Chapter 18 Columbus by Rafael Sabatini
THE JUNTA
Colon came late from the Mezquita, long after the last of the faithful had departed, and, his mind turning instantly from the sacred to the profane, he took his eager way to Zagarte’s.
He found the eating-house thronged with holiday-makers. There was no place to spare either among the press in the courtyard witnessing the mystery or at the tables in the gallery packed by those who had come to eat and drink, whilst every window was occupied. Zagarte and his myrmidons, male and female, flitted breathless, panting and sweating, to minister to the wants of the patrons. The performance was already in mid-career, and Beatriz had just made her entrance.
Colon thrust with difficulty through those who stood elbow to elbow at the back of the court, and gained at last the entrance to the stairs. He went to await Beatriz in her room, which her Morisco woman was setting to rights when he entered.
Through the open window he could hear the voice of Beatriz, and it seemed to him that it lacked something of its usual irresistible vivacity. When at last she came he was quick to observe her dull-eyed pallor and a listlessness momentarily put off at sight of him. A flush of eagerness was spent almost before he had kissed her hand.
She dismissed her woman, and let herself rest a moment against him, smiling wanly into the concern of his countenance.
“I am a little weary, that is all,” she reassured him. “I seemed scarcely to have the strength to dance to-day.”
His encircling arm was tenderly supporting her. “That you should have to make sport for the mob!” he grumbled.
“It serves no good end, my friend, to inveigh against necessity.”
“It’s a necessity that I have promised you shall cease. Let my affairs but prosper to-morrow, and there will be no more of this for you. You will become my care.”
“Why should I burden you, Cristobal?”
“Why should I love you, Beatriz? Answer the one and the other is answered. All that I have aimed to do, which has been an end in itself, is now become no more than the means to an end.” He ran on. “For an hour and more, after all had gone, I remained on my knees in the Mezquita, praying to Our Lady; praying for you and for me; praying for grace so to acquit myself to-morrow that I may finally deliver you from all this.”
She hung her head, her eyes suddenly moist.
“Do you pray for me to-night, Beatriz, in the sure knowledge that in praying for me you will be praying for yourself.”
“My dear, my dear!” She was softly weeping, the tears wrung from her by a torment that he could not guess. “It needs no such knowledge to make me pray for you. Be sure that you shall always be in my prayers.”
“They will make me strong,” he said, and reverently kissed her.
When at last he left her, he went in a confidence that was high even for so sanguine a temperament as his. He felt himself invested with a power that nothing could resist, a power by which inevitably he must prevail.
This splendid confidence was with him in the morning when, having broken his fast and prepared to leave for the Alcazar, he went to assemble his few needs.
He unlocked the coffer and raised the lid, to discover its tumbled contents. It gave him a moment’s pause, but no more. After all, there had been no tampering with the lock. The disorder must be a result of his own haste and carelessness. He took up the case and extracted from it the large chart which he had prepared and which he was to lay before the doctors. This he rolled, and tied with a piece of ribbon. Then he sought the Toscanelli chart and letter, deeming it as well to have them with him, although he scarcely thought that they would be required. Failure to find them chilled him. He brought the case to the table, emptied it out, and in dread went piece by piece through all that it contained. The precious documents were missing.
He stood a moment in a stricken perplexity; then he returned to the coffer, and feverishly dragged everything out of it in a search that was equally fruitless.
He sat down, numbed and limp, to realize at last that he had been robbed; it was not to be understood. He had found the coffer locked as he had left it. Nevertheless certain it was that he had been robbed; robbed, in this hour of hours, of the stoutest of his weapons for the battle he was to wage. In chagrin and rage he asked himself who could have done this thing, who could even have known that he was possessed of that precious chart. He had mentioned it to none—that is to say, to none but Beatriz, and the thought of her in connection with this loss was dismissed before it could even grow into a suspicion.
He could think only of the Portuguese. King John knew of the existence of the chart. Was it possible that having learned of Colon’s suit at the Court of Spain, and fearing lest perhaps the project which he had rejected should, after all, be well-founded and that Spain should profit by it, King John had employed agents to commit this theft?
It would be of a piece with the meannesses he had suffered at the hands of the King of Portugal. But he could not even think when the theft might have been committed, for it was months since last he had actually looked at that chart.
