Chapter IX: Part 9

With these personal characteristics, Columbus united a restless spirit, a firm will, and a singularly enthusiastic temperament. The latter faculty gave him a consuming zeal for his undertakings, which was as rare as it proved ultimately successful in compassing his great discovery. He was discouraged by no rebuffs, would take no denials. His motto seemed to be never to despair, and never to let go. His spiritual nature was as remarkable as his intellectual. Here, his imagination was the predominant faculty. He firmly believed himself divinely commissioned to find out the Indies, and to bring their inhabitants into the fold of the true faith. He had early vowed to devote the profits of his enterprise, if successful, to rescue the tomb of Christ from the infidels. Himself a devout son of the Church, he fervently believed that he had miraculous aid on many perilous occasions of his life. Humble before God, he was sufficiently proud and independent before men. He insisted upon conditions with the haughty sovereigns of Spain which they deemed exacting, but the high views and tenacity of Columbus carried the day, and his own terms were granted at last. He never forgot, in all his subsequent trials and humiliations, that he was a Spanish admiral, and Viceroy of the Indies.

Such was the character of Columbus. Let us now look at his environment, which in all men contributes so much to make or modify character. Born in Genoa, the headquarters in that day of navigation, Columbus early imbibed a passion for maritime affairs. His youthful days and nights were given to the study of astronomy and of navigation. He was a trained sailor and map-maker from his boyhood. He brooded over the problems involved in the spherical form of the earth. He caught up all the hints and allusions in classical and mediæval writers that came in his way, of other lands than those already known. The Atlantis of Plato, and the clear prediction in Seneca of another world in the west, fired his imagination. He himself tells us that he voyaged to the Ultima Thule of his day, which was Iceland, besides various expeditions in the Atlantic and Mediterranean.

The early fancies of isles in the western sea loomed up before his eyes, and repeated themselves in his dreams. These visions were heightened by that vague sense of wonder that is linked with the unknown. No wonder, then, that Columbus, with a bent almost preternatural toward the undiscovered regions of the globe, should dream of new lands, new men, new scenery, and new wealth. But to his vivid imagination dreams became realities, until he believed with all the force of his ardent nature that he was divinely commissioned to be a discoverer. Hitherto the Portuguese voyages familiar to Columbus had only skirted the coast of Africa, and discovered the Cape Verde Islands and the Azores. It was not till 1486, years after the idea of his western voyage took firm root in his mind, that the Cape of Good Hope was at last doubled by Vasco da Gama. All voyages prior to his had been only tentative and brief, slowly creeping from headland to headland, or else finding new islands by being drifted out of courses long familiar to mariners.

It was the supreme merit of Columbus that he was the first to cut loose from one continent to find another, and to steer boldly across an unknown sea, in search of an unknown world. We need not belittle (still less need we deny) the finding of Greenland and of other parts of North America by the Norsemen in the ninth and tenth centuries. We may hail Eric the Red and his stout son, Leif Ericson, as pioneers in what may be termed coasting voyages of discovery. But the story of America gains as little from these shadowy and abortive voyages as civilization has gained from their fruitless results.

On the first voyage of Columbus, he was more fortunate in the uncertain elements which always affect sea voyages so overpoweringly than in some of his later ones. His own vessel, with single deck, was about ninety feet long, by a breadth of twenty feet. The Pinta, a faster sailer, and the Nina (or "baby") were smaller caravels, and without decks, commanded respectively by the brothers Martin and Vicente Pinzon. The three vessels carried ninety persons, sailing September 6, 1492, running first south to the Canaries, and then stretching straight westward on the twenty-eighth parallel for what the admiral believed to be the coast of Japan. Delightful weather favored the voyagers, but when, on the tenth day out from Spain, the caravels struck into that wonderful stretch of seaweed and grass, known as the Sargasso Sea, fear lest they should run aground or soon be unable to sail in either direction took possession of the crews. In five days the caravels ran into smooth water again. But as their distance from Spain grew greater, the spirit of protest and mutiny grew louder. Columbus needed all of his invincible constancy and firmness of purpose to quell and to animate his despairing crews. At last, October 21, 1492--day ever memorable in the annals of this world--the unknown land rose from the bosom of the water. It was named by its pious discoverer San Salvador--Holy Saviour. The charm of climate and of landscape enchanted all, and fear and despondency gave way to delight and joy and the most extravagant anticipations. The subsequent history of this first voyage, the wreck of the admiral's flag-ship Santa Maria, the base desertion of Pinzon, and his baffled attempt to forestall Columbus in the credit of the discovery, the triumphal honors paid to the successful admiral, and the pope's bull conferring upon Spain all lands west of a meridian one hundred leagues from the Azores--all this is familiar to most readers. The actual discoveries of the first voyage included Cuba and Hispaniola (or Haiti), with some little islands of the Bahama group, of small importance.

On his second voyage Columbus found no difficulty in collecting seventeen ships and 1,500 adventurers, so popular had the new way to the Indies become when the way was once found. He set sail six months after his return to Spain, or on September 15, 1493. He returned in June, 1496, after three years of explorations, interrupted by a long illness, and having discovered Jamaica, Porto Rico, Santa Cruz, Antigua, Montserrat, Dominica, and Guadaloupe.

