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4 Nuñez de Balboa. In the midst of these triumphs who could have thought of Columbus?

During two consecutive years his oldest son had in vain solicited from King Ferdinand the investiture of the posts and dignities of his father, conformably to the text of the conventions signed the seventeenth of April, 1497, in the plain of Granada, ratified the twenty-third of April, 1497, and confirmed at Valencia by letter royal the fourteenth of March, 1502. All that he could at last obtain of the jealous monarch was the authorization to establish his rights according to law. But in this process, which he instituted against the Crown of Castile, Don Diego Columbus encountered as defendant the public minister, called the Fiscal Attorney. The latter, in the interest of the Crown, opened inquiries to which all the enemies of Columbus, — the ungrateful, the envious, and the officers who were rebellious to his authority, — were invited to depose against his glory. The Fiscal Attorney opposed to the claims of Diego, that his father had never rendered to Castile any eminent service, and that he was not the true author of the Discoveries. He was accused of having despoiled of his plan, his charts, his observations, an unknown pilot, who might have died at his house when he lived in the Portuguese island of Porto-Santo; and of having, by means of this almost sacrilegious spoliation, executed his enterprise. It was, moreover, asserted, that if he had discovered some islands, he was not the first who had landed on Terra Firma, — the new continent. Thus were reproduced, sustained, and renewed all the old calumnies which, during his life, envy had sown in his path as a consequence of his triumph.

While these inquiries were being prosecuted, a Florentine, Amerigo Vespucci, a man of letters and a mathematician, came to be nominated president of the commission for inquiry into naval affairs. At first, being first clerk in the important house of the maritime expedition which his countryman, Juanato Berardi, had founded in Seville, and therefore in assiduous relations with Columbus, he imbibed,