are apt to look upon Columbus as a person who knew that there existed a great undiscovered continent, and who made his way directly to the discovery of that continent—springing at one bound from the known to the unknown. Whereas, the dream of Columbus's life was to make his way by an unknown route to what was known, or to what he considered to be known. He wished to find out an easy pathway to the territories of Kublai Khan, or Prester-John.

Neither were his motives such as have been generally supposed. They were, for the most part, purely religious. With the gold gained from potentates such as Kublai Khan, the Holy Sepulchre was to be rebuilt, and the Catholic Faith was to be spread over the remotest parts of the earth.

Columbus had all the spirit of a crusader, and, at the same time, the investigating nature of a modern man of science. The Arabs have a proverb that a man is more the son of the age in which he lives than of his own father. This was not so with Columbus; he hardly seems to belong at all to his age. At a time when there was never more of worldliness and self-seeking; when Alexander Borgia was Pope; when Louis the Eleventh reigned in France, Henry the Seventh in England, and Ferdinand the Catholic in Arragon and Castille—about the three last men in the world to become crusaders—Columbus was penetrated with the ideas of the twelfth century, and would have been a worthy companion of Saint Louis in that pious king's crusade.

Again, at a time when Aristotle and "the Angelic Doctor" ruled the minds of men with an almost unexampled tyranny: when science was more dogmatic than theology; when it was thought a sufficient and satisfactory explanation to say that bodies falling to the earth descended because it is their nature to descend—Columbus regarded natural phenomena with the spirit of inductive philosophy that would belong to a follower of Lord Bacon.

Perhaps it will be found that a very great man seldom does belong to his period, as other men do to theirs. Machiavelli [1] says that the way to renovate states is always to go back to first principles, especially to the first principles upon which those states were founded. The same law, if law it be, may hold good as regards the renovation of any science, art, or mode of human action. The man who is too closely united in thought and feeling with his own age, is seldom the man inclined to go back to these first principles.

[Footnote 1: Machiavelli was contemporary with Columbus. No two men could have been more dissimilar; and Machiavelli was thoroughly a product of his age, and a man who entirely belonged to it.]

It is very noticeable in Columbus that he was it most dutiful, unswerving, and un-inquiring son of the Church. The same man who would have taken nothing for granted in scientific research, and would not have held himself bound by the authority of the greatest names in science, never ventured for a moment to trust himself as a discoverer on the perilous sea of theological investigation.

In this respect Las Casas, though a churchman, was very different from Columbus. Such doctrines as that the Indians should be somewhat civilized before being converted, and that even baptism might be postponed to instruction,—doctrines that would have found a ready acceptance from the good bishop—would have met with small response from the soldierly theology of Columbus.

The whole life of Columbus shows how rarely men of the greatest insight and foresight, and also of the greatest perseverance, attain the exact ends they aim at. In this respect all such men partake the career of the alchemists, who did not transmute other metals into gold, but made valuable discoveries in chemistry. So, with Columbus. He did not rebuild the Holy Sepulchre; he did not lead a new crusade; he did not find his Kublai Khan, or his Prester John; but he brought into relation the New World and the Old.

It is impossible to read without the deepest interest the account from day to day of his voyages. It has always been a favourite speculation with historians, and, indeed, with all thinking men, to consider what would have happened from a slight change of circumstances in the course of things which led to great events. This may be an idle and a useless speculation, but it is an inevitable one. Never was there such a field for this kind of speculation as in the voyages, especially the first one, of Columbus. The first point of land that he saw, and landed at, is as nearly as possible the central point of what must once have been the United Continent of North and South America. The least change of circumstance might have made an immense difference in the result. The going to sleep of the helmsman, the unshipping of the rudder, (which did occur in the case of "The Pinzon,") the slightest mistake in taking an observation, might have made, and probably did make, considerable change in the event. During that memorable first voyage of Columbus, the gentlest breeze carried with it the destinies of future empires. Had he made his first discovery of land at a point much southward of that which he did discover, South America might have been colonized by the Spaniards with all the vigour that belonged to their first efforts at colonization; and, being a continent, might not afterwards have been so easily wrested from their sway by the maritime nations.

On the other hand, had some breeze, big with the fate of nations, carried Columbus northwards, it would hardly have been left for the English, more than a century afterwards, to found those Colonies which have proved to be the seeds of the greatest nation that the world is likely to behold.

It was, humanly speaking, singularly unfortunate for Spanish dominion in America, that the earliest discoveries of the Spaniards were those of the West India Islands. A multiplicity of governors introduced confusion, feebleness, and want of system, into colonial government. The numbers, comparatively few, of the original inhabitants in each island, were rapidly removed from the scene of action; and the Spaniards lacked, at the beginning, that compressing force which would have been found in the existence of a body of natives who could not have been removed by the outrages of Spanish cruelty, the strength of Spanish liquors, or the virulence of Spanish diseases.[Footnote 2]

[Footnote 2: The smallpox, for instance, was a disease introduced by the Spaniards, which the comparatively feeble constitution of the Indians could not withstand.]

The Monarchs of Spain, too, would have been compelled to treat their new discoveries and conquests more seriously. To have held the country at all, they must have held it well. It would not have been Ovandos, Bobadillas, Nicuesas and Ojedas who could have been employed to govern, discover, conquer, colonize—and ruin by their folly—the Spanish possessions in the Indies. The work of discovery and conquest, begun by Columbus, must then have been entrusted to men like Cortes, the Pizarros, Vasco Nunez, or the President Gasca; and a colony or a kingdom founded by any of these men might well have remained a great colony, or a great kingdom, to the present day. ARTHUR HELPS. London, October, 1868.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I. Early Discoveries in the Fifteenth Century

CHAPTER II. Early Years of Columbus

CHAPTER III. Columbus in Spain

CHAPTER IV. First Voyage

CHAPTER V. Homeward bound

CHAPTER VI. Second Voyage of Discovery

CHAPTER VII. Illness; Further Discoveries; Plots against Columbus

CHAPTER VIII.