The third voyage began May 30, 1498, and embraced six vessels and 200 men. Columbus struck southwestward from the Cape Verde Islands and ran nearly to the equator, into a region of torrid heat, discovering Trinidad, Tobago, Grenada, and the Gulf of Paria, and making his first landing on the continent, at the Pearl Coast, near the mouth of the Orinoco, in what is now Venezuela. This voyage witnessed many disasters--the rebellion of Roldan, the severe prostration of the admiral by fever, and his seizure and imprisonment in chains by the infamous Bobadilla.

The fourth and last voyage of Columbus, with four small caravels and 150 men, was begun May 11, 1502. On this voyage he discovered Martinique and the coasts of Honduras, Nicaragua, and Veragua, on the mainland, returning to Spain, after untold disasters and miseries, on November 7, 1504. Then followed the weary struggle of the infirm old voyager to secure justice and a part of his hard-earned benefits from the crown. But Isabella had died, and Ferdinand, under the influence of the hard-hearted and cruel bigot, Fonseca, postponed all the claims of Columbus. He who had given a world died in poverty, a suppliant for the means of an honorable existence.

It is easy enough for the writers of the nineteenth century to criticise the actors of the fifteenth; and learned scholars, sitting in luxurious easy-chairs in great libraries, can pass swift and severe judgment upon the acts and motives of Columbus. But let them go back four hundred years, and divest themselves of the bias which the science of to-day unconsciously inspires; let them quit the age of steam-engines, telegraphs, democratic governments, printing-presses, and Sunday-schools; let them orient themselves, and become Spaniards of 1492, instead of Americans of 1892; let them take the place of Columbus--if they are gifted with imagination enough among their manifold endowments to do it; let them think his thoughts, endure his trials, cherish his resolves, encounter his rebuffs, overcome his obstacles, launch out on his voyage, govern his mutinous crew, deal with his savage and hostile tribes, combat the traitors in his camp, suffer his shipwrecks, struggle with his disappointments, bear the ignominy of his chains, see his visions, and pray his prayers.

Behold him, launched on his uncertain voyage across the "sea of darkness," in three little caravels, no larger than the modern yacht, and far less seaworthy. Watch his devoted and anxious look, his solitary self-communings, his all-night vigils under the silent stars. See his motley crew, picked up at random in Palos streets, ignorant, superstitious, and full of fears, dreading every added mile of the voyage, and alarmed at the prevalent east winds which they thought would never permit them to sail back to Spain; so that Columbus, on a contrary head-wind springing up, thanked God with all the fervency of his pious soul. Pursue his career in his later expeditions, hampered by the mutinous vagabonds whom fate had thrust upon him as followers, many of them desperadoes just out of jail. See his baffled endeavors to maintain order and discipline among such a crew; to restrain their excesses, curb their lawless acts of violence, and secure some semblance of decency in their conduct toward the natives. Many of them, we read, were so given over to idleness and sloth, that they actually made the islanders beasts of burden, to carry them on their backs. It is a most unhappy fact that the missionaries of the cross were often accompanied by bands of miscreants, who wantonly broke every commandment in the decalogue and trampled upon every precept of the gospel. See him in his last voyage, beating about the rocks and shoals of an unknown archipelago, overtaken by West India hurricanes, almost engulfed in waterspouts, scudding under bare poles amid perilous breakers, blinded by lightning, deafened by incessant peals of thunder, his crazy little barks tossed about like cockle-shells in the raging waves, his anchors lost, his worm-eaten vessels as full of holes as a honey-comb, two caravels abandoned, and the two remaining run ashore at Jamaica, where Columbus built huts on their decks to shelter his forlorn crew. See him stranded here, pressed by hunger and want, visited by sickness and almost blindness, burning with fever under the wilting, fiery heat of the tropics, desolate, forsaken, infirm, and old. There he lay a whole year without relief, until the cup of his misery was full.

If Columbus was sometimes harsh and cruel, we are to remember that he lived in an age when the most cruel and barbarous punishments were common. There are numerous instances of his clemency both to natives and to his revolted Spaniards, and he more than once jeopardized his own life by sparing theirs. Among a treacherous and vindictive race, many of whom were continually plotting for his overthrow, the admiral, endowed with full power over the lives and acts of his followers, was compelled to make examples of the worst, many of whom were criminals released from the prisons of Spain. Like other fighters, he met treachery with treachery, cruelty with cruelty. He had never learned to love his enemies, nor to turn his cheek for the second blow. Show us the man invested with absolute power, in that or in any former age, who abused it less. Try him by the moral standards, not of our humane and enlightened age, but by those of his own. Compared with the deeds of darkness that were done by Bobadilla and Ovando, the governors who replaced him, the reign of Columbus appears, even at its worst, to have been mild and merciful.

