WaybackWire

GRAN CANARIA, Friday.—The Admiral has resolved to give the Pinta a new rudder at Gran Canaria, after weeks of trouble with the old one and a vain hunt for a ship to replace her.

The rudder came unshipped on Monday 6 August. Martín Alonso Pinzón, who commands her, suspects her owners, Gomes Rascon and Cristóbal Quintero, because “they dreaded to go on that voyage”.

The Admiral could not help without danger, but took comfort that Pinzón is “a man of energy and ingenuity”. The rudder was secured next day, but by 8 August the Pinta was making water, and he meant to leave her at Gran Canaria and find another ship.

Contrary winds kept the fleet off Gran Canaria when it raised the Canaries on Thursday 9 August, so the Admiral left Pinzón there to find a ship and went on with the Niña to Gomera.

He reached it on Sunday 12 August and found none. He waited for Doña Beatriz de Bobadilla, the lady of the island, expected from Gran Canaria in a vessel of 40 tons, and sent word to Pinzón by a bark bound there.

On Saturday 25 August he came in to Gran Canaria, where Pinzón had struggled in the day before. Doña Beatriz, he learned, had sailed the Monday before in that very vessel; if God had not been pleased for him to find that vessel, the Admiral said calmly, there might have been some obstacle in it.

PALOS.—The man the Sovereigns have sent west is a Genoese who traded in Andalusia as a seller of printed books. Skilled in cosmography from Ptolemy and other books, he drew a map of the world and showed it to the King and Queen.

In Lisbon he married Doña Felipa Moniz, whose father, Pedro Moniz Perestrello, had found Madeira and Porto Santo with two other captains and governed Porto Santo; his widow gave Colón his journals and sea charts. Colón has been with the Portuguese to Guinea and their fort of St George of the Mine.

His wife dead, he left Portugal secretly about the end of 1484 with his little son Diego, for fear the King would stop him.

Diego, by the Queen’s warrant of 8 May, is page to Prince Juan, with 9,400 maravedís a year.

PALOS.—The Admiral sails on a plain reckoning: the world is a globe that can be sailed round, and the sea west to the Indies is not wide.

From Ptolemy and Marinus he puts the unknown space between the eastern bounds of India and the Cape Verde islands at a third of the globe at most; from Alfragan he takes a degree of only 56 and two-thirds miles.

Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly, whom he cites, holds that Spain and India are neighbours westward: “there is no doubt but it may be sail’d over in a few days, with a fair wind”.

Paul, a physician of Florence, sent Colón a copy of his letter of 25 June 1474, with a chart in his own hand. It tells of Zaiton, a port where a hundred great ships of pepper load and unload each year, under the Great Khan, who mostly lives in Cathay.

Due west from Lisbon to the great city of Quinsay the chart gives 26 spaces of 250 miles. Of the island of Cipango Paul writes that “they cover their temples and palaces with plates of pure gold”.

Seamen and islanders have told the Admiral of signs from the west: carved wood, not worked with iron, picked up 450 leagues west of Cape St Vincent, and two dead men, very broad-faced and unlike Christians, cast up on Flores in the Azores.

SANTA FE, BEFORE GRANADA.—The Admiral won his commission only after years of refusal, and at the last by a royal messenger who caught him riding away, on the bridge of Pinos, two leagues from Granada.

The King and Queen gave the plan to the prior of Prado and some cosmographers, who judged it vain and impossible. A ship that went down beyond the known hemisphere could never come back, some said: “it would be like climbing a hill, which ships could not do with the stiffest gale”.

The Sovereigns put the matter off for the war of Granada, and Colón was ready to try the King of France, until Friar Juan Pérez, guardian of La Rábida and the Queen’s confessor, went to the Queen for him.

At Santa Fe his demand to be admiral and viceroy, with a tenth of all gain, was thought too much, and in January he rode away.

That same day Luis de Santángel, who keeps the allowances of the King’s household, told the Queen the risk was small and the glory great, and that Colón asked only 2,500 crowns. She offered to pledge her jewels; Santángel offered to lend the money himself.

Her messenger brought Colón back, and the secretary Juan de Coloma drew up his articles as he had asked. Granted at Santa Fe on 17 April, they make him Admiral of all islands and mainlands he discovers in the oceans, for his lifetime and then his heirs for ever, and Viceroy and Governor General there, with the tenth of the gain.