by David Boyle
Some weeks later, a small caravel did arrive on the horizon, but, when it anchored off shore, it was clear that Méndez was not on board. It had been sent by Ovando and captained by one of Roldán’s old lieutenants, who handed over a cask of wine and a haunch of pork and then set sail again. This fleeting and peculiar glimpse of freedom was enough to break the uneasy truce with Porras and his followers, and here Bartholomew’s battlefield skills saved his brother and those that remained loyal to him.
When Porras and his supporters struck on May 19, they surrounded Bartholomew on the beach. But in a series of deft moves, Bartholomew killed five of those in front of him, before Porras struck him so hard in the shield that he could not pull his sword out again. Bartholmew knocked him down, disarmed him, and took him prisoner. The rest of the mutineers begged for forgiveness, while the villagers watched fascinated from the edge of the forest.
Columbus was afraid that Ovando’s delay was motivated by the fear that he was trying to supplant his successor as governor. He needed a scheme to reassure him, and over the next six weeks, he puzzled over how to solve the problem. But then, finally, on June 28 there was another sail on the horizon, and it was clear that Méndez had succeeded after all. He had chartered a ship and here it was.* Barely able to believe it, Columbus and his crews boarded and set sail. On September 12 he embarked from Santo Domingo to Castile for the last time, in the same leaky caravel that had rescued him from the beach.
II
“An old man, broken with the storms of state Is come to lay his weary bones among ye; Give him a little earth for charity.”
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Henry VIII
When Columbus landed at Sanlúcar de Barrameda on November 7, 1504, he was exhausted and barely able to move. His first thought was of the queen. He had learned through bitter experience how vital it was to get his story in first, especially as Porras had been freed by Ovando and might tell his. She was also the only person likely to restore the lost privileges, which he had hoped to leave to his son Diego. Columbus was taken by boat upriver to Seville and then carried to a rented house in the parish of Santa Maria, where he remained bedridden, a chest of gold coins beside his bed, complaining to everyone about his abject poverty and obsessing about his scandalous treatment.
There was the question of all the other expeditions to the Indies, unlicensed by him as admiral. But there was also the question of the various shares he was expecting—the third, eighth, and tenth—from his 1492 agreement. Not to mention his removal as governor of the places he had discovered. But the news on the dockside had been bleak: Isabella was ill and had been ailing for some months.
In fact, Isabella had been sick almost since Columbus left. She had been weighed down by the economic problems of her combined kingdom, the continual crop failures and resulting hunger, and the worrying question of why gold seemed to be flooding out of the country. Most rulers had not yet grasped the idea of balance of payments: gold was leaving Spain because they were importing more than they were exporting. By May 1504 she was too ill to carry on working, and she retired to her bed in Medina del Campo in great pain and with a constant fever. She suffered from insatiable thirst, but the sight of food made her vomit. Columbus had hoped that, if he could only make the journey to visit her on her deathbed, he could get her to promise that Diego could inherit his privileges, but his own condition just did not allow it.
Isabella died on November 26, less than three weeks after Columbus landed. They never met again. Her body, dressed as a Franciscan, was drawn on a litter draped in black through the appalling storms and swollen rivers, all the way to her burial in Granada. Her will urged her successors to conquer Africa. If Columbus had not already discovered the Indies, that is no doubt what Isabella would have tried. A last-minute codicil urged her navigators to instruct the Indians in the Catholic faith. But for all this detail, the will left out information that it really should have included. Who was going to succeed her as ruler of the kingdom of Castile, given that her husband was only king of Aragon? The strong implication was that it should be her eldest surviving daughter, Juana, supported by her husband, Philip Hapsburg. He was the son of the Holy Roman emperor Maximilian, the heir through his mother to the extraordinary wealth of Burgundy and the Netherlands. But would Ferdinand really relinquish his hold?
