Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [212]
Several years after that, Luís Columbus, who had given up his family’s administrative responsibilities in exchange for a title—Duke of Veragua—and an annuity, was convicted of bigamy, and sentenced to ten years’ military service in North Africa. Even when confined to remote outposts, Luís Columbus, who had a long history of entanglements with women, bribed his guards, found a mistress, and married her, although his three previous wives were all living. He was exiled again, this time to Oran, a large port city in Algeria, where he died at age fifty, in 1572. He was interred in what had become the Columbus family burial place in the cathedral of Santo Domingo.
In 1697, Spain ceded part of Hispaniola, now Haiti, to France, and later the rest of the island. To prevent the remains of the Columbus family from going to the French, they were shipped to Havana, Cuba, in 1795, where they were entombed in another cathedral, apparently for all time. But it was not meant to be. In 1877, a priest in the cathedral at Santo Domingo uncovered a lead casket filled with bones, several legends identifying the “Discoverer of America, First Admiral,” and a lead bullet. A year later, further excavations yielded another sign, this one reading “Last of the remains of the first admiral, Sire Christopher Columbus, discoverer.” It could not be established who had placed the signs there, or the significance of the bullet.
It was later determined that the remains in Havana were actually those of Diego Columbus, the Admiral’s son, and that Columbus himself was still buried in the cathedral of Santo Domingo. In 1879, a report compiled by the Spanish Royal Academy of History listed no less than five burial places for Columbus. After the Spanish-American War in 1898, Spain transported what appeared to be Columbus’s remains in a lead casket to Cadiz, and then up the Guadalquivir River. On January 19, 1899, the lead casket was reburied in the Seville Cathedral, the third cathedral to host the Admiral. As he did in life, the Admiral of the Ocean Sea simultaneously unites and divides three countries and two continents.
Today, Spain considers Seville the final resting place for Columbus’s remains. The Dominican Republic insists that Columbus and his errant grandson Luís are buried in Santo Domingo, and that Seville has only the remains of his son Diego. DNA tests on the remains proved inconclusive. The controversy is not likely to be resolved anytime soon. And no one knows what to make of the lead bullet found with Columbus’s remains. The exhumations and re-interments of his remains evoke the unquiet soul of a voyager with no final resting place, fated to haunt the shores he explored in his lifetime.
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EPILOGUE
Columbus Day
The drastic devaluation of Columbus seems a recent phenomenon, but it originated at the time of his voyages. The Spanish judicial investigator, Francisco de Bobadilla, sent him home in chains. King Ferdinand disdained him. Bishop Fonseca’s intense dislike for Columbus was widely known. Amerigo Vespucci fostered the impression that he, rather than Columbus, had discovered a New World, and gave his name to the continent. His former lieutenant, Alonso de Ojeda, laid claim to territories first visited by Columbus. Nicolás de Ovando, who succeeded Columbus as governor of Hispaniola, endangered his life and mocked him. The Porras brothers, Francisco Roldán, and others who sailed with Columbus staged mutinies with little or no retribution.
The most lasting damage to Columbus’s reputation came from the pen of Bartolomé de Las Casas. Arriving in Hispaniola with the new governor, Nicolás de Ovando, in 1502, Las Casas began as a slave owner. In 1510, he became the first priest to be ordained in the Americas, often called the “Apostle to the Indians.” In his influential jeremiad, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias ), written in 1542, he laid out the