of the vine, olive, and fruits 

 of the orchard, &c. ; the sixth and seventh, on the ox, horse, mule, 

 ass, sheep, goat, and dog, that is, the shepherd's dog and the house 

 dog, for he specially excludes the sporting dog, as interfering with, 

 instead of promoting the economic management of a farm. The 

 eighth book treats of the poultry-yard, and the ninth of bees. The 

 next, which hag for its subject the vegetable and flower garden, pre- 

 sents the unusual spectacle of a poem in the middle of a prose work. 

 This form was selected by Columella at the pressing solicitation of 

 his friend Silvinus, and the poem was avowedly put forth as a supple- 

 ment to the Georgics of Virgil, in answer to the challenge of the 

 Mantuan bard (Georg. iv.). In the eleventh book the author is again 

 on the terra firma of prose, and gives us in three long chapters, not 

 very closely connected, the duties of a bailiff, a farmer's almanac, and 

 the vegetable garden. This book is sometimes entitled the 'Bailiff' 

 (Villicus) ; as the last bears the name of tne ' Bailiff's Wife' (Villica), 

 and treats of the indoor duties, the making wine and vinegar, preserving 

 fruits, &c. 



In the composition of this work, Columella has made free use of the 

 Roman writers on agriculture who preceded him. Among these we 

 may particularly mention Cato the Censor, Terentius Varro, his own 

 contemporaries; Cornelius Celsua and Julius Atticus; and lastly, 