Philip had been the most eligible bachelor in Europe. He was known as “Philip the handsome.” He was a man with everything, and on top of that was articulate and highly intelligent. His sister had married Ferdinand and Isabella’s tragic eldest son, Juan, so he was bound into the family already. He was also an obsessive womanizer, and this was having a devastating effect on his wife’s mental state, the beginning of her reputation as Juana the Mad. The complication was that because Ferdinand could theoretically still father a son, the court in Aragon refused to recognize Philip and Juana as his heirs there. Even the senior officials in Castile were worried about news of Juana’s fits of uncontrollable rage and violence. Claiming to be Juana’s protector, Ferdinand made an abortive attempt to be named regent of Castile, and then waited nervously for the heirs to make their arrangements to leave on their long journey by sea from the Netherlands.
All the decisions required from the courts of Castile and Aragon had to wait as officials delayed to see which way they should jump. There was little chance that Ferdinand would focus on an irritant like Columbus’s forgotten privileges.
Meanwhile, Vespucci was beginning to reestablish himself in Seville. It seemed as though he had been at least partially forgiven by the court for his disappearance and defection to Portuguese service, but for a while he remained rather a pathetic figure, ill and impoverished, staying briefly in Columbus’s own lodgings. He borrowed Columbus’s books and witnessed at least one draft of his will. People trusted Vespucci as they always had, at least those people whom he needed—he castigated mariners who knew nothing of navigation instruments both in print and conversation. Columbus was no exception.
Vespucci may have taken part in a journey that broke Columbus’s monopoly on voyages to the Indies, but it was quite clear that Vespucci’s objective was fame as much as it was enrichment, and it was money that really bothered Columbus. Columbus was terrified that time was running out for him to make sure that what he believed he was owed would be passed on to his sons. Columbus was not, in fact, impoverished—it was the ship he owned, filled with gold from Hispaniola, that had been the only one to survive the hurricane of 1502 unscathed. But he felt poor.
Neither he nor Vespucci was well. Columbus was all but bedridden and in great pain in the limbs and bladder. He obsessively railed against those who had betrayed him and criticized his son Diego for squandering money. Vespucci was suffering from recurrent bouts of malaria. Apart from their ailments, they shared unprecedented knowledge about the geography of the Indies, and though their understanding of it diverged considerably, they had a great deal to talk about.
It was also clear that their positions were beginning to reverse themselves. Vespucci had begun as a manager for the company that was investing in Columbus’s first two voyages of discovery. He was a very junior partner in the relationship, a mere accountant and fixer, a supplicant to the Admiral of the Ocean Sea. But now he was a navigator with claims for the attention of history, an experienced explorer who was not—as Columbus was—locked in a dispute with the crown. Their conversations must have been awkward to begin with. Vespucci’s successes were a measure of Columbus’s failures, and it was his failures that obsessed him, and the failure of those around him to recognize his achievements.
Vespucci was at least able to travel. Columbus could not sit on a horse. He had tried to borrow the same litter that brought the body of the archbishop to Seville, but his doctor told him he was too ill to travel. Vespucci therefore agreed, on his visit to the court early in 1505, that he would press Columbus’s claims while he was there. Columbus in turn wrote to his son Diego, asking him to help Vespucci:
He has always been desirous of s
erving me and is an honorable man, though fortune has been unpropitious to him, as to many others, and his labors have not been as profitable as he deserves. He goes on my account, and with a great desire to do something which may redound to my advantage, if it is in his power.
Vespucci was already more famous than Columbus around the world, and both may have known it. But it is a touchingly trusting letter, and one that proves to some extent the falsity of later claims that Vespucci was deliberately trying to steal Columbus’s reputation. Right to the end the two men were friends, even if they were not necessarily in agreement. Also right to the end, Columbus maintained his position that his Indies were only a few days’ journey from Asia.
Even so, Vespucci was not wholly trustworthy. His own claims came first when he reached the court. He made little headway with Columbus’s, but he was successful on his own account. He was wholly forgiven for his Portuguese escapade and was made an honorary citizen of Castile.
