The homeward voyage was a stormy and seasick one.  Once it was so rough that Columbus thought surely the Nina would be wrecked.  So he copied off the story of what he had seen and done, addressed it to the king and queen of Spain, put it into a barrel and threw the barrel overboard.

But the Nina was not shipwrecked, and on the eighteenth of February Columbus reached the Azores.  The Portuguese governor was so surprised when he heard this crazy Italian really had returned, and was so angry to think it was Spain and not Portugal that was to profit by his voyage that he tried to make Columbus a prisoner.  But the Admiral gave this inhospitable welcomer the slip and was soon off the coast of Portugal.

Here he was obliged to land and meet the king of Portugal—­that same King John who had once acted so meanly toward him.  King John would have done so again had he dared.  But things were quite different now.  Columbus was a great man.  He had made a successful voyage, and the king and queen of Spain would have made it go hard with the king of Portugal if he dared trouble their admiral.  So King John had to give a royal reception to Columbus, and permit him to send a messenger to the king and queen of Spain with the news of his return from Cathay.

Then Columbus went on board the Nina again and sailed for Palos.  But his old friend Captain Alonso Pinzon had again acted badly.  For he had left the Admiral in one of the storms at sea and had hurried homeward.  Then he sailed into one of the northern ports of Spain, and hoping to get all the credit for his voyage, sent a messenger post-haste to the king and queen with the word that he had returned from Cathay and had much to tell them.  And then he, too, sailed for Palos.

On the fifteenth of March, 1493, just seven months after he had sailed away to the West, Columbus in the Nina sailed into Palos Harbor.  The people knew the little vessel at once.  And then what a time they made!  Columbus has come back, they cried.  He has found Cathay.  Hurrah! hurrah!  And the bells rang and the cannons boomed and the streets were full of people.  The sailors were welcomed with shouts of joy, and the big stories they told were listened to with open mouths and many exclamations of surprise.  So Columbus came back to Palos.  And everybody pointed him out and cheered him and he was no longer spoken of as “that crazy Italian who dragged away the men of Palos to the Jumping-off place.”

And in the midst of all this rejoicing what should sail into the harbor of Palos but the Pinta, just a few hours late!  And when Captain Alonso Pinzon heard the sounds of rejoicing, and knew that his plans to take away from Columbus all the glory of what had been done had all gone wrong, he did not even go to see his old friend and ask his pardon.  He went away to his own house without seeing any one.  And there he found a stern letter from the king and queen of Spain scolding him for trying to get the best of Columbus, and refusing to hear or see him.  The way things had turned out made Captain Alonso Pinzon feel so badly that he fell sick; and in a few days he died.