Lectures on Modern History - Faculty of Social Sciences

<strong>Lectures</strong> on Modern History/51bus saddled his mule and took the road to Prance. In that superb momenthe showed what man he was, and the action was more convincingthan his words had been. An Aragonese official, Santangel, found themoney, the £1500 required for the expedition, and the traveller was overtakenby an alguazil a couple of leagues away, and recalled to Granada.Santangel was, by descent, a Jew. Several of his kindred suffered underthe Inquisition, before and after, and he fortified himself against theperil of the hour when he financed the first voyage of Columbus. Granadafell on the 2nd of January 1492. The Jews were expelled on the 20th ofMarch. On the 17th of April the contract with Columbus was signed atSanta Fe. The same crusading spirit, the same motive of militantpropagandism, appears in each of the three transactions. And the explorer,at this early stage, was generally backed by the clergy. JuanPerez, the hospitable Franciscan, was his friend; and Mendoza, the greatcardinal of Toledo, and Deza, afterwards Archbishop of Seville. Talavera,the Archbishop of Granada, found him too fanciful to be trusted.Sailing due west from the Canaries he crossed the Atlantic in itswidest part. The navigation was prosperous and uneventful until, changingtheir course to follow the flight of birds, they missed the continentand came upon the islands. It was the longest voyage that had ever beenattempted in the open sea; but the passage itself, and the shoals andcurrents of the West Indies, were mastered with the aid of nautical instrumentsfrom Nuremberg, and of the Ephemerides of Regiomontanus.These were recent achievements of the Renaissance, and without themthe undertaking was impossible. Even with the new appliances, Columbuswas habitually wrong in his measurements. He put Cuba 18º too farto the west; he thought San Domingo as large as Spain; and he sawmountains 50,000 feet high in Yucatan. Indeed, he protested that hissuccess was not due to science, but to the study of the prophet Isaiah.Above all things, he insisted that Cuba was part of the Asiatic continent,and obliged his companions to testify to the same belief, althoughthere is evidence that he did not share it.He had promised Cathay. If he produced an unknown continent instead,a continent many thousands of miles long, prohibiting approachto Cathay, he would undo his own work; the peasants who had exposedhis fallacies would triumph in his failure, and the competing Portuguesewould appropriate all that he had undertaken to add to the crown ofCastile. Without civilisation and gold his discoveries would be valueless;and there was so little gold at first that he at once proposed to make