By the side of the atrocities and cruel massacres perpetrated under Cortes in Mexico, and Pizarro in Peru, the few deeds of blood under Columbus appear slight indeed. While we have no right to extenuate his errors and his abuses, we have as little right to hold him to a standard nowhere set up in his day. He had learned his ethics in a school which taught that, for great and pious objects, the end justified the means. In the ardor of his zeal for what he deemed the Christian faith, Columbus committed many glaring mistakes and errors; but what over-zealous apostle or reformer has failed to do the same? Columbus was unduly eager after gold, they say; but in our advanced age, when that which Virgil called "the accursed hunger for gold" pervades all ranks, and our cities are nothing but great encampments of fortune-hunters, does it lie in our mouths to condemn him?

The age of Columbus took him as he was--all full of human imperfections and frailties, but full also to overflowing with a great idea, and with a will, a perseverance, a constancy, and a faith so sublime, as fairly to conquer every obstacle, after a weary struggle of eighteen years, and to carry forward his arduous enterprise to triumphant success. That the great discoverer failed as a governor and administrator makes nothing against his merits as a discoverer. That his light at last went out in darkness--that the world he discovered brought nothing to Spain but disappointment and Dead Sea ashes--that he dragged out a miserable old age in rotten and unseaworthy ships, lying ill in the torrid heats of the West Indies, racked with excruciating pain, and in absolute penury and want--all this but adds point to a life so full of paradox that we may almost pardon him for believing in miracles. After so much glory and so much fame, his life darkened down to its dreary and pathetic close. His ardent soul went at last where wicked governments cease from troubling, and weary mariners are at rest. On May 20, 1506, worn out by disease, anxieties, and labors, the great discoverer launched forth on his last voyage of discovery, beyond the border of that unknown land whose boundaries are hid from mortal ken.

His place among the immortals is secure. By the power of the unconquerable mind with which nature had endowed him, he achieved a fame so imperishable that neither the arrows of malice, nor the shafts of envy, nor the keenest pens of critics, nor the assaults of iconoclasts can avail to destroy it.

[Signature: A. R. Spofford.]

VASCO DA GAMA[10]

[Footnote 10: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]

By Judge ALBION W. TOURGÉE

(1460-1525)

Vasco da Gama was the pet of fortune. Never did a man win immortality more easily. As a discoverer and a navigator he should rank not only below Columbus, but also below Bartolemeo Diaz and Cabral among his own countrymen, as well as Vespucius and Magellan, who carried the Spanish flag, and the Cabots, who established England's claim to the most important portions of the New World. As a commander, an administrator, and ruler of newly discovered regions, however, he ranks easily above them all. He not only led the way to India, but laid securely the foundations of Portuguese empire in the East.

Even in the hour of his birth he was fortunate. Prince Henry, surnamed "the Navigator," to whose indefatigable exertions for more than forty years was due that impulse to maritime achievement of which the discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were the result, had just died, and his influence hung like an inspiration over the little kingdom for which he had wrought with such self-denying patience. This grandson of John of Gaunt has received scant credit for that wonderful series of discoveries by which the accessible earth was more than quadrupled in extent. Yet without him, there is no reason to believe that either the coast of Africa would have been explored, the Cape of Good Hope passed, or the American continents discovered for a century, at least, perhaps for two or three centuries afterward. He was the father of discovery, and it was his hand more than any or all others that rolled up the curtain of darkness which hid the major part of the habitable globe. All the navigators and discoverers of that marvellous age were but the agents of his genius and the creatures of his indefatigable exertion.

The son of the most noted sovereign of Portugal, and grandson of that rugged Englishman from whose loins have sprung so many royal lines, he was fitted by descent and training for the heroic part which he performed. Distinguished for military achievement before he had come to man's estate, urged by four of the leading sovereigns of Europe to take command of their armies, and made Grand Master of the Order of Christ before he was twenty-five, there is hardly any limit to the military distinction he might have won or the power he might have secured, had he sought his own advancement.

But he gave himself to Portugal, and determined to raise the little kingdom his father had so gallantly held against jealous and powerful neighbors, to the rank of a first-class power. To seek to enlarge a realm shut in by mountains on one side and the sea upon the other, by constant strife with embittered enemies, he saw at once was to invite annihilation. The sea afforded the only avenue of hope, the continent of Africa, where his father had already gained something from the Moor, in battling with whom he had himself won renown, the only visible opportunity. So he determined to explore, and finally, to circumnavigate Africa, and give to Portugal whatever of power or wealth the ocean or the dark continent might hide. He believed that India might be reached by sailing round its southern extremity, and he determined to pour the wealth of the Orient into the treasury of the kingdom his father had established.

In 1418, therefore, he turned his back on personal ambition, laid aside the glory of military renown, and sat himself down to a hermit's life and a scholar's labors on the promontory of Sagres, in the province of Algarve, that point on the coast of Portugal which stretches farthest out into the Atlantic in the direction of his hope. Here he built an observatory whose light was the last his captains saw as they went forth, and the first to greet them on their return. Here he opened a school of navigation, and here were trained the discoverers who opened the way for all who came afterward. Here was not only nourished the impulse which fired the hearts of Columbus and his contemporaries, but here was taught the science and here were gathered the facts which enabled them to achieve success.