For a while he sat there faint and sick under this cruel blow, dealt him in the very hour of his high assurance of triumph. Gradually, however, his resilient nature shifted the focus of the situation, until it appeared less desperate. After all, to what did his loss amount? The Toscanelli documents were merely confirmatory of his own conclusions. Those conclusions had been reached by arguments developed before ever Toscanelli had been consulted, and by these arguments, overwhelming in their total, he should carry conviction to any assembly of men of learning.
He took heart afresh. If the shabby King of Portugal was indeed the thief, he should find that he had stooped in vain to this mean larceny.
By the time he came to the Alcazar his courage was as high as ever, and was there to be further fortified not only by Santangel’s good wishes but by Frey Diego Deza’s assurances that Colon could count upon his suffrages. The paunchy, benign little friar was on his way to the council-chamber where the junta was assembling when he paused in the ante-room for a word with the waiting Colon.
“Be confident of success, my son. Mine is not the only voice upon which you can depend to-day.”
What need, he asked himself, to bewail his loss when without Toscanelli’s support his arguments had carried conviction to so acute a mind as Deza’s? Upon that reassurance he dismissed his last misgiving, and took his way to the council-chamber.
Thirteen men, of whom nine were ecclesiastics, composed the tribunal that was to pronounce judgment upon his plan.
Seated along one side of a long table that was covered in red velvet and furnished with writing materials they faced him when, of an aspect so commanding that in itself it should compel men’s confidence, he advanced into the vaulted room.
Frey Hernando de Talavera, now Bishop of Avila, who presided, occupied a high chair with carved arms, raised by some inches above the others, so as to enthrone him. On his immediate right sat Deza, on his left Don Rodrigo Maldonado, a navigator of experience now Governor of Salamanca. The other laymen were Don Matias Rezende, Admiral of the galleys of Aragon, and the two chancellors, Quintanilla and Santangel. Of the remainder, five were in the white habit and black cloak of the order of St. Dominic, all of them professors at the University of Salamanca; a sixth, Frey Hieronymo de Calahorra, in high repute as a mathematician, wore the grey fustian of St. Francis. The last, a secular priest, was Don Juan de Fonseca, of whom Las Casas says that though a cleric and an archdean, he was very capable for worldly affairs, especially for recruiting soldiers and for manning fleets, for which reason the King and Queen always entrusted him with the fleets which were armed in their lifetime. A sufficient explanation, this, of his presence on the junta.
Facing the middle of the table, opposite Talavera, a low armchair had been set, to which Colon was invited by a gracious wave of the Bishop’s slender, almost translucent hand.
He bowed to the assembled company, and took his seat, with his rolled chart across his knees. At once Talavera addressed him.
“We are gathered here, sir, by command of their Highnesses in order to hear your proposals in all detail, examining such proofs as you may have to urge, so that we may judge of their possibility of execution, and after full discussion report upon them to their Highnesses. We can assure you, sir, of a sympathetic hearing, and we invite you to begin.”
Under no obligation to do so, Colon nevertheless rose. He possessed sufficient histrionic sense to realize what he would thus gain in dominance.
Beginning quietly and warming gradually to his task, he discoursed of the discoveries of Marco Polo and quoted from the Venetian’s own account of his eastern travels, giving the position of Zipangu as some fifteen hundred miles beyond Polo’s own eastern journeyings. Then reminding them of the sphericity of the Earth, of Ptolemy’s theory, which all knowledge accumulated since had gone to confirm, he pointed out how irresistibly it followed that by sailing west, the Zipangu of Polo and lands beyond it must be reached. Independent evidence of the existence of such lands was supplied by objects drifting out of the west that had been washed up on the shores of the Azores; he spoke of those pieces of timber of a kind never seen in the known world, so carved that it was clear the work had not been done with iron; a monster pine-tree, the like of which did not grow in the known world, and he alluded to those canes, now at Lisbon, so gigantic that a gallon of wine might be contained between any two joints, which he supposed to be the giant reeds of which Ptolemy speaks.
He was jarred at this point by the first interruption. It came from Maldonado, and bore witness to the narrowly legal training of the man’s mind.
