“The King and the Queen.

  “Cavaliers, Esquires and other persons, who by our command are in the
  Indies:  we send you thither Juan Aguado, our Gentleman of the Chamber,
  who will speak to you on our part:  we command that you give him faith
  and credence. 
    “I the King:  I the Queen. 
    “By command of the King and Queen, our Lords. 
       “HENAND Alvarez. 
    “Madrid, the ninth of April, one thousand
    four hundred and ninety-five.”

  Plots to undermine and ruin the admiral

The royal commissioner arrived at Isabella in October, 1495, and his proceedings in the colony, together with the fear of what he might report on his return, quickened the admiral’s desire to return to Court, that he might fight his own battles there himself.  For the tide of his fortune was turning, and this appeared by several notable signs.  Strong as was the confidence which the Sovereigns reposed in him, the representations of Margarite and Buil—­the rough soldier and the wily Benedictine—­had produced their effect.  They complained of the despotic rule of Columbus; of the disregard of distinctions of rank which he had manifested by placing the hidalgoes on the same footing as the common men, as regards work and rations, during the construction of the settlement; and of his mania for discovery, which made him abandon the colony already formed, in the unremunerative search for new countries.  The commissioner who was sent to investigate these charges, as well as to report on the condition of the colony, found no difficulty in collecting evidence to substantiate them.  An unsuccessful man is generally persuaded that somebody else has caused his failure.  And the “somebody else,” in the case of the colonists, was, by universal consent, the foreign sea captain who had deluded Spanish hidalgoes by his wild projects, and had become a grandee under false pretences.  The Indians, too, who were glad to lay their miseries at the door of somebody, and who were told that Aguado was the new admiral, and had come to supplant the old one, were not slow to add their quota to the charges against Columbus.  To rebut these accusations, as well as to protest against the issue of licences, to private adventurers, to trade in the new countries independently of the admiral (a measure which, in violation of Columbus’s charter, had lately been adopted by Fonseca) he quitted Isabella on the 10th of March, 1496, in the “Nina,” while Aguado took ship in another caravel.  Many of the colonists, who had been rudely awakened from their golden dreams, seized this opportunity of returning to Spain; and the Cacique Caonabo was also on board, probably with a view of impressing upon him an overwhelming conviction of Spanish power, and of the futility of any efforts to resist it.

  Wretched voyage home