In the spring of 1505, after Vespucci’s failure on his behalf at court and the winter weather began to break, Columbus finally felt well enough—or at least desperate enough—to make the journey to see the king. He rode a donkey, which was strictly illegal in Castile because they were reserved for military transport, and was accompanied by Bartholomew and a great deal of luggage. His son Ferdinand had been acting as his secretary and he came too, but it was a five-hundred-mile journey, and it was exhausting even for someone in good health.
The party left Seville in May 1505, picking their way carefully along the rutted roads and tracks, and managed to reach Segovia, where he met his son Diego. Columbus and the king finally came face-to-face a few days later. Columbus had never trusted Ferdinand and he expected little from this encounter. He was also planning to write to Philip and Juana, and seems to have been thinking about an appeal to the pope as well. But Ferdinand was friendly and proposed a new contract between them, and offered to find a mediator who could help them agree about exactly what Columbus was owed. Columbus agreed.
As soon as the admiral was gone, painfully carried back to his lodgings, Ferdinand wrote to Ovando and told him to make sure the Columbus family received what was due to them. But the rest did not work out quite as planned. The frenetic activity preparing for the arrival of his daughter and son-in-law pushed the business of the new contract out of the forefront of Ferdinand’s mind. Even so, the agreed-upon mediator set to work and in due course handed down his decision. The so-called tenth applied solely to the sovereign’s share of the money from the Indies, and was therefore a tenth of a fifth—a fiftieth—rather than a tenth of the whole amount. The eighth referred to the share of Columbus’s profits from his own direct investments and therefore had nothing to do with the crown. The third was pure imagination, said the mediator. It was based on the tradition that the other admirals in Castile were allowed to collect a third of the tax on the waters under their jurisdiction. This had never been extended to Columbus. He was left, therefore, with one fiftieth.
Columbus gave up. “Since it seems that his highness has no intention of keeping the promises he made on his honor and signed in his hand together with the queen, may God keep her soul, I believe that to fight it any longer would be, for me, who is an insect, like flogging a dead horse.” He spent most of the rest of the year exiled in Segovia, with its medieval Alcazar high on a rock and its tremendous Roman aqueduct. There was little, away from Seville, to distract his bedridden thoughts from his mission and the bitterness of betrayal. The winter was also bitter that year. His sons felt it was too cold to be in Segovia and began to persuade him to move again.
The months passed by. He was unable to read anything. In April 1506 he dictated a last hopeful letter to Philip and Juana, expected in Castile at any time, asking for their support. He urged his sons to meet them, swear an oath of allegiance to them, and to beg them for help.
Columbus was by then very weak, and they moved him to Valladolid, where he owned a two-story brick house. He was taken upstairs and put to bed on the top floor, where his mind wandered and his nights were filled with the most violent and grandiose dreams. There he dictated his final will, leaving his titles and privileges to his son Diego. In his final days, he was looked after by the Franciscans. On the night of May 20, with his sons and his friends Fieschi and Méndez in the room, he died. He was only fifty-four. His reputation had suffered so much in the intervening years that there was hardly any contemporary mention of his death.
Columbus was buried in the Franciscan monastery at Valladolid, after a funeral at the parish church of Santa Maria la Antigue nearby. Diego then commissioned a family mausoleum in the Carthusian monastery of Las Cuevas in Seville, and in 1509 his father’s remains were moved there, along with his mother, Felipa’s body, which was brought from Madeira. It was to be the first of many moves that their bones were to make.
Only a few years after this burial, Diego changed his mind about the mausoleum. It would be more fitting if his father was buried in Hispaniola instead, the heart of Columbus’s discoveries. So Diego ordered the building of a convent of the Poor Clares at Concepción on Hispaniola, but this was unfinished by the time he died in 1526, and he was also buried in Seville, along with his parents and his uncle Bartholomew, who had died in 1514 leaving behind one six-year-old illegitimate daughter.