Up to that time, Cape Nun had been the boundary of the modern world to the southward. With infinite patience, Prince Henry labored to convince his captains that the terrors which they thought lay at the southward of this point were wholly imaginary. Little by little his caravels crept down the coast of Africa. Every year he sent out two or three. Navigators and geographers flocked to his service. In two years he re-discovered Madeira and Porto Santo, of which latter he afterward made Perestrello, the father of Columbus's wife, the governor. By 1433 his ships had reached Cape Bojador; eight years afterward they passed Cape Blanco; in 1445 they were at the mouth of the Senegal. Still he urged them on toward that "_thesaurus Arabum et divitia Indiæ_," to which he set himself the task of opening up the way. The crown of Portugal assumed all the cost of these expeditions. Gold, ivory, cinnabar, dye-woods, spices, and slaves, added to the wealth of the kingdom only to furnish forth new ventures.

He died before the end came, but not until many of the most important problems of cosmographic condition had been solved. It was known by actual experience that the "steaming sea" was a myth. Ships had crossed the equator, and their crews came back to tell of southward-stretching shadows. Ships were able, it was seen, to sail up the southern slope of the world as well as down it. Why they did not fall off into space, none knew, but that they did not was proved. Gravitation was a force whose laws and character were yet unformulated. The diurnal motion of the earth was hardly suspected until a hundred years later. But the facts on which these two fundamental truths are based were being gathered for Newton and Copernicus. When he died, those whom he had inspired and instructed continued the work to which he had devoted himself, under the patronage of his brother Alfonso and his nephew João II.; until, in 1486, Bartholomeo Diaz had sailed two hundred miles to the eastward of the Cape of Good Hope and returned to assure his sovereign that the way to India had at length been found.

It was not, however, until Dom Manoel had succeeded to the throne, in 1495, that any successful effort was made to follow up the success which Diaz had achieved. The way to India was indeed open, but no one seems to have had sufficient fortitude to undertake so long a voyage in order to reach it by that route. Dom Manoel had, however, but one idea. He was not a geographer like his predecessor, João, "the perfect," but he was a man of action, and determined that the route Prince Henry's navigators had opened to India should not remain unused. Vasco da Gama was then in his thirty-fifth year, the handsomest man of his age, of ancient family, and it is claimed was not without royal blood in his veins. As a soldier he was trained in the war with Castile; as a navigator he had served under Prince Henry's best captains. Camoens, the historical poet of Portugal, declares that he was familiar not only with the recorded achievements of his predecessors, but with all the regions they had discovered. Dom João, on the return of Diaz, selected him to command the fleet he meant to send to follow up this discovery. In the ten years that elapsed before he actually sailed, it is probable that he had grown to be not only a better geographer, but also a stronger, more cool-headed, and reliable man. That he was able to command, those mutineers who cavilled at his severity during the stormy passage of four months from Lisbon to Table Bay, found out when they demanded that he give up trying to reach India and return to Portugal as other captains had done, at the behest of their crews. He made short work of them, and in his whole career, so salutary was the lesson, no one under his command ever again refused to obey his orders.

It was July 8, 1497, when he sailed from Lisbon, and it was not until December 1st that he left Delagoa Bay, the farthest eastward point which Diaz had reached, to pass over the actually unknown water that lay between him and India. Even this could hardly be called "unknown water," for Corvilhan, who a dozen years before had made his way overland to Aden, had sent back to Dom João II. this message:

"Anyone who will persist, is sure to sail around the southernmost point of Africa, and can then easily make his way up the eastern shore and across the gulf to India."

Literally were his words fulfilled. With favoring breezes, Gama reached Malinda early in January, 1498, and securing the services of an Indian pilot, who had not only sailed hither from Calicut, but seemed as familiar as Gama himself with compass and astrolabe, he set out boldly across the Indian Ocean, and in May arrived at Calicut. When we consider that this latter part of the voyage was with a pilot accustomed to make the trip in the far more fragile crafts of the Arabs, the boldness of the undertaking does not seem so apparent to one of our day. Compared with the voyages of Columbus, Magellan, Vespucius, or Cabral over absolutely unknown seas, without pilots or charts of any kind, the passage from Aden to India hardly seems remarkable. Yet upon this the fame of Gama as an explorer rests, and as has been remarked, "few men have won fame so easily." His real merit lay in the fact that he did what so few of his predecessors were able to accomplish, controlled the mutinous crews, who had after all been the most serious obstacle in the path of Portugal to the coveted Indian possessions. It is probable that if Prince Henry had encouraged his captains to exercise greater severity, the darling object of his life might have been attained before his death and the birth of the fortunate explorer, whose cheaply-won fame has obscured his own, even with the king-loving Portuguese.

It would seem as if the capacity to control men, which was so prominent a characteristic of the "Discoverer of India," was not of a conciliatory character, for the Zamorin of Calicut received him but coldly, and before his ships were loaded the difference had ripened into a quarrel, and he was obliged to cut his way out of the harbor to begin his homeward voyage. This lack of complaisance on the part of the Zamorin he attributed, not without reason, to the jealousy of the Arab merchants, whose swift-sailing dhows crowded the port. Why should they not be jealous of him who came to take away their immemorial privilege? Theretofore the treasures of the Orient had reached the western world only through the hands of the Arab merchants. The dhow and the camel had been its carriers. Gama had brought the more capacious caravel to bear them over a new highway to the western consumers. His success meant the loss of a great part of the business on which the sailors, merchants, and camel-drivers of Arabia depended for a livelihood. Why should they not conspire to kill him and destroy his fleet?