“You speak now, sir, merely of things which you have seen, or of which you have heard tell, but which you cannot show us, and which, therefore, we are not to consider.”
Two or three heads were sagely wagged in agreement. That and the interruption were as spurs to Colon’s quick nature. His grey eyes flamed upon Don Rodrigo.
“I speak, sirs, of things of whose existence you may readily inform yourselves, things whose existence is generally known to men who engage upon the study of such matters.”
He counted upon the weakness of human nature, to ensure silence, since the admission of further doubts must now serve only to acknowledge ignorance.
After a moment’s pause in which none attempted to answer him, he resumed with an increase of confidence. Leaving the realms of mathematics and physics, he passed to scriptural warrant for his next argument. He quoted the Prophet Esdras as having revealed that God commanded that the waters be gathered into the seventh part of the Earth, and upon that divinely inspired assertion he based the calculations which established that land must be reached within a distance of some seven hundred leagues to westward, that this land would be the easternmost point of the Indies, as the chart he had prepared would serve to show.
He unrolled his parchment, advanced to the table, and spread it there before the presiding Bishop.
At Talavera’s invitation, Deza and Don Rodrigo drew closer so that they might study it with him. They had no comment to offer, and the chart was passed on for study by the other members of the junta. They pondered it, in twos and threes, fingers pointing, lips whispering, heads wagging, whilst Colon, waiting, returned to resume his seat.
At last, when the chart had come back to lie again before Talavera, the Bishop’s solemn dark eyes were levelled on Colon. “You will have something more to urge.”
“Have I not urged enough?” asked Colon with quiet deference.
“You have urged assumptions, backed, it is true, by arguments, but not, so far, I perceive, by evidence. We have no such proofs as we are sent to seek.”
Colon came to his feet again. “With submission, my Lord Bishop, I think you have. Proof by deduction is a form of proof known to every mathematician, and in a less degree to every mariner.”
Talavera appealed to the Admiral. “What do you say to that, Don Matias?”
“I hold it a good answer, my lord. It is a sound argument, accepting the sphericity of the Earth, which to-day is beyond doubt, that if we sail west, we must eventually reach the ultimate boundaries of the land to the east of our starting-point.”
From the table’s end a harsh voice croaked with a touch of derision. “Can the sphericity of the Earth establish the puerile contention that land is distributed over every side of it?” It was Calahorra, the Franciscan doctor, who spoke. “Is it not manifest,” he pursued, “that the ocean encircles the land, that the land is bounded by the ocean, and that to sail forth upon this is to sail without hope of return?”
“Yet,” said Colon quietly, “men have sailed forth upon it. Bold navigators in the service of Portugal have thereby brought great credit, power and wealth to the Portuguese crown.”
“Sailed forth upon it, do you say? Sailed along the edge of it, keeping within sight of land, coasting Africa. A very different matter.”
“And rounding the Cape of Torments, since re-named the Cape of Good Hope,” Colon retorted. “Thus sailing into seas that superstition formerly peopled with monsters.”
“God give you a better understanding,” the Franciscan bawled at him. “That was still to sail along the ocean’s edge; a very different matter from venturing out upon it, going westward across it.”
“A very different matter, indeed,” agreed another voice, to announce to Colon yet another adversary. It was Don Juan de Fonseca who had spoken, a bulky man of middle height, whose round, flat, yellow face made up with his bald, glossy yellow head the appearance of a bladder of lard that had been smeared with features.
Meanwhile the Franciscan was continuing: “The very sphericity of the Earth by which you set such store must render return impossible. For though you might sail down the slope of the seas, how could you ever hope to sail up it again?”
“Yes. Answer that,” Fonseca mocked him.
Colon permitted himself disdain. “That is scarcely a matter for theologians. I invite those here who are mariners to say from their experience upon the seas how often they have seen a ship hull down upon the horizon—no more than her topmasts visible—which presently has come up into full view.”
He looked for confirmation to Maldonado and Rezende. Both nodded.
“That is certainly so,” said Don Rodrigo.
“A thing well known to every sailor,” added the Admiral.
The Franciscan owned defeat by a shrug. Fonseca, however, would not yield. He was exacerbated into shrillness. “An illusion. As much an illusion as the famous Isle of St. Brandan, which many have seen, but none has ever reached. Who can deny it? To accept these theories is to accept the absurdity of the antipodes.”
