Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 1).djvu/662



But all these reforms had been brought about by a course which had greatly increased the number of his enemies. Every worthless fellow whom he had sent home or punished became his implacable foe and intrigued for his downfall; and too many of them had influence at court, which, in the absence of Columbus, produced its effect. At last he was superseded; and, to the disgrace of Ferdinand and Isabella, who lent too ready an ear to the calumnious reports spread against him, this great and good man was arrested, and he and his two brothers sent in chains back to the country to which he had given a new and a now mighty world.

Thus humiliated, Christopher Columbus landed at Cadiz towards the close of the year 1500. The fact of the ignominy to which he had been subjected spoke with the voice of thunder to the feelings of the people. They neither cared for nor inquired into the cause of his great humiliation. It was sufficient for them to know that this noble-minded man had been brought home in chains from the world he had discovered, and the sensation thus produced was almost as great as the reception which had awaited him on his triumphant return from the first discovery of America, in March 1493.

His own feelings of the wrongs he had sustained at the hands of his worthless enemies are nowhere so well described as in the letter he addressed, immediately on his return to Spain, to a lady who was in immediate attendance on the queen, and stood high in her favour. "I have now reached that point,"