His homeward passage was as fortunate as the outward one had been. That he did not experience the disasters which befell others, was no doubt largely due to the fact that he foresaw and avoided peril whenever possible. He was one of those men who, while shrinking from no unavoidable danger, take no unnecessary risks. He was received with unprecedented honors when, after two years and two months' absence, his ships were again anchored in the Tagus. Their rich cargo attested the rare value of the trade he had opened up. Despite the gold which the miners of Española were beginning to send to Spain, and the pearls which had come from Cubagua, the apparent value of the discoveries of Columbus were as nothing to the boundless wealth which Gama's voyage assured to Portugal. By the bull of Pope Alexander VI., all lands discovered east of the meridian of the Azores belonged to the King of Portugal. It was not only half the world, but that half which was of most inexhaustible richness, Asia and Africa. Titles and honors and wealth were conferred upon the fortunate explorer. In consideration perhaps of his royal extraction, he was permitted to affix the kingly title, "Dom," to his name. No wonder he was thus honored, when the cargo of one small caravel loaded with spices, yielded a greater sum than the whole outfit of the fleet Columbus commanded on his first voyage!

In an incredibly short time, thirteen ships were fitted out, and under that prince of navigators, Cabral, set sail to secure the results of Gama's discovery. On him, too, fortune smiled as it rarely has on them that "go down to the sea in ships." Blown out of his course by head-winds, his very mishaps ripened into the rarest fortune, for he discovered Brazil, and thus added to his master's realm what was destined to be one of the richest kingdoms of the world. With the instinct of genius, and a courage as rare as it was heroic, he did not return to notify his king of the new continent which had risen out of the deep before him, but sending back a single caravel with the marvellous news, he turned his battered prows to that point of the compass where he judged the Cape of Good Hope to be, and after passing three thousand miles of water that had never known a keel before, he rounded the southern point of Africa and proceeded to carry out his orders. He lacked, however, the soldierly qualities and administrative power of the "Discoverer of India," who the year after his return was sent out to complete his work. This time he had a fleet of twenty sail, and from the outset was bent not only on taking permanent possession of the countries whose trade it was desirable to secure, but on avenging the affront that had before been offered him by the Zamorin of Calicut and the Arab traders who had inspired the action.

On his way he founded the colonies of Mozambique and Sofala, and sailed to Travancore. During the passage he fell in with a ship which was carrying many Indian Mussulmans to Mecca, laden with rich presents for the shrine of the Prophet. This he pillaged and burned, with all of her 300 passengers except twenty women and children, whom he saved more for his own pleasure, no doubt, than from any pity for them. He excused this act of savagery, so far as any excuse was necessary, on the ground that they were paynim Moors, and some among them had incited the attack upon him at Calicut on his former voyage. The truth is they were rich; he wanted the plunder; and there was less likelihood of trouble if he killed them than if they were left alive to publish and avenge their losses. It was merely an application of the freebooter's maxim, that "dead men tell no tales."

Arriving at Calicut, he found that forty Portuguese who had been left to establish a permanent post, had been killed. With unusual deliberation, he investigated the matter and demanded reparation, submission, and a treaty acknowledging the sovereignty of Portugal over India. This being refused, he bombarded the city, burned the ships in the harbor, and compelled the Zamorin himself and all the native princes of the region to submit and acknowledge themselves feudatories of Portugal. So rapid were his movements, and so accurate his calculations, that before the close of 1503 he had reached Lisbon again with thirteen vessels laden to the gunwale with the plunder of the Orient--by all odds the richest argosy that had come to any European port since the days of the Romans.

Da Gama was now forty-three years old, and must have been in the very prime of manhood. Why so skilled a navigator, so intrepid a commander, so shrewd a negotiator, and so successful an administrator, who had established the power of Portugal from Delagoa Bay to Calcutta, should, at that period of his life, have been laid upon the shelf for twenty years, is a conundrum hard to answer. Knowing the character of Dom Manoel, it is not difficult to guess that his sordidness lay somewhere at the bottom of the trouble; but it is said to Gama's credit, that he neither whined nor remonstrated.

It must be admitted, however, that he was succeeded by one who was greatly his superior both as a general, a statesman, and an administrator. If Vasco da Gama laid the foundations of Portuguese empire in the East, Alfonso d'Albuquerque, "the Great," broadened and built upon them as he could never have done. From Aden to Cochin blood flowed beneath his blows, but peace followed; and though he was termed "the Portuguese Mars," his justice became traditional, and his sagacity was shown in the permanence of the settlements he made, even under the incompetent viceroys who followed him.

It was twenty years since Vasco da Gama had commanded a ship. Albuquerque was dead, and his successors had brought shame and defeat upon the Portuguese power in the East. Dom Manoel was dead also, and whatever grievance he had against "the Discoverer of India," seems to have died with him. His successor, Dom João III., casting about for someone to bring order out of confusion, success out of failure, and honor out of shame, called again into his service the courtly and sagacious mariner, now over sixty years of age; and conferring upon him the title of viceroy, sent him to retrieve the prestige his successors had lost. His high spirit was yet undaunted, and when he neared the coast of India and found the waters in a strange ferment for which no one could account, as there was neither wind nor tide, he said loftily: "The sea beholds its conqueror and trembles before him!" It sounds bombastic, but in the mouth of one who had first guided a civilized keel over its surface, such arrogance is at least pardonable.