“Is it an absurdity?” Colon asked him. “Fifteen hundred years ago Pliny was already pronouncing the antipodes the great contest between the learned and the ignorant. If we are to dismiss as absurdities all those things which we cannot understand, how much of the world would be left?”
“Enough for sane men,” Fonseca answered him, and with that contemptuously abandoned the argument.
But it was not yet to be allowed to drop. It was taken up by one of the Dominicans, Frey Justino Vargas, a doctor of canon and civil law.
“Whatever cosmographers may say,” he urged in a mild voice, “a great father of the Church opposes a serious obstacle to belief in the antipodes. Lactantius has raised the question whether there are any so foolish as to believe in the existence of men who walk with their heels upwards and their heads hanging down, or that there is a part of the world in which trees grow downwards and rain falls upwards.”
“Was he a mariner, this Lactantius?” Colon asked dryly.
The question sobered some countenances that were grinning and brought him a sharp rebuke from Talavera. “You have heard, sir, that Lactantius was a father of the Church, a saintly man of almost evangelical authority.”
But Colon in his irritation was not to be put down. “Upon matters evangelical, with which we are not now concerned.”
“You are at fault, sir. The great St. Augustine has pronounced the doctrine of the antipodes to be at issue with our Faith. For to contend that there are inhabited lands on the opposite side of the Earth would be to contend that there are peoples not descended from Adam, since it would have been impossible for them to have crossed the intervening ocean. This would be to contradict the scriptures, which expressly declare that we are all descended from that first created man.”
For a moment Colon stood baffled, caught, he felt, in a theological morass in which it might be dangerous to struggle. Yet struggle he must, or else own defeat; and he would incur the peril of fire for heresy rather than abandon the fight.
“Do the pronouncements of St. Augustine rank as dogmas of the Church?” he asked, and for all the humility of his tone, he shocked them by the question.
“You speak,” Talavera sternly reminded him, “of one of the great luminaries of our Faith.”
But here unexpectedly it was the erudite Deza, admittedly the greatest theologian present, who came to Colon’s aid. He turned to Talavera.
“He is probably aware of that, my Lord Bishop,” he said quietly. “What he asks is only if the pronouncements of St. Augustine rank as dogmas. And to that the reply must be that they do not.” His myopic eyes twinkled as he peered round to see if any would have the temerity to find fault with him. “We are not to hobble Master Colon by leaving him under the fear of stumbling into heresy.” He smiled at Colon, encouraging him to proceed.
“I thank you, Frey Diego. I have to say that there is something that St. Augustine may have left out of account: mutations in the surface of the Earth since the creation. Lands that are now beyond the ocean may once not have been so divided from those we know. There is Plato’s lost continent of Atlantis, by some accounted a fable, but credited by others just as learned, who see in the Fortunate Isles fragments remaining from that continent’s disruption. If Atlantis once existed—and who shall dare to say positively that it did not?—it may have supplied a bridge by which the children of Adam passed to those far eastern lands, whose presence, much nearer to us on the west, I claim to demonstrate.”
Deza nodded. “That is, indeed, something that may have escaped the notice of St. Augustine.”
The Admiral had drawn the chart towards him and had been studying it. He now took up the examination. “I’ll not dispute with you, sir, that you offer a plausible case. But in my view it still remains no more than plausible. I take it that we are all acquainted with the writings of Marco Polo, and to an extent they would seem to justify you of your conclusions. But only to an extent. Beyond that we depend upon your mathematics.”
“By your leave, sir, there is more here than mathematics.” Colon drew himself up, his eyes kindled, he delivered himself in resonant tones with the voice of the mystic. “There is the light vouchsafed to devout and earnest contemplation: the light of God’s grace, which has illumined my mind to this discovery for His greater honour and glory.”
“Sir, sir,” cried Talavera, with a hand raised in protest. “What are you claiming now?”
Far from quenching the fire in Colon, this was but fuel to it. His voice soared dominantly. “What I know from the force astir within me. And it must prevail, so that our Holy Faith be spread through lands unknown and peoples yet unknown, however Satan may blunt men’s wits against the truth I expound, and inspire them to withstand me.”
