“And I direct him [Diego] to make provision for Beatriz Enriquez, mother of D. Fernando, my son, that she may be able to live honestly, being a person to whom I am under very great obligation.  And this shall be done for the satisfaction of my conscience, because this matter weighs heavily upon my soul.  The reason for which it is not fitting to write here.”

About the condition of Beatriz, temporal and spiritual, there has been much controversy; but where the facts are all so buried and inaccessible it is unseemly to agitate a veil which we cannot lift, and behind which Columbus himself sheltered this incident of his life.  “Acquainted with poverty” is one fragment of fact concerning her that has come down to us; acquainted also with love and with happiness, it would seem, as many poor persons undoubtedly are.  Enough for us to know that in the city of Cordova there lived a woman, rich or poor, gentle or humble, married or not married, who brought for a time love and friendly companionship into the life of Columbus; that she gave what she had for giving, without stint or reserve, and that she became the mother of a son who inherited much of what was best in his father, and but for whom the world would be in even greater darkness than it is on the subject of Christopher himself.  And so no more of Beatriz Enriquez de Arana, whom “God has in his keeping”—­and has had now these many centuries of Time.

Thus passed the summer and autumn of 1487; precious months, precious years slipping by, and the great purpose as yet unfulfilled and seemingly no nearer to fulfilment.  It is likely that Columbus kept up his applications to the Court, and received polite and delaying replies.  The next year came, and the Court migrated from Zaragoza to Murcia, from Murcia to Valladolid, from Valladolid to Medina del Campo.  Columbus attended it in one or other of these places, but without result.  In August Beatriz gave birth to a son, who was christened Ferdinand, and who lived to be a great comfort to his father, if not to her also.  But the miracle of paternity was not now so new and wonderful as it had been; the battle of life, with its crosses and difficulties, was thick about him; and perhaps he looked into this new-comer’s small face with conflicting thoughts, and memories of the long white beach and the crashing surf at Porto Santo, and regret for things lost—­so strangely mingled and inconsistent are the threads of human thought.  At last he decided to turn his face elsewhere.  In September 1488 he went to Lisbon, for what purpose it is not certain; possibly in connection with the affairs of his dead wife; and probably also in the expectation of seeing his brother Bartholomew, to whom we may now turn our attention for a moment.

After the failure of Columbus’s proposals to the King of Portugal in 1486, and the break-up of his home there, Bartholomew had also left Lisbon.  Bartholomew Diaz, a famous Portuguese navigator, was leaving for the African coast in August, and Bartholomew Columbus is said to have joined his small expedition of three caravels.  As they neared the latitude of the Cape which he was trying to make, he ran into a gale which drove him a long way out of his course, west and south.