In the few months that intervened before his death he made the power of Portugal once more respected in the East. When he died in Cochin, in 1525, he was mourned by the natives as a just ruler, and by his countrymen as one who had saved to Portugal the richest part of the national domain. It is not strange, therefore, that when his ashes were conveyed to Lisbon, they were received with a pomp almost equal to that which greeted him when he came as the discoverer of the Orient and its priceless treasures. It is rare in history that one receives two triumphs, the one while living and the other when dead, especially in connection with the same achievement; but it is rarer still that one who has won immortality should leave a record so singularly free from bickering and strife as that of the dignified and self-contained Portuguese rival of Columbus, Dom Vasco da Gama, the "Discoverer and Sixth Viceroy of India, Count of Vidigueira," where he lies entombed. Little is known of his private life; but there seems no doubt that it was free from the stains that obscure his great rival's fame, from whom he also differed in the fact that he neither begged nor boasted, and in old age was honored even more than in his prime.

[Signature: Albion W. Tourgée.]

THE CHEVALIER BAYARD

By HERBERT GREENHOUGH SMITH

(1476-1524)

Pierre Du Terrail was born in 1476, at Castle Bayard, in Dauphiny. The house of Terrail belonged to the Scarlet of the ancient peers of France. The Lords of Bayard, during many generations, had died under the flags of battle. Poictiers, Agincourt, and Montlhéry had taken, in succession, the last three; and in 1479, when Pierre was in his nurse's arms, his father, Aymon du Terrail, was carried from the field of Guinegate with a frightful wound, from the effects of which, although he survived for seventeen years to limp about his castle with the help of sticks, he never again put on his shirt of mail.

The old knight was thus debarred from bringing up his son as his own squire. But the Bishop of Grenoble, his wife's brother, was a close friend of Charles the Warrior, the great Duke of Savoy. When Pierre was in his fourteenth year it was proposed that he should begin his knightly education among the pages of the duke. The bishop promised to present him. A little horse was bought; a tailor was set to work to make a gorgeous suit of silk and velvet; and Pierre was ready to set out.

During six months the palace of Charles became his home. The lovable and handsome boy soon won all hearts about him. The duke with delight saw him leap and wrestle, throw the bar, and ride a horse better than any page about the court. The duchess and her ladies loved to send him on their dainty missions. His temper was bright and joyous; his only fault, if fault it can be called, was an over-generosity of nature. His purse was always empty; and when he had no money, any trifling service of a lackey or a groom would be requited with a silver button, a dagger, or a clasp of gold. And such was to be his character through life. Time after time, in after years, his share of treasure, after some great victory, would have paid a prince's ransom; yet often he could not lay his hand on five gold pieces.

When Pierre had lived at the palace about half a year, the duke made a visit to Lyons, to pay his duty to the king. That king was Charles the Eighth, then a boy of twenty, who was making his days fly merrily with tilts and hawking parties, and his nights with dances and the whispers of fair dames. The duke desired to carry with him to his sovereign a present worthy of a king's acceptance. A happy notion struck him. He resolved to present the king with Bayard and his horse.

King Charles, delighted with his new page, placed him in the palace of Lord Ligny, a prince of the great house of Luxemburg, and there for three years he continued to reside. During that time his training was the usual training of a page. But the child was the father of the man. Thoughts of great deeds, of tilts and battle-fields, of champions going down before his lance, of crowns of myrtle, and the smiles of lovely ladies--such already were the dreams which set his soul on fire.

At seventeen Pierre received the rank of gentleman. Thenceforward he was free to follow his own fortune; he was free to seek the glorious Dulcinea of his dreams--a fame as bright and sparkling as his sword. And thereupon begins to pass before us, brilliant as the long-drawn scenes of a dissolving view, the strange and splendid series of his exploits. He had not ceased to be a page ten days before the court was ringing with his name.

Sir Claude de Vauldre, Lord of Burgundy, was regarded as the stoutest knight in France. He was then at Lyons, and was about to hold a tilt, with lance and battle-axe, before the ladies and the king. His shield was hanging in the Ainay meadows, and beside it Montjoy, the king-at-arms, sat all day with his book open, taking down the names of those who struck the shield. Among these came Bayard. Montjoy laughed as he wrote down his name; the king, Lord Ligny, and his own companions, heard with mingled trepidation and delight that Bayard had struck the blazon of Sir Claude. But no one had a thought of what was coming. The day arrived, the tilt was held, and Bayard, by the voice of all the ladies, bore off the prize above the head of every knight in Lyons.

The glory of this exploit was extreme. It quickly spread. Three days later Bayard went to join the garrison at Aire. He found, as he rode into the little town, that the fame of his achievement had arrived before him. Heads were everywhere thrust out of windows, and a band of fifty of his future comrades issued on horseback from the garrison to bid him welcome. A few days after his arrival he held a tilt in his own person, after the example of Sir Claude. The palms were a diamond and a clasp of gold. Forty-eight of his companions struck his shield, and rode into the lists against him. Bayard overthrew the whole band, one by one, and was once more hailed at sunset by the notes of trumpets as the champion of the tourney.

