Columbus_ The Four Voyages - Laurence Bergreen [224]
For more about Columbus and the Guaiqueri Indians and chicha, see Morison and Obregón’s The Caribbean as Columbus Saw It (1964), beginning on page 160. This work contains photographs of vistas as they might have appeared to Columbus, but five hundred years of erosion and other changes have altered the land- and seascapes. Nevertheless, this document remains an evocative view of Columbian harbors and ports.
Chapter 9: Roldán’s Revolt
For full accounts of the back-and-forth between the two sides as related by Ferdinand Columbus, see Fernando Colón, The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus by His Son Ferdinand (1959) and The History of the Life and Deeds of the Admiral Don Christopher Columbus, Attributed to His Son Fernando Colón (2004). Also, Las Casas delivers his own stinging assessment in Las Casas on Columbus: The Third Voyage, vol. 11, Repertorium Columbianum (1999). Las Casas lamented that Roldán was never brought to justice in Spain—his lineage worked in his favor, just as Columbus’s worked against him.
Chapter 10: “Send Me Back in Chains”
The letter to Doña Juana appears in Cecil Jane, The Four Voyages of Columbus (1988), vol. 2, page 54.
Letters from Bobadilla read aloud: Las Casas on Columbus: The Third Voyage, pages 24–128. Here, as in many other places, Las Casas shows his mettle as a historian when he refrains from strident editorializing and learned digressions to focus on the matter at hand.
Background about Bobadilla’s inquiry is drawn from the corrective study by Consuelo Varela, La caída de Cristobál Colón, el juicio de Bobadilla (2006).
In Las Casas on Columbus: The Third Voyage, page 136, Las Casas writes that Vallejo was “my good friend.” The letter in which Columbus avows that he has been diligent, and says “I swear,” appears in the same work, page 43.
The Royal Mandate restoring Columbus’s possessions is contained in Morison, Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, pages 300–302.
Chapter 11: El Alto Viaje
John Noble Wilford’s The Mysterious History of Columbus offers an absorbing discussion of the mystical Book of Prophecies on pages 217 and 223.
Ferdinand’s extensive library emphasizes the bookish, scholarly side of the Columbus family. Although Christopher, as a mariner, is considered primarily a man of action, he was thoroughly educated in the sea, and throughout his life he was eager to absorb (if not apply) new information and lore. His brother Bartholomew was, of course, a map and book dealer, and his son a historian and bibliophile.
Ferdinand Columbus never married.
Chapter 12: Castaways in Paradise
Columbus’s striking description of ascending his ship and hearing the voice of God appears in Christopher Columbus: Accounts and Letters of the Second, Third, and Fourth Voyages, vol. 6, part 1, Nuova Raccolta Colombiana, pages 143 and following. The entire letter is an extraordinary cri de coeur that would be easy to dismiss were it not so self-dramatizing and nakedly poignant.
The “Account by Diego Mendez of Certain Incidents on Christopher Columbus’s Last Voyage” can be found in J. M. Cohen, The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1969), pages 305–17.
Chapter 13: February 29, 1504
Las Casas’s first crossing: quoted in David Boyle, Toward the Setting Sun (2008), page 264.
Details of the death of Isabella can be found in Hugh Thomas’s authoritative study, Rivers of Gold, page 236. Thomas appears much less troubled by Columbus’s humanitarian failings than other contemporary historians, and encompasses a wide swath of the age of discovery in his sturdy account.
Isabella’s reputation for piety lived on after her death. A movement took shape to have her canonized for sainthood on the basis of her protection of the poor and of the Indians of the Caribbean, despite her fervent support of the Inquisition and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, the year of Columbus’s first voyage. As recently as 1974, Pope John Paul VI nominated Isabella I for beatification, the third of four steps toward canonization.