He paused a moment, dominant, majestic in his poise, meeting the sudden wonder and displeasure in which they received that tactless suggestion that they might possibly be Satan’s agents. Then he concluded: “King John of Portugal put to shame his sight, his hearing, and all his faculties, for I could not make him understand what I said. That was, I now see, the will of Heaven, to the end that I should bear this inestimable blessing to the Sovereigns of Spain, so worthy of it by their labours against the Saracen. They, with the vast wealth from these new lands at their command, will persevere in that work until the Holy Sepulchre shall have been delivered from the Infidel. That, noble and reverend sirs, is the end to which I am but an instrument in the Divine Hand, to fulfil the promise of that chart.”
Santangel, absorbing through eyes and ears every shade and turn of that fiery address, was stirred by a secret amusement tempered by anxiety. He trembled lest this dear rogue should overplay his part, overdo the histrionic magnetism which he suspected him of deliberately exerting.
He was relieved of his fears by the half-cowed looks of the junta when, ceasing on that high note, Colon stood before them, his mien and attitude those of one who has flung down a gage of battle.
So effectively had he subdued them that it was some moments before any spoke. Then it was Fonseca’s sneer that shattered the spell he had woven.
“All this may be as you say. But at present we have no more than your word for it.”
“As for all the rest.”
“As for all the rest. Just so. That is our difficulty.”
Fonseca would have continued, but that Talavera, cold, honest man that he was, intervened to check him.
“You make a high claim, Master Colon. It is for this junta to determine whether you sustain it by what you have stated.”
He looked about him, and his glance settled finally upon Deza, as if inviting the Prior of St. Esteban to answer an inquiry that was general. “Are there any further questions?”
“For myself,” said Deza, answering the invitation of the look, “I am satisfied. Setting aside Master Colon’s persuasion that he is divinely inspired, which I by no means reject, because it can be only by God’s grace that men’s minds are so illumined, his cosmographical conclusions compel my respect.”
The high repute of Deza’s erudition precluded open contradiction. Only Fonseca, at the table’s end, ventured by the darkening of his countenance to express a scornful disapproval. The mild Dominican who had intervened before, Frey Justino Vargas, was not, however, to be stifled even by Deza’s great authority.
“The reverend and erudite Prior may be justified of his faith. But is faith enough in such a case? I recognize that proof of the existence of something which the eyes have not yet seen must of necessity be only inferential. But in accepting such inferences are we not to be governed by the recognized authority—or the lack of it—of those who draw them?”
“We may be governed,” Deza answered him, “by the inferences themselves, by the effect of their impact upon our wits and our logic.”
“Agreed. Oh, agreed, most reverend Prior. But should not something more be required by us? We move here in a realm of speculation. The most that we dare to say is that from the arguments of Master Colon it is possible that these lands of his dreams may actually exist. We admit that these arguments are shrewd. But does even the great learning of which this junta disposes suffice to judge the competence of Master Colon?”
“In other words,” said Talavera, “we should hesitate to accept Master Colon’s conclusions because of his lack of established authority as a cosmographer and a mathematician.”
“That is my difficulty, my Lord Bishop.”
Colon stood hesitating. He was a prey to a mixture of emotions in which chagrin predominated. Abruptly he was brought face to face with the need to play his last card. Trump card though it was, he must ever have been reluctant to play it save in the last necessity, since to do so must diminish the lustre of conclusions independently reached, must make it appear that they were borrowed from another, instead of merely confirmed by that other’s greater authority. Yet play it he must at last if it had still remained in his possession. Immeasurably was his chagrin increased now at the theft of that card without which, as things were falling out, he might fail to prevail against the opposition of these limited, prejudiced intelligences.
And then the matter was taken out of his hands by Frey Diego Deza.
“Happily,” he said, “that difficulty does not exist. Master Colon is supported by the authority of the greatest mathematician the world has known: Paolo del Pozzo Toscanelli.”
The announcement made a stir which Santangel thought to increase by adding: “And it was precisely because of this support that her Highness was moved to appoint this junta.”
Talavera looked bluntly at Colon. “Why were we not told of this before?” he complained.