Diego’s son Luis Colón, the third admiral, moved all their remains to Santo Domingo in 1541. He agreed that Hispaniola was the place they belonged, initially at least in a space next to the high altar in the new cathedral. The plaque on the vault, marking the spot, was removed just over a century later in 1655, when the authorities were afraid that the city would be sacked by Admiral William Penn, and the remains of the Columbus family would be an obvious target.
It was a sign of things to come. The Spanish empire had been drained of its wealth during the seventeenth century, and the island of Hispaniola—with no Tainos left alive—was partitioned. The Spanish gave away the western half, named Haiti—the original Taino name for the whole island—to the French in 1697. The other half, which eventually became the Dominican Republic, was also handed over to France a century later. It was unthinkable that Columbus’s bones should lie in a French cathedral. The headquarters of the Spanish empire was moved to Havana, Cuba, and so with great ceremony, the commander of the Spanish imperial fleet opened the tomb and found a small stone vault with some bones and ashes inside. These were put into a lead casket with iron locks and taken to Havana, where they were put in a niche in the side of the altar of the cathedral there.
But only two generations later, there was confusion about exactly what was where. In 1877 repairs were being made on the cathedral of Santo Domingo and a previously unopened vault was found. In it were a casket with some bones, some dust, and one unexplained bullet. There was a notice with them that said that these were the remains of “the illustrious and famous gentleman Sir Christopher Columbus.” When they were put back a year later, another label, engraved on silver, was found among the bones, which said they were the last of the remains of Columbus. Both notices were crude and clearly not made in the sixteenth century, but on the strength of this information, the archbishop of Santo Domingo announced that the remains were still there, and that the bones sent to Havana must have been those of Columbus’s son Diego. The archbishop happened to be an Italian, which made the Spanish authorities even angrier, and they insisted that Columbus’s bones were in Havana and would remain there.
Yet not even that was permanent. Only two decades later, the Spanish-American War led to Cuban independence. The Spanish empire had shrunk to just a few Caribbean islands, and it was once more unthinkable that Columbus’s remains should slip outside Spanish territory. So at the end of the year they were taken out of their niche and sailed to Cadiz. There they were taken by the royal yacht, flying the Spanish flag at half mast, up the Guadalquivir, and back to Seville. They arrived there in January 1899 and were put behind a little door in the side of the impressive monument in the cathedral
that is seen to this day, with a giant coffin held aloft by four medieval kings, representing the nations of Spain: Leon, Navarre, Aragon, and Castile.
But the dispute rumbles on. The Dominican Republic still argues that they have the genuine bones, and they built a new monument shaped like a lighthouse to house them in preparation for the five-hundred-year anniversary of Columbus’s discovery held in 1992. There is still quite a lot left unexplained, with experts supporting either side of the argument, and many unanswered questions. What, for example, was the bullet doing there? What happened to Columbus’s beloved chains? There are those who say that, in fact, the Franciscans would never have allowed Columbus’s body to leave their friary in Valladolid and that he remains there. That is how the Italian historian Giovanni Granzotto came to believe that he was buried under what was by then the pool table in a small beer cellar called the Café del Norte.
An examination by surgeons in 1960 concluded that there were actually bones from at least two bodies in the Seville tomb, and that is where matters have stood for the past generation. But there is a new clue. Columbus’s younger brother Diego had a peculiar, but definite tomb. He ended his life as a priest and died in 1515 and was buried in a monastery in Seville. The building eventually closed, and by the nineteenth century it had become part of a ceramics factory, under English management. Diego’s remains were exhumed from behind the wall where they had been for three centuries and kept in a box, and so, by our own time, they were available for scientific examination.
In 2006 a team led by the forensic geneticist José Antonio Lorente took DNA from Diego’s bones and from those in his brother Christopher’s supposed tomb in Seville—the bones taken from the niche in Havana in 1899. They were also given permission to open the tomb of Ferdinand Colón, also in the Seville cathedral. Their results coincided with the five-hundred-year anniversary of Christopher’s death and confirmed that the few bones in Seville were indeed those of a close relative of Diego’s.
