been committed with the intention of doing evil, and I believe that their Highnesses regard the matter just as I state it:  and I know and see that they deal mercifully even with those who maliciously act to their disservice.  I believe and consider it very certain that their clemency will be both greater and more abundant towards me, for I fell therein through ignorance and the force of circumstances, as they will know fully hereafter; and I indeed am their creature, and they will look upon my services, and will acknowledge day by day that they are much profited.  They will place everything in the balance, even as Holy Scripture tells us good and evil will be at the day of judgment.

“If, however, they command that another person do judge me, which I cannot believe, and that it be by inquisition in the Indies, I very humbly beseech them to send thither two conscientious and honourable persons at my expense, who I believe will easily, now that gold is discovered, find five marks in four hours.  In either case it is needful for them to provide for this matter.

“The Commander on his arrival at San Domingo took up his abode in my house, and just as he found it so he appropriated everything to himself.  Well and good; perhaps he was in want of it.  A pirate never acted thus towards a merchant.  About my papers I have a greater grievance, for he has so completely deprived me of them that I have never been able to obtain a single one from him; and those that would have been most useful in my exculpation are precisely those which he has kept most concealed.  Behold the just and honest inquisitor!  Whatever he may have done, they tell me that there has been an end to justice, except in an arbitrary form.  God, our Lord, is present with His strength and wisdom, as of old, and always punishes in the end, especially ingratitude and injuries.”

We must keep in mind the circumstances in which this letter was written if we are to judge it and the writer wisely.  It is a sad example of querulous complaint, in which everything but the writer’s personal point of view is ignored.  No one indeed is more terrible in this world than the Man with a Grievance.  How rarely will human nature in such circumstances retire into the stronghold of silence!  Columbus is asking for pity; but as we read his letter we incline to pity him on grounds quite different from those which he represented.  He complains that the people he was sent to govern have waged war against him as against a Moor; he complains of Ojeda and of Vincenti Yanez Pinzon; of Adrian de Moxeca, and of every other person whom it was his business to govern and hold in restraint.  He complains of the colonists—­the very people, some of them, whom he himself took and impressed from the gaols and purlieus of Cadiz; and then he mingles pious talk about Saint Peter and Daniel in the den of lions with notes on the current price of little girls and big lumps of gold like the eggs