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"The comparisons are not respectful, since they refer to trivialities but let it pass. I will answer in the Discoverer's own words: 'God had been graciously fitting me, during many years, for the reception of a final revelation of the absolute Principle of Scientific Mind-healing." "Many years. How many?" "Eighteen centuries!"
From the date of this Diego's death in 1578, when the direct male line of the Discoverer's descendants became extinct, the history of the house becomes obscure: it was sequestered by court decree in the course of the long inheritance litigation between the members of the Columbus family and appears to have been awarded in 1583 to the Admiral of Aragon, son of a sister of Louis and Cristobal, and in 1605 to Nuno de Portugal, grandson of another sister; the former may have sojourned there temporarily, but it is doubtful whether the latter or any of his descendants ever visited Santo Domingo.
Many had wished to tell Winsome these things, but to no one hitherto had been given the discoverer's soul, the poet's voice, the wizard's hand to bring the answering love out of the deep sea of divine possibilities in which the tides ran high and never a lighthouse told of danger. "Tell me more," said Winsome, being a woman, as well as fair and young.
Around the hall stood the grandees of Spain and the magnates of the Church, as obsequious and attentive to him now as they had been proud and disdainful when, a hungry wanderer, he had knocked at the gates of La Rabida to beg bread for his son. It was the acme of the discoverer's destiny, the realization of his dream of glory, the well-earned recompense of years of persevering endeavor.
Much that was said was of such frankness, particularly as to public men, as to be obviously confidential. He was asked whether he had secured, among his trophies, any new species of animal that might be named after him. In Africa there is a custom of giving the discoverer's name to any new kind or class of animal that is killed.
What did this band of a thousand weary men go seeking as they took the reverse route of Coronado's to the Southwest over these ceaslessly crawling sands? Not the discoverer's fame, not the gold-seeker's treasure led them forth through gray interminable reaches of desolation.
The unexpected finding of the long forgotten remains of the grandson of the Admiral recalled the tradition that the Discoverer's body still remained in Santo Domingo, and several gentlemen, among them the Italian consul, requested the bishop to take advantage of the repairing of the church for a thorough investigation of the altar platform in order to ascertain whether it contained any other notable graves.
Of far greater interest is the small map of Louis Joliet, made and presented to Count Frontenac immediately after the discoverer's return from the Mississippi. It is entitled Carte de la decouuerte du Sr. Jolliet ou l'on voit La Communication du fleuue St. Laurens auec les lacs frontenac, Erie, Lac des Hurons et Ilinois.
The perils that lay in the discoverer's path, and the sufferings he had to sustain, were scarcely inferior to those that beset the knight-errant. Hunger and thirst and fatigue, the deadly effluvia of the morass with its swarms of venomous insects, the cold of mountain snows, and the scorching sun of the tropics, these were the lot of every cavalier who came to seek his fortunes in the New World.
Watling, for this and other reasons dwelt on by English surveyors, is on the new maps rebaptized San Salvador, in rectification of euphony not less than of historic truth. If now equally successful inquiry could be brought to bear on the identity of the Discoverer's bones, claimed alike by Hayti and Cuba, it would be an additional comfort to the lovers of fact.
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