150 



HISTORY OF THE SEA. 



to say that the exhaustion of the treasury necessitated the post 

 ponement of the whole subject until the close of the war with 

 Grenada. At last, Columbus, reflecting upon the delays, re- 

 fusals, affronts, and suspicions of which he had been the object, 

 the time he had wasted, and the antechambers in which he had 

 waited the condescension of the great, resolved to shake the dust 

 of Spain from his feet, and returned to the abbey of his friend 

 Marchena. He arrived there bearing upon his person the im- 

 press of poverty, fatigue, and exhausted patience. Marchena 

 was profoundly annoyed by the reflection that the glory of the 

 future discoveries of Columbus would be thus taken from Spain 

 and conferred upon some rival power. Fearing, however, that 

 he had too readily lent his ear to theories which had been twice 

 rejected as puerile by a competent junto, he sent for an eminent 

 mathematician of Palos, Garcia Hernandez, a physician by pro- 

 fession. They then conferred together upon the subject and pro- 

 nounced the execution of the project feasible. The assertion that 

 the famous sailor Martin Alonzo Pinzon was a party to the confer- 

 ence would appear to be an error. Pinzon was at this period at 

 Rome, and did not see Columbus for a year or more afterwards. 



Marchena at once wrote an eloquent letter to Queen Isabella, 

 and intrusted it to a pilot whose relations with the court rendered 

 him a safe and reliable messenger. He gave the missive into 

 the hands of the queen, and returned to the monastery the 

 bearer of an invitation to Marchena to .repair at once to Santa 

 Fe, where the court then was, engaged in investing Grenada. 

 Columbus borrowed a mule for the friar, who left secretly at 

 midnight and arrived safely at Santa Fe. That Isabella should, 

 at such a moment, when engaged in war and harassed by finan- 

 cial embarrassments, listen to a proposition which had been twice 

 condemned by a learned body of men, is a circumstance which 

 entitles her in the highest degree to a share in the glory which 

 her protege' Columbus was, through her, destined to obtain. 

 She received Marchena graciously, and instructed him to summon 



