Page:The life of Christopher Columbus.djvu/54

30 Spotorno judges that Beatrix Enriquez did not belong to the nobility; that she must have been very poor; and that the remorse of Columbus, and his fear of the cause of it being discovered, prove manifestly that his connection with her was not cemented by a legitimate union.

The persistence of Spotorno, the positive tone of his assertions, and especially the silence of contradictors, have imposed on his fellow-citizens. His accusations, far from being combated, have been reproduced with eagerness; he has passed for a kind of oracle at Genoa, and in the whole of Liguria.

The respect generally manifested for Spotorno by the writers of Liguria (except in their differences on the question of origin), their credulous repetition of his silly stuff, and their mutual respect for the errors of each other, would still have been of little consequence, if Navarrete had not seized with malignant joy the denunciations of Spotorno against the amours of Columbus in Cordova. And even this accusation would have had no untoward notoriety, destitute as it was of foundation, had not the illustrious Humboldt accorded it credit, in screening with his encyclopædic name the accusations made by Navarrete.

After the history of Washington Irving, the work which most expressly and most fully treats of Columbus is assuredly that which has been published by Humboldt, under the title of A Critical Examination of the History and the Geography of the New Continent. These two works, then, compose solely the groundwork of science and of history relative to the discovery of the New World. The one by his great popularity, the other by his magisterial authority, have fixed, and almost formed public opinion. Academies, learned societies, astronomers, naturalists, and especially mariners, have no opinions about Columbus but those that are peculiar to Humboldt. We ourselves based our opinions on him before we examined with our own eyes. But, whatever may be our esteem for his judgments in matters of pure physical science, we are forced to declare, that