It is not in tournaments and tilts, however, that a knight can win his spurs. Bayard burned for battle. For many months he burned in vain; but at last the banners of the king were given to the wind, and Bayard, to his unspeakable delight, found himself marching under Lord Ligny against Naples.

The two armies faced each other at Fornovo. The odds against the French were six to one, and the fight was long and bloody. When the great victory was at last decided, Bayard was among the first of those called up before the king. That day two horses had dropped dead beneath him; his cuirass and sword were hacked and battered, and a captured standard, blazing with the arms of Naples, was in his hand. At the king's order he knelt down, and received upon the spot the rank of knight. At one bound he had achieved the height of glory--to be knighted by his sovereign on the field of battle.

Bayard was not yet nineteen. His figure at that age was tall and slender; his hair and eyes were black; his complexion was a sunny brown; and his countenance had something of the eagle's.

He was now for some time idle. He was left in garrison in Lombardy. But fiercer fields were soon to call him. Ludovico Sforza took Milan. At Binasco, Lord Bernardino Cazache, one of Sforza's captains, had three hundred horse; and twenty miles from Milan was Bayard's place of garrison. With fifty of his comrades he rode out one morning, bent on assaulting Lord Bernardino's force. The latter, warned by a scout of their approach, armed his party, and rushed fiercely from the fort. The strife was fought with fury; but the Lombards, slowly driven back toward Milan, at length wheeled round their horses and galloped like the wind into the city.

Bayard, darting in his spurs, waving his bare blade, and shouting out his battle-cry of "France," was far ahead of his companions. Before he knew his danger, he had dashed in with the fugitives at the city gates and reached the middle of the square in front of Sforza's palace. He found himself alone in the midst of the fierce enemy--with the white crosses of France emblazoned on his shield.

Sforza, hearing a tremendous uproar in the square, came to a window of the palace and looked down. The square was swarming with the soldiers of Binasco, savage, hacked, and bloody; and in the centre of the yelling tumult, Bayard, still on horseback, was slashing at those who strove to pull him from his seat.

Sforza, in a voice of thunder, bade the knight be brought before him. Bayard, seeing that resistance was mere madness, surrendered to Lord Bernardino, and was led, disarmed, into the palace. Sforza was a soldier more given to the ferocity than to the courtesies of war. But when the young knight stood before him, when he heard his story, when he looked upon his bold yet modest bearing, the fierce and moody prince was moved to admiration. "Lord Bayard," he said, "I will not treat you as a prisoner. I set you free; I will take no ransom; and I will grant you any favor in my power." "My Lord Prince," said Bayard, "I thank you for your courtesy with all my soul. I will ask you only for my horse and armor." The horse was brought; Bayard sprang into the saddle, and an hour later was received by his companions with raptures of surprise and joy, as one who had come alive out of the lion's den.

Milan fell; Sforza was taken; and Bayard went into garrison at Monervino. At Andri, some miles distant, was a Spanish garrison under the command of Don Alonzo de Sotomayor, one of the most famous knights in Spain. Bayard, with fifty men, rode out one morning, in the hope of falling in with some adventure. It happened that he came across Alonzo, with an equal party, abroad on the same quest. Their forces met; both sides flew joyously to battle, and for an hour the victory hung in the balance. But at last Bayard, with his own sword, forced Alonzo to surrender; and his party, carrying with them a large band of prisoners, rode back in triumph to the garrison.

Sotomayor behaved in most unknightly fashion, and after being ransomed, accused Bayard of ill-treating him. Bayard sent him the lie, and challenging him to a duel to the death, slew him. A few days later, the Spaniards, panting for reprisal, proposed to meet a party of the French in combat, for the glory of their nations. Bayard received the challenge with delight. On the appointed day, thirteen knights of either side, glittering in full harness, armed with sword and battle-axe, and prepared for a contest to the death, rode forth into the lists.

By the laws of such a tilt a knight unhorsed, or forced across the boundary, became a prisoner, and could fight no longer. The Spaniards, with great cunning, set themselves to maim the horses; and by these tactics, eleven of the French were soon dismounted. Two alone were left to carry on the contest, Bayard and Lord Orose.

Then followed such a feat of arms as struck the gazers dumb. For four hours these two held good their ground against the whole thirteen. The Spaniards, stung with rage and shame, spurred till their heels dripped blood. In vain. Night fell; the bugles sounded; and still the unconquerable pair rode round the ring.

But great as this feat was, it was soon to be succeeded by a greater. A few weeks afterward the French and Spanish camps were posted on opposite sides of the river Gargliano. Between them was a bridge, in the possession of the French; and some way farther down the river was a ford, known only to the Spanish general, Pedro de Paez. He proposed to lure the French guards from the bridge, and then to seize it. And his stratagem was ready.