“I did not perceive the need. I depended upon the cogency of my arguments and upon the chart that is before you.”
“It will shorten discussion,” said Deza, “if you submit the chart you had from Toscanelli.”
“You have a chart in his hand!” exclaimed Talavera, and the faces of Colon’s opponents were seen to lengthen.
With rage under his outward composure, and with every eye upon him, Colon answered truthfully, yet evading the actual question. “When first I formulated my theories, and before submitting them to the Court of Portugal, I sought a pronouncement upon them from Paolo Toscanelli. In expression of his full agreement he sent me a letter and a chart that differs from the chart before you in one particular only. I do not agree with him upon the distance westward. By my computing, it is materially less.”
“No matter,” said Talavera. “The main principle remains; and it is upon the main principle that the word of that great cosmographer is of weight.” He looked to right and left for a confirmation that was nowhere now withheld.
“Of Toscanelli’s agreement with that principle,” said Colon boldly, “I have the honour to assure you.”
“It is not your assurance that we ask, but the actual chart.”
Pressed thus, Colon stood at bay. “Unhappily I am unable to lay it before you. It has been stolen from me.”
There was an ominous silent pause. Colon saw the widening of Santangel’s eyes, the lengthening of Deza’s ruddy face. Fonseca whispered to his neighbour.
“But, sir,” said Talavera, at last, in a voice that was entirely colourless, “who would rob you of such a parchment?”
“There, my lord, you ask more than I can answer. Nor at the moment does it matter. I no longer possess it. But that I did possess it, and that it is precisely as I have stated, I here make solemn oath.”
Someone softly laughed. It was as a whiplash to Colon. He stiffened, the blood suffused his face, and his eyes flamed upon countenances that were blank when they were not scornful. His self-control was slipping from him; but before he could speak Talavera was addressing him again coldly judicial.
“Master Colon, since you came to Spain have you ever shown this chart to anyone?”
“Never. No.”
“So that Toscanelli being dead we have only your word for its existence?”
“That is so,” Colon admitted.
“And if I rightly understand Don Luis de Santangel, it was on the strength of this word of yours that their Highnesses ordered this inquiry?”
“It may have influenced them. No more than that.”
“It would seem to follow, then,” put in Fonseca, “that if their Highnesses had known that no such chart, in fact, exists, this inquiry would never have been held.”
Colon was stung to heat. “If the implication is that I misled their Highnesses by pretences that were false, I resent and reject it. False it would be to say that the chart does not—or did not—exist. Rash to assume that, even if it did not, their Highnesses might not still have ordered my claims to be examined. And I may add that in no case should I have thought to produce it save to convince minds that attach more importance to a name than to logic and mathematical deductions.”
It was not a happy retort. It had an air of bluster that must alienate what sympathy still lingered amongst them. But exasperation was mastering him.
He met the eyes of Deza, who had been his stalwart advocate, and found them stern. Santangel and Quintanilla showed troubled countenances. Elsewhere he met either inscrutability or open scorn.
There was yet a question from the Dominican jurist: “You said that you were at the Court of Portugal when you received that chart and letter. Did you submit them to King John?”
“I did.”
The Dominican put up his brows. “And yet King John was not persuaded to support you with ships?”
“A fact,” said Colon, “for which the Spanish Sovereigns if wisely advised may have occasion to be thankful.”
Frey Justino Vargas was content to vouchsafe him a sour smile in acknowledgment of that expiring flicker of the fire they had damped.
Talavera waited yet a moment, and as no other offered to speak, he cleared his throat to utter Colon’s dismissal.
“If you have nothing to add, sir, we will come to our deliberations. You have leave to retire.”
Under the general mistrust of him which he now perceived, it required an effort of self-mastery to maintain an outward dignity of bearing. “I have to repeat, my lord,” he said, “that what I have told you of the Toscanelli documents is true, and of that I take God to be my witness. With that, sirs, I thank you for the patience with which you have heard me, and kiss your hands.”
He bowed solemnly to the assembly, and stalked out.
But before the door had closed upon him he overheard Fonseca’s sibilant voice. “I do not think, my Lord Bishop, that we need waste much time in our deliberations upon this imposture. It is plain that we have been assembled in consequence of a misrepresentation fortunately discovered in time.”