Early in the morning the French soldiers at the bridge were startled to perceive a party of the enemy, each horseman bearing a foot-soldier on his crupper, approach the river at the ford and begin to move across it. Instantly, as Paez had intended, they left the bridge and rushed toward the spot. Bayard, attended by Le Basque, was in the act of putting on his armor. He sprang into the saddle, and was about to spur after his companions, when he perceived, across the river, a party of two hundred Spaniards making for the bridge. The danger was extreme; for if the bridge were taken the camp itself would be in the most deadly peril. Bayard bade Le Basque gallop for his life to bring assistance. And he himself rode forward to the bridge, alone.

The Spaniards, on seeing a solitary knight advance against them, laughed loudly at his folly. Their foremost horsemen were already half-way over when Bayard, with his lance in rest, came flying down upon them. His onset swept the first three off the bridge into the river, and instantly the rest, with cries of vengeance, rushed furiously upon him. Bayard, not to be surrounded, backed his horse against the railing of the bridge, rose up in his stirrups, swung his falchion with both hands above his head, and lashed out with such fury that, with every blow a bloody Spaniard fell into the river, and the whole troop recoiled in wonder and dismay, as if before a demon. While they still stood, half-dazed, two hundred glaring at one man, a shout was heard, and Le Basque, with a band of horsemen, was seen approaching like a whirlwind. In two minutes the Spaniards were swept back upon the land in hopeless rout--and the French camp was saved.

Bayard received for this great feat the blazon of a porcupine, with this inscription, _Unus agminis vires habet_--"One man has the might of armies."

And still came exploit after exploit in succession--exploits of every kind of fiery daring. At Genoa, when the town revolted, Bayard stormed the fort of the insurgents, quelled the riot, forced the city to surrender, and hanged the leader on a pole. At Agnadello, against the troops of Venice, he waded with his men through fens and ditches, took the picked bands of Lord d'Alvicino on the flank, scattered them to the winds, and won the day. At Padua, during the long siege, he scoured the country with his band of horse, and frequently rode back to camp at nightfall with more prisoners than armed men. At Mirandola, where he faced the papal armies, he laid a scheme to take the Pope himself. A snowstorm kept the fiery Julius in his tent, and Bayard lost him. A few days afterward the pontiff's life was in his hands. A traitor offered, for a purse of gold, to poison the Pope's wine. But it is not the Bayards of the world who fight with pots of poison; and the slippery Judas had to fly in terror from the camp, or Bayard would infallibly have hanged him.

So far, amid his life of perils, Bayard had escaped without a wound. But now his time had come.

Brescia was taken by the troops of Venice. Gaston de Foix, the thunderbolt of Italy, marched with 12,000 men to its relief. Bayard was among them. At the head of the storming-party he was first across the ramparts, and was turning round to cheer his men to victory when a pike struck him in the thigh. The shaft broke off, and the iron head remained embedded in the wound.

Two of his archers caught him as he fell, bore him out of the rush of battle, and partly stanched the wound by stripping up the linen of their shirts. They then bore him to a mansion close at hand. The master of the house, who seems to have been a person of more wealth than valor, had disappeared, and was thought to be hiding somewhere in a convent, leaving his wife and his two daughters to themselves. The girls had fled into a hay-loft, and plunged themselves beneath the hay; but, on the thunderous knocking of the archers, the lady of the house came trembling to the door. Bayard was carried in, a surgeon was luckily discovered close at hand, and the pike-head was extracted. The wound was pronounced to be not dangerous. But Bayard, to his great vexation, found he was doomed to lie in idleness for several weeks.

According to the laws of war, the house was his, and all the inmates were his prisoners. And the fact was well for them. Outside the house existed such a scene of horror as, even in that age, was rare. Ten thousand men lay dead in the great square; the city was given up to pillage, and it is said that the conquerors gorged themselves that day with booty worth three million crowns. The troops were drunk with victory and rapine. No man's life, no woman's honor, was in safety for an instant.

Bayard set his archers at the door-way. His name was a talisman against the boldest; and in the midst of the fierce tumult that raged all round it, the house in which he lay remained a sanctuary of peace.

The ladies of the house were soon reassured. Bayard refused to regard them as his prisoners or to take a coin of ransom. The daughters, two lovely and accomplished girls, were delighted to attend the wounded knight. They talked and sang to him, they touched the mandolin, they woke the music of the virginals. In such society the hours flew lightly by. The wound healed, and in six weeks Bayard was himself again.

On the day of his departure the lady of the house came into his apartment, and besought him, as their preserver, to accept a certain little box of steel. The box contained two thousand five hundred golden ducats. Bayard took it. "But five hundred ducats," he said, "I desire you to divide for me among the nuns whose convents have been pillaged." Then, turning to her daughters, "Ladies," he said, "I owe you more than thanks for your kind care of me. Soldiers do not carry with them pretty things for ladies; but I pray each of you to accept from me a thousand ducats, to aid your marriage portions." And with that he poured the coins into their aprons.

His horse was brought, and he was about to mount, when the girls came stealing down the steps into the castle court, each with a little present, worked by their own hands, which they desired him to accept. One brought a pair of armlets, made of gold and silver thread; the other, a purse of crimson satin. And this was all the spoil that Bayard carried from the inestimable wealth of Brescia--the little keepsakes of two girls whom he had saved.